All Hail the Stomach Steinway:

Squeeze Please

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 11/15/95

The three-CD set Planet Squeezebox (Ellipses Arts) is perhaps the perfect use of the CD box-set format. It offers a wealth of musical education, to the point that it’s a must for the collections of every school and public library. Its 51 tracks by 51 acts in 40 genres provide listening experiences ranging from exuberant participatory folk celebrations to world-weary melancholy to mind-altering alternate melodics. For an instrument of so many variations (including the concertina, bandoneon, and organetto) used in so many places in so many ways, it’s surprising to read in the box set’s exquisite 56-page booklet that the beloved “Stomach Steinway” dates only back to 1829 (less than 50 years before the first phonograph). From Austria it quickly spread throughout Europe, and from there to Europe’s colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, the Americas, and scattered parts of Asia. Twice as loud as any previous Euro folk instrument, it was also capable of playing melody, harmony and rhythm at once. By the 1850s its various forms were mainstays of folk and dance music worldwide, taking the place of everything from bagpipes to violins in dozens of new and pre-existing genres. Wallingford-based Petosa Music still makes some of the best-loved accordions anywhere; over-30 locals remember the sqeezebox stylings of kids’ TV personality Stan Boreson (while ’90s hipsters know Accordion Joe’s performances on The Spud Goodman Show).

Planet Squeezebox offers great examples of much of what you might expect it to offer: Polkas, tangos, Irish jigs, American jazz and blues standards, zydeco, Jewish klezmer wedding music, sambas, assorted Lat-Am dance musics. You might not expect what else you’ll get: French musettes, Egyptian belly-dancing accompaniment, Quebecois barn-dance balladeering, Italian tarantella, achingly poignant modern-classical compositions, even a Debussy prelude. It’s unfortunately diluted, by the kind of conservatively-curated and blandly-mixed mellow tedium that still gives the U.S. world-music industry a bad name. That’s particularly the case on disc 3, in which the set’s curators go to Africa equipped with your basic Paul Simon notions of nice unchallenging world-beat tuneage. But hey, that’s what programmable CD players are made for.

But at a time when the “Unplugged” fad and the various successors to ’70s “women’s music” have revived the association of acoustic music with singer-songwriter solemnity, it’s important to have the best parts of a set like this reminding us how this family of instruments has long been a force for honest artistic expression, celebration, and working-class togetherness. Those “punk polka” spoofs in the ’80s by Weird Al Yancovic and others weren’t too off the mark; the squeezebox really is the original hi-NRG DIY music machine.

Blessed Is the Meek:

Believe It

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/26/95

The press kit for the compilation CD It’s Hard to Believe It: The Amazing World of Joe Meek (Razor & Tie) talks about the early-’60s UK record producer-engineer-songwriter as an Ed Wood of music, a tragic figure of promotional energy but dubious talent at the center of a stable of bizarre non-stars. Not quite so. Joe Meek was a troubled genius who never came to terms with his homosexuality and eventually did himself in, but he was also a technical wizard, a savvy self-promoter (the first successful independent producer in the EMI-ruled UK record biz), and someone with a highly developed sense of what made a great pop single. The hundreds of sessions staged in his London home studio indeed included a lot of schmaltz and tripe, but even his secondary work conveyed a sense of urgency and excitement.

And unlike Wood, Meek had genuine hits. The entire electic-power-pop strain of music can trace its roots to the eternal space-age instrumental “Telstar,” which leads the CD. Credited to the Tornadoes, who essentially executed only the rhythm tracks, the tune is really a tribute to Meek’s writing, engineering and tape-manipulations, and to his space-age wonderment at the possibilities of aural fantasy. More importantly, it’s a lesson in deliberate lo-fi. Meek had his frequent partner Geoff Goddard perform the lead on a clavioline, a primitive electric organ; he then used equipment of his own devising to compress its sound. The result is a delicate clash between the galactic imagery of the arrangement and the honed-in focus of the final sound. It is, as all great pop singles are, a brief moment of perfection.

The CD’s other 19 cuts will be first-time experiences for most of you. (Even its other U.S. Top 10 hit, “Have I The Right” by the Honeycombs, isn’t really part of today’s classic-rock canon.) They’re a cross-section of mostly US-inspired styles of the day: Country-rock, blues-rock, good-girl balladeering, dead-teenager rock, monster-movie rock (including the novelty great Screaming Lord Sutch), note-perfect tributes to Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, even Stereo Action bachelor-pad music. They all feed easily into Meek’s precision primitivism. Even the dross shows off his eccentric genius, adding echo-on-reverb-on-compression and string sections from nowhere to make the most of even the tritest material. He’d turned down the chance to produce the first Beatles record, preferring to work with studio bands and pre-fab celebrities he could personally mold (bleach-blond pretty boy Heinz, Petula Clark wannabe Glenda Collins).

By February 1967, when a distraught Meek shot his landlady and then himself, the UK pop revolution he’d pioneered had passed him by. By the end of the year, Sgt. Pepper and prog-rock would render the pop single an obsolete commodity for the next decade. But his work survives; and now’s the perfect time to bring it back.

Unabombs Away:

F.C.’s Dreams for Agrarian Authoritarianism

Manifesto review for the Stranger, 10/4/95

Industrial Society and its Future (a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto) was published as a supplement to the Washington Post and as a “virtual book” at the Time website. Because the daily Post is unavailable outside the Eastern Seaboard, this anti-technology tract is accessible to most readers only via computer. [NOTE: The uncopyrighted work has since been issued in an unauthorized paperback edition, available thru this link.]

Its author is known popularly as “the Unabomber,” but he (the FBI believes it’s a lone male) uses the unexplained pseudonym F.C.

While F.C. doesn’t cite ideological inspirations, he stands in a long line of anti-tech thinkers from William Blake to Gerry Mander. Many of these authors are slicker and more coherent than F.C., but that’s part of F.C.’s point. Early reviewers described F.C.’s writing as stilted and dry, detracting from his persuasiveness. I disagree. Any work of criticism carries the aesthetic of its ideal alternative. F.C.’s stodgy, authoritarian pronouncements express his wish for a stodgy, authoritarian future. His rambling arguments visualize his dream for a slower-paced world. His overgeneralizations about human nature reveal a utopia where most people would be treated as “masses,” placed in socially-useful labor.

F.C. believes “the industrial-technological system” is a social, psychological and environmental “disaster for the human race.” He believes people have become slaves to a system working for its own growth, not for human betterment; a system too complex and powerful to ever be “reformed;” a system which, unless overthrown, will eventually destroy the planet. Plenty of non-murderers have said things like that. In his way F.C. essentially says he’s tired of talk and wants action. He’s tired of college leftists because they just talk, and also because Marxist ideals of collective “progress” and planned economies would require the industrial state he wants to smash.

Most dystopians are utopians at heart, and most utopians seek a society in which people like themselves would rule or at least fit in better. While his prescriptions for the world are far more vague than his condemnations, F.C. clearly pines for a society guided not by the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace, nor by the impersonal demands of production and consumption, but by the force of muscle and will — presumably other people’s muscle and his will.

He doesn’t mention that modern experiment in a planned neo-agrarian society, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Here was a philosopher-activist who, like F.C., was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to bring about a more “natural” state; except his system couldn’t feed an industrial-age population base, and the industrialist Communists of Vietnam had a stronger army. In F.C.’s utopia, there wouldn’t be heavy machinery or internal-combustion engines (he fantasizes about “burning all technical books” so these things can’t be brought back), hence no armies capable of reversing his revolution. Cold Warriors used to rant about the Reds’ ability to “bomb us into the stone age.” F.C. would settle for bombing us into the Bronze Age.

Akre-monious debut:

The Big G

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 8/30/95

Carrie Akre has many loyal fans who stuck with her after the crash-n’-burn of her first band Hammerbox (shortly after their major-label debut album). Her fans are right; Akre’s got an amazing voice and a keen sense for the heartbreaks and frustrations of everyday existence.

