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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)
ELSEWHERE:
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.”
TODAY, The Seattle Times publishes its final afternoon edition after some 103 years.
The paper’s switch to morning publication, along with the threatened closures of the San Francisco Examiner and Honolulu Star-Bulletin, leaves the Atlanta Journal and the labor-lockout-stricken Detroit News as the only remaining big (circulation over 100,000) U.S. evening dailies. (P.M. dailies are still a big business in Canada.)
Afternoon papers used to be “home papers.” The businesspeople and the commuters got their news in the A.M.; working stiffs and their families (as well as horse bettors) got their news in the P.M.
But P.M. papers also promised “Today’s News Today” (a longtime Times slogan). That meant their editors always scrambled for the newest angle, the approach to the day’s events that wasn’t in the morning papers.
If there wasn’t a new big front-page event to cover that had occurred since the morning papers had gone to press (a stock-market slide, a plane crash, a war), then they’d have to come up with at least a slightly different spin on the same items that were already on the A.M.s’ front pages. Thus was born the now-routine exercise known as “instant analysis”–the on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, what-might-it-all-mean pontificating that most papers started emphasizing by the ’70s.
In 1960, evening papers outnumbered morning papers by almost five to one. As late as 1975, almost 60 percent of the copies of daily papers distributed in the U.S. were evening papers. But the main papers in most cities were always the morning papers.
The first waves of industry consolidation in the ’50s and ’60s bore the gravestones of such now-forgotten evening dailies as the New York World-Telegram, the Los Angeles Mirror, and the Washington Times-Herald.
As the biz continued its brutal march toward local monopolies in most cities, readers lost the Chicago Daily News, the Spokane Chronicle, Portland’s Oregon Journal, the Dallas Times-Herald, the Minneapolis Star, and the Miami News.
Small-town and suburban papers that used to publish in the evenings (partly to avoid direct competition with metropolitan morning papers) switched to mornings; including the Everett Herald and the Tacoma News Tribune.
With the Times’ switch, P.M.s will still account for about half the nation’s 1,400 or so dailies. But almost all of them are small-town and suburban papers. In the major metro areas that still have evening papers, those papers are the decidedly weaker halves of two-paper monopolies (as in Atlanta) or of joint operating agreements (as in the once-mighty Las Vegas Sun and Cincinnati Post).
Seattle was the last U.S. city where the evening paper had more readers than the morning paper. (The last other one was Milwaukee, before that town’s two-paper monopoly merged its properties.) Another of those “only in Seattle” things that’s disappearing.
The Times’ publication schedule was an integral part of the city’s daily rhythm. The first edition showed up downtown around 10 a.m. and across the city shortly thereafter; meaning you always had something new to read for lunch. Editions came out as late as 3 p.m. (schedules varied from day to day), which meant the “Night Final” (formerly known as the “Night Sports Final” back in the days of afternoon baseball) had that day’s closing stock prices and whatever national stories the network TV evening newscasts would probably cover.
And a late riser could take pride in the number of days in a week he could get out of the house before the Night Final appeared.
Now, there’ll be no more of that. The Times will get trucked around the region in the same shipments as its JOA mate, the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer.
The Times has already changed its advertising image from that of a leisurely home paper to “The Hard-News Newspaper.” The P-I (which approved of this change in the JOA contract in order to have a full website) insists it will remain a strong quasi-competitor; but already, some speculators are wondering how long it will be before the morning Times becomes the only paper in town.
I believe it’s quite possible for two morning papers to coexist, so long as they continue to have at least somewhat different editorial visions and to seek somewhat different market niches. As I’ve written before, I believe the real reason fewer people read daily papers (readership’s gone from 77 percent of the population 30 years ago to 57 perent today) is because papers have become bland, dull, one-size-fits-all nonentities. In a world of increasing media choices (on the air, on cable, on the Net, etc.), the big dinosaur daily is an increasingly unattractive choice.
No matter when it comes out.
MONDAY: MTV: over one million served.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the putting-up-for-sale and potential loss of the Frontier Room, downtown Seattle’s last truly great dive bar and a gathering place for everyone from young punks to old pensioners.
That sale is probably predicated (the Frontier’s runners aren’t officially talking) by owner burnout; unlike most of our formerly-fair city’s cool-place disappearances.
The latest apparently doomed outpost of non-mellow life: The five-story Jem Studios and Galleries in the historic Washington Shoe Building.
