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AN EARLY 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.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
ELSEWHERE:
METALLICA, those late-’80s champions of politically-progressive heavy metal, are among the bands playing next month’s grand opening weekend for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
This means one of the first personal-computer zillionaires is hiring a band that’s just become known as the chief party-poopers of the digital-music-distribution revolution.
For those just tuning in, a little history:
Napster’s own servers don’t hold or download any MP3s. Instead, they provide links, searches, and a standard downloading protocol for thousands of individual users’ own sites. You’re not downloading a song from Napster; you’re just using Napster to find the song on another individual’s server and to download it from there.
The aging band, which hasn’t had many new hits lately but still has an avid cult following, agreed to put its name and populist reputation on the line in the most aggressive kill-Napster campaign to date.
This gave the industry a convenient front group for its actions. The band could claim it was working on behalf of “artists’ rights;” even though the industry’s moving in other forums (including proposed copyright-law revisions) to stifle artists rights and redefine all releases as “works for hire” to be owned by the labels in perpituity.
(Yes, in both cases it’s the little Napster enterprise that’s getting sued.)
Even if Napster is forced out of business by this or any subsequent industry suits, its principle of decentralized file-serving and file-searching is here, probably to stay.
Other outfits, even smaller and less suable than Napster, can (and are) expanding upon the concept and making new software tools for anonymous, authority-free, intellectual-property-be-damned file trading.
These tools wouldn’t be used just for hit music but for files of all types–software code, porn, movies, political documents certain governments around the world want to keep from their citizens, drug recipes, conspiracy theories, Scully-and-Mulder sex stories, etc. etc.
Metallica, meanwhile, has taken a lot of heat from fans and ex-fans over its new-found public image as stooges for the RIAA’s showbiz weasels. So far, they’re not backing down.
So it’s only appropriate they’re playing for Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft–and former owner of Ticketmaster.
MONDAY: The “in” typeface for 2000.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
AFTER AN HOUR of watching architect Rem Koolhaas’s slide presentation at Benaroya Hall on 5/3, I finally figured out the dual schemes behind Koolhaas’s design for the new Seattle library:
(1) It’s a giant, 15-story, uneven, vertical pile of books. (Imagine the stack of law books in the Perry Mason closing credits)
(2) It’s also the linear, angular, rational counterpart to the Experience Music Project’s touchy-feely curves and textures.
Seattle’s a town where yang-oriented geeks and eggheads have long been prized (Boeing engineers, software coders, biotech researchers). But it’s also a town where more yin-ish salespeople and dealmakers have brought the real money in.
The new library and EMP, while situated some two miles apart from one another, will provide a balanced tribute to both sides of the city’s character.
I could bore you with rundowns of how Koolhaas (yes, it’s pronounced “cool-house”) discussed the building’s schemes for foot-traffic flow, seizmic safety, natural-light bringing-in, computer access, balance between public-gathering and info-storage functions, and ability to handle expanded multimedia collections. But if you’re anything like most of the packed Benaroya audience, you want to know about two particular aspects of the design:
(1) The translucent floors on certain levels won’t be so see-thru that enterprising Net-entrepreneurs could use them in making “upskirt” image sites.
(2) And the spiraling central corridor of book stacks (officially devised not as a tribute to the labyrintian monastic library in The Name of the Rose but to allow “the uninterrupted flow” of the Dewey Decimal system) won’t be too steep for either wheelchairs or employees’ carts, Koolhaas insists. It’ll just be a gentle four-percent grade, much easier to handle than the steep 20-percent-grade Benaroya Hall aisles (or the spiraling galleries at NYC’s Guggenheim Muesum).
Koolhaas tried to prove his point with still photos of a full-size mockup of the sloping stacks, built on short notice by the Seattle Opera scene shop. The photos showed humans and wheeled devices ascending and descending and stopping on the ramped floor with ease.
You might be able to make your own test; the mockup might be installed for a couple days or so at the current downtown library later this month. If that happens, you might even be able to give it the real test–how well it allows for the descent of marbles, Hot Wheels cars, and Slinkys.
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK (Tom Heald at TV Barn: “A few weeks ago this column may have implied that pop stars Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears may not be ‘naturally curvy.’ What I meant to say is that they are untalented. I regret possibly offending their fans.”
TOMORROW: You don’t have to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some of the big-money, big-power shticks being used by Big Media companies in the U.S., to try and hold on to their position of profitability and influence.