The eponymous debut of her new ensemble Goodness (Y) shows Akre reaching out beyond Hammerbox’s full-bore-center rock assault in search of a wider range of sounds and moods. On several tracks she succeeds brilliantly. “For Lovers’ Sake” is a catchy, understated neo-power-pop minor classic delivered in a brisk near-whisper. “Between You & I” and “Viva Le High” are breathless heartmelting ballads. And “Labor Day” is a breezy goodbye ditty reminiscent of various British new wave singers’ variations on Motown.

Many of the disc’s other eight songs start out intimate and intriguing, then accelerate into vehicles for Akre’s older, bluesier rock-out style. It works the first one or two times (“Superwise,” “Smoking”) but later comes close to getting repetitious. Akre and company (Danny Newcomb, Garth Reeves, Fila McGann, and Easy/Give vet Chris Friel) maybe oughta consider alternating between more all-soft and all-hard songs in future sets. Fortunately, the untitled bonus track delivers a blast of Hammerbox-style righteous noise unfettered by opening niceties.

That caveat aside, Goodness reveals Akre’s tremendous growth as a vocal stylist and songwriter. This disc is already better than many of the rockin’-chanteuse products touted in Entertainment Weekly. And in its best moments, it holds the promise of what could solidify into a pop-rock band of mind-blowing potential.

(Latter-day addendum: Goodness soon signed to a major label, which reissued this debut disc, then dropped the band shortly thereafter. The band has self-released A Five-Song EP while working on a new full-length disc and a new record deal.)

A Short History of the Seattle Comics Scene

Based on an essay for The Stranger

by Clark Humphrey and James Sturm

3/15/95

Nearly two decades after central Seattle native daughter Lynda Barry first snuck a small comic strip onto the classified pages of the old Seattle Sun, the Seattle comics scene boasts a diverse and vibrant community of artists, writers, and publishers. Perhaps not in a generation has there been such a gathering of comics creators in one place. These artists’ lives weave together at work and play. Seattle has been, and continues to be, a mecca for a generation of cartoonists who are more concerned with the exploration of their craft than the demands of the marketplace.

First off, let’s offer an attempted definition of “alternative comics.” A simple definition would be comics created for their artists to express themselves. Another definition involves works that derive direct or indirect inspiration from the 1967-73 underground comix explosion–when artists like R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, S. Clay Wilson, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Seattle native Shary Flenniken(Trots and Bonnie) and scores more mingled, penning and publishing hundreds of black-and-white comic books in the process. That scene fragmented, along with the rest of the “counterculture,” and sputtered along for several years.

As the ’80s dawned, so did a new distribution system that helped make post-underground comics publishing more feasible. Under this system, known as the “direct market,” specialty stores bought publications on a non-returnable basis. This scheme led to a network of mom-and-pop comic book stores, many of which found shelf space for works by small publishers with non-action-adventure subjects.

This anti-corporate stance may be the most important link among the Seattle comics community. Just as first Seattle theater groups and then Seattle bands broke with their respective established industry hierarchies to start doing and promoting their own thing, so have Seattle cartoonists.

And just as there never was one singlular “Seattle Sound,” despite the national music-press hype of one, there isn’t one “Seattle Look” in cartooning. What there is, is an attitude of cooperation, self-expression, and relatively hype-free promotion.

It’s also a place where living, working and getting around are still practical: One former New Yorker noted that there were at least as many alternative cartoonists in New York as here in Seattle; but back there, the city itself was such a demanding presence that fostering a community in such a hectic environment was difficult at best. Some artists even claim the local weather makes it easier to stay home and keep concentrating on their drawing.

History of local cartooning

There’s at least been newspaper cartooning since this place was settled. Washington’s most famous politician, the late Sen. Henry Jackson, got his nickname “Scoop” from an Everett Herald comic strip about a lazy paperboy. Dennis the Menace creator Hank Ketcham grew up on Queen Anne Hill. Basil Wolverton, a resident of southwest Washington, is acknowledged today as the first master of hideously funny caricature. Other Northwest artists of national note included Uncle $crooge creator Carl Barks and Broom-Hilda creator Russel Myers.

But the force that really got local kids from the late ’50s to the early ’70s turned on to the possibilities of funny drawings came not from the papers but the tube. KING-TV had a succession of three “Cartooning Weathermen”: Bob Hale, Bob Cram, and Tom Davie. In the pre-minicam years they added a visual dimension to what were often static talking-head newscasts. They chatted to the audience about the day’s weather and other light topics while making funny drawings with felt markers on big sheets of paper. Their nightly real-time demonstrations helped demystify the creative act, and instilled the cartooning bug into local kids like Lynda Barry,Mike Lukovich (now a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist in Atlanta), and Tacoma native Gary Larson. (Berkeley Breathed, who moved here after establishing his career, isn’t related to this history.)

More recent roots

The more specific origins of the local comics scene began in the mid-’70s. The Evergreen State College (specifically, its radio-station program guide and its student paper) provided a training ground for Barry, Portland native Matt Groening, Charles Burns, Steve Willis, and Dana Squires (whose hip yet lighthearted images helped inspire the “innocent” graphic look associated with the K Records scene).

Barry was known at the time as a typical comics loner, who preferred the company of her pen and paper to the companionship of other artists. Still, she appeared in a lot of places before she left town in the mid-’80s. After leaving Evergreen, Barry contributed to the UW Daily (alongside her high school buddy John Keister) and to the Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly published from 1974 to 1982. The Rocket began as a Sun spinoff in 1979, publishing Barry, Burns, Holly K. Tuttle, Mark Zingarelli, Michael Dougan (who moved here from east Texas), Ron Hauge (later a writer for Ren & Stimpy and Seinfeld), and Triangle Slash. The Rocket also commissioned strips and covers from out-of-town alt-comics stars like Gary Panter (who married former Rocket art director Helene Silverman in New York), Drew Friedman, Raymond Pettibone (famous for his Black Flag album covers), Carel Moisievitch, andHarvey Pekar. Local publisher Michael Dowers was printing mini-comics (including Willis’s Morty the Dog) from 1982 on.

But despite all this activity, there was not much of an interacting community of cartoonists here in 1984, when Peter Bagge arrived from New York (because his new wife got a job at her parents’ deli in Kirkland). Bagge describes the Seattle cartooning scene at the time as stuffy and Victorian, a city of loners and hermits. The cartoonists didn’t see themselves as a group. No one wanted to meet anybody. Bagge was editing Weirdo (a quarterly anthology comic book founded by R. Crumb) at the time, and sought out cartoonists as a way of making friends. Weirdo began to take on a Northwest flavor, with artists like Dougan and Zingarelli appearing in it regularly. Taking it upon himself to build a community, Bagge hosted parties and gatherings with people like Dowers, ex-Rocket writer Dennis P. Eichhorn, and Bruce Chrislip.

As Eicchorn remembers those times, “I’m not going to mourn for the good ol’ days. Cartoonists were starving to death then and they’re starving to death now.”

The coalescing of it all

Bagge persuaded the publishers of his solo comic book Neat Stuff, Fantagraphics Books, to move from L.A. to Seattle in 1989. Over the previous eight years, Fantagraphics had become the preeminent U.S. publisher of alternative comics. Besides Bagge, its stars included Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Daniel Clowes (Lloyd Llewellyn, Eightball), Roberta Gregory (Naughty Bits), Joe Sacco (Yahoo, Palestine), and Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo). Its magazine about the business, the Comics Journal, was recognized and/or castigated throughout the alternative-comics world as the chief vehicle for news and criticism about the field.

Fantagraphics honchos Gary Groth and Kim Thompson set up house in a remote suburban split-level near the King/ Snohomish county line. They held parties there for their staff and local and visiting cartoonists about once a month or so. Because many of them had to carpool to get there and back, the Groth-Thompson parties forced many typically-shy cartoonist types to learn to become social, to keep talking to their fellow guests over the course of an evening. This furthered the local comics scene’s evolution from a bunch of individuals isolated at their own drawing boards, toward a mutually-supportive group.

