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IT’S A LONG ENTRY TODAY, and it starts with a question:
WHAT WILL BECOME of “alternative” culture? Until last Tuesday, the prospect of a recession seemed to mean we could all go back to being grumpy worrywarts, without all that new-economy exuberance getting in the way. But now along comes war-lust, and the potential revival of censorship and repression of dissent, not to mention changes in the whole social zietgeist.
Remember, WWII changed American culture even before the U.S. military got into it. In came the aggressive comedy of Abbott & Costello and Bugs Bunny. Out went the lighter antics of W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.
Even before the hijackings, there’d been talk for a year or two among the culture pundits of a “new sincerity,” spread among (or at least corporately targeted at) a new generation grown weary of cynicism and distanced irony. Among the trend’s purported examples: Dawson’s Creek, Lilith Fair, the WTO protests, Martha Stewart, Oprah, bottled water (as an alternative to fizzy drinks), the new soft-R&B divas, and those achingly cloying boy bands. When Tablet launched, one year ago next week, it sold itself as the sincere, prosocial, community-supportive alternative to what its creators claimed was The Stranger’s arrogance and irrelevance.
Will the new social and economic shudders further this trend? Quite possibly. Even among the potential opponents of a potential new war, the schtick’s gonna have to be about working together and working hard.
And will the culture of individual excess (the rich person’s equivalent to hip irony) become seen as not merely wasteful but unpatriotic?
I’ll tell you what I don’t want to see, and that’s a “Return to the Spirit of the Sixties.” A lot of tactics simply didn’t work then and won’t work now. Counterculture separatism, square-bashing, drug-assisted pomposity, and general rudeness won’t do anything except make a few self-promoters famous.
Indeed: Separatism, the belief that one (and perhaps one’s close circle of compatriats) constitute some superior species, is one of the poisonous ideas terrorist leaders always exploit.
WHICH BRINGS US to our next sermon topic: Who do YOU hate?
No, I’m not talking about who those people out in bad old Mainstream America hate.
I’m not talking about who your parents hate.
I’m not talking about who the guy next to you hates.
I’m talking about you. Yes, you.
It’s easy for members of one or another “alternative” social niche to admit how wrong it is to hate ethnic minorities, gays, women, and the poor.
But what about your own attitudes toward those who are different from you?
Do you ever sneer with disdain at people who eat meat, or at people who don’t smoke pot?
Do you dehumanize heterosexuals, men, suburbanites, hippies, bimbos, southerners, mall shoppers, tourists, headbangers, lawyers, bureaucrats, business executives, polyester wearers, pina colada drinkers, people who listen to non-NPR radio stations, or people who shop at non-co-op grocery stores?
Then you’re just being human. You’re not a superior species to the rest of homo sapiens; nobody is. But a lot of people like to imagine they are. Some use religion, nationalism, ethnicity, or caste as their excuse. Others use fashion sense, arcane knowledge, or claims of higher “enlightenment.”
The real enlightened ones aren’t the ones who boast of their separateness from humanity, but the ones who realize their connection to humanity, to the web of life.
The illusion of separateness is especially prevalent in times of war-lust. Every warring nation propagandizes that it’s the real greatest nation on earth, and that those opposing nations are vermin needing to be eradicated or heathen needing to be “civilized.”
That’s why a Unabomber can callously take lives and then claim it’s all to make a better world. That’s why combatants in Belfast can aim guns on schoolgirls. That’s why a handful of true believers, who may or may not be connected to similar cells elsewhere in the world, can devote their lives toward a mega-scale suicide bombing.
We need no more of that.
What we need, now more than ever, is to reconnect, to touch.
Build movements. Get closer to your neighborhood, your community. Go see bands, concerts, plays—anything that’s live. Take a class. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Make love as often as possible (safely and consensually). If you’ve got kids, hug them early and often. Have a good meal, a good drink, and/or a good laugh. Get involved in something greater than mere money and power.
Call it the new sincerity if you wish. Or just call it the best way to keep our species going, by breaking down some of the barriers between people and between cultures.
…to me regarding my appearance as an interview subject during VH1’s tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana’s-Nevermind special. I didn’t see the show myself, but it’ll be rerun on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 9 pm ET/PT.
AT BAILEY-COY BOOKS last night, local author Rebecca Brown carried on with her previously-scheduled reading promoting Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary (Grey Spider Press), a short nonfiction narrative about taking care of her dying mother. Brown opened the event by telling why she declined to cancel it–because her book is largely about the grieving process, something we all must go through now.
