It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
From the Seattle offices of ESPN.com, it’s the thrilling Photoshopped adventures of Ichiro-Man vs. Godzilla!
An entire site devoted to the history of 45 rpm record label design!
“Comics I Don’t Understand.”
Why do rock stars have to look so surly all the time?
I OFTEN GET EMAILS from folk who run other websites, asking for plugs for their sites on mine. And on rare occasions, sites are even recommended to me by people other than the sites’ own creators.
Today, a look at some.
Creating Your Own Funeral: Site creator Stephanie West Allen calls her site an info-repository for creating your own funeral or memorial service.”
It’s a basic links page to basic, relatively cheery how-to pieces (some by Allen) about “designing your end-of-life event, regardless of your age or state of health.” One thing you can say: It’s one artistic creation where you won’t care about the audience response.
Xiao Xiao: Described by the correspondent who recommended it to me as “deranged but weirdly hypnotic stick-men homage to Jackie Chan, The Matrix, and Crouching Tiger, etc. etc.”
It turns out to be a cute, albeit morbid, Flash animation of simply-rendered figures in various monochromatic colors, engaged in violent karate and knife fights in a setting reminiscent of ’80s video games.
Cranky Media Guy: Site runner Bob Pagani thinks I should put in a good word for his online narrative about a friend, Tom Kraemer, who (according to Pagani) “is in love with an imaginary woman.”
As Pagani explains, “Back in February, I loaned him my Mac and a copy of the imaging program SuperGoo. With them he made the face of a ‘woman….’ Now he says he is in love with the woman he created and wants to find her real-life counterpart. While I realize this is pretty odd, he is my friend and I do want him to be happy so I have put the picture of Tom’s ‘dream girl’ and the entire story
on my website… so that Tom can find his ‘dream girl’ and have a happy life.”
The Art of Kissing: Reader John R. Nicholson recommended this online posting of a 1936 how-to manual by one Hugh Morris.
This simple, one-page, all-text work is elegantly and tastefully written, even as it discusses such topics as “Why Kissing Is Pleasant” and “How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouths.” While some readers might chafe at Morris’s insistence upon traditional gender roles (“He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones”), I believe all of you will enjoy the way he expresses his convictions.
Written long before the first computer, this is clearly the best site of today’s reviewed batch.
NEXT: Just a little more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
TODAY, I’M PLUGGING a book you can’t buy yet.
But I want you to remember it; it’s just that great.
The Golem’s Mighty Swing, by original Stranger art director James Sturm, is the first comic I know about (and one of the best narratives of any sort) about that relatively obscure but avidly-followed-by-some corner of sports history,
Jews in baseball.
It’s also an astounding feat of storytelling, finding the Universal in the Particular by creating specific characters and situations that show off these characters’ personalities.
And it’s an amazing piece of art.
Remember a while back when I raved about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, that brilliantly written and drawn “educational comic” about the medium’s aesthetic principles? The Golem’s Mighty Swing could be a textbook case for many of these principles. Every frame is exquisitely composed. Every figure, every face, is a mini-masterpiece of action and characterization in deceptively simple ink lines. The baseball-playing scenes by themselves are frozen-action renderings that outpunch almost all superhero comics ever drawn.
The plot, you ask? The Stars of David are a barnstorming baseball team, traveling across 1920s middle America in a broken-down bus, playing local minor-league teams in exhibitions. They play up their ethnicity as an exotic selling point to the small-town audiences. But a fly-by-night promoter convinces them to take the act further, dressing their physically biggest player (who’s really black) as a golem, the man-made monster of Hebrew legend (and of a popular silent film of the era).
What neither the team nor the promoter realize, until it’s too late, is that the golem character’s visage on publicity posters helps inflame the anti-Semitic sentiments of the town where the team’s next game is scheduled, leading to vicious attacks and a dramatic climax you’ll never get in any yuppified baseball-as-Americana tale.
The book’ll be out in a couple of months from Drawn & Quarterly Publications. I’ll let you know when it appears. When it does, get it.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last week’s piece about the new book Fast Food Nation drew a quick email response from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. He wrote that I shouldn’t have been so hard on the book’s author Eric Schlosser, who, despite the book’s rants about big restaurant chains and their corporate-agribusiness supply system, claims to still be a meat-and-dairy consumer and a loyal patron of his hometown indie pizza joint.
NEXT: The original Seattle Weekly crew was never as “alternative” as it apparently thinks it used to be.
EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT, and am not even related to, the guy who still writes “I Love Television,” I still defend the medium from its more strident and less thoughtful bashers.
