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Best of ‘Times’
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
IN FEBRUARY, John Hartl and The Tentacle more or less called it quits.
Apart from the coincidence of timing, these events wouldn’t strike most people as being connected in any way. A daily newspaper movie critic and an avant-garde music magazine collective of editor/publisher/writers might even seem to be enemies.
Besides, what common cause could there be between a hugely commercial art form, as exemplified by the Hollywood blockbuster known to all, and an assertively bizarre artistic foray, as exemplified by performances where the players have been known to outnumber the audience?
Maybe nobody in management at the downsized Seattle Times now appreciates that publication’s erstwhile status as Washington’s “paper of record,” but John Hartl did.
He made it his business to review everything. No matter how obscure the film or broke the theater or short the run, for 35 years Hartl went out of his way to let you know what was out there and what he thought about it. His consistency of views, depth of experience, and breadth of interests made his writing a reason to subscribe to that paper.
Although he will continue to cover movies for the Times as a freelancer, this coverage is bound to be less comprehensive than it was.
In the aftermath of a six-week strike, in which the paper lost $21 million while resisting contract demands that would have cost the company $3-4 million over one year, paternalist rules force returning strikers to be nice to bosses and scabs while bosses are free to sneer as they please, and morale is about what you would expect it to be at an office run by zombies whose Bible is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By not calling most striking reviewers back to work (and by urging long-time employees like Hartl to take early retirement), the paper has slashed arts coverage.
NEXT: Another fond adieu, this one to a most peculiar music zine.
ELSEWHERE:
SEATTLE’S PIONEER SQUARE MARDI GRAS began in the mid-’70s, under the Anglified/sanitized name “Fat Tuesday.” It was intended less as a public celebration than as a promotion for the neighborhood’s music clubs and their already-calcified formula of superficially aggressive but ultimately tame all-white “blues” bands.
After the first year, the New Orleans-style rowdiness so incensed the powers-that-be (a notorious Times headline called it “Lawless Tuesday”), that the organizers scaled back their offerings to special nighttime promotions within the bars and family-friendly, daytime-only outdoor events (such as the Spam carving contest and the “Miss No Fat” beauty contest).
But revelers in recent years have refused to be denied. They began to hold their own informal, unofficial “real” Mardi Gras bashes in the streets, here and in a few other big cities.
Last year’s Seattle bash, three months after WTO, felt a lot like WTO without the politics–young folk getting rowdy and mean; cops getting stern and meaner.
So this year (from which all of this page’s pictures date), Paul Schell’s Forces of Order announced plans to harshly deal with any attempts to create a giant outdoor moshpit in the streets. The result, last Saturday night, was a lot of rowdy overgrown boys (and a few flash-happy ladies), a few drunken fights, heavy police over-reaction to the fights, and heavier crowd reaction to the police-heightened violent atmosphere.
Monday night was a kind of halftime in the revelry, with more cops than partiers on the streets.
Then came Tuesday night.
Thousands crammed the area. Most were young and male. Some were attracted by hopes of a Woodstock ’99-style “rage rock” riot. Some, including the small but particularly violent black street gang the TV cameras particularly loved to point to, apparently wanted to hit at anyone and anything in sight. Some just showed up hoping to get shitfaced and to scream at women to raise their tops.
Most just wanted to share a non-mellow, non-rational bacchanalia–a universal human desire, and one for which any community worthy of the name provides regular outlets.
Yes, there were fights and other assorted rowdinesses. A poilce department (like New Orleans’s) trained for such an event would spend less effort tryng to impose order, and more effort stopping specific looting and fighting incidents while letting the rest of the crowd get happy, naked, and/or stupid.
For that matter, a city that was truly comfortable with human behavior in this “Xtreme” age would be prepared to welcome and channel this energy, to curate a celebration that would let young adults vent their energies in a more sociable manner, with folk having fun together without turning against one another.
The old Seattle image of an overgrown small town where everybody was a mellow, upscale, white baby boomer was never as real as the media and the politicians wanted it to be, and now has become a dated cliche.
So let’s lot fear or try to re-ban a big outdoor Mardi Gras, but instead start planning now to make it better.
