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CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.
The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.
The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on “How to Dress for a Nudist Camp.” Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.
While the Nova story’s text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre’s, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something’s loony about males and un-“beautiful” females treating their bodies as unshameful.
Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I’ve yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I’ve written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone’s expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.
Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.
Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one’s inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.
As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement’s ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)
No, nudists aren’t weird in Bizarre’s usual definition. They’re normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.
Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.
(P.S.: I’ve been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I’ve found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn’t sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)
TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.
ELSEWHERE:
I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.
Men’s designer fashions have become just as silly as women’s designer fashions!
The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. “Hip” white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).
The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men’s fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase “A Return to Elegance” or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in “menswear,” they almost always referred to the “menswear look” for women, not to clothes for males.
There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, “casual Friday” khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch’s gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between “casual elegance” and “elegant casualness.”
But that’s apparently changing. And, once again, it’s at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.
In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the ’90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap’s biggest market.
That concept “filtered up” to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.
While that particular look hasn’t “graduated” to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.
Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.
So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months’ time.
And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE’S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn’t have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me.
TOMORROW: We are driven.
Further Confessions of a Boss Chick
by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies
(LAST FRIDAY, our guest columnist began her reminiscence of being a lonely teenager in Philadephia during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. She’d befriended Kathy, a party-in’ girl who had few girlfreinds but many guy friends. They’d gotten summer jobs together at Philly’s legendary top-40 station WFIL. After one day in the back offices, Kathy had been promoted to a Boss Chick–a public promo person for the station, not unlike the KNDD jobs held by the Real World: Seattle cast.)
ONE NIGHT, at about 7 o’clock or so, that guy who hired me and Kathy, who I really pretty much hardly ever saw again, found me in the Addressograph room. “What time do you have to be home?” he asked.
I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me until he threw me a “uniform” and offered me double my salary to fill in for a Boss Chick who was out sick. “Be in front of the station in a half hour”, he said.
I was about to spend the evening asking grown men to dance at WFIL Night at the Windjammer Room in the Marriott on City Line Avenue.
For a shy 16-year-old girl with braces, a night from hell.
There’s nothing like putting on hot pants in a bathroom stall while thinking up a lie to tell your mom to make you feel like an authentic red-blooded American teenage girl.
I fit my pack of Marlboros perfectly in the pocket of my handbag, slid my lighter into my boot, and boarded the bus filled with veteran Boss Chicks. They were all blonde and beautiful. Mostly between 18 and 20. None with braces. They were having so much fun being them. No sign of Kathy; I figured she must be the one I was filling in for.
I thought she was ill; but I later found out that she was keeping a low profile while healing from a shiner, which she occasionally got from Mommy’s boyfriend.
The gals tumbled off the bus together like a spinning pinwheel. I watched them bounce through the lobby of the Marriott in front of me while I strolled behind them. As we passed the restaurant I caught a glimpse of where, not long ago, me and my mom sat eating sundaes at our favorite window table, looking out onto the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter.
I entered the Windjammer Room to the classic “sounds of Philadelphia”. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass “Bad Luck”–an ominous sign.
The other “chicks” began dancing as soon as they entered the room. One by one, they grabbed one of the guys at the bar, which was filled with traveling salesmen and lecherous locals who came out that night to dance with hot-panted-bell-heel-booted girls.
The guy that hired me came up to me and said, “Debra, you have to go ask one of those guys to dance with you–that’s why you’re here.”
I was horrified. I looked up and down the bar trying to find the loser who least disgusted me. They were all equally creepy.
The first guy I asked was slobbering drunk and kept falling into me during “Soul City Walkin’.” The next guy groped me all the way through “Me and Mrs. Jones” and proceeded to call me “Mrs. Jones” the rest of the night.
Finally, I found one guy who seemed just to be interested in dancing and having fun. He had lots of energy. And lots of coke, which he proudly snorted in front of everyone from a vile and spoon around his neck (which kept getting tangled up in his Italian Stallion medallion).
Suddenly he went nuts during “I Love Music” and shook his Pabst Blue Ribbon and sprayed it all over my T-shirt, screaming like a pig. I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back out ’til it was time to board the bus back to the station.
Needless to say, they never asked me to do the “Boss Chick” thing again. I resumed my survey and Addressograph work, which I liked a lot better, even if it was only half the pay.
Soon they asked me to assist a university student named Mark Goodman with telephone research. He and I became great friends. In my senior year of high school, he helped me obtain an internship at the leading FM rock station in Philly. Mark went on to become one of MTV’s very first VJs. WFIL went on to become a Christian talk station.
