A Triumph of Underachievement

Book feature for The Stranger, 5/26/99

AN UNDERACHIEVER’S DIARY

by Benjamin Anastas

Spike/Avon, $10 (paperback)

Success, success, success. Sometimes all the damned ostentatious displays of wealth, power, and smugness out there just make one want to throw up, or at least momentarily escape from it all with this beautiful, spare novella. The book’s a success itself, but that’s forgivable because it successfully celebrates failure.

One of its many triumphant aspects is its (relatively) unapologetic defense of that venerable American personality type, the scion of affluence who rejects striving in favor of what pessimists call “slacking” and what optimists call “voluntary simplicity.”

As the back-cover blurb explains, “In the mid-1960s, William was the firstborn of identical twins. It is the last time in his life he will ever be first in anything.”

What gets in the way is a series of debilitating childhood illnesses, which keep him out of school for the better part of two years and permanently affect his self-image. Narrating from adulthood, he insists he wasn’t and isn’t looking for anybody’s pity. He claims his underachieving was a deliberate life choice, a path of bitter struggle to contrast with his twin’s charmed life of effortless grace.

“Please, do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose, designed to exorcise my demons and provide a thrill for everyone who cares to watch them all take flight….”

You don’t have to be familiar with the literary “theory of the unreliable narrator” to detect a taste of self-serving defensiveness.

But no matter what the motivation, William’s early life certainly is one defined by its missed marks.

Almost fatally introverted, he cuts down on his opportunities to strike out with girls by asking his parents to send him to a boarding school he calls “The Boys’ Prison.”

From there it’s five years in a hilariously undistinguished little college, where he adopts “a steady diet of beer and chicken wings” while his classmates wander “through the dirt and rubble smiling like idiots, name tags affixed to their ‘Coed Naked Frisbee’ T-shirts” (and while his brother wows ’em all at Harvard).

From there it’s a series of go-nowhere jobs, ending as William hooks up with a small-time religious cult, not out of any worshipful fever but for the convenience of letting someone else make all the decisions for him.

Of course, it’s no real autobiography. Benjiman Anastas comes from out of that ever-acclaimed Iowa Writer’s Workshop gang, and his elegant prose ripples with the mark of patient polishing with which any real William wouldn’t bother, even when defending the nobility of the underachiever:

“The underachiever’s life is a lonely one, devoid of sustaining warmth, and fundamental intimacy; this statelessness, if you will, can be the source of boundless happiness, a kind of transcendental bliss known only to the deepest American thinkers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Tony Robbins)…”

Amy Denio’s Playful Noise

Music review, 5/19/99

AMY DENIO Greatest Hits

(Spoot Music/Unit Circle)

SUE ANN HARKEY Fulcrum

(Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures)

WELLWATER CONSPIRACY Brotherhood of Electric

(Time Bomb/BMG)

While, or perhaps because, few outsiders were paying attention, Seattle’s quietly become a major center for theTentacle zine calls “adventuresome” or “creative” music. One might also call it post-jazz (even though not all of its practitioners improvise), or “ambient” (even though not all of its practitioners play softly).

Amy Denio simply calls it “Spoot,” referring to one particular effect in her repertoire of sounds.

Of course, this music’s uncategorizability has been one asset in keeping it from becoming corporatized. Another is its supposed highbrow inaccessibility.

But that’s exaggerated. A lot of this avant tuneage, particularly Denio’s, is very easy to get into. It’s a playful noise, full of the fun of just playing around (albeit executed by someone who knows damn well just how to play around).

And play she does. Guitars, bass, drums, “found” percussion, drum machines, accordion, sax, vocals, and assorted programming shticks. As often as not, her vocals are treated as just another instrument. Some of the songs have lyrics in assorted foreign languages; many of the ones in English don’t tell stories so much as they collect syllables and words that fit the melodies.

While Denio’s never had any industry-official “hits,” she’s been recording since 1987 for assorted indie labels on two continents, under a vast assortment of band names. Among the ensembles represented on this disc alone:Tone Dogs, Curlew, (EC) Nudes, Pale Nudes, FloMoFlo, and perhaps her best-known creation, the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet (which continues to gig after she’s left it).

Despite the vast array of instrumentations, dates, and personnel (some tracks are Denio multi-track solos, on one she’s only a backup vocalist), the whole thing fits together beautifully. It’s because Denio maintains a consistant aesthetic to all her works.

She employs alterate tunings and scales, unfamiliar (and shifting) time measures, and many of the other avant-composer tricks music students have learned from Harry Partch, Schoenberg, Varese, and the Knitting Factory clique. But her goal is never to be exclusionary, nor to merely impress us with her learning or her virtuosity.

She’s an artiste, but she’s an entertainer first. She engages her listeners, luring them whimsically into her alluring soundscapes, then sending them into new ways of hearing (and therefore seeing) the world around them.

