AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?

Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.

All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.

It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.

The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).

All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.

(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)

Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)

Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).

TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.

IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.

ELSEWHERE:

• Banner ads in review….

LIKE MANY FREE-LANCERS and self-employeds during Tax Time, I’ve been looking around for potential new gainful means of employment.

I’ve looked into everything from the 2000 Census to “Today’s Hottest Upstream MLM Opportunity.”

Heck, I’ve even looked into working for Microsoft.

But there’s one career opportunity I haven’t seriously pursued, because it would involve a no-turning-back life alteration: To cash in on my left-wing reputation by renouncing it.

It’s becoming quite a lucrative profession, both in the U.S. and in Europe. There’s one East Coaster, David Horowitz (not the ’70s TV consumer reporter of the same name), who’s spent nearly three decades capitalizing on the two or three years he spent as a ’60s radical–before he realized how much more he could make in lecture fees to conservative think tanks.

In France, meanwhile, the neo-con parade of right-turning intellectuals has grown so ubiquitous that German-British historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t get anybody in France to publish his book The Age of Extremes : A History of the World, 1914-1991 for five years. While Hobsbawm has acknowledged Stalinism’s cruelties, he’s refused to renounce his essential beliefs in the Marxian principles that Stalin & co. had perverted.

To personally blame a western Euro-Socialist for the Gulag is, to me, equivalent to blaming your local nunnery for the Inquisition.

There. Now I’ve just made a leftist statement I can subsequently renounce for big money.

Now all I have to do is make my presence and intentions known to the Discovery Institute, the Washington Institute for Policy Studies, KV-Lie, and Food Services of America.

They’ll eagerly welcome me as a convert to The Cause. I’ll tell them just what I’ll subsequently tell their friends–how I once was a lost soul in the wilderness of mistaken notions of equality and justice; but now realized that the only people who deserved any money or power were exactly the people who have most of the power and money right now.

I’ll gleefully tell the rich and comfortable that all the real problems in this country are due to those awful poor people. Yeah–and it’s also due to those pesky liberals who foolishly want to help those poor people instead of disciplining ’em with boot camps and more prisons and welfare “reform” and the demolition of public transportation.

Then I’ll go on to say global warming’s just a myth, that big-ass SUVs are really good for the environment, that anything Communist dictators ever did was evil but everything anti-Communist dictators ever did was good, and that you mustn’t believe anything the Liberal Media tell them but you must believe everything I tell them.

I’ll command umpteen-thousand-dollar book advances from HarperCollins or Regnery. I’ll rake in $50 grand talking to millionaires’ weekend retreats. I’ll be on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC whenever I want to.

Unless I have a sudden conscience attack and renounce my renunciation.

TOMORROW: ‘Norma Jean & Marilyn’ & Frances Farmer.

ELSEWHERE:

• Wm. Greider suggests a post-WTO mobilization strategy…
• Get your own Wu-Tang Clan nickname!…
• A great old fun tradition from chat rooms and bulletin board systems comes to the Web: the write-along story!…

TWO POLICE PROFESSIONAL-ASSOCIATION GUYS wrote a Seattle Times op-ed piece last week, asking Seattle Mayor Paul Schell to step down.

They said Schell’s handling of the World Trade Organization convention, the protests against it, and the police response to the protests was all wrong.

So far, I’ve no disagreement. But then these two go on to explain how and why they think Schell failed. They apparently believe the Schell-led police response wasn’t brutal enough.

No, no, no!

The cops, and the rent-a-cops trucked in from other jurisdictions (whether or not Schell was still in full control of their actions by then, which remains to be investigated), first “did nothing,” or at least very little, to the strategic vandals and random looters. Then, as if by excuse, they spent the following three days tear-gassing and pepper-spraying everybody in sight, as far as a mile or more away from the convention site.