We’re more diverse than we used to be, but we’re still not particulalry overflowing with cajuns, Latinos, or Catholics. The pre-Lenten excuse for Mardis Gras doesn’t really work here except on a rent-a-culture basis.
But we can purposefully stage a big, fun, inviting tribute to the lengthening days, the slightly drying climate (in most years), and the chance to get back outside. Imagine a spring-equinox party, only as long as a month before depending on the wandering Passover/Lent season. Let the noisy boys and flashy girls show up, but also make it inviting to a wider swath of the populace. Have mood-setting music, art, dance, street performers and other elements to add an infusing/diffusing element that would discourage violence more effectively than any baton-holding police stormtroopers ever could.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the mayoral race.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
THE YEAR’S BIGGEST local news story, the one with the most potential impact on our lives, didn’t have a single big event at its heart.
It’s the decline (and, in some cases, collapse) of dot-com stock speculation. It made its presence felt in small-scale ways (office closings; layoffs; fewer and sparser “networking” soirees; and a slight but accelerating slowdown in real-estate hyperinflation).
(Its related story, the possible Microsoft bust-up, had its spectacle elements take place in Washington, DC courtrooms.)
But several big here-and-now events did take place here which had an impact beyond their immediate sights-‘n’-sounds. Here are some of them.
1. The Kingdome Blows.
After Paul Schell cancelled the official, public New Year’s, Paul Allen staged a great pyrotechnic celebration during Spring Equinox week (the ol’ pagan New Year’s). It was also a half-minute rife with symbolism; deconstructing the onetime triumph of the pre-MS Seattle’s attempts to Go Major League (on a budget, and without needless ostentation).
2. The E.M.P.-ire Strikes Back.
Mr. Allen taketh away; Mr. Allen giveth. The Experience Music Project is almost all needless ostentation, a whole quarter-billion worth of it. It doesn’t really represent the spirit of Northwest pop music (its cocktail lounge doesn’t even have Rainier, let alone Schmidt!). It does represent the spirit of the new regional powers-that-be, who’ve got gazoods of dough and want to show it off as show-offy as can be.
The museum’s opening weekend was a big, mostly free, bash of all the top touring acts Allen could afford (and he could afford a lot of them), plus a nearly-complete local all-star lineup. (The biggest nonparticipants: Pearl Jam, who still have this beef with one of Allen’s former properties, Ticketmaster.)
3. End of Jem Studio Galleries.
Gentrification hit arts spaces hard; knocking out one of the city’s oldest and largest visual-arts workspaces (and First Thursday ground zero).
The Jem artists went out with essentially a four-month-long party of exhibitions, installations, performances, DJ events, live-music shows, etc., ending on the last night with a going-out bash that included a coed nude body-paint wrestling match.
4. Ralph Nader “Super Rally,” KeyArena.
The post-WTO Way-New Left had its biggest show of strength when about 10,000 paid real money to see the first real liberal Presidential candidate in 28 years and assorted celebrity guests.
5. Daily Papers Go Scab.
The JOA-married bombastic voices of the civic establishment, which had been proclaiming for so long about how things were just so great here and could only keep getting better, got a dose of reality. Just as the Times was running a huge feature series about the winners and losers in today’s concentration-O-wealth thang, the papers’ editorial and ad employees rejected a pitiful contract offer that wouldn’t help them keep up with housing costs.
The Times and P-I instantly turned into waify simulacra of themselves. Thin papers, bereft of their usual interminable “analysis” and huge feature series (and of their regular writers and photographers, and of the previous evening’s sports results, and of arts reviews). Papers that, had they been produced by competent people, would’ve been improvements on their prior bloated formats.
TOMORROW: A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
Police Action
by guest columnist Sky Callahan
AT ABOUT 8:30 P.M. ON NOV. 30, I arrived downtown by bus, after having worked late. A resident of Belltown, I’d originally planned to make a quick stop at the Bon Marche, then a subsequent stop for groceries at Ralph’s Deli before returning to my apartment near Fourth Avenue and Bell Street.