Gregory, Pat Moriarity, and Jim Blanchard came to Seattle specifically to work in the Fantagraphics production department. Other creators began to move here to become part of the community forming around the company: Julie Doucet, Ed Brubaker, Jeremy Eaton, and Al Columbia.

The Stranger brought James Sturm and Jason Lutes here, and has given freelance work to such creators as local kid Megan Kelso and newcomers Ward Sutton and Ellen Forney.

Posters, advertising work, record covers, and Rocket and Stranger illos provided work for several local cartoonist/illustrator crossovers, including Triangle Slash, Friese Undine, Carl Smool, and Ed Fotheringham (who’s gone from Sub Pop covers to the pages of the New Yorker).

The current scene

The work of Seattle’s cartoonists varies greatly in content, style, ambition, and maturity. Some, for instance, are inspired by Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), others by underground creator Joe Coleman. There are various factions and, like in most communities, a fair amount of gossiping.

The scene has continued to grow on its own momentum, as cartoonists move here to be part of it. Some (like Doucet) leave; others (like Forney) settle in for the long haul. Cartoonists like Jim Woodring and Bagge own houses and have children.

Despite the hype and media exposure some alternative comics creators have gotten in recent years, theirs is still a fairly underground cult milieu. If this medium is ever going to break through and be taken seriously by a larger public, better work needs to be produced. Perhaps the conditions here in the Northwest will allow comics to take another step forward.

Where the Suckers Moon

Book review for the Stranger, 11/13/94

Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy is one of your classic Northwest success stories. Its Nike spots established it as the agency that knew how to give a hip, wiseguy image to an inanimate object. It became the sort of agency ripe to be sought by a company down on its luck–especially if that company wanted to change an unhip public image, like Subaru of America.

Where the Suckers Moon (Knopf) is former New York Times business writer Randall Rothenberg’s extremely long but laff-a-minute account of the resulting misadventure. Rothenberg follows W&K’s go-getters (some of whom openly hated cars and car ads) as they spent other people’s money to create slick, oh-so-clever artistic statements about how Subaru makes back-to-basics cars for back-to-basics people. At a couple of points, Rothenberg implies (but doesn’t overtly allege) that the ads may have been intended more to increase the agency’s rep inside the ad world than to move units.

Rothenberg uses 463 pages to discuss the making of a handful of 30-second commercials and another handful of print ads. With that much available verbal roadway, he covers every conceivable angle of his topic, from the lighting and editing tricks used in modern commercials to the ideological roots of W&K’s trendy approach to image-making, from the history of Japanese automaking to the corporate-culture clashes between Subaru in Japan, Subaru of America (until recently a separate wholesale company started by a Philadelphia furniture salesman), and their branch offices and dealers. Add a recessionary, industrywide sales slump and some Oregon ad whizzes smugly telling everyone that everything they’ve heretofore done to sell cars was wrong, and you get a fascinatingly-described series of turf conflicts among people who often don’t seem to be trying to do the same thing (i.e., push the sheet metal off the lots). You also get a great glossary in the back for further reading about the wacky world of marketing.

You also get a few tidbits of regional history — how Portland’s business culture of New England Brahmin descendents differs from Seattle’s ex-Minnesotans, and how there’d been a dark side to Oregon’s pure-living ideology long before anti-gay crusader Lon Mabon (it was once a center of Klan activity, and passed a law to prevent blacks from moving to the state).

Rothenberg doesn’t, however, mention the ad that most completely encapsulated W&K’s desperation to be hip, the infamous “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car” ad that aired a few months before the carmaker fired the agency.

Now, Subaru’s gone back to low-budget, low-profile advertising with clunky slogans like “The Beauty of All-Wheel Drive.” The cars are selling not significantly better or worse than when W&K ran its pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads. W&K went on to make self-referential PoMo ads for Black Star beer (another campaign now discontinued) and OK Soda (ditto).

Sexfilm:

The next last frontier of B filmmaking

Essay for the Stranger, 10/24/94

Sci-fi, horror and fantasy used to be the place to learn the craft of the simple direct narrative film, as a potential creator or simply a more informed viewer. These genres once offered bright delicious eye-and-ear candy, films that cut through the boundaries of slick production and linear narrative to speak directly to their audiences with imagery, energy and audacity.

But the days of low-budget screamfests like Basket Case, The Stuff and The Corpse Grinders now seem long gone in this age of morphing effects, video-game plots and $70 million vehicles for mass-murdering “heroes.”

Meanwhile, the “experimental” or “underground” film has been permanently corrupted by the theft of almost all its repertoire of techniques by music videos, fashion videos and even snowboarding videos.

Likewise, the formerly reviled “shockumentary” has become big business as tabloid TV.

At the other end of the sellout spectrum, the suspense thriller has turned into the USA World Premiere Movie and a host of direct-to-video films by directors imitating 0899506186 De Palma’s imitations of Hitchcock. The only suspense in most of these lame exercises is figuring out which beginning-screenwriting course the writers just came from.

Only one American commercial exploitation genre retains its power to keep re-creating its audiovisual vocabulary, to use simple easy-to-understand tools in creating unreal domains of character and behavior–tools young filmmakers can easily comprehend and copy to their own ends.

I speak, of course, of the sex film.

By stretching its range from the dingiest amateur hardcore tapes to the slickest theatrical “erotic romances,” the sex film has become an item of mass appeal (or rather of a hundred overlapping cult audiences). And not just for the lonely-guy crowd either: the trade mag Adult Video News claims the market for adult-video rentals (hardcore and softcore combined) is 47 percent female. That’s a better gender ratio than you’ll find in many more allegedly “progressive” media like alternative comix and computer online services. It’s still not big in American multiplex theaters, it’s not on American broadcast TV, and many of its subgenres can’t be found at conservative video chain stores. That means it’s still an item people have to go out of their way to get. That means it’s still made to be something people will actually want, rather than some overproduced bland effects-fest.

And because the sex film is centered in the human body and the human spirit, it can’t stray too far from human-scale storytelling. Add money to an action scene and you get noise, smoke, computer-generated effects, and a thousand dead foreigners. Add money to a bedroom scene and you simply get a better-furnished, better-lit bedroom–and maybe some better actors.

Consider the critically-snickered-at producer-director Zalman King, purveyor of “class” adequate-budget softcore (Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction, the made-for-Showtime Red Shoe Diaries series) for viewers who may still be a little timid about the genre. The typical King plot involves a shy heroine who becomes inexorably drawn toward carnal temptation. King and his colleagues (like Roger Corman, King now hires underlings to direct most of the films he produces) spend lots of screen time luring their heroines (and their viewers) from something approaching suburban consensus reality toward a semi-surrealistic universe of blue lighting, dreamlike nonlinear images, and hokey slow jazz-fusion music. In some King features there’s as much as a half hour before the first major nude scene. It’s an eon compared to King’s literary equivalent, the “steamy romance” novel, in which the heroine typically gets to have some action well before page 30. Yet this long first act cleverly lets King and his directors act as patient seducers, bringing viewers and characters alike into the scary freedoms of sensation and irrationality.

And because body doubles are so frequently and obviously used in King’s productions, you’re really seeing four people in every coupling–even kinkier if you think about it. This usually isn’t because the stars don’t have fine bodies, but because King likes to hire specialists in figure posing for the extreme close-ups, just like TV commercials hire separate hand models to pour the beer.

