It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
SOMETIME LAST WEEK,MTV claimed to have played the one millionth music video (counting repeats) in the cable channel’s 19-year history.
You probably didn’t even notice. The channel didn’t even bother to plant hype stories the channel planted in newspapers about the “achievement.” (The clip chosen to represent the milestone: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”)
Once the #1-rated basic cable channel, MTV’s ratings have steadily declined. (A recent, laudatory Forbes article touted the successful launches of localized MTV channels around the world, but tellingly said nothing about the U.S. original.)
What’s more, the channel’s more exclusively than ever drawing teen and young-adult audiences, who (despite being incessantly wooed by every channel from NBC to UPN) proportionately watch far less TV of any type than any other age group.
The problem’s not that ex-viewers like me grew older while MTV didn’t. It’s that MTV has indeed grown old; or at least tired.
Briefly, during its mid-’80s to early-’90s midlife, the channel was known for championing artistically flashy “breakthrough videos,” and also for breaking exciting new acts that threatened to stretch the boundaries of pop and rock.
Back in 1981, MTV had been routinely criticized for its lack of programming diversity. It mainly just showed hard-rock and top-40 acts, with a smattering of British “new wave” clips and almost no R&B or hiphop.
Today, during those hours when it isn’t re-re-rerunning five-year-old Real World episodes or Celebrity Deathmatch animations, MTV almost exclusively plays music from five, very rigidly-defined, genres:
Of course, as an integral part of the mainstream record-industry hype machine, MTV’s decline has parallelled the industry’s. With no real “top 40” mass market anymore, the industry has devolved and retreated into niches where it believes its big-promotion, big-marketing approach can still move CDs–the five genres listed above, plus the easy-listening acts played on VH1 (also owned, like MTV, by Viacom) and the pop-country acts played on TNN (soon to be owned by Viacom once its merger with CBS goes through).
TOMORROW: What’s in a (corporate) name?
ELSEWHERE:
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”
They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.
A sociocultural movement based on the principles of DIY culture (real indie music, real indie filmmaking, real indie publishing) would probably never lead to any singular mass uprising that would seriously threaten the United States government or the World Trade Organization.
But consider the legacy of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution.”
Having seen the 1968 “Prague Spring” reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks, some underground musicians, writers, and thinkers set about, in spite of heavy censorship and repressions, to form a permanent alternative culture. A culture in which the very premises of authoritarian, top-down thinking would be replaced by notions of self-expression and voluntary association.
When the Soviets’ grip on eastern Europe finally loosened in the late ’80s, it was these folks who filled the void in both political and cultural leadership. The result: A country that made one of the smoothest post-Soviet transitions, that has a relatively healthy economy and political system, that even allowed the Slovaks’ bloodless secession.
The situation here’s much different than in the old Eastern Bloc, for sure.
Back there, back then, all non-official cultural expressions were tracked down and stomped on. Here, indie culture’s treated as corporate culture’s minor leagues (film festivals are promoted as showcasing “tomorrow’s Spielbergs;” indie rock scenes used to be hyped as “the Next Seattle”). If something shows no prospect for being “mainstreamed,” such as difficult-listening music, it’s ignored, left to wither in the shadows.
But the situation’s changing, at a speed faster than so-called “Internet Time.”
As this online column’s oft mentioned, the Net’s one-to-one and one-to-few modes of expression make standard U.S. notions of mass entertainment and mass marketing seem woefully outdated. The oldline TV networks, daily papers, movie studios, and record labels are only keeping their stock value up by consolidating with one another. The record giants in particular are losing market share worldwide, especially in places where local acts are taking back local audiences, away from the Anglophone superstars.
Folks everywhere are hungering for something more immediate, more personal, more “tribal” if you will, than the Time Warners and the Wal-Marts are equipped to provide.
This means an opportunity for avant-improv music (as well as other ground-level genres, from bluegrass to straight-edge) to form new audiences and alliances. And because I believe politics leads from culture and not the other way around, I also believe this is our best hope for forging a decentralized, bottom-up political movement the likes of which America’s never really had.
TOMORROW: Results of the latest MISCmedia questionnaire.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
YESTERDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and the aforementioned Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Hughes and Rea could have listed some other potential sociocultural lessons from avant-improv:
But can the “creative music” aesthetic really work as a metaphor or object lesson for larger society?
Probably not. But that’s at least part of the whole point.
MONDAY: The last of this for now, I promise.
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
BEFORE WE BEGIN, A QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT: My once-canceled talk radio appearance has been rescheduled on short notice. It’ll be at noon this Sunday on “The Buzz,” 100.7 FM.
WHILE RESEARCHING a future piece for this space about those screeching new business magazines, one phrase kept recurring in their headlines. It was a phrase I’d remembered from dreadful Reagan-era articles in the likes of Vanity Fair and Esquire about seemingly unstoppable tycoons and financiers.
