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OKAY. THIS IS WHAT I’M A GONNA DO.
The online and print versions of this here verbal venture have acted as loss-leaders for each other.
Way-bad business planning, no?
So the print magazine’s going to an all-paid-circulation format either this next issue or the one after. You’ll still be able to get single copies in Seattle, but at fewer spots, and they’ll cost ya.
Ya wanna be a freeloader and read the stuff without payin’? You’ll hafta go online. And even then, you’ll be asked to contribute.
By today, we should have instituted a donations box on this here main page. Look for it. It means you can take a quarter from your credit or debit card and help support this here low-budget but definitely not no-budget textual venture.
You can donate as often as you like; even more than once the same day.
It’s run through a middleman outfit called PayPal. Eventually, I’ll turn the online ordering of the print magazine and our books over to PayPal too. (The outfit doing that part now has done a fine job; but its own screens and help files presume you’re buying “shareware” software, not books or magazines.)
Could the PayPal system be the answer for long-sufferin’ web content creators, or even a path toward such an answer?
It’s not the “micropayments” scheme some have advocated for years, going back to Ted Nelson’s long-proposed Xanadu system. With micropayments, readers would be charged pennies (or even fractions of pennies) for every view of a web page run by a participant in the plan. But it’s as close to it as anyone, to my knowledge, has gotten actually running.
IN OTHER NEWS: There was a gang-related shooting in Pioneer Square last Saturday. Mayor Paul Schell, showing his continuing descent into the influence of reality-challenged City Attorney Mark Sidran, immediately blamed it on hiphop music. The next night, another gang shooting broke out in Chinatown. The mayor declined to blame it on karaoke. Nor has he chosen to blame the Belltown muggings earlier this month on the undue spread of $100-a-plate restaurants.
OTHER WORDS (from page3.com’s “Joke of the Day” page): “Put simply, the core humour preferences of many of the Western world’s men, as we see it, can be roughly summarised thus:
“Brits: sex, booze, the Irish/Scottish/Welsh, English uperiority over everyone else.
“Americans: sex, lawyers, Bill Clinton, death, stupid Southerners.
“Canadians: sex, America, penis size, how great/well-endowed Canada is/Canadians are.
“Australians: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Kiwis.
“Kiwis: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Australians.”
TOMORROW: That ’70s Column.
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, I briefly discussed a recent trip to Vancouver, B.C. Like a similar trip discussed here last year, it was on the utterly beautiful Amtrak Cascades (if there’s a nonsexual experience as completely striking as a full-moon sunset on a trestle over Chuckanut Bay, it’s one I’ve yet to confront).
Today, some other reminiscences of what I found there:
The re-imaging of big-ass motorcycles as costly toys for corporate warriors appeared to have reached a nadir with a raffle of a C$27,000 Harley for, of all folks, the Vancouver Opera.
But the new brand-image of biking still isn’t total. Canadian news media regularly refer to a couple of organized-crime rackets, now violently battling for control of the Montreal drug-smuggling trade, as “biker gangs.” Members of one of these rackets are suspected in the recentnear-fatal shooting of a Montreal tabloid reporter who was investigating it.
(That reporter’s near-tragedy coincided with a remarkable syndicated series by another reporter, Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, detailing just why North America’s War On Drugs is destabalizing society and ruining lives far more than the drugs themselves. We’ll discuss this topic later, I promise.)
The B.C. economy still has a ways to go. It’s still heavily based on tourism, agriculture, “extractive” industries (timber, mining), and the Port of Vancouver’s shipping of Sonys and Lexuses into the rest of Canada. The province, and the country, doesn’t have the virtual infrastructure of venture capital and hi-risk speculators that’s fueled so much of the hi-tech biz Stateside. Canadian capitalists have traditionally tried to pass off chancy ventures, either to government subsidy programs or to U.S. parent companies.)