Then, just to show himself to be even more afraid of people and of public life, Schell canceled the Seattle Center New Year’s Eve. (The free, public New Year’s Eve, that is; $50-$150-and-up events elsewhere in town went on, as did the public bashes in Tacoma, NYC, Jerusalem, Belfast, etc.).

In the days after this decision, his excuses for it got ever lamer, to the point where he actually proclaimed himself to not be a wuss.

As my mom always said, if a boy thinks he has to tell you how tough he is all the time, it just shows he’s the real weakling.

Schell did indeed botch the WTO-protest response. But that response was excessively, not insufficiently, forceful. And it was an over-reaction to the results of the municipal power structure’s own narrow vision. Everybody knew there were going to be self-styled anarchists showing up here. It was all over the TV news in the weeks before WTO.

But Schell’s bureaucrats might not belong to “everybody.” Knowing their heavy upscale-baby-boomer makeup, they could very well be part of that certain subculture that only listens to NP-fucking-R and only reads the New York-fucking-Times.

But even if they’re not extreme, Schell and his minions are definitely Out Of It.

They’re near-quintessential Pro-Business Democrats. They’re so concerned with placating downtown chain stores, condo developers, and the affluent that they not only don’t care about the under-50-grand-a-year folks, they seem to actually wish we no longer existed.

But I’d hate for any potential Schell recall movement to degenerate into a two-sided battle between the elitist Democrats he represents and the demoagoguian Republicans the aforementioned police-association men represent.

If there’s something more dangerous than leaders who only listen to NPR, it’s leaders who only listen to Rush Limbaugh and company.

MONDAY: If dot-com hype can fade away, can cyber-futurist hype do the same?

ELSEWHERE:

• Get your preteen daughters off of drugs or bulimia and onto a more potentially healthy overriding obsession….
• The potential next step in indie-moviemaking: Quick-Cam Cinema!…
• It’s your special day; try not to look too dorky (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….

AT THE END OF ’99, New York magazine essayist Michael Wolff predicted “old media” companies would buy dot-com companies with the cash these E-commercers have been paying to these established media giants for expensive TV commercials.

Didn’t take long for his prophecy to come true, sort of.

Yesterday, Time Warner (Warner Bros., The WB, CNN, Cartoon Network, TNT, Atlanta Braves, World Championship Wrestling, Warner Music Group, Rhino Records, Castle Rock Entertainment, New Line Cinema, CD Now, DC Comics, People, InStyle, Fortune, MAD, et al.) said it would combine with America Online (which had previously digested Netscape, CompuServe, and MovieFone).

The twist: Instead of TW simply engulfing and devouring AOL, the deal’s being touted as a merger (history’s biggest, by stock value) that would leave AOL in front of the new company’s name, and would assume AOL’s stock-ticker symbol. AOL shareholders would own 55 percent of the new company, to be called “AOL Time Warner.” AOL bossman Steve Case will be chairman of the combo, which should emerge from the various regulatory and bureaucratic processes by the end of this year.

The Associated Press even referred to the deal as AOL acquiring TW.

If anything, TW shareholders are getting the sweet end of the deal in pure financial terms. Thanks to the stock market’s dot-com speculation mania (something we’ll probably discuss at greater length next week), AOL’s stock was worth twice as much on Monday as TW’s–even though TW has much larger and vaster operations.

Variety, ever praising the old-media values, insists the deal’s details show that AOL needed TW more than the other way around. The online biz, the showbiz trade paper insists, is becoming more and more dependent upon “content.” That, and the old buzzword “synergy” (the excuse given 10 years ago for the original Time Inc./Warner Communications merger).

You remember synergy, don’t you? That was the magic word under which, say, Sports Illustrated and CNN were supposed to mesh seamlessly into a greater co-prosperity sphere. As the aforementioned Michael Wolff previously noted, it hasn’t quite turned out that way; leaving TW an overall financial underperformer trapped under several layers of Hollywood bloat. The big priorities at TW in recent years haven’t been the “content” operations but the distribution mechanisms; resulting in projects like SpaceJam, conceived as merchandising and cross-promotion tools first and as movies second.

