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Feed and Suck went on “indefinite hiatus” last Friday. I miss both of ’em, but particularly Feed.
Run by Steven Johnson, one of the early gurus and advocates of web publishing, Feed had a novel format combining a single online column by various contributors (“Feed Daily”) with feature-section packages taking longer and broader looks at meta-themes such as politics, the environment, and literature.
What’s more, Feed had the novelty of coming from NYC, not Frisco, which helped it maintain a healthy distance from the more annoying aspects of cyber-hype. (Suck sneered at the cyber-hype but still imagined it to be important enough to sneer at.)
OTHER VOICES (William Arnold, in his P-I review of the Tomb Raider movie): ” …It’s also scary to keep reading (even in my own newspaper) how Lara Croft is such a wonderful new feminist role model for young women. We’re talking here about a sadistic egotist who greedily vandalizes the cultural monuments of the Third World and embodies the spirit of Columbine. A role model? God help us all.”
ELSEWHERE:
Devo action figures! Every home should have a complete set! (found by Slumberland)….
What if they gave an Internet content creators’ convention and nobody came?…
Sympathy for the record industry?…
Dave Winer’s long-running (in Net-years) DaveNet column recently suggested a “corporate death penalty,” the government-mandated dissolving of companies found guilty of major offenses.
“For example,” Winer writes, “I would have put Exxon to death for the Valdez disaster, to set an example for other would-be rapers of the environment.”
Winer has yet to detail how this might be carried out (government seizure and auction of assets, perhaps?). But he has suggested it’d be the ideal answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Instead of splitting MS up into two firms, “after the death penalty, there would be zero Microsofts, not two.”
There’s a precedent for this in Britain, under the old tradition of crown-chartered corporations (such as the still-extant Hudson’s Bay Co.) existing on the government’s bidding and subject to periodic review and non-automatic renewal.
The modern-day example of this is Britain’s oldest commercial TV network, ITV. As I oh-so-briefly explained recently, ITV was devised as a loose consortium of local stations, with no central corporate management save for the heavy hand of their government regulator, originally known as the Independent Television Authority (ITA). The ITA built and ran the transmitters, then contracted out the programming and ad sales on these stations to 15 different companies. The contracts were for limited terms (four to eight years) and their renewal was not automatic. The ITA would re-hire, fire, or force mergers among contractor companies for any combination of reasons, from financial solvency to programming priorities. Thus major operators such as ATV/ITC (producers of The Prisoner and The Muppet Show), Associated British Corp. (The Avengers), Rediffusion (Ready Steady Go!), and Thames Television (The Benny Hill Show) have come and gone from the ITV airwaves over the years.
Of course the US has always had a more libertarian attitude toward the sacred rights of business than the pre-Thatcher UK. Today’s American regulatory system luuuvs gigantic media conglomerates and other global business giants. To even put teeth back into US business oversight (let alone fangs) would require a far bigger change in Congress than one centrist Republican turning into a centrist Democrat.
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.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have, as local readers might guess, been postponed.
When last I wrote about Emmett Watson, the dean of Seattle newspapermen, I described him as “possibly the greatest self-proclaimed hack writer in Northwest history.”
He was a helluva lot more than that.
He was a city’s chronicler, in a three-dot item column and occasional longer essays, then in three volumes of memoirs (all, alas, out of print).
He was also a city’s conscience, though he’d never admit to such a potentially pretentious appellation.
He would, however, freely admit to being a throwback to both the old days of newspapering and the old days of Seattle.
The former meant he was a master of the now largely-forgotten Art of the Column and the heritage of the classic newspaperman character type, the ink-stained wretch who drank with two fists and typed with two fingers. Watson wasn’t really like that, but he endearingly pretended to be such for droll-comic effect.
The latter meant he gave a damn about this once-forgotten corner of America and the humans of all social strata who inhabited it. He hobnobbed with the powerful, and dropped many a local-celeb name in his columns, but felt at home with the working stiffs, the unsung men and women who actually did things. (It’s sad but appropriate that his final published column appeared in last fall’s strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.)
Even his “Lesser Seattle” schtick, a running semi-gag about trying to “Keep the Bastards Out” and put the brakes on regional development, was really a not-so-disguised paean to the Seattle and the Northwest that he knew, the gruff but lovable place of honest curmuddgeons and simple dreamers–a culture he saw being steadily eroded, not just by loud-talkin’ Calif. immigrants but by local boosters who seemed to hate everything that was great about this place and desperately wanted to turn it into something “World Class” at any cost.