Sue Ann Harkey’s been exploring similar musical-art-entertainment territories (in Seattle, New York, Arizona, and Britain) even longer than Denio. Now approaching her 20th year in the genre, she’s just put out a CD calledFulcrum on her own label, Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures. As the company name implies, Harkey’s a little further along the cosmic-ambient side of the soundscaping game than Denio. She’s also closer to post-jazz improvving, at least in this particular recording (which features local avant-music all-stars Lori Goldston, Fred Chalenor, and Tucker Martine).

But, like Denio, Harkey entices and embraces listeners in a fully-realized alternate aural universe. Some of it’s hypnotic; some of it’s ritualistic; some of it even sounds a tiny bit like early Kraftwerk. But it’s all enveloping and seductive and more life-affirming than any pedestrian new-age stuff could ever be.

Elsewhere in post-prog land, Wellwater Conspiracy (ex-Monster Magnet member John McBain and the former Soundgarden rhythm section) has delivered a new batch of neo-acid power pop. It’s bright and bouncy, it’s upbeat and depressing, it’s contrived and free-flowing, it’s spacy and down-to-earth, it’s tons of fun.

It’s even got a song titled “Hal McBlain,” McBain’s self-comparison to the ubiquitous L.A. studio drummer Hal Blaine. (The song “Born With A Tail,” by the way, is no relation to the Supersuckers’ track of the same name.)

Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be

TV essay, 5/12/99

The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.

The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.

As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.

When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.

The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.

The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.

Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).

It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.

The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).

I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).

Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.

Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.

Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.

This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40 Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.

To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).

Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.

Journeys of the Mind:

Yourgrau, Mygrau, Ourgrau

Book feature, 4/28/99

HAUNTED TRAVELLER:

An Imaginary Memoir

by Barry Yourgrau

Arcade Publishing, $23.95

Barry Yourgrau, as he insists on telling us (in the least interesting segment of his latest collection of “sudden fiction” sketches), is, in real life, yet another middle-aged, N.Y.C.-based author whose existence is centered around the old home office and whose “adventures” tend to involve sitting at the keyboard, trying to think stuff up.

Actually, his life’s been a little more exciting than that. He’s had side careers in acting and performance art (the latter basically involving telling his stories to live audiences). The bulk of the press packet for his new book,Haunted Traveller, consists of article clippings regarding the ill-fated film version of his last collection, The Sadness of Sex. (The movie, which alternated between readings and re-enactments of Yourgrau’s surrealistic mini-tales of obsession and low-key angst, remains unreleased after only a few producer-paid screenings in L.A.)

The Sex book, however, was and is a triumph. It can essentially be described as a sequence of brief, finely-described dream/nightmare imageries, mostly built not on erotic excitement but on sexuality’s other easy-to-push buttons–despair, loneliness, frustration, fear, embarassment, farce, compulsion, emotional turmoil, and the particularly hetero-male metaphor of finding oneself lost within an alien (and potentially unfriendly) environment, apprehensive yet compelled to continue surveying.

It’s no big stretch, then, for Yourgrau to switch to deconstructing travel-memoir cliches in his newest themed collection of fiction-oids.

I feel I’d spoil it if I mentioned too many of Yourgrau’s ingenious story premises here, because their downbeat, Kafkaesque revelation forms the whole point of many of his pieces. Like that mythical Japanese tour group that spends days on a bus to the Grand Canyon and then turns back after taking a few snapshots, Yourgrau never spends more time in any one fictive place than he deems necessary.

I am comfortable saying all the stories are based on the same premise: A first-person narrator travels, usually by foot, across strange and distant lands where he happens to speak the local language well enough to get involved (usually against his better judgement) with assorted citizenry and strange phenomena. It’s a classic storytelling setup (used everywhere from The Odyssey and Gulliver’s Travels to TV’s Route 66 and even Pokemon). But in Yourgrau’s deft hands, it serves less to introduce colorful short-term characters than to illuminate glimpses of his unnamed protagonist’s own persona. Through the 40 or so vignettes, we end up learning a lot less about the assorted places and people the Haunted Traveller meets than we do about the Traveller’s own rootlessness, his restlessness, his need to keep seeing more and more places and to never see too deeply into any one of them.

I will also reveal that the last piece, “Music,” finds the Traveller’s soul finally at rest, only after he’s no longer capable of continuing his lifelong escape from his own mortality.

In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau deconstructed lust. In Haunted Traveller, he deconstructs wanderlust. In both collections (and in two earlier books Arcade’s reissuing), he uses the precision techniques of the short-short story to provide a well-balanced exhibition of tiny glimpses into the human condition. Think of it as literary pointillism, or as the use of breadth to tell what depth cannot.

How Green Were My Pajamas

Music feature, 4/21/99

This is a somewhat poignant, yet ultimately optimistically tale about a man who tells somewhat poignant, yet ultimately optimistically tales, and the musicians who help turn his realities into dreams.

Jeff Kelly began recording with the band Green Pajamas some 15 years ago. Music had been Kelly’s calling since age 11, when he formed a group called the Electric Garbage Cans. Under the auspices of the tiny local label Green Monkey Records, Kelly, guitarist Joe Ross, and keyboardist Eric Lichter released a handful of 45s (the exquisite “Kim the Waitress”), cassettes (Summer of Lust), and LPs (Book of Hours) until 1990. Green Monkey entrepreneur Tom Dyer had taken a day job by then, as had the band members. Kelly spent the next several years working, starting a family, living a quite normal life, occasionally performing for friends and loved ones, and continuing to write and tape-record hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss.