For nearly 20 years, Jem’s been the heart and soul of the Pioneer Square Art Walk and a landmark in artist-controlled exhibition space. It got to be that way under the benign landlordship of Sam Israel, who was notorious for buying old buildings, renting them out cheap, and performing the least maintenance and upkeep on them allowed by law.
Israel’s will assigned his properties to a newly-formed nonprofit group, the Samis Foundation, to provide income for local Jewish schools. The Samis board has treated maximum income as its only operating goal for the buildings.
That’s meant the dislocation or annihilation of the Red White and Blue Restaurant, the Colourbox rock club, the ex-Pioneer Square Theatre, and all the small public-interest agencies that used to have offices in the historic Smith Tower (now mostly occupied by dot-coms).
Now, Samis has gotten around to the Shoe Building. The place is to be gentrified into hi-rent Internet offices, plus a luxury “loft” penthouse suite. (The latter, according to some rumors, is intended as a home for Samis’s president.)
The Times did a glowing, pro-gentrification article in its Sunday real estate section in late January. The story (no longer available online) talked about how the “art-loft lifestyle” was the latest In Thing among the fashionable New Money crowd, and the developers who are kicking out all the working artists as somehow bringing new energy to the arts scene.
To its credit, the Times ran a letter to the editor that called crap on all that. And to its credit, the Times also ran a weekday arts-section piece days later telling a more realistic take on the Jem story.
The Jem resident artists and gallery operators held a press conference at the most recent First Thursday. They wanted to raise public awareness about the plight of artist housing (and, by extension, all non-millionaire housing) here in City Extra-Light.
Jem’s current manager talked about getting a new studio-space complex in the city’s far south end (which would protect artists’ work spaces from gentrification for a little while but would be a lousy public gallery location). Some other speakers even set the audacious goal of trying to buy the Shoe Building from Samis (which insists it won’t sell).
The save-Jem-Studios drive might be a tiltin’-at-windmills effort or a publicity stunt. But the situation remains.
This town that used to pride itself on supporting “The Arts” is fast becoming a soulless blank, populated by hot-shots who have “lifestyles” but not lives.
TOMORROW: Cussing around the world.
AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?
Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.
All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.
It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.
The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).
All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.
(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)
Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)
Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).
TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.
TWO POLICE PROFESSIONAL-ASSOCIATION GUYS wrote a Seattle Times op-ed piece last week, asking Seattle Mayor Paul Schell to step down.
They said Schell’s handling of the World Trade Organization convention, the protests against it, and the police response to the protests was all wrong.
So far, I’ve no disagreement. But then these two go on to explain how and why they think Schell failed. They apparently believe the Schell-led police response wasn’t brutal enough.
No, no, no!
The cops, and the rent-a-cops trucked in from other jurisdictions (whether or not Schell was still in full control of their actions by then, which remains to be investigated), first “did nothing,” or at least very little, to the strategic vandals and random looters. Then, as if by excuse, they spent the following three days tear-gassing and pepper-spraying everybody in sight, as far as a mile or more away from the convention site.
Then, just to show himself to be even more afraid of people and of public life, Schell canceled the Seattle Center New Year’s Eve. (The free, public New Year’s Eve, that is; $50-$150-and-up events elsewhere in town went on, as did the public bashes in Tacoma, NYC, Jerusalem, Belfast, etc.).
In the days after this decision, his excuses for it got ever lamer, to the point where he actually proclaimed himself to not be a wuss.
As my mom always said, if a boy thinks he has to tell you how tough he is all the time, it just shows he’s the real weakling.
Schell did indeed botch the WTO-protest response. But that response was excessively, not insufficiently, forceful. And it was an over-reaction to the results of the municipal power structure’s own narrow vision. Everybody knew there were going to be self-styled anarchists showing up here. It was all over the TV news in the weeks before WTO.
But Schell’s bureaucrats might not belong to “everybody.” Knowing their heavy upscale-baby-boomer makeup, they could very well be part of that certain subculture that only listens to NP-fucking-R and only reads the New York-fucking-Times.
But even if they’re not extreme, Schell and his minions are definitely Out Of It.
They’re near-quintessential Pro-Business Democrats. They’re so concerned with placating downtown chain stores, condo developers, and the affluent that they not only don’t care about the under-50-grand-a-year folks, they seem to actually wish we no longer existed.
But I’d hate for any potential Schell recall movement to degenerate into a two-sided battle between the elitist Democrats he represents and the demoagoguian Republicans the aforementioned police-association men represent.
