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THE APPARENTLY GOOD NEWS: Belltown’s historic Rendezvous diner, bar, and mini-theater will probably be saved from the wrecking ball.
The potenally bad news: It could get ruined anyway, by the longtime practice of taking a great honest space and “restoring” it to a frou-frou “elegance” it was never meant to have.
The current operators’ lease ends this next Halloween. Supposedly (and nothing’s being officially announced yet), certain folk with certain “hip” credentials will take it over, give the interior a tasteful makeover, and make it a cool hangout spot with cool hangout music.
True, the ol’ Rendezvous and its Jewel Box Theater are in disrepair; and the joint’s current revenue stream probably isn’t enough to pay for the needed fixings.
But I (and lotsa other folk) want it to not become just another outpost of the upscale Monoculture, a glitzy martini bar or the like.
And we certainly don’t want the old-age pensioners, Alaska fishermen, and world-weary types who populate its crowded front bar to get kicked out or made to feel unwelcome.
We want the Rendezvous to become a well-kept version of what it is now–a comfy, quietly classy joint, where the artsy types and the salt-O-the-earth of all races and gender-types coexist under the watchful eye and beehive hair of goddess barmaid Dodi.
This all comes as the Belltown Business Association is trying to give the neighborhood a marketable identity. It held a meeting this week on “Branding Belltown.” The concept is to use cutesy public art and street signs, according to the group’s newsletter, “to maintain the top-of-mind status that Belltown has deservedly acquired over the last few years as the premiere neighborhood in which to live, work, and play. We want tolks to be able to find us and help describe us in a way that we help define.”
Of course, when I think of “branding,” I think of sloganeering. (I also think of the branding-iron fetish, but that’s off-topic.)
And I’m sure you could come up with some slogans for the former artists’ haven that are much better than these samples of mine:
NEXT: Another entry in “Every Home I’ve Ever Lived In.”
ELSEWHERE:
I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE letters and emails asking me to stop using the word “yuppie” in the online column.
So, at least for today, I’ll use a different term to describe the only people Seattle’s political and media elites care about–the Monoculture.
In the Monoculture aesthetic, everyone who lives in Seattle (or at least everyone who deserves to live here) is affluent, childless, in an office-type profession, educated yet decidedly non-intellectual, “culturally aware” yet relentlessly middlebrow, “active in the community” yet devoutly pro-business, a devout attender of high-volume, high-priced restaurants, and a strong supporter of “diversity” just as long as everybody looks and behaves identically blandly.
Entire retail empires, publications, and political campaigns are built on this dubious premise.
And now, there’s a slick free monthly, Colors NW, showing that you don’t have to be of pale Euro descent to be part of the Monoculture.
The magazine’s second issue, out now, has a Bon Marche ad on the back (why, by the way, doesn’t the Bon still have a real website?), smaller inside ads for mortgage consultants and liposuction clinics, and features within about the Film Festival, a dot-com executive, and pricey restaurants.
The Bon model is Asian American. The liposuction ad’s before-and-after model and the dot-com exec are both African American. The restaurant reviews hype “upscale soul food” and “down home Japanese.” Otherwise, they’re hard to distinguish from similar features in Monoculture-obsessed media.
“Yeah,” you might be saying if you’ve already read the mag, “but what about the cover story on the history of Asian American political activism in Seattle? Or the profile of Samoan hiphop DJ Kutfather? Or the little back-page essay by a Seattle U student advisor on the identity confusion resulting from her own half-white, half-Filipino heritage?”
Yes, the mag has all those things. But these three pieces depict their subjects as ideal citizens of Seattle-The-Good. Even the Asian-activism story is written as a tale of earnest progressives striving to rectify wrongs that all nice Reagan Democrats can agree are wrong (racist ad images, for example).
And in the context of the magazine’s more consumerist material, the profiled activists get the same overall aura you see in corporate-sponsored Martin Luther King Day ads. That is, they become seen as out-of-the-box-thinkin’ political entrepreneurs, the social-justice equivalents of “new economy” CEOs.
