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NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
ELSEWHERE:
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
SINCE IT’S THE LAST ‘TRIPLE-DOUBLE’ DAY of the century (11/22/99–get it?), I’ve got just as good an excuse as any of the current barrage of century-in-review pundits to go off and pontificate.
But instead of reviewing all the supposedly most important movies, CDs, public speeches, world leaders, or stadium-organ songs of the past 100 years, let’s skip the present century altogether and instead look at the 21st century as somebody imagined it in the 19th.
Edward Bellamy (1850-96) wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Many critics consider it the first major utopian novel written in the U.S.
Like most of the perfect-future tales that have followed, Bellamy’s is less of a story than a tract. The plot, such as it is, is pretty much over by page 50–a wealthy, “refined” young man of 1887 Boston, who’s come to loathe most of railroad-age industrial society, awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000.
From then on, just about all that happens is that our 19th-century sleepyhead looks around the future Beantown, while the kindly doctor who’d awakened him (and the doc’s smashingly-beautiful daughter) simply tell him everything about how wonderful everything has become. (The doctor has a wife, but we see or hear almost nothing of her.)
There are no conflict points in the story, but that’s part of the point.
Bellamy’s ideal future is one of those in which most anything that could result in trauma, let alone drama, has been systematically removed from the social condition.
Indeed, in one chapter the awakened narrator reads from a late-20th-century novel (you millennium-sticklers out there will be relieved to hear Bellamy refers to 2000 as part of the 20th century). Without detailing this other story’s plot or characters, the narrator tells us how weird it was for him to read…
“…a romance from which shall be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer… a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”
As you might’ve guessed, Bellamy’s is one of those utopias where nobody goes hungry but nobody’s obscenely wealthy. That’s ’cause everybody works for one employer (a strict-yet-benevolent government “Industrial Army”) for the same wage. (Physical labor and other unpopular jobs are made to be as attractive as cushy office posts, by offering shorter hours or unspecified prestige perks)
It was a popular fantasy at the time it was written. Many of Bellamy’s readers had become baffled by the rapidly-changing industrial scene and its massive social consequences–which by 1888 had already included urbanization, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, monopolies and cartels running key industries, the mass immigration of low-paid laborers from such places as Germany and China, the lonely-guy culture of single-male immigrant workers (hookers, saloons, gambling), tenement housing, coal-smoke pollution, nationally advertised brand-name products, and the first large-scale labor strikes.
To those dismayed by the 1880s present, an end-O-history future, a stable and prosaic future with no conflicts or worries, would seem mighty desirable.
TOMORROW: More on why Bellamy’s scheme wouldn’t work, why he and his readers thought it might, and lessons for muddling through the real century-switch.
YESTERDAY, we began to look into potential alternate routes to the philosophical-aesthetic cul de sac that postmodernism has become, and to instead seek a more pro-active way to see the future.
Of course, some highly-paid pundits are already doing something sorta like that.
But the likes of George Gilder are really in the business of stooging for the elites, telling people with money and power that they can count on having even more money and power in the 2000s.
Gilder’s futurism purports to predict a “revolution,” but merely a “revolution in business” which would leave the cleverest and most ambitious corporate go-getters in charge of a world totally and unalterably under the firm control of Global Business.
They don’t imagine how emerging Net-communications, digital-DIY media, and other empowerment tools could subvert big business’s privileges of scale and influence. Either that, or they don’t want to imagine it.
No, I think there is a real new era coming–if we work at it. I don’t have a splashy book-title name for it yet, but I’m working on it.
Wired’s “digital age” hype doesn’t quite describe it; nor does the “chaos culture” notion promoted by rave-dance folks a few years ago.
(The right-wing-think-tank people behind Wired are too trapped in their own privileged status to support a real revolution; the rave people are seeing only the most hedonistic aspects of the revolution.)
Without wanting too much to sound like a certain late multimillionaire who sang about a future without possessions, I’ll ask you to imagine.
Imagine a world in which motion pictures are made everywhere, not just in one city in the whole world.
Imagine a world that had actors but not movie stars. Imagine no more gatekeepers.
Imagine a society without a right-wing hierarchy of privilege or a left-wing hierarchy of righteousness. A world in which women are equal to men, but in which men are also equal to women.
A world without bestseller lists, Billboard charts, or box-office rankings. A world of artists, not celebrities.
A world with no master race, no master gender, no master nationality, no master religion, no master economic system, and even no master operating system.