Among those are the promoters of something called “Turn Off TV Week,” going on now.
I am just so darned tired of these decades-old (and oversimplified even then) arguments that Reading Is Always Good and Viewing Is Always Bad.
There’s nothing intrinsically empowering or progressive or even truthful about The Book. Mein Kampf was a book. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a book. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon was a book. Heck, even some of the most horrid movies ever made (Donovan’s Brain, Forrest Gump) were originally books.
And in the supposed Golden Age Before Television, what were some of America’s favorite mass entertainments? Adventure pulp magazines (lurid covers, bland formulaic insides). Sensationalistic Hearst newspapers. Underground “Tijuana bible” mini-comics. I happen to adore all of these ephemera, despite (or at least partly because of) their classic-showbiz energy and their lack of intellectual pretension.
Meanwhile, the audiovisual medium all conformist hippies and rote radicals obediently hate has recently given us endless numbing hours of impeachment, Elian, and celeb divorces (not to mention the Fox News Channel’s nattering ninnies); but also such quite smarty fare as Malcolm in the Middle, The Big Guy and Rusty, (the original) Law and Order, The Awful Truth, The Drew Carey Show, BBC America’s world news, BET On Jazz’s Live from the Knitting Factory, etc. etc. etc.
Heck, even PBS has something smart on every once in a while.
Smartness and/or dumbness can be found most anywhere, in most any medium. (Though the smartness half of the equation is increasingly hard to find at chain-owned radio stations, but that’s a rant for another time.)
NEXT: On a similar note, a eulogy for a Net radio favorite.
IN OTHER NEWS: I’ve continued to delay the transformation of this site’s main page to the increasingly popular “welbog” format. Still haven’t figured out how to replicate all the page’s features in one of those scripted weblog programs.
YOU SIMPLY MUST GET Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.
This handsome full-color volume, curated and narrated by Julie Lasky, gathers the best posters, album covers, ads, logos, magazine covers, and other assorted graphic creations produced from 1978 to 2000 by Chantry, the king of Seattle designers (until he followed a girlfriend’s career move to St. Louis).
Lasky thoroughly chronicles Chantry’s various “periods” or subgenres of retro design–Sub Pop, Estrus, the Rocket, theatrical work, slick posters, cheap posters, copies of sleazy-mag back-cover ads, copies of tool catalogs, copies of circus posters, copies of retro-smut, and, oh yeah, the four or five books he designed, including mine. No amount of thanks I can ever give will be enough for the work he did on Loser (which gets its due as a piece of Chantry’s oevure in Lasky’s book).
When Chantry held his leaving-town bash at the new Cyclops back in March 2000, he gave me the usual rant people were giving in those pre-NASDAQ-crash weeks about the dot-com invasion having finally sealed the ultimate triumph of the gentrifiers over the humble, funky li’l Seattle we’d known and loved (even though he’d complained as much as anybody about the town’s supposed lack of opportunities and urban sophistication back in the old days).
But it wasn’t just the destruction of artist housing and funky spaces, or the increase in arrogant cell-phone yappers, that he hated about the alleged Internet Revolution.
He was a lo-tech guy, in both his aesthetic styles and his working techniques. The text of Loser was desktop-published, but the 1,000-or-so images and the chapter headings were all pasted-up by hand, and all the photos were screened on a real stat camera. He despised the soulless perfection and numbing slickness he saw in digital graphics.
Nowadays, with KCMU in Paul Allen’s clutches and The Rocket and Moe and the OK Hotel gone, but also with clubs slowly getting back to booking more live bands instead of soundalike techno nights, and with retro-industrialism so beloved in PoMo architecture (plate glass, thin wires, exposed duct work), I have one thing to say to Art:
It’s OK now. Really. Things are getting better; that is to say, Seattle’s feeling comfortably depressed again. The dot-comers are on the run. Everybody’s sick of virtual reality. Real objects, real passions, and real life are back in vogue.
You can come back now.
NEXT: George W. Bush and Don De Lillo.
NINE YEARS OR SO AGO, Courtney Love may have been the personally least popular figure in the then-Red Hot Seattle Music Scene.
In a town that prized politeness and personability above all other traits (even among punk rockers!), Love was defiantly brash, unapologetically careerist, and defiantly self-promoting.
She would’ve been (and was) unpopular among many here and in her former Portland digs, even without the ludicrously false allegations a few guys made against her concerning hubby Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction and suicide. (I believe she’d tried to save him as best she could, but he was too far gone.)
