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IT’S THE FOURTH OF JULY of a Presidential election year. Time for Silly Season to get underway–except that it’s been going for some time now.
On the Presidential end, we’ve got another of what Michael Moore likes to call “Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” pairs. Their economic and other policies are virtually identical.
Both Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils (heart symbol) big corporations, “free” trade, megamergers, and (despite occasional posturing otherwise) lobbyist-financed campaigns.
Each proclaims himself to be the one to lead America’s booming-as-never-before economy to even further heights–despite the several early-warning signals that the overheated economy’s starting to cool off, and despite the reality that the vast majority of folks have barely stayed economically even (or fallen behind) in these recent years of downsizings, manufacturing-job exports, stagnant wages, real-estate hyperinflation, and potentially dangerous stock-market speculations.
Should the stock markets (and the highly-speculative tech stocks in particular) continue their recent downward step-stumble, should gas prices remain high, and should interest rates stay up, the question will change from who’ll best continue our economic course to who’ll best redirect it.
And since both candidates got their respective party nominations due to heavy up-front campaign donations and backroom influencing by the corporate crowd, don’t expect either to have any real ideas in that realm.
Instead, look to Gore and Bush to each continue his appeal to his respective party’s faithful based on what we could call market-segmentation partisan issues.
Gore will make the requisite half-sincere pronouncements about health care, the environment, women’s and gay rights, transit, arts funding, and protecting abortion rights.
Bush will make the requisite half-sincere pronouncements about turning Social Security over to the stock market, landowners’ rights, developers’ rights, family values, highway building, prison building, and repealing abortion rights.
The message of each candidate will be that he’s a big-money whore, but he’s our big-money whore.
Here in The Other Washington, meanwhile, we’ve a somewhat clearer choice in chief-executive wannabes.
Since right-wing Democrat Dixy Lee Ray’s single term ended in 1980, our state’s been governed by one centrist Republican (John Spellman), one true liberal Democrat (Mike Lowry), and two corporate Democrats (Booth Gardner and Gary Locke). Locke has caved in on health care and stadium subsidies and virtually every other issue on which corporate bucks have applied sufficient pressure.
That would make Locke vulnerable to a strong opposition candidacy by a progressive Republican of the old Northwest Dan Evans/Tom McCall school. To Locke’s luck, they don’t make that kind of Republican anymore.
Instead, the GOP’s handing its gubernatorial nomination to John Carlson, talk-radio demagogue and all-around power-grubbing twerp.
I’ve had more to say about Carlson in the past, and am sure to have more to say about Carlson later this election season. But for now, let’s suffice to say that, by giving Carlson the nomination, the state GOP has written off Seattle (heck, Carlson used to proudly proclaim on his radio hatefest how much he detested Seattle and its voting population), along with anybody elsewhere in the state who’s not part of the religious right or the Limbaughist religious cult.
All Locke will have to do is pick off enough votes from sane Republicans across the state, folks who might love entrepreneurism and hard work but who don’t particularly care for the scarier parts of the Carlson camp’s agenda.
Carlson’s role will be to simultaneously hold onto the cultists while insisting to non-cult members that he’s still normal enough to be trusted with the governor’s office.
Carlson’s proven himself to be a cagey, slick operator. But this task might be too challenging even for his duplicitousness.
TOMORROW: What the heck isMicrosoft.NET anyway?
IN OTHER WORDS: There won’t be any cherry pies served at the RR Diner for a while; bummer.
ELSEWHERE:
A FEW DAYS AGO, I briefly mentioned a vision I’d had of what social changes might potentially arise from a tech-company stock crash, should such a rapid downfall occur the way certain anti-dot-com and anti-Microsoft cynics around these parts hope it does.
(If you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and do so. I’ll still be here when you get back.)
One aspect of this vision was that a general public backlash against “virtual realities” (computer-generated and otherwise) could lead to a craze for any personal or cultural experience that could be proclaimed as “reality.”
Let’s imagine such a possible fad a little further today.
I’m imagining a movement that could expand upon already-existing trends–
It’s easy to see these individual trends coalescing into a macro-trend, coinciding with a quite-probable backlash against the digitally-intermediated culture of video games, porno websites, chat rooms, home offices, cubicle loneliness, et al.