(This is all still largely a reactive, PoMo vision, I know. But future installments will be more proactive, I promise.)
The techno-corporate futurism of Gilder, Wired, et al. is only a feeble half-step in this direction. The real revolution wouldn’t be a revolution for corporations, but against them. Not new opportunities for the Viacoms and GMs, but the means toward their overthrow.
And yes, it is a revolution. But like any real revolution, some people will find it, well, revolting.
But that’s a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: We escape the topic of Century 21 for a while, to look at the history of escapism.
YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.
In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.
But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.
The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)
Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.
The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.
IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.
You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.
Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.
It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this, plus the lost art of seductive architecture.
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried in a Macworld story is the factoid that commercial printers these days are making fewer huge press runs, instead churning out “a greater number of small- and medium-volume projects than ever before.” Cultural decentralization continues…. Buy a magazine, help a struggling neighborhood institution….
ELSEWHERE: The Virtual Talking Mom (found by Bifurcated Rivets) is ready to give you a virtual scolding any time of the day or night…. The last days of the original Prodigy, inventor of the Banner Ad and the censored chatroom…. Musings on the real nature of creativity….
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…”
Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be
TV essay, 5/12/99
The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.
The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.
As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.
When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.
The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.
The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.
Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).
It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.
The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).
I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).
Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.
Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.
Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.
This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40Â Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.
To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).
Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.
MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:
Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.
Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.
Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”
How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…
TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…
GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.
History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.
In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.
Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.
There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.
Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)
MISC. is the column asking the musical question: Would you even want to live in the same building with the maniacally-grinning GQ models depicted in all those condo ads?
UPDATE #1: Tosco, which runs gas stations under the BP brand in Washington, sez it’ll keep that name up for the time being, even though BP’s own stations in other regions will switch when BP takes over the Amoco brand. (Confused? Good.)…
UPDATE #2: QFC, having absorbed Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, is now taking over another of the top Seattle indie supermarkets, the gargantuan and lavish Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. Art’s was originally a multi-store strip mall containing both an Art’s supermarket (the last of what had been a five-store chain) and a Marketime drug-variety store. Fred Meyer bought Marketime in the ’60s, then unloaded its half of the Holman Road complex to Art’s (which kept many of the Marketime merchandise departments, making it what the French call a “hypermarket”). Now that Fred Meyer’s already bought QFC last year, it’s got the whole complex back. (Still confused? Good.)
HELD IN CHECK: Seafirst now has “Celebrate Diversity” checks, in a sort-of rainbow design–only this “diverse” colorscape is all mellow and pale. A lot like Seattle in general….
TOO CLOTHES FOR COMFORT: After a couple of weeks, I think the new Nordstrom store looks a LOT like the Forum Shops mall at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a place that doesn’t even pretend to be sublime or understated. It was made clear from the start that nothing recognizable from Frederick’s, except for the exterior facade and the thick supporting posts, would be preserved. (Even the elevator and escalator shafts were moved.) But I don’t think many expected the new store’s total in-your-face experience of New Money, all proud and boastful and coldly showoffy yet trying conspicuously to be proper. If Bloomie’s or Saks had installed such a store, everybody’d complain how indiscreetly un-Seattle it was.
MILLENNIUM BUGGY: The Year 2000 Computer Problem hysteria hasn’t spawned a new survivalist cult, as some commentators and periodicals have claimed; but it has breathed new life into existing cults. The “head for the hills with canned goods and guns and gold” folks, having missed out (so far) on predicted apocalypses (apocali?) involving nukes, race riots, U.N. “black helicopters,” oil shortages, etc. etc., now get to invoke a simple yet oft-misunderstood software-upgrade failure as their new premise to solicit converts and customers–a premise conveniently scheduled on a date steeped in religious mysteries and referenced by prophets from Nostradamus to Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Criswell.
Many of the “Y2K” doomsday scenarios promoted by the survivalists read less like knowledgeable tech writing and more like excuses to shoehorn in pre-existing survivalist dogma. Like the parts about inner cities turning into instant war zones while the rural inland west remains serene and posse-protected. Not only does this line ignore that over half the country now lives in suburbs, it ignores that major metro areas are usually the first to get upgraded civic electronics, while the countryside’s still stuck with some of the most antiquated phone and power-delivery systems–the ones most likely to not get fixed so their databases understand years that don’t start with “19.”
What the alarmists get right is how nearly everything in the modern world (air-traffic control, oil refineries, long-distance lines, Social Security, medical equipment, stock markets) is intertwined in mainframe-computer networks, the real “world wide web.”