If there’s something more dangerous than leaders who only listen to NPR, it’s leaders who only listen to Rush Limbaugh and company.
MONDAY: If dot-com hype can fade away, can cyber-futurist hype do the same?
TODAY, A BREAK from the heavier topics we’ve covered of late, for some slightly-odd short stuff.
FASHION-VICTIM ASSAULT WEAPON OF THE WEEK: Rolling Stone magazine now has its own brand of sunglasses. Presumably just the thing if you want to look like a washed-up, clueless, verbose rock critic (you know, the oldest and squarest guy at the concert).
WHICH PAPER D’YA READ?: Times headline, 11/12: “University District: Rail’s last stop.” P-I headline, following day: “Support for Northgate link gains momentum.”
ART UPDATE: Several weeks ago, I wrote about a poster advertising a “Butch Erotica” cabaret, which looked from afar like it was instead advertising “Butoh Erotica.” At the most recent First Thursday art openings, I finally saw some Butoh erotica.
It took place at the Jem Studios (currently doomed-for-gentrification), in a room filled with video monitors showing footage of one nude model moving about extremely slowly. In the middle of the room, the artist/model herself appeared, “dressed” only and entirely in white body paint (applied by a male assistant with a house-paint roller). She then slowly walked about the room, slowly climbed a step ladder, slowly smoked a cigarette (handed to her by another male assistant), and slowly gazed at the art-viewers.
She became the voyeur; we became the spectacle. Nothing had turned me on as much in months.
WORST JUNK EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (needless to say, from a “friend” I’ve never heard of, at an apparently nonexistant email address)
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉 From: asynergy@quixnet.net To: clark@speakeasy.org Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;). Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites. when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉
From: asynergy@quixnet.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;).
Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites.
when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
BEST EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (from a David Foster Wallace mailing list)
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted] To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized! I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill
From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted]
To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org
Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized!
I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
I can see it now. Probably colors, patterns, and logo “wallpaper.” I think we can all imagine some of the advertisers more likely to use this medium:
TOMORROW: I’ve complained about rude, pretentious San Franciscans. But are Seattleites these days any better?
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.
HERE’S THE SECOND essay I wrote this summer for Seattle magazine. (The mag’s under new management; I don’t know if the new folks will want me back.)
The occasion of my new book collection of old newspaper columns gives me an excuse to look at the art form’s sorry current state.
I don’t claim to write the funniest or wisest or sharpest columns around. I just wish more of today’s working columnists tried (or were allowed) to be better than they currently are.
The newspaper column just might be America’s greatest literary invention. Yet, like so many great American inventions, America seems to have largely forgotten how to do it right.
Seattle’s dailies haven’t had a columnist worthy of the title since the Times either allowed or persuaded professional gadfly Terry McDermott to move on a year or two back.
Back in the day, when Emmett Watson was in his prime and the likes of Byron Fish and even John Hinterberger were going strong, the P-I and Times relied on columns the way buildings rely on them–to prop up the whole superstructure of the edifice.
Even stronger stuff could be had in The Washington Teamster, wherein editor Ed Donohoe’s weekly “Tilting At Windmills” corner poked light fun at politicians who supported the union’s agenda and struck heavier barbs at politicians who didn’t.
Now, though, the columns in the local dailies are mightily staid affairs.
Latte jokes. Slug jokes. Endless paeans to why the baby-boom generation is even more darned important to the course of western civilization than it already thinks it is. A woman who claims it’s safe to walk the streets of Bellevue, as if anyone ever does. Political harrangues about why citizens are too chicken to dream bold dreams unless they go along with the latest scheme to subsidize private developers. Tirades about how Those Kids Today are either too lazy (unlike the diligent kids from The Sixties Generation) or too work-driven (unlike the value-centered kids from The Sixties Generation).
And, of course, oversimplified ideas about modern society, told in one-sentence paragraphs.
Really simple one-sentence paragraphs.
At least the sports pages still have the likes of Laura Vescey, Art Thiel, and Steve Kelley. But it’s sadly telling that the papers will only permit really good columnists to do really good work if it’s about a topic that doesn’t really matter.
The situation’s not much better in the “alternative” press.
My ex-stomping ground, The Stranger, was once full of strong, personal voices, from Anna Woolverton to “Spikey’s Coffee Corner;” but now apparently prefers formula concepts like restaurant briefs and a police blotter.