The summer ended and I returned to school with a new feeling of confidence. I quickly made a new set of friends.
One early fall night I was out with Flufffy, my evening ciggarette and my WFIL handbag. Kathy was on her steps in her Catholic school uniform, and a plaid waisted coat with a fur collar.
She was kissing Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
TOMORROW: The magazine glut.
Confessions of a Boss Chick
ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.
Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.
One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.
And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.
Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.
She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.
So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.
And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.
By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.
Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.
I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”
When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.
The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”
Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.
They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.
I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”
“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.
And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.
The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.
I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.
I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”
Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.
Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.
MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and ambient-improv musician Dennis Rea.
THE NIGHT AFTER the “Save the Jem Studios” rally I’ve already written about, I went back to the building for the launch party of something called “Glamour Girls International.”
The name was at least partly a misnomer. There were slightly more men than women among the 100 or so folks at the party; including one fab-looking drag queen, an Austin Powers impersonator, and a neo-pagan dude in orange body paint and a black loincloth (having seen some of the backstage preparation, I can assure you he was painted even where he wasn’t showing).
The women, not to be undone or out-glammed, were all dolled up in an array of retro cocktail dresses, neo-Twiggy minidresses, Lewinsky black wigs, feather boas, and at least one authentic-looking hesher metal costume (complete with Twisted Sister T-shirt).
Besides the showing off and dancing and drinking and eating and chatting, there was a brief runway fashion show in which some of these glamour girls ‘n’ guys strutted their well-dressed stuff under some improvised spotlights. There was also much photography and videography, some of which involved a Barbie Polaroid camera.
The point of the party, besides dressing up and having fun? To launch further opportunities for dressing up and having fun.
Shannon Lindberg, the ceramics-and-glass artist who devised the event (under the pseudonym “Eva New Dawn”), wants to use the names and addresses she gathered at the event (and any income from selling people prints of the photos taken of them) in order to stage bigger, lovelier parties and fashion shows; and to eventually start a website and maybe even a print magazine. (The website will be at “glamourgirlsinternational.com”; the URL “glamourgirls.com” is already used by a soft-porn site.)
Lindberg told me she sees her Glamour Girls parties as a social movement, one that would reassert women’s innate values and strengths after too many years of patriarchal society.
I saw the kickoff party as something only slightly less vital.
I saw it as reasserting the kind of funky, DIY glam that used to be the hallmark of Seattle bohemia in the years before three-story rave clubs with dot-com sponsorships and recessed lighting. The kind of glam you used to see at the old Vogue or Tugs Belltown. That was about making friends/lovers and being fabulous, not about making business contacts and being what NYC magazines thought was hot.
It’s the kind of real beauty we need tons more of.
TOMORROW: Yes, it’s still chicken.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Smoking Gun has uncovered that the mysterious title personage in the infamous Fox TV special Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? is really an actor and “corporate comedian”–who was served with a restraining order back in ’91 after an ex-fiancee made allegations of abuse.
THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 14th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.
As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of the Double-Oughts; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some Packard Bell PCs to sell you.
(P.S.: Every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)
INSVILLE
OUTSKI
Jigglypuff
Charizard
Washington Law & Politics
Washington CEO
TrailBlazers
Knicks
‘Amateur’ Net porn
LA porn industry
Game Show Network
USA Network (still)
Casual sex
Casual Fridays
The Nation
The New Republic
Women’s football
Wrestling
Gas masks
Bandanas
Begging
IPOs
Jon Stewart
Jay Leno
Public nudity
“Chastity education”
Global warming
Rolling Stone’s “Hot Issue”
Commuter rail
Anti-transit initiative
Dot-commies (online political organizing)
Dot-coms
Good posture
Implants
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (still)
Greed
Post-Microsoft Seattle
Silicon Valley
Post-WTO Left
Corporate Right
Dalkey Archive Press
HarperCollins
Bust
Bitch
‘Love Your Dog’
‘Kill Your TV’
Artisan Entertainment
Miramax
McSweeney’s
Speak
The Donnas
TLC
Tobey Maguire
Tom Hanks
Spike Jones
Spike Jonze
Michael Moore
Mike Moore
Darren Aronofsky (Pi)
Quentin Tarantino
Finding a Kingdome implosion viewpoint
Finding a New Year’s party spot
Keeping Ken Griffey Jr.
