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via kathrynrathke.blogspot.com
All good tidings and shout-outs to my fellow Stranger refugee and prominent commercial illustrator Kathryn Rathke. She’s created the new official logo for Wendy’s restaurants. The deceptively simple mascot caricature took three years of client approval and market testing.
kurzweilai.net
google earth via rhizome.org
A scene from the 2008 Japanese film Love Exposure (dir. Sion Sono).
by marlow harris, http://seattletwist.com
Tuesday’s Nirvana Nevermind 20th anniversary concert at EMP was a total blast.
Even if you weren’t there, thanks to the live stream from, er, Livestream.com.
You can still view it. Though you might want to fast forward some parts. Thanks to band set-up breaks, it took three and a half hours to get through the original CD’s 13 tracks and 10 other Nirvana songs. Each tune was re-created by a different combo. (The exception: the Presidents with Krist Novoselic; they got to perform two, nonconsecutive songs.)
The evening started off with a total sonic blast, as the reunited Fastbacks (above) completely nailed “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Singer Kim Warnick, like many of the night’s performers, had known Kurt Cobain.
Warnick’s also an ex-roommate of Susie Tennant, the longtime local music scene promoter and publicist. (Tennant had staged the original Nevermind release party at Re-bar.) Tennant has gone through a cancer scare (thankfully apparently over); the concert was a benefit for her treatment and recovery.
The Livestream page had a chat-room corner. Some chatters made snide insults about Warnick’s middle aged appearance. (Just the sort of “fans” Cobain had vocally denounced.)
All the performances were loose, spirited, and enthralling, true to Nirvana’s own rough and tumble gigging.
My own faves included, in no particular order:
…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.
1983 ad from vintagecomputing.com
They’re demolishing Pier 48 on the Waterfront today. The beautifully rundown wooden building was vacant for several years. Before that, it had several uses.
It was home to the Princess Marguerite car ferry to Victoria, long since replaced by the faster but blander Victoria Clipper stationed a mile or so north.
It was the site of the first few Seattle Bookfests. Fans of the event (relaunched last year in Columbia City) like to say it just wasn’t the same after it couldn’t use the pier anymore.
The global Cobain fetish cult knows it as the 1993 site of MTV’s New Year’s Live and Loud concert special, which turned out to be Nirvana’s final Seattle show.
The pier, once cleared of the old building, will become a construction staging area for the Alaskan Way Viaduct demolition (and perhaps for whatever project might replace the viaduct).
—
CORREX: Kind reader Martha Bussard remembered that Nirvana played Seattle once more, in the old Coliseum (soon to become KeyArena) on 1/8/94. The Live & Loud special was taped on 12/13/93.
Finally saw the Seattle Art Museum’s exercise in quesitonable idolatry, Kurt.
As my ol’ acquaintance Charlotte Quinn later summarized it to me, “So depressing. And so bad.”
The icon-ization of someone who not only had a complicated relationship with the cruel master that is “fame,” but who was killed by that master. Well, by that and that even crueler master known as heroin.
The pieces in “Kurt” (aside from the actual photos of Cobain by Charles Peterson and of latter-day Cobain fans by Alice Wheeler) were big, nay humongous, paintings and sculptures and videos and installation pieces made by artists from across North America and Europe. They were made for the museum “market,” though not specifically for this exhibition.
And they by and large sucked.
When the most lively piece is a video of a mall rat (portrayed by the artist herself) dancing in an energetic yet amateur fashion to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” you know something’s amiss.
But really, what could have been done with that subject? You have a dude, a gifted yet confused dude, who has three public faces: sensitive boy poet, BS-shearing aggressive rocker, and suicide-by-the-installment-plan junkie.
Take the music and the words away, which pretty much has to be done in visual still imagery, and that’s all you have left—graven images of a very reluctant god.
Been wondering when Seattle would get a permanent, tangible Kurt Cobain memorial other than that bench in Viretta Park? Wonder no longer. Here’s the “giant Cobain-inspired guitar” neon sign for the new Hard Rock Cafe on Pike Street. You know, the bar/restaurant/club/merch shop that was supposed to have opened last summer.
Someone placed simple holiday trappings on the unofficial Cobain memorial bench in Viretta Park.