Watson tweaked and stretched the format of the three-dot column so it could say just about anything he wanted it to. He was outspoken (and on what I consider the right side of) just about every big political and social issue of the past half-century.
And it’s not an exaggeration to note that all I’ve done in this online (and sometimes print) column was an attempt, however misdirected and feeble, to try to write like he did.
NEXT: My print future.
I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE letters and emails asking me to stop using the word “yuppie” in the online column.
So, at least for today, I’ll use a different term to describe the only people Seattle’s political and media elites care about–the Monoculture.
In the Monoculture aesthetic, everyone who lives in Seattle (or at least everyone who deserves to live here) is affluent, childless, in an office-type profession, educated yet decidedly non-intellectual, “culturally aware” yet relentlessly middlebrow, “active in the community” yet devoutly pro-business, a devout attender of high-volume, high-priced restaurants, and a strong supporter of “diversity” just as long as everybody looks and behaves identically blandly.
Entire retail empires, publications, and political campaigns are built on this dubious premise.
And now, there’s a slick free monthly, Colors NW, showing that you don’t have to be of pale Euro descent to be part of the Monoculture.
The magazine’s second issue, out now, has a Bon Marche ad on the back (why, by the way, doesn’t the Bon still have a real website?), smaller inside ads for mortgage consultants and liposuction clinics, and features within about the Film Festival, a dot-com executive, and pricey restaurants.
The Bon model is Asian American. The liposuction ad’s before-and-after model and the dot-com exec are both African American. The restaurant reviews hype “upscale soul food” and “down home Japanese.” Otherwise, they’re hard to distinguish from similar features in Monoculture-obsessed media.
“Yeah,” you might be saying if you’ve already read the mag, “but what about the cover story on the history of Asian American political activism in Seattle? Or the profile of Samoan hiphop DJ Kutfather? Or the little back-page essay by a Seattle U student advisor on the identity confusion resulting from her own half-white, half-Filipino heritage?”
Yes, the mag has all those things. But these three pieces depict their subjects as ideal citizens of Seattle-The-Good. Even the Asian-activism story is written as a tale of earnest progressives striving to rectify wrongs that all nice Reagan Democrats can agree are wrong (racist ad images, for example).
And in the context of the magazine’s more consumerist material, the profiled activists get the same overall aura you see in corporate-sponsored Martin Luther King Day ads. That is, they become seen as out-of-the-box-thinkin’ political entrepreneurs, the social-justice equivalents of “new economy” CEOs.
But that’s not necessarily all that bad. After all, there’s something to be said for the idea that ethnic striving oughta be about making it, succeeding in the melting-pot and taking pride in that success.
Even if it means conforming to the white-dominated zeitgeist of the Monoculture, and not to the “true diversity” zeitgeist of white lefties such as myself.
IN OTHER NEWS:A tiny news brief reveals what critics of “get tuff” welfare policies have long claimed–that draconian aid regulations cost more in paperwork and enforcement costs than they save in denied benefits.
NEXT:“The arts” as an economic development scheme.
Some folk in Boston are archiving those “we’ll set your poem to music” records. The ones they don’t consider good enough to reissue on CD, they’ve posted online (found by The Interstellar Cafe)….
I OFTEN GET EMAILS from folk who run other websites, asking for plugs for their sites on mine. And on rare occasions, sites are even recommended to me by people other than the sites’ own creators.
Today, a look at some.
Creating Your Own Funeral: Site creator Stephanie West Allen calls her site an info-repository for creating your own funeral or memorial service.”
It’s a basic links page to basic, relatively cheery how-to pieces (some by Allen) about “designing your end-of-life event, regardless of your age or state of health.” One thing you can say: It’s one artistic creation where you won’t care about the audience response.
Xiao Xiao: Described by the correspondent who recommended it to me as “deranged but weirdly hypnotic stick-men homage to Jackie Chan, The Matrix, and Crouching Tiger, etc. etc.”
It turns out to be a cute, albeit morbid, Flash animation of simply-rendered figures in various monochromatic colors, engaged in violent karate and knife fights in a setting reminiscent of ’80s video games.
