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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.
ELSEWHERE:
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”
4/93 Misc. Newsletter
GREAT! GATES GETS HITCHED
JUST AFTER I TOSS MY OLD LIST
OF COMPUTER-NERD SEX PUNS…
Misc. hopes you’ve all got your copy of the white-on-black T-shirt featuring a hypodermic needle superimposed on the Space Needle beside the slogan, ” I went to Seattle to make a score and all I got was this lousy recording contract.”
UPDATE: I recently said we should preserve Seattle as a working city and resist the huge “Seattle Commons” yuppification project. Advocates of the Cascade neighborhood, a neglected pocket of affordable housing threatened by the Commons plan, have now formed the Cascade Residents Action Group to fight the wrong kind of redevelopment (info: 624-9049 or 523-2569).
BEEHIVE VIDEO, R.I.P.: It began 15 years ago on N.E. 45th as a far-flung outlet for the Peaches record chain, housed in an ex-Ford dealership. When that chain went Chapter 11 in ’81, the local manager bought it and added a Ballard outlet. It was the last large locally-owned record store in town, and the last to stock new vinyl. The first sign of trouble came in ’87, when the Wherehouse chain opened across the street, followed by Blockbuster down near U Village. In ’90, the store stopped paying for the Peaches name and held a contest for a new name (which meant no more word-balloon signs with the “Peachy” mascot pointing to the “Gay and Bisexual Videos” shelf). In ’92, they sold the Ballard store and made the 45th outlet all-video. It bravely (foolishly?) failed to stock umpteen multiple copies of blockbuster action hits, instead keeping a large stable stock of cool obscurities. The strategy cut costs and attracted a loyal clientele, but it still wasn’t enough. On 3/22, I rented my regular Monday 2-for-1 titles and saw nothing strange, except that the sale shelf of close-out tapes was a bit fuller. The next afternoon, I went in and was abruptly told I couldn’t rent anything else: “I’m sorry, we just went out of business. We’re only taking returns.” Its loss leaves a lot of frequent-renter cards that’ll never get filled up, and leaves the central U District without a decent foreign-film store.
OUT TO DRY: The Squire Shops are in Chapter 11; many of the remaining 23 outlets are closing. Just as the ugly clothes that made ’em famous are coming back! Squire sold clothes that young mall-crawlers thought were hip. In its heyday, that meant jeans with cuffs nearly as wide as the waist. Seattle wore bellbottoms years after the rest of the country stopped. Several companies formed here to keep Seattle in clothes the national companies no longer made. That scene led to the local firms that gave the world loud sweatshirts with goofy slogans and Hypercolors; some of those firms are now on the wrong side of that fad and face money trouble themselves. (“Designer grunge” has virtually nothing to do with the local fashion biz.)
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Washington Free Press promises to be the hard-hitting investigative newspaper Seattle’s never really had, with the possible exception of the pre-JOA P-I. Several tabloids over the years promised this, but soon turned into lifestyle rags that just used `politics’ to define their subcultures (Community Catalyst is just as guilty of this, in its way, as the Weekly). Free Press isn’t like that. It doesn’t tell you what clothes you have to wear or what food you have to eat. It just reports the under-reported big stuff. In the April ish, that’s a huge piece about Boeing’s spotty environmental record and vigorous influence-peddling. The rest of the free monthly tab’s weaker (talk radio-style rants against Jack in the Box) but shows promise….Beyond the Cultural Dustbin is Hans and Thelma Lehmann’s personal history of highbrow art, music and dance in Seattle since 1938, when UK conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (scion of the drug empire that now owns Contac) came to lead the Seattle Symphony. He left a year later, calling Seattle “a cultural dustbin.” The book argues that we’ve come a long way since then, from the Northwest School painters of the ’50s and John Cage‘s residency at Cornish to today’s proliferation of dance and theatrical troupes. The book implies but doesn’t directly ask: We’ve got culture now, but is it art?
JESUS JONES WITHOUT THE JONES: Counter Culture is the first Christian alternative-music zine I’ve seen in Seattle since the Jesus Freak scene of the ’70s. Its cover interviewee, Tonio K., was a minor ’79 LA singer-songwriter (best-known LP: Life in the Food Chain) who’s now born-again and wants a crossover hit just like Amy Grant. The writers insist at several parts that you can still like Jesus even if you don’t like the Religious Right. It displays calls to prayer in standard cut-up punkzine design. It covers Christian grunge bands that mix “`70s funk with the anxious mind of `80s punk rock with the heart of God.” But then, punk and its descendants, even in their nihilism, held a righteous notion of good and evil, a conviction that the world should be better than it is. Bands like U2 and 10,000 Maniacs already use songs as sermons. Take out sex and drugs, add New Testament imagery, and you too could exhort the faithful at the Vineyard coffeehouse in the U District.