The result: You can get a house in Vancouver for maybe two-thirds of the price of a similar Seattle abode. And thanks to recent trends in the Canadian dollar, consumer goods there are no longer significantly costlier than here. Wages are stagnant.
Taxes are still higher than here. But the corporate-friendly Liberal Party is vowing to do whatever it takes to cut taxes and increase “investor confidence,” even if that includes potentially gutting a broken-but-fixable public health care system. (They appear to be a little less anxious to dismantle government subsidies to corrupt mining and oil ventures.)
Things I did:
One reason for its popularity: It runs underground downtown but on elevated tracks along the rest of its 17-mile line, providing a more aesthetically pleasurable ride (and less neighborhood disruption) than Sound Transit’s planned subway and surface-level route. It doesn’t use monorail technology (which would let it climb Seattle-scale hills), but it’s otherwise a living proof of why the Monorail Initiative guys have a better idea than the Sound Transit bureaucrats.
MONDAY: What’s wrong with Sound Transit.
IN OTHER NEWS:Whither department stores?
THE STEADILY RIGHTWARD-DRIFTING Pee-Eye ran a big feature package last month on rural Washington state’s political climate for Indecision 2000.
The piece was full of the usual Grumpy Small-Town Conservatives (an archetype made for urban consumption if there ever was one). They dutifully blamed all of non-urbanized Washington’s economic problems on pesky bureaucrats and, in one interviewee’s description, “environmental Communists” meddling in these salt-O-the-earth folks’ need to make a rightful off-the-land living.
The reality, natch, is more complex.
The main reason for the economic gap between greater Seattle and the rest of Washington is that the Metroplex has had this here boom in hi-techy and other professional employment this past decade; resulting in the traffic jams, the real-estate hyperinflation, the proliferation of “Market Price” gourmet restaurants, the Blob-shaped music museum, and all the other detrius of gentrification we’ve complained about here.
But, despite the cyber-libertarians’ occasional claims that the PC Age would result in the death of cities (since, these pundits used to profess, doesn’t everybody really want to live in horse country?), eastern and southwestern Washington remained stuck in 1991-recession conditions.
The same global-corporate machinations that clogged Issaquah with condos kept farm commodity prices low, while diverting more pennies of the consumer food dollar toward processors and middlemen and marketers (which, in turn, have been merging and consolidating as fast as the financiers can close the deals).
The timber biz is in a similar predicament, with three additional complications:
The rise on the world market of cheap wood stocks from Indonesia and other countries with low wages and few enforced environmental protections;
The legacy of two or three decades’ overcutting here; which has pretty much just left the most environmentally-sensitive old-growth forests left (aside from the timber-company-run “tree farms” that are still years away from “reharvesting”); and
Consolidation and automation within the sawmill side of the biz; allowing companies to close smaller mills and blame the environmentalists.
A true progressive movement in this country, somethiing along the lines of the old-line Minnesota and Wisconsin rural populists, would be able to capitalize on these real reasons for rural recession. It would feed this simmering frustration into a movement to check corporate power and promote sustainable forestry and agriculture.
Not “environmental Communism,” but a green-but-not-red campaign that would preserve both the land and the people who’ve depended upon it.
The leaders of today’s Democratic Party, concerned almost exclusively with raising $$ from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and courting voters from affluent suburbs, couldn’t care less.
They’ve all but officially written off wide swaths of the nation’s heartland to the Republicans, who are more than willing to accept country folk as voters, volunteers, talk-show callers, and newspaper-interview subjects–all while the GOP politicians continue to prop up the pro-corporate policies that leave farming and timber communities stuck in their rut.
TOMORROW: The disappearance of the old-fashioned bicycle.
IF YOU KNOW THE NAME OF EMMETT WATSON, you might associate it with a weekly Seattle Times column, which usually consists of cute dog stories or reminiscences about Seattle’s quieter olden days.
He’s 81 now. It’s OK in my book for him to take his life, and his writing, a little easier these days.
But you should’ve seen him in his prime.