Trading away pitching
Quitting your job
Going on Prozac
Nerdy individuality
Hip conformity
NetSlaves
Business 2.0
Drip
Lattes
Dodi
Dido
Target
Wal-Mart
Amazons
Pensive waifs
Post-corporate economic theory
Dissertations about Madonna
Electric medicine
HMOs
“Girlie” magazines
“Bloke” magazines
Graceland
Last Supper Club
Labor organizing
Hoping for stock options
Yoga
Tae Bo
Urbanizing the suburbs
Gentrifying the cities
The Powerpuff Girls
The Wild Thornberrys
New library
New football stadium
Detroit
Austin
African folk art
Mexican folk art
As the World Turns
Passions
Liquid acid (alas)
Crystal
Dyed male pubic hair
Dreadlocks
Scarification
Piercings
People who think UFOs are real
People who think wrestling’s real
Red Mill
iCon Grill
76
BP/Amoco/Arco and Exxon/Mobil
Rock/dance-music fusion
Retro disco
Peanuts retirement
Garth Brooks retirement
Maximillian Schell
Paul Schell
Breaching dams
Smashing Pumpkins
Smart Car
Sport-utes (now more than ever)
Contact
Dildonics
Orange
Blue
Public accountability
Police brutality
Georgetown
Pioneer Square
Matchless
Godsmack
Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack
Pulp Fiction soundtrack (finally)
Labor/hippie solidarity
‘Cool’ corporations
Performance art
Performance Fleece
Radical politics
‘Radical sports’
Chloe Sevigny
Kate Winslet
International Herald Tribune
Morning Seattle Times
Piroshkies
Wraps
Prague
London
Kozmo.com
Blockbuster (still)
The exchange of ideas
NASDAQ
Fatigues
Khakis
First World Music
Interscope
Gill Sans
Helvetica
Pretending to be Japanese
Pretending to be gangstas
Botany 500
Blink 182
Tanqueray
Jaegermeister
Bremerton
Duvall
Nehi
Surge
Jimmy Corrigan
Dilbert
Cross-cultural coalitions
In-group elitism
Northern Ireland peace plan
Lord of the Dance
Hard bodies
Soft money
Doing your own thing
‘Rebelliously’ doing exactly what Big Business wants
MONDAY: I’m perfectly confident there will still be electricity and computer networks, and am prepared to ring in the double-ought year with a Peanuts tribute.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.
Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.
A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.
That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.
Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.
That one notion, natch, led to more.
There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:
Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.
TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.
TODAY, A BREAK from the heavier topics we’ve covered of late, for some slightly-odd short stuff.
FASHION-VICTIM ASSAULT WEAPON OF THE WEEK: Rolling Stone magazine now has its own brand of sunglasses. Presumably just the thing if you want to look like a washed-up, clueless, verbose rock critic (you know, the oldest and squarest guy at the concert).
WHICH PAPER D’YA READ?: Times headline, 11/12: “University District: Rail’s last stop.” P-I headline, following day: “Support for Northgate link gains momentum.”
ART UPDATE: Several weeks ago, I wrote about a poster advertising a “Butch Erotica” cabaret, which looked from afar like it was instead advertising “Butoh Erotica.” At the most recent First Thursday art openings, I finally saw some Butoh erotica.
It took place at the Jem Studios (currently doomed-for-gentrification), in a room filled with video monitors showing footage of one nude model moving about extremely slowly. In the middle of the room, the artist/model herself appeared, “dressed” only and entirely in white body paint (applied by a male assistant with a house-paint roller). She then slowly walked about the room, slowly climbed a step ladder, slowly smoked a cigarette (handed to her by another male assistant), and slowly gazed at the art-viewers.
She became the voyeur; we became the spectacle. Nothing had turned me on as much in months.
WORST JUNK EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (needless to say, from a “friend” I’ve never heard of, at an apparently nonexistant email address)
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉 From: asynergy@quixnet.net To: clark@speakeasy.org Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;). Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites. when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉
From: asynergy@quixnet.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;).
Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites.
when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
BEST EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (from a David Foster Wallace mailing list)
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted] To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized! I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill
From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted]
To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org
Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized!
I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
I can see it now. Probably colors, patterns, and logo “wallpaper.” I think we can all imagine some of the advertisers more likely to use this medium:
TOMORROW: I’ve complained about rude, pretentious San Franciscans. But are Seattleites these days any better?
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
YESTERDAY, we discussed a would-be commercial “alternative” magazine that wasn’t quite fiscally making it, and how it would probably have to find a business plan that didn’t require big corporate advertisers.