Such profiles would almost inevitably carry the title “The Rise and Rise Of….”
The oft-unspoken assumption behind the phrase is that there were certain ultra-Alpha-Male money-gods for whom the rise-and-fall, birth-and-death rules of normal human existence do not apply.
You want to know the roots of today’s supposed decline in “civil society?” The I-got-mine-screw-you zeitgeist exploited by conquest-of-nature SUV ads and ultraviolent video games? The who-needs-you “Attitude” of wrestlers, sexist/racist comedians, “aggro” rock bands, and Microsoft attorneys? It’s all in those five short words, expressing the manufacture of a particularly annoying social archetype–the quasi-neo-Nietzschean ubermensch who believes himself to be above the petty rules of puny humans.
With this premise in mind, I did a quick Net-search for the phrase. Following are some of the hundreds of results of the search; people, places, and things that, according to various print and Net-only journalists, are or were on “The Rise and Rise”:
And, of course:
There are also films entitled The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, and an earlier stage play called The Rise and Rise of Arturo Ui.
Mind you, I happen to like some of the stuff on this list (particularly Bowie, bagels, miniskirts, and the Net). It’s just that nothing keeps rising forever and ever, except in theoretical algebra.
MONDAY: More media merger madness.
AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?
Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.
All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.
It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.
The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).
All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.
(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)
Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)
Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).
TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.
A FEW WEEKS BACK, we discussed how the punk rock subculture has changed over the past quarter-century.
One of these changes has been an attitude adjustment.
Back in the soft-rock ’70s and the Reagan ’80s, you weren’t supposed to have what was known then as a “bad attitude.” Conservatives demanded you get with the program and stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself. New Agers and aging Deadheads condescendingly pitied you if you refused to conform to a “positive mental attitude.” The radio-TV stations and the newspapers depicted an urban America composed almost exclusively of “successful” upscale baby boomers; and snidely scoffed at anyone too young, too poor, or too dissatisfied with the way things were.
So: Attitude, with a capital A, became a quick and simple stance of rebellion.
A visible minority of young adults who’d spent their adolescence in the ennui days of Watergate, stagflation, and gasoline shortages took their worldview from youths in the much-drearier place that was early-Thatcher-era Britain.
An American punk was somebody who chose alienation as often as alienation chose him or her. Somebody who deliberately picked at any perceived open sores in U.S. society; who scoffed at “positivity” as a means of brainwashing imposed by society’s powerful onto an all-too-supplicant populace.
Century’s end finds the country in a somewhat different situation.
Ad-bloated magazines such as Fast Company and Business 2.0 cheerlead for a supposedly new way of doing business, a new way of working, a new way of living.
And it’s all got Attitude coming out its ass.
You’re not supposed to work your fingers to the bone in quiet desperation. You’re supposed to work your fingers to the bone and beg for more. You’re a “rebel” if you break free from those nasty old-fashioned restrictions (such as a personal life, a mind of your own, or pesky health-and-safety laws) and muster up all the Attitude you can to produce-produce-produce, sell-sell-sell, hustle-hustle-hustle, or schmooze-schmooze-schmooze.
Attitude’s everywhere else, too: SUV highway hogs; Young Republicans on Harleys; cigar bars; Road Rage; “morning zoo” radio; hate-talk radio; potty-mouthed comedians. I swear, you can’t sneeze without infecting a piece of Attitude.
Even that hokiest of entertainment enterprises, the World Wrestling Federation, now uses “Attitude” as its one-word corporate slogan.
So today, any true attitude of rebellion would be a rebellion against Attitude.
That, more than any perceived “death of irony,” could be the reason Those Kids Today increasingly flock to The WB’s hyper-sincere youth dramas, away from Fox (the network that used to boast of “Fox Attitude”).
It could be at least one reason why the sincerely “realistic” horror of The Blair Witch Project took to movie viewers’ hearts in ways the bombast of, say, the Mummy remake couldn’t.
For several years now, black music audiences have been flocking to embrace what someone like me might call sappy love songs, leaving the gangstas to play to the white mall kids.
The heavy youth presence at the WTO protests (in all of the protests, not just the media-beloved “violent” ones) may or may not mean the Post-Blank Generation’s searching for a way to do things that matter, rather than just to show off their own transgressiveness.
But one caveat remains, as it remained in the prospects of a post-ironic age: How’s someone of my in-between generation, who grew up believing in Loud Fast Rules and disdaining anything laid-back or mellow, going to handle the flip-flop of the zeitgeist toward rebel communitarians battling establishment rugged-individualists?
By muddling through, just like everybody in this not-just-on-the-calendar New Era.
TOMORROW: Should Netzines go print?
