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IT’S SO NICE TO KNOW that I’m not the seemingly only person who’s tired of Internet-stock inflation.
Indeed, there seems to be a game going on among amateur and semipro market observers. They’re waiting for the dot-com stock bubble to pop. Some have been waiting for months. So have I.
It’s not that I particularly want those young families with mutual funds to lose their kids’ college money; or for those overworked young workers at venture-capital-dependent Net companies to lose their jobs.
But it would be nice if some of the money-lust mania got out of the game.
It hurts the economic fabric, all that inpouring of wealth into the virtual casino that is tech speculation.
And it hurts the social fabric, all that reverse distribution of wealth into the already-wealthy classes. Behind the media-hype over garage entrepreneurs turning into instant IPO-zillionaires, the fact remains that just about all the massive new wealth North America’s created in the past couple of decades has flowed to the richest 20 percent or so of the populace.
Where the great American middle-class dream once stood (and yes, I know I used to scoff at that dream while it was alive, but that’s beside the point), now there’s a new caste system gelling, like that old Jell-O 1-2-3 dessert mix: The Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets sitting rich and creamily on top; the lower-upper and upper-middle-class professionals and the dot-com mogul wannabes in a semi-fluid layer beneath the top; and all the rest of us Kmart shoppers gelatinously stuck as a mass of goo at the bottom.
Net-stock mania didn’t cause this by any means. It just symbolizes it.
By the end of last year, there were two main stock markets–not NYSE and NASDAQ per se, but the speculation-bloated tech stocks and the sluggish everything else. But as January began, the tech issues began to slide and stumble like a beginning skier, while “flight to quality” investors propped up traditional industrial stocks and bond issues.
But by mid-month, the sector had already gained back its declines and seemed to be a-roarin’ again; thanks in part to the AOL/Time Warner consolidation mania and rumors of a forced Microsoft breakup.
So maybe the tech-stock bubble might not pop.
Maybe it’ll just gently deflate instead.
Mind you, I still think the Internet is, and will continue to be, changing darn near everything humans do; from product-supply chains to underground-art movements. And I realize these new ventures are risky. And I hope the folks investing in them understand the risks. And I also hope they understand even the “winners” in the Net-biz universe may take longer than “Internet time” to show real profits. (Heck, in old-fashioned media a big new venture like a splashy national magazine isn’t expected to turn a profit for three to five years.)
It’s just that this transitoriness is the way things are now. Nothing to get that excited about; nothing to risk one’s life savings on. Unless you really want to.
MEANWHILE: Only an ego-big-as-all-outdoors such as Bill Gates would manufacture an excuse to kick himself upstairs (into a position of just as much big-picture authority, just fewer day-to-day duties)–the excuse being he needs to oversee stratagems to make Windows even more obligatory; i.e., even more of what the Justice Dept. says it’s too much of already…. And here’s a Microsoft permatemp (an old college pal of mine, in fact) who worked three years of up to 90-hour weeks and still didn’t get to be a “regular employee.”
TOMORROW: Looking at real-life film locations.
ELSEWHERE:
IN THE WEEKS SINCE Judge Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft’s a monopoly, a lot of blather of varying degrees of insight and coherence has been written about what will and/or should happen next.
Microsoft itself, and the people who are paid to like Microsoft, insist the company should be left as-is, with the “freedom to innovate” (which is apparently something on the order of the right to do what you’re not doing now, but still want the option to do in the future).
Others want the Feds to create a bifurcated or trifurcated MS. They offer up various schemes for splitting the empire. Some schemes would leave one “Baby Bill” in charge of the Windows OS; others would have two or three companies that would sell their own versions.
And, natch, the “digerati” pundits in Silicon Valley couldn’t stop gleefully anticipating a future in which the pesky northern threat to total California control of everything “E” would be finished once and for all.
Meanwhile, back up here in my neck-O-the-woods, things have been, to say the least, “interesting.”
Local daily papers that seldom find a bad word for anything Gates-related have willingly run (out-of-town, syndicated) commentaries suggesting that Redmond’s Masters of the Cyber-Universe deserve all the comeuppance they’re gonna get.
MS cult members are even more true-believer than ever. They’re being taught to treat the federal and state antitrust cases as heathen attacks that only prove the total righteousness of the MS cause–doing everything one can for Bill (and for one’s own stock options).
Some of those Seattleites closest to MS are privately anticipating the excitement and drama a drawn-out divestiture dispute would bring; while publicly expressing concern about the future value of all the MS stock they and their pals hold.
In the fancy-schmancy restaurants and hoity-toity shops dependent upon MS hotshots’ spending power, and in the local arts groups and charities increasingly dependent upon cash from MS and from MS people, nobody’s talking publicly. Privately, few seem directly worried. They apparently figure the MS wealth machine will just keep on funnelling cash from the world into Western Washington, even if the machine’s eventually re-engineered into multiple smaller components.