But the Y2K problem won’t crash everything at once. It just means companies and governments that let these unprofitable but necessary system upgrades slide now have to implement them at once.
At the least it’ll mean a hit on most everybody’s financial bottom lines for the next two years; draining cash-flows and spurring various degrees of layoffs. At worst, some of the various software/ hardware fixes around the world might not be ready (or adequately tested) in time, so some databases might have to be put off-line for a few weeks and some utility and industrial-control systems might have to be switched to planned backup mechanisms. In an absolute-worst plausibility, some fixes that were thought to work won’t, causing scattered system crashes. And some stand-alone industrial machines with pre-programmed computer chips inside might hiccup; but even most of those failures should be predictable and worked around.
So don’t give in to the fear-profiteers in the canned-food and gun industries. If you want to believe in a Biblical-style apocalypse, remember the verse about how mankind “knoweth not the day nor the hour.”
(More good readin’ about this topic is in Paul Kedrosky’s recent essay at Rewired.)
MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.
ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?
INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…
WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.
They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”
Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…
SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.
At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.
So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.
Online Extras
This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.
Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.
The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.
In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.
The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”
Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.
Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.
Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)
A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.
If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.
I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.
One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”
But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”
Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.
There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.
Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.
Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.
The Info Age, Our Way:
The Road Ahead Less Traveled
Eessay for The Stranger, 5/1/96
You’ve heard lots of hype about the Information Superhighway, the Infobahn, a bright promising tomorrow coming your way out of a little wire running into your home.You may think the hype sucks.
You’re right to be skeptical. The digital utopia promised more or less in unison by the phone companies, the cable TV companies, the online services, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, Wired magazine, and Bill Gates (all of whom get their ideas from the same handful of pro-business think tanks) is a future not appreciably better than our present, and potentially a lot costlier. While claiming to promote “empowerment,” it would merely move us from a society run by a financial elite to one run by a technological elite.
But theirs is not the only possible scenario. The Digital Age can be better, if we can wrest control of it away from the people doing the promising.
THEIR FUTURE
As late as 1994-95, the corporate techno-futurists were boasting of a future in which everyone (or at least everyone who mattered) would live through computer/video screens connected by fiber-optic lines to proprietary online networks. The owners of these online services would become America’s most powerful institutions, controlling everything from entertainment to banking and even politics.
In this future, you could look forward to choosing your morning news packaged in assorted combinations of verbal and visual output, filtered to emphasize your favorite subject areas. You could even choose your news interpreted from a variety of ideological perspectives, all the way from the far right to the near right.
Then, after you’ve downloaded Rush Limbaugh’s or Pat Robertson’s latest commentary, you could instantly contact your elected representatives to demand their support of the Limbaugh/Robertson agenda.
From there, you could log onto a commercial online services to see the latest Treasury Bill yields or a video by your favorite major-label singer. You could enter a virtual-reality chat room, where you’d control a 3-D cartoon character exchanging pleasantries with other characters (all supervised by service employees, ensuring nobody says anything they oughtn’t).
But eventually you’d have to get to work. In this future, all the important work will be done by an upscale Knowledge Class, who will all live in big isolated houses in the country or outer suburbs (since the techno-futurists believe nobody, given the choice, would ever want to live in a city). Most of the Knowledge Class would operate from home workstations, in contact with the boss via video teleconferencing. The other 80 to 90 percent of the population would be freed from the daily grind thanks to corporate downsizing; they’d get to go into business for themselves, selling products or services to the upscale class, at wages competitive with Third World labor.
Come the evening, you wouldn’t need to leave home to be entertained. Just order the latest hit violence movie on Pay Per View, available whenever you are. Hungry? E-mail for grocery delivery from the digital mall; while you’re “there,” get that blouse for tomorrow’s video-conference meeting. The kids, meanwhile, are entertaining themselves with their masturbation robot dolls or vicariously exploding other kids in virtual-reality games.
This nonexistent world already looks incredibly passé. Initial market tests show little interest in high-price, low-selection pay-per-view systems. Meanwhile, the Internet’s near-instant popularity has throttled all but the biggest online services, and those such services that remain are rapidly trying to reposition themselves as Internet gateways.
So instead we’re getting the revised pipe dream of a corporate Internet, in which the wide-open online frontier would be tamed. Data transmission might be based on a decentralized Internet protocol or something like it, but a few dozen companies would still control most of the content and most of the transactions.