IN A RETAIL RECORD STORE (I’m going to try to avoid the term “brick and mortar,” which should’ve been on Matt Groening’s “Forbidden Words” list for this year), space limitations necessitate what you’ll get to choose from.
It’s usually some mix of what the store operators believe will sell (whatever’s getting the hype or buzz in its respective genre this month; what’s sold well in the recent past) and what they want you to buy (personal favorites; stuff they’ve got too much of this week; stuff they get extra profit margins from).
But on the Web, as you know, the “stock in trade” is limited only by what the operators can special-order from their wholesale suppliers. Web-based music stores can therefore sell any darn thing they want to, to just about anyone who’s got the credit rating.
Web music “malls,” which rent or give away server space to any artist with wares to offer, do away with even minimal “quality control.”
I’ve previously said this is an overall good thing. If properly nourished, this could be a vital part of the demolition of the big-media cartel (or at least a strong challenge to it) and the triumph of what Patti Smith once called “The Age Where Everybody Creates.”
But I also appreciate the great difficulty a band has in getting any attention from the users of an MP3 free-for-all site, where thousands of other bands (many of them quite similar to your own) vie for the same attention, and where free streaming-audio files don’t necessarily spur users to buy whole CDs of a band’s stuff.
Nevertheless, there is some cool/odd/cute stuff on these sites. From time to time, MISCmedia will attempt to find you a few of them. Such as the following (in no particular order):
TOMORROW: New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?
NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
SOMETHING STILL STICKS in my mind from the scattered anti-WTO vandals so long ago (was it really just four weeks?).
The most blatant, deliberate vandalism I saw involved a team of boys in black clothes with punk-anarchist insignia, pounding on Gap windows with small hammers until the windows finally cracked. They were communicating to (or at least greeting) one another with fake gangsta hand signals.
Back in my day, sonny, punk-anarchists didn’t pretend to be black. They pretended to be English.
But I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.
After all, it was at least five years ago that I realized punk had become older than hippie had been when punk started. As we approach a quarter-century since the first Ramones and Richard Hell gigs at CBGB’s in NYC, some two dozen or more variants on the old three-chord garage sound have come, gone, and in many cases come back–hardcore, queercore, emocore, mathcore, etc. etc.
But for the purposes of gross oversimplification (and what could be more punk than that?), let’s compare, in excessively broad definitions, punk (as I’d known it in the late-’70s-early-’80s timeframe) with today’s neopunk (the subculture that the Gap and Van’s Shoes, among other marketers, have been trying to exploit, to the anarchists’ disgust):
PHENOM..............PUNK...............NEOPUNK Food................Greaseburgers.......Vegan burritos Beverage............Jaegermeister.......Mountain Dew Drug................Smack (alas)........Ecstasy (alas) Summer..............Tour van overheats..Skateboarding Winter..............Van stuck in snow...Snowboarding Emotional stance....Glum ennui..........Exuberance Footwear............Converse............Docs Economic prospects..Dim indeed..........Where's my stock options? Af-Am hero..........James Brown.........Ice-T McDonald's..........Reliably mediocre...Root of all evil Sex.................Simple time-waster..Too complicated by gender Porn................Simple time-waster..Only OK if gay or fem-dom Athletics...........Root of all evil....X-treme, man! Vehicle of choice...Beat-up Chevy van...Rebuilt mountain bike Baseball cap........Frontwards..........Backwards Video game..........Atari 2600..........Dreamcast Christians..........Annoying fascists...Tonight's opening band Britain.............Rebel role models...No snow or surf Corporate America...Trying to stop us...Trying to take us over Fave hibrow author..Wm. Burroughs.......Edward Abbey Hippies.............Old farts...........Young, cute, often naked Major labels........Won't sign us.......Drop us, leave us in debt Girlfriend..........Supports me w/job...My drummer Boyfriend...........Sucks...............Licks Future death-cause..Liver damage........Broken neck
PHENOM..............PUNK...............NEOPUNK
Food................Greaseburgers.......Vegan burritos
Beverage............Jaegermeister.......Mountain Dew
Drug................Smack (alas)........Ecstasy (alas)
Summer..............Tour van overheats..Skateboarding
Winter..............Van stuck in snow...Snowboarding
Emotional stance....Glum ennui..........Exuberance
Footwear............Converse............Docs
Economic prospects..Dim indeed..........Where's my stock options?
Af-Am hero..........James Brown.........Ice-T
McDonald's..........Reliably mediocre...Root of all evil
Sex.................Simple time-waster..Too complicated by gender
Porn................Simple time-waster..Only OK if gay or fem-dom
Athletics...........Root of all evil....X-treme, man!