As I wrote on Monday, live, in-person entertainment would, under this scenario, become the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences. The self-styled “cultured” folks and intellectuals could come to disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
(Not coincidentally, this disdain would emerge just after technology has allowed the masses to fully create and distribute their own books, movies, recorded music, etc.)
Society’s self-appointed tastemakers could come to insist on live theater instead of films, lecturers and storytellers instead of writers, participant sports (including “X-treme” sports) instead of spectator sports, and concerts (or playing one’s own instruments) instead of CDs.
The arts of rhetoric and public speaking could enjoy a revival on the campuses. The slam poetry and political speechifiying beloved by Those Kids of late just might expand into a full-blown revival of Chataqua-style oratory. On the conservative side of politics, Limbaugh wannabes might take their rhetorical acts away from radio and further into staged rallies and intimate breakfast-club meetings.
Jazz, the music that only truly exists when performed live, could also have another comeback.
Even “alternative” minded music types could get into this line of thinking; indeed, there are already burgeoning mini-fads in “house concerts” and neo-folk hootenaneys.
As packaged entertainment becomes more exclusively associated with nerds, squares, and people living outside major urban centers, it might come under new calls for regulation and even censorship; while live performance could become an anything-goes realm.
(If carried to its extreme, this could even lead to the recriminalization of print/video pornography, and/or the decriminalization of prostitution.)
The rich and/or the hip would demand real shopping in real stores (maybe even along the model of the traditional British shopkeepers, in which the wife rang up sales in the front room while the hubby made the merchandise in the back.)
Those without the dough might be expected (or even made) to use online instead of in-person shopping; much as certain banks “encourage” their less-affluent customers to use ATMs instead of live tellers.
In this scenario, what would become of writers–or, for that matter, cartoonists, filmmakers, record-store clerks, etc.?
(One group you won’t have to worry about: The entertainment conglomerates. They’ll simply put less capital into packaged-goods entertainment and more into theme parks (manmade but still “live” entertainment), Vegas-style revues, touring stage shows, music festivals, and the like.)
MONDAY: Another local landmark gets defaced a little more.
IN OTHER NEWS: There’s one fewer employer for washed-up baseball stars.
YESTERDAY, we began a look at Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Today, a few more thoughts on the building and what it might mean.
7. The commodification of “rebel” images as corporate and safe has reached an apex with architect Frank Gehry’s gargantuan shrine. No longer can rockers, especially Seattle rockers, romantically imagine their milieu as a stronghold of anti-Establishment defiance. (Unless EMP becomes a symbol of everything to be rebelled against (see item 5).)
8. It’s a hallmark of “smooth” industrial design, the same aesthetic principle seen in the New Beetle, the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the iMac, Nike shoes, etc. etc.
Two essays in the July Harper’s (not posted online) discuss this aesthetic as a symbol of global-corporate power and the ascendancy of soft-edgedness in all social endeavors: Mark Kingwell’s “Against Smoothness” and Thomas de Zengotita’s “World World–How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob.”
9. The opening was almost exactly three months after another Paul Allen-instigated event, the Kingdome implosion.
The latter event took place on the Spring Equinox weekend, that traditional time of new beginnings. The EMP celebration, featuring a Seattle Center-wide weekend of free-to-$140 concerts (several of them quite good, especially Patti Smith’s), took place on the Summer Solstice weekend, that traditional time of celebrating the bounty, the harvest; the time when all is, to quote a title of a certain Seattle songwriter, “in bloom.”
10. The opening ceremony itself, in which Allen smashed a custom glass guitar made by Dale Chihuly, was one of those singular moments encompassing so many references. In this case, it encompassed many aspects of the Seattle baby-boomer fetish culture–Allen’s Microsoft bucks; Chihuly’s eternal cloyingness; and the Seattle white guys’ cult of Hendrix.
11. People still don’t know what to think of the building. One woman told me she thought it was supposed to “represent a heart.” I replied that that couldn’t possibly be so; it would have required Mr. Allen to have been aware, at the project’s outset, of musicians who’d actually lived in Seattle as adults.
