‘Life, The Movie’:

All the World’s a Multiplex

Book feature, 2/3/99

Life, The Movie:

by Neal Gabler

Knopf, $25

Seems most everybody these days hates the mass-media industry, including a lot of the folks who work in it.

Now, in Life, the Movie, we’ve got Hollywood biographer Neal Gabler complaining semi-coherently about Hollywood’s power to shape the popular zeitgeist. I’ve complained about that myself over the years. But my beef’s different from his.

I believe the six big studios (and the five big record labels, the three or four big networks, the 12 big cable-channel owners, and the similarly concentrated magazine and newspaper operators; most of which are cross-owned by a dozen or so media Goliaths) concentrate too much sway over the world’s visions, dreams, and consciousnesses.

Gabler, though, apparently has no problem with a nation (and, by extension, a world) beholden to a single set of ideas dictated by a small cultural elite. He just wants a different elite to be in charge. If anything, he thinks a society organized around mass media (and various interest groups’ need to attain publicity via mass media) istoo populist. From politics and warfare to religion and academia, from fashion and architecture to journalism and bestseller literature, any venture or idea Gabler surveys is one that has to become popular to succeed, and to become popular it has to put on the old razzle-dazzle, to gussy itself up in a narrative arc and a star system and a carefully-staged spectacle and a happy ending.

Gabler’s take will likely appeal to both liberal and conservative elitists. I suspect he’s personally on the left wing of what the webzine Salon calls “the literate overclass,” for the simple reason that Gabler, like a lot of left-elitists, is far more articulate about what he’s against than about what he’s for. He admires that sourpuss left-elitist prude Neil Postman, and he expresses wistful nostalgia for dour Puritanism with its repression of individual personality in favor of “character” (yet he disapproves of cynical politicians who preach about “character” while practicing stage-managed campaigns and market-researched platforms).

While not explicitly calling for it, Gabler seems to want a society run, well, by people like him. A more ordered, rational society, such as that fantasized by the “civil society” movement. A society where a few urban-Northeast big thinkers ponder what’s best for everybody, then face few obstacles of authority in putting their decisions into action. A society where all of us residing outside the corridors of power work hard, save our money, and solemnly tend to our own affairs. Something like what those Seattle City Council members admired so much about Singapore on their junket there a year or two back, before today’s Asian recession discredited a lot of that paternalistic-central-planning ideal.

Besides, America isn’t and never was what Gabler seems to wish it was. Hell, the human race isn’t. We’re a sensual, sensuous species. From the Noh theater of Japan to the Greek tragedies to African tribal dances to Shakespeare to carny shows to museum mega-exhibitions to porn to the Indy 500 to the fashion runways to heavy metal to Japanese magazine ads showing fantasies of American cowboys, we want and love to have our passions stirred, and marketers and publishers and preachers and politicians would be fools to not know it. And, on at least one level, Gabler seems to know it too. In his long, tedious invective over the failings of all humans less brain-centric than himself, Gabler reveals himself to be what the gays call a “drama queen.”

Ya Gotta Have Hartley

Film essay, 1/27/99

Henry Fool

(1998, dir. Hal Hartley)

At one time, Hal Hartley seemed the savior of American cinema.

Against an ’80s moviescape of loud special effects, inane violence, and “brat pack” smarminess (more about the latter in a future installment), Hartley’s low-key comedy-dramas (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and the made-for-PBS featurette Surviving Desire) were all talk. Smartly-written talk, executed by attractive, accomplished actors, who were framed in perfectly-composed shots. Talk ascribed to characters who were umpteen degrees smarter and more coherent than most film characters of their socio-economic status or age, whose problems typically involved the need to either maintain or break down the barriers between souls. Talk set in inner-ring Long Island suburbs and N.Y.C. outer-borough neighborhoods which Hartley depicted not as sterile sprawl zones but as painfully-honest-to-God small towns, where everybody knows everybody’s failings and where grudges last lifetimes.

Hartley hasn’t exactly gone soft. If anything, his mid-’90s installments Amateur and Flirt showed he could carefully increase the sex-and-violence aspects of his stories without losing their human cores. But as Amerindie film became an increasingly ossified set of rules and conventions designed to get films shown at Sundance and sold to Miramax, Hartley’s shtick became one of the indie industry’s more-often-imitated formulas. (Take The Brothers McMullen or Trees Lounge. Please.)

With so many literate-loners-with-relationship-troubles-and-questionable-pasts films out there, all Hartley has to separate himself from his imitators are his skills and his storytelling genius. With his most recent entry, Henry Fool, that’s almost enough.

The plot summary, as if plot were really the important thing in a Hartley film: Henry (James Urbaniak) is your basic Hartley antihero, a smooth-talking confidence man whose simple explanations for everything include simple explanations for his own life’s failure. He boasts of being such a stupendous literary author that the world’s simply not ready for his envelope-pushing greatness. He takes in (and is taken in by) Simon Grim (Thomas Jay Ryan), a young-adult garbage man still living with his teen sister (Parker Posey) and unstable mom. Simon writes a book under Henry’s encouragement and tutoring, which is apparently awful but highly marketable. Henry’s own work, however, turns out to be apparently merely awful. Simon becomes a Gen-X literary celebrity (yes, there can be such a thing); while Henry seduces both mom and sis (leading to the former’s suicide and the latter’s shotgun wedding). Henry ends up in the dead-end working-stiff existence to which Simon originally felt resigned.

