IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.

In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.

Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.

Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”

But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.

The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.

With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.

Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.

The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).

And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.

Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.

The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)

Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.

Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).

Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.

It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”

TOMORROW: Some short stuff.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Guess the Dictator/Sitcom Character” (found by The Mysterious Box)….
• “19. The boy and the girl each knew that the first sign of immortality is becoming invisible to dogs….”

MOST OF US, I suspect, have experienced the moment.

You hear your favorite or once-favorite song; only something’s different, something’s wrong somehow.

Then you remember: You’re in a store, restaurant, or (yes) elevator; and the tune you’re hearing is a syrupy symphonic rendition, probably piped into the premises on equipment leased from the Muzak company.

I just experienced this a week ago. The place was a Bartell Drugs store. The song was the Posies’ classic “Golden Blunders;” redone in total “stimulus progression” precision.

While Muzak regularly licenses compositions wholesale from song-publishers’ catalogs for either re-arrangement (on the Muzak-classic satellite feed) or original-version replay (on its other channels), there might’ve been a special reason for including the Posies’ song.

While I don’t believe any Posies members worked at Muzak, many of their pals in the Seattle music scene did. It’s easy to imagine some of them picking their pals’ tune for extra rotation (and extra ASCAP royalties).

Muzak, founded in the ’30s in New York (it originally distributed its programming on leased phone lines), moved its HQ to Seattle in the mid-’80s after a merger with the locally-based Yesco, which fed what it called “foreground music” (i.e., the original recordings, not string-laden covers) into business places.

Another merger later, and Muzak’s moving again; this time to the Carolinas.

In the overheated Seattle economy of the early-Oughts, there are plenty of software-biz and dot-com-biz jobs to be had for those Muzak programmers, librarians, engineers, administrators, etc. who might choose not to relocate.

Slightly more problematic are the local job prospects for the music staff–the creators of Muzak-classic’s cover recordings, and the curators of Muzak’s “foreground” channels.

It’s not just the hard-rock scene in Seattle that’s seen its share of the global music-biz mindset diminish lately. Commercials, industrial films, and other non-pop production work’s also down.

The one bright spot: soundtrack scoring.

Clever entrepreneurs, including members of the Seattle Symphony, have made Seattle an unsung center of movie background music making. (You know: The stuff that used to be heard on soundtrack albums, before those were turned into pop-hit anthologies that had little relation to anything you actually heard in the movie).

Seattle’s chief emerging rival in this field is Salt Lake City; specifically companies formed there by veterans of Bonneville International’s old “beautiful music” radio programming division (which used to produce Muzak-like recordings for broadcast FM stations).

So you won’t hear Seattle-made violin-and-synth stirrings in your drugstore (at least not after Muzak-classic’s current fare eventually gets retired from rotation).

But you’ll still hear it in six-channel Dolby at your multiplex when the 55-year-old leading man tenderly embraces the body double of his 25-year-old co-star.

TOMORROW: Learning to appreciate the worst comic strip in the papers.

ELSEWHERE:

• Sure, a lot of librarians work for governments; but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be anarchists! (found by Abada Abada)….
• A list of songs someone doesn’t want Puff Daddy to ruin by sampling from….
• “Here in Olympia the new craze is committees! Committees have replaced parties as our favorite pastime….”

HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.

Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.

This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.

KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.

While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.

TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.

ELSEWHERE:

• The very first-ever Onion link from this site: “Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television….”
• Random acts of senseless violence against a doll that has no mouth to scream with….
• In praise of that little known film sub-sub-genre, Bowling Noir…./UL>
  

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• In the proverbial doghouse again? Perhaps Mark’s Apology Note Generator can help….
• You think the U.S. arts scene’s stifling? Just look at this site all about films banned in Britain….

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.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, the local and national sports media portrayed Ken Griffey Jr. as the Nice Guy Who Finished First, at least in individual baseball achievements.

(Unfortunately for him, baseball’s a team sport, a lot more of one than basketball. Mariners fans have long known what Cubs fans have recently learned–that a singular home-run titan doesn’t make a championship team.)

Then, during the recent contract re-negotiations, Griffey was portrayed in the local press as having always really been the Mean Guy Who Wanted His Way. (As if any true superstar player didn’t have an overriding ambition to do his best and to push those around him to do the same.)

Now, by accepting a new contract worth millions less than he would’ve gotten from the Mariners (or the Yankees or Braves) just to finish his career with his hometown (small-market) team, he’s being portrayed as the Nice Guy once again. He probably always a guy who enjoyed being nice when he could but who was also subject to stress and frustration like anyone in his hi-pressure position. He didn’t change; just the image.

My only regret,besides that of not being able to watch him break a few batting records here in town, is that Griffey’s personal “best company to work for in America” has had such sleazy owners.