But my personal conundrum of what the design’s supposed to represent was finally satisfied by this image of the Monorail tracks entering a strategic opening through the building. (Amazing, the raunchy content that can get into a so-called family newspaper these days.)
12. It’s bound to be a classic tourist trap. See the fish-throwers, Ride the Ducks, eat at the Space Needle, take a ferry boat, do the EMP.
One of these months, I might even go inside the thing myself.
(I did go into the merchandise shop, which you can enter without paying admission to the rest of the place. So far, they’re not selling a certain book that no Seattle music museum merchandise shop should be about. If you go there, you might ask them for it.)
TOMORROW: Reality, what a concept!
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.
After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.
So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:
“Money. It’s not everything.”
“Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”
“Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”
“There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”
“Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”
“Is that fourth car really necessary?”
“Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”
“Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”
“You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”
(Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)
IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.
TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
THE FIRST TIME Life magazine died, it was mourned far and wide on TV newscasts and in other publications’ commentary pages as symbolizing the end of an era.
This time, its second demise is hardly noticed outside the mag industry.
The old Life was a huge glossy that came out every week for a paltry price. (The original 1936 cover price was 10 cents; subscription rates at its 1972 end were little higher.) It was supported by ads–big, slick, colorful ads for brand-name consumer products ranging from cars to Campbell’s soup; ads aimed at mass-market middle-class households with little regard for the details of demographic market segmentation.
Five years after the weekly’s end, Time Inc. bosses figured the Life name still held a cachet among readers. So they relaunched it as a monthly. They charged more for it the second time around, but it basically kept to the same format–photo-heavy stories and features about assorted general-interest topics (movie stars, animals, science, history, uplifting-human-interest stuff, etc.).
Time Inc. killed the old Life because TV had taken mass-marketing ad dollars away from magazines. AOL-Time Warner is killing the current Life, effective with the current issue, because the entirety of the advertising business (even broadcast) has gone to niche marketing as its gospel.
Life still had a steady circulation around 1.7 million. It was still turning a small profit. But AOL-TW’s ad sales team was finding the mag an increasingly difficult sell to ad agencies.
The company could promote Money as reaching an audience of middle-managers, Fortune as reaching top executives, Sports Illustrated as reaching young-adult males, and In Style as reaching young-adult females.
But who reads Life? A little bit of everybody? Companies don’t want to sell to a little bit of everybody. They want to sell condensed soup to grandmas, dry soup to college kids, ready-to-heat soup to upper-middle-class moms, microwaveable soup to busy singles, vegan soups to vegans, and boxes of soup ingredients to weekend chefs.
So Life will again become a heritage of photojournalism and a word in the names of AOL-TW’s Time-Life Books and Time-Life Music.
It didn’t have to be this way, and it still doesn’t.
AOL-TW could always reinvent the title again, in this or some future year. The next time, they could downplay the feature-y material and emphasize a harder, more immediate brand of photojournalism, telling compelling stories to a readership that could cut across the demographic boundaries, allowing marketers to reach beyond their increasingly boxed-in little niches.
Could it happen? As they say in the photojournalism trade, let’s see what develops.
TOMORROW: A few things you think you know, but which are wrong.
SOME SHORT STUFF this Memorial day, starting with two words you should start remembering:
“Fette Mittlelschrift.”
You’ve probably never heard its name before, but you’ve seen it.
It’s the typeface that’s taking over the world.
(Some type suppliers call it “Meta,” but we’ll choose to call it by the more-fun name.)
Last year, it seemed every wannabe-hip graphic designer and design client (from rave flyers to MTV to Urban Outfitters) was agog over plain old Helvetica, the typeface they all saw as representing the sleek modernism people in the ’60s thought people in the ’00s would all be living in. (I, as a former late-’70s-early-’80s young adult, still identify Helvetica with bad early desktop publishing and Penthouse magazine.)
But now that nostalgia for formerly-predicted 21st centuries is a fairly done deal, this newer sleek-modern sans serif face is spreading everywhere.