Much has been made by critics about how the audience never hears either Henry’s or Simon’s writings. It’s not really that novel. You never really saw the art-objects of desire in Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing or Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (or, for that matter, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights). Besides, what counts for Hartley isn’t the characters’ works but everybody’s (including their own) reactions to them.

The Ratio of ‘Alpha’ to ‘Pi’

Film review, 1/20/99

Alphaville

Home Vision Cinema

Pi

Artisan Entertainment

When I finally saw the video release of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (known on-screen, and on the video box, by the Greek letter), it was on the same day I happened to catch Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville on the Independent Film Channel. The two films turn out to be bookends of the modern information age.

Alphaville, as all good film-studies alums know, was Godard’s low-tech response to the popular fears generated by the high-tech advances of the late ’50s and early ’60s. His storyline involved hardboiled private eye Lemme Caution (Eddie Constantine) venturing to a far-off planet where one hyper-rational, central mainframe computer ran everything, and where the display of human emotion was a crime punishable by death. But it was shot on contemporary-modern locations with a small cast, off-the-rack costumes, and no special effects (the voice of the evil computer was played by a throat-cancer patient with an electronic voice-box implant). Godard’s statement against dehumanization was made with rigorously human-scale tools. Since its making, several films have referred to images or plot elements in Alphaville (from Blade Runner to Trouble In Mind to a no-budget ’80s indie called Betaville). But Pi’s the first to both do so successfully and to put a modern spin on the original film’s theme.

Like Alphaville, Pi’s shot in grainy, hi-contrast black-and-white, and utilizes lotsa extreme-close-up cutaway shots of flashing digits–its antihero Max Cohen (Sean Guillette) apparently dabbles in stock-market “day trading” to finance his lonely pursuit of mathemetical keys to the meaning of life. But where Lemme Caution seeks to reclaim human souls from the cold, inhumane hyper-rationality associated with IBM 360-era centralized computing (and visualized by stark, bureaucratic office buildings and harsh fluorescent lights), Max is the ultimate loner-male computer hacker, preferring literal “known quantities” to the chaos of humanity (as visualized by teeming NYC street scenes). Max finds relief from everyday existence’s humdrum disappointments in the burning heat of ultra-logic (literally–he’s addicted to the very intense thought processes that also aggrivate his severe migraines, which he can only partially relieve via massive prescription combos). Like some mid-’80s computer fanatics I knew, he’s devoted most of his small Manhattan apartment to a complex, personally-assembled “kludge” of a computer setup, which he’s even named (“Euclid”). To him, logic isn’t the enemy of life but the heart of its very being. He believes if he can master the ultimate mysteries of math and geometry (which, in his case, include Leonardo’s “magic rectangle,” numerological interpretations of the Hebrew Torah, and the ultimate math-mystery, the unending and unrepeating number at the heart of the circle and known by the greek letter pi), he can unlock the final mystery of–well, if he knew what it was, it probably wouldn’t torment him as much as it does.

Both films have thriller subplots to add on-screen action to their cerebreality. Lemme engages in espionage and chase scenes against the agents of Alphaville’s machine-controlled regime; Max is pursued in the subways and streets by the employees of a Wall Street financier (Pamela Hart) and by a cabal of Jewish mystics; each party seeks to exploit his way with figures for purposes only partly revealed by the film’s end.

Yet near the end, he proclaims to the mystics that they, and he, were mistaken to seek the ultimate truth in a mere number. “It’s not the number–it’s the meaning, the syntax, the spaces between the numbers.” Only after this (and the death of his only friend) does the film’s image briefly switch from stark b&w to shades of grey. Max Cohen understands the temptations of the desire for rational knowledge far better than Lemme Caution ever could, but ultimately reaches a similar conclusion in regards to logic’s frustrating limitations. Max realizes too late, it really isn’t what you know but who you know.

It should also be mentioned that Pi is a tour-de-force directoral debut blah blah blah; but more importantly, it’s a real independent film. It’s not a low-budget, “hip” version of a standard Hollywood formula. Despite the chase interludes, it’s not some commercially-released demo reel intended to show the director’s skill at orchestrating violence or mayhem. Nor is it a Sundance Festival-formula product, full of relatively-affluent WASPs standing around talking about relationships. It’s a real movie about real ideas–something rare in any age.

Precision Ennui in the Funny Pages:

Too Clowes for Comfort

Book feature, 1/13/99

Caricature

by Daniel Clowes

Fantagraphics, $29.95 (hardcover)

Let us now praise Daniel Clowes, one of the reigning American masters of visual perfection and human imperfection in the graphic-novel field.

Clowes emerged from Chicago in the ’80s with Lloyd Llewellyn, a private-eye spoof series full of fab ’50s architecture, pre-cocktail-revival hip men’s clothes, and gag stories built around a combination of early MAD Magazine subtle outrageousness and postpunk hip irony.

For many an aspiring alterna-cartoonist back then, a modest success like Lloyd would’ve been the cornerstone of a career. But for Clowes it was just a start.

Encouraged by Fantagraphics Books to phase out the limited Lloyd format in favor of a broader pallate, Clowes launched the anthology comics series Eightball in 1990. The first few issues contrasted Lloyd-style gag humor with darker, scarier drama pieces (such as the story Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, serialized for over two years) and first-person illustrated rants and fantasies (“On a Desert Island With the People on the Subway”). By the time Velvet Glove finally ended, Clowes had constructed a recipe for low-key, high-anxiety tales that married precise, tight drawings with all-too-flawed characters moving through an urban landscape of loneliness and forever-dashed expectations.