Vehicle of choice...Beat-up Chevy van...Rebuilt mountain bike
Baseball cap........Frontwards..........Backwards
Video game..........Atari 2600..........Dreamcast
Christians..........Annoying fascists...Tonight's opening band
Britain.............Rebel role models...No snow or surf
Corporate America...Trying to stop us...Trying to take us over
Fave hibrow author..Wm. Burroughs.......Edward Abbey
Hippies.............Old farts...........Young, cute, often naked
Major labels........Won't sign us.......Drop us, leave us in debt
Girlfriend..........Supports me w/job...My drummer
Boyfriend...........Sucks...............Licks
Future death-cause..Liver damage........Broken neck
TOMORROW: The Grinch who stole New Year’s.
ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.
It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.
Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
YESTERDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
It’s brought thousands of bright, ambitious people and billions of the world’s dollars into our once supposedly backwoods region.
It changed the world’s image of Seattle from gritty to glamourous–and from poilte to predatory.
Among MS employees and even many perma-temps, any digression from official Bill-approved thought is increasingly treated as heresy. (Repeat, droning, over and over: “Freedom to innovate… freedom to innovate…”)
Boomtown Seattle’s behavioral trends (the hustling, the dealmaking, the backstabbing, the delusions of Godhood in God’s Country) seem, on the surface, to constitute a complete break from the town’s prior stereotype as The City of the Nice.
But actually, as I’ve noted on prior occasions, the new NW Aggression has deep regional roots.
It goes directly at least as far as the Nordstrom corporate culture; which applied ’70s “motivational training” shticks into an all-enveloping system of rewards, punishments, dominations, and submissions.
At the peak of what was known as “Nordy-ism,” you could not merely be a Nordstrom employee. You had to be a Nordstrom believer.
You had to cheerfully “volunteer” for unpaid overtime and off-the-clock tasks. You had to meet seemingly arbitrary sales or work goals. You had to regularly submit to performance reviews that judged not only your results but your team-player attitude. You had to attend est-like training seminars to become immersed in the mentality of Total Service (and servitude).
You had to work like hell. And you had to love it more than anything else in the world.
People I know who work at Nordstrom these days claim the manic excesses of Nordy-ism have been toned down a bit–partly to avoid lawsuits, partly to appease key workers in a tight labor market.
But its legacy lives on regionally in the ultra-aggressive cultures of Microsoft, Nike, Amazon, assorted dot-coms led by ex-MS principals.
Earlier in this decade, Seattle had a reputation nationally as a haven for nihilistic young cynics eager to proclaim a no-future of eternal ennui. (Though those guys were really quite entrepreneurial.)
Out-of-towners who never realized how assertive the “grunge” people were often mistakenly see it weird that the same small city would suddenly become the city whose suburbs house the company known by many PC-biz observers as “The Evil Empire.”
But cults, especially cults rising at the turns of their respective centuries or millennia, have often had an end-O-the-world aspect to their doctrine and their fervor.
In the case of the Bill Gates personality cult, the doctrine’s a millennial variant on the old-conservative stereotype of “Government Bad; Business Good.”
In the MS religion, Bill is the Great and Omnipotent Force rising to smite evil Government, reform backward Old Business, unleash the cleansing forces of New Business, tame the chaotic Internet, trample competing high-tech cults, and impose by his will (and the work of his minions) the dawn of a new era in civilization.
An era of one world, united by its dependence upon one operating system.
No wonder S/M’s so popular in Seattle.
It’s only appropriate for the fetishes of old empires (Rome, Britain) to become the favorite public sexual displays in a town increasingly populated by those who would build new empires.
P.S.: Some of you may remember “Building Empires” as the title a home-video collection by local hard-rockers Queensryche. They took it from railroad baron James Hill, who called himself (and his flagship passenger train) the Empire Builder. Another example of how the Northwest wasn’t all as progressive or egalitarian as it’s now supposed to have used to been.
P.P.S.: For a fictionalization of the Nordstrom corporate culture (and, hence, of the MS corporate culture), check your TV listings this month for Ebbie, a 1995 shot-in-Vancouver TV movie. It’s a sex-change Christmas Carol with Susan Lucci as “Elizabeth Scrooge,” who runs a fashionable department store by grinding her staffers into the rug and expecting them to love it.
(Of course, the only nightmares our real-life local slavedriver bosses are probably getting these days involve the Spirits of WTO Protesters Past.)
P.P.P.S.: We previously mentioned a local indie movie, Doomed Planet, a broad comedy in which an end-of-the-millennium Seattle is the battleground for a couple of ruthlessly competitive religious cults. When I first saw it a couple months back, I thought it was just a comedy, with little real-world satirical meaning. In retrospect, the videomakers may have been more allegoric than I gave them credit for.
TOMORROW: Boomtown Seattle’s architectural legacy–real-world monuments bought by cyberspace money.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.
And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.
The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.
Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.
Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).
All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).
Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.
(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).
First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.
But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.
It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).
Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.
It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.
TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.
IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.