Unfortunately, the only way you can do that (besides coming through newspaper microfiches in the library) is to stumble upon Watson’s three volumes of memoirs–all of which are, apparently, out of print.
Aside from a handful of ex-UW Daily cartoonists (Mike Lukovich, Lynda Barry), Watson may be the only truly great creative mind the Seattle newspaper industry has generated. (And yes, I’m fully aware that Tom Robbins had been a newspaperman here.)
During his peak years (essentially the era of his main P-I column, 1959-82), he was one of the master practitioners of the three-dot column, that now nearly-forgotten American art form in which dozens of seemingly unrelated items would share the same space, rattled off in crisp stacatto brevity.
But Watson did more than just chronicle the comings and goings of local politicians, business bigwigs, TV-news personalities, and other “celebrities.” He captured the soul of the city he loved.
Each of Watson’s books fits as a discrete part of a whole, like the items in a three-dot column.
The first, Digressions of a Native Son, was put out in 1982 by the Pacific Institute, an employee-motivation-seminar outfit Watson was copywriting for after the P-I reduced him to part-timer status. (How that Lovable Curmuddgeon wound up, even temporarily, with such a Think Positive Thoughts outfit is one story he’s never completely told.) Digressions is mostly autobiography, with long pauses to reminisce about the World’s Fair, press agents, colorful local characters past and present, etc.
A decade later, Watson’s own Lesser Seattle Press came out with Once Upon a Time In Seattle. This slim volume profiled a dozen local leaders and characters; most of whom, like Watson, came of age in the Prohibition and Depression years.
He immediately followed that with My Life In Print. It starts by reprinting the most important autobiographical scenes from Digressions. That’s followed by some 370 pages of Watson’s old newspaper writings, culled and edited for Watson by longtime friend Fred Brack. After a few examples of his early work as a sportswriter (he was 40 before he got to write general-interest columns), My Life gets down to business with brilliant examples of his P-I and more recent Times work.
The three-dot material isn’t included; that, apparently, has proven too perishable, its shortness necessitating an audience pre-familiarity with the eprsons and topics at hand. Rather, My Life collects the single-topic, full-length essay columns that would fill his daily slot once or twice a week. It’s not that he was doing the daily goings-on-about-town stuff to draw a salary and a forum for the longer material; rather, he put into these 900-word profiles and rants everything he continued to learn on the daily grind about pacing, brevity, and writing for impact.
That’s what makes the pieces in My Life still work so well; whether they’re profiling authors and senators and Supreme Court justices, complaining about all the skyscrapers going up downtown even then (he says their massiveness reduces street-level humans to the insignificance of ants), crowing for the preservation of the Pike Place Market, or promoting his only-partly-joking anti-civic-boosterism crusade, “Lesser Seattle Inc.”
Get any or all of Watson’s books. Look on the auction boards for them, if they’re not at a library near you.
Learn about the heartbeat of a community, and read some of the best prose ever “forgotten tomorrow” while you’re at it.
WE’LL BE OUT OF TOWN THE REST OF THIS WEEK, BUT ON MONDAY: Paul Schell’s latest miscalculation.
WHEN BICYCLE MESSENGER YIANNI PHILIPPIDES died in late June, after being struck by an SUV near Alaskan Way South, almost nobody in the local media mentioned it.
There were only a couple of brief Seattle Times stories about a rally and memorial staged by bike activists days later. And even those pieces emphasized the inconvenience commuting motorists received from the 100-plus bicyclists at the rally, not the much greater harm done by one motorist to one bicyclist.
Now, fortunately, the full tale of Philippides’ tragic end has been told in Kickstand, a messengers’ activist zine to which he’d been a contributor.
The 40-page issue #12 contains many pictures of and writings by and about Philippides. He’s shown to have been an ordinary dood; an often-smiling, beer- and beat-poetry-loving student, artist, writer and musician.
The issue also calls loudly and often for folks to see his death not as an isolated happenstance but as a call-to-arms about reckless and aggressive driving these days. As a flyer passed around at the rally stated, “Help us live to ride another day.”