Just as there are innumerable ways to have sex, there are innumerable ways to represent it on the screen. Here are a few examples of how the combined allure and absurdity of on-screen sex, explicit or not, makes for entertaining and even breathtakingly weird film:

Rinse Dream (Nightdreams, Party Doll a Go Go) and Andrew Blake (House of Dreams, Secrets) are among the few would-beauteurs in the mostly boring world of hardcore video. Dream uses staccato video editing, Daliesque stage sets and just a dash of PoMo cynicism to enliven the standardized rite of the ritual fuck video. Blake, who started with “tasteful women’s erorica” for Playboy Video before moving into the hardcore side of the business, maintains a sense of ambitious visual pseudosophistication in his works, with wordless narratives that put teased-hair models through Helmut Newton-esque tableaux on their way toward the sex scenes. Blake is one of the few filmmakers who’s attempted to make explicit fuck scenes visually attractive; a Quixotic task at which I believe he fails.

The Playboy video centerfolds go further than Blake in exploring the inherent absurdity of out-of-context screen nudity. Each tape consists of a half-dozen vignettes, some more linear than others. Some show nude women doing things real-life people often do in the nude (stripping, dressing, bathing, sleeping, swimming, laying in the sun). Others show them doing things few people ever do nude (washing cars, riding jet skis, painting self-portraits, lying in empty storm drains, aerobicizing, doing modern-dance moves, holding up big globes or flags, playing pool, breaking into other people’s houses, making ice sculptures).

On the other end of the linear/ nonlinear spectrum are some videos marketed at female viewers. Each vignette in the Love Scenesseries begins with a conservatively-dressed young woman meeting a man who just happens to work as a male stripper; 15 minutes later, he’s privately showing her his hot dance moves (and his penile implants). Candida Royale, meanwhile, makes “feminine” hardcore tapes with lots of character development, lots of dialogue, almost halfway-decent acting, as few as two slow-paced sex scenes per hour, and the visible use of condoms (“except,” say the closing credits, “when the talent involved are lovers in real life”).

Royale’s work can be contrasted with generic hardcore, something that was never very good when it was in theaters (In the ’70s you could make the sleaziest crap this side of an Elks Lodge stag reel and the Frisco hype machine would call it bold and daring!). It’s gotten even duller on video.

A glut of producers has caused budgets to collapse. The average (and most are very average) video has five to eight fuck scenes strung together with the least possible dialogue, all quickly shot on local-news-quality camcorders and dubbed with cheesy synth music (it’s cheaper to hire a one-person band than to license stock music).

Yet this dismissal of all artistic pretension gives the assembly-line hardcore video a peculiarly honest quality. It doesn’t pretend to tell a real story or make any social statements (beyond crusading for its own legal right to exist). It is what it is, and claims to be nothing more.

With “pro” hardcore budgets so slight, it’s only a slight leap of lessened watchability into amateur hardcore videos. What they lack in picture quality they gain in energy. These are couples from across America, of all races and body types, who actually like one another and want to show you how much. If that’s not punk-rock moviemaking I don’t know what is.

There are many more sexfilm subgenres worth a cursory glance:

* sex-ed videos: many are more sex than ed, but the point is the illusion of education

* highbrow liberal sexfilm (Sirens, The Lover)

* The gloriously cheesy sex comedies USA shows late at night with all the sex cut out, like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips

* sex documentaries and shockumentaries

* short-form Playboy Channel stuff, most of which gets onto video before or after its cable run

* Euro sex sitcom films

* British sex farces (neither really sexy nor really funny, but a fantastic insight into the non-Masterpiece Theater side of English life)

* ’70s Euro erotic drama

* recent Euro erotic drama, from The Double Life of Veronique to the B melodramas released on video here by Private Screenings

* classic girlie film: strippers, nudists, David Friedman, and especially the king of over-the-top sex farce, Russ Meyer.

But we can’t leave without mentioning the best-distributed and worst of current sex genres, the made-for-video “erotic thriller.” At their best, they’re like mediocre USA World Premiere Movies with breasts added. At their worst, they’re the only current sex films that fulfill the radical-feminist stereotype of sex films as encouraging viewers to get off on violence against women. It’s a sick joke that Blockbuster will carry dozens of these but not a single tame centerfold video. (This may change now that Blockbuster’s part of the Viacom-Paramount-MTV-Showtime-Spelling empire.)

What if they gave a

Northwest Music Conference

and nobody came?

Article for the Stranger, 6/28/94

First, the bad news about the first Northwest Music Conference.

IMIJ and Meddaphysical didn’t show for their showcases. The all-eMpTy showcase at Oz and the Friday showcase at the OK Hotel were canceled altogether. The Colourbox showcases were turned into regular Colourbox gigs. The KCMU debate and the zine-publishing seminar didn’t happen. Several seminars were bereft of scheduled panelists. Several of the seminars that did go off as scheduled were sparsely attended, or had awkwardly-devised themes that didn’t always fit what the speakers and audiences were prepared to discuss. Keynote speaker Nat Hentoff was stranded at the airport and phoned in his speech to a near-empty ballroom, then called back and asked for his full $4000 fee. Only some 300 people (including invited guests) attended, 60 percent of the organizers’ initial goal.

Now, the good news. Plenty of showcases did go on and attracted large enthusiastic audiences. Many vital things were said at the seminars–especially at the packed Women In Rock panel. Many people learned important things about some of the more mysterious aspects of the music biz.

The Washington Music Industry Coalition says it plans to hold future conferences. Here’s my $.02 on how to plan the next one:

1) Don’t promise more than you’re capable of delivering. If you don’t have the corps of organized volunteers, don’t try to mount a big conference with dozens of panelists and exhibits.

2) The more visuals, the more better. Get an exhibit of poster art and band pictures. This year’s modest auction of Alice in Chains collectibles wasn’t enough.

3) Redefine the panels and seminars to meet the needs of the Northwest music community. Don’t settle for imitating the programming of larger festivals like the ones in NYC that cater to major-label “alternative” bands and bands that want to be on the majors. Instead of so many topics about teaching ambitious bands how to kowtow to the business, there should be hands-on instruction in making your own opportunities–getting a practice space, making a DAT tape, getting that first self-released CD made and marketed, getting gigs without getting (excessively) screwed, making posters, creating legal postering sites, making videos, working for more all-ages shows.

4) Get more of the music community involved. Where was Sub Pop? Where was Rhyme Cartel? Where were the management and promotion companies?

5) Get more commercial exhibitors and give them a more prominent place, not a few isolated hotel rooms two floors above the seminars.

6) Schedule it when fewer important local bands are going to be on tour. It’d help greatly if some more established bands had headlined shows.

7) Spend wisely, not ostentatiously. If The Meeting Place in the Market or a few motel meeting rooms are the right size for the festivities planned, don’t bother with a major downtown hotel. This shouldn’t be done to show NY/LA that Seattle’s “made it” by having a big-time corporate con just like the big boys. This should be done to serve our own local needs, to build a community and get more control of our own art.

But everything that can be in one building should. The film matinees shouldn’t have been at a theater six blocks from the main conference site. Even some of the hospitality events should be at the main site.

And lastly, one word says it all: Organization.

NW Music Showcase Reviews

A large Vancouver contingent at the conference spent a lot of time talking up the praises of DDT, even claiming it would be the band to put B.C. back on the musical map. Disappointingly, all the hype turned out to be about an extremely average macho white funk band, fronted by two frat boys in backward baseball caps chanting “Yo” as if they were doing something profound or “rebellious.”

More portentious of the future was Danger Gens, the ex-Maxi Badd fronted by that consummate local insider Gretta Harley. Harley’s voice and stage presence are powerful without being afraid to be vulnerable, or perhaps the other way around.

Scribble, a recent Oly band with a typical Oly-scene childlike name, ground out powerful neo-power-pop ditties with a clear sense of melody married to guitar noise.

Vexed, local legends back together after a too-long hiatus, has a great sense of love and despair as interpreted thru dissonant but never incoherent art-damage.

And the second-ever local screening of the documentary Live With This: Adrift in America proved again what an engaging band ex-Seattleites Popdefect are. They’ve got a new EP on the Flipside label (only the band’s third non-45 release in 14 years), and are working to get on a bigger label. In keeping with the band’s hard-luck career, the film still doesn’t have a distributor; director Brad Vanderburg vows to at least get it out on video within the year. Few other still-obscure bands are more deserving of bigger exposure.

