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I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
ELSEWHERE:
PIONEER SQUARE, most agree, has been lost as an art neighborhood.
The machinations of the Samis Foundation, the old neighborhood’s most influential landlord, have resulted in building after building being transformed from artist housing and little galleries into nouveau-riche condos and dot-com offices. Rock clubs have died off (even some of the Square’s trademark bad baby-boomer-blues venues have disappeared).
The artists, musicians, et al. can scatter (and are scattering) their residences to the new hipster-diaspora neighborhoods in the near suburbs. But they still need a place to gather, to hold the all-important par-tay thang that regularly celebrates folks’ emerging from their studio drudgeries and showing off their wares.
The most recent candidate: Ballard Avenue.
The diagonal, partly-cobblestoned street of paint factories, fishing-industry offices and residential hotels has long been a favorite of hipster types who adored its old-world charm and its reasonable rents. A music scene developed there in the mid-’80s with the club now known as the Tractor (headquarters of the local alt-country community). Other venues with similar musical fare followed. In the early ’90s, Hattie’s Hat (a beautiful old working-class eatery and bar) was rescued and “restored” by new owners associated with the Tractor crowd.
In the years since then, art studios and small galleries have popped up along the street. A tattoo parlor followed. Most recently, the old Sunset Tavern was gussied up into a not-too-slick rock club.
The street had a coming-out party of sorts on July 1. In the galleries, wine and Costco pretzels flowed freely. In the Sunset, a DJ played the Young Canadians’ “(Let’s Go to Fucking) Hawaii” in honor of Canada Day; a neo-burlesque troupe stripped (incompletely but with great skill and spirit); and four bands played. In back of the tattoo parlor, a neo-folk-rock band played tunes reminiscent of the neighborhood’s Nordic heritage. Around the corner at Mr. Spott’s Chai House, an all-female singer-songwriter bill warbled and crooned.
Great times were had by all. There will be further gallery evenings the first Saturday of each month. I can’t promise they’ll be as carefree and wild as this was, but it’s a hopeful start to what might be a renaissance of boho spirits and creative community.
But it’s already changing in the creeping-gentrification manner that often accompanies a neighborhood’s “arrival.” The working-stiff hotels and the industrial storefronts that had coexisted with the hipster joints are being decimated. Already, there’s a trendy day spa and hair salon in the area. And developers have announced plans to demolish the Wilson Ford lot on nearby Leary Way for, you guessed it, luxury condos–complete with a “neo-urban” pedestrian corridor to Ballard Ave.
So enjoy the parties, and the music and art, while you can.
TOMORROW: More de-subbing the suburbs.
LAST FRIDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
I’d first moved into the Ellis Court building in September 1991. As you may recall, several other things happened in Seattle that month. Nirvana released Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, KNDD brought commercial “alternative” radio back to Seattle airwaves for the first time in three years, and a certain tabloid newspaper, for which I would end up devoting seven years of my life, began publication.
When I first moved in, Ellis Court was a regular commercial apartment building. I hadn’t known that it had been a favorite of drug dealers. The first clue of that came on my first night as a resident, when the intercom would BUZZZZ loudly all through the wee hours, by men who invariably gave, as their only name, “It’s Me, Lemme In.” Fortunately, the owners had just begun to clear the building of crooks; by my second month there, nearly a third of the apartment doors bore foreclosure notices.
By 1993, the building was being managed by Housing Resource Group Seattle, a nonprofit agency doing what it can to meet the ever-escalating need for “below market rate” (i.e., for non-millionaires) housing in our formerly-fair city.
Belltown was a happenin’ place at the time I moved in. While several artist spaces and studios had folded due to already-rising rents, there were still many (including Galleria Potatohead and the 66 Bell lofts). The Crocodile Cafe nightclub had just opened. The Vogue was in the middle of its 17-year reign as Seattle’s longest-running music club. The Frontier Room, the Two Bells, the Rendezvous, My Suzie’s, the original Cyclops, and the venerable Dog House were serving up affordable foods and/or drinks; to be soon joined by World Pizza.
By early 1995, the Speakeasy Cafe and the Crocodile had become the anchor-ends of a virtual hipster strip mall along Second Avenue, which also included Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, World Pizza, Shorty’s, the Lava Lounge, the Wall of Sound and Singles Going Steady record stores, the Vain hair salon, the Rendezvous, Black Dog Forge, and Tula’s jazz club.