TO WOMB IT MAY CONCERN: First Moments is a local firm offering “videos of your child’s first moments” — ultrasound images of the fetus, to be treasured as a family heirloom; there’s blank tape at the end so you can add birth and infancy footage. Forgetting the unspoken anti-abortion implication, it makes you wonder: if you’re sick of friends’ cloying baby pix now, just wait!
OPEN MEMO TO CURSE: You’ve successfully exposed the hypocritical machinations behind KCMU-Lite and its instigators. But to restore the station as a community resource, you’ve gotta deal with the UW Board of Regents, who control the license. The current managers were turning the station into nothing but a self-serving fundraising machine, something the Regents can identify with. After fundraising, their no. 2 priority is saving face; with all the other campus scandals, they might seek the safest way out of the KCMU dilemma. Unfortunately, there are “safer” ways than restoring Classic KCMU. They could turn it into an automated classical outlet, or return it to the Communications School. You’ve gotta assert that any format change would violate the promises made in membership drives. Then, offer an olive branch. Ask your comrades, the fired DJs with the class-action suit, to back off if the Regents will let you help set up a new structure for the station, not like it’s now but not quite like before either. Tell them you don’t want to restore all of the station’s rough-hewn past. You want to build on its heritage, to more strongly serve students, alternative-music communities, and others now unserved by local radio. Even after that, you’ll have to deal with KUOW management down the hall, people who’ve asserted excessive control over KCMU and who honestly don’t get what’s wrong with institutionalized “public” radio. People who only seek the most upscale listeners. People who mistake blandness for a virtue. The announcers on NPR stations all sound like HAL 9000, for chrissakes! They oughta sound more like the booming, colorful voice who used to announce the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They oughta reflect the glorious pomposity of orchestral and opera music, the twee affectations of chamber music, the life-affirming spirit of real jazz, instead of a yup variation on BBC English. Public radio should be by and for the public, not just by the bureaucracy for the upscale.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Ex-KCMUers Debbie Letterman and Kathy Fennessy are now spinning CDs as live “queue jockeys” for callers on hold for Microsoft’s product-support lines. While it’s a novel job that pays OK, Letterman told the Puget Sound Business Journal that she’s still tied into as restrictive a format as she faced at KCMU-Lite before she quit. “The key word is mellow:” Enya si, Ministry no.
THE URBAN TOURIST: Columbia Center sounds as strange as it looks. The climate-control hum and rushing air from elevator shafts give the 5th Ave. entrance cool noises (they’d be great for a sci-fi movie). Even weirder is the Seafirst Corridor, a passageway under 5th and Columbia from Columbia Center (where the bank execs work) to Seafirst 5th Ave. Plaza (where the back-office staff works). It’s the most surreal walkway since the United terminal at O’Hare. On the walls, plastic-covered pastel lights flash in a slow sequence of colors, while New Age music and ocean sounds enhance the creamy dreamscape. At the end, two elevators take you one flight up to the harsh utilitarian corridors of the 5th Ave. Plaza, where a security guard waits to let you back into a numbing temp job.
DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: If you think Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy‘s Subaru spots are already odd, wait ’til you see the one with a dude in black jeans saying that the Impreza’s “like punk rock, only it’s a car”.
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS (via Michelle McCarthy and David Humphries): “London news has reported the NY bomb news prominently, but I think Londoners were squinting a little at the panicky New Yorkers having had their first initiation to bomb-based evacuation. Since we’ve lived here, areas as populous as Wall Street are evacuated for bomb threats close to weekly, and one actually goes off about once a month. It’s hard to imagine the US tolerating the constant shutdown and occasional destruction of its biggest cities and business districts.”
CHRISTIAN GORE AT 911: Three years ago, Gore was the uppity editor of a Detroit ‘zine about perverse film and video. Now, he’s the uppity editor of a slicked-up, mass-market Film Threat, based in Beverly Hills (at that ZIP Code) and financed by Hustler‘s Larry Flynt. Gore puts big stars on the cover (for sales) and trashes those stars inside (for credibility). He covers “B” Hollywood horror and sci-fi, and still promotes a few undergrounds. Gore promised two different nights of video treats, but the Friday and Saturday shows shared half the same material: drive-in movie trailers, Sid & Marty Krofft theme songs, banned Ren & Stimpy episodes (Gore’s cronies with the original R&S team), psychedelic computer animation. At both shows, Gore passed around cans of cheap beer and asked the audience to sit back, yell if they thought something was boring, and act like they were in his living room. I took advantage of this after he showed a student film about an “artist” who has naked women with blue paint on their bodies press up against butcher paper: “Everybody knows that’s based on a real artist, right?” Gore, incredulous: “It is?” Me: “Of course. Yves Klein! He was in the first Mondo Cane movie.” “I didn’t know that.” A guy who doesn’t know the daddy of schlockumentaries shouldn’t call himself a weird-film authority.