Over the past six years, Clowes has continued to perfect this style; with more than a little influence from another Chicago-based Fantagraphics cartoonist, Acme Novelty Library creator Chris Ware. Eightball continued to combine the outrageous with the comitragic, particularly in the series’ five-year serial Ghost World.

Which brings us to Clowes’s newest Eightball collection, Caricature. It collects eight one-shot stories from pastEightball issues, plus one similar piece (“Green Eyeliner”) commissioned for last year’s Esquire summer-fiction issue.

The title of Caricature fits both the topic of the lead story (a once-promising commercial artist now reduced to drawing faces for hire at crafts fairs) and the book’s overall tone. In front of all of Clowes’s exquisitely-composed frames of strip-mall landscapes, motels, and “restored” blocks of former urban decay, the faces of his characters hauntingly stare straight out at you, as if pleading for your understanding. In most cases, they’re the jaded, tired faces of men and women who’ve been either burned by life, frozen out of life, or both.

These characterizations go far beyond the one-dimensonal square-bashing Clowes once practiced with gag characters such as Young Dan Pussey (the ultimate alternative-comix-world putdown of geeky superhero-comics fans). The characters in Caricature, no matter how pathetic, antisocial, or cruel, are all given a degree of human dignity by Clowes that they lack in their own lives.

Many of these going-nowhere people go through quite a bit of plot twists in their brief tales, mostly minor tragedies that leave them even more jaded and confused than before. In the collection’s longest work, the 22-page “Gynecology,” Clowes employs flashbacks, flash-forwards, asides, asides within asides, and suplots often lasting a single ninth-of-a-page drawing frame to relate the complicated, yet ultimately futile, lives of a lonely doctor’s wife, the cynical gallery painter with whom she’s cheating, and their assorted friends, spouses, lovers, rivals, and enemies. This story, like all the stories here, is a masterwork of the comix-narrative form, bouncing images and words off of one another and using sequential drawings to juxtapose subplots and ideas, only to neatly bring it all back together in the last two pages.

It’s also a bookend to the title story, in a way. The title of “Caricature” implies a seemingly shallow impression of a public face which can actually reveal much (maybe too much) about the person’s soul. In “Gynecology,” the doctor’s wife’s lover complains that her husband can coldly stare at other women’s private parts with no emotional response, that there’s something wrong about “a man who can turn off natural human impulses like a light switch whenever he feels like it.”

While Clowes never gives his characters an alternative to their Hobson’s choice between snide sarcasm and jaded reserve, his drawing and his writing offer such an alternative to us. It’s the opportunity to see the world directly around us with a little more compassion, a little less self-centeredness.

Her Throbbing Volvo:

My Troubles With Upscale Erotica

Book review feature, 1/6/99

SEDUCTIONS: Tales of Erotic Persuasion

Edited by Lonnie Barbach, Ph.D.

Dutton, $23.95

HIGH INFIDELITY: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors

Edited by John McNally

Quill/William Morrow, $13 (paperback)

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INFIDELITIES

Edited by Stephen Brook

Penguin, $12.95 (paperback)

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW EROTICA

Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

Carroll & Graf, $10.95 (paperback)

Every year, a group of British book critics gives out an award-O-shame for the most ridiculously-written sex scenes in contemporary mainstream novels. Sure they’re fun, but bad writing, when it’s done right (no, that’s not a contradiction), can make a sex scene sexier. After all, sex at its best is a release from the rigors of the intellect and the propriety of good taste.

Would that any of that contest’s winning examples of purple prose appeared in the ’80s-’90s specialty genre of upscale “literary erotica.” You know: those hardcover and trade-paperback collections sold in the back of Tower Books or the front of Toys In Babeland, promising ever-so-tasteful excursions into the lower passions, many of which proudly claim all-female and/or all-gay mastheads.

Instead, what you usually get are bland, mannered accounts of bland, mannered people, almost always upper-middle-class and ultra-caucasian (except in anthologies specifically ethnic-branded), for whom orgasms are merely another upscale leisure activity, and for whom discovering a new lover is no more or less exciting than discovering a new store.

Lonnie Barbach’s collections appear to be aimed at those readers who can only indulge in visceral-fantasy reading if it’s got a justifying patina of “education.” Her introductions in Seductions denote specifically what pleasures and psychological lessons the reader is expected to attain from each of the collection’s 20 stories. Only five of Seductions’ stories are written from a male point of view–in three, the men serve as helpless targets of women’s schemes; in one, a nice gay man pondes another man’s cute dimpled face (but never gets into discussing gay-male sex as explicitly as other stories in the book discuss lesbian sex); and in the other, a Renaissance-era rogue (i.e., a safe fantasy figure from a time and place far removed from ours) gives a lovemaking lesson to another man’s fiancee.

The book’s other stories are all about heroines, nice complacent heroines who have nice complacent fun with nice complacent men and/or women. Even when cheating on husbands or screwing compliant department-store workers in the fitting room, none of these women (except the ones who get converted to lesbianism) learn major life-changing things about themselves, and none of them does anything really mind-altering like falling in love.

