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WHAT I THOUGHT I’D NEVER DO, I just did.
Yes, I returned to a certain sleazy tabloid after about 32 months away.
Even after all that blather just weeks ago in this virtual space about giving up on the pathetic word biz in order to concentrate on the more tangible realm of photographic imagery.
The first batch of pieces, in the issue coming out tomorrow night, will be little regular features: The X-Word puzzle, and a new obituaries piece.
I’ll also be contributing larger feature pieces on a less-regular basis. The first will be a nostalgic look back at the last time I was one of the paper’s key contributors, the dot-com-crazed autumn of 1998.
For this, I seek your help.
Tell me your stories of those giddy (for the financially ambitious) yet scary (for many of the rest of us) times, via email or via our MISCtalk discussion boards.
(Ahh, the Late Nineties. They were such simpler times…)
NEXT: Another of my former homes depicted.
ELSEWHERE:
THE AMERICAN DISTRIBUTOR of the Danish movie The Idiots demanded its frequent shots of male nudity be (crudely) censored, to insure an ‘R’ rating (and, therefore, the chance at mainstream theatrical bookings and big-newspaper advertising).
My first thought: What’s so horrible about a penis and a couple of testicles anyway? I think my own are just fine. I’ve been in locker rooms and at nude beaches, and my finely-attuned writerly senses were never offended by other men’s dangling participles.
As for female viewers, some sensitive ones might indeed feel confronted by the organs some women associate only with rape and violence, not with lovemaking. But such viewers, I believe, would be helped if they could see more male bodies in the nonthreatening environment of a cinema; they might learn to see them as symbols not of male power but of the ultimate male weakness.
(I’ve seen naked men running, in a nudist camp’s annual Bare Buns Fun Run, and it can be as silly and awkward a sight as one can imagine.)
In certain other jurisdictions of the civilized world (namely Britain and Japan), the formulaic, ritualized entertainment known as hardcore pornography does not legally exist, but less extreme sexual and/or anatomical exhibitions are freely and openly available (nudity in newspapers, cuss words in the comics, simulated film-sex on network TV).
In certain other jurisdictions (such as much of the European continent), this dichotomy is considered superfluous and just about anything goes.
Here, things are a little different.
The Motion Picture Association of America, the media conglomerates who control it, and the other media conglomerates who control major-newspaper advertising have conspired to keep anything more salacious than one Kate Winslet breast from being seen in anything that looks like a real movie theater (where IDs can be checked) and instead relegated to premium cable TV (where anyone living in a subscribing household can conceivably watch) or the adult-video market (where the use of sexuality to reveal characters or tell stories isn’t a high priority).
Anyhoo, I went to the U District and saw the censored version of The Idiots, with the quaint black censor bars around the male parts (and, in only one shot, around female parts).
The movie would’ve been a lot less disturbing if they’d shown the full nude scenes and cut out all the scenes with the cast wearing clothes.
Essentially, this is a story of six men and five women, all young adults of solid bourgeois upbringings, who crash in one of the men’s uncle’s second home and turn their lives into a performance-art project, by acting in a rude and obnoxious manner to anyone they meet. (I can see that sort of thing in the U District any day without spending $7.00 for the privilege, but that’s beside the point.)
Specifically, they do this by pretending to be from a group home for retarded adults. (You might expect me, as one with a retarded older brother, to be offended by this, and I was.)
Back at the house, the film’s characters continue the role-playing as a means of releasing their “inner Idiots.” They justify this with the age-old young-intellectual blather about overcoming everyday consciousness to become one with primal nature; but at least they don’t do this by pretending to be blacks or Indians.
In the last reel, we’re supposed to suddenly poignantly identify with the faux-Idiots, because at least three of them are revealed to have had real emotional problems, and to have been using the Idiot game as therapy. I didn’t buy it.
Nor did I buy the “purity” of the film’s Dogme 95 wobbly-cam technique, which (thanks to too many bad Amerindie fake-documentary films) already seems like just another gimmick.
Director Lars Von Trier has done far better stuff. Any regular filmgoer who tells you otherwise is a, well, you know.
TOMORROW: Flann O’Brien, my current Main Man.
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.
After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.
So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:
“Money. It’s not everything.”
“Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”
“Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”
“There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”
“Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”
“Is that fourth car really necessary?”
“Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”
“Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”
“You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”
(Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)
IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.
TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
BILL GATES MAY DICTATE Seattle’s currently ascendant “Attitude” problem.
