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LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
ELSEWHERE:
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.
WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.
I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”
The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.
This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.
Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”
Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”
Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”
Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.
If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.
Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”
But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?
As IF!
MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.
THE LAST REEL: The final issuance of technical specs for digital, high-definition video has opened the speculative floodgates: Whither film?
This summer, a few scattered movie theaters have staged test runs of digital-video movie projection. Audiences apparently liked what they saw; so trials and tests will continue.
Distributors look forward to being able to “ship” their shows to theaters via satellite, instead of trucking film prints around. Theater chains look forward to no longer worrying about film breakage and scratchage, and really look forward to the chance to fire even more projectionists.
In a recent issue of the New York Press, Godfrey Cheshire looked ahead toward the final replacement of “film” as we know it by digital-video projection, and (like the self-described “videophobe” he is) foresw only bad things ahead.
I beg to differ.
For one thing, digital-video features will undoubtedly still include many of your favorite movie cliches. “A female lead with feminist leanings will always despise a macho hero–until the first time he rescues her from certain death. She will then become totally conventional and dependent…. Time will stand still when when the hero is in the presence of a company logo….”
For another, regular-definition digital video production’s already on the verge of revolutionizing independent moviemaking. The makers of Doomed Planet (which they describe as “America’s favorite low-budget Armageddon comedy!”) say they were able to complete the feature for $10,000 with digital video, but it “would have easily cost a half million dollars had we shot it on 16 or super-16mm film.”
(Our local readers can see the results at the Doomed Planet premiere party, next Friday (9/24) at Sit & Spin, 2219 4th Ave. in Seattle.)
Once hi-def camcorders become widely available on the indie level, ground-level directors would be able to realize their visions and make them look just as slick as the big-boys’ movies (if they wanted to).
Of course, as anybody who’s seen some of the abundant Amerindie-film dross of the ’90s knows, just because these tools become available to more would-be auteurs it doesn’t mean you’ll get viewable results.
Meanwhile, the current Wired (which won’t be available online until after it leaves the newsstands, approx. Oct. 17) has a cover-story package all about digital moviemaking, including two (count ’em!) Nor’wester stories: one about Seattle’s “microcinema” producers and disseminators (including Blackchair Productions, 911 Media Arts, Atom Films, and Honkworm Entertainment), and one about Myst/Riven video-game legend Robyn Miller putting his share of the games’ earned millions into a movie-production venture right in the Spokane suburbs (about as off-Hollywood as you can get without running into the Hollywood second-homers who’ve infiltrated so many other inland-west towns).
IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls ban studs. (Insert your own teen-boywatching joke here.)
MONDAY: Taking the personality out of print journalism.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
LOCAL NOTE: Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival ended its Sunday fare with ex-local film collector Dennis Nyback showing off some old reels of vaudeville stars. Highly appropriate, since Bumbershoot itself is like a vaudeville show exploded onto a bigger time/space canvas (four days and 17 stages). It’s a big all-you-can-eat buffet of darn near every performing- and visual-art genre, designed to pack in a huge, mongrel audience. Increasingly, those audiences are responding to the more challenging, unfamiliar entrees. Cibo Matto played to a packed KeyArena throng; and many of the “adventurous music” acts completely filled their own smaller stages. Enough to give you renewed faith in humanity. (Speaking of faith and the future….)
TWO ‘K’S, MUCHO KALE: For a recent freelance gig with Everything Holidays, I was assigned to research a short piece about Year-2000 survivalist camps.
I’d expected to find a lot of the separatist compounds out in the hills, like I’d seen when I first explored the topic last year. Folks who’d previously used rumors of the “new world order,” UN black helicopters, race war, nuclear war, the Red Scare, flouridated water, religious Armageddon, and countless other excuses to call true believers to set up a self-contained utopia of true believers, equipped with canned goods and guns.