Brown added that the nature of the N.Y. and D.C. attacks, with so many deaths, occuring so suddenly, and with so many bodies that might never be recovered, makes the grieving process even more difficult. Brown and her mother had both known the mother’s end was coming, and were able to psychologically and emotionally prepare themselves; then afterwards, the family was able to gather and celebrate the mother’s life.
Excerpts, by the way, is highly recommended. It’s currently available only in a 500-copy limited edition, made on an old fashioned letterpress and hand-bound, in keeping with Brown’s emphasis on the personal touch and intimate care.
CHRIS ESTEY WRITES:
“Nice Michael Moore quotes, but to add to your ‘videos of movies that won’t be revived any time soon’ list:
Hardcore band that won’t see reissue for awhile: Fearless Iranians from Hell.”
UPDATES: Except for some college football games, major sports won’t resume until Monday. All canceled Major League Baseball games will be rescheduled for the week after the previously-set end of the regular season, which means the Mariners will still be able to attempt an all-time win record… One by one, the non-news cable channels that had switched to disaster coverage or signed off altogether are returning to regular fare today.
MORBID ASIDE #6: The Letterman show will have to create a new opening segment, sans the main NYC skyline shot. What’s more, the show’s whole flippant-ironic attitude may have to be altered, along with its ‘Fun City’ portrayal of life on the streets of Manhattan.
For 31 of Seattle Center’s 39 years of existence, Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival has been its biggest annual event.
Devised from the start to encompass the entire former World’s Fair grounds (except the now separately-run Space Needle and Pacific Science Center), it’s also the last of Seattle’s annual lineup of big populist summer gatherings (starting in May with Opening Day of Boating Season and the Film Festival, then continuing with Folklife, the Bite of Seattle, and Seafair).
Bumbershoot’s premise: An all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet of culture. A book fair in one corner, short plays in another, contemporary art installations in another. At the big stages, bigname music celebs. At smaller stages scattered about, secondary performers of all types.
And between everything, the familiar sideshow attractions of Thai-food booths, street jugglers, balloon sellers, and fenced-off beer gardens.
In its early years, Bumbershoot was strictly aimed at a specific socioethnic caste then taking control of the city’s cultural identity–aging, increasingly square baby-boomers. Nonwhite performers were largely limited to boomer-friendly blues bands; mainstage shows were heavy on the likes of Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor.
In the late ’80s, that started to change slightly. Younger, hipper, and more diverse acts have steadily gained their way into the mix.
A bizarre P-I preview story called this year’s lineup “Bumberpalooza,” comparing it to the ’90s Lollapalooza rock package tours. I initially thought the article’s writer used the analogy to claim the festival was becoming more corporate-mainstream.
But the writer, still believing Lollapalooza’s original “alternative” hype, really wanted to say B’shoot had become edgier and more experimental. Fortunately, she was right.
With more hip-hop acts, a whole electronica stage, and a mainstage lineup ranging from Loretta Lynn to G. Love and Special Sauce, Bumbershoot 2001’s fulfilling its name’s promise of an all-covering umbrella of expression.
In these images: Happy crowds; the Book Fair (including, this year, only one small press with the word “heron” in its name!); local collectors’ caches of electric mixers and Harlequin Romance cover paintings; an information booth at the start of the slinking line into KeyArena; Posies legend Ken Stringfellow; a hula-hoop demonstration on the main lawn; and, below, our ex-Stranger colleague Inga Muscio.
Muscio, scheduled to perform on the Starbucks-sponsored literary stage, peppered her half-hour slot with plugs for smaller coffee brands. She ended it with a story about dreaming Starbucks boss Howard Schultz was her S&M slave.
Yeah, this is another piece about the Seattle mayoral election, whose primary round is three weeks away as of today.
Specifically, it’s about a very strange event last night at A Contemporary Theatre, a performance-art circus billed as a candidates’ forum on arts and cultural issues. How strange was it? KIRO-TV news guy Mike James was overheard saying, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
It started normally enough, with 50 or so protesters staging a sit-in in front of ACT, criticizing city attorney/mayoral candidate Mark Sidran’s “civility laws,” including his ban on sitting on city sidewalks.
But the event inside got off-script once fringe candidate Richard Lee (producer-host of the cable access show Kurt Cobain Was Murdered) stepped on stage, wearing a dress and holding a video camcorder aimed at his own face.