The real loss was the world’s. Kelly’s deceptively simple stories of unrequited crushes, everyday disappointments, nuns, vampires, and pleasant afternoon strolls never got the audience they deserved. Kelly had never really cared for the hassles and insanities of the music business, and Dyer could barely afford to get records out locally (though one Pajamas release was licensed to the influential L.A. label Bomp!).

Then, some five years after the band’s breakup, “Kim the Waitress” (which I’d described in its original recording as “seven minutes of ethereal innocence”) was simultaneously covered by Seattle band Sister Psychic and Chicago band Material Issue. Neither version was a national hit, but they raised enough interest in the Pajamas’ past work for the band to reunite. The Pennsylvania-based Get Hip label put out a best-of collection, Indian Winter; while new material was contracted to the Camera Obscura company in Australia. Unlike certain past import-only releases by American bands, the Green Pajamas CDs are priced competitively with domestic issues and are at least fairly decently available, at least on this site.

The first new Pajamas disc, Strung Behind the Sun, was great, but the newest one, All Clues Lead to Meagan’s Bed, just might be the last undiscovered classic of the decade.

The All Music Guide calls it “an hour of literate, articulate, and impeccably crafted songs,” and lists as influences everybody from the Beatles and the Move to King Crimson, Squeeze, George Harison, and even Pearls Before Swine. One could imagine at least twice as many bands the Pajamas sort of sound like, but it wouldn’t add up to the serene joy of Kelly’s understated, plaintive voice, meshing perfectly with the band’s mix of soft power-pop and “paisley underground” neo-psychedelia.

So just get this one. And tell everybody about it. If Kelly doesn’t want to try to be A Rock Star, that’s fine. But we can at least make his work a little better known. His particular melancholy could make a lot of people happy.

You’re In High School Again

Film/TV essay, 4/14/99

High school, the modern grownup theory seems to go, is most fondly remembered by those who were either too spaced out at the time (either naturally or chemically) to notice what was really going on at the time or by those who were never as popular or powerful since. That notion hasn’t stopped the making of movies and TV shows about really hot, beautiful, and fun-lovin’ teens. But, since the mid-’80s, the theory has informed a handful of productions with a sense of the underlying terrors and pressures beneath the surface of even the most “wholesome” middle-class adolescences–while giving grownup actors the chance to act all goofy and immature on screen.

These films and shows have allowed their adult stars to play faux teens who are really authors (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), undercover cops (the filmed-in-Vancouver series 21 Jump Street), mob-escapees (Hidin’ Out), or simply adult women who need to go through the ol’ teen traumas one more time as a learning experience (Peggy Sue Got Married, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Nadine’s storyline in Twin Peaks).

Now, we’ve got two of-age actresses reliving their supposed “simpler times” and finding them not all that simple. One’s a big-name star in a bigtime movie. (You can tell it’s a bigtime movie, because the closing credits list 53 actors and 54 excerpted pop songs!). The other’s a little known improv actress, co-creating and starring in a cable series that’s either a surrealistically-improbable sitcom or an over-the-top sketch extended to 13 half hours.

First, the big expensive one.

Never Been Kissed combines the Romy and Michelle theme of fixing teen-socialization mistakes after the fact with the Fast Times shtick of the undercover reporter assigned to learn what Those Kids Today are really like. Onetime Seattleite Drew Barrymore leaves little scenery unchewed as a meticulous, presumably virginalChicago Sun-Times word-wrangler who gets to live as a high school senior for one semester and do all the things she never got to do in her real teens–to drink at a kegger, to eat pot-laced cake, to dump the nerds’ clique to become one of the popular girls, and to snag a hunky English teacher for her very own. There are a few more plot complications than that, but they’re not important. What’s important is Barrymore’s incessant mugging, accompanied by syrupy string music that bellows up whenever the brief snippets of rock songs (for the all-important tie-in “soundtrack” CD and accompanying music videos) aren’t playing. It’s an inconsequential little future Showtime time-filler, despite (or because of) the Barrymore character’s insistence that it’s all a major life-and-death matter. On the other hand, if you cut some of the mild sex talk, you’d have a suitable (if too long) ABC After School Special in which our plucky heroine learns some valuable life lessons and everybody lives happily ever after.