(At least, however, the stories in Barbach’s collection present non-monogamous and recreational sex as something potentially beneficial and even wholesome. After 15 years of stupid “erotic thriller” movies and novels in which intercourse (even hetero intercourse among HIV-sparse population segments) was treated as a crime punishable by death, it’s welcome that fictional heroines can again enjoy their and others’ bodies this nonchalantly.)

In contrast to Seductions’ unbearable lightness of licking, the High Infidelity collection occasionally acknowledges the limitations of a lifestyle-centered sexuality. Indeed, its focus is not The Affair (let alone The Act) but about how affairs are great angst generators for self-centered, all-too-literate white people who seem to get off less on sex (or on the excitement of illicitness) than on the opportunity to wallow in their own guilt, confusion, and/or vengeance. This is a theme implicit in most of the book’s segments and is made explicit in one story (Robert Boswell’s “Flipflops”), wherein a philandrous couple vacationing at a Mexican seaside resort are only briefly, temporarily, disrupted from their vapid relationship-talking by the sight of a local man drowning just beyond their beach.

The Penguin Book of Infidelities tells more, and far better-written, tales of illicit couplings and the wide variety in cultural attitudes toward them in different places and times. While John McNally’s introduction to High Infidelitytreats extramarital play as an eternal problem, the Penguin collection notes it’s been considered more or less of a problem depending on where and when it happened. From Tunisian wives who found public veil-wearing advantageous while persuing local stable boys without being seen, to old French lords and ladies who sat for banquets as foursomes with their respective current lovers seated to each side, there’ve been plenty of social solutions to the stability/monotony dilemma, few of which (besides secrecy and guilt trips) find their way into the modern-day tales in High Infidelity.

If you want to find out about this genre without investing a whole lot of money, Carroll and Graf’s huge paperback collections give you a lot of different stories for not much money. Few are outstanding, but they do represent almost as much variety as you can expect in the scene. The best of them try to combine the visceral manipulation of the reader with a solid plot; such as The Mammoth Book of New Erotica’s centerpiece novella, Michael Hemmingson’s “The Dress.” A proper upper-middle-class British couple realize (unlike any of the protagonists in Seductions) the limitations of their mannered upscale life. The husband’s solution: Go out in public with the wife in highly revealing dresses. It revitalizes their sex life, but then leads them to further self-realizations that change their lives forever, as the wife goes from play-acting the “lead” role in the couple’s sex life (at her husband’s prodding) to taking charge for real. But still, all works out for the best; as both partners decide they’d rather enjoy their passions than sit around and brood about them. Perhaps a lesson to be learned by the characters in some of the other books discussed here.

From Hot Bollywood Action to

Lo-Fi Turned Into Hi-Tech

CD review roundup, 12/30/98

KALYANJI, ANANDJI

Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, & Sitars

(Motel) ****

I LOVE movie music from Bollywood (the Bombay commercial film industry)! This is as great an introductory sampler of it as you’ll find. The Motel Records gang’s taken 15 tracks from ’70s crime and gangster films scored by the brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah, and heavily remixed and remastered them for western rock-oriented tastes. (Unfortunately, Motel’s added jokey song titles to most tracks (“The Good, the Bad, and the Chutney”) and left off any specific info about the original films they’re from.) Syrupy strings, twangy sitars, sireny synths, smoky harmonicas, metallic guitars, blazing horns, mod tambourines, and a hundred eastern and western musical traditions both smoothly mesh and jarringly confront to create what the liner notes rightly call “some of the wildest, funkiest, and least incidental `incidental’ music ever made.” To attempt to describe this any further would be foll. Just get it and be astounded.

If you’re after a purer packaging of the original music, without the gag song titles, check out the import 2-CD set The Golden Collection.

TIFFANY ANDERS

Runnin From No Place to Nowhere

(Up) **

Anders (sometime Dinosaur Jr./Mike Johnson backup singer, ex-Hot White Noon frontwoman, and daughter of filmmaker Alison Anders) has assembled twenty-five minutes of light, bright, sarcastic, sardonic, almost quaint singer-songwritery balladeering, backed by her own energetic indie-rock electric guitar (with assistance from bassist Jeff Tobin and three guest drummers, one of whom is Dino-boss J. Mascis in case you care). It takes about six listenings to really get into, but once that point’s reached Anders’s sweet-yet-strong voice and harsh-yet-melodic strumming can get to one.

PASTELS AND FRIENDS

Illuminati: Pastels Music Remixed

(Up) ***

How to make an electronic “remix” CD from one of the most enduring lo-fi indie rock outfits anywhere (Scotland’s long-running Pastels): Hire great synth composers and arrangers to create what are essentially new works, taking the titles, inspiration, and sampled bits of instruments and voices from old Pastels tracks (predominantly from the 1997 CD Illumination). The result: Not a cute-jangly-guitar album with electronics underneath, but a predominantly electronic album perfectly adhering to the Pastels’ aesthetic of patience, understatement, and wistful observance of life. Utterly perfect winter-drizzle music.