The Gaul of Them

Film essay for the Stranger, 1/10/94

I’d always figured the French Ministry of Culture to be an institution of bureaucratic nepotism, taking the taxes from laid-off Citroen assembly workers to subsidize incomprehensible books by irrelevant semioticians (“How many angels can dance on the head of a text?”) and “art” films chock full of social criticism and softcore sex (admittedly, two of my favorite genres). You know, Eurosocialism at its finest — bleeding the workers to support the bourgeois.

But I’ve got more respect for the Ministry of Culture now that it’s stared down the Hollywood monster and held to its demand to keep “free trade” from gutting the European film industry.

Before I proceed, some background. You know how all those movie people clamored to contribute to Clinton’s presidential campaign? It was more than just your everyday liberal-celebrity primping. The entertainment industry is an economic force, and saw a chance to make friends and peddle influence. In return, the new administration has supported or accepted every move toward big-media consolidation and domination. Broadcasters can buy more and more stations; networks can again control the syndication rights to their shows; cable operators and phone companies and movie studios can plan huge megamergers without a peep of antitrust interference.

And Hollywood got the White House to push its cause at the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Teriff) negotiations. At one point the US delegation threatened to let the deadline for the 1993 round of GATT talks expire, killing agreements on dozens of other trade issues, if France wouldn’t agree to stop using movie-ticket taxes to subsidize its domestic filmmakers.

This was just the sort of thing that leftists like Noam Chomsky warned against during the NAFTA debate: Big corporations using “free trade” as a justification for interfering in domestic policies, short-circuiting democracy.

The French officials had screwed over their farmers in other trade talks, but held their ground on the culture issue. The issue of French film support was set aside for discussion at a later date.

It was a great triumph over Hollywood’s pathetic longtime flack Jack Valenti, whose incessant whining about the poor helpless media conglomerates got lamer every time he spoke (“We’ve got 60 percent of your country’s box office; we demand the rest”). After he lost the fight, Valenti apparently realized the bad PR he’d gotten as a Goliath figure trying to push around the Eurofilm Davids. Valenti wrote to the NY Times that his industry group hadn’t really wanted the breaks it’d lobbied for. He now claimed Hollywood only really wanted a piece of any European taxes on blank videocassettes, revenues earmarked for the Euro film industry as a compensation against home taping. The studios (and the major record labels) have lobbied for similar taxes in the US. I think blank-tape taxes are unfair to begin with; they feed cash from indie video producers and home-movie makers toward the bigger boys. They’d be more unfair if they made overseas governments funnel cash toward US media empires.

Vice President Gore was in LA on the 11th. He spoke to a convention of media and telecommunications giants, with guest appearances by Lily Tomlin and Nancy Sinatra. He assured the throng that the administration would keep hounding the pesky Europeans to provide US “information providors” with “full access” to these “major world markets.” He added that as an ol’ Nashville guy he was proud that “you can turn on a radio almost anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before you hear American music.” To Gore, and to most of the people at the convention, music and film and video are Product, and those who resist the Hollywood (or the Nashville) cartel are mere nuisances meddling in the natural flow of commerce.

Some of us think differently. We think music, film and video are, or should be, vehicles for communicating ideas and emotions. We want to break the stranglehold of The American Entertainment Business on the world’s (including America’s) expressions and dreams. The stand-up comics are wrong: today’s big cultural rivalry isn’t NY vs. LA, it’s NY and LA (and Tokyo) vs. the rest of the world. We need more Chantal Akermans and Almadovars, and could live with fewer John Hugheses and even fewer George Lucases. Even a bad Euro movie (and I’ve seen plenty) is a better viewing experience than your average A-budgeted B-movie from the Hollywood stimulus-response factories.

There will be many similar battles in the years to come, as the entertainment conglomerates maneuver to subdue the economic and technological trends that threaten to make them obsolete.

So raise a Brie and a glass of fine wine in saluting the Ministry of Culture, preferably in front of a (now French-owned) RCA VCR running Camille Claudel.

Save the Movies, Kill Hollywood

Essay for the Stranger, 6/22/93

The biggest movie of the year is about dinosaurs, and the movie business is a dinosaur. It’s addicted to the big-budget, little-boy formula, a genre that can produce a few monster hits a year but on the whole is a recipe for self-destruction.

The industry knows that fewer people, especially younger people, are going to theaters (20 percent fewer admissions than a decade ago). They want to solve it by formulating vehicles with different demographic targets, or retooling their ad campaigns. They won’t address the real problem: that most Hollywood movies are insipid, overproduced, overhyped pro-violence orgies bereft of charm or substance, that treat their viewers as idiots.

I’ve just about given up on any movie favorably described as “a roller coaster ride.” A movie’s quality today is usually inversely proportional to its budget. A thousand El Mariachis could’ve been made for the budget of Last Action Hero. Even if I never saw all 1,000 of them, I’d enjoy most of the 10 or 20 I would see, more than anything with Arnold or Jean-Claude or Charles or Chuck.

Today’s movie “heroes” exist to promote the joy of murdering people. Their plots exist to give a righteous excuse for their slaughtering. Hollywood bigshots speak out to save the trees and the whales, but make films that treat human beings as expendable. Then the hotshots look aghast when violence breaks out in their own city, and respond by moving to Montana or the San Juan Islands.

Action and spectacle don’t have to suck. Hong Kong films have colorful images and enticing fantasies. Even in the ones with gangster plots, the combatants don’t just aim and shoot; they struggle to get what they want, bringing out their characters. Those movies movein ways bloated U.S. movies can’t.

Hollywood, full of current and recovering powder-cocaine addicts, makes movies according to a cocaine aesthetic: relentless aggression, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money. Even non-violence movies feature short scenes, simplistic dialogue, garish visuals, shallow emotions. Watching one can be like a snorting roommate who makes you listen to him scream harshly and incoherently.

Note the “him” above. Females get only 30 percent of big-studio roles, says the Screen Actors Guild. The Oscars just had their “Year of the Woman”; three of the five best-picture-nominee clips were all-male scenes.

In the fifth grade, boys who only want to play with other boys are treated as real men, while boys who like girls are called sissies and even faggots. This is the presexuality of the “action” movie. Guys shooting guys, guys kickboxing guys, guys chasing guys, guys buddying up with guys, guys playing sports with guys. When sex appears, it’s either as a hero’s conquest or as a villain’s cruelty that the audience is invited to “get off” on, while still giving the hero an excuse to kill the villain. (Despite its “realism,” Unforgiven did for women what Mississippi Burning did for blacks: use their plight as an excuse to depict white guys fighting.)

Yo, studios! Some of us are past puberty, and we’re not all are boys. Many of us boys like girls; we want more girls in the movies, doing more interesting things than just getting dispassionately screwed or shot. Some of the boys among us like boys, but in different ways than you’ve been willing to show. Many of the girls among us like boys, but don’t like to see ’em killing all the time.

If Hollywood won’t overcome its fetish for killing, maybe we should kill Hollywood. We’ve made the equally-pathetic music biz notice quote-unquote “alternative” bands. It’ll be harder with film, ‘cuz even cheap indie features cost so much. But there’s hope. Screening spaces like 911 provide a forum for indie films. Short films are moving beyond the non-profit ghetto, thanks to the music-video scene and animation festivals. Directors in those two scenes aren’t making films that people have to “support;” they’re making indie films that people actually like.

That’s the foundation. Make stuff that really reaches people without being corporate/stupid. Learn by doing and viewing; avoid film schools and screenwriting classes that just tell you to do things the stupid way. Find new ways to get it out. Build new spaces and video stores; show stuff in clubs, cafes and the nether regions of cable. And don’t let LA take it over.