But that’s not necessarily all that bad. After all, there’s something to be said for the idea that ethnic striving oughta be about making it, succeeding in the melting-pot and taking pride in that success.
Even if it means conforming to the white-dominated zeitgeist of the Monoculture, and not to the “true diversity” zeitgeist of white lefties such as myself.
IN OTHER NEWS:A tiny news brief reveals what critics of “get tuff” welfare policies have long claimed–that draconian aid regulations cost more in paperwork and enforcement costs than they save in denied benefits.
NEXT:“The arts” as an economic development scheme.
Some folk in Boston are archiving those “we’ll set your poem to music” records. The ones they don’t consider good enough to reissue on CD, they’ve posted online (found by The Interstellar Cafe)….
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Morris Graves, last of the ’50s “Northwest Mystic” painters and a continued inspiration even to diehard urban skeptics such as myself.
SOME OF THE THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING in recent weeks, instead of finishing up the transformation of this site to that popular “weblog” format:
They sat me down for an hour with a Betacam camera and a chroma-key blue screen in a Westin Hotel meeting room. I gave the usual shtick on the rise of Cobain and co. (Refreshingly, they were interested in Nirvana’s music and indie-rock philosophy, not the Cobain-Love celebrity circus or the drug tragedy.)
While I was miked up, I also answered questions about the movie Slacker (the product of a highly un-slacker-esque DIY-culture aesthetic), the continuing success of Nintendo’s Super Mario character (putting him in ever-bigger worlds only enhances his feisty-little-guy appeal), “designer grunge” fashion (I pleaded with viewers not to blame anyone in Seattle for it), and that way-overused term “Generation X” (the BBC producer was unaware that it originally came from a 1964 British book).
I’ve no idea when the show will air in Britain, whether it will ever appear Stateside, or whether any of my comments will make the final cut.
NEXT: In the Seattle upscale monoculture, everybody’s white (including the blacks).
LAST TIME, we ran some short reviews of sites various people (usually their own operators) have asked me to plug.
Today, one more.
The day we ran a piece about the demise and (possible) resurrection of the great Net-radio station Luxuria Music, Simone Seikaly wrote to suggest checking out the outfit for which she works, TheDial:
“We are an entertainment company (based in Seattle) which creates timely and topical news/parody/comedy every day, and you can hear what we create interpersed between music in any one of our 20 music formats. Or, you can forego music and just listen to fresh content in our daily show, The Daily Dial, hosted by Brian Gregory.”
I wanted so much to be able to recommend TheDial’s audio streams. Not only is it a local outfit, but it employs some nice people. The aforementioned Gregory is not only a local radio vet, but the son of a longtime MISCmedia print-mag subscriber. Company programming VP Matt Bruno is a great power pop singer-songwriter.
And, unlike the currently dormant Luxuria, TheDial has a business plan, albeit an anything-for-a-buck business plan. Its site’s chock full of offers selling commercials, corporate custom-audio streams, and “investment opportunities.”
My problem with TheDial, though, lies at the heart of its programming concept. It’s a company led by folk from modern radio management, and run strictly according to the principles of modern radio–principles which, in my humble opinion, suck.
The comedy segments are loud, ultra-aggressive, overflowing with capital-A Attitude, and almost stupefyingly unfunny. They’re streamed on all 20 music formats, which means listeners to (f’r instance) the “Women in Rock” channel are apparently expected to guffaw out loud over such bits as “Showdown at the D-Cup Corral” (in which a male narrator describes a fight to the death between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, using instantly-inflatable bosoms as weapons).
The music streams, from all I’ve been able to hear of them, are strictly defined, built around only their genre’s biggest (i.e., most overplayed) hits, and crafted not for artistic effect but for the accumulation of desirable demographics. It’s the sort of programming philosophy in which “Alternative” is just another formula genre.
I want online radio to be an alternative to the corporate stupidity of today’s commercial broadcast stations, not just an extension of it. And I continue to believe it can become that. Luxuria (despite its fiscal shortcomings and its demise at the hands of Clear Channel, the biggest and stupidest radio chain of them all) proved a great online station could be made by treating one’s listeners with intelligence and respect.