Readers around here probably know Fette Mittelschrift as the typeface in The Bon Marche’s current ads. It’s immediately identifiable by its narrow letter shapes, its large “x” sizes, and the peculiar lower-right curve in its lower-case “L”s.
Once you recognize it, you’ll start spotting it everywhere–Harper’s Bazaar cover blurbs, assorted smaller lifestyle and fashion rags, on-screen graphics on The NBA On TNT and the Independent Film Channel, and ads and in-store signs for Bank of America, Canon, Merrill Lynch, Payless ShoeSource, Kmart, Oldsmobile, Subaru, American Express, HBO, Philip Morris (those pathetic “Working to Make A Difference” spots), and many, many others.
(Similar, but not precisely identical, typefaces are used by the new P-I TV listings and those annoying ABC “We Love TV” ads.)
But be careful–once you start realizing just how widespread Fette Mittelschrift is, you could end up seeing it everywhere; or even obsessively-compulsively repeating the name, a la Zippy the Pinhead. “Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift.”
PHILM PHUN: Let’s attempt, for future readers, to explain some prospective future confusion.
The 2000 release American Psycho was, on at least one level, about beauty–a cold, antihuman, perfectionistic ideal of beauty.
The 1999 release American Beauty was about psychos–four adults and three teenagers, each a case study in a different type of psychological dysfunction (neurosis, paranoia, catatonia, voyeurism, transferred incest-compulsion, etc.).
Critics who called AB just another anti-suburban slam were wrong. It’s really a taut character study that could be set in any affluent North American setting. It’s just that the “wide open spaces” setting clashes perfectly with the characters’ internal confinement.
TOMORROW: The city Paul Allen’s building, in spite of us.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s tonight at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT TOOK THE P-I to point out one of those startling bookends-O-history:
“Mount St. Helens blew at exactly 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday. Nearly 20 years later, the Kingdome was imploded at 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday.
“Coincidence?”
Actually, even if the eerie time synchronicity hadn’t happened, I’d have thought of St. Helens and the Dome as the defining boom-booms of the late-modern PacNW.
St. Helens killed 57 people, thousands of trees, and dozens of old codger Harry Truman’s cats, and disrupted thousands of folks’ routines. The Kingdome only killed two ceiling-tile workers, who had a construction-crane accident a couple years before it was deemed unworthy of continued existence.
The pre-blast St. Helens was considered by most a jewel of a peak. The pre-blast Kingtome was considered by many an eyesore.
But both blasts were popular spectacles that generated marathon TV coverage, souvenir sales, and “where were you when…?” popular memories.
In 1980, a spectacular natural “disaster” was about what it took to get the Evergreen State on the network news. (The eruption didn’t make the top of the NY Times front page for two days; the paper being otherwise occupied covering Miami race riots.)
In 2000, hardly a week goes by without big headlines about Microsoft, Starbucks, police brutality, or gypsy moths.
But the near-universal thrill at watching the Dome go kablooey proves we haven’t lost our ability to find wonder and thrills in the sights and sounds of mass-scale destruction.
P.S.: I can never get tired of reruns of the TV footage of St. Helens.
For one thing, despite having been five years into the era of minicams and even home VCRs, and despite the weeks of warnings and buildup on the mountain, the only real footage of the blast itself came from a still photographer who simply hand-forwarded his film as fast as he could.
For another thing, it was one of the last domestic TV news events at least partly covered with 16mm film cameras, rather than live video feeds. To folks my age and up to 10 years older, the scratchy, dark, washed-outy look of 16mm reversal film will always signify scruffy, raw news footage (or the exterior scenes of British miniseries that were otherwise shot in brightly-lit studios on video).
I find myself having to tell Those Kids Today that there was a time when prime-time news promos really did say “Film at 11,” and when local newscasts weren’t burdened by endless, uninformative, live “standup” chats with reporters on the scene of something that had ended hours before.
TOMORROW: Those annoying “My __” websites.
WHILE FEW AROUND HERE WERE LOOKING, Seattle has become the unquestioned world capital of photography–at least from the “intellectual property” angle.
Two local outfits, Getty Images and Bill Gates’s Corbis, have busily bought up lots of the world’s big and medium-sized stock image collections, and have signed exclusive contracts with many of the top agencies that represent individual freelance photographers.