But AOL could still have needed TW precisely because of its distribution properties–specifically, TW’s collection of local cable-TV systems (one of America’s top five).

AT&T, which bought TCI’s even bigger batch of local cable monopolies, has been aggressively moving into cable modem service It’s been positioning its own ISP, @Home, as its cable customers’ only home-broadband choice–a move which, if unchecked, could lead to the company having heavy influence over what individual Net users got to access. Regulators in Portland and other localities have tried to force AT&T to allow other ISPs on its cable; challenges which are still crawling through the courts.

Time Warner has its own cable-modem enterprise (entitled, synergistically enough, “Road Runner”). If AOL was going to stay strong in the emerging high-speed Net era, it had to have a deal with a big cable-modem operator. Now it has one.

When AT&T devoured TCI, it spat out a majority interest in TCI’s content operations (its stakes in Fox Sports Net, Discovery Networks, and assorted other cable channels). It’s not hard to imagine a similar future scenario in which AOL absorbs TW’s cable systems, then decides to spin off or sell off the assorted magazine, movie, TV, cable-channel, and other media properties; either as a whole or as individual dismemberments.

What would the synergy advocates (let alone the content advocates) say then?

TOMORROW: Why ‘Attitude’ is such a bore.

ELSEWHERE:

• Thanks to the Web, everyone can again enjoy that turn-of-the-century “nerve food” soda, Original Moxie!…
• “Swedes favor the flavor of ketchup on plain pasta….”
• Learn to make your own faux-Twinkies at Top Secret Recipes (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….

SOME WOMEN SPEND FORTUNES trying to look sexy. But none would ever spend a dime directly for sex.

That’s the message of an article in the print version of the sex-workers’ zine Blackstockings. (It’s not available on the zine’s website as of this writing.)

The piece’s writer wants to be mean to any het-male readers of the zine–men who are probably picking it up out of support and/or sympathy for the women and gay men in the escort, stripper, phone sex, and porn trades, and should be thanked instead of scolded.

But no, this writer wants to talk trash to any guys out in her reading audience who have the common but unrealistic fantasy of sexually servicing women for money.

It’s an intriguing dream, to imagine oneself such a great lover as to charge cash from ladies. As long as you don’t think of having to go through some of the everyday hassles women in the sex-biz face–from having to mate with unattractive people (as spoofed in the recent farce movie Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo) to legal troubles, cruel pimps, personal-safety threats, and the other stuff Blackstockings regularly reports in detail.

While women directly buying sex is rare in North America’s cities, a lot of more common transactions come close. Women have often “paid” indirectly to satisfy their hormones–day-spa treatments from Senor Bruno; costly singles-bar apparel; affairs that put a woman’s marriage and/or career at risk; abusive relationships a woman might stay in because of her addiction to the intense sex; seductions that lead to confidence-game scams.

Some of these costly behaviors might theoretically be better replaced by discreet, professional encounters with men trained to completely please a woman and to expect nothing in return but the bucks. (That could also be a potential godsend to older or shier women, or professional women who don’t have the time or patience for the dating grind.)

And it is happenning; just not anywhere around here.

Early last year, I mentioned how, in the Caribbean, the sex-tourism industry had discovered female customers. There’s an extensive item about it in the latest Utne Reader, called “In Search of the Big Bamboo.”

The story describes island “beach boys” who troll the resorts and tourist zones, offering their toned, dark-skinned bodies to visiting women in exchange for “gifts,” some of which are in the form of cash. The story adds that similar scenes take place in Brazil, the Philippines, Greece, Spain, India, and that sex-biz stalwart Thailand–spots where the weather’s warm, the scenery’s exotic, no gossipy neighbors are around, and women with money can meet studly young men with much less money.

This means certain females, under certain conditions, will indeed behave as “johns–” the behavior certain radical-feminists used to point to as evidence of the universal ickiness of all males and the universal victimhood of all females.