ANOTHER FUTURE, AND ITS PAST
But there’s another potential future. It’s a future without major record labels, big Hollywood studios, or broadcast networks; or at least one where they’d have less power. Instead of 50 or even 500 TV channels, Internet server computers would offer tens of thousands of text, video, and audio programs–some free, some pay-per, some by subscription. Virtually anyone with something to say or show could send it to virtually anyone else.
Thousands of subcultures would thrive, none interested in lowest common denominators. Uncensored chat, bulletin boards and e-mail could spark a revolution in active, highly personal, discourse.
This re-personalization of everyday life could lead to a whole re-scaling of American society: co-operatives, barter associations, community schooling, a Babel of new political movements, religious cults, sub-genres of art and literature, cuisines and craft movements, ethnic pride groups (and, yes, a few ethnic hate groups).
These creative, energized people would tire of staying home on the keyboard. They’d find ways and reasons to gather in the flesh: cafés, theaters, musical societies, youth soccer leagues, reading clubs, performance-art troupes, sewing circles. Many would eschew the sterility of the subdivision, the isolation of the exurb, in favor of real communities.
Work and commerce would be increasingly conducted on a person-to-person level, instead of being molded to fit the long-term strategies of giant organizations. Corporations would devolve into small, focused operations doing a few things well, joining forces by short-term contracts to complete individual projects.
The Internet’s most enthusiastic followers are the inspirational descendents of a subculture where “computer hacker” meant a highly individualistic programming ace, not a crook. They’re the people who started using university e-mail in the late ’70s, PC-based bulletin board systems in the early ’80s, the Internet in the late ’80s, and the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. As this group grew, it developed a communications aesthetic now known as “Netiquette,” an aesthetic favoring unfettered, ungated info-culture (expressed in Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s 1986 adage that “information wants to be free”).
Corporate futurists patronize these people as “early adopters of technology” whose wishes must now be abandoned so the Net can be “mainstreamed.” But the Internet doesn’t want to be “mainstreamed,” and neither do many of its users. They don’t want to be constrained by top-down ad agency, studio and network thinking–the cornerstone of American mass culture since the 1920s. They also want to talk to one another. Even on the commercial online services, whose only unique selling point is professionally-created “content,” e-mail and discussion-group messages between users account for an estimated two-thirds of time spent online.
MY LIFE AS AN EARLY ADOPTER
I’ve had the privilege to see this culture develop. I was on local bulletin board systems as early as 1983, and was co-sysop of a board from 1984-88. I wrote a hypertext novel in 1988. I watched as university e-mail systems evolved and merged with a military research network to become the Internet. I saw bulletin board systems like Robert Dinse’s Eskimo North develop the threaded message-topic systems later adapted into Internet newsgroups. Eskimo North went on to add Internet e-mail, then add Internet newsgroups with once-a-day feeds of new material, then become a professional Internet service provider with a full-time Net connection. Some BBSs fell by the wayside as their operators moved to other pursuits; others started up to take their place. New companies started up as Internet service providers; it proved not to be a simple “turnkey” moneymaking operation, and many providers died off if they charged too much and/or couldn’t keep up with user demands for faster connections and fewer busy signals.
I’ve seen online services like Prodigy and CompuServe grow from novelties to semi-major powers, then saw them shrink in relative importance as the World Wide Web became the flavor of the year.
MORE BACKTRACKING
The Web is hard to describe tersely, and most mainstream journalists don’t try too hard. Basically, it’s an Internet-based system for transmitting documents of text, graphics, and/or other media formats, with clickable links within and between documents.
It was developed over the winter of 1989-90 at a Swiss particle-physics lab by programmer Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted a simple, unified system for accessing and cross-referencing research data, one that would work on all the lab’s computers. He used the concept of clickable hypertext links (conceived of by computer visionary Ted Nelson and implemented in the mid-’80s in programs like HyperCard and SuperCard) to interconnect texts, graphics, and other document types. Berners-Lee wrote a simple hypertext programming language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), that allowed some limited text formatting.
Berners-Lee expressly wanted to move the premises of communication from one-to-many to many-to-many. In his initial proposal to CERN management Berners-Lee wrote, “Everything we have seen so far (in the telecommunications field) is information distributed by server managers to clients everywhere. A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.”
The web initially spread to other research institutions, including the UW. In early 1993 Marc Andressen, a $6.75-an-hour student programmer at a U. of Illinois computer center, devised a program called Mosaic as a “graphical front end” to the Web on Unix terminals. That fall, Mosaic came out for Mac and Windows. The following spring, after Wired and others started to hype the web, Andressen got California venture capital to start Netscape Communications, releasing its first Web browsers in October 1994.