Kurt and Courtney and Nick
Film review, 2/17/99
Kurt and Courtney
(1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)
Hype!
(1995, dir. Doug Pray)
Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
(1994, various directors)
By my calendar watch, we’re only seven weeks from what’s sure to be another exercise in media excess–the fifth anniversary of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
No, I don’t think Cobain was really murdered. The various conspiracy theories are too pat, too dependent on ignoring facts of the case that don’t fit the theorists’ neat little conceptions.
Besides, nobody had anything to gain from Cobain’s death, except the conspiracy theorists. Even if he were planning to quit music and leave the admitted publicity-addict Courtney Love, she would’ve gotten as much (and possibly more useful) ink as Cobain’s ex as she did as his widow.
Yet the theories continue to find an audience, among Cobain fans who still don’t want to believe their troubled idol could possibly have wanted to die.
Yet the clues are everywhere in his songs and performances. He really was a sensitive soul who sought to acquire the virtual invincability of a rocker (NOT of a “rock star”–while his music was some of the most accessible U.S. punk ever made, he never wanted what he considered the corrupt rock-star lifestyle).
But the assorted stresses of suddenly becoming a generation’s icon (and the locus of a multimillion dollar business) proved too much for him.
What survives are his music, his haunting image, and the many hangers-on and media vultures still trying to cash in, literally or figuratively, on his story.
One of the latter, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, was thwarted in his attempt to make a movie about the Cobain tragedy; neither Love nor the surviving Nirvana members would talk to him or permit the use of Nirvana’s music or video footage. Instead, Kurt and Courtney is the personal story of Broomfield’s failure to make the film he’d wanted to make. He travels around Seattle, Aberdeen, Portland, and L.A. He interviews a few of the couple’s friends and relatives, none of whom had anything bad to say about the self-deprecating Kurt or anything good to say about the monomaniacally ambitious Courtney.
A large bulk of the film’s time is spent on the professional Courtney-bashers who’ve shown up regularly in magazine stories, talk shows, and Internet newsgroups–Courtney’s very estranged father Hank Harrison, conspiracy theorist Tom Grant, and washed-up early Seattle punker Eldon “El Duce” Hoke. Hoke, whose career (such as it was) was predicated on calculated noteriety, claimed Love had offered to pay him to kill Cobain but he’d turned down the offer. Hoke died days after Broomfield filmed him; he was hit by a train while stoned out of his gourd. (He reportedly told friends he’d made up the hit-man story in a scheme to get his own name back in infamy.)
Broomfield clearly wants to contrast the ill fate of the tender, ulcerous Cobain with Love’s final re-creation of herself as a total Hollywood celebrity. But I couldn’t help seeing a more telling comparison between Cobain and Hoke. Both were self-styled bad boys; both eventually died indirectly from their drug addictions. But Hoke, bereft of much talent or imagination, sought merely to push the offensiveness envelope, and ended up a long term burnout case, living out his existence on L.A.’s far outskirts. Cobain beautifully married punk noise and pop immediacy, art and entertainment, and (as can be seen in the compilation video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!) burned out much more quickly.
Meanwhile, the definitive videocassette document of Nirvana’s era remains Doug Pray’s Hype! It contains very little Nirvana material, but puts the band in the context of its time and place better than star-obsessed folks like Broomfield ever could.
Gossip Galore, But Where’s the Love?:
The Girl With The Most Hype
Book feature for The Stranger, 4/17/96
I don’t really want to blame Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi for the disappointing content of her book, Courtney Love: Queen of Noise, A Most Unauthorized Biography (Pocket Books). I’m certain she was just following orders. You don’t have to read between too many lines to realize Pocket wanted this type of book, and dutiful magazine stringer Rossi complied. The type of book I’m talking about was best expressed in an old New York Rocker review of a Keith Moon biography: “All sex and drugs and no rock and roll.”