But the place got a far pricier rep soon after that. In block after block, six-story condo complexes replaced the used-vacuum stores, recording studios, band-practice spaces, old-sailor hotels, and old-sailor bars. About the only spaces not turned into condos were turned into either (1) offices for the architects who designed the condos, and (2) fancy-shmancy $100-a-plate restaurants (the kind with valet parking, executive chefs, and menu items designated as “Market Price”).
The demolition of the SCUD building (home of the original Cyclops) in ’97, followed in ’99 by the condo-conversion of the 66 Bell art studios, provided more than enough confirmation that Belltown just wasn’t my kinda scene no more.
Moving on time was well due.
Maybe past due–aside from people in the same apartment building, by this spring I only knew five people who still lived in Belltown. Everyone else had either gone to other established boho ‘hoods in town or had joined Seattle’s new Hipster Diaspora, scattered to Ballard, Columbia City, Aurora, or White Center.
More about that in a few days.
TOMORROW: A few moving misadventures.
IN OTHER NEWS: The icon of many a blank-generation boy’s dreams is alive and well and living in Kelso!
Further Confessions of a Boss Chick
by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies
(LAST FRIDAY, our guest columnist began her reminiscence of being a lonely teenager in Philadephia during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. She’d befriended Kathy, a party-in’ girl who had few girlfreinds but many guy friends. They’d gotten summer jobs together at Philly’s legendary top-40 station WFIL. After one day in the back offices, Kathy had been promoted to a Boss Chick–a public promo person for the station, not unlike the KNDD jobs held by the Real World: Seattle cast.)
ONE NIGHT, at about 7 o’clock or so, that guy who hired me and Kathy, who I really pretty much hardly ever saw again, found me in the Addressograph room. “What time do you have to be home?” he asked.
I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me until he threw me a “uniform” and offered me double my salary to fill in for a Boss Chick who was out sick. “Be in front of the station in a half hour”, he said.
I was about to spend the evening asking grown men to dance at WFIL Night at the Windjammer Room in the Marriott on City Line Avenue.
For a shy 16-year-old girl with braces, a night from hell.
There’s nothing like putting on hot pants in a bathroom stall while thinking up a lie to tell your mom to make you feel like an authentic red-blooded American teenage girl.
I fit my pack of Marlboros perfectly in the pocket of my handbag, slid my lighter into my boot, and boarded the bus filled with veteran Boss Chicks. They were all blonde and beautiful. Mostly between 18 and 20. None with braces. They were having so much fun being them. No sign of Kathy; I figured she must be the one I was filling in for.
I thought she was ill; but I later found out that she was keeping a low profile while healing from a shiner, which she occasionally got from Mommy’s boyfriend.
The gals tumbled off the bus together like a spinning pinwheel. I watched them bounce through the lobby of the Marriott in front of me while I strolled behind them. As we passed the restaurant I caught a glimpse of where, not long ago, me and my mom sat eating sundaes at our favorite window table, looking out onto the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter.
I entered the Windjammer Room to the classic “sounds of Philadelphia”. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass “Bad Luck”–an ominous sign.
The other “chicks” began dancing as soon as they entered the room. One by one, they grabbed one of the guys at the bar, which was filled with traveling salesmen and lecherous locals who came out that night to dance with hot-panted-bell-heel-booted girls.
The guy that hired me came up to me and said, “Debra, you have to go ask one of those guys to dance with you–that’s why you’re here.”
I was horrified. I looked up and down the bar trying to find the loser who least disgusted me. They were all equally creepy.
The first guy I asked was slobbering drunk and kept falling into me during “Soul City Walkin’.” The next guy groped me all the way through “Me and Mrs. Jones” and proceeded to call me “Mrs. Jones” the rest of the night.
Finally, I found one guy who seemed just to be interested in dancing and having fun. He had lots of energy. And lots of coke, which he proudly snorted in front of everyone from a vile and spoon around his neck (which kept getting tangled up in his Italian Stallion medallion).
Suddenly he went nuts during “I Love Music” and shook his Pabst Blue Ribbon and sprayed it all over my T-shirt, screaming like a pig. I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back out ’til it was time to board the bus back to the station.
Needless to say, they never asked me to do the “Boss Chick” thing again. I resumed my survey and Addressograph work, which I liked a lot better, even if it was only half the pay.