Upon reaching the Bon, I discovered that a large number of protestors had reoccupied Westlake Plaza, after having earlier dispersed for the purpose of attending a candlelight vigil at Seattle Central Community College. I also noted that a large number of police officers were forming lines around the knot of demonstrators.
Employees of the Bon were applying duct tape to all the entrances for the purpose, I was told, of preventing possible damage from any tear gas assault that might occur. The store was effectively closed for the night, so I lingered outside one of the Fourth Avenue entrances for awhile, intrigued by the scene around me.
At about 8:45 p.m., police issued their first order for the crowd to disperse. This was followed by another order at about 8:50, and a third at 9:00. Each order saw the departure of any number of protestors and, by 9, almost everyone had completely dispersed and the intersection at Fourth and Pine was reopened.
At this juncture, the demonstrators began moving north on Fourth Avenue, toward Denny Way, followed by a large contingent of police. The procession was slow, and someone operating a megaphone informed the crowd that a party would shortly be underway on Minor Avenue.
It seemed quite apparent to me that the group, numbering perhaps 200 at this point, was truly dispersing.
I stopped at Ralph’s Deli to pick up my groceries, and exited the store with two bags. Upon stepping back onto Fourth, I saw that police lines had begun forming alongside of the street on both sides, and I asked an officer if it was possible to continue down Fourth to Bell Street. He assured me there would be no problem, and urged me to continue on. I did so, noticing more and more police were arriving and taking up positions along the street as I walked.
Upon reaching Bell Street, I realized I’d forgotten to pick up soft drinks, and went into a small convenience store on the corner to rectify my oversight. I was in the store perhaps five minutes, and exited to realize that a police line had taken up a position spanning the width of Bell Street where it crossed Fourth.
At this point, I was half-a-block from my apartment, laden with grocery bags, and approached to police officer to ask if I could pass through the line. I explained my purpose, pointing my apartment building out to him, but was denied passage. I was instead directed to retrace my steps one block back to Blanchard, turn east and walk north on Fifth to circumvent the now-restricted area.
I did as instructed, only to find my passage was also blocked at Blanchard. I proceeded to each intersection, only to be turned away at each. I found that the police had completely hemmed in the length of Fourth Avenue between Lenora Street and Bell Street, and were not allowing anyone to pass out, for any reason.
I was eventually directed to speak to a sergeant commanding a line on the west side of Fourth and Blanchard, but this proved to be of no avail. The sergeant told me he’d been given orders to let no one pass in or out, and couldn’t find his commander to allow him to do otherwise.
As I stood there, I saw a line of police in riot gear move toward us, from the west, on Blanchard, and noted that a similar line was forming on the east side of the intersection. As the minutes passed, more helmets and bulletproof shields materialized, and I began to get the sense a baton charge was imminent.
Meanwhile, an increasingly large number of people, both individually and by megaphone, began to assert that they only wanted to leave the area and either go home or go to the party. The police refused to allow them to do any such thing, and a feeling of tension began to rise precipitously.
My own concern was reaching epic proportions. I’d taken to visualizing any number of possible scenarios, and only wanted to get home after a long day at work. I’d been repeatedly assured by a couple of different police officers that I could achieve this goal by going here or going there, only to find I’d become further enmeshed in this situation.
I suppose an increasing alarm began to register on my face as, finally, a young bicycle officer asked to see my driver’s license. It naturally indicated my address, just a block away, and he took it upon himself to escort me past the police line and to Third Avenue. He did so with some concern, as he had no particular authority on the line, and was ostensibly going against the wishes of his sergeant. I suspect that the fact I was carrying grocery bags, reasonably well-dressed, and middle-aged probably convinced him that I had been mistakenly swept up in this situation.
For about the next hour, these protestors were completely trapped in this three block length of Fourth Avenue, and refused permission to exit although there were openly requesting to do so.
I dropped my groceries off at home, and made my way to the Two Bells Tavern, near my apartment building. There, I sat with friends while watching a new police line form just outside the door of the tavern. We would occasionally stick our heads out to see Metro buses taking up positions, and cops milling about in rather massive numbers.
