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THERE’S AN AUTHOR named Dave Eggers. He just put out a slightly-fictionalized memoir, immodestly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
It’s gotten a lot of press attention.
Some reviewers criticize Eggers’s audacity for daring to publish his life story at age 29; and then for writing it in a modified PoMo, self-reflexive, hip-ironic manner.
Other reviewers praise all that.
For the most part, neither group of reviewers seems to know what Eggers’s book is really about.
It’s not about Eggers being a smarty-pants hipster.
It’s about his journey through that stance and finding a way beyond it.
The plot in brief: Eggers is a 21-year-old college grad who returns to his home in a patrician Chicago suburb to tend to his cancer-striken mom. Only his dad turns out to also have the Big C, and both parents die within weeks of one another.
Dave, his big sister Beth, and his orphaned seven-year-old brother “Toph” (short for Christopher) then head out for hyper-hyper San Francisco. There, Dave takes a day job in P.R. while spending much of his inheritance starting Might, a magazine that’s first going to have been The Voice of A New Generation but which quickly turns into typical S.F. fare: Attitude-overdosed hipsters proclaiming how with-it they are and how out-of-it the Rest of America is.
The Might years are rightly disclaimed in Eggers’s long intro as the dullest section of the book. He says they “concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.”
Indeed, the book ends with Dave realizing the meaningless treadmill his life and work had become, as he returns to Illinois for a friend’s wedding and reconnects with the world of his past. The book’s story, Eggers’s personal journey from extended post-adolescence to budding adulthood, ends there.
This personal journey corresponds with Eggers’s professional journey–from merely sneering at mainstream media to exploring a pro-active alternative, and finding it in Lawrence Sterne-esque serious whimsey.
After folding Might and moving to N.Y.C., he took a day job at Esquire. Then, after signing his book deal, he quit that job and started Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a beautifully-made occasional paperback journal of gentle (but never wimpy) humor and pro-social texts of many types.
In a cultural milieu that values bad-boy hipster Attitude ahead of all other possible values, A Heartbreaking Work and McSweeney’s are attempts to reconnect with what’s great and eternal about human communication and community.
The Eggers of Might was a writer-editor of his period; the Might book collection already seems quite dated indeed.
The Eggers of McSweeney’s is a writer-editor of the timeless.
Perhaps he’s not really a “staggering genius.” But that’s not really what we need right now.
MONDAY: Literary lessons from the business papers.
ELSEWHERE:
Wine Dark Sea
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
GENERAL INTEREST MAGAZINES like Time are nice barometers of what a culture is supposed to be like, but give me an industrial trade magazine, any day. Who wouldn’t rather read Blackstockings than Playboy?
When it comes to my own trade, selling wine, I read the two main consumer mags, the glossy Wine Spectator with its fondness for California chardonnay and the fussy Wine Advocate with its preference for wine you can’t find (let alone afford), as well as an assortment of crass rags (Market Watch, Beverage Retailer) geared for managers of chain stores.
But the best publication for anyone who wants info on the wine industry is Wine Business Monthly.
It also happens to be very entertaining and, if you pass for an insider, free.
The seven-year-old monthly has the look and heft of Barrons, running about 80 legal-size pages of better-than-newsprint black and white articles illustrated by charts, graphs, and photos. Advertisements provide color as well as information about bottles, corks, fake corks, industrial machinery, and farm equipment.
The news can come across as the kind of no-bullshit approach you get in the Wall Street Journal news section (not to be confused with the editorial blather), although some pieces rely on too few sources. A recent story on Best Cellars failed to point out that these “bargain” boutiques actually sell the most expensive cheap wine around (in Seattle, at any rate, the same bottles can often be had across the parking lot at the U. Village QFC, for a buck less).
Much of the March 2000 issue is devoted to the theme of packaging, focusing on bottle and label designs; but two pieces leap out and grab casual reader/ drinkers and political activists: an op/ed primer on media relations and an article on the wine industry and the WTO.
“Winery Public Relations Is Changing,” by p.r. exec Judy Kimsey, presents a peppy mixture of common sense and stupefying bromides to inform as well as entertain. Unfortunately, Kimsey for the most part minds her diction, primly shielding readers from the array of argot neologisms that often make business writing more dazzling than language poetry.
