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TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Morris Graves, last of the ’50s “Northwest Mystic” painters and a continued inspiration even to diehard urban skeptics such as myself.
SOME OF THE THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING in recent weeks, instead of finishing up the transformation of this site to that popular “weblog” format:
They sat me down for an hour with a Betacam camera and a chroma-key blue screen in a Westin Hotel meeting room. I gave the usual shtick on the rise of Cobain and co. (Refreshingly, they were interested in Nirvana’s music and indie-rock philosophy, not the Cobain-Love celebrity circus or the drug tragedy.)
While I was miked up, I also answered questions about the movie Slacker (the product of a highly un-slacker-esque DIY-culture aesthetic), the continuing success of Nintendo’s Super Mario character (putting him in ever-bigger worlds only enhances his feisty-little-guy appeal), “designer grunge” fashion (I pleaded with viewers not to blame anyone in Seattle for it), and that way-overused term “Generation X” (the BBC producer was unaware that it originally came from a 1964 British book).
I’ve no idea when the show will air in Britain, whether it will ever appear Stateside, or whether any of my comments will make the final cut.
NEXT: In the Seattle upscale monoculture, everybody’s white (including the blacks).
ELSEWHERE:
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.
HERE’S MY TAKE on why Net-based delivery outfits have collapsed (Kozmo.com, Pets.com), merged away (HomeGrocer.com), or are on the verge of demise (Webvan.com).
It’s not just that these enterprises had to Get Big Fast by building real-world inventories, infrastructures, and staffs on what used to be known as “Internet Time.”
They were also based on a faulty premise from the start.
These concepts were devised by tech-biz moguls and wannabe tech-biz moguls who lived in Frisco, Manhattan, and horse country, and who imagined that all of urban America had the lifestyles of tech-biz moguls who lived in Frisco, Manhattan, and horse country.
I.e., they presumed the existence of tens of millions of folk with lotsa disposable income, little or no disposable time, and either no individual vehicle or no major supermarkets or strip malls nearby.
But as it turned out, the suburban lifestyle has yet to take a serious popularity hit. Most middle- and upper-caste Americans have never needed to get their dog food or cat litter delivered UPS Ground, or for their Frosted Flakes to arrive via private courier.
And those who did need or at least enjoy the service didn’t like it enough to pay the extra costs neded to make it all viable. (Part of the genius of/trouble with superstore/strip-mall marketing is the amount of “hidden” distribution costs passed on to consumers by making them drive to ever-larger, ever-further-apart emporia.)
I was an occasional Kozmo.com customer, and still am an Albertsons.com customer. Delivery isn’t just a convenience to me; it’s a vital building block of the New Urbanism. We need to promote more car-free living (not just commuting).
But the way to build such alternatives isn’t with centralized, top-down, venture-capital-funded, high-profile, high-burn-rate Big Ideas. It’s with street-level, little-guy entrepreneurial efforts, rooted in their localities and in touch with customers’ needs.
There’s already a small company in town that handles deliveries for local restaurants. As part of its schtick, it also offers a small selection of convenience-store items. I can’t see why the same can’t be done for video rentals, staple groceries, etc., without the dot-com hype and with old-fashioned service.
NEXT: Turn On TV Week.
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.
THIS EDITION OF MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of William Hanna, whose TV cartoons entranced millions of kids (and whose early, low-budget shows helped demystify the animation and filmmaking processes for thousands of those kids).
AS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD BY NOW, the Boeing Co. announced one of its periodic reorganizations the other day.
It’s gonna group its own heritage assets, and the assets it’s bought from Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Motors into three main groups, each of which would act more like a stand-alone company with its own management and offices (and, potentially, its own “tracking stock” IPO). At the top would be a slimmed-down corporate headquarters–which won’t be in Seattle (or St. Louis or Long Beach, where two of the three operating groups will be based).