Cranky Media Guy: Site runner Bob Pagani thinks I should put in a good word for his online narrative about a friend, Tom Kraemer, who (according to Pagani) “is in love with an imaginary woman.”
As Pagani explains, “Back in February, I loaned him my Mac and a copy of the imaging program SuperGoo. With them he made the face of a ‘woman….’ Now he says he is in love with the woman he created and wants to find her real-life counterpart. While I realize this is pretty odd, he is my friend and I do want him to be happy so I have put the picture of Tom’s ‘dream girl’ and the entire story
on my website… so that Tom can find his ‘dream girl’ and have a happy life.”
The Art of Kissing: Reader John R. Nicholson recommended this online posting of a 1936 how-to manual by one Hugh Morris.
This simple, one-page, all-text work is elegantly and tastefully written, even as it discusses such topics as “Why Kissing Is Pleasant” and “How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouths.” While some readers might chafe at Morris’s insistence upon traditional gender roles (“He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones”), I believe all of you will enjoy the way he expresses his convictions.
Written long before the first computer, this is clearly the best site of today’s reviewed batch.
NEXT: Just a little more of this.
IN LAST SUNDAY’S Seattle Times Sunday magazine, my ol’ pal Fred Moody had a memoir piece about his 20-plus years as a freelancer, staff writer, and/or editor at Seattle Weekly. It’s a nice little read; but two aspects particularly struck me:
1. Moody appears to believe, unless he’s being really sarcastic (and he’s been known to get that way), that the original Weekly incarnation under founding publisher David Brewster was a daring, status-quo-challenging “alternative” rag.
Bull doo-doo. Claiming the Brewster-era Weekly had ever been “alternative” is as phony a boomer-generation conceit as claiming Linda Ronstadt had ever been a rock singer.
From the start, the Weekly had been an attempt to put out the content of a slick upscale city monthly on once-a-week newsprint. (Brewster had previously worked on the first Seattle magazine.) The second cover story was about a “foodie” restaurant (the now-defunct Henry’s Off Broadway). Restaurant covers outnumbered arts covers most years, as best as I can recall.
From its political priorities to its entertainment coverage, everything in it was aimed at a small but well-defined target audience–the New Professionals who wore Nordstrom dress-for-success suits to jobs at the big new downtown office towers, attended watered-down “art” movies such as Harold and Maude, and dined on “gourmet” versions of American comfort foods. (The paper’s original backers included Gordon Bowker, who also helped start Starbucks and Redhook.)
If it ever took a “non-mainstream” approach to its topics, it was the same approach as that taken by early NPR or such PBS shows as Washington Week In Review–not the elite speaking to the masses, but the elite speaking to itself.
And if it ever took anything approaching an “irreverent” attitude toward regional politics, it was only firmly placed within official worldview–that The Sixties Generation, no matter how blanded-out and comfortably ensconced in premature middle age, was the absolute ultimate apex of human evolution.
In this worldview, oldsters (including oldster politicians) constituted a squaresville presence to be placated or patronized.
And anyone too young to have needed (or too proletarian to have attained) a college deferment from Vietnam didn’t even count as a full human being.
Thus, rock n’ roll music was never, ever, a priority at the old Weekly. Nor was any black culture too young to have been taken over by whites.
If you think this is just my Blank Generation whining, it isn’t. The Weekly has been sold and totally revamped twice, but old Weekly worldview lives on in the current mayoral campaign of Mark Sidran, whose demographic-cleansing campaigns as city attorney are based squarely on the assumption that upscale white baby boomers are the only “real” people in this town.
2. Moody was right on the button when he noted that, just as the success of the early Stranger proved how old and unhip the old Weekly was (or at least as it had become), so is today’s Stranger heading in the same direction.
But that’s a topic for another day.
NEXT: People who want me to plug their sites.
YOU SIMPLY MUST GET Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.
This handsome full-color volume, curated and narrated by Julie Lasky, gathers the best posters, album covers, ads, logos, magazine covers, and other assorted graphic creations produced from 1978 to 2000 by Chantry, the king of Seattle designers (until he followed a girlfriend’s career move to St. Louis).
Lasky thoroughly chronicles Chantry’s various “periods” or subgenres of retro design–Sub Pop, Estrus, the Rocket, theatrical work, slick posters, cheap posters, copies of sleazy-mag back-cover ads, copies of tool catalogs, copies of circus posters, copies of retro-smut, and, oh yeah, the four or five books he designed, including mine. No amount of thanks I can ever give will be enough for the work he did on Loser (which gets its due as a piece of Chantry’s oevure in Lasky’s book).