There’s a class of what might be called “ground level” zines (slicker than underground fanzines but rougher than corporate mags) that basically run on the business plan of expecting to lose money, and coming out as often as, or as long as, their publishers can subsidize them.
One of the more durable of these was Ben Is Dead. In tiny type on cheap newsprint, it relished in adoration or at least obsession with many of the relics of late-modern life–Sassy, Beverly Hills 90210, childhood memories, Marvel Comics, underwear, etc. etc.
But after some 30 issues in 11 years, publisher Darby Romeo has finally quit. Like the makers of Factsheet Five, Fizz, and several other ground-levels that have gone away in recent years, she’s decided to move on in her life.
A piece at Feed claims the end of Ben Is Dead forebodes the end of the whole Zine Revolution, an explosion of self-expressions that got underway in the early ’80s with cheap photocopying and desktop publishing.
Nowadays, the Feed essay notes, it’s easier (and just as materially unrewarding) to put up a personal website.
From my own 5.5-year experience in newsletter self-publishing, I could certainly see how the excitement of accumulating piles of print can begin to wear off. But I also see personal publishing as, well, a personal endeavor, one it’s perfectly OK to leave when you want to do something else.
Ben Is Dead is not a “failure” for not being continued, and Romeo’s certainly not “giving up.”
A personal zine is also a product of its times. Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rough-hewn look of many ground-level zines was an appropriate visualization of a DIY aesthetic opposed to old bureaucratic communications media. But in today’s go-go-go-getter cyber-economy, everybody’s supposed to be a young entrepreneur, and homemade-looking media can sometimes be perceived as simply the work of young entrepreneurs who aren’t doing it right.
I’ve seen newer ground-level zines, such as ROCKRGRL, Bust, and The Imp, which put their messages into more elaborate, more “professional” looking (but still un-corporate) designs. Will these go on to enjoy long lives? Maybe, or maybe their makers will move on to still-newer concepts.
Zines are no more dead than print media in general.
And, no, print media in general isn’t dead either.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle’s news media finally found something more important than Ken Griffey Jr. leaving town–specifically, a chance to spend seven hours of commercial-free live TV ruthlessly exploiting a minor tragedy; complete with lingering helicopter shots of police dogs wandering around clueless and scentless.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Who had the first commercial on South Park’s virulent anti-Pokemon episode? That’s right–Magic: The Gathering, from the now-Hasbro-owned outfit that also makes the Pokemon card game.
TOMORROW: Ron Harris’s journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
WHAT THE WORLD thought seven years ago to be “The Seattle Scene Look” was really just a thrown-together assortment of anti-fashions, usually obtained at thrift stores. Its aesthetic of comfort and unprettiness was the direct opposite of the “designer grunge” look the world would later blame Seattle for, even though it really came entirely from New York (and which pretty much killed off the Generra/Unionbay “sportswear look,” which actually did come from Seattle).
Back during the previous decade and the start of this one, the lowly thrift store was considered the absolute coolest shopping site by the punk elites, as well as by many other smart young adults.
A whole subculture formed around the ideas of outfitting one’s life for very little money, of surrounding oneself with beautiful goods tossed out by our planned-obsolescence society, and of collecting and preserving assorted cultural detrius (which could be good or hideous, timeless or incredibly passe, just as long as it wasn’t bland or dull).
And, as with any young-adult subcultural activity, it had its own zine–Thrift Score, edited in Pittsburgh by “Al Hoff, Girl Reporter.”
It’s been almost a year since Hoff issued TS #13. While both the print zine and the TS website promise new issues eventually, the bulk of issue #13 was devoted to a thorough dissection about “The State of the Thrift Union.”
It ain’t a pretty picture (not even a paint-by-numbers one on velvet).
Among the reasons Hoff cites for the thrifting lifestyle’s decline and fall:
Hoff’s call to action in that issue was largely a boycott cry: “Don’t buy stuff at inflated prices. If it sits unsold, a thrift may re-evaluate its price.”
Since then, Hoff has largely moved on to other freelance topics, such as NASCAR auto racing.
She now says concerning her thoughts about thrifting back in TS #13, “I reckon, most of that still holds true. if anything, it’s more so. I’ve sort of given up thinking about the topic. I mean, it’ll just drive me mad, and I promised everybody I’d look on the bright side.”
TOMORROW: Words about pictures.
IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.
JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.
AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.
I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.
My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).
I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.
Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.
Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’
Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.
Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!
My life was forever changed.
No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.
Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:
never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”
TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.
ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…