Most all the people I’ve met who’ve worked at stupid radio stations were personally capable of much better and more creative work than their bosses permitted. I’m sure the same’s true of TheDial’s personnel.
Here’s hoping they can move beyond the straitjacket of their current structure and get the chance to really prove themselves.
NEXT: Saving the light-rail plan from its planners.
IN LAST SUNDAY’S Seattle Times Sunday magazine, my ol’ pal Fred Moody had a memoir piece about his 20-plus years as a freelancer, staff writer, and/or editor at Seattle Weekly. It’s a nice little read; but two aspects particularly struck me:
1. Moody appears to believe, unless he’s being really sarcastic (and he’s been known to get that way), that the original Weekly incarnation under founding publisher David Brewster was a daring, status-quo-challenging “alternative” rag.
Bull doo-doo. Claiming the Brewster-era Weekly had ever been “alternative” is as phony a boomer-generation conceit as claiming Linda Ronstadt had ever been a rock singer.
From the start, the Weekly had been an attempt to put out the content of a slick upscale city monthly on once-a-week newsprint. (Brewster had previously worked on the first Seattle magazine.) The second cover story was about a “foodie” restaurant (the now-defunct Henry’s Off Broadway). Restaurant covers outnumbered arts covers most years, as best as I can recall.
From its political priorities to its entertainment coverage, everything in it was aimed at a small but well-defined target audience–the New Professionals who wore Nordstrom dress-for-success suits to jobs at the big new downtown office towers, attended watered-down “art” movies such as Harold and Maude, and dined on “gourmet” versions of American comfort foods. (The paper’s original backers included Gordon Bowker, who also helped start Starbucks and Redhook.)
If it ever took a “non-mainstream” approach to its topics, it was the same approach as that taken by early NPR or such PBS shows as Washington Week In Review–not the elite speaking to the masses, but the elite speaking to itself.
And if it ever took anything approaching an “irreverent” attitude toward regional politics, it was only firmly placed within official worldview–that The Sixties Generation, no matter how blanded-out and comfortably ensconced in premature middle age, was the absolute ultimate apex of human evolution.
In this worldview, oldsters (including oldster politicians) constituted a squaresville presence to be placated or patronized.
And anyone too young to have needed (or too proletarian to have attained) a college deferment from Vietnam didn’t even count as a full human being.
Thus, rock n’ roll music was never, ever, a priority at the old Weekly. Nor was any black culture too young to have been taken over by whites.
If you think this is just my Blank Generation whining, it isn’t. The Weekly has been sold and totally revamped twice, but old Weekly worldview lives on in the current mayoral campaign of Mark Sidran, whose demographic-cleansing campaigns as city attorney are based squarely on the assumption that upscale white baby boomers are the only “real” people in this town.
2. Moody was right on the button when he noted that, just as the success of the early Stranger proved how old and unhip the old Weekly was (or at least as it had become), so is today’s Stranger heading in the same direction.
But that’s a topic for another day.
NEXT: People who want me to plug their sites.
MY FAVORITE NET RADIO STATION (other than my own B>MISCmedia Radio, of course) is dying this weekend. Or maybe not.
If the planned reincarnation of Luxuria Music as a pay site works out, it could be a catalyst toward finally establishing a viable business plan for Web-based content.
If it flops, a grand experiment in devising a radio station specifically for online listening (as opposed to the mere web-streaming of existing broadcast stations) will become just another memory of the dot-com crash.
Luxuria (named for a Roman goddess of lust) started up in LA a little over a year ago.(Yes, somethinig from LA that I actually like.) Its core staff included The Millionaire, cofounder of the once-smashing “cocktail nation” revival band Combustible Edison.
As you might guess from his involvement, its playlist was heavy on exotica, lounge, soft-surf, orchestral-pop instrumentals, and torch tunes.
But the station went further out from its core format-niche than most broadcast commercial stations nowadays. Any given hour might find it playing spy-movie themes, the poppier side of techno (cf. Pizzicato Five), rockabilly, French cabaret tunes, serious bebop jazz, odd early synth covers of Beatles hits, and awful Bill Cosby anti-drug children’s songs.
