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SIX MONTHS AGO, you couldn’t see a string of TV commercials without at least one website address flashing on-screen.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see a string of TV commercials (except maybe on Pax TV) without at least one ad that’s all about a website.
Yet despite the hype over e-commerce and the dubya-dubya-dubya as a marketing tool, the Web remains what I hoped it would become five years ago–an all-accessible repository for great, immediate writing.
Herewith, a few examples of fine online verbiage that are not Salon and heavens-not Slate:
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accompaniment to the print somewhat-less-than-quarterly McSweeney’s alterna-lit journal, but sharing no content with the paper version–just the same sense of literate whimsy and post-postmodern graciousness.
Rat Bastard. Washington, DC-based Don Bruns doin’ the personal-net-diary thang, with self-effacing wit to spare.
Exquisite Corpse. Andrei Codrescu’s little paper litmag is now indeed a corpse, but he continues to present brash-yet-thoughtful voices online.
My current fave: James Nolan on American doublespeak in the age of spin-control (a topic that gets beaten to death every election cycle, but he manages to bring it back to life).
Bittersweets. Each day, a one-paragraph narrative or observation about the wistfully-regretful side of life.
The Napkin. Like Bittersweets, but shorter, usually less bitter, and sometimes even cosmic (in a nice way).
Word. Besides the fun contemporary-art pages, the pages of found-objects pix, and the “Junk Radio” section full of moldy-oldies in streaming audio, the words on Word are themselves darned interesting and lively. Current best example: Philip Dray’s probably-fictional yet realistic reminiscence of being “a Jewish caddy at a WASP country club.”
You can tell the folks running Word have the right attitude if you hit “View Source” on your browser when you reach its homepage. There, amid all the HTML codin’, is this hidden (until now, anyway) treat:
“META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Forget about whatever you were searching for. It’s not important. You may not be aware of it consciously, but you really want to read Word instead. So go on — click here. You’ll be glad you did! Satisfaction guaranteed!”.”
Random Story Generator. I know it’s just an automated version of Mad Libs, but damned if it’s not a total laff-riot each and every time.
ELSEWHERE: There’s a big convention of ethnic-minority journalists in my town this week. The Seattle Times has been dutifully covering and previewing the event, but its big Sunday feature story tie-in was strictly about the “minority” the Times, and Seattle, are most comfortable with–upscale, white women (preferably blond and blue-eyed); in this case, TV anchorwomen.
TOMORROW: David Foster Wallace’s new fiction collection is anything but ‘hideous.’
CONTINUING WITH HIGHLIGHTS from last week’s fantabulous Big Book of MISC. pre-release party, here are some of the best entries in our little “Insta-Poem” game, anonymous and in no particular order.
The game’s only rule: “Write within these lines, with these words.” For our purposes here, the words given on the Insta-Poem form are capitalized; the words entered by individual Insta-Poets are uncapitalized.
“Despite THE DECLINE OF nonspecific generalities AFFECTED by the entire CAKE of Bill Gates III IN A WORLD of Nazis THE POLITICS OF Holland, Sweden, and Germany bring EXCELLENCE IN marijuana consumption in a MALE-ORIENTED society with a PRIORITY in the overzealous beliefs of THE FEMININE agenda against the rest OF THE WORD especially if it’s heterosexual males FROM America and Canada TO Great Britain and Portugal. JUST ONE MORE lustful, intoxicated DESIRE could MAYBE bring peace to this land WHEN it SHOULD always NEVER and ALWAYS because it CAN’T we MUST and COULD the WANTS puke LOVE.” “With THE DECLINE OF western civ., the AFFECTED morons will ear CAKE and like it! Because, IN A WORLD of morons, THE POLITICS OF L. Ron Hubbard will suffer EXCELLENCE IN Internet access when MALE-ORIENTED sports attain PRIORITY on television and THE FEMININE side of men will revolt and rage OF THE WORD www.