It’s not just that they’re acting like bullies.
They’re acting like scared bullies.
As well they should.
The various centralization moves within the media biz aren’t happening half as fast as the various decentralization moves within the larger cultural universe.
And your ob’d’t MISCmedia site’s rarin’ to be part of it.
Starting this very day (if everything goes right), there’ll a streaming Net-radio station as the newest piece of your favorite popcult site in the world.
MISCmedia Radio will focus, initially, on Northwest indie pop, power pop, punky pop, and ballady pop. (There are many other musical genres I adore, but this is what we’re starting with.) We’re assembling a massive library with hundreds of Hi-NRG faves, to give you a boost through your computer-workin’ day and your home-entertainin’ evening.
It’s all legal, being run thru a server that’s got the proper ASCAP/BMI licenses and everything.
The one thing holding up the project’s completion, besides the time investment in assembling everything: Much of my personal music library’s on vinyl and tape. If any of you out there in Readerland have an analog stereo hooked up to a computer and can help me get this fabulous tuneage digitized, email me.
For now, though, please listen to what we’ve got so far by pointing your MP3 player (RealPlayer, Macast, SoundJam, WinAmp, et al.) to http://166.90.148.106:8458. You can also access MISCmedia Radio thru our server supplier, Live365.com. (Just enter “MISCmedia Radio” in the search box.)
Artists and labels that would like their stuff played on the station can send such stuff to MISCmedia, 2608 2nd Ave., #217, Seattle WA 98121. As you might expect, we’ll listen to everything but can’t promise to play it.
(NOTE: At the time this is being written, a 30-minute test broadcast is currently up on the station’s server. With any luck, a full playlist will commence later today.)
TOMORROW: Were the Democrats ever as progressive as Jim Hightower wishes they’d become?
IN OTHER NEWS: Waiting for the threatened big e-tail collapse.
CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to that timeless vaudeville comic of the Stiff Records era, Ian Dury.
WATCH THIS SPACE: No sooner had we printed the precarious status of the Frontier Room than rumors spread about potential changes at Belltown’s other remaining old-folks’ drinking house, the venerable Rendezvous.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers, some background: The area surrounding Second Ave. and Battery St. used to be Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the major studios had their regional distribution offices. The Rendezvous restaurant and lounge was built on this block in the ’30s by a company that built and furnished movie theaters. Its back room, a former private screening room where the movie distributors previewed their latest offerings to theater managers, was designed as a miniature version of the auditoria this company designed and supplied.
In recent decades, the Rendezvous has had two simultaneous main uses. The beautiful back room has been a reasonably-priced rental hall for Belltown’s young hipsters to hold birthday parties, film screenings, performance-art pieces, and music shows. (At least three music videos have been shot there.)
The crowded barroom, meanwhile, has proudly served strong cocktails and cans of Rainier beer to merchant seamen, fishing-boat shoreleavers, old-age pensioners, working-class widows, and young adult alkies-in-training. As building after building in Belltown has gotten torn down or upscaled, the Rendezvous is one of the neighborhood’s last remaining unpretentious dive bars.
But for how much longer?
Here’s all we’ve been able to confirm: The building’s been sold. The new landlors have evicted the apartments, band-rehearsal spaces, and bicycle shop, which had all been on month-to-month.
The Rendezvous itself, and the Sound Mail Services private-mailbox service next door, have long-term leases, which will apparently be adhered to for now.
But eventually, rumor-mongers claim, the new landlords would like to assume management of the restaurant-lounge and (yes, that dreaded word arises once more) “restore” it.
As one who’s held public events in the Rendezvous’s classy old meeting room, I’d loathe any changes that would make the pensioners and fishing-boat people less welcome there.
Maybe we could hold a benefit toward keeping the Rendezvous more or less as-is. I’m sure we could get Dodi, the local band named after the Rendezvous’s legendary veteran barmaid, to play at it.
TOMORROW: Boy, we’ve sure got some demographics.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
MOST OF US, I suspect, have experienced the moment.
You hear your favorite or once-favorite song; only something’s different, something’s wrong somehow.
Then you remember: You’re in a store, restaurant, or (yes) elevator; and the tune you’re hearing is a syrupy symphonic rendition, probably piped into the premises on equipment leased from the Muzak company.