But it makes a little more sense if you can abandon such narrow gender stereotypes and accept that women really can do everything men can; including things an ’80s radical-feminist might disapprove of.

As for the ’90s “sex-positive” feminism of Blackstockings, the existence of overseas “beach boy” hooking proves that females have (1) females have desires, and (2) in a monetary-based society, desires will be traded for currency.

It just probably won’t involve any would-be Deuce Bigalows in the Blackstockings readership, at least not soon.

MONDAY: More on the MP3 glut.

ELSEWHERE:

• Is Ken Griffey Jr. now “so valuable that no team can afford to pay him properly”?…
• Are you sure you really heard that on the air?…
• How to reuse a spent WTO tear-gas canister (found by Bud)….
• Finally, somebody found some appropriate uses for a cell phone….

NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.

Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.

DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.

MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.

At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):

1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–

2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–

3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.

I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.

Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.

It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.

American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.

What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.

And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.

I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.

New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.

T’aint the case no more.

These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.

Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)

This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).

Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.

I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.

TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.

ELSEWHERE:

• Bored by TV shows? Then go straight to the commercials!…
• First there was that movie, The Gift. Now, you can gift-wrap yourself in the modern Net-shopping/UPS-delivery way, with see-thru bubblewrap vests, skirts, and bikinis from Bubblebodywear! (found by Slave)….

FIRST, A LOYAL THANX to all of you who responded to yesterday’s piece on the Grinch who stole New Year’s.

BY NOW, you may be quite tired indeed of reviews of the century and of the millennium.

You might even have noticed a few Year-in-Review feature stories out there.

But one thing we haven’t seen at all (except for Michael Wolff, MTV, and CBC) are reviews of the decade.

You know, that epoch in time long enough to seem substantial, but short enough that people old enough to go to bars have been through at least two of them.

So in our effort to always remain out-of-step with what everybody else is doing, here’s MISCmedia’s own Eighty-Six to the Nineties:

Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution:

• That whole World Wide Web thang.
• “Alternative” music.
• “Indie” film.
• The “New Urbanism.”
• Foreign “relief missions” (Somalia, etc.).

We’ll Look Back and Laff At:

• Rush Limbaugh and co.
• Day trading.
• White rappers and “new heavies.”
• “Girl Power” singers who didn’t write songs or play instruments.
• “Young Country.”
• Every damned band in Seattle since 1992 claiming it was the only band in Seattle that was “not-grunge.”
• The Phantom Menace.
• Computer-graphic “morphing.”
• “X-Treme” sports.
• Gaudy sneakers.

Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated:

• The Gulf War.
• Rodney King verdict.
• Gargantuan SUVs.
• Mike Tyson.
• Newt Gingrich and co.
• Analog video.
• Planet Hollywood.

We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without:

• DVDs.
• DSL lines.
• Digital camcorders and desktop video editing.
• BBC America, Game Show Network, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc.
• Streaming audio/video.

Future Nostalgia Icons of the Decade:

• The Simpsons.
• Pokemon.
• Teletubbies.
• South Park.
• Minivans.
• Cell phones.
• Telephone modems.
• Martha Stewart.
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
• Palm Pilot.

We’ll Wonder What All the Fuss Was About:

• Net porn.
• Monica Lewinsky.
• Celebrity “journalism.”
• Trash talk shows.
• Wrestling.
• Dot-com IPOs.
• V-chips.
• The end of Seinfeld.
• Talk and George magazines.
• Windows 95.

Sources of Hope:

• The WTO-protest coalition (greens, unions, cultural anti-imperialists, organic-foodies, etc. etc.; all joining to fight the common enemy of the corporate monoculture and to seek the right to agree to disagree in a more diverse future).
• Online organizing (political, tribal, subcultural).
• DIY cultural production/distribution.
• Greater-or-lesser progress toward freedom and/or peace in South Africa, East Timor, the Balkans, N. Ireland, Middle East, etc.
• “Instant” book printing.