You get maybe 1,000 words at most about Courtney Love the singer, the musician, the songwriter, the still-aspiring actress. That’s scattered among some 85,000 words about Courtney Love the problem child, the reform school dropout, the stripper, the small-time groupie, the big-time groupie, the wife, the mom, the widow, the riot-grrrl hater, the force of nature, and most of all the Celebrity. Rossi’s book is a chronological compilation of my-god-what’s-she-done-now stories, divided into three sections of roughly equal length (before, during, and since her marriage). The cover photo might show an artfully cropped shot of Love in mid-guitar strum, but the inside teaser brings us not to a concert but to Love’s barging in on Madonna at the MTV Awards preview show. In the priorities of Rossi’s editors, the incident marks Love’s ascendancy to Madonna’s former title of #1 Rock Bad Girl–not because Love, unlike Madonna, writes her own material and plays an instrument onstage, but because Love’s unpredictably wild antics were more outrageous than Madonna’s calculated publicity schemes could ever be. Pocket doesn’t care who’s got the better tuneage, just who’s got the most hype.
(Indeed, at one point Rossi mentions trying to sell publishers on a Love book four years ago; the NY big boys decreed Love, fascinating a character as she might be, was not A Star and hence unworthy of mainstream publishing’s attention.)
On one level, this might be the way Love prefers to be known. More than anyone else in the Northwest “alternative” music universe (at least more than anyone else who succeeded), Love wanted to be a glittering light in the firmament of celebrity and fame. As Rossi thoroughly documents, this lifelong ambition for the spotlight has caused her, and continues to cause her, no end of conflict with music people in Portland, Seattle, and particularly Olympia who believe the punk ethic that music ought to be a creative endeavor and a personal statement, not an industry. Rossi also shows how Love’s ongoing quest to be (in)famous has endeared her to the NY/LA entertainment and gossip businesses. Five years into the “alternative” revolution Love’s late husband helped instigate, Vanity Fairand Entertainment Tonight (and Pocket Books) would still rather talk about Rock Stars than about rock. Love may appear out of control in dozens of the book’s episodes–drinking, drugging, harassing ex-boyfriends, sleeping around, encouraging her husband’s descent into heroin (or so Rossi alleges) then desperately failing to bring him back out. But she also clearly knows how to get and keep her name in the headlines, even when they aren’t always the headlines she wants.
Yet Love is more than just tabloid fodder. She’s succeeded by the pure-art standards she’s sometimes claimed to disdain. The first Hole album, Pretty on the Inside, is an experienced of focused anguish and vengeance, one of the finest American pure-punk records ever. Live Through This is a poppier, more rounded, more “accessible” work effortlessly careening between moments of beauty and ugliness. Love has spoken in recent months of wanting to be known primarily for her work, and also of wanting to be something at least closer to a positive role model (as in her backstage quip to a KOMO reporter about wanting “to prove girls can be the doctors, not just the nurses”).
Ultimately, it’s Love’s work that makes her life worth reading about, not her infamy that makes her records worth listening to. It’s these two contrasting aspects of her story that combine to make her such a fascinating figure.
Thus, by instructing Rossi to write almost exclusively about Love’s life as a succession of notorious (even by punk rock standards) incidents, Pocket loses out on a chance to fully explore Love’s story. Instead, we get a punkified version of The Rose with all the songs cut out.
One place where Rossi’s writing is allowed to shine is in her description of the old Portland music scene. Rossi and Love were both hangers-on in it, though they didn’t know one another. Rossi’s boast that Portland’s early-’80s punk world was livelier and more creative than Seattle’s is certainly a boast I could question; but Rossi makes a stong case for her allegation with Portland’s one great unsung band (the Wipers) and its many darn good bands ( Napalm Beach, Dead Moon, the Dharma Bums, the all-female Neo Boys). That the only mainstream star from that scene is Love, who’d only been a groupie in Portland and started her career in Minnesota and California, is indeed the minor tragedy Rossi makes it out to be. Of course, those other Portland bands didn’t try to be Stars above all other priorities; they tried to make great music, and under the financially-impossible conditions of indie rock at the time they succeeded at their goal.
If I had more space here, I could borrow a few clichés from the middle-aged scholars at our nation’s universities in the field ofAdvanced Madonna Studies, and write interminable ramblings about whether Love’s perceived interest in celebrity above accomplishment, along with her use of fashion-as-uniform and her cosmetic surgeries, somehow represent her identification with a notion of feminine being as contrasted to masculine doing. But I don’t so I won’t.