I just experienced this a week ago. The place was a Bartell Drugs store. The song was the Posies’ classic “Golden Blunders;” redone in total “stimulus progression” precision.
While Muzak regularly licenses compositions wholesale from song-publishers’ catalogs for either re-arrangement (on the Muzak-classic satellite feed) or original-version replay (on its other channels), there might’ve been a special reason for including the Posies’ song.
While I don’t believe any Posies members worked at Muzak, many of their pals in the Seattle music scene did. It’s easy to imagine some of them picking their pals’ tune for extra rotation (and extra ASCAP royalties).
Muzak, founded in the ’30s in New York (it originally distributed its programming on leased phone lines), moved its HQ to Seattle in the mid-’80s after a merger with the locally-based Yesco, which fed what it called “foreground music” (i.e., the original recordings, not string-laden covers) into business places.
Another merger later, and Muzak’s moving again; this time to the Carolinas.
In the overheated Seattle economy of the early-Oughts, there are plenty of software-biz and dot-com-biz jobs to be had for those Muzak programmers, librarians, engineers, administrators, etc. who might choose not to relocate.
Slightly more problematic are the local job prospects for the music staff–the creators of Muzak-classic’s cover recordings, and the curators of Muzak’s “foreground” channels.
It’s not just the hard-rock scene in Seattle that’s seen its share of the global music-biz mindset diminish lately. Commercials, industrial films, and other non-pop production work’s also down.
The one bright spot: soundtrack scoring.
Clever entrepreneurs, including members of the Seattle Symphony, have made Seattle an unsung center of movie background music making. (You know: The stuff that used to be heard on soundtrack albums, before those were turned into pop-hit anthologies that had little relation to anything you actually heard in the movie).
Seattle’s chief emerging rival in this field is Salt Lake City; specifically companies formed there by veterans of Bonneville International’s old “beautiful music” radio programming division (which used to produce Muzak-like recordings for broadcast FM stations).
So you won’t hear Seattle-made violin-and-synth stirrings in your drugstore (at least not after Muzak-classic’s current fare eventually gets retired from rotation).
But you’ll still hear it in six-channel Dolby at your multiplex when the 55-year-old leading man tenderly embraces the body double of his 25-year-old co-star.
TOMORROW: Learning to appreciate the worst comic strip in the papers.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW what it’s like to be constantly mistaken for someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything.
Phone calls in the wee hours from obsessed acquaintances demanding I relieve their self-made mental torture by telling them the answers to obscure conundrums I’ve never considered.
Couples spotting me from a block away and chasing me down, yelling at me to tell them the directions to someplace I’ve never heard of or the name of the best sushi restaurant in the neighborhood.
Guys in bars enlisting me to settle burly drunken men’s disputes over the most arcane sports or movie trivia; as if I (1) knew the answer, and (2) wanted to make either burly drunken guy mad at me.
For the record, let it stand that I do not know everything.
If I did, I sure wouldn’t be stuck with some dorky little website now, would I? I’d be independently wealthy from prescient stock trades and/or sports bets, which I’m most assuredly not.
(Okay, I did have one dream three years ago that focused on the office tower of a major company that, upon wakening, turned out to have suddenly announced a big merger; but that’s never happenned before or since.)
So, here’s but a very partial list of the many, many, many things I don’t know:
(On the other hand, I have known most of the answers on that TV show, even the toughies. I keep calling the hotline but I never get the random call-back. Oh well, maybe I can still learn day-trading….)
TOMORROW: Retro-progressivism.
IN OTHER NEWS:
ONCE UPON A TIME in the ’80s, when cable TV was just starting to grow and most of its customers still lived in rural areas, the Grand Ole Opry people started The Nashville Network.
It drew on the existing resources of the Opry radio show, the Opryland theme park, and the Opryland TV-studio facility (home of Hee Haw). Because few country acts had made music videos, the channel emphasized variety shows and other live-performance formats.
And it was good.
TNN’s amassed an invaluable trove of performance and interview footage with every major country star active since 1983; its archives contain rare film and video of most every country star who’d died before the channel’s debut.
TNN’s been instrumental in “breaking” most of those “Young Country” stars, and solidified a new, mainstreamed audience for the genre as a whole.
Its influence was proven in the mid-’90s, when the Billboard record charts switched from a survey format to listing actual record sales. The young-country acts were suddenly revealed to be bigger sellers than most of the corporate-rock superstars.