During most parts of the day, this music was curated and mixed by live DJs, who communicated with listeners via a chat room and a studio webcam. Some of these, such as Eric Bonerz (son of the Bob Newhart Show dentist) and performance artist Val Myers, turned their shifts into bizarre sketch-comedy schticks that also had music. Others produced long interviews (with musical highlights) of legends musical and otherwise, ranging from Beach Boy/tortured genius Brian Wilson to Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft.
But in the profitability-challenged web content industry, quality wasn’t enough. The station’s financial backer, a company developing turnkey technologies for Net radio, sold all its assets (including Luxuria) to Clear Channel Communications, one of the three or four mega-giants that have been consolidating and ruining broadcast radio all over America (Clear Channel alone owns some 1,200 stations!).
Clear Channel wanted to apply this company’s technologies toward the streaming versions of its broadcast properties (streams that are now offline, as part of a dispute with announcers’ unions). Clear Channel had no interest in maintaining Net-only stations like Luxuria, and announced in early April that it was shutting down the station as of April 30.
Luxuria’s been in death-watch mode ever since.
As DJs left or got laid off one by one, their time slots were taken over by an automated playlist system (nicknamed Luxotron 5000). In the site’s chat room and message boards, listeners and station personnel openly discussed how Luxuria might be saved, at a time when available investment capital for web content is essentially nil.
Finally, this week some of the station’s remaining live DJs hinted that, starting next Tuesday, you’ll be able to continue hearing those lush Lux sounds after all–if you cough up a $10-per-month subscription. They announced an email address where you could request further details as they become available.
I dunno if a subscription scheme will work for Lux. Such schemes haven’t worked on the web yet, except of course for porn, sports-betting info, and stock-market-betting info. And $10 a month (some cable systems charge less than that for HBO) might be a little steep.
But I hope it works, or leads to another plan that works.
For those not yet ready to shell out for Lux’s lush and luscious sounds, there are alternatives for the adventurous listener. One of the best is Seattle-based Antenna Internet Radio and its Friendly Persuasion show, an hour or two (always up, replaced weekly with new episodes) of oddities and delights from the editors of Cool and Strange Music magazine. Another is Swank Radio, an automated stream of ’50s orchestral pop (mostly instrumentals).
NEXT: A partial defense of fast food.
YOU SIMPLY MUST GET Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.
This handsome full-color volume, curated and narrated by Julie Lasky, gathers the best posters, album covers, ads, logos, magazine covers, and other assorted graphic creations produced from 1978 to 2000 by Chantry, the king of Seattle designers (until he followed a girlfriend’s career move to St. Louis).
Lasky thoroughly chronicles Chantry’s various “periods” or subgenres of retro design–Sub Pop, Estrus, the Rocket, theatrical work, slick posters, cheap posters, copies of sleazy-mag back-cover ads, copies of tool catalogs, copies of circus posters, copies of retro-smut, and, oh yeah, the four or five books he designed, including mine. No amount of thanks I can ever give will be enough for the work he did on Loser (which gets its due as a piece of Chantry’s oevure in Lasky’s book).
When Chantry held his leaving-town bash at the new Cyclops back in March 2000, he gave me the usual rant people were giving in those pre-NASDAQ-crash weeks about the dot-com invasion having finally sealed the ultimate triumph of the gentrifiers over the humble, funky li’l Seattle we’d known and loved (even though he’d complained as much as anybody about the town’s supposed lack of opportunities and urban sophistication back in the old days).
But it wasn’t just the destruction of artist housing and funky spaces, or the increase in arrogant cell-phone yappers, that he hated about the alleged Internet Revolution.
He was a lo-tech guy, in both his aesthetic styles and his working techniques. The text of Loser was desktop-published, but the 1,000-or-so images and the chapter headings were all pasted-up by hand, and all the photos were screened on a real stat camera. He despised the soulless perfection and numbing slickness he saw in digital graphics.