At the present rate of consolidation, it won’t be long before these firms become the places where publishers, ad agencies, news organizations, commercial websites, etc. will have to go to get ready-made and/or historic still images.
The Big Two have become so powerful, they’ve been able to push quite favorable contract terms on the agencies. In turn, the agencies are pushing strict work-for-hire terms on their member photographers, depriving them of any rights to their own work in any form forever.
Some of the awful details are in a recent letter to the MacInTouch site (from the linked page, scroll down to the April 12 archive).
This sort of mercenary behavior represents the more threatening, better-publicized side of the current media-biz churn: ever-fewer big players, force-feeding their “synergies” all the way up and down their respective supply chains to the benefit of only the few at the top.
It’s the exact opposite of the “disintermediation” (elimination of middlemen) the Net’s supposed to be bringing to business and other human endeavors, according to an article in the current Harper’s (more about that tomorrow).
Call it “ultramediation” maybe, control of whole industries by a few middlemen. Major record labels and movie studios are more intermediators than anything else these days–other entities often make the works; but the media giants stay in control by ruling the distribution.
(Gates, of course, is the king of the ultramediators. He took the operating system (a piece of low-level software that originally ran a computer’s most rudimentary functions and translated instructions from application software to the hardware) and made it, and himself, the near-absolute rulers of the cyber-universe.)
But there’s another way the Net could help counter this trend. I’ve written about it often: Using these tools to help get individual photogs, say, together with individual clients via “business to business” (sorry to use such a CNBC-popular buzzword) catalog sites, auction sites, and clearinghouses.
Clients (at least the ones I’ve known) are too deadline-stressed to look carefully at every individual would-be contributor’s portfolio; one reason the stock-photo companies Getty and Corbis are now eating had gotten so popular. But a site where individual photogs and illustrators could pool their offerings in a well-organized display would offer clients most everything the Big Two can offer, while keeping the photogs in control of their own copyrights.
I’m too busy these days to start such a site myself. But if you start one, or know of someone who already has, lemme know.
TOMORROW: Harper’s visits the Dreaded Eugene Anarchists and worries about the cyber-snobs.
A YEAR AGO, I wrote in this space about NBC’s callous treatment and eventual dumping of what had been its longest-running soap opera, Another World.
At the time, I’d neglected to notice the network had, and has, another daytime drama incorporating many of the classic soap elements (heroes, villains, cliffhangers, short- and long-term plotlines, convoluted relationships, petty power battles) in a modern format, highlighting modern-day priorities and personal obsessions.
I speak, of course, of NBC’s business-oriented cable channel, CNBC.
I’ve taken lately to having it on while I’m writing during the mornings.
The past two or three weeks have provided for especially gripping viewing, as you might imagine.
Last Friday, particularly it looked as if the great tech-stock bubble “pop,” which I and many other market observers have impatiently awaited lo these past six months, had finally arrived.
In soap terms, it could be seen as an act of vengeful retribution by the established investors against those upstart bitch-goddess dot-coms and their coming-on-too-strong day-trader speculators. Comeuppance for all the concentration-of-wealth guys, those oh-so-easy-to-stereotype overgrown boys with their big-ass SUVs and their ever-beepin’ cell phones. (Not to mention the billions of on-paper wealth lost by a certain Mr. Gates overnight.)
Of course, in the soaps as well as in real life, the relatively innocent may also suffer when the villains are brought down. A soap baddie might blurt out some devastating family secret in court, or might even commit suicide and set it up so a good guy will be framed with a marder charge.
In the case of the tech stocks, or the stock markets in general, millions of folks who’ve never even bought anything at Restoration Hardware have put their savings and their retirement funds into what market pundits had called the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com-led bull market. With adjusted-for-inflation wages stagnant over the past decade or two for most non-wealthy folks, mutual funds and other stock-based investments have provided one way for middle-class and some upper-middle-class households to keep up with the rising costs of real estate, college tuition, etc. (My own family is such a beneficiary of such investments.)
And soap villains usually don’t conveniently go away when they’re found out. Not only do many of them avoid long jail terms, they can repeatedly cheat death itself.