ROKY ERICKSON

Never Say Goodbye

(Emporer Jones) ***

When these home-tapes were made (mostly in 1971 and ’74), the Peanuts comic strip had already speculated about the Great Pumpkin, a dimigod-like gourd who searched the earth for the most sincere pumpkin patch. If ex-13th Floor Elevators frontman Erickson had been a gourd farmer, that mythical G.P. wouldn’t have had to look further. This solo-acoustic compilation’s the absolute most earnest, heartfelt set you’ll ever hear. No hypocrisy, no affectations (well, maybe a couple of fake-Dylan nasal wails but even those come off as charming), all serious and all rooted in Erickson’s rock-solid lyric writing and the real pain of his life. Indeed, six of the 14 tracks were made while Erickson was living in a psychiatric hospital (some associates claim he emerged more disjointed than when he went in). It’s perhaps not the best intro to psychedelic pioneer Erickson, but a great treat for completists, and for anyone who truly loves pure pop in the rough. (It’s also, the label claims, the first disc on which Erickson owns all the songwriting royalties. Currently living a semi-subsistence existence as a forgotten pop pioneer, he could use the bucks.)

‘I Was A Teenage Hacker’

Book review roundup, 12/23/98

EXTRA LIFE:

Coming of Age in Cyberspace

by David S. Bennahum

Basic Books ($23)

Bennahum’s is merely one of many stories that could be told about the teen and young-adult males who played a huge, under-documented role in the 1974-84 dawn of personal computers and online communication, back when the word “hacker” still meant a guy who got kicks from high-intensity programming, not from crime.

Bennahum (a Manhattan rich kid who got to learn programming in a prestigious private high school with its own DEC PDP mini-mainframe computer) isn’t the most typical early-’80s compu-teen. But his story’s close enough to the subculture’s norm for his memoir to reveal its era. As he sees it, it was an era marked by specific phases in technology, after the very first personal computers but before the Mac and Windows stuck the guts of computing behind user-friendly (but programmer-hostile) interfaces.

True hackers (of the old definition), like true auto mechanics, didn’t just want to make their machines go–they wanted to know every aspect of how they ran, from the hexadecimal codes to the 8-bit processor chips. Popular sentiment derides guys of such obsessions as geeks. But, as Bennahum’s tale shows, it’s just this kind of obsession that can change the world (or at least one’s own life).

REDHOOK, BEER PIONEER

by Peter J. Krebs

Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)

What’s a nice ultra-highbrow house like Four Walls Eight Windows doing with a lightweight business “success” story like this? (The Redhook book’s existence isn’t mentioned at its publisher’s website; often an omen.)

Not that the book’s a total puff piece. You will learn a lot about the ’80s-’90s microbrew phenomenon if you can get past the fawning portrayals of Redhook founders Gordon Bowker and Paul Shipman. Peter Krebs (author of Microsoft Press’s Building Microsoft Exchange Applications; not to be confused with the beloved singer-songwriter Pete Krebs) pours out every cliché from hokey business-magazine profile articles (the kind usually titled “The Rise and Rise Of…”).

Read how Shipman (previously an up-n’-coming exec at Chateau Ste. Michelle) and Bowker (also involved in the launches of Starbucks and Seattle Weekly), armed with the dream to do for American beer what Starbucks had done with American coffee, hit up all the available moneybags in town, barely collecting enough loot to install some used brewing equipment in a former Ballard transmission shop.

Share the pain as the original Redhook Ale’s released in 1982, to near-unanimous cries of “This tastes funny.”

Feel the struggle as the founders, abetted by original brewmaster Charles McElevey, kept fiddling with the original Redhook, only to abandon it as better-selling flavors (Blackhook, Ballard Bitter, Redhood ESB, Winterhook, Blonde Ale) come along.

Sense the pride as the Little Brewery That Could starts getting its wares out to such exotic outposts as Denver and Spokane; then shudder the dreaded word “Sellout” as Shipman abandons the “craft brewing” mystique in favor of state-of-the-art plants (one later chapter’s entitled “You Can’t Taste the Automation”) and distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch.

Cringe as the great microbeer glut of 1996-97 leaves Redhook badly overextended, causing the closing of the brew part of its Fremont brewpub.

If, after all this, you still think of Redhook as the quaint little upstart, just read Shipman’s closing words of encouragement, insisting his outfit will survive because of its “combination of distribution, quality control, brewery efficiency, and resources deep enough to survive the current shakeout.”

(For a different, slightly more craft-devoted, take on the dawn of microbeer, Redhook’s Yakima archrival Bert Grant’s got his own memoir just out, The Ale Master (Sasquatch, $19.95). Of course, Grant’s own company’s now owned by the snuff-tobacco people who also own Ste. Michelle.)

CIRCUS OF THE SCARS

illustrated and designed by Ashleigh Talbot

Brennan Dalsgard Publishers ($26)

First thing anyone will notice is what a beautiful, elegant tome this is; easily the best-looking thing to come from a Northwest indie publisher this year. It’s not just a document about high-profile show people, it is a work of showmanship.

Second thing you’ll find is how utterly long it is. It takes over 500 pages to tell about a little over two years in the lives of the first Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. At the risk of boring the supposed short-attention-span audience the sideshow lived for, ex-Rose roadie Gregor has tried to recreate the pace of life on the road, hour after hypnotic hour of driving somewhere punctuated by moments of onstage thrills and the occasional round of groupie sex and/or tourism. So far, it might seem like a rock band’s tale; appropriately, since the sideshow essentially toured as a rock n’ roll attraction that performed stunts instead of songs.

But venues notwithstanding, these particular freaks were and are very serious about seeing themselves as a revival of the old-time carny tradition. Long interludes compare the Rose troupe’s travels to the apparently fictional (but thoroughly research-based) life story of a turn-of-the-century carny performer.