After a bit, the police waded into the crowd they’d trapped, and arrested something on the order (according to newspaper reports) of 140 of them. The Seattle Times states that the arrest were for failure to disperse and pedestrian interference.
No protestor was ever allowed the opportunity to disperse, and had even been engaged in the act of dispersing from Westlake Plaza when they were surrounded and stopped. In fact, after the separation from Westlake, no subsequent order to disperse was ever given.
Additionally, the only pedestrians suffering interference could have been other demonstrators. Several friends and neighbors found themselves swept up in the arrests, having been out to dinner or shopping, or simply taking walks with significant others.
So far as I know, I’m the only person who was ever allowed to leave the scene, and the precise reason why is still something of a mystery to me.
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for nerd-dom.
YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.
Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”
And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.
Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.
I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.
Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.
(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).
Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.
He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.
Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.
MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).
By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)
But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.
The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)
MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.
Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:
(Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)
(The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)
(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)
MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.
IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.
IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.
One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”
It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)
All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.
It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.
All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.
The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.
The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.
Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.
None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.
The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.
To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.
And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)
IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).
Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.
The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.
(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).
TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.
It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).
Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.
The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)
Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.
The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”
So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?
It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.
If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.
Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)
And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.
For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)
And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.
Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.
TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.
LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.
I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.
The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.
The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!
The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.
Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.
And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.
Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.
For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.
For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).
For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.
The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)
And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)
TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)
IF YOU KNOW THE NAME OF EMMETT WATSON, you might associate it with a weekly Seattle Times column, which usually consists of cute dog stories or reminiscences about Seattle’s quieter olden days.
He’s 81 now. It’s OK in my book for him to take his life, and his writing, a little easier these days.
But you should’ve seen him in his prime.
Unfortunately, the only way you can do that (besides coming through newspaper microfiches in the library) is to stumble upon Watson’s three volumes of memoirs–all of which are, apparently, out of print.
Aside from a handful of ex-UW Daily cartoonists (Mike Lukovich, Lynda Barry), Watson may be the only truly great creative mind the Seattle newspaper industry has generated. (And yes, I’m fully aware that Tom Robbins had been a newspaperman here.)
During his peak years (essentially the era of his main P-I column, 1959-82), he was one of the master practitioners of the three-dot column, that now nearly-forgotten American art form in which dozens of seemingly unrelated items would share the same space, rattled off in crisp stacatto brevity.
But Watson did more than just chronicle the comings and goings of local politicians, business bigwigs, TV-news personalities, and other “celebrities.” He captured the soul of the city he loved.
Each of Watson’s books fits as a discrete part of a whole, like the items in a three-dot column.
The first, Digressions of a Native Son, was put out in 1982 by the Pacific Institute, an employee-motivation-seminar outfit Watson was copywriting for after the P-I reduced him to part-timer status. (How that Lovable Curmuddgeon wound up, even temporarily, with such a Think Positive Thoughts outfit is one story he’s never completely told.) Digressions is mostly autobiography, with long pauses to reminisce about the World’s Fair, press agents, colorful local characters past and present, etc.
A decade later, Watson’s own Lesser Seattle Press came out with Once Upon a Time In Seattle. This slim volume profiled a dozen local leaders and characters; most of whom, like Watson, came of age in the Prohibition and Depression years.
He immediately followed that with My Life In Print. It starts by reprinting the most important autobiographical scenes from Digressions. That’s followed by some 370 pages of Watson’s old newspaper writings, culled and edited for Watson by longtime friend Fred Brack. After a few examples of his early work as a sportswriter (he was 40 before he got to write general-interest columns), My Life gets down to business with brilliant examples of his P-I and more recent Times work.
The three-dot material isn’t included; that, apparently, has proven too perishable, its shortness necessitating an audience pre-familiarity with the eprsons and topics at hand. Rather, My Life collects the single-topic, full-length essay columns that would fill his daily slot once or twice a week. It’s not that he was doing the daily goings-on-about-town stuff to draw a salary and a forum for the longer material; rather, he put into these 900-word profiles and rants everything he continued to learn on the daily grind about pacing, brevity, and writing for impact.