(One unconfirmed rumor about the Philippides crash: The SUV driver supposedly expressed more immediate concern about the blood stains on his vehicle’s paint job than about the man he’d just sent into a coma.)
A MUCH MORE LIGHTHEARTED NOTE is taken by another new local zine, John Montonye’s Salmon, Broads & Beer: A Northwest Journal for the Salmon Sophisticate.
Montonye describes his eight-page rag’s focus as “the three key elements of the Northwest fisherman’s life triangle–calmon, chicks, and brew–I hope to help you land that monster king in your net, an Alyssa Milano lookalike in your lap, and the perfect ale in your hand.” Thusly you learn how to: troll for lingcod; offer pizza slices to women heading out of bars at closing time; and make some homebrew ale that doesn’t taste too creepy.
TOMORROW: What’s still right with Bumbershoot.
RECENTLY I GOT me that AT&T digital-cable thangy, of which I’ve already written about in general terms.
One of the most intriguing and bizarre channels on the system is BBC America.
I hadn’t been a PBS pledge-giving Anglophile for umpteen years, but the BBC America package is something else. Like few cable channels since the early MTV, it’s a whole. It’s got a 24/7 unified programming aesthetic at work, due to its careful selection of BBC-controlled programs and the clear look-and-feel of its promo spots.
A brief explanation: The British Broadcasting Corp., as part of its continuing, government-directed drive to reduce its dependence on “license fees” to TV-set owners (kind of like a mandatory HBO subscription for all UK viewers), established two ad-funded cable/satellite channels for exporting its programs. BBC World is an all-news channel, beamed to cable systems and hotel rooms from Paris to Sydney to Santiago. BBC America is a mostly entertainment channel, aimed squarely at U.S. and Canadian cable and home-satellite systems.
Its schedule is aimed strictly for this niche, and emphasizes the types of BBC programs previously familiar to U.S. audiences on PBS stations. Hence, it doesn’t replicate the schedules of the BBC’s two U.K. broadcast channels (which include plenty of bizarre kiddie shows, collegiate quiz shows, fine-arts documentaries, morning talkfests, U.K. domestic newscasts, one or two Hollywood hit series per night, and day-long weekend coverage of darts and snooker tournaments).
What you do get are:
But’s the juxtaposition of all this hi-class programming fare with the cheap-tchotchke commercials that really puts BBC America over, at least to me. There’s nothing quite like the hushed dialogue and slick camera moves of a drama like Love Hurts (office politics and sexual intrigue at a charity agency) or Casualty (office politics and sexual intrigue in a hospital) being interrupted by the loud hawking of such “As Seen on TV” products as the Turbie Twist hair turban, the Craftmatic adjustable bed, and a wall clock with pictures of toy trains.
It sure beats those “underwriting announcements” for ExxonMobil.
TOMORROW: A pair of local zine reviews.
NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (P-I Bumbershoot preview by R.M. Campbell, 9/1): “Bumbershoot has a long history of supporting local dance groups. Most are local….”
BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture? Good. Get used to it. Learn to love the chaos.”
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.
The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.
The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on “How to Dress for a Nudist Camp.” Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.
While the Nova story’s text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre’s, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something’s loony about males and un-“beautiful” females treating their bodies as unshameful.
Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I’ve yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I’ve written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone’s expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.
Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.
Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one’s inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.
As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement’s ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)
No, nudists aren’t weird in Bizarre’s usual definition. They’re normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.
Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.
(P.S.: I’ve been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I’ve found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn’t sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)
TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.
AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.
It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.
I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.
Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.
Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.
I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.
He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.
At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).
It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.
Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.
Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.
It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.
And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.
He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.
Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.
But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?
TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?
THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.
Call it the Proud Creep.
This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.
In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.
I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.
It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.
Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:
As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.
(In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)
I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.
It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.
SO I FINALLY SAW Survivor.