One of her most outspoken schticks was her embracing of Rock Star glamour. While many local musicians (particularly among Cobain’s indie-rock activist pals in Olympia) treated small-scale DIY music as a religion, Love rode in limos, put on (and took off) designer fashions, hobnobbed with celebrities, moved to LA and became a movie star.
So, despite her deliberately generated reputation for hot-headedness, she’s just about the last one I’d have expected to (1) publicly denounce the major record labels, and (2) put her career on the line in order to do so.
She’s suing Vivendi Universal (nee MCA) Records to get out of her recording contract. More importantly, she insists she’s not out to just quietly settle the suit for her own personal gain, but to overturn the major labels’ whole stranglehold on recording artists’ careers and livelihoods.
The corporate record labels’ litany of sins is surely one you’ve heard often, by everyone from Calvin Johnson to Prince.
Artists get signed with big up-front “advances” that actually put them in debt to the labels, and bind them to the labels for as much as seven albums which could encompass their entire careers (while the labels can drop the acts at any time).
The artists are liable against royalty payments for everything the labels spend on their behalf, and are at the mercy of the labels’ marketing effectiveness and all-too-frequent corporate reorganizations and staff turnovers.
If a label opts to give a particular artist low promotion priority, or wastes money charged to an artist on excessive video-production budgets or on drugs-and-hookers bribery to radio stations, an artist can do little or nothing about it.
Even if an artist gets released from a bad major-label deal, s/he has little choice but to accept another bad deal from another major label.
The indie-label resurgence (particularly in the hiphop, alterna-rock, and techno-dance genres) gave some folk a glimmer of hope that this dilemma could be changed, but also a few sobering examples of just how hard it can be to go up against the majors for radio play, record-store shelf space, etc.
Net-based marketing schemes provided additional hopes for musicians to sidestep the majors’ stranglehold (though the first successful online-sold CDs were by already established acts).
Then the Napster craze, and the labels’ litigous response to it, further exposed the majors’ double-faced attitude and money- and power-hogging tactics.
There’s enough popular opinion out there against the entertainment conglomerates that some industry observers say Love’s suit might just succeed at forcing the labels to give up some of their worst contractual practices.
But will it succeed at rehabilitating Love’s reputation among the street-level music community? Only time will tell.
IN OTHER NEWS: Rumors continue to swirl concerning the fate of the OK Hotel, the legendary music club in an historic Pioneer Square building that was hurt in last week’s quake. Unconfirmed tales currently allege the building owner wants to use the quake as an excuse to raze the whole thing for parking. Further details as they become available.
NEXT: PBS discovers marketing to teens.
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
Better Listening Through Research
by guest columnist Ilse Thompson
RAYMOND SCOTT–recognized these days for compositions adapted for Bugs Bunny cartoons–spent the first half of his musical career as a pop figure.
He was an acclaimed and formidable band leader, composer and pianist through the ’30s and ’40s. In the ’50s, he led the house band on the TV show Your Hit Parade, all while writing bouncy ad jingles for everything from Sprite to IBM–allowing him to fund his secret, and very private, life as an avatar of electronic music.
This is the Raymond Scott–inventor, pioneer, visionary–Basta Records pays homage to with Manhattan Research Inc.
Left to its own devices, this two-CD set of Raymond Scott’s previously unreleased electronic compositions evokes a transcendental catatonia. Played on instruments of his own invention (the Clavivox, Circle Machine, Bass Line Generator, Rhythm Modulator, Karloff, Bandito the Bongo Artist, and his baby, the Electronium) these pieces will shift your foothold.
So… enough about the music, already.
Scott’s recordings are hardbound to accommodate a lavish 144-page set of “liner notes,” edited by Irwin Chusid–WFMU radio mainstay, director of the Raymond Scott Archives, and author of the recently released book, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.
In his introduction, Chusid says that “throughout Scott’s career in the public spotlight, there were occasional reports of an alter ego–the inventor, the engineer, the professor in the lab coat, the electronic music pioneer. But little of this work received public exposure.”
In order to remedy that, Chusid has compiled a collection of interviews with Scott’s contemporaries, including Robert Moog; historical essays, including one on Scott’s trippy collaborations with Jim Henson; articles written about Scott from back in the day; photographs of Scott and his musical equipment; patent designs; private musings and correspondence; promotional material; advertisements; detailed descriptions of each piece included on the CDs; and a wealth of fascinating ephemera.
As Chusid says, MRI is “a chapter of electronic music history you won’t find in most existing books on the subject.”