For the next two hours, no matter what question the moderator (James’s former KING colleague Lori Matsukawa) asked, Lee spent his alloted minutes and longer repeating the same rant–that he has supposed proof that Cobain was assassinated (or at least might have been), that city and county officials (including the three candidates at the forum currently in government employ) are involved in a cover-up conspiracy, and that anyone who declines to play along with his verbal attacks is also part of the conspiracy.
In one evening of tiresome theatrics, Lee destroyed any remaining credibility in himself or his “crusade.”
Worse, he made Sidran look sane.
Notwithstanding Lee’s histrionics, the forum’s other six candidates also frequently strayed from the questions at hand, into pre-prepared hype statements.
Sidran, smug and grating as ever, made his usual buzzwords about “civility” and “strong leadership.” His answer to a question about high housing costs pushing artists and arts groups out of town: Give more “incentives” (read: subsidies) to private developers, and improve the highways so it would be easier to push the non-wealthy out to Kent and Shoreline.
Incumbent Paul Schell and front-running challenger Greg Nickels made nearly identical, nearly meaningless smooth talk about supporting the arts as harbingers of cultural diversity in a cosmopolitan city at the dawn of a new millennium and so forth. The big difference between the two: Schell defended his veto of changes to the hated Teen Dance Ordinance, while Nickels called for new initiatives to promote safe live shows for under-21s.
Omari Tahir-Garrett, out on bail after charged with hitting Schell with a megaphone in July, repeatedly brought every response back to a call to recognize the problems of minorities, especially minority youth. Such statements, by themselves, would’ve been good toward reclaiming his credibility within the Af-Am community–but he usually segued straight from that line into his personal cause, the proposed African American Academy project that’s been years in the making and was taken out of his hands.
(This is an admittedly incomplete telling of what’s really a long story. Tahir-Garrett’s career, and his relationship within local black leadership, is much more complicated than that.)
Scott Kennedy, one of the two liberal-progressives in the race, showed up late and kept promoting his non-politician status. He insisted that as a small businessman, a rock musician, and a friend and colleage of artists and arts organizers, he’d be more sympathetic to the arts than other candidates, but didn’t specifically propose much on their behalf.
Charlie Chong, the race’s other left-of-center guy, was soft-spoken and down-to-earth, and stayed the closest to the topics of Matsukawa’s questions. Then, in his closing statement, he called himself an “anti-establishment candidate,” humorously said that a Seattle under Sidran would be like a Stephen King horror movie and a Seattle under Nickels would be like “four years of Bonanza reruns” (a probable reference to The Stranger nicknaming Nickels “Hoss” during the 1997 election), and apparently offerred his support to Schell, whom Chong fought hard against in ’97.
Yes, things can get weirder still. And they probably will.
Scott Kennedy, a software engineer who started the (lovely) BitStar Internet Cafe on Capitol Hill, launched his independent mayoral campaign Sunday evening with a short rally outside the former Denny Way car-rental office where he’s installed his campaign HQ. The 50 or so supporters did little to fill the huge parking lot in front of the office.
The advertised highlight was a gig by a Beatles cover band, the Nowhere Men, playing on the building’s roof. (The real Beatles, as you assuredly know, played on a London rooftop as their final joint public performance–not the right symbolism when you want to be starting something, such as a political career.) The arrangement of the band on the roof and the audience down below kept the audience from getting within 30 feet of the campaign building, except for one dancing fool of a four-year-old boy.
Kennedy’s speech at the event, also performed on the roof, showed inadequate preparation and the lack of seasoned campaign handlers on his team to coach him. He interrupted himself twice, to take some gum out of his mouth and to take an earpiece out of his ear. He didn’t have anyone introduce him (you know, someone who could give endearing personal remarks about a candidate which the candidate himself would pseudo-modestly then demure from).
I personally like many of Kennedy’s stated platforms and ideas, which you can read about on his own site. I just want him to become more effective at stating them, and at the basic nuts-‘n’-bolts of campaigning. After all, voters have always, at least partly, judged a candidate’s potential adeptness as an office-holder by his/her adeptness as an office-seeker.
In the usually-brightest part of an unusually glaringly bright year, three days of rain and low overcast made a most welcome appearance this week. So comfy, so refreshing, so fresh-scented. The diffused light, the soft colors of everything, the relaxing heaviness of the air. Don’t like it? Go to Albuquerque.