Soon they asked me to assist a university student named Mark Goodman with telephone research. He and I became great friends. In my senior year of high school, he helped me obtain an internship at the leading FM rock station in Philly. Mark went on to become one of MTV’s very first VJs. WFIL went on to become a Christian talk station.
The summer ended and I returned to school with a new feeling of confidence. I quickly made a new set of friends.
One early fall night I was out with Flufffy, my evening ciggarette and my WFIL handbag. Kathy was on her steps in her Catholic school uniform, and a plaid waisted coat with a fur collar.
She was kissing Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
TOMORROW: The magazine glut.
Confessions of a Boss Chick
ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.
Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.
One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.
And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.
Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.
She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.
So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.
And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.
By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.
Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.
I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”
When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.
The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”
Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.
They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.
I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”
“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.
And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.
The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.
I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.
I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”
Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.
Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.
MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.
Who Wants to Get Laid?
by guest columnist Scott Johnston
HAVE YA HAD CASUAL SEX LATELY? If you’re in the market, you should really head down to the Fenix in historic Pioneer Square. It offers an unbeatable combination of just-turned-21-year-olds, alcohol, and dim lighting guaranteed to make the night a sure thing.
I’d been to the Fenix plenty of times as a single 20-something, but this time I was newly thirty and actually brought a girl instead of trying to just leave with one.
The reason? We wanted to see our favorite local band, a great lounge act called The Dudley Manlove Quartet. Covers of one-hit wonders from the ’70s and ’80s are a Dudley specialty; and if you know another place I can hear “Copacabana” (the hottest spot north of Havana), a Neil Diamond medley, and the theme to Shaft in the same night, let me know right away.
Not many people admit to liking the Dudley Manlove Quartet, but their shows are always packed and they now play regular gigs as far as San Francisco. They’re not trying to change the music world; they’ve just got a steady flashback of great songs you had long since forgotten. It’s the kind of fun you want to have on a Saturday night with your girl and a few friends.
What I realized on this particular Saturday night soon after our group arrived is that the Fenix is now the official frat boy headquarters of Seattle. My friends and I have a serious aversion to the frat-boy mentality, avoiding them at all costs. When I am forced to talk with one, in line for drinks or the bathroom, the conversations enviably go like this:
Frat boy: “Hey.”
Me: “Hey.”
Frat boy: “I WANT SOME PUSSY!”
Me: “Good luck with that.”
The Fenix is the kind of place wherehalf the crowd is trying to get laid–and I don’t mean just the male half.
The last time I tried to see a band there on a Saturday night (back in my 20-something days), my buddy and I had a fascinating conversation with a woman who introduced herself by walking over and running her finger up and down my friend’s chest.
Woman: “Hi handsome, what’s your name?”
Buddy (feebly pointing to his wedding band): “Uhh…I’m married.” (My friend has been with the same woman for 10 years and has very little experience fending off such aggressive advances.)
Woman: “Oh that’s okay, so am I.”
Buddy (squirming): “Uhh…talk to him, he’s not married.”
Woman (turning to me): “Hi handsome, what’s your name?”
You get the idea.
Our party made it past the ex-Marine bouncer who checks ID and table-hopped our way to a spot with a view as Dudley got underway.
I attempted to purchase drinks from our heroin-chic cocktail waitress, but apparently the bleach job had affected more than just her hair because she kept forgetting to bring our beverages. After she brought someone in our party a margarita with sugar around the rim instead of salt, we just started going to the bar ourselves.
However, the music was good, we all had comfortable seating and there had already been one small fight.
As Dudley ended their first set, it was time for the big contest sponsored by everybody’s favorite local alternative radio station that is owned by a huge nameless, faceless cooperation: The End (now featuring acoustic versions of the songs you’ve been hearing every hour for the last six months).
Up on stage was DJ Brian Beck to give away a brand new snowboard. Not into snowboarding? No problem; according to Mr. Beck, you can “sell the shit and make some extra bank.” These alternative DJs are so cool. “WHAT DOES ‘EXTRA BANK’ MEAN?” I yelled out.
Now that the place was packed, people had surrounded our table and kept invading our personal space. Since we had a couple of all-girl groups around us, the frat-boys kept trying to muscle their way closer and closer.
“What’s the difference between a frat boy and a gay man?” queried a female member of our party loudly “About six beers” was the punch line.
Suddenly all the guys gasped and pointed to the crowd below. Another fight? Someone puking on Brian Beck?