When Chantry held his leaving-town bash at the new Cyclops back in March 2000, he gave me the usual rant people were giving in those pre-NASDAQ-crash weeks about the dot-com invasion having finally sealed the ultimate triumph of the gentrifiers over the humble, funky li’l Seattle we’d known and loved (even though he’d complained as much as anybody about the town’s supposed lack of opportunities and urban sophistication back in the old days).
But it wasn’t just the destruction of artist housing and funky spaces, or the increase in arrogant cell-phone yappers, that he hated about the alleged Internet Revolution.
He was a lo-tech guy, in both his aesthetic styles and his working techniques. The text of Loser was desktop-published, but the 1,000-or-so images and the chapter headings were all pasted-up by hand, and all the photos were screened on a real stat camera. He despised the soulless perfection and numbing slickness he saw in digital graphics.
Nowadays, with KCMU in Paul Allen’s clutches and The Rocket and Moe and the OK Hotel gone, but also with clubs slowly getting back to booking more live bands instead of soundalike techno nights, and with retro-industrialism so beloved in PoMo architecture (plate glass, thin wires, exposed duct work), I have one thing to say to Art:
It’s OK now. Really. Things are getting better; that is to say, Seattle’s feeling comfortably depressed again. The dot-comers are on the run. Everybody’s sick of virtual reality. Real objects, real passions, and real life are back in vogue.
You can come back now.
NEXT: George W. Bush and Don De Lillo.
ONE OF THE NET’S first writer-success stories is Aaron Barnhart.
Back in the Iron Age of online communication (circa 1993-94), Barnhart started a weekly e-mailed column, Late Show News, covering late-night TV with a particular David Letterman emphasis.
Barnhart’s searing, witty, and attitude-free insights got him a cult following that led to freelance assignments for “real” print publications, and eventually to his getting a job as TV critic for the Kansas City Star.
Barnhart’s been dealing with leukemia lately, and talks frankly about it at his TV Barn site.
Among his comments is his personal experience with the kind of genetic-based therapies whose early unperfected forms, and their associated tragic human clinical trials, were the topic of last week’s Seattle Times long investigative series.
The Times stories repeatedly depict the therapies Hutch studied, and the trials thereof, as one big horrible disaster, spurred not by scientific inquiry but by the financial interest held by the Hutch and some of its physicians in the products being studied.
But Barnhart (whose paper is owned by Knight-Ridder, which owns 49.5 percent of the Times) notes on his site that if it weren’t for those crude, early versions of the therapies, the more perfected versions he’s using wouldn’t have been developed.
Yes, many people died in the Hutch’s early tests. But many of them would have died from their cancers anyway. And it’s because of what the Hutch and other institutions learned from those tests that the current therapies are around to help prolong the life of one of my favorite online writers.
The remaining issue raised by the Times series is whether patients in the clinical trials knew how experiemental and risky their treatments were. Based on his experience, Barnhart writes that that’s an issue endemic to the whole medical-research industry, not just to the Hutch.
NEXT: Tell me a story.
Critical Mass Exodus
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist discussed the sudden, management-pushed retirement of longtime Seattle Times film critic John Hartl. Today, a look at a quite different critical voice, also disappearing–a highbrow- and experimental-music zine.)
IT’S OFFICIAL: The Tentacle is jettisoning its ink edition. The current spring issue will be followed by a final one in a few months. The web site, www.tentacle.org, will probably continue to list shows, but this activity, like any resumption of the print version, depends on a dwindling supply of volunteer labor.
Although money is always tight in the magazine world, the main reason Tentacle helmsman Dennis Rea gives for quitting is that he and other collective members (Mike Marlin, Christopher DiLaurenti, and Carl Juarez) need to spend more time on their own projects.
A larger problem is that the community The Tentacle serves is too small. Of the dozens who regularly do, as the cover says, “free improv, avant-rock, new composition, noise, electro-acoustic, out jazz,” and other unusual forms, not enough folks contribute to the one publication that pays much attention to them.
Twenty subscribers and a handful of ads pay the bills, and it takes another twenty people to write, edit, lay out, publish, and distribute this 24-page, 8.5 X 11 newsprint denizen of the resonant deep.