“In the music of the future,” Scott writes in 1949, “the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channeled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea.” These glimpses into Scott’s mind make the listening experience deliciously disorienting.
If Chusid’s compilation were simply an academic thesis on the subject of electronic music or a plain old biographical essay, I could take it or leave it.
It is essential as an accompaniment to the CD set, however, because it reveals Scott as a downright visionary–a man who collaborated with his machines and was driven by more than a simple desire to make wicked new sounds.
He was trying to ignite an evolutionary leap in music, technology and even consciousness.
TOMORROW: The ol’ WTO-riot-anniversary thang.
SCOTT MCCLOUD first emerged on the independent-comics scene in the ’80s with Zot!, one of the most intelligent and character-driven (and, for the time, least violent) superhero series around.
But he found his real calling in discussing comics, and making comics that discussed comics.
He’s now followed his ’93 bestseller Understanding Comics with a bigger, even more ambitious work, Reinventing Comics.
McCloud’s first volume was an introductory explanation of the art form, and an argument about why it should be considered an art form instead of the kiddie pap many Americans have treated it as.
His new one also has two tasks, divided into two sections.
In the first half, he bemoans the sorry state of the comics scene in North America as both an art form and a business. Daily strips are following the newspapers they appear in on a slow road toward oblivion or at least irrelevance in many people’s lives. Comic book stores, and the publishers and creators supplying them, took a financial shellacking in the mid-’90s when the speculator market collapsed. The so-called “mainstream” comic book publishers still concentrate too tightly on selling one genre (superheroes) to one niche audience of white male fanboys, neglecting the diversity of subjects, styles, and creators that could attract a wider clientele.
(Although, he acknowledges, some strides have been made in creator’s rights; and indie publishing has slightly increased the breadth of both content and diversity of contributors.)
In the second half, McCloud looks to possible solutions to comics’ artistic and business dilemmas. Guess what? They all have to do with the medium on which you’re reading this.
NASDAQ speculators and venture-capital funds may have written off the Net as a content medium, but McCloud insists its only problems are simply bugs to be worked out; mainly involving most users’ slow modem speeds and still-developing display technologies.
McCloud remains a mostly-unwavering advocate of the Internet (or what it can evolve into) as a force for decentralization, disintermediation, and creative breakthroughs.
The thing is: If and when all these revolutions come into being, will the result be anything approaching comics (or “sequential art”) as we know it?
If you define “comics” as printed documents comprising hand-drawn still images in linear sequence (sometimes with written narration and/or dialogue), maybe not.
If you define comics according to McCloud’s definition, maybe.
By the time Web comics really take off, they could become something closer to today’s Flash animations or the narrative elements of CD-ROM games than to silent still images in frames.
A new art form, perhaps; or at least a new blend of existing forms (comics, animation, film/video).
But it still wouldn’t mean the preservation of the existing comics form; many of the strengths of which lie in the disciplines of its limitations (no motion, no sound).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist remembers the worst job he ever had.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE UPDATE: Just as the excitement of a Presidential non-election finally wound down, the Seattle scab newspapers returned to their previous levels of bulk and dullness. Indeed, with their no-name staffs they’re even duller than before. Meanwhile, the Seattle Union Record has quickly blossomed into quite the spunky li’l alterna-rag. I still want it to go permanent and daily.
Generation S&M, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)
MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.
Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.
And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.
I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.
Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)
On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.
Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.
These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.
In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.
We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.
Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.
In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.
In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.
The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.
In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.
And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.
Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?
I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.
Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.
That would be SO Catwoman of me!
TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.
IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.
SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with another dare received on an email list.
A WILD BORE: Nickelodeon recently debuted Pelswick, a cartoon series created by our favorite Portland paraplegic satirist John Callahan. Its hero is a 13-year-old boy, who just happens to use a wheelchair.
One emailer on one of the lists I’m on noted that, not too long ago, such a character situation would never have been deemed an appropriate topic for a children’s light-entertainment series. This correspondent also asked if anyone could “name a subject that isn’t at least potentially entertaining.”
Here’s what I came up with:
(On the other hand, a drawn-out, never-concluding Presidential election is about as much fun as one can have with one’s garments currently being worn.)
YOU ROCK, ‘GRL’!: Media reaction to the ROCKRGRL Music Conference, Seattle’s biggest alterna-music confab in five years, was nothing if not predictable.
Before the conference, the big papers described it as an attempt to get a “women in rock” movement back on track after the end of Lilith Fair (which was really an acoustic singer-songwriter touring show, and which had included almost no nonsinging female instrumentalists).