She does, however, advocate exploring long-term pro-active strategies and maintaining an effective Internet presence by having a “sticky” website (i.e., a site people who don’t have a life in meat world will keep coming back to out of sheer boredom). A “sticky” website is, after all, “a vital part of your public relations arsenal.”
Rather than hold up a mirror to see ourselves as others see us, op-ed pieces like this let you see them as they see themselves.
Nothing against Gina Gallo (or against whatever data may indicate that Gallo sales are up), but how strange it is to read of the “Gina Phenomenon,” where the pretty celebrity/ heir/ winemaker drives sales by providing a “personality-driven image!”
And while the wine industry plunges into organic viticulture, there’s a “misperception” that it’s “the environmental bad guy” because it’s a monoculture and because of “novice owners whose vineyards slide off the hillside into the local creek.”
If that isn’t enough of a trip to Never Never Land, get this:
“Return press calls promptly. In most industries, not returning a press call within the day, if not the hour, is a firing offense.”
In the real world, as in prevalent practice in the wine world Kimsey chastises, p.r. flacks must get bonuses for not returning press calls; and when they do call back, the reporter is in for hours of happy talk in lieu of concise information.
“Wine Still Swirls as a Trade Issue,” by Lisa Shara Hall, came at an ideal time for me: en route to have dinner with some visiting Italian wine execs at a restaurant along the trail of tear gas that police blazed to drive protesters out of downtown and into the neighborhoods of lower Capitol Hill.
Simon Siegl, ex-Washington Wine Commission czar and current head of the American Vintners Association, was the only quoted source for the article. His message to winemakers? Shut up and join an organization like his. “This is an area where horizontal expansion of communications merely adds confusion,” he says.
As a WTO protester and a co-owner of a small wine shop, I remain skeptical of the WTO having any say in my industry. But thanks to this article, I was able to relate my skepticism to the Italians in a way that hit home.
The main enemies of people who drink, sell, and make wine that’s imported to the U.S. are tariffs and pressures to remove “subsidies.” Fortunately for us, the U.S. has the lowest tariffs on wine; and European farmers and vintners have resisted attempts to change the way they do business. So, as things stand, a good bottle of Chianti Classico is still $12-$15 and plenty of good Italian wine is still under $10 a bottle.
In other words, I said, the protesters in the streets of Seattle were not destroying property; we were defending our right to purchase Italian wine at fair prices.
The big U.S. wine interests may be too sophisticated to behave like hicks and demand an end to all, say, tax breaks that foreign wineries enjoy. After all, their main concerns involve exports: getting other countries to lower tariffs and to accept some kind of label standardization.
But, “Next on the list is the elimination of subsidies,” which is complicated because “The EU wants to protect its historical and culturally based subsidies.”
Make that, the EU, American consumers, American importers and dealers, and everybody else.
The only ones who don’t like this arrangement are outfits like Gallo, whose Gina Phenomenon doesn’t change a legacy of farm-worker exploitation and a line of rotgut sold under names swiped from Europe and then trademarked so the world could come to know Hearty Burgundy and Chablis.
(To receive Wine Business Monthly, pick up a sub form at a local wine shop or write to them at 867 W. Napa St., Sonoma, CA 95476. Make up an industrial position for yourself (retailer, grower, restaurateur, etc.) and don’t tell them I sent you.)
TOMORROW: Dave Eggers, Threat or Menace?
TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday’s online edition, which may or may not affect how the site’s updated later this month.
THANKS TO A KIND READER, I’ve finally obtained a few copies of Philadelphia’s Metro, the only new big-city daily newspaper in the U.S. these days.
Can the city where the U.S. was born now facilitate the rebirth of a sleepy, slowly-but-inexorably declining print-news industry?
From the looks of things, maybe. Just maybe.
Metro is the first North American unit of a chain of identically titled and formatted tabloids. The chain started in Sweden and now has clones in a half-dozen European cities plus Santiago, Chile.
The concept is so utterly simple, it’s a wonder nobody did it before. Metro is a free tabloid, put out five mornings a week. Most of its editions are entirely ad-supported. The Philly version also gets a partial subsidy from the regional transit authority, which had commissioned the chain to set up there and has made it the only paper available inside its bus and train stations.
The content: A controversy-reduced package of short items. Think of a USA Today, cut down to fit 24 tabloid pages (including seven pages of ads). There’s color on every page, and a couple of staples in the spine for extra convenience.