(blank).com FROM here TO eternity. JUST ONE MORE drink, baby! You and I DESIRE sex MAYBE later or tonight WHEN you SHOULD sleep NEVER long ALWAYS wanting CAN’T settle MUST try COULD not WANTS more LOVE.” “I felt that THE DECLINE OF all that AFFECTED a glorious coconut CAKE fluffy and white–completely eaten up IN A WORLD doomed to languish in THE POLITICS OF pie. Oh why, but where can EXCELLENCE IN popery be turned into a pit of MALE-ORIENTED lesbianism, settling the PRIORITY of unavailability–claiming THE FEMININE majority. Only a whisper OF THE WORD and all of our managed senses to be FROM time shocked TO time forgotten in the auspices of JUST ONE MORE time. Forfeit DESIRE, forfeit pain, and MAYBE, only maybe, that coconut will fall WHEN it SHOULD and NEVER be eaten, ALWAYS beaten. CAN’T wait, MUST I COULD I–only WANTS, wants LOVE.” “After the industrial revolution, THE DECLINE OF mankind AFFECTED my future drastically! CAKE, formerly homemade, is now mass-produced IN A WORLD which doesn’t care. THE POLITICS OF mass production has caused the death of individuality. EXCELLENCE IN honeing one’s individuality was tossed out with MALE-ORIENTED aplomb. PRIORITies have changed. Money is #1. THE FEMININE mystic now consists of a nice car and a good plastic surgeon. OF THE WORD `individuality,’ no one speaks. FROM shore TO shore, one man’s voice is JUST ONE MORE agreement to the never-ending array of capitalist DESIRE and propaganda. MAYBE all of us are biologically sick WHEN we say we SHOULD NEVER complain. ALWAYS complain! CAN’T you see you MUST! Freedom COULD happen, WANTS of individual LOVE, could come to be!” “Lipstick, THE DECLINE OF ciders, dancing AFFECTED fast CAKE from drunks IN A WORLD of opium smoking, THE POLITICians and pansies for un-requited EXCELLENCE IN benevolent forms of MALE-ORIENTED tse-tse flies. But the first PRIORITY should be baby marmosets or THE FEMININE mystique. Adapted out OF THE WORD `supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ derived FROM horse pucky TO cave paintings. JUST ONE MORE thing, baby. Just remember DESIRE is for the weak. MAYBE the strong should try it. WHEN sleeping, SHOULD is a silly word. NEVER is lost; ALWAYS can wait; CAN’T is useless; MUST is urgent; COULD is subjective; WANTS lead to LOVE.” “Regarding THE DECLINE OF morals, the AFFECTED population can’t have its CAKE and eat it while living IN A WORLD subjected to THE POLITICS OF the profit motive. There is no EXCELLENCE IN shuffling through piles of MALE-ORIENTED corporate conformity with its only PRIORITY being apathetic advancement. THE FEMININE aspects of our subconscience reveal the limitation OF THE WORDs `competition,’ `advancement,’ and `pragmatism.’ To go FROM capitalism TO complementary holism means JUST ONE MORE person(s) acquiring an insatiable DESIRE for truth. MAYBE even you with your beer will cry WHEN you know you SHOULD have, but NEVER acted on the `ALWAYS-true, but CAN’T quite fit, but MUST if only I COULD prove, everyone WANTS only true LOVE’ theory.” “As I recall, THE DECLINE OF Seattle poetry AFFECTED the scent of fresh Hostess CAKE drifting south from Lake Union. IN A WORLD shimmering with THE POLITICS OF hydrofoil turbulence, the muses huddled to consider EXCELLENCE IN the wooden skeletons of whale-songs. How could a MALE-ORIENTED economy of engines and high-PRIORITY jetcraft surrender at night to THE FEMININE welding of cadence and verse? A memory OF THE WORD repeated often, like a lingering after-effect FROM symptomatic nerve gas, TO remind the soul that there was JUST ONE MORE movie, just one more song, just one more glance of DESIRE, one moment when MAYBE, perhaps, the film-row houses and ghosts of sailors knew WHEN to shout! SHOULD I forget, NEVER to whisper, ALWAYS to desire what I CAN’T have again? I MUST know I COULD forever know who WANTS my sky-red LOVE.”
“Despite THE DECLINE OF nonspecific generalities AFFECTED by the entire CAKE of Bill Gates III IN A WORLD of Nazis THE POLITICS OF Holland, Sweden, and Germany bring EXCELLENCE IN marijuana consumption in a MALE-ORIENTED society with a PRIORITY in the overzealous beliefs of THE FEMININE agenda against the rest OF THE WORD especially if it’s heterosexual males FROM America and Canada TO Great Britain and Portugal. JUST ONE MORE lustful, intoxicated DESIRE could MAYBE bring peace to this land WHEN it SHOULD always NEVER and ALWAYS because it CAN’T we MUST and COULD the WANTS puke LOVE.”
