ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.

All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.

It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.

How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)

There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.

I speak, of course, of pornography.

But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.

A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).

But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.

The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.

Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.

So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?

It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).

This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.

MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.

ELSEWHERE:

• Now electronics has really gone too far–a Japanese firm has demonstrated a “smart toilet”!…

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

Generation S&M, Part 2

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)

MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.

Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.

And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.

I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.

Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)

On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.

Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.

These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.

In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.

We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.

Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.

In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.

In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.

The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.

In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.

And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.

Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?

I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.

Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.

That would be SO Catwoman of me!

TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.

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.

IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could that most Web-user-beloved of humor institutions (and former home of many of the original Stranger staff) be selling out?…
• The NY Times marks seven years after the WWW became an established institution (which, in the paper’s estimation, was when the NY Times first reported on it)….

Generation S&M, Part 1

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

THE OTHER DAY I was surprised to see a preview to the new movie Quills, a tale loosely based on facts about the Marquis de Sade.

Surprised because I thought that S&M was out. The movie is complete with a star-studded Hollywood cast and lots of flogging.

Some fads go out slowly, occasionally bobbing their heads aggressively before drowning completely. You can’t really write a fair essay about a fad until it’s over. You have to give it time to die, and God knows you don’t know a fad is happening while you’re in it. No one knew the roaring ’20s were roaring until at least the ’50s.

So it’s stupid for me to reminisce about S&M and the glorious late ’90s yet, but I’m doing it anyway.

S&M made a comeback in the early ’90s. I heard someone once say that Seattle was some sort of Centre de Sadism renowned throughout the world. I don’t really think so.

I mean, of course there was the Vogue, which started having Sunday fetish nights in the nineties. Then the Catwalk, where you could playfully whip boys in leather, a few underground S&M raves that were hard to avoid if you ever danced.

There was even a more serious bordello/dungeon of sorts in Magnolia. The torturous Jim Rose Circus Side Show and The Pleasure Elite originated here. Still, I never thought of Seattle as an epicenter for S&M.

I did notice that suddenly S&M was cool. People were wearing corsets and spiked heels and dog collars again and suddenly black rubber was everywhere. People were “coming out” about their sexual strangeness. The personals started being really entertaining with all the weird fetishes. Post-grunge fashion picked up on the trend.

The S&M love story by Anne Rice, Exit to Eden, was made into a (crappy) Hollywood movie. Xena: Warrior Princess started kicking the shit out of men; as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catwoman, and Lara Croft the cyberbabe.

Obvious dominitrixes like Miss Parker of The Profiler came back to TV. The Gimp appeared in Pulp Fiction; vampires made a comeback; Clinton was elected (and everyone knows he’s a bottom).

When you write an essay about a fad, like for example the slew of Vietnam movies made in the late ’80s or the preppy movement of the early ’80s, or even anorexia nervosa, you have to say what were the factors that allowed the fad to be.

Like for example, a lot of preppy kids had these cool ex-hippie, pro-pot, pro-everything parents, and the only way suitable for them to rebel was to change their name to Buffy and buy stocks and iron their clothes. Works for me.

Much the same thing happened with S&M.

Everyone knows that our parents raised us in the ’70s and they were into the most hideous, revolting, normal sex.

Encounter groups, est, Unitarian Church Singles Groups (called USAG). I’m OK, You’re OK. The Show Me! book, the anatomically correct dolls. The ’70s, when people sang “I’m Easy” and “Sometimes When We Touch” with a straight face.

Yeeech. Blek.

Our parents’ sex, although “open” and “free”, bored us all to tears. I mean, Alan Alda and Woody Allen as sex symbols?

While their twenties were spent rebelling against the sexual repression of their ’50s-era parents, our twenties were spent trying to re-achieve the coolness of repression.

And I think I personally found it in Catwoman.

TOMORROW: A possible source of S&M fascination–’60s sitcoms.