Rose himself is depicted not so much as the bad-boy persona he offered in his own book Freak Like Me (cowritten by Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi) and more like a clever, energetic entrepreneur who put the show on the map, staged near-perfect publicity coups, then let go of performers like Tim Cridland (“Zamora the Torture King”) and Matt Crowley (“The Tube”) when he chose to move the act into a more mainstream direction.

Whatever lingering personal rancor Rose and his ex-troupers might have, they did and do follow in an honorable tradition of showmanship. They may see themselves as rebels, but they’ve eschewed the now-30-year-old “generation gap” schtick. We’ve always had freaks, geeks, and outrageous stage people. If the current and former Rose troupers have their way, we always will.

Uncensored and Eager:

Miso Horny

Original online essay, 12/16/98

My Fair Masseuse (Kitty Media)

1996 (U.S. release 1998), dir. Naruo Kuzukawa/Akita Shoten

Japan, as many of you know, is a society with plenty of sexual hangups and contradictions–much like America’s, but with just enough differences to seem exotic. The country of floor-length, figure-hiding kimonos is also the country of delicate, yet often extremely explicit, “floating world” prints. Japan’s animated films, TV shows, and direct-to-video productions have expressed these contradictions at least as well as any of the country’s other contemporary art forms.

By legal censorship restrictions, and by a system of genre formulae pretty much set in stone by the early ’80s, anime works could display explicit violence (the louder and more explosive the better), but had to depict sex only without showing male genitalia or female pubic hair. This meant lower-hairless damsels could be grotesquely raped by the squid-like tentacles of outer-space monsters or underground demon creatures (the subgenre containing these scenes is known among fans as “Hentai” (perversions), but could only engage in loving relations with other humans via discreet “camera angles.”

One less-violent anime sub-genre has traditionally managed to make up for what little it couldn’t show by applying exaggerated cartoon techniques to the time-honored tradition of sex farce. Young adults (and some apparent teens) engage in somewhat exaggerated versions of typical sex and relationship problems (somewhat complicated when some of the females are disguised angels eager for a taste of earthly pleasures, and some of the males develop instant pants-bulges bigger than their skulls). Semi-realistically drawn faces morph into hyper-cartoony caricatures when confronted with lust, embarrassment, or any mixture of the two.

But with My Fair Masseuse (which apparently isn’t the first video to show it all, just the first I’d learned about), these visual elements are accompanied by delicately drawn lower organs engaged in full-motion versions of sex acts not unlike those depicted in those old-time Japanese prints.

The gender-depiction issues in the video, perhaps to some of your dismay, are similar to some of those in the prints, which often involved noblemen cavorting with courtesans. Here, our heroine Moko is a former nurse who’s decided she’d rather carry out a “life of service” as a high-class prostitute, who strips out of something as close as copyright allows to an old Playboy Club bunny costume.

The plot’s paean to modern gender mores comes in Moko’s repeated assertions that she’s nobody’s victim, but rather an assertive career woman who loves her work (even with fat, old clients). In the last of the video’s three episode segments, she tries learning to role-play with her clients as a demure, innocent waif, only to find neither she nor they really like it that way–so she returns to energetically jumping atop her man-of-the-hour and draining all the yang right out of him.

Of course, this could be seen as a pivotal distinction between old and new favored attitudes toward work in many professions, in many parts of the world. It’s certainly a distinction Japan’s facing in its forced transition from its paternalistic, quasi-feudal old business culture to today’s go-go global entrepreneurial culture. Submissively acquiescing to your job like an old-time courtesan (i.e., quietly admitting you’d rather be doing something else) is the new taboo of Global Business. Rather, more and more of us are expected to eagerly, passionately, put everything we’ve got into–well, you know…

Words Against Words

Original book feature, 12/7/98

THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:

The Conflict Between Word and Image

by Leonard Shlain

(Viking) $24.95

THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD

by Mitchell Stevens

(Oxford) $27.50

Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.

Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.

His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.

In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).

Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.

NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).

While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.

Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.

Work (Out) Music

Record review roundup, 11/18/98

These go out to all those working at home these days, whether by choice or otherwise. If your home office sometimes gets as nonsensical as Letterman’s, maybe it’s time to get a good set of headphones beside your workstation and heed some of the Muzak company’s old research into music’s role in aiding worker productivity. Herewith, suggested accompaniment for personal deskbound accomplishment.

STAR SYSTEM:

**** = Executive suite

*** = Corner office

** = Cubicle

* = Temp pool

SAM SPENCE/JOHN FACENDA The Power and the Glory: Original Music and Voices of NFL Films (Tommy Boy) ***

There are days when you need this: Monday mornings, deadline days, times when you must do something really scary (say, a job interview) or otherwise head into battle. The glorious symphonic anthems of classic 16mm pro-football documentaries will stir you into action like, well hopefully not like recent Seahawk seasons. Anyhow, these masterpieces of orchestral bombast are alternated with short snippets of gravelly-voiced ex-Philly news anchorman John Facenda’s narrations from the films, hokey (sometimes even rhyming) yet never ever hip or ironic. You don’t have to like (or understand) pro football to like this record.

