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YESTERDAY, we began to look into potential alternate routes to the philosophical-aesthetic cul de sac that postmodernism has become, and to instead seek a more pro-active way to see the future.
Of course, some highly-paid pundits are already doing something sorta like that.
But the likes of George Gilder are really in the business of stooging for the elites, telling people with money and power that they can count on having even more money and power in the 2000s.
Gilder’s futurism purports to predict a “revolution,” but merely a “revolution in business” which would leave the cleverest and most ambitious corporate go-getters in charge of a world totally and unalterably under the firm control of Global Business.
They don’t imagine how emerging Net-communications, digital-DIY media, and other empowerment tools could subvert big business’s privileges of scale and influence. Either that, or they don’t want to imagine it.
No, I think there is a real new era coming–if we work at it. I don’t have a splashy book-title name for it yet, but I’m working on it.
Wired’s “digital age” hype doesn’t quite describe it; nor does the “chaos culture” notion promoted by rave-dance folks a few years ago.
(The right-wing-think-tank people behind Wired are too trapped in their own privileged status to support a real revolution; the rave people are seeing only the most hedonistic aspects of the revolution.)
Without wanting too much to sound like a certain late multimillionaire who sang about a future without possessions, I’ll ask you to imagine.
Imagine a world in which motion pictures are made everywhere, not just in one city in the whole world.
Imagine a world that had actors but not movie stars. Imagine no more gatekeepers.
Imagine a society without a right-wing hierarchy of privilege or a left-wing hierarchy of righteousness. A world in which women are equal to men, but in which men are also equal to women.
A world without bestseller lists, Billboard charts, or box-office rankings. A world of artists, not celebrities.
A world with no master race, no master gender, no master nationality, no master religion, no master economic system, and even no master operating system.
(This is all still largely a reactive, PoMo vision, I know. But future installments will be more proactive, I promise.)
The techno-corporate futurism of Gilder, Wired, et al. is only a feeble half-step in this direction. The real revolution wouldn’t be a revolution for corporations, but against them. Not new opportunities for the Viacoms and GMs, but the means toward their overthrow.
And yes, it is a revolution. But like any real revolution, some people will find it, well, revolting.
But that’s a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: We escape the topic of Century 21 for a while, to look at the history of escapism.
ELSEWHERE:
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
YESTERDAY, we discussed a would-be commercial “alternative” magazine that wasn’t quite fiscally making it, and how it would probably have to find a business plan that didn’t require big corporate advertisers.
There’s a class of what might be called “ground level” zines (slicker than underground fanzines but rougher than corporate mags) that basically run on the business plan of expecting to lose money, and coming out as often as, or as long as, their publishers can subsidize them.
One of the more durable of these was Ben Is Dead. In tiny type on cheap newsprint, it relished in adoration or at least obsession with many of the relics of late-modern life–Sassy, Beverly Hills 90210, childhood memories, Marvel Comics, underwear, etc. etc.
But after some 30 issues in 11 years, publisher Darby Romeo has finally quit. Like the makers of Factsheet Five, Fizz, and several other ground-levels that have gone away in recent years, she’s decided to move on in her life.
A piece at Feed claims the end of Ben Is Dead forebodes the end of the whole Zine Revolution, an explosion of self-expressions that got underway in the early ’80s with cheap photocopying and desktop publishing.
Nowadays, the Feed essay notes, it’s easier (and just as materially unrewarding) to put up a personal website.
From my own 5.5-year experience in newsletter self-publishing, I could certainly see how the excitement of accumulating piles of print can begin to wear off. But I also see personal publishing as, well, a personal endeavor, one it’s perfectly OK to leave when you want to do something else.
Ben Is Dead is not a “failure” for not being continued, and Romeo’s certainly not “giving up.”