Nowadays, with KCMU in Paul Allen’s clutches and The Rocket and Moe and the OK Hotel gone, but also with clubs slowly getting back to booking more live bands instead of soundalike techno nights, and with retro-industrialism so beloved in PoMo architecture (plate glass, thin wires, exposed duct work), I have one thing to say to Art:
It’s OK now. Really. Things are getting better; that is to say, Seattle’s feeling comfortably depressed again. The dot-comers are on the run. Everybody’s sick of virtual reality. Real objects, real passions, and real life are back in vogue.
You can come back now.
NEXT: George W. Bush and Don De Lillo.
THE DEMISE OF PUNK PIONEER JOEY RAMONE, of lymphoma at age 49, struck me more than that of Elvis Presley (at an even younger age).
Not just because, unlike Presley, I’d actually seen the Ramones live several times, but because of their respective places in the advancement of rock as an art form.
Presley hadn’t been the first white white singer to copy a hard R&B style. But he was the first to make a huge business from it. The process of his schtick was to bleach the blackness out of black music, to make it just acceptable enough for white consumption while still being “wicked” enough to draw prudes’ ire.
When that territory got too crowded, he turned on himself in a series of self-deconstruction movies. This inward obsession finally manifested itself in drug-influenced lethargy and obesity.
Joey and his fellow faux-bros. emerged on the scene as Presley had disappeared into the recursive trap of self-parody. The Ramones took self-parody as one of the four corners of their group persona (along with ’60s garage-rock, Phil Spector-Brill Building pop, and biker leather wear).
But instead of retreating further into self-referentiality, they started by jokingly depicting themselves as cretins and pinheads, then expanded outward with a hard, fast recapturing of the vital energy that had been sucked out of rock by the post-1960 Presley (and by flower power, Sgt. Pepper, prog rock, soft rock, mullet-head metal, etc.). As Joey allegedly once said, “We wanted to play rock n’ roll, not drum solos.”
Along the way, they reinvigorated rock, launched (not singlehandedly but almost) the punk revolution, directly and/or indirectly inspired thousands of bands (yes, including many here), and churned out dozens of mini-masterpieces of two-minute, three-chord perfection.
While Presley turned ever-inward until he died alone, Ramone kept spinning out toward the allegedly-real world. Joey eventually (at least indirectly) renounced the just-kidding aspect of his original schtick with the anti-Reagan song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” In it, the singer who used to sport swastikas on his leather jacket as a cheap anti-PC gag got serious to denounce a president who’d become too forgiving about the real Nazis.
Also, nowhere in Ramone’s originals or his carefully-chosen cover recordings did he ever pretend to be black. (Ex-bandmate Dee Dee Ramone did, on a misguided rap CD, but that’s another tale.) A strange ’90s book called Hole In Our Soul saw this lack of minstrelism as a renunciation of the whole R&B tradition and, hence, of everything wonderful and heartfelt about America’s cultural heritage. I think that’s bunk. What Joey and his punk pals and proteges did was find themselves enough heart and, yes, soul in the garage-rock heritage, and could express themselves while respecting black music enough to not try to take it over.
P.S.: The afternoon Ramone died, I happened to be at the Museum of Flight and happened to see U2’s elaborately painted private jet taking off from Boeing Field following their Tacoma Dome gig. U2 would never have had that jet, let alone a career, if it hadn’t been for Ramone–one who, at least publicly, decried the whole material-excess lifestyle and rock-star aesthetic U2 now relishes.
NEXT: A chant, re: The art of Art Chantry.
ALL WEEK LONG, we’ve been preparing for the huge MISCmedia 15th Anniversary gala (June 2, mark your calendars now), with pieces of the art show that’ll be part of it–randomly-ordered pix of every home yr. web-mate’s ever lived in. Today, the last such installment for now.
#20: Ellis Court, 2510 Western Ave. A clean, decent, well-maintained studio apartment in a building protected from excess rent inflation. Occupied September 1991-August 2000.