Colonel Bleep, Clutch Cargo and Space Angel

Video review for the Stranger, 9/25/92

From 1958 to 1967 (peaking around 1962), tiny independent studios churned out nearly three thousand low-budget cartoon shorts for insertion into local TV kiddie shows. Some of these cartoons didn’t air in every city; most have never been rerun. But now Streamline Pictures, originally formed to import Japanese animation, has released multi-tape packages of three of these series.

Colonel Bleep is a masterpiece of color and composition, which aired when most TV sets were black and white. The title character is a plucky little space creature who mostly communicates by flailing his arms and legs around (in oft-reused stock footage). His sidekicks, an Earth caveman and a living puppet, can talk in some episodes and not in others, leaving all the storytelling to a narrator. Unlike the cookie-cutter mediocrity of Hanna-Barbera’s product of the time, this show’s passionate cheesiness is innocently beguiling.

Same with Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, “adult” adventure series that used still drawings of realistic human characters. Almost the only movement was provided by the characters’ mouths — real human mouths, superimposed on the drawings through something called “Synchro Vox.” The Catalog of Cool calls it “a line-drawing dadafest of epic proportions.”

Issaquah’s Whole Toon Catalog has all these tapes for sale, plus such other contemporary curiosities as Bozo, Popeye, Beetle Bailey, Felix, Hercules, Roger Ramjet, Dick Tracy, Spunky and Tadpole, Pick a Letter, and Sinbad Jr.

LATTER-DAY ADDENDUM: I continue to receive more e-mail about this short-short review than about everything else on my site put together. I’m not a hardcore Clutch fan, and don’t know the answers to any of your production/credits questions about the series. I don’t know who now owns the master rights to the series. There’s some info about the series at the Toon Tracker site. Facets Video, which bought the Whole Toon Catalog’s mail-order operation, might have a little more info.

Junk Food: The American Way

Essay for Wire, 6/7/92

For five years, I’ve been writing a newsletter called Misc. It usually contains a segment commenting about the “Junk Food of the Month.”

I believe junk food is an important part of Americana; an important part of any culture. Archaeologists on their digs like to show off rare treasures and ceremonial objects, but they get the most productive research out of examining the remaining objects of a culture’s everyday life. What it wore, what it used as tools, and how it ate.

Our understanding of England would be just a bunch of cluttered stereotypes if we knew only about its fine cuisine (come to think of it, is there any fine cuisine in England)? You can tell much more about how England really lives by taking a quick glance at lukewarm thick ale, cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips that used to be sold wrapped in newspaper, and the near-unspeakable things they make out of the variety meats.

That’s why I write about junk food, because it’s the true symbol of one’s country. It embodies the American obsessions with advertising flair, instant gratification, and obsessive-compulsive “fun.” There’s more real America in a box of Teddy Grahams than in a thousand white-college-boy blues bands.

The history of junk food is the history of America, from the first Uneeda Biscuit ads in turn-of-the-century magazines to the building of the first companies capable of supplying fresh food products through a network of plants connected to every spot on the continent.

Junk food is also a microcosm of modern advances in technology. Several years ago, there was this great British documentary shown on the PBS series Nova, about the making of a new snack product. It began with surveys showing that consumers wanted more wholesome, natural snacks — but then these guys with college degrees in food tech reduced those desires to a set of flavors and textures, to be re-created with the newest manufacturing advances. The end result was a tubular cracker with a cheese-flavored filling, “co-extruded” through an experimental continuous-run machine. Even that wasn’t half as cool as the scene with the stuffy Brit executives trying to figure out how “natural” they could legally call their product while still getting to use their complete arsenal of additives and processes.

Junk food is not always pretty, but neither is this country, as we have seen in recent weeks. But it can be a source of understanding. For one recent example: Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Hostess Turtles Pies (advertised as “Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Farley’s Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and a thorough layer of green frosting. I have publicly nauseated people by eating one in their presence. Kids, of course, get off on doing things considered gross by people my age. As for the fantasy of foods arriving fresh from the sewer, it’s a natural for a target audience of guys living in the years between toilet training and puberty, some of whom have a healthy obsession with exploring the sides of human/animal nature that us grownups keep trying to ignore.

The “vanilla” flavor in the pies probably came from a 42-year-old south Seattle plant that made over three million pounds of vanillin a year. According to the Times, the chemical flavoring was extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide. One pound of vanillin was taken from 140 pounds of pulp, used for important drugs as well as flavoring; the remaining pulp was sent on to paper mills. Now, the plant’s closing, replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (I want to hear no grumblings from the natural-food crowd about how unappetizing this all sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical (“nature-identical” in British lingo) to traditional vanilla; it just comes from a tree instead of a bean. Besides, some of these same purists will drench their pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)

Disappearance is an accepted fact of life when one is a junk food aficionado. So many of the junk foods I’ve written about in the past five years are no longer available. You can’t, to the best of my knowledge, get Space Food Sticks, or Pudding Roll-Ups. I know you can’t get Billy Beer, and that it’s even become hard to find the generic “Beer Beer” with the puzzles inside the bottle cap letting you test whether you’ve had too many that you can’t see or think straight. And you can’t even get Vernell’s Gummy Transformers anymore, those chewy candies in the shapes of powerful robots.

But wherever there is disappearance, there is scarcity, and the chance to profit from people’s memories. Somebody is trying to start a craze for collecting cereal boxes, reportedly primarily to raise prices for his own collection, and is starting a magazine called Flakes to promote the new hobby. Look for it. Also look for a three-volume video collection of cereal commercials.

You can tell where a nation’s heart is any given year by the ways in which it consumes its sugar and/or alcohol. Envir-O-Mints are not going to save the world all by themselves, but the yummy locally-made little chocolate pieces with pictures of endangered species embossed onto them do show off the consumer’s concerns for a better future. Sure, you could say that these animals would stand a better chance of survival if more of the Third World wasn’t cleared off to grow cocoa, coffee and sugar for western consumption, but a few cases of mints aren’t going to change that imbalance in either direction.

Or take a recent Kraft newspaper insert, headlined “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington in a green suit, pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the famous vegetable. Not only is the ad a wonderfully garish display of almost glow-in-the-dark colors, but it ties a gooey processed dairy product in with the public image of a president who, at the time the ad was designed, didn’t have much of a public image to exploit.

Junk foods are also an underrated force in local and national politics. Note the attempts to ban McDonald’s in a few towns across the country that think they’re “progressive” but are really just paternalistic. And note how the soft drink bottling industry always comes to Olympia when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), and now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products.

And if you still don’t think snack foods are an integral part of the modern human condition, think of this: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” The notion that Castro would divert precious meat supplies for a snack product shows how vital snack products are to people’s souls. To buy something to eat which has been prepared by someone else is in its own little way a mark of luxury. It proclaims that one has risen, at least slightly, above the standards of one’s ancestors who toiled all day, every day, to gather and prepare a meal.

Genuine Northwest Video: The Stan Boreson Show

Video review for the Stranger, 5/5/92

You who did not have childhoods here do not know the roots of Northwest humor. Lynda Barry, Gary Larson, and Almost Live have at least some inspiration in the deceptive wackiness propagated at KING-TV, with its “Cartooning Weathermen” and with the kids’ show KING’s Klubhouse, later retitled The Stan Boreson Show.

A home-video retrospective of the Boreson show has been out since last Christmas. It’s one hour of fuzzy black and white films of Boreson’s songs and gags. You can buy it from better video stores; Tower on Mercer rents it.

Boreson toured 25 countries as a young USO musician during World War II. As a GI Bill student at the UW in 1949, he got onto a student-talent show on KING, the region’s first TV station. From there he got his own weekly variety show. He told Scandinavian-dialect stories and skits and sang corny songs, accompanying himself on accordion and piano.