A personal zine is also a product of its times. Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rough-hewn look of many ground-level zines was an appropriate visualization of a DIY aesthetic opposed to old bureaucratic communications media. But in today’s go-go-go-getter cyber-economy, everybody’s supposed to be a young entrepreneur, and homemade-looking media can sometimes be perceived as simply the work of young entrepreneurs who aren’t doing it right.
I’ve seen newer ground-level zines, such as ROCKRGRL, Bust, and The Imp, which put their messages into more elaborate, more “professional” looking (but still un-corporate) designs. Will these go on to enjoy long lives? Maybe, or maybe their makers will move on to still-newer concepts.
Zines are no more dead than print media in general.
And, no, print media in general isn’t dead either.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle’s news media finally found something more important than Ken Griffey Jr. leaving town–specifically, a chance to spend seven hours of commercial-free live TV ruthlessly exploiting a minor tragedy; complete with lingering helicopter shots of police dogs wandering around clueless and scentless.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Who had the first commercial on South Park’s virulent anti-Pokemon episode? That’s right–Magic: The Gathering, from the now-Hasbro-owned outfit that also makes the Pokemon card game.
TOMORROW: Ron Harris’s journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue’s survey of various critics’ musical “guilty pleasures” of the past decade.
Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I’ve liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.
Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.
(Some of these following discs I’ve mentioned in prior articles on this site.)
American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can’t see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.
Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to ‘Ren & Stimpy’ and Russ Meyer movies.
One day, when the true obscurities of “Seattle Scene”-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!
More relics from the early “We’re Notgrunge, Dammit!” era of local indie bands (late ’93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.
Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.
Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed “atittude”), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he’s thus far never gotten to live.
Lounge arrangements of punk classics–a surefire formula for good times! I’ve done it myself. Try it in your own home.
Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?
The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents–proof that so-called “world music” need not be laid back or mellow.
India movie music–proof that so-called “world music” need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there’s a “guilty” part to this pleasure, it’s in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.
TOMORROW: An “off-off-year” election brings leftish “progressives” and rightish “populists” against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.
AS IT APPARENTLY MUST to all local non-news TV shows in the U.S. these days, death came this summer to Almost Live, for 15 years an only-in-Seattle institution. (OK it was syndicated in two nonconsecutive years, and the national kiddie show Bill Nye the Science Guy was essentially an AL spinoff, but you get the idea.) The last AL reruns may have left the familiar Saturday time slot by the time you read this, with only occasional specials to be commissioned by KING-TV (the first is this Saturday). The cast members made an appearance earlier this month on their longtime spoof-target, KOMO’s Northwest Afternoon, during which they congratulated NWA for not having been cancelled yet.)
Theoretically, the cast (or however many members of it would be willing) could go to work for another station. But since none of those other stations seem any more interested in local entertainment fare than KING was (although Fox affilliate KCPQ’s reportedly pondering a morning show), that seems unlikely.
Call me overly optimistic, but I used to believe the increasing bevy of broadcast and cable channels would mean more opportunities for different kinds of shows–even shows that seamlessly mixed droll, low-key humor, broad sketch comedy, and cheap-shot jokes about local politicians.
Sure, a week’s episode might contain its share of groaners and easy gags. (The series almost never used writers beyond the eight cast members, two of whom also doubled as producer and director.)
But even in its weaker moments, AL had a pulse and a look all its own. And it exemplified a particularly Nor’Wester flavor of off-center humor. You could find traces of this in the writings of Lynda Barry (an old pal of AL host John Keister); the biting TV and print works of Matt Groening (an old pal of Barry); the cartoons of Jim Woodring, Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, et al.; the sardonic song lyrics of Scott McCaughey and Chris Ballew; and such former area-TV staples as Stan Boreson, J.P. Patches, and Spud Goodman.
Could anything like it appear again? Well, maybe.
Late last month, I got into a well-publicized preview screening for Doomed Planet, a shot-on-video movie directed by Alex Mayer and written by George Clark (who previously had created two issues of a Stranger parody tabloid, only to find most of their readers thought the Stranger staff had parodied itself).