Conversely, with a little more sex talk it might have come closer to Strangers With Candy, Comedy Central’s current attempt to build on its South Park noteriety. Billed as “The After-Hours After School Special,” it’s a vehicle for star Amy Sedaris to do the second-adolescence shtick for broad laffs. The setup: She’s a 42-year-old dropout, who’s grown a little old for her happy-go-lucky life of drinking and whoring; so she decided to go legit, move back in with what’s left of her birth family, and start all over again in school. Playing the role as a cross between Jan Brady and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous, Sedaris grins perkily as she instigates a different social faux pas (sometimes leading to a death, or worse) in each episode, trying desperately to become popular with the “normal” girls young enough to be her illegitimate daughters (of whom she just might have a few). As you might imagine from a Comedy Central series, Strangers With Candy wouldn’t have ever passed the Standards and Practices offices of the old broadcast networks. But it’s more than just un-PC. It’s genuinely funny. (Which is a lot more than can be said of a lot of would-be “outrageous” attempts at un-PC humor these days.)

Our lesson at the end of the day: Some comedies, like some schoolgirls, try too hard to fit in by aping the moves and clothes and attitudes that are supposed to make one popular. But some comedies, again like some schoolgirls, win something much more important than popularity by just being their own lovable, outlandish selves. Never Been Kissed is the prom queen who’ll soon become an obscure memory. Strangers With Candy is the one who seems the wallflower today, but everyone in future years will claim to have been her best friend.

A Life More Ordinary

film review, 4/7/99

Unmade Beds

(1998, dir. Nicholas Barker)

Ah, New York City. The singles scene. Dating. Mating. Orgasms without relationships; relationships without kids. All those beautiful people partyin’ down at the latest drum-and-bass club, or that swanky new bistro, all in the tightest, smartest new designer come-hither-wear.

Or, maybe, something a little more ordinary.

Unmade Beds, a documentary that’s already aired on Cinemax and has just arrived in U.S. theaters, presents the New York that people who look up to New York try to forget about. It’s like the more depressing episodes ofSeinfeld without the gags. It reveals some Manhattanites who are just as plain and/or pathetic as Manhattanites sometimes stereotype other Americans as being.

First-time, U.K.-bred director Nicholas Barker’s video cameras capture four heavily-accented Jewish and Italian-American N.Y.C.-ers (Brenda, Michael, Aimee, and Mikey), all well into middle age and all boasting of their supposed super street smarts. They’re all driven by the urge-to-merge, but have never found the love life they’ve sought (whether it be a wife for Michael, a harem of swinger chicks for Mikey, a trophy boyfriend for Aimee, or a sugar daddy for Brenda).

Some reviews have claimed some of the movie’s scenes were scripted. I don’t mind. These are still real people playing themselves. If a few preplanned scenes (such as the shots of the female subjects seen dressing through apartment windows) help to tell their tales, so be it. And if working with Barker on what they were going to say on-camera helped them get their messages across, fine. It may have helped them maintain their edgy attitude, to not be shown trying to think up a statement in “real time.”

But then again, it’s their well-practiced “Attitudes” that (as Barker shows but doesn’t tell) helps keep them alone.

The much-detracted last Seinfeld referred to its starring characters as “The New York Four,” and had other characters denounce them as cold-hearted mockers devoid of empathy or substance. Barker’s own New York Four (who are never seen with one another, thus accentuating their solitude among the millions) are depicted less as cold-hearted and more as hard-hearted. The closest we get to a verbal statement about what we see within these people is when somebody tells Michael during a party scene, “You’re giving off these negative vibes that make you unattractive to people.”

Otherwise, Barker lets his camera and his cast’s own (albeit sometimes pre-written) words show off their common fatal character flaw. These are characters who’ve grown up and grown old tough and sharp, who don’t take anything from anybody. There’s no room in their worlds for any of that sissy soft stuff, like sympathy or tears.

Nobody ever fucks with these people. So it’s sad, yet unsurprising, that nobody ever fucks with these people.

Precious Is As Precious Does:

Tell It To McSweeney

Alterna-journal feature, 3/31/99

Hard not to like a magazine whose almost all-text cover starts out, “People, People—Stop blaming yourselves! Have you forgotten: Timothy McSweeney’s Blues/Jazz Odyssey? (For short, say ‘McSweeney’s’) Also known as: ‘Pollyanna’s Bootless Errand.'” This sort of quaint, literate entertainment doesn’t stop for the next 192 pages and back cover.

For decades now (even before TV’s ascendancy), left- and right-wing Puritans alike have bemoaned Americans’ supposed disinterest in The Word; when actually it’s been dull word-packages that’ve drawn all the yawns. If literary journals, political position papers, and highbrow essays could be presented with this sense of smart whimsey, the verbal marketplace could be a quite different landscape indeed.

The origins of McSweeney’s are somewhat remarkable. David Eggers used to edit Might, one of those San Francisco magazines that claim to be “regional” or even “national” in scope but which end up almost never writing about anything outside San Francisco. Might’s post-Spy brand of smug satire wasn’t all that hot in this reviewer’s opinion, but it generated enough impressive portfolio clippings that, upon its demise, Eggers shipped off to NYC to make his way in the “real” magazine racket. There, he plies his way through what he describes as mind-numbing day-job employment at dumb, audience-despising corporate publishing; while by night, from his Brooklyn home office, he puts out McSweeney’s and its associated web site, both as an outlet for his and other writers’ “real” work and as a low-budget example of how word-wrangling ought to be done.