“With THE DECLINE OF western civ., the AFFECTED morons will ear CAKE and like it! Because, IN A WORLD of morons, THE POLITICS OF L. Ron Hubbard will suffer EXCELLENCE IN Internet access when MALE-ORIENTED sports attain PRIORITY on television and THE FEMININE side of men will revolt and rage OF THE WORD www.(blank).com FROM here TO eternity. JUST ONE MORE drink, baby! You and I DESIRE sex MAYBE later or tonight WHEN you SHOULD sleep NEVER long ALWAYS wanting CAN’T settle MUST try COULD not WANTS more LOVE.”
“I felt that THE DECLINE OF all that AFFECTED a glorious coconut CAKE fluffy and white–completely eaten up IN A WORLD doomed to languish in THE POLITICS OF pie. Oh why, but where can EXCELLENCE IN popery be turned into a pit of MALE-ORIENTED lesbianism, settling the PRIORITY of unavailability–claiming THE FEMININE majority. Only a whisper OF THE WORD and all of our managed senses to be FROM time shocked TO time forgotten in the auspices of JUST ONE MORE time. Forfeit DESIRE, forfeit pain, and MAYBE, only maybe, that coconut will fall WHEN it SHOULD and NEVER be eaten, ALWAYS beaten. CAN’T wait, MUST I COULD I–only WANTS, wants LOVE.”
“After the industrial revolution, THE DECLINE OF mankind AFFECTED my future drastically! CAKE, formerly homemade, is now mass-produced IN A WORLD which doesn’t care. THE POLITICS OF mass production has caused the death of individuality. EXCELLENCE IN honeing one’s individuality was tossed out with MALE-ORIENTED aplomb. PRIORITies have changed. Money is #1. THE FEMININE mystic now consists of a nice car and a good plastic surgeon. OF THE WORD `individuality,’ no one speaks. FROM shore TO shore, one man’s voice is JUST ONE MORE agreement to the never-ending array of capitalist DESIRE and propaganda. MAYBE all of us are biologically sick WHEN we say we SHOULD NEVER complain. ALWAYS complain! CAN’T you see you MUST! Freedom COULD happen, WANTS of individual LOVE, could come to be!”
“Lipstick, THE DECLINE OF ciders, dancing AFFECTED fast CAKE from drunks IN A WORLD of opium smoking, THE POLITICians and pansies for un-requited EXCELLENCE IN benevolent forms of MALE-ORIENTED tse-tse flies. But the first PRIORITY should be baby marmosets or THE FEMININE mystique. Adapted out OF THE WORD `supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ derived FROM horse pucky TO cave paintings. JUST ONE MORE thing, baby. Just remember DESIRE is for the weak. MAYBE the strong should try it. WHEN sleeping, SHOULD is a silly word. NEVER is lost; ALWAYS can wait; CAN’T is useless; MUST is urgent; COULD is subjective; WANTS lead to LOVE.”
“Regarding THE DECLINE OF morals, the AFFECTED population can’t have its CAKE and eat it while living IN A WORLD subjected to THE POLITICS OF the profit motive. There is no EXCELLENCE IN shuffling through piles of MALE-ORIENTED corporate conformity with its only PRIORITY being apathetic advancement. THE FEMININE aspects of our subconscience reveal the limitation OF THE WORDs `competition,’ `advancement,’ and `pragmatism.’ To go FROM capitalism TO complementary holism means JUST ONE MORE person(s) acquiring an insatiable DESIRE for truth. MAYBE even you with your beer will cry WHEN you know you SHOULD have, but NEVER acted on the `ALWAYS-true, but CAN’T quite fit, but MUST if only I COULD prove, everyone WANTS only true LOVE’ theory.”
“As I recall, THE DECLINE OF Seattle poetry AFFECTED the scent of fresh Hostess CAKE drifting south from Lake Union. IN A WORLD shimmering with THE POLITICS OF hydrofoil turbulence, the muses huddled to consider EXCELLENCE IN the wooden skeletons of whale-songs. How could a MALE-ORIENTED economy of engines and high-PRIORITY jetcraft surrender at night to THE FEMININE welding of cadence and verse? A memory OF THE WORD repeated often, like a lingering after-effect FROM symptomatic nerve gas, TO remind the soul that there was JUST ONE MORE movie, just one more song, just one more glance of DESIRE, one moment when MAYBE, perhaps, the film-row houses and ghosts of sailors knew WHEN to shout! SHOULD I forget, NEVER to whisper, ALWAYS to desire what I CAN’T have again? I MUST know I COULD forever know who WANTS my sky-red LOVE.”
