It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
…effectively killing off another great music sharing portal, Audiogalaxy.com. It was the best of its type, until the next one comes along. Which it will, despite the the forces of control.
(APOLOGIES to those who’ve found the site inaccessible for much of the past three days. My server provider insists things are now back to normal, or will be soon.)
During this biggest advertising slump of the past umpteen years, Rolling Stone has decided to abscond with one of the last links to its past, the occasional long articles and essays on non-celebrity topics. It’s hired an editor from the British-born “bloke mag” FHM, who claims (as so many middle-aged people have always claimed about their youngers) that Those Kids Today just don’t like to read. What rot.
The shortening-down (dumbing-down?) tactic is nothing new, but is endemic to publications whose runners are now much older than their target readers, who imagine their (the publishers’) own generation were young geniuses but Those Kids Today don’t know nuttin’. I’m actually noticing, at least in my own town, a longer-attention-span generation of adolescents, and an even-longer-attention-span generation of grade schoolers following them.
But short attention spans are what advertisers wish audiences to have–all the better to bombard with flashy brand images. The new Rolling Stone won’t be more reader-friendly, it’ll be more advertiser-friendly. RS publisher Jann Wenner, ever the generational-bias hypocrite, simply refuses to publicly admit it.
THERE IS NO JOY IN B-BALL VILLE. The Lucking Fakers took it all again. Damn it. At least the righteous Red Wings won the hockey title.
REMEMBER THOSE ADS in comic books that combined superheroes with Hostess Twinkies? Here’s the memoir of one of the guys who wrote ’em.
In a recent New York magazine, its tech-media beat writer Michael Wolff has proposed one possible post-MP3 future: A music business that’s more like the book business.
Wolff’s premise: Manufactured teen-pop acts are rapidly reaching their inevitable sell-by date. Commercial radio is becoming ever more corporate and ever more unlistenable. The Internet, MP3 trading, and home CD-R burning are furthering the indie-rock agenda of shunning rock-star decadence and championing a more direct rapport between artists and audiences.
Therefore, a record industry built around trying to make every release go multiplatinum is doomed. Also doomed is the whole industry infrastructure of waste and hype (“independent” promoters, payola, limos, drugs, hookers, mansions, plastic surgeons, promotional junkets for journalists, etc. etc.)
Instead, recordings will have to be sold more like books are. While there will still be some bestsellers, for the most part artists will carefully construct works that a few people will really love. Street-savvy marketers will promote these works to an infinite array of tiny niche markets.
If Wolff’s prediction comes true, we just might also expect a few other changes in the way music is made and sold, such as the following:
I was going to ponder if ecru sweaters and tweed jackets would become the new rocker uniform, but then I remembered Belle and Sebastian.
TODAY, some non-caption-requiring people shots from the Forklift Festival.
Our ol’ pal and street musician extraordinaire Artis the Spoonman had a heart attack. He’s recovering steadily in a Seattle hospital, but might need a little help with the bills.
a virtual exhibition of some 100 vintage 45 RPM record labels.
ANOTHER GENDER-MYTH CHALLENGED: As certain bestselling books have been noting lately, females can indeed do less-than-great things to other females.
F’rinstance, that Eastern Hemisphere ethnic tradition known there as “female circumcision” and around here as female genital mutilation is a practice passed on from mothers to daughters (see the item at the bottom of the page linked here).
First came the highly unofficial Star Wars Un-Premiere Party, Thursday at the Rendezvous (which is still open despite a little kitchen fire last Tuesday, thank you). Singer Cheryl Serio was the most elegant hostess, accompanied by our ol’ friends DJ Superjew and DJ EZ-Action.
Among the audiovisual attractions displayed on the video projector: Mark Hamill’s appearance on The Muppet Show (above), the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (a truly bizarre spectacle indeed), and something billed as a Turkish language version of the original film but was really a whole different movie (a hilarious sword-and-scandal adventure) that happened to incorporate SW spaceship shots, with the SW producers’ apparent authorization.
ON SATURDAY, the 22nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens blowup was celebrated by Cheryl Diane (above) and three other singer-songwriter acts in Diane’s fourth annual Eruptive Revival cabaret. As you may recall, last year’s edition was cut short by that nasty fire at the Speakeasy Cafe (still a charred-out ruin today). No such mishaps marred this year’s show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar, thankfully.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the University District Street Fair was underway again, as tired and worn-out as I’ve always remembered it being. The products displayed at the “crafts” booths were barely distinguishable from those displayed in the smarmiest tourist “fine art” stores of LaConner. The food concessions were no different from the elephant ears and kettle korn sold summer-long from Puyallup to Ellensburg. The assorted musical acts tried to grab passersby’s attention, but (at least the acts I saw) failed to overcome the cloudy-afternoon ennui in full smothering force.
And, of course, the booths only temporarily hid the dozen or more empty storefronts along the half-mile strip known to all as The Ave. The city thinks it knows just what to do about the retail ennui–a construction project. To the City of Seattle bureaucracy, every problem is solvable by a construction project.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a bureaucrat imagining that wider sidewalks and prettier street lights will draw non-student shoppers back from the malls; not while the daily papers continue to smear The Ave as A Problem Place with Those Problem People.
And as long as there’s no money to do the right things for the throwaway teens (often banished by middle-class parents over not fitting a proper upstanding image) but plenty of money to do things against them (police harassment schemes that only make things worse), this situation won’t change.