NINO TEMPO & APRIL STEVENS Sweet and Lovely: The Best of Nino Tempo and April Stevens (Varese Sarabande) ****

The only album on this list to include English-language vocals. Muzak never used vocal cuts on its “Stimulus Progression” channel, believing voices attracted too much listener attention. But at certain points in the workday, a little mental diversion can help. For calm-down moments after the stress moments, nothing could be finer than this brother-sister team from 1962-67 and their friendly, upbeat, jazzy-pop renditions of Broadway and Brill Building song standards. Also included: Stevens’ torch solo, “Teach Me Tiger”–recorded in ’59 and still too steamy for mainstream airplay, due both to the words (wherein Stevens pleads to her boy to initiate her into sexual knowledge, then turns around and offers to initiate him instead) and to the heavy-breathing growls between the lines.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Organs in Orbit (Capitol Ultra-Lounge) ***

WALTER WANDERLAY Rain Forest (Verve) ****

In the long hours before lunch (if you even take a scheduled lunch break at home), you need something light ‘n’ lively that’ll keep you at a steady pace. The friendly tones of the lustrous Hammond fit this task with a smile. Let your worries go, let your work-output flow.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners (Scamp/Caroline) ***

VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners,The ’60s (Scamp/Caroline) ***

A quick early-afternoon pick-me-up, these two are as close to Muzak’s old-time “stimulus progression” sound as you can get on commercially-available CDs. Old tracks from a British company that sold (and still sells) royalty-free stock music for use in any and all occasions (commercials, B movies, game shows, cartoons). Hear the full, original versions of songs you’ve heard in cut-up form on Ren & Stimpy, CBS Sports, Russ Meyer movies, Vaseline Intensive Care ads, and more.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Easy Tempo Vol. 6: A Cinematic Jazz Experience (Easy Tempo/Right Tempo import) ****

Back to the light-‘n’-lively, but with a more assertive tone for the afternoon when the outside world’s temptations must be drowned out for just a short while longer. Soundtracks from European commercial-entertainment movies of the ’70s are so darned cool because they had to be. The films they were made for needed such clever touches to keep up, even in their domestic markets, against Hollywood’s big-budget product. Any of Easy Tempo’s releases will envelope you in a dreamscape of fast Euro-cars, hot Euro-sex, and suave Euro-spies. This volume’s a particularly spectacular starting point. Here’s some of what I wrote on my computer’s CD-track database program: “`Gangster Song’ (torch vocal, tap dancing SFX). `Notte in Algeria’ (swingin’ brass). `Tap 5′ (sultry saxes, flute). `Semplicissimo’ (smoky male vocal, in Italian). `Quando La Coppia Scoppia’ (vibes, electric piano). `Sally’s Surf’ (way-far-out Farfisa organ). `Genova, Piazza de Ferrari’ (slinky vibes, guitar).” Purists might call these 18 tracks commercial affectations of ’50s-’60s U.S. jazz greats, but don’t you mind.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Samba Brasil (Verve) ****

“World music” that’s not curated by or for Volvo-drivin’ post-graduates. Easy-going and lively at the same time. Perfect for passing the early-P.M. hours in mindless data entry. Your hands and eyes are at the computer; your mind is in the Rio Sambadrome.

ED KALEHOFF Music from The Price Is Right (Available from The ’80s TV Theme SuperSite) **

You’ve probably heard these music cues several times (America’s last surviving network game show has been on since the Nixon administration), but never in their full-length, announcer-free form. They turn out to be bouncy, breezy, HI-NRG synth-and-horn anthems; perfect for that last-hour push toward completing the day’s tasks.

ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA F.A.B.: Music From the TV Shows by Barry Gray (Silva Screen import) ***

Workday’s done, tasks completed, deadlines met, documents e-mailed or FedExed away. Time to give yourself a thundering brass-band salute, with a blast of re-created themes from the Gerry Anderson “Supermarionation” puppet adventure shows. Thunderbirds Are Go!

Local Bands On Parade

Record review roundup, 11/18/98

GIRL TROUBLE Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (Wig Out) ****After 15 years years of high-test garage shows, and five years after the group’s last recording, Tacoma’s own masters of fun-time three-chord power finally have another record out, even if the members did have to release it themselves (with distribution help from Estrus). It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s smart-alecky, it’s smart, it’s their best ever. My fave part’s singer K.P. Kendall’s sax solo on “Strother Martin,” but it’s all great. Kendall’s vocal snarls blend perfectly with Kahuna’s guitar, Dale Phillips’ bass, and Bon Von Wheelie’s drums (yes, the only girl in Girl Trouble’s the stick-slammer). This disc firmly establishes Girl Trouble as the true successors to the T-Town hard-pop tradition of the Wailers and the Sonics. Get it. Now.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Designer Drug Volume Two (Estate) **

Estate entrepreneur Wallace Hargrave had been out of action for much of the four years since his first Designer Drug collection. The story why (the death of a bandmate and his own near-death) is very briefly touched upon in the liner notes. When combined with the online memoir of Hargrave’s ’80s punk-scene existence, it’s is one of the all-time hard-luck tales, as powerful as anything on his second compilation of his and his friends’ bands.

Like most indie-label promo compilations, it’s an uneven batch (that’s what programmable CD players are for). Among the several highlights: Primate Five’s almost dangerously aggressive garage stompin’; Pretty Mary Sunshine’s mix of ethereal vocals and art-damage guitar; Iron Beef’s sprightly power-pop ode to Sumo wrestling; and, completely out of place yet the best thing here, Michael Rook’s ultra-ultra-fast composition for a computer-controlled acoustic piano. There’s also some old-school metal, acoustic-metal, and metal-punk hybrid cuts (there used to be a word for that latter genre; darned if Ican’t remember what it was).