People who now were applying the same supposed solution to a new supposed problem–the belief, nay the hope, that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00, all of the western world’s industrial, communications, and transportation infrastructure will immediately and irrepairably go Ka-blooey.
A global computer crash that would leave the cities (especially the parts where those minorities live) in ruins, the phones out of whack, the airlines grounded, the banks busted, the electrical grid down forever, and even late-model cars with computer-chip-controlled systems undriveable.
I found a few ranters of that type. But I also found several hundred more folks who claimed to believe in one-person, or one-family, survival schemes–and were, and are, ready and eager to equip such an effort, for a modest fee.
And such a cornucopia of personal-survival tools have they!
Foodstuffs dried, canned, vaccuum-sealed, dehydrated, concentrated, irradiated, flash-pasteurized, and/or ready-to-eat.
Farm tools, implements, and “Y2K seeds,” so you can grow your own food without depending on the patent-protected, non-perennial products of the big seed companies (which, of course, will go away with the rest of corporate society).
Generators, co-generators, solar panels, battery rechargers.
First-aid kits and more elaborate medical supplies, so you can fill your kids’ cavities after all the dentists get killed in the urban riots.
Radios and shortwave transceivers that run on batteries, gasoline, or wind-up springs.
And, of course, plenty of the gold and silver coins and ingots that’re bound to become the New Currency once the global monetary system evaporates.
In a way, all this leaves me hopeful.
You see, it all means many Americans aren’t really buying the Y2K Scare as the End of the World As We Know It. Instead, they’re taking it like we take so many things–as an opportunity to do our part to keep capitalism going.
The hundreds of Y2K Scare outfitters out there are preaching disaster, but they’re practicing the all-American religion of entrepreneurialism.
And so am I. When January rolls around, and our infrastructure (as predicted by most experts who aren’t selling survival gear) doesn’t crumble, I hope to have a line of cookbooks on the market, teaching folks how to make tasty near-gourmet meals out of their three-years’ supplies of freeze-dried apricots, beef jerky, and army-surplus crackers.
TOMORROW: Yet another retro-futuristic bar, plus the possible end of a private art-garden.
ELSEWHERE: Ghosts of end-of-the-world prophecies past… And what if everything had a Y2K bug, not just computers?… “In the chaos following the collapse of Western civilization, your first objectives will be to procure food, clean water, shelter, and fresh breath…”
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.
AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.
(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)
Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:
The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.
TOMORROW: We play with our food again.
ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…
IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.
Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.
For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)
This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.
Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.
The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.
That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:
Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.
But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.
(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)
TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?
ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…
ANOTHER BREAK from the full-length webcol, for the old-time Misc. schtick of little stuff from all over.
AD VERBS: Remember when we all used to scoff at ’60s pop hits being turned into dumb commercials? Now there’s ’80s pop hits given the same treatment.
Johnson & Johnson, f’rinstance, is selling contact lenses with a recent dance remix of the Dream Academy’s “Life In a Northern Town,” a Britpop tune originally about survival amid the economic doldrums in a forlorn industrial corner of Thatcher’s England. Not necessarily the most appropriate tuneage for aggressive brand-name marketing or for a product that promises ease and security. Speaking of relief…
TAKING THE CURE: In 1976, Canadian raconteur Don Herron (best known stateside as Hee Haw radio announcer Charlie Fahrquarson) called Gerald Ford’s swine-flu vaccine crusade “the cure for which there is no known disease.” In 1989, I heard a doctor on TV predict the 21st century would be all about hooking everybody on genetically-engineered prescriptions to treat conditions not yet known to exist.
Now, Michelle Cottle in the New Republic reoprts on the newest psychological/medical fad, “social phobia” (what used to be called chronic shyness, before drug companies said they had a treatment for it):
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura…. “Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura….
“Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE DAY: Ready for yet another upscale “urban lifestyle” journal? The publishers of Metropolitan Living sure hope so. It’s slick, it’s colorful, it’s bright and breezy. And, of course, it has acres of restaurant reviews (though, unlike certain no-longer-published mags of its ilk, it doesn’t charge restaurants money to get reviewed.) And, like slick monthlies in some other towns, it’s got articles about topics other than the proper spending of consumer wealth–what a concept! (Free from plastic boxes all over town, or from 400 Mercer St., #408,Seattle 98109.) Elsewhere in magland…
THE SO-CALLED ‘REAL AMERICA’ has finally gotten to see the endlessly hyped Talk magazine, and it’s not half as stupid as its own publicity makes it out to be. There’s long articles, many of which are about big real-life concerns rather than just about The Least Interesting People In The World (a.k.a. “celebrities”). And it was an encouraging surprise to see, in a mag so full of fashion ads, a long expose of misery and survival in a Mexican sweatshop town (though none of the lo-wage factories in it were identified as garment plants). Just one major beef: It was released to stores in NY/LA/DC on Aug. 3, but not to anyplace else until Aug. 10. Hey, editrix Tina Brown: That old capital/provinces cultural-dichotomy concept is SO passe. And a minor beef: It’s co-owned by Disney thru its Miramax Films subsidiary. When Miramax was independent, it claimed to be about film-as-art, not Hollywood hype. While Talk’s content isn’t as hype-centric as initially feared, its promotional campaign certainly is.
PASSAGE OF THE DAY (from the film version of The Road to Wellville: “If I hear one more word of German, I’m going to take this stick and shove it up your alimentary canal!”
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: How prejudiced are you? No, not “those people” in bad-old Mainstream America, YOU!
ELSEWHERE: A slew of books tells Brits how Americans manage, more or less, to mix the “pluribus” with the “unum”…
YESTERDAY, I told of my not-all-that-painful-really adventures in acquiring a DSL line.
I knew in advance I’d be spending a lot of time playing with my new-and-way-improved connection, so I wrote or at least outlined several days’ worth of these columns before the scheduled installation day. What I didn’t know was how super-fast, always-on access would affect darn near every computer-based thing I do.
I’ve always resisted putting games on my hard drive, so to avoid the temptation to waste away my sittin’-at-the-screen time on diversions that won’t get any writing done or improve this site. Netting was different, because of its then-built-in limitations.
I couldn’t get on without spending at least a minute waiting for the modem to finish its groaning and wheezing. I couldn’t stay on without running the risk of missing a quasi-important phone call. I couldn’t download anything substantial without tying up the connection for 5 to 10 minutes per meg. I couldn’t move between Websites or pages without moments or minutes of load time; I kept a newspaper or magazine handy so I could keep my mind alert during these frequent delays.
But now, as you’ve guessed, that’s all different.
My browser can be on all day and all of the night. Emails load fast enough that I could go on every known mailing list, from “gas-pump-collectors-l” to “britney-spears-l.” Chat rooms, MOOs, MUDs, instant messaging, all called out for my attention.
I could spend moments-that-become-hours with the streaming-video hilarities at Honkworm International (Shockwave animations, some of which involve fish who sit at a bar, telling tall tales and drinking like, well, you know) and Trailervision (Hardware Wars-style parody movie previews).
Or, if in a more serious indie-film mood, I could spend many leisurely times with the DIY shorts at Atom Films or D.film.
I also could view all the hotnastywow movie files I wanted (only to very quickly find I didn’t really want most of them, which go beyond hardcore in inviting self-defined “heterosexual” male viewers to gaze in awe at other men’s parts in ultra-extreme close-up).
I could grab all the (legal and not-quite-legal) MP3 sound files I wanted, only to find it tuff to find any I wanted that didn’t turn out to be broken links. (MP3 search sites have a long ways to go before they’ll be even halfway useful.)
And I could follow Web link after Web link until I got totally and thoroughly lost–then start all over with a portal or Weblog site, leading me who-knows-where.