In 1956, KING assigned Boreson to create a kiddie show. He teamed up with Doug Setterberg, who’d been doing his own dialect humor on KOMO’s Scandia Barn Dance. Instead of stealing concepts from Howdy Doody or Bozo, Boreson and Setterberg combined their salty-Swede comedy with shticks inspired by the best prime-time comics, especially Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs’ “Mr. Question Man” was ethnicified into Setterberg’s “Swedish Answerman.” Setterberg was also Uncle Torvald, the other half of Boreson’s drag character Grandma Torvald. But mostly Stan was the straight man of the team. He made the live appearances at supermarkets and schools. He hawked the Twinkies in the live commercials. He sang the opening theme (“Zero-dochus, mucho-crockus, hallazaboobabub, that’s the secret password that we use down at the club”) and the Friday-afternoon pean to family values (“Let’s go to Sunday school, learn about the Golden Rule”).

Boreson and Setterberg made several “Stan & Doug” albums for national record labels. In addition to their own songs, they remade songs done in the 1940s by Yogi Yorgeson (a character created by network radio comedian Harry Stewart), with names like “Frida the Clamdigger’s Sweetheart”. A Yorgeson song became Boreson’s annual holiday tune, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas.” Setterberg got equal billing on the records, but was uncredited on the show except for the final episode in 1968.

In 1965, doctors diagnosed Setterberg with cancer and replaced his larynx with an electronic voice box. (The man who played the computer voice in the movie Alphaville had a similar implant.) Setterberg came back as three new characters: a puppet frog, a Harpo-like mime, and an old man with the appropriate (for his voice) name of Foghorn Peterson. The most poignant moment on the video shows Setterberg as Foghorn, reciting bad poetry (another Kovacs swipe), costumed with a big scarf to hide his electronics, carrying on as a real trouper.

Setterberg’s final TV appearance is not on the video. After the show ended, Boreson made one more Stan & Doug album, singing both parts. They appeared on KING’s morning talk show, with Setterberg talking in his electronic voice. Then they lip-synced from the record, with Doug mouthing Stan’s impersonation of Doug’s former voice.

Doug died soon after that, but Stan’s still with us. He’s run a series of business ventures over the years, and now packages tour groups. He still performs across the country, and has appeared six times on Garrison Keillor’s radio shows. But to know what he was really about, you’ve got to see the video. It’s not slick, it’s not fast, it’s not outrageous. It’s not “funny” in today’s aggressive way. It’s a quirkily bizarre humor, played against Boreson’s deceptively plain persona. It’s a pleasant trip to a distinctly Seattle brand of light absurdity.

Videophobia

Essay for the Seattle Times, 1/28/92

If you visit independent bookstores, you may have seen the National Book Week poster showing one book surrounded by 51 blank TV screens, with the slogan “One week a year is all we ask.”

The poster exploits an almost religious belief held by many book lovers against TV, despite the fact that talk shows are the greatest sales tool the book business has ever known. Despite the fact that the top book publishers and sellers are stronger than ever, while the big TV networks and many local stations are bleeding red ink.

Literary folks love to think that they’re a downtrodden enclave of true believers surrounded by video heathens. To admit to even owning a TV set is to be labeled as one of the unclean hordes.

Allow me to state this with no guilt or shame: I do not hate television.

It’s the most flexible communications medium in the world today. It combines the languages of film, theater, oratory, music, graphics, and every other visual and performing genre, plus a video vocabulary all its own. Its presence is immediate and intimate, not overwhelming like feature films. It can mix genres and formats much more easily than film, which is pretty much stuck with straight narrative. TV news has grown from a simple headline service to a true window on the world.

But still, the videophobes scoff at the entire medium. Every so often, some parents’ group launches a “turn-off week” campaign, accompanied by publicity campaigns designed to get them on the TV news.

Some videophobic comments involve pseudo-scientific rhetoric, based on vague “evidence” or pure speculation. Author Jerry Mander claims that since the video image is an array of colored dots and lines, it’s inferior to a “real” picture. If that’s true, then we should toss out all pointilist paintings, tile mosaics, and Oriental rugs. Mander also charges that TV consumption is inherently passive and unquestioning. Has he never seen baseball fans arguing over a play? Or a family heatedly discussing a news report? He also can’t explain why literacy rates and per-capita college graduation are higher than in the pre-tube ’40s (though still not high enough for our high-tech society).

Many TV-bashers, including Mander, came of age during the 1960s and have failed to appreciate all of society’s changes since then. They talk as if there were still just three or four channels all showing bland shows like “My Three Sons”.

But their prejudices really go back further, to an old intellectual prejudice against oral and visual expression. Before the Protestant Reformation, religious faith had been inspired largely by the spoken liturgy and visual icons. But after Martin Luther and moveable type, many Europeans believed that ideas were somehow purer when expressed in writing. They believed that words informed and enlightened, while pictures seduced and deceived.

Of course, words can deceive very easily indeed. Holocaust-revisionist “scholars” use reasonable-sounding rhetoric and seemingly authoritative documentation to assert that six million Jews weren’t systematically murdered — unless you notice that their only “substantiation” comes from one another’s books.

And reading alone doesn’t make you smarter. Some of the most mindless people I know devour a book every two days, books carefully chosen to provide predictable entertainment and predictable rhetoric.

The top 10 book publishers did more business last year than the major movie studios. Bookstores were the second-fastest-growing retail industry during the past 10 years (after restaurants). Much of their sales consist of gossipy bestsellers, formula romances and thrillers, and self-help homilies. Can you honestly say that Sidney Sheldon’s trash novels are better than his classic series “I Dream of Jeannie”?

Still, the book business has always had room for a healthy highbrow segment, while TV used to have very little intellectual content. The networks originally promised to bring high culture to every corner of the nation. But after a while, culture shows like Alistair Cooke’s “Omnibus” were replaced by westerns and cops. By 1960, you were basically stuck with light family entertainment every night of the week.

But that was the Old TV. The rise of PBS in the early ’70s was the first step in making a New TV. That was soon followed by the domestic satellites that made cable networks feasible. Also at this time, a few “video artists” started experimenting on new, smaller cameras and recorders; they explored subjects and styles that video could handle differently from film.

Home VCRs showed up in 1976 and brought a new relationship between programs and viewers. People tend to be more involved with a program that they’ve physically left the house to get. Tapes let anyone examine a show or movie, to study the techniques that make a production work. With the camcorder, millions could apply this knowledge toward making their own material.

The New TV goes beyond just watching “whatever’s on.” You can (indeed, you have to) plan in advance. Choose from the best of broadcast, cable and home video, and you can have several evenings a month of quality viewing, to complement the other activities of a well-cultured person.

Mainstream TV entertainment is, on the whole, smarter than mainstream movies with all their lurid violence and visceral special effects. If I had kids, I’d rather they like “Beverly Hills 90210” than Steven Seagal.

CNN may be the first American mass news medium to take everyday, non-disaster news from other countries seriously. Even the network newscasts have a better eye on the nation these days. We get to see the human survival stories behind the abstract word “recession.” in the ’60s, we’d only get to hear what various pinstripe-clad analysts had to say about it.

The cost of TV production and the limitations of TV distribution used to mean that only a few people got to make any. But now, adequate-quality camcorders can be rented for $10 a day. To see what a few smart people with camcorders can do, watch the independent documentary series “The ’90s” (which KCTS will only show at 3 a.m. Wednesday nights). There are also scattered spots in the MTV schedule that expose new visions, new ways of seeing and hearing things.

Also, check out the video-art screenings held at 911 Media Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and elsewhere. You’ll see a generation of people making their own TV, questioning the preconceptions of their culture. People who expose themselves to the widest range of influences, who learn new views and new languages — verbal, aural, and visual.

The New TV is an almost limitless tool. It’s not always pretty, but neither is life. Like any medium, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. Its main weaknesses are its informality and its overambitiousness (it seldom has the time or money to do anything perfectly). Its main strength is that it can take the widest spectrum of material and bring it into the home. Now there’s a new TV, and a new generation of people using these tools to make their own audiovisual vocabulary. The enemy of good writing isn’t other media, it’s bad writing (resulting from sloppy thinking). Taking control of your media is a big step in thinking for yourself.