Seattle, for better or worse, will never go back to its pre-MS status as a quiet, industrious town of aerospace engineers, sportswear vendors, and import/export lawyers. If there are Baby Bills, they’ll all likely stay based here. Indeed, if certain stock analysts are correct, the sum of the parts could come to be worth more than the whole. That means still more office and condo construction in town, more office and subdivision construction in the burbs.
These Baby Bills could be less monolithically institutional than today’s MS; more attuded to the rugged-bad-boy uber-capitalistic Attitude-with-a-capital-A seen in the rest of the software biz (including the companies founded here by MS refugees). Results: Even more monster SUVs crowding our roads. Even more silly “cuisine” restaurants. Even less affordable housing.
The computer world would face more profound changes–depending on how any breakup or set of restrictions on MS’s practices emerges. In one of the more radical scenarios, the Windows “standard” would dissolve as different Baby Bills offer different successors to the OS, each with its own add-on features. Application-software makers wouldn’t worry about getting run out of business by MS, but they would have to worry about making their stuff work on different post-Windows systems. (Of course, if they do that, then they’ll have code that’s probably also more easily portable to MacOS, Linux, etc.)
But if the video-game industry can still support between three and five platforms, then so can the “productivity” software industry.
TOMORROW: More on MS’s S/M.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper said he’ll retire in March, following public hue and cry over cop violence against peaceful WTO protesters last week. Already, the conspiracy theorists are wondering aloud whether the street cops had deliberately gone abusive last Wednesday night as an opportunity to force out Stamper. (The chief had taken pains in the past to forge a liberal, gay-friendly, community-friendly image. This stance caused many rank-‘n’-file cops to complain loudly about Stamper on hate-talk radio.) Since I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself, I have trouble believing this notion, but feel I should report it nonetheless.
ST. PETER TO GENE RAYBURN: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have prepared your (blank).”
YESTERDAY, we reported about Kentucky developers’ plans to build a 100-acre “Great Northwest” theme park south of Tacoma. They claim it will “highlight the ‘rugged outdoors’ elements of the Northwest, as well as its history.”
Today, we continue our imagined trek through what we think an NW-themed tourist attraction ought to be.
Having already witnessed Seasonal-affective-disorderland, Clearcutland, and Sprawlland, you move on (very, very slowly) in your SUV-replica tram car on the Ex-Country Road Traffic Jam Ride, on your way to your next destination–
The grownups, meanwhile, will be corralled into a cavernous meeting room to hear the Animatronic Bill robot (surrounded, as always, by a dozen animatronic yes-men) either (1) praise his legacy of innovation, or (2) map strategies for “embracing” other companies’ ideas and running said companies out of business.
A short corridor leads into the next meeting room, also known as–
The victorious upscale couple invites everyone in the audience to come celebrate this important victory for the city’s future, and leads everyone off toward–
In the corner of your eye, you spot a pair of nose-ringed beverage servers walking down a hidden passageway. You follow them down what seem like 10 flights’ worth of stairs to–
You can also see people you’ve run into earlier today. Previously, they were ride operators, tour ushers, and snack-counter servers. Now, they’re dressed in art smocks, Beatnik-chick black sweaters, ballet tights, leather G-strings, BSA-logo biker jackets, or drag gowns. They invite you to share their Triscuit-based hors d’oeuvres and wine-in-a-box, while they explain to you how everything in Boholand used to completely suck, but now it all completely sucks in totally different ways.
As your eyes adjust to the dim lights, you can see signs posted around the black-painted room. The signs announce that various corners have been condemned for an expanded Condoland. Eventually, you also see a sign that promises “Only Way Out.” It turns out to be a short cut back to Seasonal-affective-disorderland.
It’s not that you can’t leave the park, but that you’re not supposed to ever want to.
TOMORROW: Imagining life after Microsoft.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.
MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.
CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…
THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.
On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.
On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.
Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.
(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)
In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.
But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.
Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.
Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.
But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)
Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
The Microsoft File
Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98
The Microsoft File:
The Secret Case Against Bill Gates
by Wendy Goldman Rohm
(Times Books/Random House) $25
Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop
by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett
(Simon & Schuster) $13.95
If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.
Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).
But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.
That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).
Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.
Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.
Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”
Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.
Gates of Hell?
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/18/98
Barbarians Led By Bill Gates
by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller
Henry Holt ($23)
Most reviews of this book talk about how co-author Jennifer Edstrom’s mom is Microsoft’s long-serving PR boss, and how this less-than-flattering portrait of the software giant must be hurting familial relations. A better focus would be on its other co-author, ex-MS programmer Marlin Eller. Barbarians can be seen as the literary equivalent of modern-day Microsoft software. It’s fairly comprehensible, and more or less gets the job done; but it’s clunky in places, with extra features abruptly tacked onto old “legacy code.”