The second McSweeney’s finally arrived in local stores, a little over four months after the first issue of the “Quarterly Concern” appeared. Worth the wait? Yeah.

Within the densely-typeset covers are slightly less densely-typeset interior pages, comprising a variety of pleasant and often insightful prose, fiction, and humor. Of particular note is “Hooper’s Bathhouse” by co-editor Todd Pruzan. It’s a neat, tidy, precise send-up of children’s adventure fiction (one of those genres frequently touted by self-proclaimed defenders of The Word as something we must force-feed our kiddies whether they like it or not), in particular the 1980s “choose your own adventure” subset of that genre. Some of the paths in the story (spread out throughout the magazine) lead to nothing but afternoon boredom. Some lead to afternoon boredom amplified by underage pot smoking. And one path leads to the child heroes discovering some real old-time sea pirates—who promptly slay the kids.

With such a perfect example of exposing the predictability of formula fiction, it’s almost silly to refer to the magazine’s factual stories as “stranger than fiction.” Yet that tired phrase well applies to Sean Wilsey’s “The Republic of Marfa,” a long, leisurely account of an extremely remote west Texas hamlet that got turned into one of those southwest art-colony towns more commonly found in New Mexico and Arizona, and which hosted an international conference on modern architecture whose visiting egos barely fit in the region’s wide open spaces.

Many other delights await within the second McSweeney’s. I’ll leave it for you to find them, in the magazine and on the website. Just remember two of the slogans on issue #2’s cover, “Have Pity,” and “Precious Is As Precious Does.”

Perhaps if it came out more often, I could get tired of the preciousness. But 4x/year, plus weekly-or-so online doses, works out just fine. Beyond the preciousness, though, could McSweeney’s help spur a revival of fine copywriting and editing, of reading for pleasure? Couldn’t hurt trying. Or, as the motto on the bottom of issue #1’s cover states, “We Mean No Harm.”

Going to ‘The Dogs’

Original book essay, 3/24/99

The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary

City Lights Books, $10.95 (paperback)

First, the behind-the-scenes stuff you might remember from a few months back: Seattle author Rebecca Brown made the highly acclaimed The Gifts of the Body, a slightly fictionalized memoir about her days as a volunteer caregiver to AIDS patients. Then, she got a healthy deal with HarperCollins for her next novel. Then, HarperCollins proprietor Rupert Murdoch ordered management to cut expenses, after the company vastly overspent on celebrity books (including one by Murdoch’s pal Newt Gingrich). Brown’s The Dogs was one of the titles dropped, after it had already been announced in company publicity documents. It finally came out months later from a smaller press, for a smaller advance.

But enough of that. Now let’s talk about the book itself, for it’s truly a fine little piece of work which ought to stand on its own rather than as a survival story of the publishing-consolidation wars. To understand the premise, you have to start with the back cover text, which defines a “bestiary” as a “medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” The lesson taught in this tale isn’t as clear as something the Brothers Grimm or Aesop might have told (especially in the original, violent versions), but it still haunts.

Our nameless heroine/narrator, an introverted young adult living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with little need or desire for companionship, meets, or runs into, or is run into by, a doberman pinscher. The narrator takes the dog into her tiny studio apartment, names her Miss Dog, and establishes an emotional bond with the creature beyond any she’d known with her fellow humans.

Then, somewhere around page 32, things get spooky. Miss Dog has a litter of puppies. Then the narrator also gives birth to a litter of puppies. Then more dogs of various ages and demeanors start appearing, as if from nowhere, in the apartment. They follow the narrator wherever she goes, seen by nobody else yet all too physically real to her. Then Miss Dog surgically removes the narrator’s heart, then feeds it back to her chopped up into hors d’ouvres. Then she’s ritually deflated, as a balloon, so there’s more room in the apartment for the ever-increasing numbers of dogs.

As strange as this reads in this summary form, it all makes perfect dream-logic as Brown tells it. She gradually increases the surrealism quotient, patiently (well, as patiently as can be done in a 166-page tale) luring her readers into the heroine’s otherworldly plight.

Brown also never gives an “it was just a dream” cop out. Instead, she ends the heroine’s tale of woe and harrassment on a thickly-disguised therapeutic note, as the heroine finally learns what the dogs had come to her for, to show her what had been missing from her own soul (or something like that). I also cannot do justice here to Brown’s elegant, exquisite prose. Mere excerpts wouldn’t show you the tone, the delicate pacing, of her work. You’ve really got to pick this up for yourself.

The Joy of Joi

Music review roundup, 3/17/99

JOI

One And One Is One

(Realworld/Caroline) ***

In the past, I’ve expressed displeasure with the western-world record companies that curate Third World musics for passive consumption by Birkenstock-wearing WASPs. So why should I approve of a western-world record company curating Third World musics for passive-aggressive consumption by Urban Decay-wearing WASPs? Maybe because I happen to personally like this hi-NRG dance tuneage better than Paul Simonized wine-party music. Or maybe because the source material commercial east-Indian pop, is already a highly commercialized, high-camp-value genre that is in no way ruined by its use as inspiration for this Asian-British crew’s original (apparently sample-less) dance-beat pastiches. Or maybe because it’s just such infectuous fun.