TNN’s Sunday-afternoon NASCAR coverage, meanwhile, had helped make the stock-car circuit into America’s most prominent racing sport.
But in 1997, the Opry’s original joint-venture partner in TNN, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, assumed control of the channel, just as it was merging with CBS (which in turn is being absorbed by Viacom).
The new management saw TNN not for its loyal audiences or its programming heritage, but for the millions of cable homes it reached (almost every cable system in the country carries it).
Hours of original live-music shows were axed from the schedule, replaced by advertiser-friendly “lifestyle” shows and cheap reruns. At first, the rerun shows were chosen for their more-or-less “country” settings (The Waltons, The Dukes of Hazard, Dallas). But now the schedule includes Cagney & Lacy, that two-woman cop show set in New York City. (You should all now yell out like in the Pace picante sauce ad, “New York CITY?!?”)
When new original shows did appear, they were either dorky action shows (of the type clogging the USA Network’s schedule) or trash-sports concepts aimed at teenage boys: Extreme Championship Wrestling, RollerJam, Arena Football, and most recently Rockin’ Bowl.
Last month, TNN dropped its last weekday music programming, a daytime hour of videos, so it could add reruns of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. (Ahh, nothing like faked “funny outtakes” with the stars of since-forgotten 1985 sitcoms.)
The only “Nashville” left in TNN is a three-hour Saturday night block, anchored by a half-hour simulcast of the Opry radio show, and a Biography-like documentary series on Monday nights. Viewers who write or email to complain are referred to to another CBS-owned channel, the video-clip based Country Music Television (carried on far fewer cable systems).
TNN will probably survive without country music. Can country music survive without TNN?
Already, CBS’s Infinity Radio Group, which owned both of Seattle’s country stations, has switched one of them to an ’80s-nostalgia format. We may have seen the peak of commercial “Young Country;” though the more critically beloved (and sometimes even younger) “alternative country” genre appears to still be going strong on its semi-underground level.
TOMORROW: No, I don’t know everything.
IT’LL BE A WHILE before fully open wireless Net access is widely available, so Net radio’s strictly for non-portable applications (homes, workplaces).
Within that restriction, you can get hundreds of rebroadcast broadcast stations from across the world, plus thousands more Net-only programming formats. It’d take a fully-staffed, updated-daily review site just to discuss them.
(RealNetworks’ own RealGuide site only reviews sites using that company’s products, and even then it can’t discuss more than a portion of all the sites out there.)
This means it helps to be found by Net-ites if your station or program has a potential audience that might already be looking for it–such as the fans of an established musical act.
Even–or perhaps especially–if it’s an act that was dropped by its last label and hasn’t had an album of new material in three and a half years, such as They Might Be Giants.
After the beloved quirky-pop duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh was dropped by Elektra Records, they started a program of reissuing their old and/or unreleased material (plus new live recordings of the songs from their Elektra CDs) through the indy label Restless. They’ve got enough of this material to launch their own Net-radio station, which they have done.
“Radio They Might Be Giants,” with its almost all-TMBG format (they’ve mixed in a handful of what they call “Cool Songs By Other People”), shows off the vast breadth and professionalism of the group’s ouvre, belying their old MTV reputation as a mere novelty act.
It also encourages past casual fans of the band to not just get reacquainted but to become born-again collectors. If this happens to you, the group’s got plenty of pay-per-download MP3 recordings to sell you.
(One of these packages contains all previously-unreleased stuff, including a wonderfully poignant ballad called “Operators Are Standing By” (“…Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee….”).)
I was about to write at this point that there aren’t many bands that had enough (or enough diverse) material to program a single-act Net-radio channel. But then I got to thinking of all the hundreds, yea thousands, of rock, pop, hiphop, alt-country, and other indie and quasi-indie acts still touring and/or recording after 10 years or more.
It’s way-easy to imagine a Radio Pere Ubu, a Radio Built to Spill, a Radio Michelle Shocked, or a Radio Diamanda Galas. (I already know of Net-stations devoted to Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles, natch.)
Yet the question remains, can these tools help “break” an unknown act as well as they can help revitalize an established act? Countless unsigned acts on the Net are trying. (Some of them are very trying.)
TOMORROW: The channel formerly known as the Nashville Network.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.
Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.
This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.
KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.
While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.
TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.