Within a loose plotline involving two warring religious cults (a cult of sex-happy hippies vs. a cult of Armageddon-predicting Goths), the videomakers weaved in quite a bit of AL-esque bits, from genre-movie minispoofs to local popcult references (a fictionalized version of Mary Kay LeTourneau makes a brief appearance) to an atmosphere of knowing, late-century-cynical neo-burlesque.
While Doomed Planet, at least in the cut shown at the screening, is a much more rough-hewn work than Almost Live ever was (some of Mayer’s large, unpaid cast didn’t really know about comic timing, and much of the sound was muddied), it’s nice to know the no-budget, no-hype, no-pretensions NW comic spirit lives on.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another sign of hope for regionalism within the global-media landscape is Turner South, a new entertainment-and-sports cable channel to be offered only to cable systems in the southeastern states. I’d love an attempt at something like that up here; even though a NW entertainment channel would have fewer pre-existing movies and rerun series to prop up its schedule than a Southern channel would.
TOMORROW: That new alternative-art patron, Procter & Gamble.
THE NATIONAL ‘ALTERNATIVE’ MEDIA, true to its Frisco-centric ways, has been treating the attempted upscaling of a Berkeley, Calif. community radio station as a story of national import.
That kind of deadening air’s nothing new to folks up here.
KRAB, a Seattle station of similar vintage and format to that Calif. station, was the subject of an attempted gentrification attempt in the ’80s. The operation was a success–the patient died. The frequency’s now used by none other than KNDD, the local outlet for all your next-Beasties and next-Korn wannabe acts.
In the mid-’90s, KCMU, the Univ. of Washington student station that had given just about all your “Seattle Scene” superstars their first airplay (and where I’d DJ’d for a year), was the subject of a sort of palace coup by UW administrators.
The station was placed under Wayne Roth, the bureaucrat who ran KUOW, the UW’s NPR affiliate. He tried to rein in KCMU’s eclectic programming, eliminating what a management memo called “harsh and abrasive music” in favor of baby-boomer-friendly world beat and blues; all in hopes of attracting a demographic market segment favorable to corporate “underwriters.”
After listener boycotts and DJ resignations and some heavy-handed PR against the moves, Roth and the UW compromised. KCMU would henceforth be run by a paid staff instead of volunteers; its on-air delivery would be slicked up. But indie rock (though not hard-punk), avant-jazz, and difficult-listening music would remain in the mix.
Now all that may be changing again.
While details are still sketchy, the rumor mill and the local news media have been awash in speculation about KCMU’s future. Seems the UW’s top brass has been talking among itself about transferring the station out from under Roth and KUOW and to the university’s “computing and communications” unit.
Roth, who maneuvered to get KCMU onto his turf, isn’t letting it go without a spat. He’s spoken publicly about his worries that the move would put the station’s programming under the thumb of potential big donors, and named Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project museum as just such a possible donor/influence-peddler.
Of course, that’s not really all that different from what Roth wanted to do with KCMU in ’93-’94.
Except Roth would be on the outside of the dealin’, and on the inside would be folks (like the heavy-hittin’ musicologists and rock historians staffing E.M.P.) who just might want to make it into a more professionally-run version of the serious-music-lover’s station the pre-Roth KCMU had been.
Anyhow, the station’s future has yet to be officially announced. Even if it does go under new management, KCMU might change in ways longtime fans such as myself might not necessarily like. (It could become an all-oldies station for rock historians, for instance.)
But if the potential new regime plays its cards right, it could become an experiment in community radio’s rebirth.
Tune in and find out.
IN OTHER NEWS: This just might be the best news story of the year….
TOMORROW: Art-film nostalgia.
“If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler By Italo Calvino, Ultra-Condensed by Thomas Deeny: You think you’re reading a condensation of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but you’re not.”
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.
WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.
I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”
The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.
This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.
Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”
Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”
Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”
Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.
If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.
Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”
But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?
As IF!
MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.
CABLE COMPANIES FINALLY appear to be “getting it.”
They’re sluggishly rolling out the fiber-optic line upgrades they’d been promising for most of the decade.
(Here in Seattle, the now-AT&T-owned TCI is finally getting around to some of the neighborhoods it promised upgraded service to by one to five years ago.)
So, now that you can finally get Comedy Central and maybe even TV Land on your cable system, what use is there for those cable-killers, the home satellite dishes?
Well, there are several reasons to consider the little dish instead of the long wire, even though the dish costs you up-front plus monthly programming fees at least comparable to those charged by cable. Among them:
You live where there’s still no upgraded cable. South Park might be getting passe, but there’s still Strangers With Candy to make a Comedy Central-less cable hookup a little less valuable each day. Not to mention the Food Network, the Game Show Network, BBC America, MuchMusic, etc. etc.
You live where there’s no cable. The cable companies may have finally gotten around to certain “inner city” neighborhoods they’d previously shunned, but there are still some industrial, art-loft, rural, and isolated-town environments without the black coaxial running in.
You want lotsa extra-price movies and/or sports. If you’re a hockey fanatic or if you’re a fan of teams shown principally on some other region’s Fox Sports variation or if you really, really want five different HBOs, the satellite’s the only way to go.
You want porn. Some satellite dish companies offer channels displaying uncensored human-mating spectacles, or at least channels offering more lightly censored human-mating acts than the Spice channel or Skinemax offer.
You want certain channels even upgraded cable in your town doesn’t offer. Different dish services offer various ethnic and foreign-language channels for folks from China, Brazil, India, etc. And there are some “mainstream” but third-string cable channels that now have only spotty pickups on local cable systems: BET On Jazz, Style, Discovery People, MTV’S M2, ESPN Classic, CNNfn, the Golf Network, Outdoor Life, MSNBC, Bloomberg Business News.
You want ZDTV. From the Softbank/Ziff-Davis computer-magazine empire, 24 hours (actually, more like six hours repeated four times) of talk shows and news-magazine shows about hi-tech, PC buying, and life on the ol’ Internet. The Internet Tonight show’s particularly valuable as a televisual “Weblog.”
Unfortunately, its site only offers streaming live video during special events (speeches by tech-biz leaders, mostly); the short clips on its site only make you want to get a dish so you can see the whole thing.
Which, of course, is probably the management’s goal.
Cable, however, still will have certain things satellite services don’t. Local channels and major-network affiliates. Regional news channels such as NorthWest Cable News. And, of course, public access.
IN OTHER NEWS: Was a little amused by the headline, “Energetic Beck hasn’t lost a beat with time.” I thought to myself, “Sure he hasn’t had anything close to a hit since ’96, but Beck’s not that old.” Then, alas, the story turned out to be about Jeff Beck….
TOMORROW: What kids don’t know that grownups assume is ubiquitous; and vice versa.
IT’S ‘STAY AWAY FROM SEATTLE DAY,’ according to a promotion at the downtown Borders Books. According to the in-store flyer:
“Today, the rest of the world gives our city a break from the influx of people moving to the ‘Best Place to Live’ by celebrating and honoring ‘Stay Away From Seattle Day.’ Memo to out-of-state web-masters, high-tech wizards, writers and musicians: Reschedule the U-Haul and let Seattle’s siren song tempt you another day–today the city is for those of us who are already here. Present your Washington State driver license between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and receive a free tall latte on Borders (limit one per customer, no substitution.)”
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO STAYED AWAY FROM SEATTLE: Yesterday, we had some music-related fun links. Today, something only slightly more serious, involving a local guy who split town at age 18 and only came back as an occasional visitor.
Boomer-nostalgia compulsives continue to rant on about the “revolutionary” aspects of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, as this recent news feature shows.