Faster than you could download an audio clip, the culture of telecommunications changed. The corporations didn’t notice at first, or didn’t admit it. They continued to talk about the umpteen channels of HBO action hits they’d love to sell us if we’d only give them unregulated-monopoly powers and wait 5-10 years for them to figure out which kind of new wiring systems to install.
The buzzword in places like Wired last year was how the spoils in the New Media race would go to the best-marketed (not necessarily the best) infotainment “brands.” This is the thinking that got us big media mergers and the so-called Telecommunications Reform Act.
But the Web’s astounding growth shows a different paradigm. People are hungry for unfiltered artistic work, for honest discourse and forthright opinions. The web provides a glimpse of such a culture, and it leaves people hungry for more.
THE ROAD TO BANDWIDTH
The content of a post-mass-media culture is here already, or will readily get here. The means to distribute quality audio, video, graphics, and formatted text on the Internet, one- and two-way, exist. But existing modems take forever to receive them. Right now, conventional phone-line modems (which translate data into analog audio signals and back) run no faster than 28.8 kilobits per second. Experts used to claim higher bandwidth would require all-new wiring to every home and business; and that phone and/or cable companies needed an “incentive” to lay this wiring by getting to monopolize the content sent thru it. That was the original justification for the pre-World Wide Web vision of an Information Superhighway of hit movies and home shopping. But the Net community hasn’t been clamoring for a hundred channels of Van Damme movies, but for high-speed transmission from anywhere to anywhere.
The only way now to get anything faster to your home is to plead with US West to sell you an ISDN line. ISDN is technologically and bureaucratically cumbersome, and costly–US West charges $60 a month for a basic package; it’s applied to the state to triple that rate. For that you get up to 128 kilobits per second, a rate barely fast enough to get tiny, lo-res video at Max Headroom frame speeds.
One potential ISDN rival is TCI’s scheme for cable modems. Most neighborhoods are already wired for cable TV, and those cable lines can potentially send digital data much faster than analog phone lines can. TCI said it would start testing its system in California by now, but has pushed that back to later this year. If it works out as currently planned, your cable system would also become your Internet provider (eliminating all the independent phone-based providers) and a subscription-based content provider too.
Meanwhile, Lucent Paradyne (one of the companies being spun off from AT&T) is pushing a scheme called ADSL to fit ultrafast data through regular phone lines refitted with new all-digital modems at each end, as long as you’re within 2-3 miles from your phone exchange office (good news for us in-towners, tuff luck to the exurbanites). It’s potentially cheaper than ISDN and offers far greater speeds (as much as 6,000 kilobits per second). US West and GTE are just starting ADSL test installations, both in other states. US West tentatively plans to eventually offer ADSL as part of its “Interprise” service package, also supplanting the role now provided by indie Internet providers.
There’s another drawback: Like the Hotel California, ADSL and cable modems are programmed to receive. ADSL only lets you transmit at the speed as ISDN; cable modem users might have to use a regular phone modem to send data out. At worst, this will mean a continued role for independent Internet service providers, as operators of high-speed uplink lines connected to hard drives where “publishers” of music, movies and digi-zines would make their works available.
A third scheme for cheap broadband could eliminate even that obstacle. Apple Computer’s asked the FCC to allocate a chunk of the airwaves for two-way wireless data. Potential uses for these frequencies include two-way digital radio units sending and getting data at up to 24,000 kilobits a second.
OTHER OBSTACLES
If bandwidth were the only obstacle toward my ideal networked nation, I’d have little to worry about. But there are other obstacles. One is the corporate-culture status quo. It’s invested a lot toward its vision of a global business cadre dictating the world’s entertainment, cuisine, behavior, politics, and even religion. It’ll maneuver and hustle to preserve the one-to-many communication model into the digital age. (Note TCI’s logo, depicting a satellite beaming its one-way wares to all the Earth.)
Another obstacle is the Net-censorship movement in this and other countries. The futility and unconstitutionality of Net censorship won’t stop politicians from trying to impose it. If we’re lucky, the battle over censorship could lead to a breakdown of relations between the religious right and the political right (the latter opposing it on the principle of unfettered trade). In time, I believe many people who care about religious beliefs will find their causes better served by the Internet’s wide-open exchange of ideas than by cowtowing to politicians who exploit religion to buy votes and promote authority.
CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIALS
I suspect so many people wanted to own Netscape stock not because of expected profits (they’re not likely to have any for some time) but because they wanted to own a piece of the Web, in a sense of being connected with that amorphous non-thing that’s starting to change the world and could mean the end of media as we know them.
There’ll still be daily papers and broadcast TV, just as there’s still radio. But the change that’s coming will be more profound than the change TV brought to radio. We’re talking information and art, not marketing and entertainment. We’re talking about what the DIY punk rockers were talking about: Cultural expressions people actively relate to, not just time-wasters.
It won’t be a utopia. Some censorship advocates have sincere reasons for fearing a wide-open Net. It now provides voices for unpopular ideas and unpopular sexualities. It’ll eventually provide voices for every conceivable point of view, including perhaps a million Limbaughs and Robertsons as well as a few thousand Jesse Jacksons. Without mass news media to impose a semi-official version of “the truth,” what’s real and what’s important could depend on who you choose to believe.
On a less political level, an open Net will lead to a lot of bad art and media (you think you’re tired of rave graphics and sword-and-sorcery imagery now?). It could collapse the economies of scale that make major motion pictures possible (look what happened to porn movies when shot-on-video took over).
And it could increase the factionalization of America, as the artifice of “mainstream society” withers to leave thousands of warring subcultures. As we’ve seen in Africa and the Balkans, there’s a side to “tribal consciousness” you don’t hear about in New Age fantasies. And what will “alternative” folks do when there’s no more mainstream to rebel against?
Yet it can also become Patti Smith’s “age when everybody creates.” Imagine the potentials. Then go fulfill some of them.
(The Seattle Community Network, a bulletin board and web site operated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, has started a “Market Place” group to bring independent Internet service providers together and to “protect the grass roots nature of the Internet.” To get involved contact Doug Tooley, P.O. Box 85084 Seattle, WA 98145, or e-mail dltooley@scn.org.)
SIDEBAR: FOR WHOM THE CHIMES TOLL
As I’ve said before, I’m no conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d ponder the following:
1) Microsoft enters into “strategic alliances” with NBC (a couple of high-profile Bill Gates-Tom Brokaw interviews, Leno plugging Windows 95, and a planned jointly-owned online news service to be called MSNBC). Brokaw even became the UW’s first out-of-town commencement speaker in years–not because the UW was the alma mater of Brokaw’s late predecessor Chet Huntley but because Gates reportedly asked him to come.
2) The Internet has gotten in the way of both companies’ plans. MS doesn’t own the Net or the software that runs it. Companies like Sun Microsystems claim with the right Net connection, many users could do all their computing on a $500 terminal device instead of a full PC, a setup that could render MS software obsolete.
3) NBC, meanwhile, sees TV viewership on a long-term decline, and (here’s where the theory starts) perceives a threat not just from online usage but from the Internet aesthetic, encouraging many-to-many communication and close community/ subculture ties instead of submission to Big Media.
4) MS first tried to extend its rule of software into the online biz with the Microsoft Network. But paid-access services like MSN are getting swamped as more and more users prefer the Internet, where no head office decides what you’ll get to see. The surviving online services are trying to reposition themselves as Internet access points. But the MSNBC service is planned to reinforce MSN’s position as a provider of exclusive “professional” content.
5) The biggest threat to the Internet as a free, uncentralized medium is the “Communications Decency Act,” championed by retiring Sen. James Exon. Passed as an amendment to a bill to let broadcasters and phone companies consolidate ever-larger empires, the act (if upheld in court) would stick it hard to any Internet server, service provider or content producer who uploads anything a Utah prosecutor might declare “indecent.” It thus threatens everything online except the precensored content of online services. Exon’s original inspiration? An exaggerated, sensationalized “cyberporn” segment on (yep!)Â Dateline NBC.
The theory breaks down after this point. Gates has issued statements opposing Net censorship; MS and MSN are among the plaintiffs in the court case trying to overturn the Communications Decency Act. And NBC, particularly the Brokaw show, has lately gone out of its way to praise Web-based enterprises including Netscape.
9/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?
TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,
A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …
Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?
CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.
APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.
STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.
ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”
PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.
MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.
IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)
STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.
MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.
ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.
A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.
TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)
MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.
DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?
RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.
`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).
He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.
SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.
MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.
FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY
What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.
Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.
The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.
Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.
PASSAGE
Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”
WORD-O-MONTH
“Crenellated”