IT’S SQUARE TO BE HIP: I don’t just want you to question the assumptions of mainstream culture. I want you to question the assumptions of your culture, like the assumption that it’s sacred to be “hip” and profane to be “square.” The hip-vs.-square concept is the alternative culture’s unexamined legacy from the beats’ misinterpretation of jazz lingo. In the NY jazz scene, “hepcats” (derived, sez Zola Mumford, from the Senegalese word hipicat, “one who is very aware of their surroundings”) were those who played and/or listened to advanced black music (instead of the watered down Paul Whiteman versions) and who’d mastered the complex codes of social gamesmanship in Manhattan. It was a concept for a specific time/place that no longer exists. Square people these days are a lot hipper than a lot of self-proclaimed hipsters. Squares enjoy drag queens on Geraldo and buy male pinup posters. Squares buy Soundgarden CDs and watch The Simpsons. Squares grow and haul the food we eat. Squares make our cars. Squares support education and world-relief drives. As Wes “Scoop” Nisker writes in Crazy Wisdom, “the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering.” There is no superior race (not even yours). There is no superior gender or gender-role (not even yours). There is no superior culture (not even yours). The real enemies are people who think they’re hip but aren’t: The Religious Right (not a mass movement but a tightly organized minority that gets out its vote in low-turnout elections); the civic fathers/mothers who want to outlaw youth culture. (More on this below.)
IN BLOOM: When I told people I wanted to write a book about the local music scene, most said “you’d better get it out right away. Nobody will care about Seattle next month.” I don’t know if the “Seattle sound” is really the flash in the pan that so many local wags think (hoping they can go back to their familiar nihilism?). People here are so used to obscurity, when the spotlight shines they squint and wait for it to stop. But like I’ve written before, this could just be the flash that lights a lasting fire. Jonathan & Bruce shrewdly took a subgenre that’s been developing for 10 years, put a slogan on it, made it the Next Big Thing and made us its capital. But the sound they built isn’t one of those short-half-life sounds like power pop. It’s an identifiable sound, imitable yet sufficiently diverse to allow infinite variations. The dozens of “generic grunge” bands now playing opening sets at the Off Ramp could form the tourist bedrock of a permanent scene, like the “generic country” bands in small Nashville bars, bringing in the bucks and attention to support more advanced work. If we play our cards right, Seattle could become the Nashville of rock.
BUT NOT IF the forces of repression have their way, as led by our city’s “progressive” political machine. Most mayors like to kiss up to their town’s fastest growing industry, but not ours. From feminist/prohibitionists to the tepid No Nukes concert film, some of the most adamant political liberals were cultural conservatives. Norm Rice wrote the Teen Dance Ordinance as a City Councilmember; as mayor, he’s apparently behind the actions to shut down all-ages concerts and raves and the effort to seize part ownership of RKCNDY. Rice comes from the disciplinarian side of the black middle class, where adults want young people to strive hard at all times and avoid idle temptations like pop music. Rice doesn’t get that the rock scene is a hard-working, industrious bunch of people empowering themselves. He calls himself a “supporter of the arts” while clamping down against Seattle’s first indigenous artform since the ’50s Northwest School painters. He promotes Seattle as a “KidsPlace” while trying to shut young people up.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to check out the Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at the ex-Penney’s site on 2nd & Pike (where the real homeless are studiously kept outside), and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”
Christine Kelly in Sassy:
“While watching the inaugural balls, I realized that Hillary Clinton is the Courtney Love of politics. If the people want Kurt (Bill), they gotta take Courtney (Hillary) too. People will accuse Courtney (Hillary) of trying to break up the band with her constant meddling and poisoning influence, even though Courtney (Hillary) has her own band (office). Hillary (Courtney) said provocative things to the press about baking cookies (taking heroin). Courtney (Hillary) was on MTV with her husband. Both chicks have a cute, sassy daughter. There is one major difference: Courtney has too much taste to mix jewel tones like amethyst and royal blue while watching her husband accept an MTV award (get inaugurated).”
Like I said somewhere here, I’m starting to write the major history of the Seattle music scene from ’76 to today. I’ll need to talk to everybody who was a major part of it (players, promoters, ‘zine editors, designers, producers, club people). Write for details. If any of you know the addresses of ex-locals who’ve left town, also write.
“Pecuniary”
3/93 Misc. Newsletter
`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:
HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK
YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK
YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK
Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.
BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.
WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).
THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.
WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.
JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.
NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)
WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”
WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.
MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.
FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.
ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.
ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.
AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)
DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.
DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…
CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?
BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.
‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”
I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)
I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000Â Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.
“Captious”