I was to have appeared last year at a “Northwest Music” conference (canceled at the last moment), to discuss the so-called “grunge era,” right after a panel discussion that would have discussed Hendrix’s national-anthem rendition.
(Never mind the fact that Hendrix never lived in the Northwest as an adult; to the boomers he’s still Seattle’s one true claim to rock fame.)
The boomer-nostalgists apparently never learned that the tune originally was an English drinking song. “To Anacreon in Heaven” was the official song of the Sons of Anacreon, a London private club named after an eighth-century Greek poet who, in turn, wrote bawdy verses about the larger-than-life carousing of Zeus and his mythical pals.
And so, as one of the song’s original verses ended,
“While thus we agree, Our toast let it be. May our club flourish happy, united and free! And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine, The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
Our toast let it be.
May our club flourish happy, united and free!
And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine,
The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
Hendrix had simply re-inserted the boistrous, Bacchanalian revelry the tune had originally expressed, and did so with gusto.
Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” lyrics were apparently specifically written to go with the tune of “To Anacreon In Heaven,” which shows the song had become popular well beyond the private club which had originally commissioned it.
But Key’s words (the official “National Anthem”) could theoretically go with any workable melody, even one amateur singers could better execute.
The theme song from Valley of the Dolls meters almost perfectly with Key’s words. I’ve tried it. Go ahead and try it yourself, in the privacy of your own homes if you must.
Then go back and read the original lyrics for “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Then sing them (you know the tune). If you’re like me, the tune sounds a helluva lot better when it’s used in the service of images of drinking, lovemaking, and other merriments than it sounds when recounting the Battle of Fort McHenry.
It’s almost enough to make you feel good about being an American again.
At least if you’re an American of British descent like me.
IN OTHER NEWS: Fortune’s list of North America’s “40 Richest Under 40” (excluding those with all-inherited wealth) includes two Seattleites, no women, and only three names not connected to the computer or Net industries (including the list’s only two Af-Ams, Michael Jordan and record producer Master P).
TOMORROW: Who’s afraid of digital movies?
THANKS TO ALL who’ve asked about the progress of the updated second edition of LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story.
The book’s coming along, and should be off to press by month’s end (knock-on-Formica).
Some of the new material might appear on these pages in forthcoming weeks.
Until then, please enjoy the following music-related fun links.
IN OTHER NEWS: Phones ‘R’ US just changed all the prerecorded announcement pieces on its voice-messaging system to a less businesslike, more sultry feminine voice. If the old, pre-breakup AT&T was “Ma Bell” and the spun-off regional phone providers of ’84 were the “Baby Bells,” then this company might now be a “Horny Teen Bell.” (The kind who always unloads big traumas upon those responsible for paying her bills.)
TOMORROW: A revisionist look at Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.”
YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.
In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.
But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.
The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)
Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.
The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.
IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.
You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.
Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.
It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this, plus the lost art of seductive architecture.
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried in a Macworld story is the factoid that commercial printers these days are making fewer huge press runs, instead churning out “a greater number of small- and medium-volume projects than ever before.” Cultural decentralization continues…. Buy a magazine, help a struggling neighborhood institution….
ELSEWHERE: The Virtual Talking Mom (found by Bifurcated Rivets) is ready to give you a virtual scolding any time of the day or night…. The last days of the original Prodigy, inventor of the Banner Ad and the censored chatroom…. Musings on the real nature of creativity….
LOCAL NOTE: Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival ended its Sunday fare with ex-local film collector Dennis Nyback showing off some old reels of vaudeville stars. Highly appropriate, since Bumbershoot itself is like a vaudeville show exploded onto a bigger time/space canvas (four days and 17 stages). It’s a big all-you-can-eat buffet of darn near every performing- and visual-art genre, designed to pack in a huge, mongrel audience. Increasingly, those audiences are responding to the more challenging, unfamiliar entrees. Cibo Matto played to a packed KeyArena throng; and many of the “adventurous music” acts completely filled their own smaller stages. Enough to give you renewed faith in humanity. (Speaking of faith and the future….)