SLUGGER Back to Our Roots (Swizzle) **

That brief early-’90s subgenre, the three-girls-and-a-boy-drummer band, returns via this snappy suite of harsh yet cheery hard heartbreak tunes. If you like Goodness or remember the likes of Maxi Badd, you could get into Slugger.

XING Worldwide (Laundry Room) **

You could wait for your favorite ’80s new wave stars to show up on reunion tours at the Fenix or Ballard Firehouse. Or you could listen to the Portland combo Xing, which recaptures the expansive synthpop stylings of Gary Numan, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, Missing Persons, et al., without directly aping any one of them. A pleasant little trip back to yesterday’s sound of tomorrow.

17 REASONS WHY The Dark Years (Laundry Room) **

It says here 17 Reasons Why won Musician magazine’s 1998 “Best Unsigned Band Competition.” It’s easy to hear at least a few reasons why: Slickly written and produced singer-songwriter ballads with standard neo-soft-rock band arrangements backing Sattie Clark’s nice, unthreatening vocalizings. It’s nice, it’s laid back, it’s mellow. I hate laid back and mellow. I prefer something distinctive–even distinctive mediocrity–over the merely well-made.

LOSER s/t (self-released) **

Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow produces the first two tracks, which would make a dandy little cynical-pop 45. They don’t have the lyrical bite of Stringfellow’s own work, but they could otherwise pass for a Posies cover band. Then we get to the group’s own production work, which sounds more like Revolver-era Beatles. They do a fully competent job at it (at least as good as the Rutles did), but the Beatles’ own material is already widely available on CD. This three-man Tacoma combo oughta work some more on getting its own sound together.

Combustible Edison Gets Serious:

Life After Lounge?

CD review for The Stranger, 10/8/98

COMBUSTIBLE EDISON The Impossible World (Sub Pop) ***

The Cocktail Revolution is dead; OD’d on bad self-parody acts.

So how do neo-lounge pioneers Combustible Edison try to stay relevant? By dropping the rhinestone-tiara kitsch and reinventing themselves as a somewhat more serious ambient-progressive combo, suitable for indie-film soundtracks, KMTT airplay, and wedding showers.

On several tracks (“Hot and Bothered,” the closing “Scanner’s Reprise”), the band strives for admittance onto the hip-love-rock trail blazed by the likes of Pigeonhed. On others (“Tickled to Death,” “Pink Victim”), Lily Banquette works hard to gain your respect as a legitimate pop-jazz vocalist.

The Impossible World is more ambitiously composed, arranged, and produced than any previous CE disc. It’s also not as much fun as CE’s old stuff (though you might find it to be fine makeout music).

Cowboys and Heats Redux:

Memories of Fake ID

CD review for The Stranger, 10/8/98

THE HEATS Smoke (Chuckie-Boy) **

THE COWBOYS Jet City Rockers (Chuckie-Boy) *

Chuckie-Boy mogul Mike Stein continues to reissue Seattle’s forgotten musical past. Stein’s previous subjects, The Lewd, were acknowledged precursors to the local dirt-punk bands of the late ’80s. These two acts might be considered precursors to the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Hit Explosion. The Cowboys and the Heats (nee Heaters) were big regional club bands in their early-’80s heyday (filling suburban bars that had previously only hosted Led Zep cover bands), but never got recording careers off the ground in those days before home DAT tapes and CD burners.

They were also derided among the local punker-than-thou elitists who loathed the swaggering cock-rock attitudes of their respective frontmen, Ian Fisher and Steve Pearson. (Imagine–a guy in miserable little Seattle who thinks he can become an actual rock star!)

Stein’s team has done a good job at restoring and remastering; the bands sound better here than on their few, self-issued vinyl releases. For oldsters who saw these bands live, the CDs will bring back memories of that first fake-ID drunken spree.

But should anybody else buy ’em? The Cowboys’ blend of Mellencampy balladeering and Clashesque white reggae feels like a thrift-store relic; but the Heats’ Knack/Romantics power pop holds up fairly well, exemplifying both its period and timeless rules of song construction. And in this cigar-bar age, the title track of Smoke, extolling the joys of underage cigarette sneaking, can seem strangely decadent in ways not originally intended.

The Best of Anime

Record review for The Stranger, 9/15/98

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Best of Anime

(Rhino)

Most people I know who come across Japanese animation, or anime, first see it as an alternative to American formula fantasy entertainment. It doesn’t take long before they realize anime’s just a different set of formulae. Those who stick with it do so because they happen to like those formulae, including those of the music.

Rhino’s assembled not the all-time best Japanese-animation music, but a sample of fully-competent commercial pop anthems from such films and series as Megazone 23, Gunbuster, Silent Mobius, Macross Plus, and Devil Hunter Yohko (all with female “idol singer” vocals).

Amid the action themes, two gentle, haunting ballads stand out as the disc’s best: “Beautiful Planet” (from the film Windaria) and “Voices” (from the TV series Macross Plus).

A handful of English-dubbed TV themes (Gigantor, Speed Racer, Astroboy, Sailor Moon) are tacked onto the disc’s start and end, almost as afterthoughts.

The Microsoft File

Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98

The Microsoft File:

The Secret Case Against Bill Gates

by Wendy Goldman Rohm

(Times Books/Random House) $25

Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop

by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett

(Simon & Schuster) $13.95

If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.

Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).

But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.

That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).

Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.

Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.

Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”

Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.