In a way, the narrow focus is what made The Tentacle one of the most fascinating magazines around. I speared it when it first surfaced, about three years ago. At the time, I was editing the Washington Free Press and so was drawn to it as a beautifully designed shoestring-budget journal rather than as a kind of lobbying ploy on the part of some artists to get themselves noticed.
As a writer who’s done my share of such lobbying, I was also intrigued by the spirit of this mad venture. To read The Tentacle was to confront the apparent reality of a vast music scene that thrived on presenting experimental work.
In music, writing, or any other artistic discipline, works that fool around with the conventions of their craft are hard to sell. Unlike larger publications that ignore or ridicule such an approach to art, The Tentacle had a sense of humor about its place in the cultural food chain.
Of course, the expectations of artists who book and promote their own shows are nothing if not realistic. Then again, maniacs who spend years composing pieces that nobody may want to play or hear, refining techniques that seem more suited to a carnival than a concert stage, and striving for a perfection that must alienate in order to succeed are so idealistic as to make monks seem like venal hedonists.
The critical questions The Tentacle addressed weren’t the case-by-case judgments the overnight critic makes, but idealistic concerns. Instead of CD reviews and celebrity profiles for fans, there were CD release notifications and interviews and articles for fellow artists. The Tentacle provided a forum to define “creative” music and to discuss the relationship of politics to art; a place for book reviews, concert reports, cartoons, a calendar, and oddball features.
What is art? Why is art important? Which art matters?
These are the lines of investigation John Hartl and The Tentacle have pursued in their various ways.
I know these people and have written for these publications, but my stake in all this is personal only insofar as it is intellectual.
That is, the idea of devolving into a society where attitude-packed cheap shots replace thoughtful reviews and where experience, civil discourse, and consideration give way to picks-‘n-pans arts coverage is a threat to what I write, read, hear, see, and know.
People retire, magazines sink out of sight, and newspapers wrap fish.
NEXT: More things we’re losing.
(NOTE: Today’s installment concerns a topic some readers might find completely icky. Reader discretion is advised.)
THE NATION RECENTLY RAN a fairly long piece by Marc Cromer about the LA corporate-porn video industry and a new set of guidelines issued by some of its biggest producers, discouraging or banning images or situations that could be perceived as violent or excessively kinky.
Cromer’s premise: Nobody knows yet how much more censorous a good-old-boy Republican president will be than a good-old-boy Democratic president. But just in case, the biggest porn makers are reining in their directors, sacrificing freedom of expression on the altar of political expediency.
That’s not quite what’s going on.
The adult entertainment business has always been a business first, tailoring its offerings to what it believes the market, as well as the political climate, will bear.
Certainly, the thousands of lo-budget, lo-creativity XXX videos churned out by the industry’s majors (some 200 different titles every week) don’t attest to sexual or directorial imaginativeness but to assembly-line production, rote formulas, and ever more narrowly-defined market niches.
(Any real couple whose sex life was as unvarying (or as loveless) as the couples in LA porn would be a good candidate for counseling.)
Under corporate porn’s new self-imposed rules, the formula will get (and has already gotten) even duller.
But politics isn’t the chief reason for the new rules.
What happenned was a new set of distribution channels, which have made hardcore product more widely available but, at the same time, have obligated that product’s makers to adjust their content accordingly.
This story begins with the Spice Channel, a cable network owned by some big LA porn-video people. It ran their wares with all phallic and hardcore shots edited out. Then it began Spice Hot, which left in some things but not everything. Playboy bought Spice but not Spice Hot, which became the Hot Network and now appears as a pay-per-view option on assorted cable systems and in thousands of hotel rooms.
It soon became a major new revenue stream for the big LA porn producers. So much so that they started shaping their output to meet the perceived tastes of this more mainstream market.
“Money shot” ejaculation scenes could easily be cut for Hot Network showings but retained for home video. Other types of material, though, had to be rethought from the ground up, lest there be too little Hot Network-appropriate footage in a production to warrant a full pay-per-view retail price.
Hence, the new list of verboten topics Cromer recounts in his story, ranging from wax-dripping and food fetishism to black men with white women.
It doesn’t mean you can’t see these in porn videos anymore. It just means you won’t see them in the videos from the big LA porn factories with contracts to supply shows to the Hot Network. These big companies put out so many darned titles as part of a strategy to crowd smaller producers off the store shelves. The smaller smutmongers, with a whole range of material now theirs alone, might have just been given a new lease on fiscal life.