TWO ‘K’S, MUCHO KALE: For a recent freelance gig with Everything Holidays, I was assigned to research a short piece about Year-2000 survivalist camps.
I’d expected to find a lot of the separatist compounds out in the hills, like I’d seen when I first explored the topic last year. Folks who’d previously used rumors of the “new world order,” UN black helicopters, race war, nuclear war, the Red Scare, flouridated water, religious Armageddon, and countless other excuses to call true believers to set up a self-contained utopia of true believers, equipped with canned goods and guns.
People who now were applying the same supposed solution to a new supposed problem–the belief, nay the hope, that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00, all of the western world’s industrial, communications, and transportation infrastructure will immediately and irrepairably go Ka-blooey.
A global computer crash that would leave the cities (especially the parts where those minorities live) in ruins, the phones out of whack, the airlines grounded, the banks busted, the electrical grid down forever, and even late-model cars with computer-chip-controlled systems undriveable.
I found a few ranters of that type. But I also found several hundred more folks who claimed to believe in one-person, or one-family, survival schemes–and were, and are, ready and eager to equip such an effort, for a modest fee.
And such a cornucopia of personal-survival tools have they!
Foodstuffs dried, canned, vaccuum-sealed, dehydrated, concentrated, irradiated, flash-pasteurized, and/or ready-to-eat.
Farm tools, implements, and “Y2K seeds,” so you can grow your own food without depending on the patent-protected, non-perennial products of the big seed companies (which, of course, will go away with the rest of corporate society).
Generators, co-generators, solar panels, battery rechargers.
First-aid kits and more elaborate medical supplies, so you can fill your kids’ cavities after all the dentists get killed in the urban riots.
Radios and shortwave transceivers that run on batteries, gasoline, or wind-up springs.
And, of course, plenty of the gold and silver coins and ingots that’re bound to become the New Currency once the global monetary system evaporates.
In a way, all this leaves me hopeful.
You see, it all means many Americans aren’t really buying the Y2K Scare as the End of the World As We Know It. Instead, they’re taking it like we take so many things–as an opportunity to do our part to keep capitalism going.
The hundreds of Y2K Scare outfitters out there are preaching disaster, but they’re practicing the all-American religion of entrepreneurialism.
And so am I. When January rolls around, and our infrastructure (as predicted by most experts who aren’t selling survival gear) doesn’t crumble, I hope to have a line of cookbooks on the market, teaching folks how to make tasty near-gourmet meals out of their three-years’ supplies of freeze-dried apricots, beef jerky, and army-surplus crackers.
TOMORROW: Yet another retro-futuristic bar, plus the possible end of a private art-garden.
ELSEWHERE: Ghosts of end-of-the-world prophecies past… And what if everything had a Y2K bug, not just computers?… “In the chaos following the collapse of Western civilization, your first objectives will be to procure food, clean water, shelter, and fresh breath…”
SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).
True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.
True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.
Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.
Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.
It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.
The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.
The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.
The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.
In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”
A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)
This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.
I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.
And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).
But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.
TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
TOMORROW (on the site): The beauty that is The Imp.
IN OTHER NEWS: The good news is Seattle’s public-access cable channel’s getting a massive infusion of new studio equipment. The bad news is the whole studio will be out of commission for at least two months during the renovation, so everything on Channel 29 (probably starting in October) will be pre-taped on location, or a rerun of an older studio show.
ELSEWHERE: This new learning-tools site for schoolkids features some of the dumbest adult-writers-trying-to-sound-young slang ever attempted–even in the plot summaries of major books!… Speaking of learning tools, will Microsoft’s new print dictionary include nonstandard definitions for “monopoly,” “coercion,” or “protection racket”?… Now, for a limited time only, you can make up your own Netcolumn. The professionally-constructed ones you find here at Misc. World, of course, will still be better….
AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.
Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).
TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.
ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…