The word came into local media outlets shortly after 10 a.m. Friday. An electrician had found a dead male body at 8:40 a.m. in Kurt Cobain’s house on Lake Washington Blvd. A shotgun and an apparent suicide note were nearby. Authorities refused to identify the body, but that didn’t stop Nirvana fans (and reporters) from gathering outside the house. Thirty people were there within half an hour of the first announcement; an hour later the street had become too crowded for regular traffic to get through. Shortly after noon, investigators confirmed that it was indeed Cobain who had done himself in.
The AP quoted Cobain’s mother as saying he hadn’t been heard from in six days. That Wednesday, it was announced that Nirvana was bowing out of plans to headline the Lollapallooza ’94 package tour. His wife Courtney Love, who’d saved him when he took the champagne-and-sedatives overdose in Rome in March (officially billed as an accident), was off in LA wrapping up preparations for the release of a new album by her band Hole.
During the Rome coma-watch, The Stranger ran a piece by Eric Fredericksen on how the media would treat a Cobain death, as a cultural icon and a nostalgia industry just like Hendrix and Morrison. I’ll try to avoid that shit here, but I’ll try to give a personal view on the guy’s work. Like most of you, I didn’t know him personally, had never seen him offstage. I knew people who knew him; they inveriably described him as just a soft-spoken regular guy who loved to make music and art and who hated the bullshit of The Industry.
Punk rock had developed in New York as an arty affectation. England took it seriously as a voice of youthful anger. The local new wave scenes across the US took the DIY aesthetic of punk even more seriously, eventually questioning the very need for New York/London tastemakers. Cobain emerged amidst this indie-rock movement, among guys who’d chosen not to listen when the industry said punk was dead. Cobain and Krist Novoselic started playing together when they were 19, and by the time Cobain turned 21 in 1988 Nirvana was becoming a big fish in the still-small pond that was the Seattle club scene. By the next year they had an album and were part of TAD’s European tour; by all accounts it was a miserable experience, with Cobain having a nervous breakdown onstage at the last show.
While tagged by out-of-town media as the Leader of the Grunge Rock Revolution, he hadn’t been a central member of the hard-partying, extroverted schmoozers who had developed the punk-metal crossover sounds in Seattle. He was an inwardly-directed soul who, during Nirvana’s club years, holed up in an Olympia apartment and lived on corn dogs and cough syrup. While he kept his private life private, he put his personal torments into his work with a rare purity and clarity. It was his curse/blessing to be the best songwriter of his generation, and to be ripe for the picking just as “alternative rock” was becoming a big business. But it was his decision to go to Geffen; if Nevermind had come out on Sub Pop, as was first planned, it might have sold a few thousand copies, the label would have continued its slide into bankruptcy, and the Seattle rock hype would have died down leaving Soundgarden as national stars but few others.
We’ll probably never really know what finally led him to quit the world. Perhaps it was the slip back into drugs after the highly-publicized hell he went through to get off heroin. Or perhaps the hype and the pressure finally got to him. To the end, however, he maintained a public image as a survivor.
On March 27 the following statement, credited to Cobain, appeared on the Internet’s Nirvana mailing list:
“So this is the Information Highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about. Well, my manager told me some kind of fan-thing was going down here and that I should come over and check it out. Well, here I am. I’d be lying if I said I’m not surprised to see the band’s popularity reaching even into the depths of the electronic underworld. Cool.
“Well I won’t keep you people long, but I thought you might be interested in what the band is up to. Last month Chris, me, and Dave came out of London Bridge finishing up a revamped “Pennyroyal Tea” (I didn’t much care for how we did the album version and thought we could’ve done much better with the song). Geffen should have that out shortly, knowing the speed with which their money machine rolls.
“We’re all taking a break from the music and touring for a bit. I’m still a little freaked over the Rome thing and need some time to rest and get over it, you’d think they could make a good milkshake, but no. Hope you people are ready for a calmer moodier album. Yep, Nirvana’s going back into the studio at the end of the summer. I’m already working on the new songs and artwork for the new album. If you’re expecting the same verse-chorus-verse, well, I suppose you have but two choices, don’t buy the new album when it’s released in early ’95 or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity folks.”
(latter-day note: An Internet user in Victoria later claimed to have fabricated the note. My excerpts from it got printed up as authentic in Dave Thompson’s quickie Cobain exploitation book.)