And sure enough, the tech stocks you-love-to-hate came roaring back this Monday and Tuesday.
Similarly, we’ll all be living for some time to come with the tech-stock hustlers and the enterprises they’ve built on the shaky foundation of stock speculation. The recent stock drops might have been relative or virtual, but the money these companies are burning through is real enough that a widespread Net-company depression could jeopardize thousands of careers.
(One contributing factor in last week’s slump was an analyst’s report claiming most of those new online retail ventures will fail within the next two years. But most new retail ventures of any type fail in their first five years, as anyone’s who’s been involved in a fledgling restaurant or flower store can tell you.)
One last comparison: On the soaps, storylines drag on more often than they crash and disappear. Same with stock-market storylines. And since the stock markets pay no attention to “sweeps weeks,” anthing could happen on any particular day.
The next few weeks should be gripping viewing indeed.
MONDAY: Some short stuff.
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to the master of visual macabre humor, Edward Gorey.
LIKE SO MANY 18-YEAR-OLDS, USA Today (founded in the summer of ’82) has suddenly decided it didn’t want to look like a bratty kid anymore.
So it’s thrown out its old typographical wardrobe (backward baseball caps, team-logo shirts and all), got itself a page-size haircut, and is proudly showing off its “mature” look all over town.
The official excuse: Most of the newspaper industry’s moving to a standardized, narrow page size, so national advertisers can place the same ad designs in papers across the country without pesky reformatting.
USA Today, which uses 33 printing plants that belong to local dailies across the country (unlike the Wall St. Journal, which fully controls its own manufacturing network), had to go along with the scheme.
The paper’s original design, built on seven narrow columns, wouldn’t work at the even narrower new width. So the paper had to design a six-column format, and decided to use that as an excuse to modernize the whole look.
The practical result (and, if you’ll forgive me, a metaphor-switch): A paper that had always looked like a mall-store floor display (bright lights; loud, “busy” signage; lots of merchandise departments; small and shallow selections in each such department) now looks like a mall store that’s been “tastefully” redone to look more upscale.
Appropriately enough, the first week of the new look included a long feature about the Adbusters Quarterly folks in Vancouver, who preach that there ought to be more to life than just the selling, buying, and using of consumer goods.
That’s a slightly less hypocritical version of the “voluntary simplicity” movement, which in turn is being thoroughly exploited by some new mall-store outfits as an excuse to sell more consumer goods.
Like a retailer that figures to get higher sales with a clean, uncluttered, “lack of pretense” pretense, the new USA Today packages its wares in a “modern, elegant,” pseudo-Euro look.
But, like a redesigned and Martha Stewart-ized Kmart store, it’s still the same bazaar of Chee-tos and sweat pants.
And, like a kid trying to look old enough to score beer, its still-youthful enthusiasm and silliness still show through.
Which is just the way I like it.
At least in newspapers.
At least in that newspaper.
TOMORROW: Why Republicans really like baseball.
IN OTHER NEWS: What’ll happen to those IPO-obsessed dot-com slaves now?
CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 2)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
(YESTERDAY, we visited a Seattle poet/salesman who is forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is more of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.)
Salesman: What’s really bugging you?
Poet: Well, when you read the PSBJ you start thinking how much richer everyone is than you are.
Look at the numbers they throw around on the first few pages. Venture fund X raises $340 million. Y Store contemplates a $20 million dollar placement. Z Company launched with a startup stake of $50 million.
Then, by extension, you start thinking how much smarter everyone is than you are.
Then, when you flip to the back section called Briefcase, you see the pictures of all the men and women being promoted in their various professions. You reflect how much better looking they are than you.
And the writing is generally wretched. A completely depressing experience.
S: Well, I can’t cave into your inferiority complexes. I have to get out and sell things to keep you in poems and theories; so let me do my little duty here.
I open the paper and head straight for the For the Record section. This is where I can find out if company Zlab has been hit with a federal tax lien, a civil suit or is selling off pieces of itself. If so, stay away.