Tomorrow: The recently-completed Seattle International Film Festival had two high-profile documentaries about mature Americans’ fun and games. We compare and contrast.
AS PROMISED YESTERDAY, here are selected, anonymous responses to this year’s MISC.-O-Rama questionnaire, as handed out at the Big Book of MISC. prerelease party last Tuesday.
Favorite food/drink:
“Spinach/Fat Tire beer”
“Guinness”
“Lately, Ethiopian food”
“Black Butte Porter”
“Lasagna/Guinness”
“Beer/beer/pot”
“Pizza/chai and caffeine/coffee”
“Lay’s potato chips”
“Manchego cheese/Fino sherry”
“2nd Ave. Pizza; Puerco Liozon tamales”
Favorite store, if any:
“Cinema Books”
“Safeway”
“Ola Wyola”
“Le Frock”
“Pike Place Market”
“Seattle Micro”
“Larry’s Deli”
“Nelson’s on Queen Anne”
“Left Bank Books”
“Spy-PI”
Favorite website, if any:
“disinfo.com”
“Z magazine”
“www.nasa.gov”
“suck.com”
“persiankitty.com”
“belltunes.com”
“Ebay (God help me)”
Favorite Pokemon character:
“Golem”
“Psyduck”
“Golduck”
“Charmander”
“Any evil Pokemon”
“Depends on my moods”
“Huh?”
Favorite catch phrase:
“Fucko”
“Fuck it”
“Vote”
“Can I get a whoop whoop?”
“Bite me!”
“So?”
“Gotcha”
“Guh!”
What I’d like on the MISC. Media website:
“Online gambling”
“Opinions on current movies and TV happenings”
“Page #s”
“Free money”
“More Korn”
“Porn-free”
“`Things I Like’ and `Misc.’ columns”
“Truthful, relevant info”
“Clark rules!!”
How I feel about Y2K:
“Yeah!”
“What about Y3K?”
“Hello!”
“Y?”
“Y care”
“We were all alive before computers. Fuck ’em”
“Y1K”
“Cool but nervous”
“We’ll be OK–too much scare-mongering”
“Excuse to party”
“001101101011001101”
My prediction for the new century:
“Mexico’s century”
“Isn’t going to be any end of the world”
“Greed will be the end of us”
“More millionaires”
“We’ll continue evolving”
“Non-violent complementary holist revolution”
“Total economic and social breakdown”
“Technology will rage”
“Plastic guns, TVs that come with cameras so people can have their 15 minutes of fame”
“Cool stuff”
“It will happen”
How I’d fix the Mariners:
“Too late”
“Show everyone that they don’t actually mean anything”
“Sell them out of state”
“Bring back Randy”
“Greg Maddux”
“Less superstar status on players”
“Put the Braves and the Yankees into a temporal vortex for 30 years or so”
“Fix the Sonics instead. Fire Vin Baker and Polynice”
Does Seattle suck? Why/why not?
“It’s trying hard to”
“Seattle is still an insecure deb, an easy mark for the carpetbaggers. But that’s sort of endearing in a tries-too-hard sort of way.”
“Greed, greed, greed will be the end of us”
“Sometimes–too much encroaching gentrification”
“No–some of the best people on Earth live here”
“No”
“No. Someday we may be a Vancouver, B.C.”
“No–not yet”
“Yes–the invation of ugly commercial L.A. architecture”
“No fucking way”
“Seattle is a place. People and their actions universally suck.”
“People–no. Politics–yes.”
What this town needs (other than construction projects)
“More books like yours”
“More Charlie Chong/Emmett Watson type activists/characters”
“Noam Chomsky shoved down their throats”
“A committee to fight for the rights of the homeless”
“Street parking; or an innovative way to bring people in”
“A decent Mexican restaurant”
“Outdoor seating at bars/restaurants”
“A whole new life–less Starbucks; less stuff. Less is more.”
“Cheap rent”
“More surf instrumental bands”
“Less people; less money”
“Fewer buildings; less people; more beer!”
All the world’s problems can be blamed on:
“My parents”
“Bill Gates!”