GATHERING OF THE VULTURES: The vehemence with which conservative and old-hippie commentators alike treated Cobain and his fans is unprecedented in my lifetime, unless you count the bio-sleaze books of Albert Goldman (who thankfully died before he could write a Kurt exploitation book) or the Arizona politicians who wanted to prevent a Martin Luther King holiday by red-baiting King 20 years after his death. Rush Limbaugh called Kurt “a piece of human debris” and treated Nirvana listeners with equal disrespect; thus proving for all time the essential cruelty behind his worldview. If Limbaugh deliberately gloated over the demise of an opposition spokesperson, Andy Rooney was merely clueless in his denunciation of Cobain, and by extension anyone who loved him, as a “loser” not worthy of respect, only condescending pity. Locally, that professional pious hypocrite John Carlson echoed the Limbaugh party line in claiming the “sad and pathetic” Cobain should have quit music and found religion (as if Carlson has ever represented sincere Christian charity). P-I cartoonist David Horsey was at least more sympathetic when he suggested that Kurt could’ve found solace if he’d done more hiking in the woods; Kurt grew up near the woods, and from all accounts was more in touch with the terror of timber country than with its majesty.
Then there’s Times columnist Eric Lacitis, whose profound and utter incomprehension of Cobain, his music, his depression and his audience was matched only by his intransigence. First, he wrote a snide “joke” about Cobain’s March coma for a Sunday feature section that was printed before his death but distributed after it. Then, he wrote a “serious” column questioning what somebody with all that money could possibly have to worry about. Then, when many readers rightfully objected, Lacitis wrote a succession of shallow arguments attempting to defend his earlier bluster.
This is more than just the case of some oldsters who don’t get that new music (even though Cobain worked in a nearly 20-year-old genre). It’s the case of people who are paid to communicate, yet who lack a basic understanding of their topic, and in some cases have been defensive and even proud of their own ignorance. If the media business really wants to know why today’s young adults are consuming more books but far fewer newspapers and TV newscasts, it need only look to its own industry-wide “just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it” attitude. Not “getting it” is not a positive quality, and neither is inhumanity.
11/93 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
Welcome back to Misc., the pop-cult report that knows something’s gone wrong again when the songs on 120 Minutes are indistinguishable from the songs on VH-1, that loved Edward Muybridge‘s ol’ stop-motion photography experiments long before thatU2 video ripped him off.
STOP THE MADNESS!: Seems hardly a week goes by without another important cool thing about Seattle dying off. Next is the giant downtown Woolworth emporium, home of Seattle’s best selections of cheesy crossword magazines, kitschy souvenir mugs, by-the-pound chocolates, home aquariums, 10-pack tube sox, photo booths, board games, and fedoras (it’s where I’ve gotten all my hats). Where will we get any of these in the future? At some small-selection pharmacy or remote mall store? Hah! The store’s not performed poorly; the company just wants to cannibalize the variety stores for their real estate, then shunt the proceeds into more Foot Locker mall outlets. Do we need more places to buy Air Jordans and fewer places to buy $9 canvas deck shoes?
BP SELLS ALL WASHINGTON ASSETS: Guess we’ll have to go back to pumping gas into the pickup instead of replenishing the petrol supply of the lorry. Pity.
GENTRIFICATION MARCHES ON: The Eastlake dock that housed the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store for decades will now be a franchise of T.G.I. Friday’s, the NY-based king of meatmarket bars.
CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: It’s been a bad year for our pals in Tacoma. Their plan for a beautiful walkway from downtown to the waterfront died when Seattle talk-radio jerks branded it a waste of state funds. Then they lost the landmark ASARCO smelter smokestack, the Anti-Space Needle. Now the B&I Circus Store (one of the last independent discount stores in a region that used to be awash with Valu-Marts, Gov-Marts and Yard Birds) is bankrupt and will likely be sold to some chain, sending Ivan the gorilla to some out-of-state zoo. At least Tacoma’s greatest gift to rock in the past 25 years, Girl Trouble, isn’t breaking up as far as we know.
IN-A-NAME DEPT.: Haven’t said it before, but we’ve always been perturbed by the idea of Ortho brand contraceptives. Would you really put something in your body that had the same name as a bug poison? And do the burly truck jockeys ridin’ on Hyster brand heavy equipment know that that’s the old Greek word for a uterus?