What Metro doesn’t have (besides a real website): No stock listings, no unsigned editorials, no want ads, no mealy-mouthed “analysis” pieces. Also no subscriptions, no home delivery, and no in-house printing plant (it’s printed by a subcontractor out in the Jersey suburbs).
What Metro has: Over 100 short and short-short news items (world, national, local, business, sports, entertainment), a weather map, one two-page feature story, a page of TV listings, a few arts-and-events listings, a half-page of sports statistics, one local-commentary column (by a different writer each day of the week), a letters page, an easy syndicated crossword, and only two comic strips.
Because it’s a freebie, Metro can be a small enterprise witha startup-size staff, without having to match the volume-for-your-quarters content value of the city’s established two-paper monopoly, the Inquirer and Daily News. Because it’s made from an established formula, it doesn’t have to employ a lot of seasoned news hacks. Because it’s short and convenient, it may attract readers who’ve not bothered with daily papers.
Could the formula work here? Most likely; especially once the Sound Transit commuter-rail system gets underway later this year.
But it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a paper on the strict, bright-yet-bland Metro formula. It could be a paper with a little more personality, a little more local flavor to it.
Any cyber-zillionaires out there want to help start up such a paper? Let’s talk.
TOMORROW: Real estate hyperinflation: Is the war already lost?
IN OTHER NEWS: Disneyland employees are finally being allowed to grow moustaches. This means if ol’ Walt really was frozen (he’s not), he could thaw out and legally work for his own theme park.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
THERE’VE BEEN SOME RECENT CHANGES to the Seattle newspaper scene.
But, so far, they’ve one longtime tradition still standing.
The P-I still buries, back in the classifieds, a handful of comic strips that don’t garner enough popularity (according to its market research) to get into the main comics pages, but still attract just enough readers (or enough support from the paper’s sister company, King Features Syndicate) to avoid getting dropped altogether.
Among these is the strip King Features originally marketed as “the conservative Doonesbury,” Bruce Tinsley’s Mallard Fillmore.
The strip’s premise, all its 14 or so years, is utterly simple. Mallard Fillmore is a cynical talking duck in an otherwise all-human world, a la Marvel’s onetime Howard the Duck. Mallard’s also an embittered right-wing newspaperman in Washington, D.C. Every day, he spurts a two-line rant against whatever Those Liberals are doing these days.
That’s it.
During the Depression era, when FDR liberalism held the sway of popular opinion, several conservative-written comic strips (Little Orphan Annie, Li’l Abner) managed to achieve mass appeal while upholding traditional values–including the values of solid storytelling, fine draftsmanship, and portrayals of supportive personal relationships.
Mallard Fillmore has none of these.
There are no storylines and no character development. Mallard has no apparent family or personal life. There are a handful of semi-regular supporting characters (including a roly-poly little boy named Rush!), but they do nothing but provide set-up lines for Mallard’s pithy remarks. (Bill Clinton appears in the strip more often than any of these.)
Despite the lack of any narrative element, the strip still imbues its title character with a personality. And it’s perhaps the most unattractive personality of any daily-comics protagonist ever.
Mallard is depicted as an embittered loner, whose whole self-image revolves around defending and supporting people richer and more powerful than himself; as if to define himself as rightfully belonging with the rich and powerful. His politics, as a long-term reading of the strip will reveal, have almost nothing to do with any system of philosophy but with what some liberals call “identity politics.” (More about that on Friday.)
But despite his personal identification with the political causes of America’s power elite, he can’t stop seeing himself as a disempowered victim of Those Bad Old P.C. Liberals.
Pecadillos and hypocrisies among Democratic politicians are skewered regularly in the duck’s mini-rants. The same misdeeds, when performed by Republican politicians, are never mentioned. (The strip spent weeks bashing the “sensitivity training” sessions ordered to baseball pitcher John Rocker, while never discussing the racist interview remarks that got Rocker into trouble.)
If Mallard (or Tinsley) ever get disappointed by any of their conservative heroes, they never mention it. Indeed, the strip almost never advocates any conservative stances. It merely complains about liberal stances.
If Mallard didn’t get much more prominent placement in certain conservative-advocacy papers such as the New York Post, a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not) might almost imagine the strip as a cunning liberal’s project to depict conservatives as pathetic grumblers, ultimately ignored by the power structure they aggressively endorse and left lonely by their partisan separatism, unloved and unlovable.