The introduction notes this was originally to have been a straightforward memoir of Eller’s 12 years in the Redmond salt mines. The authors don’t say why the book didn’t end up that way, but the publisher clearly wanted something more applicable to recent news surrounding the company–antitrust suits, allegations of monopolistic and coercive practices. So, Eller and Edstrom re-coded the product (revised the book) to meet the new specs. The shipping version (final draft) emphasizes Eller’s toils on projects directly relevant to current MS controversies, such as early versions of Windows. Chapters about Eller’s years on projects far from MS’s operating-systems heart, like handwriting-recognition software and pay-per-view TV boxes, now emphasize object lessons about MS’s hyper-aggressive culture, its less-than-polite leadership (including Mr. Bill, depicted as an asocial geek on the world’s biggest power trip), and its drive to engulf and devour competitive technologies. Especially technologies which just might maybe nibble a bite or two away at MS’s precious OS monopoly.
MS haters will find their opinions conveniently confirmed. MS loyalists might at least grudgingly appreciate sympathetic portrayals of code warriors striving to finish impossible tasks, within inconceivable deadlines, under unliveable stress, for often-substantial material rewards. In other words, it’s designed to appeal to the largest potential user base.
Other Bill boox:
IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
IN STORE: The operators of Pin-Down Girl and Speedboat, those two nearly-adjacent Belltown hipster-clothing boutiques, have decided to no longer run two stores with such similar stuff so close. Some of Speedboat’s current stock will be consolidated at Pin-Down; the rest will be shipped to a new store the owners plan to open somewhere in California. They’re keeping the Speedboat space, and will turn it into a new business concept, as yet not officially announced.
SPIN AND MARDI: Sit & Spin’s little Mardi Gras Burlesque Revue was everything one could reasonably expect from a Carnival celebration among the infamous reservedness here in City Lite. It expressed a more sophisticated debauchery, and a more spirited approach to sexuality, than “alternative” subcultures usually endulge in.
Among the most pleasant surprises at the show was the presence of a large deaf contingent (serviced by a sign-language interpreter) at such a relatively non-saintly affair. Think about it: Blind people, in media representations, get to have the full range of human qualities (Ray Charles, Scent of a Woman, that Air Touch Cellular spokesdude), but deaf people are stereotyped as benchmarks of PC propriety (the closest thing to an exception was Ed Begley Jr.‘s womanizing character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). Even Edison and Beethoven are usually depicted as saintlier figures than they really were. Until TV closed-captioning and opera “supertitles” became widespread, the only culture thangs the hearing-impaired were welcomed into tended to be either evangelical church services or concerts by self-congratulatory folk singers. I’d always figured that putting up with such unrelenting sanctimonies could be a tougher thing to live with than deafness itself.
KIDSTAR RADIO, R.I.P.: Worthy attempt at a business model for commercial radio that didn’t depend on Arbitron’s ratings, instead using “membership” magazines and other promotional goodies to attract and keep sponsors. I’ve been writing and complaining about the suckiness of the Arbitron-controlled radio biz for over a decade. The problem has merely been exacerbated by recent government-approved station consolidations. Today’s radio biz only gives a damn about specific segments of the citizenry, ignoring preteens, people too old to be boomers, and (in this region) minorities. Teens and young adults were similarly ignored by almost all local radio throughout the ’80s, when virtually nobody who wasn’t an upscale ’60s-generation person was deemed worthy of the medium’s attention. In the universe of commercial radio (and of essentially commercial “public” radio), to be demographically incorrect by Arbitron’s standard is to not exist.
INSIDE SCOOP: Someone at the Kingdome Home Show was passing out “Save Our Shows” petitions, asking the powers-that-be to ensure room for home shows, auto shows, RV shows, etc. in any future Kingdome or replacement-stadium project. It’s only fair. The original idea behind the Dome was one structure to host different sports and different floor shows. If economics now indicate separate arenas for each game are more lucrative, there’s still a need for a place to have rotating sales booths in.
The marketplace-bazaar setup, with ailes of separately-run sales and demonstration booths, is among the world’s oldest and most widespread social institutions. More diverse and enticing than big single-operator stores, more sociable than scattered strip-mall stores, it appeals to a sense of discovery and spectacle rather than mere utilitarian acquisition. If I were county exec Ron Sims, negotiating with Paul Allen’s people about subsidies for a replacement football stadium, I’d demand an exhibition space at least as big as today’s Dome plus its overflow pavilion, with the county getting a slice of rental income from it. And I’d hustle to have that space booked year-round: Health fairs, book fairs, computer fairs, kid fairs, senior fairs, new-age fairs, arts and performance fests, carnivals, Convention Center overflow exhibits, world’s-largest-rummage-sales, etc.