MOREL CONCERNS: Mushroom hunters in Eastern Oregon forests have been shooting one another this year over the precious fungi. So much for the notion that the stuff makes you pacified and at one with the universe.
AD OF THE MONTH (from the Weekly): “I wish to apologize to all the people I called fat when I was selling a weight loss product. I am very sorry I offended each of you. I failed to see the essence of your being and your uniqueness. Maggie.” Runner-up (same source): “Achtung Baby! U2 can earn 3K/mo. starting in my international brokerage firm…”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Death of Rock n’ Roll, by Times freelancer Jeff Pike, is more than just a big book with all your favorite dead-rock-star vignettes. It also covers rock songs about death (especially the teen-suicide and car-crash songs of the early ’60s) and essays about “the three deaths” of rock itself (the clampdowns in the late ’50s, the wilting of flower power in the late ’60s, and punk’s supposed shattering of R&R populism in the late ’70s. I’d argue with the last point: instead of driving the final nail in rock’s coffin, punk and “alternative” music revived and codified the image of bad boys with guitars, for better or worse. Speaking of which…
AUDIO FILES: Didn’t care much for George Clark’s Stranger parody, The Whimper (too held-back and off-target), but his tape of Six Delightful Grunge Jingles is great. It’s the evil twin of Grunge Lite: Instead of making familiar tunes of bitterness more “commercial,” he makes bitter commercials. In the form of a fictional demo tape for a radio-ad production company, he introduces a band called Behavior Management that grinds out a perfect generic jam of drum thuds and guitar distortion, capped by a screeching rendition of “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” The other five jingles further explore the dichotomy between aggressive-poser music and ad happy-talk, as well as the desperation of marketers trying to latch onto any fad. Speaking of which…
DUDS (P-I headline on regional fashions): “It’s not just grungy anymore.” It never was. How many times to we have to say it: What the media call “grunge fashion” was invented by Marc Jacobs in New York, based mostly on Greenwich Village rich-kid primping. Don’t blame anybody here for it…Or maybe blame Charles Schulz. He’s got a new sweatshirt of Pigpen with the simple slogan “Original Grunge.” Speaking of which…
MORE DUDS: Nirvana agreed to have a logo sticker inserted in the new Sassy, but the band undoubtedly didn’t plan for it to be stapled in the middle of a fashion spread called “Oops, Your Bra Is Showing.” The sticker appears right in front of a monochrome shot of an outstretched butt in sheer undies. Speaking of which…
RETRO GRADES: Kudos to the Pearl Jam guys for refusing to be interviewed for that tacky, utterly point-missing Time cover story last week. First, the mag makes the most pathetic definition of “alternative rock” this side of Rolling Stone. Then, it patronizes present-day rockers as mere ’60s throwbacks without even mentioning those ’60s bands who really did influence today’s kids (MC5, Stooges, Velvets). Then, it chooses as the definitive angry young punk combo an outfit that never claimed to belong to any dissonant postpunk genre, but whose neo-blues-rock sound probably appeals to yup journalists more than the N-boys, the Overkill kids, the Pumpkins, the The, or other still-popular yet somewhat more street-level bands. But at least Time gives its clumsy sort of recognition to modern rock — unlike a 10-page rant in the new Utne Reader, that pseudo-liberal magazine that thinks the most oppressed people in the world are affluent white boomers. In it, some ex-hippie whines that there hasn’t been any good rock since (you guessed it!) the ’60s. He insists there won’t be any good rock again until those persnickety kids start obeying their elders by (you guessed it!) conforming to the blues-rock tradition. He doesn’t see that today’s post-mass-media world doesn’t need white R&B; we can get our black music from black people today. What the rest of us can make is music, art, etc. that speaks to our own life situations, no matter how rootless and disillusioning they may be, and hope the message doesn’t get too diluted in the hype. Speaking of which…
IN MOTION: In the new Wired, Paul Saffo posits that all it takes to start a cultural revolution in America is about 100 people plus overzealous press hype. That was about the number of hardcore Beats prior to the publication of On the Road (as Saffo quotes George Leonard), and about the number of real Cyberpunks in the mid-’80s. Saffo could’ve added, but didn’t, that there were maybe 100 Dadaists in 1920, or 2-300 Soundgarden and Green River fans in 1986, or about that many Riot Grrrls in early 1991. Seen in this light, a mass event like Woodstock could be viewed not as the dawn of an era as it was usually hyped, but as its close. It could also mean that we really do have to be as afraid of little hate groups as the media want us to be. Or, taken to an extreme, it could mean that any movement big enough to have its own professional magazine is already too unwieldy big to be effective. By the time the mainstream media hears about a scene, it may already be over. Speaking of which…