On the other hand, if company Zlab is moving into a brand new 900,000-square-foot warehouse on Monster Road, they could probably use a few new pencils. Time for a sales call. See? That’s all there is to it. We’re just about done.
P: That’s a relief.
S: You’re such a bohemian.
The PSBJ ain’t so bad. It’s better than the flimsy scenarios of murder and mayhem that are the truck and fare of the daily papers. You’re supposed to be interested in people, right? When you’re reading through the PSBJ, don’t you feel you’re getting a deeper sense of what your fellow citizens; are up to?
Maybe if more of you literary types read the PSBJ you wouldn’t write such ephemeral twaddle. Maybe it’s not so imaginative but it’s just what it is: it’s the record of balls and enterprise it takes to generate wealth.
P: Well, I’m much moved, Mr. Businessman. Excuse me while I go blow my nose into the American flag. You’re really taken in by this stuff, aren’t you?
S: Like I say, it pays the rent.
P: Oh, Balls. The PSBJ is nothing but a tear sheet of pasted together public relations flyers. Puff pieces smelling strongly of the heavy oil of the region’s marketing engines.
S: That may be; but there is something here, rather than nothing. There’s a lot of money around. That’s news. Just because you feel inferior in front of all this wealth, you shouldn’t take it out on me when I try to read the PSBJ.
P: It’s not that I feel inferior. I just feel there’s something missing in all this craven mammon worship. You said you feel like you’re getting deeper knowledge about our fellow citizens; but that’s an illusion.
Look at the PSBJ. There is no analysis here. It’s all pompoms and cheers. There’s not a bad dollar spent anywhere. Dollars don’t kill people; people kill people.
Look at what assholes most rich people are. They’re fearful, pinched, shrewd, selfish. You don’t see any of that reflected in the PSBJ.
S: OK Mr. Poet, do you have to be so insufferably ’60s? What do you propose?
P: I object to mindless dollar adoration as embodied in the PSBJ. The exaltation of money as the supreme good becomes a kind of religion. It allows us to slough off the questions of what our life is for of how to treat our neighbor or what kind of future we want for our kids. It pretends to stand for Art but all we get are toasters.
S: I’m going to have to stop here. I’ve got to go to work.
TOMORROW: Copyrights and wrongs.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 1)
DOUG ANDERSON IS a Seattle poet/salesman forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is a record of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.
Poet: If art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight…
Salesman: You’ve just described a toaster.
P: You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, if art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight when conjoined with imagination, then I don’t see much art around here.
S: Hey, take it easy. I’m just a meat-and-potatoes man.
P: Yeah, right.
S: Besides, there’s plenty of art. We’ve got full theaters, crowded art galleries and bookstores are so hot the big ones act like Mafia families trying to rub each other out.
P: I disagree. Theater has devolved into solo performers debasing themselves before the bourgeoisie, painting is going nowhere and literature has become the billionth retelling of adolescence angst.
S: You intellectual snob, I notice you conveniently left out poetry.
P: Poetry, in English, especially in the Northwest, seems to be alive and kicking.
S: Stop pimping yourself and let me read the Puget Sound Business Journal. It’s what pays the rent. Remember?
I do business to business sales and this is where you find out which businesses are going under, which are suing or being sued, which are launching IPOs and which are flush and expanding into the Kent Valley. Your theories of art are not really helpful just now.
P: Well I’m reading right along with you and I don’t want you to get overly impressed by all the money that’s flying around.
Art has hung up its imaginative spurs and gone over to technology. Craft when divorced from the imagination becomes technology and that’s what we have a lot of now.
Toasters, like you said. In the absence of art we get lots of toasters.
S: You’re saying technology doesn’t demand imagination? That makes a whole lot of fuckin’ sense.
P: I’m saying that technology is the extension of what we already have. In our five senses. The stethoscope turns your ear into a hose, ultrasound lets your eyeballs roll around like a snake into a young mom’s womb, the web has turned us all into audio-visual spiders.
Technology works within a narrow mandate: demolish time and distance by extending our senses. We don’t need imagination to develop what we already have, therefore…
S: Do you mind? Can I get on with this?
P: Feel free. I’m not stopping you.
S: No but you’re trying to distract me.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