I’d planned not to, or at least not to write about it, as part of my ever-so-contrarian policy of avoiding whatever’s the only topic on Entertainment Tonight or the Fox News Channel during any particular month. In the past, that’s meant little-to-no remarks here about O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzales, flag burning, or the departure of Kathie Lee Gifford.
But this time, I took the bait (or rather, the edible grubworms).
What I found: A compelling-in-that-train-wreck-sorta-way show that, while nominally based on a European series, plays out more like a cross between The Real World (and is just as unreal as that show, from another Viacom-owned channel), Japan’s extreme-embarrassment game shows, and corporate-warrior ideology.
The latter is the show’s most disturbing ingredient. I suppose if the New Agers could routinely misinterpret various indigenous people’s rites and customs, so can the Glengarry Glen Ross/Gordon Gekko ilk. But the whole Survivor premise is so against what real survival is all about (either for indigenous peoples, for teens and adults play-acting in “survival camps,” or for soldiers and others who happen to find themselves stuck somewhere.
That prior CBS desert-island show, Gilligan’s Island, was closer to the essence of real survival, on an island or in North American society. It depicted people who had little in common except their unsuitedness for the task at hand, and who had to learn to get along and work together for their common goal of living through their situation.
The Survivor motto, “Outplay–Outwit–Outlast,” deliberately contradicts all of this. It’s all about the rugged individualism, backbiting, and looking-out-for-#1 championed by corporate idealogues dating back to Ford and Rockefeller’s “social Darwinism” theories. Philosophies that allowed those who’d schemed and stolen their way to the top to heartily justify everything they’d done.
But as I’ve been saying for some time, business isn’t everything. And as local author David C. Korten, whom I discussed yesterday, says, the established priorities and philosophies of business (particularly of big business) aren’t the same as those of life in general. Business’s priorities can even contradict or deny those needed for real living, real relating, and real (as opposed to merely fiscal) growth.
A society that tries to hard to be like Survivor will not, in the long run, survive.
TOMORROW: The nearly-annual ‘Why I Still Love Seafair’ column.
LAST FRIDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
I’d first moved into the Ellis Court building in September 1991. As you may recall, several other things happened in Seattle that month. Nirvana released Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, KNDD brought commercial “alternative” radio back to Seattle airwaves for the first time in three years, and a certain tabloid newspaper, for which I would end up devoting seven years of my life, began publication.
When I first moved in, Ellis Court was a regular commercial apartment building. I hadn’t known that it had been a favorite of drug dealers. The first clue of that came on my first night as a resident, when the intercom would BUZZZZ loudly all through the wee hours, by men who invariably gave, as their only name, “It’s Me, Lemme In.” Fortunately, the owners had just begun to clear the building of crooks; by my second month there, nearly a third of the apartment doors bore foreclosure notices.
By 1993, the building was being managed by Housing Resource Group Seattle, a nonprofit agency doing what it can to meet the ever-escalating need for “below market rate” (i.e., for non-millionaires) housing in our formerly-fair city.
Belltown was a happenin’ place at the time I moved in. While several artist spaces and studios had folded due to already-rising rents, there were still many (including Galleria Potatohead and the 66 Bell lofts). The Crocodile Cafe nightclub had just opened. The Vogue was in the middle of its 17-year reign as Seattle’s longest-running music club. The Frontier Room, the Two Bells, the Rendezvous, My Suzie’s, the original Cyclops, and the venerable Dog House were serving up affordable foods and/or drinks; to be soon joined by World Pizza.
By early 1995, the Speakeasy Cafe and the Crocodile had become the anchor-ends of a virtual hipster strip mall along Second Avenue, which also included Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, World Pizza, Shorty’s, the Lava Lounge, the Wall of Sound and Singles Going Steady record stores, the Vain hair salon, the Rendezvous, Black Dog Forge, and Tula’s jazz club.