“Bill Gates, greed, sexism, and Starbucks”
“Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, and Michael Jackson”
“Greedy, greedy, greedy little pigs”
“Big business”
“Attorneys”
“Republicans and religious right-wingers”
“Morality legislation”
“Ignorance”
“Questionnaires”
TOMORROW: The party highlights continue with the best entries in our Insta-Poem game.
I SAID LAST TIME THERE’D BE a new look for your favorite social-commentary site, and here ’tis. From now on, you’ll get a fresh Misc. World dose every darn weekday.
Usually, these mini-columns will contain only one item apiece, compared to the 13-year tradition (four years online) of a grab-baggy of three-dot juxtapositions. These daily installments will show up right here on the main miscmedia.com page, so you can start ruining your mind right away.
For those of you who can’t log on every day, you’ll still get to read a week’s worth (or more) thanks to the handy links right beneath each day’s installment.
These daily column-ettes will now incorporate the book, movie, and music reviews which for the past seven or eight months have had their separate section of the site, Clark’s Culture Corral. Recent review pieces will continue to be linked from the Culture Corral index page; and you’ll still be able to directly go from the reviews to get the works from Amazon.com.
And, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a slight name change here. The site itself is now known as miscmedia.com; the site’s former name, Misc. World, is now the name of the online column (previously known just as Misc.) that’s the site’s main feature. The short name lives on in The Big Book of Misc.
SPEAKING OF WHICH: The Big Book is out. It’s beautiful, if I may modestly say so myself. Those of you who’ve pre-ordered your copies should have ’em now; if not, please email me.
Thanks to all of you who attended the pre-release party last Tuesday at the Ditto. Highlights from the annual party questionnaire tomorrow.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that always loves cool, dark places, couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the totally not-getting-it blurb for SIFF installed at the top of some of those HotStamp postcard racks around town: “And you thought Sundance was crowded… Be sure to catch the 25th Seattle International Film Festival. The largest movie gathering in the U.S. is sure to showcase movies from Hollywood’s heavyweights to the next Quentin Tarantino.” SIFF, at its best, is about film as art (or at least film as bougeois-boomer quasi-art), not about stupid marketing-driven Hollywood hype. More about that, sorta, a few items down.
UPDATE #1: By the time you read this, The Big Book of MISC. will be printed, bound, and shipping to those of you who’ve graciously pre-ordered it. If you’re reading this early in the week, you can get a copy for your very own live and in person at our luscious MISC.-O-Rama party, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue in seedy Belltown (just north of 5th and Bell, across from the backside of the Cadillac lot). If you’re reading this after the event, you can still get a copy in person at the Pistil and M. Coy book shops, with more outlets to roll out in the next few weeks. And, of course, you can buy it directly online at this link.
ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: The $25,000 Pyramid.
UPDATE #2: Mark Murphy’s back as artistic director of On the Boards. Kudos to all the OTB supporters and members of the Seattle performing-arts community who successfully got OTB’s board to reverse its initial firing of the much-loved Murphy.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: “After Dinner Nipples” mints at Urban Outfitters are described by the woman who recommended them to me as “better than the real thing.” I’d heartily disagree, but I did find these mint-chocolate drops tasty and great to lick (but not all that soft to the touch, and without the creamy center that would’ve made the gag-concept more complete).
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: The 13th year of this little collection of odd-stuff-from-all-over called Misc. hasn’t been the luckiest. Something once read in print (or at least glimpsed at) by a third of Seattle’s adult population now has a much smaller, though steady and growing, on-screen audience.
I’m not going away, and neither is the site.
But it’s perhaps time to reconsider a few things:
(1) The online column is still based on the concept of the print Misc.–filling a more-or-less predetermined (albeit self-pre-determined) word count, at intervals corresponding to the column’s former appearance in a weekly tabloid.
(2) One of the column’s premises has been to passionately advocate urban life and specifically Seattle life. It started back when suburban flight was still considered an inexorable trend, and when everybody (especially Seattleites) thought Seattle was a hick town where nothing ever happenned and nothing ever would. Nowadays, even Newsweek has noted big downtown “revivals” across the country. And Seattle, whose downtown never really needed reviving, is creaking under the real burdens of the cyber-wealthy, buying up everything and making borderline-boho existences even less possible.
(3) Another recurring theme has always been to assert the worthiness of the punk-rock generation and its values. Far from defeatist or nihilistic, punks have strongly believed in community, in self-expression, in taking charge of their culture and their lives. Certain fogeys such as Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran still hate punks, but the media corporations came to love ’em. And the kids younger than me haven’t rebelled against punks and their allies the way I rebelled against aging hippies. Clueless mass-media reporters can still find goths and industrial-rockers in high schools and mistakenly believe these kids are doing something new.