No sooner was the borderline-racist Marge Schott out of the Cincinnatti Reds’ front office than insurance tycoon and financier Carl Lindner came in. Lindner’s best known nationally for his hostile takeover of Taft Broadcasting (a TV-station chain that had also owned the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and Aaron Spelling’s production company).

Lindner later sold pieces of Taft to finance his takeover of Chiquita Brands. You may recall last year Lindner quashed a Cincinnatti Enquirer investigative series into financial irregularities at the food company (previously known for its former violent role in Latin American politics). Lindner not only got the paper to stop running the results of its investigation, but it successfully redirected the national media spin on the story to the tactics of the reporters, not the funny-money dealings the reporters were investigating.

How could such a Nice Guy like Junior want so badly to work for such a meanie like Lindner?

And will this change my view of how nice Junior is or isn’t? (It won’t. Really.)

TOMORROW: Another great human space gets threatened with removal.

IN OTHER NEWS: Roger Vadim, who passed on last Thursday, directed 26 films and an assortment of French TV projects. Several of his films have endured as classic entertainments of eroticism and verve (And God Created Woman, Barbarella). Others remain as unsung treasures awaiting rediscovery (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ms. Don Juan) or period pieces of what one director once thought audiences would find sexy (Night Games, Pretty Maids All In a Row, the remake of And God Created Woman). But the headlines and the TV obits barely found time to mention his work; preferring to describe Vadim only as the ex of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Years ago, the U.S. publishers of his (now out-of-print) memoirs took the same angle, retitling the book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. One of cinema’s greatest celebrants of female beauty had attained a traditionally-female fate, becoming known only as a shadow behind the achievements of his spouses.

ELSEWHERE:

• A woman writes about having become “an admirer of BHM’s (Big Handsome Men),” and no, she doesn’t mean that kind of “big”….
• The Truman Show town as avatar of “a means to strengthen communities”? (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….
• The newest e-commerce fad: “Pizza In a Tube!”…

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.

YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.

But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.

CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.

There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.

Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.

While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.

Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:

“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.

“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.

Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.

“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.

“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.

“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”

MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.

IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).

ELSEWHERE:

• A tribute to that unsung trove of hot-rod humor and iconography, CARtoons!….

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.

THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.

Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.

All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.

But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.

It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.

Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.

In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.

Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.

Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.

Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.

And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.

One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.

Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.

In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.

Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.

But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.

ELSEWHERE:

• The current list of the 100 all-time most-popular (adjusted for inflation) movies (found by Grouse) gave me a few surprises: (1) I’d seen almost all of them, and (2) I totally hated only about 27 of them….

FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent 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.

TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.

Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.

Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”

Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.

Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.

Imagine a company that had the Beatles.

Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).

And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”

What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.

On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.

On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.

On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)

Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.

What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”

The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”

But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.

Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.

TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….

AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?

Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.

All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.

It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.

The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).

All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.

(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)

Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)

Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).

TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.

IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.

ELSEWHERE:

• Banner ads in review….

Praying for Turkey, Part 2

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)

ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.

In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?

But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.

I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.

It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.

Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.

TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.

And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:

One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.

A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.

Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)

THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.

The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.

It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.

My prayer is always the same one.

“God, I pray that everyone prays.”

TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.

ELSEWHERE:

• When a Seattle transit worker hugged his gay lover on national TV, was it a major social breakthrough or just another “human interest” moment?…
• There must be 102 ways to Kill Your Computer! (found by Macintouch)…./UL>
  

WITH THE LAUNCH OF MISCmedia MAGAZINE (copies should be in early subscribers’ mailboxes by today), it’s time to open up this site to the works of other commentators.

(You can submit proposed items if you wish. Just remember: This site does have a scope of subject matter, no matter how vague; so don’t be miffed if your submission isn’t used.)

Our first such installment comes in the form of a travelogue.

Praying for Turkey

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

I WENT TO TURKEY to film a documentary about the Amazons. I know, I know there was a big earthquake there and why would anyone do that?

Well, I’ve been wanting to go to Turkey for many years.

A few years ago I would’ve gone but we were (are) at war with Iraq (Turkey’s neighbor). Then there was all the confusing horror of the Balkans, just kissing Turkey to the northwest. Meanwhile, there’s the escalating civil war with the Kurds to the southeast (still going strong). There had been terrorist bombs in tourist sites all over Turkey due to the capture of Ocalan, the Kurdish leader. To the southwest, tensions with the Greeks were mounting into perhaps a larger dispute over Cyprus. I kept postponing, praying, waiting for a peaceful time to go see Turkey.

When the earthquake hit, I guess I realized that five years was enough. I prayed real loud, and, as usual, no one answered.

SO I WENT TO TURKEY. To Samsun, about 600 miles east of the epicenter. From there I explored the wild and dangerous Black Sea coast in search of Themiscrya, the supposed ancient homeland of the Amazons.