I could pretend to be a tall, financially-secure vegan in a singles-talk room. I could view each and every page found in a search for “‘clark’ ‘humphrey’ -‘gable’ -‘bogart'”.
I could, and still can, do all of these things and more. But I won’t do them all, at least not all immediately or all the time.
After all, I got this line so I could do more efficient research for this site and for my books. It’d go against the whole point of it if I had so much obsessive-compulsive fun that I never got around to workin’.
So fret not, MISC.-fans. The site will not only remain a daily, it’ll get better in the weeks to come, with select new features and new fun links. (It still won’t be a real Weblog ‘cuz it’ll still emphasize original content more than links to other folks’ stuff.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: Are material comforts, such as home-office DSL lines, the antithesis of what makes for real art?
ELSEWHERE: That other hi-speed Net connection, the cable modem, could be crippled by cable companies using tech-tricks to hobble access to sites the cable companies don’t approve of (or don’t have a financial stake in)… More bashing of the first Woodstock, by a relative of one of its organizers… The so-erudite-it-makes-you-squirm J.K. Galbraith calls the deregulated global economy a farce of crony capitalism…A hilar-ee-ous putdown of “Angry White Rappers…”
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT all that could be said and done about the early-’90s Seattle music scene had been said and done, here come more exploiters.
At 2 p.m. today, a crew from New Line Cinema will go to the Seattle Center Fountain outside KeyArena to, as a flyer soliciting extras says, “re-create Kurt Cobain’s memorial vigil for a new feature film.”
The movie, tentatively titled A Leonard Cohen Afterworld (after a line in Cobain’s song “Pennyroyal Tea”), is the first fiction feature directed by Todd Philips (who made the documentaries Frat House and Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies).
The script is by Scott Rosenberg, who was involved in the “hip”-violence travesty Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, and apparently involves a pair of troubled teens who have various misadventures while on the road to Seattle for the Cobain memorial.
Some movie-rumor websites claim it might also include “speculations” on what may or may not have happened among Cobain and his inner circle during the rocker’s last days–a plot-concept which should immediately make all of you collectively go “Ick!” or at least “Potential Ick!”
ON A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NOTE, and as I’ve hinted at in prior installments, I’ve secured the rights to my 1995 book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back from the original publisher. I’ve also arranged financing for an updated second edition, which, if all goes right, should be available from this site and in stores in October, four years after the first edition.
While I never got rich off the old book, I did become known as a Seattle-music-scene expert, at least to European magazine interviewers. Since the Dutch magazine that talked to me over a year ago, I’ve since talked to a Swiss magazine and now the Italian mag Jam.
Here’s some of what I told that publication’s writer:
A: Things changed. There’s clubs to play at now. And experienced producers and promoters and studios and indie labels. The reason there didn’t turn out to be a “Next Seattle” (the next town for the music industry to scoop up promising acts from) was because Seattle had been more than just a source of talent. It was a nearly self-sufficient infrastructure for making and promoting music.
And that’s what’s largely survived the music industry’s retreat.
A: A lot of people here wanted to succeed but only on their own terms. They wanted to be known as artists and/or entertainers, not as media celebrities or as fodder for MTV. The last thing some of them wanted was for their messages of anger and angst to be re-interpreted as something hot and commercial.
A: A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that economic stagnation would be permanent, that young people had no real future.
Today, there’s lots of money flying about, much of it held by college-educated white young adults working at software and Internet companies. The young successors to yesterday’s “going nowhere generation” are now (at least some of them) among the most privileged young people America has ever produced. This new audience has influenced the nightlife scene greatly. The dance club ARO.Space and the new Cyclops restaurant/bar, to name only the most obvious examples, are shrines to the new monied youth.