That’s what makes the pieces in My Life still work so well; whether they’re profiling authors and senators and Supreme Court justices, complaining about all the skyscrapers going up downtown even then (he says their massiveness reduces street-level humans to the insignificance of ants), crowing for the preservation of the Pike Place Market, or promoting his only-partly-joking anti-civic-boosterism crusade, “Lesser Seattle Inc.”
Get any or all of Watson’s books. Look on the auction boards for them, if they’re not at a library near you.
Learn about the heartbeat of a community, and read some of the best prose ever “forgotten tomorrow” while you’re at it.
WE’LL BE OUT OF TOWN THE REST OF THIS WEEK, BUT ON MONDAY: Paul Schell’s latest miscalculation.
WHEN BICYCLE MESSENGER YIANNI PHILIPPIDES died in late June, after being struck by an SUV near Alaskan Way South, almost nobody in the local media mentioned it.
There were only a couple of brief Seattle Times stories about a rally and memorial staged by bike activists days later. And even those pieces emphasized the inconvenience commuting motorists received from the 100-plus bicyclists at the rally, not the much greater harm done by one motorist to one bicyclist.
Now, fortunately, the full tale of Philippides’ tragic end has been told in Kickstand, a messengers’ activist zine to which he’d been a contributor.
The 40-page issue #12 contains many pictures of and writings by and about Philippides. He’s shown to have been an ordinary dood; an often-smiling, beer- and beat-poetry-loving student, artist, writer and musician.
The issue also calls loudly and often for folks to see his death not as an isolated happenstance but as a call-to-arms about reckless and aggressive driving these days. As a flyer passed around at the rally stated, “Help us live to ride another day.”
(One unconfirmed rumor about the Philippides crash: The SUV driver supposedly expressed more immediate concern about the blood stains on his vehicle’s paint job than about the man he’d just sent into a coma.)
A MUCH MORE LIGHTHEARTED NOTE is taken by another new local zine, John Montonye’s Salmon, Broads & Beer: A Northwest Journal for the Salmon Sophisticate.
Montonye describes his eight-page rag’s focus as “the three key elements of the Northwest fisherman’s life triangle–calmon, chicks, and brew–I hope to help you land that monster king in your net, an Alyssa Milano lookalike in your lap, and the perfect ale in your hand.” Thusly you learn how to: troll for lingcod; offer pizza slices to women heading out of bars at closing time; and make some homebrew ale that doesn’t taste too creepy.
TOMORROW: What’s still right with Bumbershoot.
SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.
IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly. 2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold. 3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.
2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.
3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.
MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.
Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.
Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:
“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”
RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)
In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.
SOME SHORTS TODAY:
THE MAY ISSUE of the MISCmedia print magazine may be delayed a week or so, for reasons to be discussed later. (I’m feeling fine and everything; just job and personal complications have taken their time toll.)
THE FOLLOWING is the actual text of the story in the bottom-left corner of the Seattle Times front page on Sunday, 4/16, under the headline, “In Europe’s eyes, America becomes uglier and uglier”:
Newspaper This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 3 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. With standard tracking, H & J. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx
Newspaper
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready.
You have 3 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading.
With standard tracking, H & J.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with
PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx
STACKED: More fascinating info keeps emerging about Rem Koolhaas, the “world class” (code word for out-of-state) architect picked to design the new main Seattle library. For one thing, he just got his profession’s top award. Even cooler, the Times reported he once wrote an unproduced screenplay for everybody’s favorite sexploitation filmmaker, Russ Meyer! (I don’t know if it had anything to do with the naked-in-the-library fantasies occasionally reported on with bemusement in the Abada Abada weblog.)
DID YOU FEEL TIRED last Friday? Everyone I met that day said so. At least those who had enough energy to get out of the house. I was in line at Tower Records at 4 p.m. and everybody was yawning.The bars I hopped among were nearly deserted later that evening; folks who should’ve been bouncing and dancing were shuffling and moping instead.Was it just the arrival of cool weather after a week of warm temps, or was it a post-full-moon energy drop, or unconscious Good Friday solemnity?
TOMORROW: Seattle as photo-copyright capital of the world.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