So Boeing’s gonna become just another rootless global corporation, and have a head office not where any of its main plants are but whereever it can wring “job blackmail” deals from the local authorities and/or wherever the top execs would prefer to live.
The official reason given, that the company needs to be based someplace with “cultural diversity” and “a pro-business climate,” is, as everyone here knows, B.S. Our local and state politicians have spent their collective professional lifetimes doing whatever the Lazy B wanted. And as for the diversity part, there’s a whole world out in Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs that the Coldwater Creek store and the other promoters of Demographic Correctness couldn’t even imagine.
So let’s imagine the potential real reasons:
By having a head office physically removed from all manufacturing operations, Boeing’s proclaiming itself to the stock markets and the corporate community that it’s gonna be a company run by salespeople and financiers for salespeople and financiers, not an “old economy” company making specific products for specific customers. It’ll be a company whose real “bottom line” isn’t its operating profit but its stock price. A company that’ll do anything for the sake of short-term upturns–even take moves that could sacrifice its long-term position (such as giving away wing-design technology to the Japanese).
And if the top execs move to Texas, they’ll have more potential clout when pushing new military contracts from a Texan-run White House.
One potentially ironic note was that the top brass had apparently been bitching among themselves about all the flying around they had to do to go from Seattle to other Boeing sites and to Washington, DC lobbying sessions. (If you don’t like airline travel, guys, get into some other line of work than trying to promote more airline travel.)
NEXT: Some more of this.
AS THE ECONOMY CHURNS, influenced partly by wave after wave of dot-comeuppance, more of you are likely to suffer the humiliations and guilt-trips associated with America’s social-services system.
All the hassles, the short office hours, the long lines, the complicated forms, all the miserable eligibility requirements presumably designed to appease politicians who want poor people who feel awful about themselves.
Don’t think for a minute that our appointed President’s idea to turn whole chunks of the system over to churches (oops, “faith-based initiatives”) will make this situation any better. American religion is one whole history of guilt trips.
So, why not privatize welfare, unemployment, et al.?
If local governments can hire companies to handle everything from operating school buses to operating prisons, they could surely contract out the customer-service aspects of benefit disbursement (and their union-contracted staffs) to bidders promising to treat the needy less like suspects and more like valued customers.
Of course, just saying this brings potential problems to mind.
For one thing, what if the politicians and bureaucrats choose contractors to do just what the current civil-service staffs have done–treat the clientele with disdain? And what if the companies are chosen by the lowest bid, encouraging them to slash operating costs by making the application processes even more inconvenient and humiliating?
No, on third or fourth thought, the social-services system is corrupt from the top. Putting a different set of middlemen in charge of day-to-day operations likely won’t change it for the better.
Perhaps the system really needs to be reinvented from the top down. I don’t mean that “ending welfare as we know it” crap that just puts people through more humiliation loops and leaves some of the neediest all washed up.
No, I mean a top-down reinvention of the system of qualifying for and receiving benefits, based on service rather than shame. And to do that properly, we’ll need to keep the whole system, or at least most of it, under fully-accountable public authority.
Some improved customer-service manners, though, could at least be a good start.
NEXT: Could you be turning into a hippie without knowing it?
“DISINTERMEDIATION” is one of those buzzwords you hear in communications circles every now and then.
Applied to the online universe, the word is usually applied to individuals talking and/or writing to other individuals, rather than media professionals gathering huge massed audiences.
There’s a middle ground between these two extremes, though. It’s the e-mail list, discussion board, or website (such as this one) in which somebody puts together well-chosen words for a well-defined niche audience, or for anybody willing to read on.
We’ll look at a couple of local sites of this type today.
Seattle Stories is, as its name implies, an informal and friendly collection of little narratives. Most are seeded by the site’s creators Erik Benson, Stephen Deken, and Alan Taylor; but they’re soliciting, and starting to obtain, tales from the site’s readers.