But it’s Gates’s ex-partner, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who’s been remaking the city’s look–whether we like it or not.
Allen’s projects have been the subject of three public votes. Two of them, about the Seattle Commons scheme, led to citywide “no” votes against building a big city park in the middle of industrial land he wanted to turn into condos. (He’s going ahead with the condo-izations anyway.) The third vote, on public subsidies for his Kingdome-replacing football stadium, was a statewide plebescite in which “no” votes in Seattle (and Eastern Washington) were outnumbered by “yes” votes in the ‘burbs.
An NY Times piece a couple weeks ago (no longer on the paper’s website, except for a $2.50 fee) spent 1,600 words doting on how Allen, “who bounces around from being the second- to the fourth-richest person on the planet,” is plopping one “world class” structure down after another throughout the greater downtown Seattle area (the Union Station remodel and its adjacent new office buildings, the Cinerama Theater restoration, the waterfront sculpture park) and the UW campus (the Suzallo Library and Henry Gallery additions).
And in three weeks (by which time Allen’s Portland Trailblazers will have either won or lost the National Basketball Association championship), Allen’s most expensive and monumental structure opens–the Experience Music Project.
Known unofficially in its early planning stages as “the Jimi Hendrix museum” (before Allen and the Hendrix estate parted ways), EMP remains a quarter-billion-buck tribute to Allen’s love of the rock guitarist who left Seattle at 18, and subsequently and repeatedly expressed his disdain for it; only to get posthumously enshrined as the favorite “local musician” of a generation of modern-day geek Medicis.
One could talk about how such a huge sum of dough could’ve been used to build housing and/or transportation solutions, support more street-level arts projects, or save any number of development-threatened properties in town and in the exurbs.
But that’s moot now. Allen wanted to do this. If he hadn’t wanted to do this, he would most likely have instead put that money into his software and cable-TV investment portfolio.
EMP is here. And it will attract tourists, employ people, provide a locus for regional public-school music-ed programs (those that haven’t been destroyed totally by budget cuts), and give some support, publicity, and occasional gigs to living area musicians.
And it gives pundits such as myself plenty of sarcastic-remark fodder.
(My own current idea of what it looks like: A belly dancer lying on her side.)
TOMORROW: Why the Seattle International Film Festival was, and is, the pre-Microsoft Seattle’s favorite “arts” event.
IT’S SO NICE TO KNOW that I’m not the seemingly only person who’s tired of Internet-stock inflation.
Indeed, there seems to be a game going on among amateur and semipro market observers. They’re waiting for the dot-com stock bubble to pop. Some have been waiting for months. So have I.
It’s not that I particularly want those young families with mutual funds to lose their kids’ college money; or for those overworked young workers at venture-capital-dependent Net companies to lose their jobs.
But it would be nice if some of the money-lust mania got out of the game.
It hurts the economic fabric, all that inpouring of wealth into the virtual casino that is tech speculation.
And it hurts the social fabric, all that reverse distribution of wealth into the already-wealthy classes. Behind the media-hype over garage entrepreneurs turning into instant IPO-zillionaires, the fact remains that just about all the massive new wealth North America’s created in the past couple of decades has flowed to the richest 20 percent or so of the populace.
Where the great American middle-class dream once stood (and yes, I know I used to scoff at that dream while it was alive, but that’s beside the point), now there’s a new caste system gelling, like that old Jell-O 1-2-3 dessert mix: The Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets sitting rich and creamily on top; the lower-upper and upper-middle-class professionals and the dot-com mogul wannabes in a semi-fluid layer beneath the top; and all the rest of us Kmart shoppers gelatinously stuck as a mass of goo at the bottom.
Net-stock mania didn’t cause this by any means. It just symbolizes it.
By the end of last year, there were two main stock markets–not NYSE and NASDAQ per se, but the speculation-bloated tech stocks and the sluggish everything else. But as January began, the tech issues began to slide and stumble like a beginning skier, while “flight to quality” investors propped up traditional industrial stocks and bond issues.
But by mid-month, the sector had already gained back its declines and seemed to be a-roarin’ again; thanks in part to the AOL/Time Warner consolidation mania and rumors of a forced Microsoft breakup.
So maybe the tech-stock bubble might not pop.
Maybe it’ll just gently deflate instead.