(Clark Humphrey reads plenty of books, some of which he reviews in The Times. He also edits Misc., a monthly newsletter on popular culture.)

Jet City Lit:

So Many Seattle Writers, So Few Seattle Books

Article for Wire, May 1991

When I was a kid in a typically underfunded Washington school district, we were always hearing or reading stories about exotic lands like Korea or Harlem. But except for the incisive children’s books of Oregon’s Beverly Cleary (the Ramona series, etc.), we read nothing that took place in our own region. Without it ever being openly said, it was made clear that we were a forgotten corner of the world, stuck out in the west-coast-that-wasn’t-California, the region that didn’t count for anything.

When I was 12, the hope of every young male Washingtonian for national respect, the Seattle Pilots baseball team, left for Milwaukee. I remember national sports writers saying things like “Seattle, with its small-town country atmosphere, is clearly not ready for major league baseball.” Even from the perspective of a country boy who only got into Seattle occasionally, I knew that was mistaken as hell.

In the early ’70s, I discovered Ken Kesey’s two major novels. In the years since, a whole scene of “regional” novelists took inspiration from one of those novels. Unfortunately, they all chose the wrong one. Instead of Cuckoo’s Nest, with its bleak, wry humor and its portrayal of universal themes with a regional twist, they all chose to imitate the stoic machismo of Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nowadays, according to literary scene-chronicler Mitch O’Connell, there are at least a dozen guys (and, in a contrast from most fiction genres, they’re almost all guys) churning out what I consider to be Great Notion clones. (O’Connell actually gave me two dozen names, but he counts rural eastern Montana as “Pacific Northwest;” I don’t.) They’ve got titles like A River Runs Through It, Yellow Fish, and Honey in the Horn. They’re about hard, quiet men who live off The Land. Mainly, they’re romanticized fantasies of how noble and stoic Western farming is supposed to be. They’re upscale Westerns, and like most Westerns they’re fantasies created for Eastern consumption. The only member of this crew I’d recommend is Craig Lesley, who uses Native American mythology to contrast the romanticized memories of his people’s forbearers with the often harsh realities of modern Native life.

From what I’ve been able to piece together about my grandparents’ existence on the wheat ranches before World War I, it was a milieu of despair, disease, alcoholism, the frustration of staying married to somebody you hated, and the madness or weirdness that derives from all of that and gets passed on to future generations. It’s no wonder pre-WWII Eastern Washington seemed to be all Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic and Mormon. Only people who believed in an eternal reward for present suffering would stick around. That solemnness was not a mark of centeredness but a mask hiding a world of unfulfilled desires. Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson’s eastern Washington saga that became a 1988 film, shows this off quite well. So does This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, set in the beer-guns-and-cars teenage scene in the town of Concrete.

The Egg and I, Betty McDonald’s 1946 comic novel of a city slicker trying to make it as born-again farmers, not only tells a lot about the area as it was then but also launched the legendary low comedy of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Oh yeah, there’s also that Tom Robbins guy, whose books contain at least portions set in the back-to-nature fantasy that his fellow ex-hippies think Puget Sound and the Skagit Valley are or were.

So far, all the stories we’ve talked about had to do with Oregon, Idaho, and rural or pseudo-rural areas of Washington. I asked O’Connell if anybody wrote about places like Seattle and Tacoma; he was confused about why I’d even ask. “This is a literature about man and the environment. If people want to read about a city, there’s a million books about New York.” (As if that pair of islands off the Atlantic coast had anything in common with any mainland American city!)

In recent years, the Seattle area has become the home for many bestselling writers of stories set elsewhere. In the cases of Charles Johnson, Mark Helprin, and Pete Dexter, I’m proud that writers of their stature and quality are here. I hope they can inspire young writers to stick around. Writers who leave Washington tend to leave virtually no fictional record of their having been here. There’s little or no area content in the works of Frank Chin or the late Richard Brautigan, who both became known (in different decades) as San Francisco writers who happened to have lived here prior to their fame. Thomas Pynchon wrote much of his first novel, V., while living in a cheap U-District rental unit. (Surprisingly with the district’s recent massive development, it’s still standing.) The only piece of Seattle that’s in it, though, is the Yoyodyne Company, a lampoon of Boeing (where Pynchon worked as a technical writer).

I know of a 1987 local playwrights’ workshop at the New City Theater, where the instructor specifically told the writers not to set anything in an identifiable Seattle, because it was such a “given” that Seattle wasn’t worth talking about. Compare that to the situation in Portland, where novelist Katherine Dunn andfilmmaker Gus Van Sant aren’t afraid to confront the urban realities around them.

I don’t know more than a couple of people who are even trying to write fiction or drama set in Seattle, other than formula romances and mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local landmarks. It’s refreshing to read a J.A. Jance or Earl Emerson whodunit just to read about fictional characters eating at the Dog House, but I soon tire of the mystery genre’s predictability.

There are also a few romantic histories, such as Jane Adams’ Seattle Green, or Seattle by Charlotte Paul (“a passionate American saga of men and women fighting for the wealth and power of their chosen land…by the bestselling author of Phoenix Island“). Both feature the sort of billowy, porcelain-skinned woman who wouldn’t have lasted three weeks on the frontier. The early local white women were more like Norman Reilly Raine’sTugboat Annie stories in the Saturday Evening Post. While the stories (set in the fictional city of Secoma) really creaked along in Raine’s proto-sitcom style, the Annie character is quintessential Seattle: a woman who can work and drink as hard as any man, without needing to make a fuss about it.

Any look at the scores of nonfiction Seattle books shows a wealth of stories and story ideas. There’s quite a lot that remains to be documented about the last “real” city built in America before the suburban era, about a city just over a century old whose history is already being forgotten, about a city now considered a role model of tolerance but which was the birthplace of the officially racist Elks lodges, about a region that was a hotbed of radical labor movements (violently crushed) but later became obsessively middlebrow with the rise of Boeing’s corporate culture, a place that in the midst of being turned into a laid-back yuppie theme park has spawned the angry, passionate rock music discussed in other pages and issues of this magazine.

One of the most enduring nonfiction Seattle books is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the story of the Pilots. The economic forces that led to the birth and sudden death of that team tell a lot about a city trying too hard to become “world-class.”

I’ve met Weekly cover boy Jonathan Raban, whose new book of travel essays, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, includes a passage on why Seattle would be an ideal setting for a novel (its size, youthfulness, ethnic mix, Far East connections, last-frontier dynamic, etc.). Raban is a tall, affable middle-aged fellow with a Masterpiece Theater London accent. He offered several observations that would make great story fodder, such as the ludicrousness by Euro standards of a city whose “oldtimers” go back no more than three or four generations, whose “classic” era of architecture means the 1920s.

While “serious” writers disdain local subject matter, area cartoonists such as Portland’s John Callahan and Seattle’s Peter Bagge have no problem telling vibrant, personal stories of dark humor about themselves and the societies around them. The foremost of these cartoonists, ex-Seattleite Lynda Barry, has built her memories of her multiethnic Central Area childhood into a weekly comic strip, a bimonthly short-short story in Mother Jones magazine, and her novella The Good Times are Killing Me. A play based on her book has been running to good reviews in New York, where nobody apparently minds that it takes place in a mainland city.

Indeed, for the past year or so an obsessive cult following has gathered around a TV series about (among other things) the social structures of a typical Washington town. My sawmill-town home overlooked the mouth of the river fed by the Twin Peaks waterfall; I can assure you that virtually all the characters and stories on that show are a lot more naturalistic than you’d ever believe. While the show’s future is uncertain at this writing, it has proven that there is a culture here worth discussing and people eager to hear about it. It also showed me how to appreciate my culture in ways my grade-school teachers never dreamed.