Mallard Fillmore is still the worst strip in the papers. But as a (possibly inadvertant) PoMo deconstruction of both modern-day newspaper strips and pseudo-populist conservative politics, it continually fascinates.
TOMORROW: Where America no longer shops.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW what it’s like to be constantly mistaken for someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything.
Phone calls in the wee hours from obsessed acquaintances demanding I relieve their self-made mental torture by telling them the answers to obscure conundrums I’ve never considered.
Couples spotting me from a block away and chasing me down, yelling at me to tell them the directions to someplace I’ve never heard of or the name of the best sushi restaurant in the neighborhood.
Guys in bars enlisting me to settle burly drunken men’s disputes over the most arcane sports or movie trivia; as if I (1) knew the answer, and (2) wanted to make either burly drunken guy mad at me.
For the record, let it stand that I do not know everything.
If I did, I sure wouldn’t be stuck with some dorky little website now, would I? I’d be independently wealthy from prescient stock trades and/or sports bets, which I’m most assuredly not.
(Okay, I did have one dream three years ago that focused on the office tower of a major company that, upon wakening, turned out to have suddenly announced a big merger; but that’s never happenned before or since.)
So, here’s but a very partial list of the many, many, many things I don’t know:
(On the other hand, I have known most of the answers on that TV show, even the toughies. I keep calling the hotline but I never get the random call-back. Oh well, maybe I can still learn day-trading….)
TOMORROW: Retro-progressivism.
IN OTHER NEWS:
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
LAST MONTH, I found myself reading a short stack of those newfangled rah-rah business magazines.
One of the things that struck me was all the weird, weird names companies are giving themselves (or hiring image-consultants to give them).
I mean, it’s one thing to take an ordinary English-language word or phrase, stick an “E-” at the front and/or a “.com” at the end, and boast about how innovative and outside-the-proverbial-box you are. It’s something else again to come up with a grouping of vowels and consonants that means absolutely nothing except what your ad budget can make it mean.
Such made-up corporate monikers have come a long way since George Eastman thought up “Kodak” simply because he thought the “k” or hard “c” consonant was snappy, or since Standard Oil of New Jersey picked “Exxon” from a list of random letter-collections spun out of a mainframe computer. Now we’ve got whole companies that do nothing but find names for other companies.
Herewith, some of the goofiest and/or cleverest nonsense names seen in hi-tech magazine ads this past month:
Now: Write a sentence using all of these.
TOMORROW: Putting gentrified uses into old buildings–slightly better than just razing ’em.
SOMETIME LAST WEEK,MTV claimed to have played the one millionth music video (counting repeats) in the cable channel’s 19-year history.
You probably didn’t even notice. The channel didn’t even bother to plant hype stories the channel planted in newspapers about the “achievement.” (The clip chosen to represent the milestone: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”)
Once the #1-rated basic cable channel, MTV’s ratings have steadily declined. (A recent, laudatory Forbes article touted the successful launches of localized MTV channels around the world, but tellingly said nothing about the U.S. original.)
What’s more, the channel’s more exclusively than ever drawing teen and young-adult audiences, who (despite being incessantly wooed by every channel from NBC to UPN) proportionately watch far less TV of any type than any other age group.
The problem’s not that ex-viewers like me grew older while MTV didn’t. It’s that MTV has indeed grown old; or at least tired.
Briefly, during its mid-’80s to early-’90s midlife, the channel was known for championing artistically flashy “breakthrough videos,” and also for breaking exciting new acts that threatened to stretch the boundaries of pop and rock.
Back in 1981, MTV had been routinely criticized for its lack of programming diversity. It mainly just showed hard-rock and top-40 acts, with a smattering of British “new wave” clips and almost no R&B or hiphop.
Today, during those hours when it isn’t re-re-rerunning five-year-old Real World episodes or Celebrity Deathmatch animations, MTV almost exclusively plays music from five, very rigidly-defined, genres:
Of course, as an integral part of the mainstream record-industry hype machine, MTV’s decline has parallelled the industry’s. With no real “top 40” mass market anymore, the industry has devolved and retreated into niches where it believes its big-promotion, big-marketing approach can still move CDs–the five genres listed above, plus the easy-listening acts played on VH1 (also owned, like MTV, by Viacom) and the pop-country acts played on TNN (soon to be owned by Viacom once its merger with CBS goes through).