No. It was two beautiful women making out!
Would you believe me if I told you this happens to me all the time? Well it does. Whenever I go to parties or out clubs, women make out in front of me.
I’m not saying I approach them and make any of the moronic comments a straight guy could say to women kissing, or that after getting really hot they slither over and invite me back to their secret make-out headquarters or anything. “Did you get a good look?” chimed my girlfriend as my glance turned to a look and then a stare.
While the guys may have all looked like frat boys, the women were a different matter. As I made my way to and from the bathrooms (complete with DWI legal defense advertisements above the urinals) I spotted enough leather minis, fishnets, and bright red lipstick to give me flashbacks of my high-school heavy metal concert days.
Here’s a tip for the girls at the Fenix: Try selling the sizzle, not the steak.
We finally left just after midnight; and, despite the minor annoyances, had a great time. Of course, pretty much everyone in our party knew who they were going to bed with later, which no doubt accounted for our relaxed attitude during the festivities.
Watching everybody at the Fenix get wasted and try to hook-up was fun for a while, but I’ve got more important things to do.
Like make some extra bank.
TOMORROW: Memories of misogyny past.
THE NYC-BASED KOZMO.COM was in the news a couple weeks ago when its Seattle division started firing delivery people and other workers if they refused to submit to background checks. The balking employees called the checks an unfair inveasion of their privacy. Management of Kozmo (which delivers videos, CDs, bestselling books, and fast foods to most of Seattle, and is preparing to branch into costlier goods) says it’s a necessary security measure.
I say the company could have avoided the bad vibes and the bad press. Instead of sicking private eyes on lowly delivery dudes, it could instead have them submit the following Kozmo Quiz:
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route. B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work. C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris. D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route.
B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work.
C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris.
D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Ignore the information. B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends. C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page. D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Ignore the information.
B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends.
C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page.
D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked. B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band. C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap. D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked.
B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band.
C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap.
D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer. B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour. C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour. D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer.
B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour.
C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour.
D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use. B. Respectfully turn him down. C. Accept the offer. D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use.
B. Respectfully turn him down.
C. Accept the offer.
D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities. B. Keep your big trap shut. C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence. D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities.
B. Keep your big trap shut.
C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence.
D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries. B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits. C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind. D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries.
B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits.
C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind.
D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Pass their request on to the management. B. Ignore them. C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors. D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Pass their request on to the management.
B. Ignore them.
C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors.
D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it. B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you. C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell. D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it.
B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you.
C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell.
D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors. B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors. C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos. D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors.
B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors.
C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos.
D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
Scoring:
Each “A” answer is worth four points.
Each “B” answer is worth three points.
Each “C” answer is worth two points.
Each “D” answer is worth one point.
Totals:
34-40: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so honest, you could be in the Secret Service, protecting the next President of the United States.
26-33: You’re honest enough to be trusted with Kozmo merchandise, yet dishonest enough to make good driving time delivering it.
18-25: You possess a valuable combination of superficial trustworthiness and deep-down duplicity. You shouldn’t be delivering goods on behalf of a dot-com. You should be running your own dot-com, collecting dough from day-trading speculators based on dubious business models.
10-17: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so dishonest, you could be the next President of the United States.
TOMORROW: An odd night on the town.
A FEW DAYS AGO, I briefly mentioned a vision I’d had of what social changes might potentially arise from a tech-company stock crash, should such a rapid downfall occur the way certain anti-dot-com and anti-Microsoft cynics around these parts hope it does.
(If you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and do so. I’ll still be here when you get back.)
One aspect of this vision was that a general public backlash against “virtual realities” (computer-generated and otherwise) could lead to a craze for any personal or cultural experience that could be proclaimed as “reality.”
Let’s imagine such a possible fad a little further today.
I’m imagining a movement that could expand upon already-existing trends–
It’s easy to see these individual trends coalescing into a macro-trend, coinciding with a quite-probable backlash against the digitally-intermediated culture of video games, porno websites, chat rooms, home offices, cubicle loneliness, et al.
As I wrote on Monday, live, in-person entertainment would, under this scenario, become the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences. The self-styled “cultured” folks and intellectuals could come to disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
(Not coincidentally, this disdain would emerge just after technology has allowed the masses to fully create and distribute their own books, movies, recorded music, etc.)