FAST MONEY: Somebody tried to tell me once how computer technology was like Jeopardy!, an answer in search of a question. I replied if that was the case, then Microsoft was more like Family Feud, where the most popular answer is decreed to be correct. Whether this means Gates will be compared by posterity to the eternally gladhanding Richard Dawson (or even to the more tragic figure of Ray Combs) remains to be seen.
THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.
The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.
Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.
One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.
JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.
YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.
A happy post-7/4 greeting to all Misc. readers who, thanks to draconian govt. crackdowns against even “Safe and Sane” home fireworks, still have all their fingers. You can use those fingers of yours to pick up free postcards from the racks popping up at “hip” spots around town. The cards themselves are impeccably natty-looking, but they turn out to really be flyers inexplicably advertising L.A. hair salons. Speaking of snazzy graphics…
DESIGN FOR LEAVING: Graphic design magazines have been abuzz recently about attempts to form a “professional” association that would “accreditate” graphic designers like architects and somehow keep non-members out of top-paying markets. Besides being a monopolistic restraint-of-trade move, it’s not needed. Architects need to be accredited; a badly-designed building can fall down and hurt people. A badly-designed magazine ad can do no worse than waste its client’s money. Speaking of corporate centralization…
MY BONNIE: In today’s corporate climate, even success can lead to trouble. Case in point: the Bon Marché, the dept. store of the masses (old, anti-upscale slogan: “Where All Seattle Shops”). In 1929 it was a founding member of Allied Stores, a combine of local stores whose owners banded together for financial reasons. In the recent years of merger madness, Allied became part of Federated Dept. Stores, which did what merged companies often do: it shed pieces of itself (including the Seattle I. Magnin) and consolidated what was left into new operating groups. In the process it’s retired such classic store names as Magnin and Abraham & Strauss. Now the Tacoma News Tribune sez upper Federated management wants to replace the Bon name with another of its acquired brands, Macy’s West. Bon managers in Seattle were quick to deny the report. The L.A.-based May Co. has owned Portland’s Meier & Frank for years, but has wisely kept the M&F name. Let’s hope Federated knows enough to keep the Bon Marché appellation, derived from Paris’s original 1-stop-shopping palace of the late 19th century. Otherwise, the parent co. would surely qualify for the modern colloquial French interpretation of the phrase “bon marché” (look it up). Speaking of chain-store shenanigans…
ANOTHER DRUG WAR: The local pharmacy biz has also been consolidating, with chain operations rising and independents falling. The one constant has been regional management at most of the chains: Bartell has remained locally-owned, and the Oregon-based Pay Less absorbed the formerly Seattle-owned Pay n’ Save. That’s changing. Walgreen, the Illinois-based giant, is about to invade Seattle in a big way. Work has begun on locations in Greenwood and the Central Area; the chain’s reportedly applied with the state pharmacy board to open as many as 60 sites. Some of the new Walgreen stores reportedly will even have that onetime drugstore staple, the lunch counter (Walgreen claims to have invented the milk shake, at a Chicago luncheonette in the ’20s). Speaking of refreshments…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Hero lemon soda (available at the Hillcrest deli-mart on Cap. Hill) is a tasty tarty carbonated substance with a friendly yellow color and a cute, space-saving eight-and-a-half-ounce can. Even better, it comes from that new global junk-food mecca, Breda, Holland (hometown of that ultimate postmodern cultural icon Mentos, The Freshmaker!). Speaking of PoMo icons…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: If you enjoy Steve Shaviro’s occasional appearances in these pages, you’ll enjoy Doom Patrols, his collection of essays (he calls them “theoretical fictions” for no readily apparent reason) on PoMo heroes and heroines ranging from Kathy Acker to Bill Gates and, yes, ex-Doom Patrol comic book writer Grant Morrison. It’s even got the Dean Martin essay he first published here. Doom Patrols isn’t yet available on paper, but the entire text can be downloaded from the Web at <<http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html>>. Speaking of the Web…
UPDATE: I’m still looking for a term for Internet/World Wide Web use that isn’t “surfing.” Suggestions so far include “trolling” (found out it has a Net meaning already, a derogatory one), “waltzing,” “meandering,” “strolling,” “courting” (my favorite so far) and even “geoducking” (please!). Got anything better? Lemme know.
11/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:
LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’
IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY
Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?
AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.
UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.
GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.
SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.
This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.
Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.
However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.
GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…
HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.
THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)
Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).
THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”
BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.
BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.
The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.
FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.
TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.
PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)
MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”
THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.
KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.
GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.
The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.
ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)
I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).
The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.
It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”
PASSAGE
Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”
REPORT
You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).
Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).
With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Oogonium”