But the place got a far pricier rep soon after that. In block after block, six-story condo complexes replaced the used-vacuum stores, recording studios, band-practice spaces, old-sailor hotels, and old-sailor bars. About the only spaces not turned into condos were turned into either (1) offices for the architects who designed the condos, and (2) fancy-shmancy $100-a-plate restaurants (the kind with valet parking, executive chefs, and menu items designated as “Market Price”).
The demolition of the SCUD building (home of the original Cyclops) in ’97, followed in ’99 by the condo-conversion of the 66 Bell art studios, provided more than enough confirmation that Belltown just wasn’t my kinda scene no more.
Moving on time was well due.
Maybe past due–aside from people in the same apartment building, by this spring I only knew five people who still lived in Belltown. Everyone else had either gone to other established boho ‘hoods in town or had joined Seattle’s new Hipster Diaspora, scattered to Ballard, Columbia City, Aurora, or White Center.
More about that in a few days.
TOMORROW: A few moving misadventures.
IN OTHER NEWS: The icon of many a blank-generation boy’s dreams is alive and well and living in Kelso!
I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.
In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)
I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.
One of these was The Girls from Esquire.
That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.
(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)
The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)
The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).
But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.
Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.
A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.
And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.
Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.
Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.
TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.
AMONG THE STRUGGLING DOT-COMS that have seen layoffs, cutbacks, or total closures in recent weeks, a few have been outfits that specialized in “content” of a written or journalistic or entertainment nature.
Some critics see the troubles at some news and opinion sites as proof that either “old-media” publishing and broadcasting companies don’t understand how information flows best on the Net; or that the very notion of trying to make a business model from online content’s doomed to futility.
Some of these critics note that certain low-budget news sites have stayed afloat while more heavily-funded content sites have floundered. Many of the survivor sites are weblogs or portals, providing little more than thoughtfully-curated links to content created and posted elsewhere.
(Many of the stories linked from these link sites are, ironically enough, on the online auxiliaries of old-media newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters.)
Other critics are pointing to a concept called “open media” as a more Net-savvy, more populistic, and more modern alternative to the established, commercial “closed media” and the content sites that try to operate like old media.
The idea of “open media” seems to involve discussion boards and collections of user-contributed info; of voluntary info-sharing (nobody pays; nobody’s paid) rather than the works of career journalists.
It harkens back to the ’80s Bulletin Board System and Usenet days of modem connections as vehicles for written rhetoric, debating, arguing, and word-spreading. On that level, it’s a good thing.
But that’s not journalism.
The various flavors of critics who scoff gleefully at concent-site troubles conveniently forget that the whole dot-com sector’s seeing fiscal iffiness. Net-retailers, portal sites, search-engine sites–the red ink’s flowing all over, and the venture-capital and IPO infusions are getting scarcer.
(The critics also forget that periodical publishing, which “content” websites are essentially part of, is a high-startup-time business. New major print magazines typically take as long as five years to become profitable.)
And if “open media” means nobody pays, how are you going to get any professional reporting or research (as opposed to deskbound opinionating, partisan propaganda, or disguised press releases)?
Ad revenue, by itself, doesn’t seem to be the answer to paying for professional content-makers. (Particularly if all you’re selling are banner ads for other dot-coms, themselves now oft-struggling.)
Yet, at least so far, Net users have proven unwilling to pay subscription prices for any content that doesn’t facilitate (1) stock-market betting, (2) sports betting, or (3) masturbation.
In the “open source” software community, from which the “open media” people are getting some of their hype words, programming code is given and shared for free. It works, even as a business model for professional programmers, because these hardcore code-meisters can use that code in the business of providing in-house and custom programming services for institutional clients; they can also sell documentation and service contracts associated with the code.
If you can think of an online-content business model that might work (“Micropayments” of a few cents per page viewed? T-shirt sales? Grants? Product-placement fees?), lemme know.
I might become the first to try it.
TOMORROW: Don’t make Kozmo.com employees submit to background checks; give them a “Kozmo Quiz.”