Mind you, I still think the Internet is, and will continue to be, changing darn near everything humans do; from product-supply chains to underground-art movements. And I realize these new ventures are risky. And I hope the folks investing in them understand the risks. And I also hope they understand even the “winners” in the Net-biz universe may take longer than “Internet time” to show real profits. (Heck, in old-fashioned media a big new venture like a splashy national magazine isn’t expected to turn a profit for three to five years.)
It’s just that this transitoriness is the way things are now. Nothing to get that excited about; nothing to risk one’s life savings on. Unless you really want to.
MEANWHILE: Only an ego-big-as-all-outdoors such as Bill Gates would manufacture an excuse to kick himself upstairs (into a position of just as much big-picture authority, just fewer day-to-day duties)–the excuse being he needs to oversee stratagems to make Windows even more obligatory; i.e., even more of what the Justice Dept. says it’s too much of already…. And here’s a Microsoft permatemp (an old college pal of mine, in fact) who worked three years of up to 90-hour weeks and still didn’t get to be a “regular employee.”
TOMORROW: Looking at real-life film locations.
IN THE WEEKS SINCE Judge Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft’s a monopoly, a lot of blather of varying degrees of insight and coherence has been written about what will and/or should happen next.
Microsoft itself, and the people who are paid to like Microsoft, insist the company should be left as-is, with the “freedom to innovate” (which is apparently something on the order of the right to do what you’re not doing now, but still want the option to do in the future).
Others want the Feds to create a bifurcated or trifurcated MS. They offer up various schemes for splitting the empire. Some schemes would leave one “Baby Bill” in charge of the Windows OS; others would have two or three companies that would sell their own versions.
And, natch, the “digerati” pundits in Silicon Valley couldn’t stop gleefully anticipating a future in which the pesky northern threat to total California control of everything “E” would be finished once and for all.
Meanwhile, back up here in my neck-O-the-woods, things have been, to say the least, “interesting.”
Local daily papers that seldom find a bad word for anything Gates-related have willingly run (out-of-town, syndicated) commentaries suggesting that Redmond’s Masters of the Cyber-Universe deserve all the comeuppance they’re gonna get.
MS cult members are even more true-believer than ever. They’re being taught to treat the federal and state antitrust cases as heathen attacks that only prove the total righteousness of the MS cause–doing everything one can for Bill (and for one’s own stock options).
Some of those Seattleites closest to MS are privately anticipating the excitement and drama a drawn-out divestiture dispute would bring; while publicly expressing concern about the future value of all the MS stock they and their pals hold.
In the fancy-schmancy restaurants and hoity-toity shops dependent upon MS hotshots’ spending power, and in the local arts groups and charities increasingly dependent upon cash from MS and from MS people, nobody’s talking publicly. Privately, few seem directly worried. They apparently figure the MS wealth machine will just keep on funnelling cash from the world into Western Washington, even if the machine’s eventually re-engineered into multiple smaller components.
Seattle, for better or worse, will never go back to its pre-MS status as a quiet, industrious town of aerospace engineers, sportswear vendors, and import/export lawyers. If there are Baby Bills, they’ll all likely stay based here. Indeed, if certain stock analysts are correct, the sum of the parts could come to be worth more than the whole. That means still more office and condo construction in town, more office and subdivision construction in the burbs.
These Baby Bills could be less monolithically institutional than today’s MS; more attuded to the rugged-bad-boy uber-capitalistic Attitude-with-a-capital-A seen in the rest of the software biz (including the companies founded here by MS refugees). Results: Even more monster SUVs crowding our roads. Even more silly “cuisine” restaurants. Even less affordable housing.
The computer world would face more profound changes–depending on how any breakup or set of restrictions on MS’s practices emerges. In one of the more radical scenarios, the Windows “standard” would dissolve as different Baby Bills offer different successors to the OS, each with its own add-on features. Application-software makers wouldn’t worry about getting run out of business by MS, but they would have to worry about making their stuff work on different post-Windows systems. (Of course, if they do that, then they’ll have code that’s probably also more easily portable to MacOS, Linux, etc.)
But if the video-game industry can still support between three and five platforms, then so can the “productivity” software industry.
TOMORROW: More on MS’s S/M.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper said he’ll retire in March, following public hue and cry over cop violence against peaceful WTO protesters last week. Already, the conspiracy theorists are wondering aloud whether the street cops had deliberately gone abusive last Wednesday night as an opportunity to force out Stamper. (The chief had taken pains in the past to forge a liberal, gay-friendly, community-friendly image. This stance caused many rank-‘n’-file cops to complain loudly about Stamper on hate-talk radio.) Since I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself, I have trouble believing this notion, but feel I should report it nonetheless.