Top Local Stories:

• Rise and fall of the Seattle Music Scene hype.
• Rise and fall of Cobain.
• Rise and potential fall of Microsoft.
• The mythical Seattle of Frasier comes true: Costly restaurants, condo towers, luxury malls, and stock-option tycoons as the only people who can afford to live here.
• Monumental “world class” architecture: The new art museum, symphony hall, Experience Music Project, Seattle U. chapel, and baseball stadium; and the future football stadium, library, city hall, and opera house.
• End of Kingdome, Rainier Brewing, Almost Live, Seafirst Bank, and non-millionaire housing.
• Out-of-town protesters make things inconvenient for out-of-town WTO guests; leading to local bystanders getting sprayed and (non-lethally) shot by local cops.

TOMORROW: The 14th annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

ELSEWHERE:

• Marlene Dietrich as the century’s ultimate icon of Cool? I can dig it. (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room)….
• The Nation’s Alternative 20th-Century History includes an odd old letter-to-the-editor on the “Sissified sex literature” of the ’20s….
• From an old college classmate of David Letterman’s, a solid half-hour RealAudio collection of old Top 40 radio-station promos from across the country! (Found by TV Barn)….

IT’S A POST-SOLSTICE MISCmedia, the online column that had just gotten used to less than 8.5 hours of sunlight when the nights suddenly started getting shorter again.

For one thing, the long nites have left me plenty-O-time, and the right climactic setting, to get caught up in all the reading matter I’d obtained at the last Tower Books clearance sale six months before.

That, in turn, meant I could turn my eye toward some of the literary zines that have popped up of late.

Such as August Avo and Doug “Das” Andersson’s Klang.

It first appeared almost three years ago, disappeared after one issue, and has now reappeared, with three tabloid installments produced thus far.

Each issue mixes two serials with one-shot short stories, poems, line art (including some old Durer woodcuts), and other supplementary material.

Andersson’s serial, “The Transformation,” starts with an antihero who applies a sexual-enhancement salve and turns into a donkey. The first, origin-story installment has its lame parts (such as its fictional names for Seattle and Woodland Park Zoo); but the next two segments go places Kafka never nightmared. In the third part, that includes a Fundamentalist Y2K survivalist farm, where our protagonist (a literal “ass man”) is enslaved to run an old-fashioned flour mill.

Avo’s serial, “Badge” (purported to be a translation of a “bestselling Russian novel by Sasha Klinokov”), is even more ambitious. Since it’s now online at the above link, I won’t try to explain or summarize it. I will say that, no matter what its true origins, it does a grand job of capturing the epic-tragedy spirit of classic pre-USSR Russian lit; as situated in the epic tragedy that much of post-USSR Russia has become.

But the zine’s best part is “Notes on the American Novel” by the pseudonymous “JAD,” appearing on the back pages of issues 1 and 3. These pithy aphorisms revolve around a pair of premises: (1) The Novel, in the classical definition, is a European art form unsuited to capturing U.S. social realities; and (2) this inadequacy reveals fundamental flaws about U.S. society:

• There will be no great American novel until we get to know each other. Presently, we look at each other in a few limited and near meaningless ways: Movie star, criminal, consumer, welfare mom, soccer mom, rich guy, poor guy, Negro, whitey… gay, straight….
• In America he who screams the loudest plays guitar the loudest laughs the loudest gets the attention of others–the most obvious–wins. This is not the ideal environment in which to develop the subtle art of the novel.
• The novel in America is not considered a legitimate place of perceptual business, of intellectual endeavor or inquiry. Nothing is advanced or looked for beyond titillation and sensationalism. In America the novel is what you do at the end of the line; after you retire from film directing or acting you write novels.
• Fucking is no big deal and yet most writers, who I assume don’t get enough, magnify this act into transcendence and epiphanies.
• The only transaction that has any meaning in America is the transaction of buying and selling; we have no concept of each other outside the narrow bounds of our economic transactions.