Society’s self-appointed tastemakers could come to insist on live theater instead of films, lecturers and storytellers instead of writers, participant sports (including “X-treme” sports) instead of spectator sports, and concerts (or playing one’s own instruments) instead of CDs.
The arts of rhetoric and public speaking could enjoy a revival on the campuses. The slam poetry and political speechifiying beloved by Those Kids of late just might expand into a full-blown revival of Chataqua-style oratory. On the conservative side of politics, Limbaugh wannabes might take their rhetorical acts away from radio and further into staged rallies and intimate breakfast-club meetings.
Jazz, the music that only truly exists when performed live, could also have another comeback.
Even “alternative” minded music types could get into this line of thinking; indeed, there are already burgeoning mini-fads in “house concerts” and neo-folk hootenaneys.
As packaged entertainment becomes more exclusively associated with nerds, squares, and people living outside major urban centers, it might come under new calls for regulation and even censorship; while live performance could become an anything-goes realm.
(If carried to its extreme, this could even lead to the recriminalization of print/video pornography, and/or the decriminalization of prostitution.)
The rich and/or the hip would demand real shopping in real stores (maybe even along the model of the traditional British shopkeepers, in which the wife rang up sales in the front room while the hubby made the merchandise in the back.)
Those without the dough might be expected (or even made) to use online instead of in-person shopping; much as certain banks “encourage” their less-affluent customers to use ATMs instead of live tellers.
In this scenario, what would become of writers–or, for that matter, cartoonists, filmmakers, record-store clerks, etc.?
(One group you won’t have to worry about: The entertainment conglomerates. They’ll simply put less capital into packaged-goods entertainment and more into theme parks (manmade but still “live” entertainment), Vegas-style revues, touring stage shows, music festivals, and the like.)
MONDAY: Another local landmark gets defaced a little more.
IN OTHER NEWS: There’s one fewer employer for washed-up baseball stars.
YESTERDAY, we began a look at Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Today, a few more thoughts on the building and what it might mean.
7. The commodification of “rebel” images as corporate and safe has reached an apex with architect Frank Gehry’s gargantuan shrine. No longer can rockers, especially Seattle rockers, romantically imagine their milieu as a stronghold of anti-Establishment defiance. (Unless EMP becomes a symbol of everything to be rebelled against (see item 5).)
8. It’s a hallmark of “smooth” industrial design, the same aesthetic principle seen in the New Beetle, the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the iMac, Nike shoes, etc. etc.
Two essays in the July Harper’s (not posted online) discuss this aesthetic as a symbol of global-corporate power and the ascendancy of soft-edgedness in all social endeavors: Mark Kingwell’s “Against Smoothness” and Thomas de Zengotita’s “World World–How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob.”
9. The opening was almost exactly three months after another Paul Allen-instigated event, the Kingdome implosion.
The latter event took place on the Spring Equinox weekend, that traditional time of new beginnings. The EMP celebration, featuring a Seattle Center-wide weekend of free-to-$140 concerts (several of them quite good, especially Patti Smith’s), took place on the Summer Solstice weekend, that traditional time of celebrating the bounty, the harvest; the time when all is, to quote a title of a certain Seattle songwriter, “in bloom.”
10. The opening ceremony itself, in which Allen smashed a custom glass guitar made by Dale Chihuly, was one of those singular moments encompassing so many references. In this case, it encompassed many aspects of the Seattle baby-boomer fetish culture–Allen’s Microsoft bucks; Chihuly’s eternal cloyingness; and the Seattle white guys’ cult of Hendrix.
11. People still don’t know what to think of the building. One woman told me she thought it was supposed to “represent a heart.” I replied that that couldn’t possibly be so; it would have required Mr. Allen to have been aware, at the project’s outset, of musicians who’d actually lived in Seattle as adults.
But my personal conundrum of what the design’s supposed to represent was finally satisfied by this image of the Monorail tracks entering a strategic opening through the building. (Amazing, the raunchy content that can get into a so-called family newspaper these days.)
12. It’s bound to be a classic tourist trap. See the fish-throwers, Ride the Ducks, eat at the Space Needle, take a ferry boat, do the EMP.
One of these months, I might even go inside the thing myself.
(I did go into the merchandise shop, which you can enter without paying admission to the rest of the place. So far, they’re not selling a certain book that no Seattle music museum merchandise shop should be about. If you go there, you might ask them for it.)
TOMORROW: Reality, what a concept!
