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The Stranger, the weekly free tabloid with which I have an off-and-on stormy relationship, celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. The actual ten-year mark came last September, but obviously a lot of folks weren’t in the mood for celebrating anything back then.
I was asked to write something for it. It didn’t run in that issue (they promise it’ll run next week).
It’s a remembrance of local publications that have come and gone during the Stranger’s lifetime:
At first, I thought the sudden emergence of an overriding central political issue would render irrelevant all the littler things progressives obsess over, such as gender-role images in the media or PoMo deconstructions of texts.
But then it dawned on me that all these sub-issues relate, at least indirectly, to the main tasks at hand: Getting the U.S. going again, not letting Bush pull us toward an inevitably-futile armed conflict, and getting the U.S. out of the colonial-empire game that got us into this mess.
Herewith, a few speculative ways some of the heretofore largely separate progressive causes might tie into the new Cause #1 (finding a way out of this new military-political situation without losing lots of innocent lives here or elsewhere):
Thus, it takes PoMo thinking to find a response to the attacks that doesn’t end up destroying modern (western) society in the name of saving it.
So don’t for a minute buy into the notion that the conservative prowar contingent’s got some inevitable monopoly on the nation’s hearts-‘n’-minds.
The things progressives have talked about all these years are more relevant, and potentially more promotable, than ever.
Thanks to ye who attended our intimate little MISC Salon yesterday evening. Apologies to whomever tried to make it but couldn’t, because for a period of time that day another tenant of the space locked the front doors without telling me. We’ll do another gathering soon; watch this space for particulars.
GET YER MERCH HERE!: The luscious MISC Boutique is now online. T-shirts, coffee mugs, tank tops, mouse pads, even boxer shorts are offerred bearing Sean Hurley’s hand-drawn logo from our Summer 2001 issue (which is nearly gone from most dropoff spots–to make sure you get yours, subscribe.)
SPEAKING OF MR. HURLEY, our print mag’s illustrious illustrator has an art opening this Tuesday evening at the Little Theater, 608 19th Ave. E. (at Mercer) in Seattle’s east Capitol Hill neighborhood. His paintings and drawings never cease to amaze and astound. Be there, amigos and amigas.
ELSEWHERE:
You don’t have to use southern-California slang in your own life, but a UCLA student survey reveals a new regional definition down there of the term “ballerina”– as “an immoral person with a moral facade.”
“AIDS is not the wrath of God, nature’s revenge, or the new bubonic plague; it is a nasty infectious disease that requires clear thinking and investigation to overcome.”
Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Parade (officially, the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March, and Freedom Rally”) long ago ceased to be a niche-subculture celebration.
Today it has only slightly more specifically-gay meaning than the modern St. Patrick’s Day has specifically-Irish meaning.
It’s become the day when everybody claims or pretends to be, if not a proud queer, at least a proud friend of proud queers.
The floats, performance troups, and marching units of actual lesbians and gays (and their support groups) are heavily interspersed with those of officially gay-friendly corporations (Microsoft), marketers (KUBE-FM, Starbucks, lots of beer companies), and politicians major and minor.
Why, even petty-tyrant-wannabe mayoral candidate Mark Sidran showed up to aggressively shake everyone’s hands, whether folks wanted their hands shook or not. (Sidran was accompanied by a small entourage holding up yard signs, whose logo bore a loud rightward-pointing arrow).
Some gays might consider this mainstreaming as a sign that gays and gay rights are increasingly accepted in American society, yea even among the power brokers of business and politics.
But other gay activists, who’d dreamed their liberation movement would lead to a larger public questioning of the so-called “dominant culture,” have branded such mainstreamed celebrations with such terms as “assimilationist.”
They allege that the organizers of rituals such as Seattle’s Pride Parade are helping destroy not just the larger queer-lib political agenda but the distinct GLBT subculture.
I can leave such distinctions to those within the community.
But I can say that the overall trend in this country is for more subcultures and social niches, not fewer. Even within LGBT there are subgroups (gay men, lesbians, bis, M2F trannies, F2M trannies, cross-dressers, etc.) and sub-subgroups (bears, leather, butch, femme, etc.) and sub-sub-subgroups (too numerous to even sample).
That’s one of the aspects of the Pride Parade’s smiling, family-friendly homosexuality that helps make it so appealing to so many straights.
Thousands of Americans who’ve never been erotically attracted to someone of the same gender wish they could belong to a subculture like GLBT; though preferably without the job-discrimination and general bigotries so many real GLBTs face.
And I don’t just mean those urban-hipster straight women who think it’s cool to pretend to be bi, or those college-town straight men who wish they could be as sanctimonious as radical lesbians.
We’re all “queer” in one way or another, in the older and larger definition of the term. We’re all different, from one another and from any dictated vision of “normality.”
And we all have a sexuality; and many of us wish (at least secretly) that we could be part of a culture in which we could proudly proclaim our sexual selves, without fear of being branded as sluts or chauvanist pigs or unfit parents.