During the conference, the papers tried to brand everyone in it as reverse-sexists, out to denounce “the male dominated music industry” and anything or anyone with a Y chromosome. Many of the speakers and interviewees, however, declined to fall in line with this preconceived line. Some at the panel discussions took time to thank husbands, boyfriends, band members, and other XY-ers who’ve supported their work. Others in interviews insisted their musical influences and life heroes weren’t as gender-specific as the interviewers had hoped. (Even at the discussion about violent “fans,” someone noted that stalkers and attackers can be anyone (cf. the Selena tragedy).)
And as for the music industry, it’s not built on gender but on money and power games; games which routinely prove disastrous for maybe 80 percent of male artists and 90 percent of female artists. (We’ll talk a little more about this tomorrow.)
THE END OF SOMETHING BIG: Saw Game Show Network’s hour-long tribute to Steve Allen a couple weeks back. Was reminded of how, seeing one of his last talk shows as a teenager, he was briefly my idol. He did silly things; he always kept the proceedings moving briskly. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction books, plays, and thousands of songs.
Of course, nobody remembers any of the songs, except the one he used as his own theme song. And the books and plays were essentially forgettable trifles. His main work was simply being funny on TV, and he was able to do it on and off for nearly 50 years.
As for his latter-day involvement with a right-wing pro-censorship lobby, you have to remember he was the son of vaudeville performers and was steeped in the old American secular religion of Wholesome Entertainment. To him, the past two or three decades’ worth of cultural bad boys and girls probably didn’t really represent a “moral sewer” but a mass heresy against what, to him, had been the One True Faith.
THE MARKETPLACE-O-IDEAS: The NY Times reports about some American leftist economists (including James Tobin, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bruce Ackerman) who’ve found an appreciative and excited audience for their ideas–in Europe.
You can think of it as the socio-philosophical equivalent of those U.S. alterna-music bands that could only get record contracts overseas.
You can also think of it as another of the unplanned effects of cultural globalization. Even avid opponents of a world system ruled by U.S. corporations are taking their ideas from Americans.
TOMORROW: Apres Napster, le deluge.
REGULAR READERS of this page know I’ve been trying to tweak the format of the MISCmedia print magazine, trying to find that elusive formula for success (or at least non-failure).
Today, we’ll discuss a couple of the elements that, according to the experts contribute to success in the field of periodical print.
1. The virtual world created on real paper.
Even publications with few or no fiction texts create a highly selective “reality” based on what pieces of the real world they cover and the viewpoints they take toward those pieces. The result, if it’s executed properly, is an alternate reality readers can only experience through reading the magazine.
(Think of Cosmopolitan’s world of sassy young women enjoying hot careers and multiple orgasms, the pre-Steve Forbes’s world of thoughtful industrialist-philosophers, or Interview’s world of breezy starlets and fabulous fashion designers.
Many magazines also create their own “realities” via staged photo shoots, cartoons, and the like. Examples include fashion spreads, travelogue photos with pro models, and, of course, nudie pix.
Playboy took this a step further with the creation of the Playboy Mansion, in which the magazine’s fantasy world could be staged nightly for its photographers and invited guests.
2. The full-meal deal.
Legendary Saturday Evening Post editor George Lorimer once said something to the effect that a good magazine was like a good dinner. It should have an appetizing opening, a hearty main course, some delectable sides, and a fun dessert.
(I guess, by the same analogy, a good small newsletter-type publication might be like a handy, satisfying deli sandwich with chips and a Jones Soda. And a useful webzine might be like a Snickers.)
3. The clearly identifiable point of view, or “voice.”
The old New Yorker identity, in the Eustace Tilly mascot and in the writings of folk like E.B. White and co., was of a refined Old Money sensibility confronting the sound and fury of the modern urban world with a tasteful, distanced smirk.
A Seattle counterpart might be a funky-chic sensibility (think fringe theater, indie rock, and zines) confronting a sleek, bombastic, postmodern urban world with a worldly, haughty chortle. Maybe.
MONDAY: I finally get around to the Ralph Nader campaign.
OTHER WORDS (from French director Robert Bresson): “Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.”
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-’80s skate punks.
But that’s just part of a growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call “Reagan’s AmeriKKKa” are back.
With one difference.
A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the ’80s.
We couldn’t wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we’re still not fully beyond.
Herewith, an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.
This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)
But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.
Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren’t really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.
Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.
(In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman’s wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)
TOMORROW: The last of this for now.