IT’S A COUPLE OF DAYS since the massive pre-opening hype and the opening weekend concerts for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, and a couple of days before the tape-delayed cablecasts of the concerts show up on MTV and VH1.
So maybe you’ll be able to stand reading a few items about it today:
1. It’s done now. We’re stuck with it. The building was fun to look at while it was going up. Its form and silhouette changed almost daily. But now, it’s in its final shapeless shape. Will it age gracefully into a welcome part of the skyline, or will it become a premature eyesore? (A few observers not bought-and-paid-for by Allen’s PR bucks suggest the latter.)
2. It really is World Class, and that’s one of its biggest problems. Its out-of-scale gaudiness clearly marks it as the product of a town trying too damn hard to prove it had “made it,” too concerned with becoming “New York By-And-By” (The Chinook-jargon translation of “New York-Alki,” Seattle’s original name).
3. We won’t stop hearing about it. Allen sank nearly a quarter-billion into building the thing, but wants the museum to pay back its operating expenses. That means selling annual memberships and bringing casual visitors (local and tourist) over and over. That, in turn, means installing and promoting new attractions (unlike zoo-goers, museum-goers tend not to visit the same old exhibits repeatedly.)
4. Music in Seattle is now a Big Business to stay. EMP’s need to keep itself in the local and national media spotlight means big-name rock and rap stars will be continually trotted out here, at no small expense, to perform or speak at the place or to announce the donation of some collectible trifle. Bigtime concerts and “once in a lifetime” festivals will take place at EMP, or will be sponsored by EMP at other venues, for years to come.
5. Local bands of any degree of street-cred will be regularly “invited” to become shills for EMP (performing at it, appearing at kids’ workshops under its aegis, donating stuff). Will any significant artists (other than Pearl Jam and the Kill Rock Stars label roster) refuse? Will the Seattle Scene be divided into EMP-Friendly and EMP-Unfriendly camps?
6. Rock music is a corporate institution, as if all the previous evidence of this fact (Hard Rock Cafes, House of Blues, Rolling Stone, MTV, the Grammies, Mr. Allen’s former ownership of Ticketmaster, the record industry’s suit to kill Napster, the use of James Brown songs to sell laxatives) hadn’t convinced you.
(A lesson in rock as big business: The reason EMP exists in its present form was because Allen was thwarted in his original scheme to create a “Jimi Hendrix Museum,” honoring the rock god of all Seattle white baby boomers (who himself left Seattle promptly after turning 18, only came back on tour, and told everybody how much he hated it).
Seems Allen had helped the Hendrix family pay for its umpteen-year suit to get back the rights to his music. In return, Allen only wanted the right to create a Hendrix Museum–and, he later decided, the right to control all rights to Hendrix’s music, name, and image for the next 100 years. The family decided to part ways with Allen.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The locally-based Home Grocer is combining with a similar grocery-delivery operation, Webvan. Webvan’s actually a smaller company than Home Grocer, operating in fewer metro areas. But one of those areas is San Francisco, which means Webvan is regularly covered as “the” Net grocery company by those ever so Frisco-centric computer news outlets. Hence, the Webvan name’s far better known than Home Grocer among investors; so that’s the name (and the management team) that will survive the merger.
EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we’ll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.
We’ve already discussed many of Paul Allen’s pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here’s a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people’s work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.
Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront’s first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the ’70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-’90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV’s ‘The Real World’ got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.
Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early ’60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in “rinky-dink” piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside (“Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn’t cash checks, the bank doesn’t make pizza.”) The restaurants’ looks were modernized in the ’80s, but even that couldn’t help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey’s sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC’s on the Seattle waterfront.
The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.
The Edgewater Inn, where you once could “Fish From Your Window,” was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair. The Edgewater first gained a “rocker hotel” reputation when the Beatles stayed there in ’65. This rep was cemented in the early ’70s as the setting of the Zappa song “Mudshark,” relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter “E” was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, “upscale” revision.
The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers’ own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that’s why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.
TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.
SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.
IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly. 2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold. 3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.
2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.
3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.
MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.
Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.
Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:
“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”
RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)
In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.
FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.
It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.
Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.
It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.
Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.
Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.
The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.
In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.
They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.
They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.
Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.
TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.
FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
WTO PROTEST NOSTALGIA looks like it’s here to stay, like it or not.
And it’s already being transformed into something apolitical and nonthreatening.