Seattle Weekly’s “columns” are essentially beat-reporting corners, not classic columnar-style commentaries.
Why this state of affairs? As print media become ever more corporate and bureaucratic, it’s harder for idiosyncratic voices to please the powers-that-be. You’ve gotta be either predictably “analytical” (bland) or predictably “outrageous” (dumb).
Yet it’s just these individualists who add the spark of personality to a paper, who make it a must-read even on slow news days.
There are still a few great ones churning out verbiage across the country. The feisty Texan Molly Ivins is a national treasure. The P-I’s new syndicated contributor Sean Gonsalves has the rare audacity to criticize not just politicians but the economic interest groups who own them. And Larry King’s weekly “King’s Things” in USA Today show he’s as skilled at short-form writing as he is at long-form talking. On the conservative side, at least George Will still tries to rationally argue his points, without succumbing to Limbaughesque bully tactics.
These, and a few others, know that a great column should have its own point of view, not merely rehash what all those other media commentators are doing. (A good case of the latter came back in April, when most everybody in the papers and on the air made the same three or four, equally misinformed and inane, arguments about violent suburban teens.)
It should tell a story, or several stories. It should provide insights into the day-to-day flow of events that straight reporting or dry analysis just can’t.
And it should make its points with personality but also with efficiency, and then stop.
IN OTHER NEWS: A short while back, I suggested the violent atmosphere that led to the Woodstock ’99 rapes might have had something to do with the aesthetic of amoral aggression propagated by the likes of Limp Bizkit. Similar allegations have now been separately made, in a libelous email supposedly from a certain ex-Seattleite rock star (found by Metascene).
TOMORROW: A look at some of the city’s remaining (for now) old buildings.
PASSAGE (from Lindsay Marshall): ” If the word ‘moving’ appears on the cover and the book is not about transport then avoid it like the plague.”
SIX MONTHS AGO, you couldn’t see a string of TV commercials without at least one website address flashing on-screen.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see a string of TV commercials (except maybe on Pax TV) without at least one ad that’s all about a website.
Yet despite the hype over e-commerce and the dubya-dubya-dubya as a marketing tool, the Web remains what I hoped it would become five years ago–an all-accessible repository for great, immediate writing.
Herewith, a few examples of fine online verbiage that are not Salon and heavens-not Slate:
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accompaniment to the print somewhat-less-than-quarterly McSweeney’s alterna-lit journal, but sharing no content with the paper version–just the same sense of literate whimsy and post-postmodern graciousness.
Rat Bastard. Washington, DC-based Don Bruns doin’ the personal-net-diary thang, with self-effacing wit to spare.
Exquisite Corpse. Andrei Codrescu’s little paper litmag is now indeed a corpse, but he continues to present brash-yet-thoughtful voices online.
My current fave: James Nolan on American doublespeak in the age of spin-control (a topic that gets beaten to death every election cycle, but he manages to bring it back to life).
Bittersweets. Each day, a one-paragraph narrative or observation about the wistfully-regretful side of life.
The Napkin. Like Bittersweets, but shorter, usually less bitter, and sometimes even cosmic (in a nice way).
Word. Besides the fun contemporary-art pages, the pages of found-objects pix, and the “Junk Radio” section full of moldy-oldies in streaming audio, the words on Word are themselves darned interesting and lively. Current best example: Philip Dray’s probably-fictional yet realistic reminiscence of being “a Jewish caddy at a WASP country club.”
You can tell the folks running Word have the right attitude if you hit “View Source” on your browser when you reach its homepage. There, amid all the HTML codin’, is this hidden (until now, anyway) treat:
“META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Forget about whatever you were searching for. It’s not important. You may not be aware of it consciously, but you really want to read Word instead. So go on — click here. You’ll be glad you did! Satisfaction guaranteed!”.”
Random Story Generator. I know it’s just an automated version of Mad Libs, but damned if it’s not a total laff-riot each and every time.
ELSEWHERE: There’s a big convention of ethnic-minority journalists in my town this week. The Seattle Times has been dutifully covering and previewing the event, but its big Sunday feature story tie-in was strictly about the “minority” the Times, and Seattle, are most comfortable with–upscale, white women (preferably blond and blue-eyed); in this case, TV anchorwomen.
TOMORROW: David Foster Wallace’s new fiction collection is anything but ‘hideous.’
PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).
Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.
“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”
Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.
(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)
At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.
Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.
In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.
I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).
The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.
What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:
“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”
MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…