ST. PETER TO GENE RAYBURN: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have prepared your (blank).”
YESTERDAY, we reported about Kentucky developers’ plans to build a 100-acre “Great Northwest” theme park south of Tacoma. They claim it will “highlight the ‘rugged outdoors’ elements of the Northwest, as well as its history.”
Today, we continue our imagined trek through what we think an NW-themed tourist attraction ought to be.
Having already witnessed Seasonal-affective-disorderland, Clearcutland, and Sprawlland, you move on (very, very slowly) in your SUV-replica tram car on the Ex-Country Road Traffic Jam Ride, on your way to your next destination–
The grownups, meanwhile, will be corralled into a cavernous meeting room to hear the Animatronic Bill robot (surrounded, as always, by a dozen animatronic yes-men) either (1) praise his legacy of innovation, or (2) map strategies for “embracing” other companies’ ideas and running said companies out of business.
A short corridor leads into the next meeting room, also known as–
The victorious upscale couple invites everyone in the audience to come celebrate this important victory for the city’s future, and leads everyone off toward–
In the corner of your eye, you spot a pair of nose-ringed beverage servers walking down a hidden passageway. You follow them down what seem like 10 flights’ worth of stairs to–
You can also see people you’ve run into earlier today. Previously, they were ride operators, tour ushers, and snack-counter servers. Now, they’re dressed in art smocks, Beatnik-chick black sweaters, ballet tights, leather G-strings, BSA-logo biker jackets, or drag gowns. They invite you to share their Triscuit-based hors d’oeuvres and wine-in-a-box, while they explain to you how everything in Boholand used to completely suck, but now it all completely sucks in totally different ways.
As your eyes adjust to the dim lights, you can see signs posted around the black-painted room. The signs announce that various corners have been condemned for an expanded Condoland. Eventually, you also see a sign that promises “Only Way Out.” It turns out to be a short cut back to Seasonal-affective-disorderland.
It’s not that you can’t leave the park, but that you’re not supposed to ever want to.
TOMORROW: Imagining life after Microsoft.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.
MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.
CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…
THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.
On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.
On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.
Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.
(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)
In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.
But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.
Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.
Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.
But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)
Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
The Microsoft File
Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98
The Microsoft File:
The Secret Case Against Bill Gates
by Wendy Goldman Rohm
(Times Books/Random House) $25
Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop
by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett
(Simon & Schuster) $13.95
If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.
Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).
But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.
That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).
Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.
Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.
Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”
Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.
Gates of Hell?
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/18/98
Barbarians Led By Bill Gates
by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller
Henry Holt ($23)
Most reviews of this book talk about how co-author Jennifer Edstrom’s mom is Microsoft’s long-serving PR boss, and how this less-than-flattering portrait of the software giant must be hurting familial relations. A better focus would be on its other co-author, ex-MS programmer Marlin Eller. Barbarians can be seen as the literary equivalent of modern-day Microsoft software. It’s fairly comprehensible, and more or less gets the job done; but it’s clunky in places, with extra features abruptly tacked onto old “legacy code.”
The introduction notes this was originally to have been a straightforward memoir of Eller’s 12 years in the Redmond salt mines. The authors don’t say why the book didn’t end up that way, but the publisher clearly wanted something more applicable to recent news surrounding the company–antitrust suits, allegations of monopolistic and coercive practices. So, Eller and Edstrom re-coded the product (revised the book) to meet the new specs. The shipping version (final draft) emphasizes Eller’s toils on projects directly relevant to current MS controversies, such as early versions of Windows. Chapters about Eller’s years on projects far from MS’s operating-systems heart, like handwriting-recognition software and pay-per-view TV boxes, now emphasize object lessons about MS’s hyper-aggressive culture, its less-than-polite leadership (including Mr. Bill, depicted as an asocial geek on the world’s biggest power trip), and its drive to engulf and devour competitive technologies. Especially technologies which just might maybe nibble a bite or two away at MS’s precious OS monopoly.
MS haters will find their opinions conveniently confirmed. MS loyalists might at least grudgingly appreciate sympathetic portrayals of code warriors striving to finish impossible tasks, within inconceivable deadlines, under unliveable stress, for often-substantial material rewards. In other words, it’s designed to appeal to the largest potential user base.
Other Bill boox:
IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