3-MILE PILOT

Songs From An Old Town We Once Knew

(Headhunter/Cargo) **

Compilations of old 7-inches and outtake tracks aren’t supposed to work this well as one piece. Actually it’s two pieces; one CD full of slow songs and a second disc with some louder songs. The songs themselves are mostly post-Silkworm, guitar-distortion sludge ‘n’ drone (with piano); fine enough for ambient listening but not quite foreground material.

DAVID BAERWALD

Hurlyburly soundtrack

(Will) **

In case you’ve forgotten, soundtrack albums all used to be like this: An original suite of instrumentals composed to complement the on-screen action, instead of a promotional tie-in hodgepodge. And it’s good stuff: Lounge-y, poppy, but never-kitschy jazz bubbling smoothly along. It’d rate a third star if not for the pedestrian, studio-singer vocal on the central track, “Black Mamba Kiss.”

BEN FOLDS

Fear of Pop Vol. 1

(550/Sony) **

The Ben Folds Five ringmaster gets to ditch the discipline of composing for a touring band and instead play in the studio. A lot of go-nowhere-amicably noodling results, plus one twisted masterpiece: “In Love,” a spoken-word essay of your archtypical Guy Who Will Not Commit, delivered by William Shatner in the manner of his old bombastic anticlassic The Transformed Man. I can’t ask you to pay the full-album price for one great track, but I can ask you to check it out if you can find a used or otherwise discounted copy.

On Your Marx

Original online film essay, 3/10/99

I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).

Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).

According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.

The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).

But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.

The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)

The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)

And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)

In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.

Better Than A Pokemon With A Sharp Stick

TV essay, 3/3/99

I like Pokemon, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the awkward way the animated series’ episodes seem to have been re-edited from the original anime.

I’m intrigued by what the series might or might not be saying about human/animal relations, within its alternate-universe world where most nonhuman animal species belong to this whole other life form with odd superpowers (varying from species to species) but which can be tamed by being weakened in a fight and then forcibly teleported into an egglike “Pokeball.”

Each episode introduces viewers to at least one previously-unseen species of Pokemon, ranging from superpowered equivalents of everyday Earth animals (birds, bugs, cats, moles) to total bug-eyed monsters and abstract shapes with faces and legs tacked on. (Like I said, it’s an incredibly complicated plot, one which grownups are far less likely to comprehend than kids.)

It’s also a show and a marketing phenomenon with two local connections. The Pokemon name, and the 150 or so different critters in the Pokemon universe, are owned by Nintendo, the Japanese gaming empire whose U.S. division’s in Darkest Redmond; while Renton’s Wizards of the Coast puts out a role-playing card game based on the show’s elaborate fantasy lore.

The first Americans heard of Pokemon was when hundreds of Japanese children got epileptic seizures after viewing strobe-like patterns flashed during an episode. (The real irony’s that fewer than half the victims watched the episode’s original telecast; most were exposed when Japanese evening newscasts excerpted the scene in question.) That scene was cut when the series was redubbed for U.S. consumption. Other changes also seem to have been made; episodes are chopped up, cut to as little as 18 minutes of airtime, and then padded with low-budget extraneous material (such as the daily “Pokerap” song).

Or perhaps they’re not as heavily altered as they seem. Fans I’ve corresponded with in the process of writing this piece insist they’ve seen “Pokerap”-type segments in the original Japanese episodes. They also claim the stories were written presupposing viewer familiarity with the characters and concepts from the original games; and that that’s why the plots sometimes seem choppy by the standards of dumbed-down American kidvid.

The Pokemon universe began in 1995, when Nintendo released the original “Pocket Monsters” video game in Japan, in three versions. The independent designers who created the game on Nintendo’s behalf tried to place cute kid-appeal characters within a long, engaging adventure-game format that would encourage lingering exploration of the game, its fictional world, and its puzzles and secrets. It also encouraged fan dialogue (to successfully complete the game, by capturing and taming all 150 critters, required learning clues scttered across the game’s three slightly-different versions). The smashing success of the original game spawned sequel games, Game Boy condensed games, the card game, an animated feature film (not yet here), comics, dolls,and assorted other merchandise; much of which is now showing up Stateside. The expansive, open-ended concept (sequel games now in preparation supposedly will introduce 250 newly “discovered” Pokemon species) means the phenomenon could keep going for years to come, or at least until the next batch of young gamers decides it’s dumb and wants something else (a cycle which apparently turns over in Japan even faster than over here).

At its best, the kiddie side of Japanese anime (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z) is an entertainment genre in which soon-all-too-familiar plot and design formulas can collide with moments of utterly-baffling weirdness. Pokemon is kiddie-anime at, or nearly at, its best.

Gigolo Aunts Back From Dead;

Mia Boyle Not M.I.A.