Slightly more optimistic views on fin-de-siecle American writing can be found in Context, an in-bookstore tabloid review from the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press. Besides tributes to great authors from other times and places (Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Henry James, Samuel Beckett), it’s got thoughtful praise for Diane Williams, David Markson, and McSweeney’s. (Dalkey publishes Williams and Markson; and its placement of its own authors as implied heirs to modern-lit’s greats is a PR move for sure; but, at least in the case of Williams, it’s deserved.)

Whether Williams’s tight, internalized short-shorts; Markson’s hibrow story-essays; or McSweeney’s high whimsy mark new directions for storytelling in the new whatever-period-of-time-you-wanna-call-it will, natch, have to be answered later.

But at least they, and the Klang guys, are asking some of the right questions.

TOMORROW: A festive holiday message.

ELSEWHERE:

• Here it comes to save the day–Lee’s (Useless) Super-Hero Generator! (found by Chiplog)….
• Hate network logos in every TV screen corner? Join Kill the Bugs!…

ANOTHER YEAR DRAWS TO A CLOSE; and that means North America’s film critics are churning out their assorted “best movies of the year” lists.

Entertainment Weekly got ahead of the pack last month with a cover story calling 1999 “The Year That Changed Movies.”

Its premise: Cheap digital video, fancy computer animation, Internet publicity and distribution, and a resurgent indie-film scene combined to transform U.S. cinema.

Instead of a year that was supposed to have been dominated by The Phantom Menace and megastar action vehicles, we got a year dominated financially by The Blair Witch Project and critically by Being John Malkovich. A year in which the most talked-about special effect was the censoring of the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene. A year in which calling indie filmmakers “tomorrow’s Tarantinos” became treated as almost as bad an insult as calling them “tomorrow’s Spielbergs.”

Michael Wolff, the best thing in New York magazine these days, largely concurs. Back in September, he wrote that “it is becoming painfully clear to everyone but the studio executives that the blockbuster, brand-supporting movie is dead.”

“Imagine a world without movie stars,” Wolff writes; claiming celebrity covers no longer guarantee magazine sales (then why do print magazines about the Internet keep contriving lame excuses to feature Courtney Cox or Michael Jordan up front?). Wolff goes on to envision a society where everybody thinks they’re a potential screenwriter, actor, or director; where Hollywood’s centralized, rigid hierarchy gets tossed aside like yesterday’s drug fad. Where even the conglomerates that own the big studios recognize they can’t make consistent, stockholder-expected profit levels from business-as-usual moviemaking (even as a loss-leader for merchandise licensing).

Couldn’t happen soon enough, I say.

Whether it really is happening this way, and whether it’s happening fast enough, is still debatable.

Wasn’t too long ago that I was complaining about how indie film had gotten tired and tiresome. The whole Sundance Festival-centered sub-industry had devolved into Hollywood’s farm league, churning out interchangeable “hip violence” thrillers and gross-out comedies for release thru the big studios’ pseudo-indie distribution arms.

But, gradually, hope has returned.

This hope has come from online PR and film-discussion sites, alternative-to-the-alternative film festivals, streaming-video movie sites (many of them Seattle-based), and all the other aspects of a rapidly maturing DIY-moviemaking support network.

No longer need the aspiring next Cassavettes scrounge for funds to assemble a full shooting crew, then scrounge again for editing funds in time to make the big sales push to the Miramax gatekeepers.

Today’s Patricia Rozema wannabe can start off by making no-budget digital-video shorts, building her skills and style while networking with her fellow visionaries. When she’s ready to tell longer tales, she’ll have learned how to tell them effectively–and how to get them made and disseminated properly.

If we’re lucky, this neo-indie scene will remain diffuse and cheap enough that no future Viacoms or Time Warners can ever take it over.

Though they’ll most certainly try.

TOMORROW: A visit to the Cinema Grill.