TOMORROW: What’s in a (corporate) name?
TODAY, The Seattle Times publishes its final afternoon edition after some 103 years.
The paper’s switch to morning publication, along with the threatened closures of the San Francisco Examiner and Honolulu Star-Bulletin, leaves the Atlanta Journal and the labor-lockout-stricken Detroit News as the only remaining big (circulation over 100,000) U.S. evening dailies. (P.M. dailies are still a big business in Canada.)
Afternoon papers used to be “home papers.” The businesspeople and the commuters got their news in the A.M.; working stiffs and their families (as well as horse bettors) got their news in the P.M.
But P.M. papers also promised “Today’s News Today” (a longtime Times slogan). That meant their editors always scrambled for the newest angle, the approach to the day’s events that wasn’t in the morning papers.
If there wasn’t a new big front-page event to cover that had occurred since the morning papers had gone to press (a stock-market slide, a plane crash, a war), then they’d have to come up with at least a slightly different spin on the same items that were already on the A.M.s’ front pages. Thus was born the now-routine exercise known as “instant analysis”–the on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, what-might-it-all-mean pontificating that most papers started emphasizing by the ’70s.
In 1960, evening papers outnumbered morning papers by almost five to one. As late as 1975, almost 60 percent of the copies of daily papers distributed in the U.S. were evening papers. But the main papers in most cities were always the morning papers.
The first waves of industry consolidation in the ’50s and ’60s bore the gravestones of such now-forgotten evening dailies as the New York World-Telegram, the Los Angeles Mirror, and the Washington Times-Herald.
As the biz continued its brutal march toward local monopolies in most cities, readers lost the Chicago Daily News, the Spokane Chronicle, Portland’s Oregon Journal, the Dallas Times-Herald, the Minneapolis Star, and the Miami News.
Small-town and suburban papers that used to publish in the evenings (partly to avoid direct competition with metropolitan morning papers) switched to mornings; including the Everett Herald and the Tacoma News Tribune.
With the Times’ switch, P.M.s will still account for about half the nation’s 1,400 or so dailies. But almost all of them are small-town and suburban papers. In the major metro areas that still have evening papers, those papers are the decidedly weaker halves of two-paper monopolies (as in Atlanta) or of joint operating agreements (as in the once-mighty Las Vegas Sun and Cincinnati Post).
Seattle was the last U.S. city where the evening paper had more readers than the morning paper. (The last other one was Milwaukee, before that town’s two-paper monopoly merged its properties.) Another of those “only in Seattle” things that’s disappearing.
The Times’ publication schedule was an integral part of the city’s daily rhythm. The first edition showed up downtown around 10 a.m. and across the city shortly thereafter; meaning you always had something new to read for lunch. Editions came out as late as 3 p.m. (schedules varied from day to day), which meant the “Night Final” (formerly known as the “Night Sports Final” back in the days of afternoon baseball) had that day’s closing stock prices and whatever national stories the network TV evening newscasts would probably cover.
And a late riser could take pride in the number of days in a week he could get out of the house before the Night Final appeared.
Now, there’ll be no more of that. The Times will get trucked around the region in the same shipments as its JOA mate, the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer.
The Times has already changed its advertising image from that of a leisurely home paper to “The Hard-News Newspaper.” The P-I (which approved of this change in the JOA contract in order to have a full website) insists it will remain a strong quasi-competitor; but already, some speculators are wondering how long it will be before the morning Times becomes the only paper in town.
I believe it’s quite possible for two morning papers to coexist, so long as they continue to have at least somewhat different editorial visions and to seek somewhat different market niches. As I’ve written before, I believe the real reason fewer people read daily papers (readership’s gone from 77 percent of the population 30 years ago to 57 perent today) is because papers have become bland, dull, one-size-fits-all nonentities. In a world of increasing media choices (on the air, on cable, on the Net, etc.), the big dinosaur daily is an increasingly unattractive choice.
No matter when it comes out.
MONDAY: MTV: over one million served.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
YESTERDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and the aforementioned Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”
They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.
Hughes and Rea could have listed some other potential sociocultural lessons from avant-improv:
But can the “creative music” aesthetic really work as a metaphor or object lesson for larger society?
Probably not. But that’s at least part of the whole point.
MONDAY: The last of this for now, I promise.
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