CD review briefs, 2/24/99

Gigolo Aunts

Minor Chords and Major Themes (E Pluribus Unum) ****

The Posies may or may not be once-and-for-all broken up, but their main cohorts in way-melodic, way-sardonic power pop, Boston’s Gigolo Aunts, have suddenly and unexpectedly returned to life after almost five years of hiatusing, thanks to the Counting Crows’ E Pluribus Unum label. The power of positive negativity never sounded so sweet.

Actually, the negativity part’s toned down here, counterpointed with reassurances such as “Everyone can fly (you just have to try)” and “Blue sky hopes and horoscopes agree in the end/that timing is your real friend, your only friend.” Even in the most hopeless of situations, singer Dave Gibbs’s characters keep on a-pushin’ for renewal, cranking out new personal ads and urging friends to “get yourself together baby.”

But the positivity parts are always kept from saccarinity by the quiet acknowledgements of realistic disillusion, such as in “Everything Is Wrong” and “Residue.” Yet even in the lyrics’ saddest moments, the smart, level-headed vocals and the plaintive guitars keep things from getting too mopey. What we have here, as in the best smart-pop from Big Star on down, is intelligent assessments of the personal condition set to hoppin’ guitar chords and drum fills that keep the vocals’ messages in a context of continual striving for, and demanding that, things be better.

I could listen to this for days. In fact, I probably will.

Mia Boyle

I Am a Diver (Kitchen Whore) ***

Onetime Stranger music editor Mia Boyle, who’s performed around Seattle in such bands as Bullet Train, Moxie, and Radialarmsaw, delivers a moody suite of slow and sultry ballads, performed on multitracked guitars and vocals with ample echo effects. One or two of the tracks sound sort of like what Hole’s “Doll Parts” might have sounded if it had been sung by a more human-scale personage. Other tracks drift into a hypnotic dreamstate somewhere between subtle awareness, erotic afterglow, and the quiet not-really-depression of staring outside on a rainy, overcast March day as the diffused light fades into diffused twilight. Utterly beautiful.

(One might also note that Boyle only includes a few, quite small, photos of herself on the inside flaps of the gorgeously-designed Digipak. In the age of Lilithmania, it’s refreshing to know there’s one female acoustic-singer-songwriter type who’d rather be known for her work than for her image.)

Whale

All Disco Dance Must End In Broken Bones (Virgin) ***

You like Pizzicato 5? You’ll surely like this. Bouncy electronic mixes and samples, wistful voices, a total swingin’ fun time. Easily the most Japan-O-Rama sound to have ever come from Sweden.

Kurt and Courtney and Nick

Film review, 2/17/99

Kurt and Courtney

(1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)

Hype!

(1995, dir. Doug Pray)

Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!

(1994, various directors)

By my calendar watch, we’re only seven weeks from what’s sure to be another exercise in media excess–the fifth anniversary of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

No, I don’t think Cobain was really murdered. The various conspiracy theories are too pat, too dependent on ignoring facts of the case that don’t fit the theorists’ neat little conceptions.

Besides, nobody had anything to gain from Cobain’s death, except the conspiracy theorists. Even if he were planning to quit music and leave the admitted publicity-addict Courtney Love, she would’ve gotten as much (and possibly more useful) ink as Cobain’s ex as she did as his widow.

Yet the theories continue to find an audience, among Cobain fans who still don’t want to believe their troubled idol could possibly have wanted to die.

Yet the clues are everywhere in his songs and performances. He really was a sensitive soul who sought to acquire the virtual invincability of a rocker (NOT of a “rock star”–while his music was some of the most accessible U.S. punk ever made, he never wanted what he considered the corrupt rock-star lifestyle).

But the assorted stresses of suddenly becoming a generation’s icon (and the locus of a multimillion dollar business) proved too much for him.

What survives are his music, his haunting image, and the many hangers-on and media vultures still trying to cash in, literally or figuratively, on his story.

One of the latter, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, was thwarted in his attempt to make a movie about the Cobain tragedy; neither Love nor the surviving Nirvana members would talk to him or permit the use of Nirvana’s music or video footage. Instead, Kurt and Courtney is the personal story of Broomfield’s failure to make the film he’d wanted to make. He travels around Seattle, Aberdeen, Portland, and L.A. He interviews a few of the couple’s friends and relatives, none of whom had anything bad to say about the self-deprecating Kurt or anything good to say about the monomaniacally ambitious Courtney.

A large bulk of the film’s time is spent on the professional Courtney-bashers who’ve shown up regularly in magazine stories, talk shows, and Internet newsgroups–Courtney’s very estranged father Hank Harrison, conspiracy theorist Tom Grant, and washed-up early Seattle punker Eldon “El Duce” Hoke. Hoke, whose career (such as it was) was predicated on calculated noteriety, claimed Love had offered to pay him to kill Cobain but he’d turned down the offer. Hoke died days after Broomfield filmed him; he was hit by a train while stoned out of his gourd. (He reportedly told friends he’d made up the hit-man story in a scheme to get his own name back in infamy.)