These are tales of everyday life. Taking trips, going out jogging, falling in love, raising kids, surviving earthquakes, etc. They’re simple, pretense-free, and full of heart.
Pax Adicus is principally a rave-culture site; its “Philo” section is full of sermons by two guys who seem to imagine that taking ecstasy makes them a superior species to the rest of us squares, rehashing all the familiar techno-talk buzzwords. But its “Read” section features the same guys (using the bylines Mc Cutcheon and Ooh the Sloth 456) in a more honest and refreshing mode, relating incidents about their partyin’ lives (drinking too much, falling in lust, driving around, visiting pals, etc.).
The stories are officially billed as fiction, but they’re real (on a heart-‘n’-soul level). When the site’s authors go preachin’ about MDMA and global trance revolutions, they unwittingly depict themselves as stereotyped trend-followers. When they set that aside and turn to the details of living, they become more fully-realized “characters.”
NEXT: Don’t turn social services over to the churches, turn them into business opportunities.
Best of ‘Times’
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
IN FEBRUARY, John Hartl and The Tentacle more or less called it quits.
Apart from the coincidence of timing, these events wouldn’t strike most people as being connected in any way. A daily newspaper movie critic and an avant-garde music magazine collective of editor/publisher/writers might even seem to be enemies.
Besides, what common cause could there be between a hugely commercial art form, as exemplified by the Hollywood blockbuster known to all, and an assertively bizarre artistic foray, as exemplified by performances where the players have been known to outnumber the audience?
Maybe nobody in management at the downsized Seattle Times now appreciates that publication’s erstwhile status as Washington’s “paper of record,” but John Hartl did.
He made it his business to review everything. No matter how obscure the film or broke the theater or short the run, for 35 years Hartl went out of his way to let you know what was out there and what he thought about it. His consistency of views, depth of experience, and breadth of interests made his writing a reason to subscribe to that paper.
Although he will continue to cover movies for the Times as a freelancer, this coverage is bound to be less comprehensive than it was.
In the aftermath of a six-week strike, in which the paper lost $21 million while resisting contract demands that would have cost the company $3-4 million over one year, paternalist rules force returning strikers to be nice to bosses and scabs while bosses are free to sneer as they please, and morale is about what you would expect it to be at an office run by zombies whose Bible is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By not calling most striking reviewers back to work (and by urging long-time employees like Hartl to take early retirement), the paper has slashed arts coverage.
NEXT: Another fond adieu, this one to a most peculiar music zine.
NOT LONG AGO, we reviewed a couple of books about the late-2000 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.
Today, we look at a couple of videotaped documentaries chronicling these same events, Trade Off and This Is What Democracy Looks Like.
Trade Off was directed by Shaya Mercer, produced by ex-LA filmmaker Thomas Lee Wright, and made with a centralized crew (though with liberal use of TV footage of the conference and the protests).
Democracy comes from the Independent Media Center (which opened as a clearinghouse for WTO-protest alterna-media coverage and remains open) and Big Noise Films. The IMC has issued two other tapes packaged from its collected WTO footage, but this is the one it’s most heavily promoting online and in “alternative” print media.
It’s also the slickest. Directors Jill Freidberg and Rick Rowley gathered footage from some 100 contributing IMC volunteers as well as a dozen or two core crew members. It’s narrated by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy rapper Michael Franti and bigtime actress Susan Sarandon. It’s got all the modern digital-editing schticks that can now be accomplished on a low budget.
Both tapes offer the same heroes (third-world feminists, steelworkers, Ruckus Society organizers), villains (corporations, politicians, cops), and storyline (a massive groundswell of concerned folk from all over gather to take over the streets, get inhumanely roughed up by bad cops, take credit for the breakdown of negotiations inside the WTO conference, and start an exciting new era of mass activism).
But there are differences, especially in what each tape’s curators choose to include.
Trade Off, while made by professionals who might have been expected to dwell on the story’s exciting visuals, spends more time discussing the issues behind world trade and the centralization of political and economic power by big business and international financiers.