ON A HAPPIER NOTE, Sunday evening brought two of my all-time fave cartoonists, ex-local Charles Burns and still-local Jim Woodring, to a singing session at Confounded Books/Hypno Video.
You’ve gotta check out Woodring’s newest, Trosper. Painted in bright pastel colors you can eat with a spoon, and printed just like an old Little Golden Book, it’s a wordless, utterly engrossing little tale of a cute little elephant who just wants to have fun, in a world seemingly bent on frustrating him. It even comes with a CD by one of our fave neo-improv artistes, the incomprable Bill Frisell.
If I said I was never a metalhead, especially not as a teenager, would you believe me?
Following the spat over Patricia Ridenour’s male nude photos at the Benham Studio Gallery, the space put up another photog’s show full of men for this month. But the personas shown in this show are clearly gay–which makes them actually less threatening than Ridenour’s straight-guy nudes in the topsy-turvy, reverse-double-standard realm of the Seattle art world.
FASHION UPDATE: Artist-designer Godis Nye asked me to tell you she created some of the set pieces seen in the fashion-show photos below.
BRIT VS. BRITNEY: A Londoner taunts the all-too-apparent hypocrisy of today’s poster child for “abstinence education.”
…in the “Creative Age,” according to one commentator: Singles, gays, ethnic minorities, performance spaces, walkable neighborhoods, and rock bands! What doesn’t work: Subsidized sports arenas.
PASSAGE (Michael Bolton CD review by Elysa Gardner in USA Today, 4-23): “…Other selections artfully combine adult-contemporary clichés with the most banal aspects of modern pop, from gaudy faux-Latin flourishes to gooey bubblegum reverb. What remains distinctive is Bolton’s inimitably constipated vocal style, which seems to disprove the theory that men can’t empathize with the pain women suffer in childbirth.”
IT’S PHOTO DAY TODAY, starting with some more examples of American business standing up for our nation (don’t you dare imagine any commercial exploitation of the popular emotions could be involved.)
First, it’s good to know the bowling pins of America refuse to be knocked over by internal divisiveness…
…And almost as good to know that giant balloon eagles are valiantly defending our right to consume mass quantities of imported oil to power our big-ass RVs.
Meanwhile, some folks who had other ideas about America and commerce staged protests across the nation on Saturday. Locally, rallies took place at Westlake Park, the Seattle Central campus, and at Broadway and East Thomas Street (where activists staged a symbolic “Take Back the Streets” exercise in the middle of the intersection.)
Whilst phalanxes of cops protected oil-company assets, peaceful advocated advocated peace. Peace was about the only thing all the protesters seemed to be for (some attendeess also expressed support for the Palestinian cause).
The protests across the country were ostensibly about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protest leaders have depicted the organizations as loan sharks, ruining the economies of Third World countries for the benefit of big global corporations. But, as often happens in a lefty gathering, topic drift abounded.
So you got bashers of the Bush oil policy, the Bush Mideast policy, the sanctions against (and potential invasion of) Iraq, the war on drugs, SUVs, domestic banks, and capitalism in general.
Later on Saturday, about 100 fans of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley held a quiet vigil at the Seattle Center International Fountain. Staley, 34, was found dead at his University District home late Friday night; probably from an overdose.
In his songs and in interviews, Staley frequently admitted that he’d used heroin and that it had turned his life into a living hell. His lyrical imagery was perfectly matched by the band’s music–heavy metal dirges, often slow and pounding.
By 1993 AIC’s brutal and tragic aesthetic, unrelieved by the pop-punk energy of Mudhoney or the cynical wit of Nirvana, had come to most purely embody what many people (including most rock people in Seattle) claimed they hated about the media’s “Seattle Scene” stereotype. By 1996, Staley had essentially retired from making music. He seldom appeared in public, stopped performing live, and contributed to only a handful of new recorded songs. The few friends who kept in contact with him didn’t talk.
A Stranger gossip item last year said he’d been seen, looking presumably healthy, at a local club. A lot of us wanted to believe it. Instead, it now turns out to have been one of many unsuccessful sobriety attempts.
Staley never glamorized drug use. His songs and interviews spoke plainly of heroin’s momentary joy and lingering sadness. He lived in a private hell; it ultimately didn’t matter that this hell was initially of his own making.
JUST ONE DAY after I read a zine editorial bemoaning the music biz’s continuing demeaning treatment of female musicians, along comes an AP dispatch about companies introducing “feminine” styled guitars for teenage girls. Make of it what you will.
CAN WE REALLY think for ourselves anymore after a century of sneaky PR campaigns? (I, of course, will say yes.)
A LUSCIOUS net-radio stream of snazzy lounge and swanky easy-listening music, coming to you from servers in Russia (where, presumably, it might escape the wrathful attacks of a corporate music industry out to essentially quash indie net radio.)
IT’S NOT JUST a dictionary, it’s YourDictionary!
SOME WEBLOGS attempt to be all things for all readers (or at least many readers). A blog called GoodShit simply reflects one man’s range of interests: Philosophical discussion, classical art, political debate, and breasts.
…Ghost World creator/co-screenwriter Dan Clowes, predictably lost. But that’s OK really. At least that nephew of the guy who wrote the 20th Century-Fox fanfare finally won one.