Postscript: The night before the parade, Showtime ran Sex With Strangers, a documentary by Joe and Harry Gantz about three couples (two from Olympia), and the bi-female “friend” of one of them, who are all in the swingers’ lifestyle. The closing “where are they now” titles revealed that three of the seven individual protagonists had lost their jobs after their nonmonogamies became known. (The other four were either self-employed or were now on “extended vacations.”) The lesson: You don’t have to be gay to need the more progressive social attitudes gay-lib promotes.
Post-postscript: The loneliest-looking entry in the Pride Parade was the car sponsored by the Capitol Hill Alano Club, with its plain signage, few passengers, and fewer attending marchers. The 12-Step group was almost directly followed by a succession of beer-company vans and trucks (even a delivery semi rig).
THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.
Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.
Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.
And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.
They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.
But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.
The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:
Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.
So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?
Yes.
If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).
You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:
As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.
As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.
And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.
TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Tomata du Plenty, 52, who’d cofounded Ze Whiz Kidz (a gay-camp theater troupe that pretty much established the funky-but-chic tone of Seattle nonprofit theater) and the Tupperwares (a drag vocal trio that included the man who inherited and closed the Dog House restaurant), before heading off to be an L.A. punk rocker, a Miami painter, and assorted other roles in assorted other towns.
LAST SATURDAY, those wacky petrifiers of ephemeral art forms at the Experience Music Project held a museum-piece tribute to that one musical/subcultural genre one would never expect to ever see turned into a museum piece, the skate punks.
Those late-’70s-early-’80s skater boyz had been vilified by many “intellectual punks” at the time. In this scenario, the Black Flag/TSOL/Germs gang had singlehandedly turned punk rock in L.A. (and by 1981 in the U.S. as a whole) from an attempted populist musical revolution into an exclusive, often violent, “hardcore” clique dominated by white male suburbanites of questionable intelligence and serious drinking-drugging-fighting proclivities.
But that young white male suburban demographic was just what ad agencies craved a decade later.
Skate punk’s somewhat more respectable next generation, and the overlapping snowboarding and “beach sports” scenes, became favorite iconographies for the selling of everything from soda pop to cereal.
Skate punk has become the illegitimate parent of “good” and “evil” twins–the clean-cut, corporate “rebellion” of the ESPN X Games and the Hollywood-promoter-contrived, white-trash trash talk of the “aggro” music scene.
And the skater doodz were from L.A., which is always a geopolitical plus to the marketing biz. TV networks, record labels, and ad agencies forever want impressionable teens across the globe to believe their own lives are empty; that you’re not a true “rebel” unless you look, talk, and behave just like someone in N.Y./L.A./S.F. is doing; and that the only way to keep up with these style dictates is to keep buying what you’re told to buy.
(But on the flip side: While many U.K. and N.Y. punk bands got released on major labels, L.A. skate punkers had to rely on feisty indie outfits like Tommy Boy (now selling ESPN soundtrack CDs), Frontier, and Slash. These supposedly nihilistic self-destructors turned out to have helped jump-start the whole indie rock phenomenon, from within the shadows of the Hollywood entertainment oligopoly.)
Hence, skate punk really is a topic deserving of museum-piece recollection.
And, yeah, there’s irony up to the armpits in those no-future crusters not only turning 40 but becoming idols to hundreds of fresh-faced young ‘uns at the municipal skate park across from EMP.
And a few looks at those old punkers, especially their hands and their kneecaps, gave me a revelation. I may be “sex-positive,” but I can still find certain body parts to be completely icky.
MONDAY: The larger ’80s nostalgia problem.
IN OTHER NEWS: Speaking of being stuck in the past, Mayor Schell has vetoed the Seattle City Council’s repeal of the onerous, censorious 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance; making his own re-election next year even more doubtful.
THINGS OF BEAUTY: The current issue of the architecture mag Arcade carries the cover headline, “So There Are A Lot of Female Public Artists. So What?”
The short title essay, by Carolyn Law (not yet available online as of this writing), attempts to define a universal feminine aesthetic behind the success of certain women in the realm of government-commissioned sculpture and environmental-art pieces. A philosophy that would link women’s historic role in influencing the look of the home, the private built-environment, and many women’s current careers in influencing the public built-environment.
Law further believes (citing Carol Gilligan’s book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development) in a universal female point of view.
“Women,” as Law paraphrases Gilligan, “tend to define the world through an ethic of caring, take into account circumstances and relationships in our consideration of events, and think of responsibility as a response to diverse considerations rather than a limiting action defined by rules and beliefs….
“As we work in the larger community of neighborhoods, towns, and cities, the potential exists for advancing a sense of meaning and living that is grounded in a complex sense of relationships, a recognition of the need for a flowing connection, less bounded by a hierarchy of rules and beliefs. I believe that this perspective can lead us to a more creative, more cooperative mode of life.”
I’d offer an additional, less ideological reason for the achievements of some of the artists profiled in the Arcade issue’s other articles (Sheila Klein, Norie Sato, Linda Beaumont, Elizabeth Connor, Beliz Brother, et al.).