Unless, of course, there really is a renewed political censorship scare.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race at this early date.
YESTERDAY, we discussed what’s wrong withPlayboy these days. It’s bland, corporate, materialistic to a festishist extent, and not particularly sexy.
Today, we begin to ponder an alternate vision-in-text of what sex is and can be in this new century.
And I don’t mean that now-passe ’90s vision, expressed in Wired magazine and elsewhere, of advanced masturbation helpers such as holographic pornos and “dildonic” sensor-fitted suits. Even at the time those things were being hyped, I believed sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart in their lonely individual fantasy realms.
The world doesn’t need more fake sex. It needs more real (albeit safe) sex. Sex is great. Most people should have more.
This means I think coitus (in whatever gender-combo you prefer) is preferable to solo sex; but, more importantly, that any (respectful) sexual expression is preferable to the squeaky-clean unreality promoted by the religious right and those high-school purity pledges.
Chastity is good, at least for periods of time, for (1) those adults who’ve chosen it as part of a spiritual discipline; (2) those young people who aren’t yet ready for the emotional turmoil of intimate relationships (or for the discipline of contraception); (3) those in monogamous relationships who choose to forego alternatives during periods of separation; (4) those older and/or widowed people who’ve chosen to retire their sex lives; and (5) those in dysfunctional life patterns who need to take time out from intimacy while working to heal themselves.
But for the vast rest of the citizenry, more sex is, generally, mo’ better.
It’s not the answer to everything (and it’s certainly not the only answer to an otherwise failing relationship).
But when it’s done right, it can bring you to a greater awareness of yourself, your partner, and even to the continuum of life.
(It’s also a great way to relieve nervous tension, invigorate your metabolism, and spot potential cancer warning signs.)
And the answer to bad sex, i most cases, isn’t no sex but good sex–a healthy attitude towards one’s body and its cravings, combined with enough guilt-free respect to avoid or resist abusive situations.
You don’t prevent kids from getting exploited by keeping them ignorant and “innocent,” but by teaching them to respect their sexualities and themselves. You don’t prevent the spread of STDs by telling people they have to stay alone in shame and frustration, but by helping them learn to love safely and consciously.
SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine’s video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol’ American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher’s self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine’s longtime critics, who’ve leveled the same charges against it all these years–charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that’s a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they’re honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Women” and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That’s what I think they think they’re doing. What I think they’re really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics’ diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It’s corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable “product,” utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as “flatteringly” as ad photographers try to “humanize” the newest cars and detergents.
Today’s Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they’re playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They’re L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America’s lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell–to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they’re not even all that sexy.
It’s an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn’t seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British “bloke magazines” such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women’s clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers’ lives and making it seem naughty again. They’re rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood’s grip on America’s minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.
A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.
A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.
As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.
Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.
(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)
So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.
The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.
Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.
A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.
(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)
But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.
The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.
TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?
LAST THURSDAY, we talked a bit about the end of the Seattle Union Record, the little paper formed by then-striking Seattle Times and P-I workers.
I said then that the Union Record was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town (heck, any town) needs. There oughta be a way to make something like it that can survive as an ongoing venture. (The UR relied on volunteer help and “sympathy ads” bought by other unions, tactics which obviously wouldn’t work on a permanent for-profit paper.)
So here’s my not-at-all-modest proposal for a new local daily, based on the UR format:
A (non-strike) daily paper isn’t a zine. Even a tight-and-taut li’l free daily like the one I’m outlining here would require a full-time staff of at least several dozen, and enough operating capital to keep it going until it proves itself as an ad vehicle. (USA Today took three or four years to become consistently profitable; some bigtime magazines can take up to five years.)
But I’m convinced the potential is there. The UR proved there’s reader interest in such a paper. By reaching readers who’ve become turned off from the standard cookie-cutter U.S. newspaper, it would provide an alternative for advertisers who like the dynamic and semipermanence of print but don’t generate enough business from placing ads mainstream dailies.
Given the right people and enough time and money, such a paper could become successful enough that the Newsaper Guild would be able to demand (and get) its rightful share of that success.
So who wants to help me get this started? Lemme know.
TOMORROW: Lynda Barry’s Cruddy is anything but.