It was a moderate-income building, originally built so the developer could get permission to condo-convert some other existing building. It had been a druggie haven before I’d moved in; but within weeks of my arrival, half the units on my floor were sporting door-posted eviction notices. That didn’t stop guys from buzzing my door buzzer all night long, looking for whoever had preceded me.
Other things that happened in September 1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten were released, KNDD went on the air, and the first Stranger came out. I saw all of these as vindications of my long-held aesthetic convictions.
Months after I moved in, the building was taken over by the semi-subsidized Housing Resources Group. This meant in the nine years I lived in Belltown, my rent rose 20 percent while that of the tenants in most nearby buildings at least doubled.
Things that left Belltown in those years: The Dog House and (original) Cyclops restaurants, the SCUD and 66 Bell art studios, The Rocket, the Belltown Dispatch.
Things that showed up in Belltown in those years: The Crocodile, Sit & Spin, the (new) Cyclops, the Speakeasy, the Lava Lounge, Shorty’s, dozens of restaurants I couldn’t afford, hundreds of condos I couldn’t afford (including new buildings on both sides of Ellis Court).
Things that showed up in Belltown and later left: The Weathered Wall, the Center on Contemporary Art, assorted dot-com and day-trading offices.
Weeks after I left, Ellis Court was subjected to a thorough structural reworking, including the removal of all exterior surfaces for replacement with less-leaky materials. The project is still underway at the time I write this. (Yes, I still didn’t get my cleaning deposit back.)
NEXT: Tulipomania redux.
WHEN I FIRST READ that my beloved KCMU radio was being effectively taken over by Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project people, moved off of the UW campus, and renamed KEXP, I half-thought the announcement had to be an April Fool’s prank–even though I’d heard and read rumors about such a move for over a year, ever since the station won its hard-fought operating independence from KUOW, the UW’s money- and demographics-obsessed NPR station.
It just couldn’t be happening. Not really.
Like many loyal listeners to one of America’s finest “college radio” (whatever that means anymore) stations, I’ve invested a lot of time and memories in KCMU.
But I’ve also got a degree of pseudo-proprietary interest in it, having been one of the first new-music DJs on the station in 1980-81 (when it ceased to be a UW student-lab operation and became the valuable community resource it’s been all these years).
As I aged from nerdy college-radio new waver into dorky near-middle-aged progressive-pop fan, the station followed my (and my peer group’s) aging. It laid off from much of the hard-punk material (alas) and inserted a whole variety of fun and/or progressive genres all mixed up (yay!).
But KUOW management gradually asserted more control over KCMU in the early ’90s (at the height of the Seattle Music Scene hype KCMU had helped jump-start). I joined in with the C.U.R.S.E. (“Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics”) gang that had launched a boycott, eventually forcing management to back down on its programming-gentrification plans (although the station’s top-notch progressive-news programming remained excised, and today exists only in a Sunday-morning timeslot ghetto.)
This past year KCMU’s been about the best it’s been. The now full-time staff has got the “variety format” down pat, relentlessly mixing everything from power pop and emocore to delta blues and Italian soundtrack tunes.
So when the Big Change got closer, and more likely to be oh-so real, I almost feared setting my clock radio for Monday morning.
As it turned out, nothing seemed to have audibly changed. Yet.
But diligence is necessary.
We don’t want Allen’s minions turning KCMU (I still can’t type “KEXP” without trepidation, let alone say it) into some bland boomer-nostalgia station, or (almost as bad) the type of defanged, Paul-Simonized station the KUOW guys already tried to turn it into.
P.S.: If any of you have tapes of any of the now no-longer-to-be-heard KCMU promo spots, I’d love a copy.)
NEXT: Mulling more possible changes to the site. (I know, again….)
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s darned hard to think of Frisco Net-boors as folk needing or deserving our “support,” as postulated by the organizers of today’s “Back the Net Day.”
THEY’RE BACK. Eight years or so ago, I thought we were rid of them for good. But now they’re reasserting themselves, and again threaten to subjugate us all under a numbing regime of enforced mindlessness.
I’m not talking about the Republicans but about the hippies.