Did they talk about the earthquake in Samsun? Not much. It was in the air; and, from what I could gather in three weeks, the Turks suffer loudly and animatedly, but not for long. The earthquake would come up once in a while and everyone would say it was bad and unfortunate (two words I heard over and over again), and thank God for the Americans, and the Iraqis, and even the Greeks for helping out, and then there would be a deep silence until someone would mention how unlikely an earthquake would be in Samsun. On to the next subject.

They realized I was the representative of the tourist industry. Nothing negative, oh, no. One person said, “You gave us 10 million dollars, but Iraq gave us 20 million in oil.” That’s kind of embarrassing, considering I think we have some airbase in Turkey from which we are refueling to bomb Iraq.

Just before I left for Turkey a news story struck my attention from the back pages of the newspaper. Americans had mistakenly launched a missile at an entire Muslim family’s home in Iraq. They were murdered while they slept. Mothers, uncles, children–everyone was dead. Two cousins who were outside at the well survived. This was brought up in conversation while I was in Turkey. I felt too humiliated by my own country to say anything. Most Americans, I wanted to tell them, don’t know we are still bombing Iraq at all.

I HAD READ IN MY LONELY PLANET GUIDEBOOK not to discuss politics with the Turks. Turns out the people I talked to were not at all opposed to arguing politics. We shared our unhappiness and frustration about nearly every country. (America shouldn’t be bombing Iraq to hell, we decided). I argued for the legalization of prostitution; they didnt agree.

This is from a society which is highly censored. You can’t speak against the government.You can’t say anything negative about Ataturk, the man who westernized Turkey in the 20s. If you do, it’s straight to jail. And the Turkish police are not opposed to torture; although since Midnight Express they are really really nice to Americans. I’m not kidding.

While most unmarried turkish couples can’t get a hotel room, even in Istanbul, tourists can be an heathen as they like. In a country which needs tourists more than ever now, there is a great deal of pressure on the whole country to treat tourists like royalty.

STILL, DON’T PUT DOWN ATATURK. On every pedistal, in every town square, every school, mosque, etc. there is Ataturk, who gave the Turks their last names, their westernized letters, and their secular goverment. You can go to prison for criticizing him. I made an off joke, saying something like, “Oh, another Ataturk statue”, and I noticed some self-censorship on the part of my friends. Laughter was stiffled, heads were turned, the subject was changed. Best to avoid Ataturk altogether.

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

• Collective Insanity: Stories, poems, line art, semi-abstract photos, a “scepter of misspoken time,” and “Why I Bought a Kitten….”

MARILYN MONROE DIED in the summer of 1962, while the Seattle World’s Fair was open and celebrating the going-to-be-wonderful 21st Century. Her demise, undoubtedly (except to conspiracy theorists) by her own hand, said and still says a lot about 20th-Century celebrity and its downsides.

Lincoln Kirstein’s Nation obit said something about her that latter-day fetish-iconographers should remember: “Marilyn Monroe was supposed to be the Sex Goddess, but somehow no one, including, or indeed first of all, herself, ever believed it. Rather, she was a comedienne impersonating the American idea of the Sex Goddess…. Her performances indicated that while sex is certainly fun, and often funny, it is only one of many games. Others include the use of the intelligence.”

Nearly four decades later, Monroe’s films and still images still resonate. Marilyn fetishism, meanwhile, remains as icky as ever.

I maintain a revulsion to the continued exploitation of someone who’d fatally burned out on the stress that arose from just such exploitation. That’s why it took me until now to see the HBO movie Norma Jean & Marilyn. It turned out to be just as pathetically trashy as I’d expected.

Screenwriter Jill Isaacs was clearly trying to be sympathetic to her subject. But the stench of celeb soul-robbing is evident from the moment Issacs introduces her psychological-theory premise: that Monroe was a multiple-personality sufferer, torn by internal conflict between the invented sex-goddess persona and the “real” Norma Jean Baker. (I happen to have known real multiples, which makes this particular tabloidist premise even sicker to me.)

Monroe’s problem is much easier to explain, in a way that keeps some respect for her travails. She was simply a smart, aware person who tried to be in control of her own stardom (something Katherine Hepburn, among others, managed to succeed at in varying degrees). But she faltered under the intense pressures of being the locus of corporate entertainment’s impersonal, often cruel machinations.

Anyone who lived in Seattle six years ago can recognize this story.

Cobain also tried to keep his personal and artistic integrity amid intense industry hassles, and shattered from the contradictions.

He also named his daughter and a song on his last studio album after a previous showbiz stress victim, Frances Farmer.

Like Monroe (who showed up in Hollywood around the time Farmer disappeared from it), Farmer’s been the object of much latter-day theorizing and misplaced idolatry.