Broomfield clearly wants to contrast the ill fate of the tender, ulcerous Cobain with Love’s final re-creation of herself as a total Hollywood celebrity. But I couldn’t help seeing a more telling comparison between Cobain and Hoke. Both were self-styled bad boys; both eventually died indirectly from their drug addictions. But Hoke, bereft of much talent or imagination, sought merely to push the offensiveness envelope, and ended up a long term burnout case, living out his existence on L.A.’s far outskirts. Cobain beautifully married punk noise and pop immediacy, art and entertainment, and (as can be seen in the compilation video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!) burned out much more quickly.

Meanwhile, the definitive videocassette document of Nirvana’s era remains Doug Pray’s Hype! It contains very little Nirvana material, but puts the band in the context of its time and place better than star-obsessed folks like Broomfield ever could.

McLuhan Made Simple(r)

Book feature, 2/10/99

McLuhan for Beginners

by W. Terrence Gordon; illustrated by Susan Willmarth

Writers and Readers Publishing

The Mechanical Bride:

by Marshall McLuhan

Beacon Press

The Medium Is the Massage:

HardWired

War and Peace in the Global Village

HardWired

In the late ’70s, the U.K.-based Writers and Readers organization helped revitalize the sub-genre of educational comics with its series of cleanly-drawn, rigorously-edited trade paperbacks, many on leftist political topics that had become the domain of ponderous academic verbiage. After a falling-out around 1990 with Random House, which had issued the U.S. editions of its early books, Writers and Readers set up its own Stateside distribution arm for what it calls its “documentary comic books” (which are really more like heavily-illustrated texts). The “For Beginners” line’s topics have broadened from Marx and anti-nuclear-power activism to include opera, architecture, pan-Africanism, and the history of clowns.

But what happens when you try to use the illustrated-text format to simplify an author/philosopher/sociologist who already tried during his lifetime to issue illustrated and simplified expressions of his ideas?

Not the total redundancy one might expect.

Marshall McLuhan’s own illo-books (the early The Mechanical Bride and the later The Medium Is the Massageand War and Peace in the Global Village) still hold up today as prime examples in the marriage of word and picture to express a sequence of ideas and critical arguments. Bride, the Toronto media analyst’s first, now damn-hard-to-find book (1950), used the word-picture interplay not only as its technique but as one of its topics. At the time TV was just starting up, McLuhan (1911-80) found most of the things later curmuddeonny media-analysts would blame on TV in the existing realms of radio, movies, newspaper front pages, comic books, and especially magazine ads. While his fellow academics were coccooned away in their ivory towers (perhaps in hiding from the hordes of GI Bill kids then invading campuses south of the Canadian border), McLuhan saw the forces of corporate culture using every persuasive trick, not to inform the populace but rather to keep it in a passive, sleepwalking state of production and consumption.

After his long, detailed, and pictureless Understanding Media (1965) brought him fame and a modicum of critical respect, McLuhan returned to the illustrated format with Massage in ’67, followed-up the next year by Global Village. The two mass-market-paperback sized books, co-written by Quentin Fiore and designed by Jerome Agel, can be seen as one two-volume work. McLuhan called them “mosaics,” possibly referring to the old adage that America was a melting pot but Canada was a mosaic of still-differentiated identities. The McLuhan-Fiore-Agel team mixed New Yorker cartoons, ads, found images, and news and documentary photos to accompany short, pithy, universal pronouncements (“Art is what you can get away with,” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”).

By chopping up his remarks into micro-essays (more about that literary form in a future week) on nothing less important than the essence of modern social interactions, with lots of sharp black and white pictures, it’s easy to see he was trying to use the techniques he’d observed in commercial media to new, more enlightening ends. Unfortunately, readers and critics sometimes didn’t understand the difference between McLuhan’s and advertisers’ use of such visual-verbal techniques, and incorrectly presumed McLuhan was celebrating or approving of the social changes he was actually trying to warn us against.

McLuhan for Beginners author Terrence Gordon (whose work here was admired enough by McLuhan’s family for him to bag the assignment to write his estate-authorized biography) makes clear, to the point of redundancy, that the old Torontoan was trying to keep up with the ’60s, not to wallow in the go-go-go zeitgeist but to warn us about it, as a reserved yet kindly Canuck gentleman dismayed by the U.S.A.’s culture of excess. An excess which not only sent Americans into space but into the horrors of the Vietnam war, into cloverleaf freeways and decayed ghettos, into ever faster, busier, and more manic existences.

Massage and Global Village were intended to only explore pieces of McLuhan’s worldview. Gordon’s book, written nearly two decades after his subject’s death and a decade since his last posthumously-published work, gets to summarize the man’s whole life, career, and teachings. That he does an admirable, cohesive job of it is due partly to his skill, partly to the finely honed instincts of the Writers and Readers editors, and in no small part to the head start given him by his subject.

At a time when so many self-proclaimed “communication” experts can’t write a simple declarative sentence (to the point where you need a “documentary comic book” re-interpretation just to get what they’re trying to say), McLuhan’s knack for breaking down a complex argument into solid bite-sized points, learned largely from the mass media he studied and often opposed, still points the way toward not just understanding media, but making yourself understood in the process.