THE NON-SHOCK OF THE NON-NEW: Most “political” writing and art from as late as last October seems utterly dated now. One can almost look at the late ’80s-early ’90s as what all nostalgized eras are called, a simpler time. Everything seemed obvious then: “Activist” art didn’t have to bother with changing the world, only with announcing your own righteousness. All you had to do to call yourself politically active was sit and complain about Bush and other easily dehumanized targets. Because Republican rule was considered permanent, you didn’t have to bother with devising any practical agendas of your own. You could just keep making pseudo-“confrontational” art that only slammed people you safely knew wouldn’t be in your audience. Then we got a president who wants to make a better country, even if a ’50s-style Congressional coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats doesn’t want to help too much. There are detailed debates going on about not just whether but how to climb out of America’s assorted messes. You have to actually think about things these days, not just follow some “hip” line. Speaking of which…
PRESSED: Remember when the Weekly “discovered” the Italia restaurant as headquarters of “the new art scene” in town? Guess who’s on the ground floor of the paper’s new building? Speaking of which…
REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: NYC politicians are supposedly giving up on their 25-year dream of razing most of Times Square for bland monolithic office towers. Actually, they still want to build the office towers, but now they’re grudgingly willing to have street-level retail in them, maybe some fast-food chains with appropriate-for-the-area loud signs. They probably wouldn’t think to have the wig shops, music stores, and other places that give the human touch to that huge district. And no more porn, of course. Speaking of which…
PRO-CREATIVITY: It’s common knowledge that the best aspects of most XXX videos are the titles based on regular movies (Fleshdance, Edward Penishands). So don’t be surprised that a Nevada company’s made Sleeping With Seattle.
CATHODE CORNER: Imitation Ren & Stimpy cartoon shows are popping up all over. They’ve got the flashy colors and gross-out gags but not the comedic or artistic excellence instilled by fired R&S creator John Kricfalusi. Nickelodeon’s new Rocko is produced by the same in-house team that’s preparing the new version of R&S, to premiere later this year. If the sorry Rocko‘s any evidence, the new R&S won’t be much. And the Ted Turner people running Hanna-Barbera have 2 Stupid Dogs, whose rehashed retro-’50s design is unsupported by flat gag plots….Meanwhile, if the makers of New Pink Panther show had to give the cat a voice, it shouldn’t have been the nasal Canadian whine of Matt Frewer. To me, the only guy living who could voice this character right would be Tony Bennett.
AUTO MANIA: Damn, I want one of those 2.5-foot-wide “commuter cars” proposed by Subaru to meet Calif.’s forthcoming tough emissions requirements. The prototype shown in the Times is bright red and about the size of an Indy car, seating one passenger behind the driver. Utterly, utterly cool.
ICY DILEMMA: I’ve been receiving reports from college towns across the country, via people on my newsletter mailing list. They’re talking about what they see as a new social coldness on campuses. Students are shutting themselves off from public displays of affection or courtship. Men and women aren’t even looking one another in the eye.
Under the new propriety it’s OK to have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you publicly treat the relationship nonchalantly, as settled down into blasé platonics; otherwise, you’re supposed to be aloof and untroubled by those pesky anti-intellectual hormones. That’s not being cool, that’s being frozen.
There are plenty of potential causes: a decade-long media campaign to instill a fear of sex (you won’t get AIDS by eye contact), ongoing ill-will between macho men and judgmental women, rising heterophobia within the boho/alternative community (reminding me of a line attributed to Robert Anton Wilson or to the book Principia Discordia about “what was once compulsory is now forbidden”).
It is possible to be a man (or a woman who loves them) and a human being. Don’t buy into one-dimensional stereotypes, mainstream or alternative flavors. You don’t lose your soul via emotional intimacy, you strengthen it. This neo-puritanism doesn’t deter abusive relationships (creeps don’t bother with intellectual dogma except when it suits them). It only reinforces the fears of smart but shy young sensitives, the very people who need relationships, who could bring more humanness into the social realm.