Artists whose work isn’t really very much alike, except in its shared sensibility of reassurance and emotional safety–something the buyers of public art (always justifiably paranoid of news-media “You Paid For THIS?” pieces and of censorious conservatives) like a lot.
My theory: Commercial-gallery art is run by a business aesthetic of rugged individualism and PR hype.
Public art is bought and sold by bureaucracies, in committee meetings–a realm North American women have historically felt comfortable in (c.f. school boards, church planning committees, ladies’ aid societies, et al.).
Women in other careers could study these traditional areas of strength, to help organize more female-friendly structures in their own lines of work.
This goes beyond early-’80s “networking” buzzwords.
It also shouldn’t be construed into a belief that everything in every social institution would be automatically better if “Women” were ruling them (no specific ones, just generic “Women”).
For one thing, even the most officially “progressive” committee- or collective-style organizations can degenerate into quite hierarchical, procedure-laden entities, or into dictatorships of the bullheaded. Certainly, anyone who’s been involved with a public-art bureaucracy can tell a few horror stories about its internal politics and those participants (M or F) who exploit and abuse it.
We’ll close this with remarks elsewhere in the Arcade issue by Beliz Brother:
“I make sculptures that are components of a larger spatial experience, rather than isolated elements…. I develop public art projects that respond to civic need, to a specific space, to the human condition…. Is this gender specific?”
IN OTHER NEWS: Twenty years ago, my then-UW Daily colleague and now unemployed TV raconteur John Keister wrote a mock proposal for “Homosexual Cliff Notes”–study guides what would help you write a guaranteed-“A” essay proving every major character in every major literary work was really gay. Now, someone appears to have actually written such a guide, only covering composers, musicians, and singers.
WORD-O-THE-DAY: “Gazumping.”
TOMORROW: “Alternative” college radio, sold out or rescued?
IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)
A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”
While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).
What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.
What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).
DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.
The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).
The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).
Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.
THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.
“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.
But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”
I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…
TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.
A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.
But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.
Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.
Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.
But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.
Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.
So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.
Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.
Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.
This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.
It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.
What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.
Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.
So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.
The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”
TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.
YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.
Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.
(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)
I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.
This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.
Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.
A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”
The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.
But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…
Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.
This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.
That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.
Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.
The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.
Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.
LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.
Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.
Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.
Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.
It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.
Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.
The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.
But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.
“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”
She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”
That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.
It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.
It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.
I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.
Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.
Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
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.
Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).
AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.
AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).
SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…
SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)
But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…
BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”
Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.
Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.
Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.
So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
Going to ‘The Dogs’
Original book essay, 3/24/99
The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary
by Rebecca Brown
City Lights Books, $10.95 (paperback)
First, the behind-the-scenes stuff you might remember from a few months back: Seattle author Rebecca Brown made the highly acclaimed The Gifts of the Body, a slightly fictionalized memoir about her days as a volunteer caregiver to AIDS patients. Then, she got a healthy deal with HarperCollins for her next novel. Then, HarperCollins proprietor Rupert Murdoch ordered management to cut expenses, after the company vastly overspent on celebrity books (including one by Murdoch’s pal Newt Gingrich). Brown’s The Dogs was one of the titles dropped, after it had already been announced in company publicity documents. It finally came out months later from a smaller press, for a smaller advance.
But enough of that. Now let’s talk about the book itself, for it’s truly a fine little piece of work which ought to stand on its own rather than as a survival story of the publishing-consolidation wars. To understand the premise, you have to start with the back cover text, which defines a “bestiary” as a “medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” The lesson taught in this tale isn’t as clear as something the Brothers Grimm or Aesop might have told (especially in the original, violent versions), but it still haunts.
Our nameless heroine/narrator, an introverted young adult living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with little need or desire for companionship, meets, or runs into, or is run into by, a doberman pinscher. The narrator takes the dog into her tiny studio apartment, names her Miss Dog, and establishes an emotional bond with the creature beyond any she’d known with her fellow humans.
Then, somewhere around page 32, things get spooky. Miss Dog has a litter of puppies. Then the narrator also gives birth to a litter of puppies. Then more dogs of various ages and demeanors start appearing, as if from nowhere, in the apartment. They follow the narrator wherever she goes, seen by nobody else yet all too physically real to her. Then Miss Dog surgically removes the narrator’s heart, then feeds it back to her chopped up into hors d’ouvres. Then she’s ritually deflated, as a balloon, so there’s more room in the apartment for the ever-increasing numbers of dogs.
As strange as this reads in this summary form, it all makes perfect dream-logic as Brown tells it. She gradually increases the surrealism quotient, patiently (well, as patiently as can be done in a 166-page tale) luring her readers into the heroine’s otherworldly plight.
Brown also never gives an “it was just a dream” cop out. Instead, she ends the heroine’s tale of woe and harrassment on a thickly-disguised therapeutic note, as the heroine finally learns what the dogs had come to her for, to show her what had been missing from her own soul (or something like that). I also cannot do justice here to Brown’s elegant, exquisite prose. Mere excerpts wouldn’t show you the tone, the delicate pacing, of her work. You’ve really got to pick this up for yourself.