(What many current white kids have done has been to ignore rock in general, turning away from the major labels’ glut of fake-Pearl-Jam bands and toward post-gangsta hiphop; which in turn has caused many young blacks to run from that and toward newer acts considered either too advanced or too lovey-dovey for the mallrats.)
(4) Punks also believe the “lowly” medium of rock ‘n’ roll music is, or can be, an art form; not via the bombast of early-’70s “art rock” but by being the best damn rock ‘n’ roll music it can be. That strident belief has fueled the column’s whole defense-of-pop-culture premise–once something few other ambitious writers attempted, but now commonplace.
In the mid-’80s, when the column first appeared in ArtsFocus (a publication mainly devoted to local fringe-theater and ethnic-dance activities), many intellectuals and art-worlders still believed there was a rigid dichotomy between “high” and “low” culture. This notion was perhaps best depicted in the 1990 “High and Low” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which purported to compare and contrast works from the two realms but which really turned into a long, desperate defense of this artificial division.
When “popular culture” was seriously talked about (in places like Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a whole department about it), it was usually treated in the post-leftist “cultural studies” manner, as a set of sociological and political phenomena to be dissected and theorized about–never as “real” art or even entertainment, never as the work of creative people who might be trying to express something.
That, of course, was the era of only three major TV networks, monopoly newspapers, and CD plants who’d only do business with the major labels. It was a time when the book business was still considered too marginal for big corporations to want to muscle in on (at least on the retail end). It was easy to still think of “popular” culture as “low” culture, as something factory-produced and best considered in industrial terms.
Things are a little different now, sorta. There’s dozens of cable channels, hundreds of book imprints, thousands of indie record labels, and scores of “alternative” weekies (though each business mentioned still has a few high-rollers at its top, struggling to stay on top via increasingly-frenetic dealmaking). Despite the current dropping-off of exhibitor interest in “indie” films (due at least partly to the glut of fake-Tarantino “hip” bloodfests from the big studios’ pseudo-indie divisions), true-indie filmers and videotapers continue to shoot and edit away.
Then there’s this World Wide Web thang. Whole books and magazines have been devoted to how the web and associated technologies are affecting marketing, shipping, TV viewing, music-listening, dating, masturbation, etc. etc. I liked to think when the web first took off, and I still like to believe, that it’s doing much more than that.
It’s vindicating the whole punk-DIY ethos. It’s helping to build real as well as virtual communities. It’s giving voices to tens of thousands of heretofore-obscure subcultures (some of whom I empathize with, some of whom I loathe; but that’s the whole point). Among these subcultures are the fan movements for popcult genres previously considered by the “cultural studies” snobs to be only liked by illiterates. I’m no longer a lone-voice-in-the-wilderness in my insistence that pop culture is real culture.
And what’s more, the web’s accellerating acceptance of the notion that art, music, literature, fashion, decor, graphics, video, and even movies need no longer be the exclusive products of the N.Y./L.A./S.F. elites.
Some elite forces realize this and are running scared (like Time and the censorous Australian parlaiment).
Other elite forces are trying to tame the Web into something safe for Conde Nast. Despite the failure of the Microsoft Network’s “shows” concept, corporate website-makers are still trying to launch online magazine sites with predictable texts and features aimed at rigidly defined demographic target audiences. I like to think web users are smarter than that.
Which gets us back to item (1), this here site’s print-legacy format. With The Big Book of MISC. now a-born, look in upcoming weeks for further changes to the miscmedia.com website. Don’t know for sure yet what they’ll be. But they’ll be designed to keep it all apace with an ever-changing, ever-Misc.-er world.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Saturnine.”
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:
Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.
Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.
Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”
How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…
TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…
GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.
History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.
In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.
Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.
There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.
Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)
YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.
MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.
CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…
THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.
On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.
On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.
Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.
(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)
In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.
But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.
Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.
Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.
But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)
Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.
MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?
THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.
UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…
BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…
FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.
OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:
Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).
As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.
And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:
(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)
OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.
THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)
SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)
AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.
BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”
SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.
For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).
Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:
You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.
‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”
SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.
As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).
Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.
NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)
During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.
SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.
Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…
BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.
Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…
WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.
This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)
Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”
IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)
GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.
Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!
GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book
Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality
technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.
It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:
ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