Humans of my acquaintance, whom I thought were safe from the infestation, have succumbed one by one. Could you be the next? Take our handy quiz.
Patchouli smells like:
(B) Stale beer.
(C) The breath of the angels.
Television is:
(B) A pleasant-enough diversion.
(C) The root of all evil.
Spectator sports are:
(B) A great way to spend the afternoon with the guys and/or the family.
Lower-income working Americans are:
(B) The key toward establishing a permanent progressive movement in this country.
(C) All redneck fascists.
Tobacco is:
(B) An unfortunate addiction.
(C) Good for you if it’s American Spirits, right?
I buy my groceries:
(B) Where I get the best selection.
(C) Someplace small and dark where I have to bring my own unbleached cash-register paper.
Medical marijuana should be prescribed:
(B) To the extent it can be shown to relieve extreme pain among the seriously ill.
(C) For tummy aches and bad-hair days.
The answer to global warming is:
(B) Concerted efforts to make industry cleaner and reduce automobile use.
(C) Hemp.
The answer to racial inequality is:
(B) Diversity training in schools and workplaces.
The answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem is:
(B) Now believed to be known, but too complex to be quoted here.
The purpose of politics is:
(B) To realign society’s structures of power.
(C) To let me proclaim how perfect I am.
SCORING:
Score one point for every (A) answer.
Score two points for every (B) answer.
Score three points for every (C) answer.
RESULTS:
11-17 Points: You’re safe for now. But creeping hippiedom can occur to anyone, so be careful.
18-25 Points: You’re in serious trouble, dude. You should consider total-immersion therapy: Eighteen hours at the Riverside Inn casino, playing high-stakes poker in between line-dancing lessons.
26-33 Points: If you don’t act now, you might be just days away from tie-dying your bedsheets and taking up the hammer dulcimer. You need professional help; or at least a few days’ worth of sensory realignment at a Tokyo pachinko parlor.
If you didn’t even finish the quiz, you might have lost the ability to concentrate. Get to your nearest aerobics class or sports bar immediately, or as soon as you can gather enough energy to put some shoes on.
NEXT: Boeing becomes just another global corporation.
A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti
It’s the moment that always freezes my heart.
I’m at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we’re entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we’re in the bedroom.
She smiles, nods to the other stereo–this one smothered with candles or books–and offers “Music?”
For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.
What do I say? I say nothing.
We wouldn’t be this far if we didn’t appreciate each other’s taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.
Forget it, I say “sure” and pray that the music isn’t crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates–along with our mood–into nothing.
As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.
Slow, moody jazz from the ’50s and ’60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn’t cut it.
Judging by the LP jackets from the ’70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.
Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can’t touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.
So where is my lust-inducing music?
While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari’s Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio’s Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.
Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.
Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music’s embrace.
Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.
NEXT: The heroism of America’s TV critics (or at least one of ’em).
Critical Mass Exodus
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist discussed the sudden, management-pushed retirement of longtime Seattle Times film critic John Hartl. Today, a look at a quite different critical voice, also disappearing–a highbrow- and experimental-music zine.)
IT’S OFFICIAL: The Tentacle is jettisoning its ink edition. The current spring issue will be followed by a final one in a few months. The web site, www.tentacle.org, will probably continue to list shows, but this activity, like any resumption of the print version, depends on a dwindling supply of volunteer labor.
Although money is always tight in the magazine world, the main reason Tentacle helmsman Dennis Rea gives for quitting is that he and other collective members (Mike Marlin, Christopher DiLaurenti, and Carl Juarez) need to spend more time on their own projects.
A larger problem is that the community The Tentacle serves is too small. Of the dozens who regularly do, as the cover says, “free improv, avant-rock, new composition, noise, electro-acoustic, out jazz,” and other unusual forms, not enough folks contribute to the one publication that pays much attention to them.
Twenty subscribers and a handful of ads pay the bills, and it takes another twenty people to write, edit, lay out, publish, and distribute this 24-page, 8.5 X 11 newsprint denizen of the resonant deep.