ELSEWHERE:
Rock stars reviewed according to their reported sexual prowess. (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail.)
From the Seattle offices of ESPN.com, it’s the thrilling Photoshopped adventures of Ichiro-Man vs. Godzilla!
An entire site devoted to the history of 45 rpm record label design!
“Comics I Don’t Understand.”
Why do rock stars have to look so surly all the time?
A New York Post story claimed British comic playwrights are planning an opera based on The Jerry Springer Show. The story explains that “Springer enjoys immense popularity in England, where he was born to parents who survived the Holocaust.” Not only is his US show exported there, but he flies to London every other week to host a late-night variety show.
This may explain the particularities of the Springer show’s cast of freaks (real Americans with assorted “relationship issues,” who are chosen by the producers for their weirdness and coached to exaggerate outrageous behaviors onstage).
The Springer show, it’s now obvious, is a show made for export. It’s clearly devised to serve up a British/Euro vision of white Americans as uncouth louts, ignorant trailer trash bereft of either common sense or dignity–but mightily entertaining.
Not far from some white Americans’ vision of black Americans.
MTV celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday with 13 hours of oldies videos, displaying such now-novel sights as rappers who were actually black and women who actually played instruments.
VH1’s list of the “100 Most Shocking Moments In Rock & Roll” didn’t include anything involving Buddy Holly, Bobby Fuller, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton’s racist remarks, Ronald Reagan pretending to have heard of Bruce Springsteen, $200 concert tickets, or the use of Janis Joplin’s Mercedez-Benz song in an awful real Mercedes commercial. (Cobain’s death was ranked #4 on the list.)
A story about White House plumbing that has nothing to do with Watergate.
Whatever happenned to UFO sightings? (found by Fark)
Sean Hurley has designed a truly luscious new logo for the revamped print MISC (yes, reverting to the shorter original title). I still only have about half the material I need.
All of you who think you can write, and especially those who falsely believe you can’t: We need your stuff. Particularly desired, though not exclusively, is material within the next issue’s theme of “Death and Destruction.” That could be a brief memoir of a loved one, a death-defying or otherwise fearful experience, a remembrance of a no-longer-extant favorite home or hangout or funky building or radio station, a job-loss horror story, or a meditation on the eternal creation/destruction cycle.
Email me at clark@speakeasy.org for particulars.
UPDATE: Turns out others besides Dave Winer are interested in the idea of dissolving criminal corporations. Those wacky Vancouverites at Adbusters magazine are also proposing it.
THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Spoon Size Shredded Wheat box): “POST is committed to nurturing and championing the well-being of families across America. Our families, like yours, have challenges and triumphs. We celebrate both the big and small events–the everyday joys and moments that sustain us. We’d love to hear from you about the things that help make a difference in your family.” [Then, in almost unreadably tiny type:] “Comments and materials submitted become the property of Kraft Foods and may be used by Kraft Foods without compensation to the submitter.”
TALES FROM THE INTELLECTUAL-PROPERTY INDUSTRY: Michael Jackson currently owes Sony Music $30 million! If the major-label system doesn’t work for even one of its (formerly) most lucrative artists, for whom the hell does it work?
Singles to Jingles
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
IN THIS WACKY WORLD, TV ads create the music hits.
The radio stations wouldn’t touch Sting’s new album, but suddenly got bombarded with requests for his new song after the Jaguar commercial aired. So now we have greedy and artless ad execs chosing our records for us (rather than greedy and artless radio producers).
Then there is Moby, who deserves brief mention, since he sold every song on his album Play to advertisers. The Chemical Brothers sold out to Nike, but most horrible of all is, of course, the old Nair commercial that some how got the rights to “Short Shorts.”
This leaves us with the obvious question: Is there any dignity left?
I wonder if it has anything to do with 100 TV channels, or the MTV generation, or the gradual coorporate overtake of the music industry, or… oh whatever! Truth is, when this generation gets older, our favorite songs, the anthems of our generation, will be fuel for Rolaids, Paxil, and feminine itch products.
Here are some possible ads we may see in the future:
…offers an amusing little piece speculating about the future advertising uses of today’s pop-song hits (Viagra jokes included, but of course). It’s at this permanent link.
IN THE WAKE of the dead-dot-com tracking site FuckedCompany, there’s now FuckedWeblog to track personal content sites whose creators have found better uses for their time.