It’s OK to be whatever sex and sex preference you are, even if it’s an outré one. It’s not what’s in your pants that makes you good or evil, it’s what’s in your heart.
MISC. UNPLUGGED: Power outages aren’t supposed to happen to urbanites with underground wiring. They’re supposed to happen to middle-class couples out in some forlorn suburb they mistakenly think is “The Country,” where overhead wires dangle dangerously beneath wind-vulnerable tree limbs. Little did I realize (‘tho I should’ve, from friends’ experiences in the ’88 downtown outage) that all these new Regrade condo projects had been fed into the same aging WWII-era circuitry.
So, around 2 a.m. Monday morning, I glanced at the digital alarm to find it off. Everything was off, even at the seniors’ housing out the window. Only the emergency lights were on in my hallway (by 9 a.m. their batteries died, and the windowless halls became pitch black). The Sunday/Monday wee hours are radio’s traditional dead spot, so there was no news of the outage ’til KIRO-AM signed on for the morning commute. Even then, local radio stations seemed to care little for the story, even the stations that were in the blackout zone. You could go for two or three consecutive news breaks without hearing a thing about it. In the Information Age, this is a pathetic excuse for “When You Want to Know First.”
‘Twas weird to see the Space Needle enshrouded in the morning fog without even its top aircraft beacon. ‘Twas weirder to glance into the Western Ave. band studio, one of those mazes of cheaply-built sheetrock walls; too bad one of the bands based there,Candlebox, couldn’t live up to its name.
Found myself depending on the kindness of strangers, including one household where I spent one night on a couch with two hyperactive kittens shoving each other all night for the right to claw me. More frustrating were my attempts to recruit sympathy from acquaintances outside the affected area; so many “hip” folks these days are so proudly ignorant of any local news, that I had to explain what an outage was and why I had one.
As my computer/video/stereo withdrawal set in, I caught a glimpse of the pristine life of info-chastity my acquaintances were living. Its simplicity was seductive, but dull! I decided quickly that I like modern life. Heat, hot water, electric shavers, coffeemakers, toasters, dishwashers, answering machines, VCRs, and modems are good things (‘tho there was something nice about not hearing the next apartment’s bass speaker).
People in the neighborhood were serviced with a Red Cross meal van, serving up free coffee, fruit, soup, and Spam sandwiches. I spent as much time out of the house as I could, hanging out at art spaces. The evening after getting re-plugged, I was doing the Pio. Square gallery crawl and happened to run into ol’ pal Bill Rieflin, who’s drummed in a couple of famous bands but was best known here for his work with one of Seattle’s best-ever combos, the Blackouts.
Lessons? Only that big developments, even in established urban areas, entail a public price for infrastructure. City Light bet it could get away without upgrading its wiring system, and lost. The Seattle Commons plan, which would stick a population the size of Pullman into what’s now a square mile of light industry, will take a lot of public investment. The advocacy group Allied Arts wants a public vote before the city spends or rezones toward the Commons condos. They’re right. I like living downtown, and wouldn’t mind more company, but we all need a voice in whether to adopt this massive scheme.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, try to figure why the state puts signs in over-21 places saying you’ve gotta be 18 to buy cigs, and hope all your troubles disappear as completely as the Canadian Conservatives.
PASSAGE
Sign outside Dr. Zipper on Fremont Ave.: “When I, Dr. Zipper, made the Zippocratic Oath, I pledged to fix zippers on PARKAS and PACKS, Heal SLEEPING BAGS and TENTS. Apply the mending touch to snaps and buckles. Restore CAMPING GEAR and SOFT LUGGAGE to useful life. Invisibly Patch Gore-Texreg. and other STORMGEAR. Restitch CLIMBING GEAR for maximum safety. Teach the MENDING ABC’s: All-One-Zipper Meshed-In-Line, All-One-Zipper Save-You-Money, New-Life-To-Outdoor-Gear Lesson. Don’t Replace! REPAIR-REPAIR-REPAIR OK!” (Cf. Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles.)
REPORT
Still seeking a publisher for my local-music history book. Thanx to all who’ve participated in it so far.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Pithacoid”