Democracy, despite coming from an activist organization with a political agenda to sell, prefers to dwell more on the spectacle of the protests themselves. It depicts the protestors and their organizers as the new counterculture heroes, and emphasizes the feel-good aspects of the protesting experience (the shared community, the sense of empowerment).
But as I’ve been saying these past 15 months, the protests will have ultimately failed if their only legacy is as a future nostalgia topic for the middle-aged of tomorrow.
So it’s Trade Off that expresses the best hope for a worthwhile WTO-protest legacy, one in which more folk become informed about the complexities of the issues surrounding their lives and livelihoods, then take an active role in helping change them.
As the black activist site Seditionists.org quotes author Barbara Ehrenreich, “There is a difference, the true seditionist would argue, between a revolution and a gesture of macho defiance. Gestures are cheap. They feel good, they blow off some rage. But revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have learned how to count very slowly to ten.”
NEXT: ‘Porn for conservatives’ or just another commercial niche?
WHEN WE LAST LEFT our lovable fictional gang at the promising Internet startup company RevolutioNet, control of the firm had just been usurped by Demographic Debbie, the perfect urban-white American adult female.
In her first month in charge, Debbie’s already proved herself valuable to the company’s backers. As the perfect target-market consumer, Debbie knew what her fellow perfect target-market consumers (in her case, small-to-medium-business owners) wanted. And as someone who looked good in a dress-for-success suit, she’s successfully schmoozed her way into trial deals with many of the businesses needed for the firm’s new focus as a business-to-business supply brokerage.
But as the leader of a staff of computer geeks and young Web hotshots, her day-spa looks and ever-so-moderate demeanor left much to be desired. That was all fine for her investor-bosses, who enjoyed her image of “adult supervision,” showing the world that this was no hopeless dot-com venture but Serious Business run by Serious People.
Her employees, though, didn’t like to be treated as rude schoolchildren in need of a strict schoolmarm’s discipline. They (especially the programming staff) began to chafe under her ever-tighter grip on expense accounts, departmental budgets, working hours, even in-office music (official order: nothing weirder than Enya).
Debbie may have been a priss, but she was an attentive priss. She knew any staff insurrection (especially by Pratt, the headstrong chief programmer who’d hand-tooled most of the website’s code) would be disastrous at this stage in the company’s halting start. She knew she had to change, to reach out to the young and/or hip among her charges.
That’s why she came, albriet reluctantly, to the little coffeehouse near the office, where many young and/or hip people congregated. It was hard, mighty hard, for her to admit needing help in anything; and she certainly wasn’t going to let a man hear it. So she asked Kirsten, the sullen barista; Janis, the 41-year-old punk rock mom; and Flies-With-Eagles, the New Age shaman. As they sat around the big table in the back of the coffeehouse after hours, she asked them to help her loosen up, lighten up, and wisen up, at least among the staff in the office.
Flies-With-Eagles said Debbie needed to confront and release her fears–fears of failure, of vulnerability, of being fully human.
A more pragmatic Kirsten said Debbie had to trash the beige pantsuits, the M.A.C. cosmetics, and the horrendously conventional short brown hair.
A patient Janis waited her turn, then said both the other women had their points. Debbie, Janis quietly proclaimed, needed to shed both her old way of looking and her old way of thinking. In short, she needed a makeover, and pronto. What’s more, Janis proclaimed herself just the one who could make Debbie over right; to make her look and feel younger, less inhibited, more alive and attuned to the world around her.
At least that was the idea. The result, I must confess, didn’t quite work out that way.
Oh, Debbie looked years younger all right. Between the Krazy Kolor hair dye (with clashing-color extensions), the neo-1979 platform shoes, the Alexis Carrington handbag, and the vintage Generra unisex pattern tops, Debbie looked, and felt, just like she had as a teenager.