Most of the works in the “Whole World Is Watching” exhibition of WTO-themed art at the Center on Contemporary Art treat last fall’s four days of marches, teach-ins, rallies, and police brutality as a sociocultural experience (a “happening”) rather than a cross-cultural movement against consolidating corporate power.
It’s easy to see how the show’s contributing artists could develop this point of view. WTO had lots of elements just ready to be turned into 2-D art representing 1-D worldviews.
There was excitement. There was motion. There were easily-caricaturable heroes (the protestors, especially the young, hip ones) and villains (the Imperial Stormtrooper-masked cops and the square bureaucrats giving their orders). There was violence against property. There was violence against people (almost all of it inflicted by the police; but with no known fatalaties).
Even the zines and posters about WTO at the COCA show, both those published during and after the protests, often seemed less interested in building a more equitable world than in provoking an “X-treme” visceral response among readers and viewers.
(Two major exceptions among the show’s visual-art components: Friese Undine’s wall of mug-shot-size portraits of world political and business leaders, and Chris Johnson and Jenniffer Velasco’s mini-mural of the street protests in which the symbols of the real issues (an Asian garment worker, for instance) are almost hidden in corners and interstices of the image.
At the show’s opening party last Saturday, I met many people who remembered the events of six months ago as an exciting time, a once-in-a-lifetime high of energy and even accomplishment (the city shut down; the WTO conference itself ended in disagreement and strife).
But will it come to mean nothing but that?
An ironic note of caution came at the Benham Studio Gallery’s art opening two nights before the COCA party. On display: Late-’60s rock celebrity photos by Graham Nash and scenes from the original Woodstock festival by Elliott Landy; scheduled to coincide with the opening of the Experience Music Project later this month.
Most all the turmoil and strife of the period were far out of these photographers’ camera range. You saw no racial anguish (indeed, no black people except rock stars), no political upheavals, no suburban sprawl, nothing in far-off trouble spots such as Vietnam.
And no garage-rock, bubblegum pop, Atlantic soul, or avant-jazz music. Just the media-appointed goddesses and gods of rock and crossover R&B, and their wild-oat-sowing fan tribe. Just a demographic-marketing target group celebrating its specialness and mistaking hedonism for revolution. (Remember, the original Woodstock was a business venture, partly funded by Warner Bros. and intended to be a relatively controversy-free entertainment.)
The WTO protest subculture (or rather, the white-hipster, demographically-privileged segment of that subculture) could so easily be similarly tamed.
MONDAY: Imagining the WTO generation thirty years from now.
IN OTHER NEWS: For one of menswear’s most creative inventors, “Aloha” means goodbye.
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
ONE OF THE RISKS involved with having so much of one’s past writing available online is the risk of readers finding something you wrote long ago, which in retrospect has proven to be rather stupid.
Example: Somewhere back in the early ’90s (oh, the ’90s, weren’t they such a simpler time?), I wrote something to the effect that rap music had “fulfilled what the bebop jazz guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t
need white people to ‘popularize it’ (i.e. muscle in).”
I seem to have actually believed at the time that hip-hop culture had attained the long-sought holy grail of African-American musicians–a style so intricately, innately black that any white hipsters who tried to take it over would sound hopelessly inept at it.
I was SO wrong.
Not too many years after I wrote that, Hollywood promoters essentially took over rap. They aggressively promoted their gangsta stars to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages. Whereas early hiphop had often been about challenging images of black males as dumb, sexist, gun-happy drug dealers, gangsta rap relished in precisely these images.
This gave rap a much bigger market. But it also turned the white “crossover” market into the force that drove the business. It helped determine which artists would get signed, get radio and MTV play, get large promo budgets, etc.
That shift, in turn, meant that mainstream rap would become more musically tame each year. Samples became more obvious. Wordplay became simpler. Delivery became slower, steadier, easier for an untrained listener to understand.
The result, by late 1998, was a hiphop sufficiently dumbed down that not only could clueless white guys understand it, they could make it.
Hence, Insane Clown Posse, Eminem, Kid Rock, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the other “aggro” acts and novelty acts now profitably spreading messages of egotism, violence, misogyny, profanity, etc.
Thus, the music that began with messages of black intelligence has morphed into something that, as often as not, wallows in notions of white stupidity.
I don’t quite call that progress.
TOMORROW: Some things that aren’t as much fun in one’s forties.