But for those without high paying cyber-careers, wages have stagnated and the cost of living has risen (especially housing, which has become ridiculously expensive with the cyber-monied people willing to pay just about anything). It’s harder to be a self-employed artistic-type person (or an artistic-type person with an undemanding day job) here; even as the social pressure rises (even in “alternative” circles) to be upbeat and positive and success-minded at all times.
A: What was initially intended by most of its musicians to be a reaction against music-industry fads became promoted by the industry and the media as just another music-industry fad. In the short term, that had the effect a conspiracy theorist might imagine: Audiences tired of the hype and, around 1996-97, turned away.
MONDAY: More of this.
ELSEWHERE: Jessica Hopper, editor of the Chicago zine Hit It or Quit It (linked here via the indie-rock portal site Insound), has a quaint glossary of indie-scene terminology. Example: “Nature Melt: Hippies dancing or gathering en masse. A: ‘We had to leave Lilith Fair early, the nature melt was out of control.'”
A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.
Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.
But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.
(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)
Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.
And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.
But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.
As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.
As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.
(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)
This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.
Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.
Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.
Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.
Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).
So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.
(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)
TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?
ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”
AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.
It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).
These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.
More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).
When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.
Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.
The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.
If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.
That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.
Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.
These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.
SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.
A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.
TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!
DISCIPLINE, I heartily believe, is one of the most important ingredients in any artwork. Especially in any artwork based on one of the “popular” (or formerly-popular) art forms. As any decent jazz teacher will tell you, you must know the rules before you can properly break them.
Herewith, some important disciplinary elements of time and space for the true pop-culture scholar.
0.2 seconds (five frames of film; determined by animation legend Tex Avery to be the minimum time for the human eye to “read” a motion gag such as a falling anvil).
0:58 (actual content length of a 60-second TV commercial, dating back to when most spots were edited and distributed on film, so local stations could splice spots onto one reel without worrying about the two-second differential between a frame of film and its corresponding soundtrack segment).
1:00 (standard length of a TV commercial break in the ’50s).
2:10 (average minimum length of a TV commercial break these days).
3:30 (more-or-less maximum length of a Top 40 single in the ’50s and ’60s, so radio stations could expect to fit 1:30 of commercials and DJ patter into a 5:00 segment).
4 minutes (limit of a 78 rpm record).
6 minutes (the final standard length of a Warner Bros. cartoon; 540 feet of film).
7 minutes (maximum length of a side of a 45 rpm record, without using analog sound compression).
10 minutes (standard length of an act in a vaudeville revue; later the maximum length of a one-reel film comedy or newsreel).
16-20 minutes (average and maximum lengths of a two-reel film comedy).
24 minutes (length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, before they started cramming more ads into prime-time; nowadays a sitcom can be as short as 19.5 minutes).
30.5 minutes (maximum length of a side of an LP record when using analog sound compression).
72 minutes (maximum length of a standard audio CD).
80 minutes (considered the minimal length of a commercial studio feature film; the standard length of most U.S. animated features).
300-400 words (average length of a book page).
750 words (standard length of a newspaper op-ed column).
800 words (standard length of an old New Yorker “casual” humor story.)
1,000-1,400 words (typical length range of a magazine page).
5,000 words (standard length of an old Saturday Evening Post short story).
90,000 words (maximum length of a mass-market-paperback novel in the ’50s, when publishers were still trying to stick to a 25-cent price).
6 episodes (minimum duration of a BBC sitcom season).
13 episodes (standard duration of a ’30s movie serial).
39 episodes (original duration of a TV season on the U.S. big-three networks, derived from the days of live radio; now whittled down to as few as 20 and as many as 30).
65 episodes (standard duration of the first season of a weekday animated series; the episodes may be in production over two years before premiering).
100 episodes (generally considered the minimal duration of a TV series to succeed in syndicated reruns; also the typical duration of a Mexican telenovela).
Monday: More on the end of Another World.
LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.
Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.
Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.
Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.
It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.
Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.
The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.
But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.
“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”
She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”
That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.
It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.
It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.
I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.
Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.
Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