And it was just at the time she looked at herself in the ladies’-room mirror in the coffeehouse, in this garb with this hairdo, that she suddenly remembered what a miserable teenager she’d been.
Instead of freeing her from her repressions, her new look unleashed everything she’d spent her adult life working so hard to repress.
The first words she told Janis: “Is my ass too big? I don’t just mean in this outfit, I mean is it too big in general? Am I EVER going to get boobs? You don’t see any zits, do you? Do you think I’d look better with those collagen puffy lips? What CAN I ever do to stop looking so fat?”
Kirsten and Flies-With-Eagles both rolled their eyes in dismay.
Janis, however, couldn’t have been happier. Another successful case, she thought, of a soulless yuppie turned into a real person.
A real unhappy, obsessive person, but a real person nonetheless.
NEXT: Real life among the dot-com decommissioned.
Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.
While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.
To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.
Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.
While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.
And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.
Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.
This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.
A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.
No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?
Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.
“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”
IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.
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.”
SEVEN DISGRUNTLED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES (current and former) have filed this here $5 billion race-discrimination lawsuit. They claim there’s a “plantation mentality” at the software giant, in which black employees were routinely denied promotions and raises and were subject to retaliation if they complained.
In its statements of denial, MS officials essentially said such a thing could never, ever have occurred at a company so forthright, so diversity-conscious. The routine tech-media gang of MS defenders has gone on to share this line.
Why are some people so shocked to hear about the Microsoft discrimination suit? You all oughta know by now how the software giant’s got this corporate culture in which only a certain type of person (the Gates clone wannabe) gets ahead.
The MS corporate culture was, at least indirectly, inspired by that of Nordstrom (which, you may recall, faced its own discrimination suit a few years back).
In both companies, and in whitebread Seattle society in general, the real goal of preaching “diversity” isn’t to bring more minorities into the corridors of power but to allow the white folks already there to feel better about themselves. If corporate Seattle could figure out a way to support minority rights without having to actually deal with real black (or hispanic or American Indian) folks in their own offices, they would.
One quintessential example of this hypocrisy is the awful movie version of that breast-beating, locally-written novel Snow Falling On Cedars.
It’s ostensibly about the WWII relocation camps and other racist acts against Japanese Americans in our state not too long ago. But the movie (in which no Asian-American actor is billed higher than eighth!), and the novel, are really all about raising audience sympathy for the nice white-boy hero, a noble hack journalist (and the author’s presumed alter ego).
This past week’s local Martin Luther King Day public-service ads further exemplify this faux-diversity mindset.
The ads all venerate King as a visionary, a leader, a forward-thinker (i.e., a representative of the values CEOs often imagine themselves to have). The ads then close with pats-on-the-ol’-back to the forward-thinking corporations who pitched in to pay for the ad space or time. Little or no mention is made of the real social issues King confronted, many of which still need confronting today.
So it stands to reason that a theoretical company that participated in these and other “diversity” themed self-celebrations (which theoretically might also include donations to inner-city schools, representatives at minority recruiting fairs, and internal sensitivity-training classes for white employees) might theoretically, and informally, decide it’s been doing enough to feel good about itself diversity-wise, and that it doesn’t have to go that extra, often-unpublicized step and actually demand fair treatment for actual minority persons within its own employment ranks.
If that’s what really went on, I (though perhaps not top company management) wouldn’t be the least surprised.
TOMORROW: I know what IT is. Will I tell you? Find out.
FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.
A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.
A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.
As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.
Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.
(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)
So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.
The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.
Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.
A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.
(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)
But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.
The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.
TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?
MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.
The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.
One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.
Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.
It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).
Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)
Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).
So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:
10. Still not a wimp.
9. Support international child labor.
8. Affordable housing for the rich.
7. Once a developer, always a developer.
6. Give corporate welfare a chance.
5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.
4. Known round the world.
3. More ugly architecture for the Center.
2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.
1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”
TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.
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.