In a way, the narrow focus is what made The Tentacle one of the most fascinating magazines around. I speared it when it first surfaced, about three years ago. At the time, I was editing the Washington Free Press and so was drawn to it as a beautifully designed shoestring-budget journal rather than as a kind of lobbying ploy on the part of some artists to get themselves noticed.
As a writer who’s done my share of such lobbying, I was also intrigued by the spirit of this mad venture. To read The Tentacle was to confront the apparent reality of a vast music scene that thrived on presenting experimental work.
In music, writing, or any other artistic discipline, works that fool around with the conventions of their craft are hard to sell. Unlike larger publications that ignore or ridicule such an approach to art, The Tentacle had a sense of humor about its place in the cultural food chain.
Of course, the expectations of artists who book and promote their own shows are nothing if not realistic. Then again, maniacs who spend years composing pieces that nobody may want to play or hear, refining techniques that seem more suited to a carnival than a concert stage, and striving for a perfection that must alienate in order to succeed are so idealistic as to make monks seem like venal hedonists.
The critical questions The Tentacle addressed weren’t the case-by-case judgments the overnight critic makes, but idealistic concerns. Instead of CD reviews and celebrity profiles for fans, there were CD release notifications and interviews and articles for fellow artists. The Tentacle provided a forum to define “creative” music and to discuss the relationship of politics to art; a place for book reviews, concert reports, cartoons, a calendar, and oddball features.
What is art? Why is art important? Which art matters?
These are the lines of investigation John Hartl and The Tentacle have pursued in their various ways.
I know these people and have written for these publications, but my stake in all this is personal only insofar as it is intellectual.
That is, the idea of devolving into a society where attitude-packed cheap shots replace thoughtful reviews and where experience, civil discourse, and consideration give way to picks-‘n-pans arts coverage is a threat to what I write, read, hear, see, and know.
People retire, magazines sink out of sight, and newspapers wrap fish.
NEXT: More things we’re losing.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST ANNOYANCES of my younger days, when I was annoyed at quite a lot of things, was when somebody would tell me bad news and then perkily ask, “OK?”
No, it wasn’t OK that I didn’t get that scholarship, the last ferry back into town for the night had already left, or Kirsten wanted to stay friends.
And it’s definitely not OK that we just lost the OK Hotel Cafe, for over a decade Seattle’s most enduring, and one of its liveliest, spots for music, performance, and art.
I’d known it when it was just a raw, old building acquired first as a rehearsal space, then as a cafe. To the cafe were added art shows (at first in the tiny hotel rooms upstairs; then, after that part was declared unoccupiable by the general public, in the main cafe space). Along with the art shows came occasional live-music shows in the cafe’s raised back area.
As the years went by, owners Steve and Tia Freeborn took over two more rooms on the ground floor. They and their team built a handsome bar-lounge and an intimate back ballroom stage.
For a while, they kept the back room boozeless and all-ages, while hosting 21-and-over shows in the lounge. But the costs and complications of this arrangement didn’t work out, and the whole place went adults-only in ’94.
During both the all-ages and 21-plus segments of the OK’s history, it’s hosted just about everybody of consequence in the NW music scene(s), plus tons of touring acts.
A representative sample: Built to Spill, Mother Love Bone, Beat Happening, the Black Cat Orchestra, Wayne Horvitz, Combo Craig, the Drews, Soundgargen, the Presidents of the United States of America, Bill Frisell, and Rockin’ Teenage Combo.
And it had remained an eclectic and dependable art space; showing the works of, among others, our own regular MISCmedia print mag contributor Sean Hurley (whose multicultural mermaids, shown here, were displayed just above the back-room bar).
But the Ash Wednesday quake damaged the building just enough for its current landlord to evict Freeborn and company on the premise that the place isn’t safely occupiable as a public gathering spot and won’t again be so for some time.
The building, I’m told, has landmark status; but the OK Hotel Cafe operation as we know it is gone. Whether Freeborn and crew will be able to resurface elsewhere is something only time will tell.
The OK was better than just OK. Its sudden loss is one of the most not-OK things I can think of.
NEXT: A fond adieu to a film critic.
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