Many of the recent Farmer fetishists lionize her as a victim of male-oriented Hollywood; even though her involuntary institutionalization was arranged in the mid-’40s by her equally strong-willed mother, probably in a well-meaning effort to get her out of Hollywood.

The Mel Brooks-produced movie Frances (like most Hollywood biopics, full of fiction) spread the rumor that she’d been lobotomized while in Wash. state mental institutions; some who knew her in the hospital have since explained that she was instead probably hooked on severe, primitive psychoactive drugs. (Just about as debilitating as a lobotomy, but less sensationalistic as a film-plot device.)

(If Farmer’s mom really had put her daughter away just to keep her away from the boozing and drugging and smoking and screwing and general bad-living of Hollywood, it turns out she needn’t have bothered. Farmer, who outspokenly espoused left-of-center political causes, would certainly have been forced out of movies during the anti-Communist blacklistings of 1948-60.)

Farmer, Monroe, and Cobain share an object lesson in the relative inability of any individual of brains and integrity to hold onto one’s core values while afflicted with supestardom.

Such is the story of 20th-century corporate entertainment. Don’t become a superstar and you risk the chance to earn a living at your art. Become a superstar and you risk losing everything else.

MONDAY: Hollywood tries to stop the game-show revival by over-stoking it.

ELSEWHERE:

• MS Windows as a work of art?…

FOR THE FIFTH TIME, here are some looks at recycled real estate around my town. This time, there’s more-or-less a theme: Places that had their moments in the movies.

Second Avenue in Belltown used to be Seattle’s “Film Row.” Movies were neither made nor publicly shown there, but the big studios had their regional distribution offices there. Many were in the Screen Services building at Second & Battery, long since razed for the Belltown Court condos. Still surviving across Battery are the ex-Paramount office (more recently housing the Catholic Seamen’s Club and the Milky World gallery) and the ex-MGM office (currently housing a card shop, a fabric store, and the Lush Life restaurant).

Across Second Avenue from the Lush Life is the Rendezvous Restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater, which had been a promotional screening room used by the local distribution branches of all the major film distributors. It’s where they’d promote their latest offerings to theater operators. The room itself was a miniature movie theater; the display showroom for a theater-design company operating in the same building. During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, firms such as this would build and completely equip a movie house wherever you wanted one built, based on a complete prototype plan. Today’s strip-mall multiplexes are also often built from prototype plansÑjust much less beautiful plans.

Few feature films were shot in Seattle before the ’60s. One of the first was The Slender Thread (1965). The movie was constructed around the producers’ desire to cast Sidney Poitier with a white actress but with no romance (this was a couple years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). So Poitier ended up playing a Crisis Clinic volunteer called by suicidal housewife Anne Bancroft. (The two characters never meet on screen.) Exteriors of Poitier’s office were shot at what was then the real Crisis Clinic HQ, in this lo-rise Eastlake Avenue building.

The Union Street side of Benaroya Hall used to be a temporary park (as seen in the film American Heart). Before that, it was a construction-staging area for the Metro bus tunnel. Before that, it was the original 211 Club, a billiard palace now relocated to Belltown. The old 211 served as the titular location in David Mamet’s 1987 movie House of Games, in which card shark Joe Mantegna plays a complex scam on psychiatrist Lindsay Crouse. Her office scenes were filmed at the old AFLN gallery building on Capitol Hill (the Madison Market grocery and condos are now on that site).

This site on Lenora Street has housed several different kinds of restaurants over the last decade (another’s soon to open). None of those real eateries was anything like the boistrious diner set there in Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind. Run by Genvieve Bujold, it was a classic checkerboard-floored, cuppa-joe joint the likes of which this town sees far too little of these days. The same film used what’s now the Seattle Asian Art Museum as the private mansion of a slimy crime lord (played in male dress by Divine), decorated completely by Seattle contemporary artists.

Singles, Hype!, and Kurt & Courtney depicted the “Seattle Music Scene” the kids know and love; but The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) depicted a “scene” Seattle civic officials would much rather promote–piano bars and lounge singers. Beau and Jeff Bridges are the ivory-ticklin’ boys; Michelle Pfeiffer’s the torch queen who rescues Jeff from an existence of sullen solitude and tawdry sex. We know about the latter because of a brief scene, shot in the apartments above the 2 Dagos From Texas restaurant, with Jeff and a character identified in the credits only as “Girl in Bed” (played by Terri Treas, later on TV’s Alien Nation).

TOMORROW: What to do with that leftover Y2K-survival stuff.

IN OTHER NEWS: Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t really the meek-and-mild dreamer of latter-day corporate PR….

ELSEWHERE:

• Remember Saber Rider or ThunderCats? Then the ’80s Cartoon Alliance is for you….
• Must destroy… must destroy….
• Now, let us bow our mice and pray….

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.)