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• No products, no employees, no customers, no business plans; nothing but domain names for sale on eBay, all promising smash revenues…

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:

• Snow. Hope we get some in Seattle this winter.
• Discovering a great new band.
• Luxuria Music, a streaming net-radio station playing a mix of lounge, jazz, surf, bebop, soundtracks, and other “music to stimulate the entire organism.” It’s co-curated by The Millionaire, formerly co-leader of cocktail nation faves Combustible Edison.
• Brave New Waves, a nightly program of experimental and just plain odd music from the CBC (and streamed online at 9 p.m. PT).
• The inventive products of North America’s packaged-food and fast-food industries.
• Sex. (Well, duh….) Specifically, the kind of sex that brings two people closer together on psychic-emotional-physical levels.

  (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.)

• Harper’s Magazine.
• Collecting old magazines, especially the kinds that aren’t normally collected (Time, Seventeen, Family Circle).
• Pre-1970 nudist books and magazines. Hard to tell which aspect of these images is more worldview-skewing: The sight of pre-hippie-era grownups (of all ages, genders, and physiques) unabashedly nude, the sight of unabashedly nude grownups in deliberatley non-erotic (sometimes even anti-erotic) poses, or the accompanying text sermons defending the lifestyle as being just as clean, wholesome, and sexually repressed as any deserving aspect of mainstream American life.

  (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.)

• The new Office Depot at 4th and Pike.
• Unexpected phone calls from people I personally know who aren’t trying to sell me something.
• The recent election mess. No, really. It was one of those fun interruptions of the daily grind, and it kept going into ever-further absurdity levels like an Absolutely Fabulous script.
• Glow-in-the-dark green plastic. You can get it in everything from yo-yos to toothbrushes to Burger King promo toys. Heck, you can even get an Apple iBook in it!
• Grocery deliveries.
• Online reference libraries.
• Pyramid Snow Cap Ale.
• Digital video camcorders. The devices which just might yet kill Hollywood. (You’re getting me one for Christmas, right?)
• The recent Pac-10 football season, which came down to the last weekend with three (count ’em!) of the conference’s four Northwest teams battling it out for the championship–including the long-humbled, now-proud Oregon State Beavers!
• The conveniences of modern life; including but not limited to indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone service, public transportation, trash pickup, a division-of-labor setup wherein many of us don’t have to toil out in the fields tending crops unless we want to, digital cable, photocopiers, and electronic bill paying.
• Truly wacky ’70s movies, such as Lisa and the Devil or Dolemite.
• Money. Just love the stuff. Wish I had some now.

(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.

ELSEWHERE:

• A former member of fun-punkers the Dead Milkmen talks about his lifelong appreciation for dumb children’s records….
• Too many chain stores?…

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Remember the Joan Rivers movie Rabbit Test? Or the feminist bumper stickers, “If men could get pregnant….” Well, one man claims he is!…

THE ART-HOUSE MOVIE HIT of the season is Dancer in the Dark, a partly locally-shot musical by Danish director Lars von Trier in which the leading lady (played by singing sensation Bjork) steadily retreats into a fantasy world as she steadily, irreversibly, loses her eyesight.

A similar decline in vision and withdrawal into fantasy is befalling the bigtime movie biz.

We’ve already mentioned the vast oversupply of umpteenplex movie theaters in this country. Even when there are hit titles out, they can’t possibly fill all those seats.

And when there’s a dearth of hits, like there’s been this month, the industry gets even more pathetically desperate.

It retreats further into already worn-out formulas, trying to recapture audiences increasingly tired of the same-old perky “romances,” violent “heroes,” and gross-out “comedies.”

As an extra added detraction, we get election-year trash talk about the studios pushing violence and profanity onto Our Innocent Kids (as if kids hadn’t always been fascinated with that sort of thing), and you get the potential makings of an even more timid, fear-driven Hollywood establishment than we’ve already got, churning out even blander and dumber fare. At least until the threatened actors’ and writers’ strike next spring.

One note of sanity in all this comes from a Boston Globe reviewer who asks, “Too much sex in movies? Give me more.”

He notes that what passes for sexuality in Hollywood films these days usually has nothing to do with beauty, passion, or love, but rather with smirking and ultimately embarrassing gags aimed at a horny/frustrated adolescent-male zeitgeist. Any positive screen sex would be life-affirming, about bringing people together instead of keeping them apart.

As filmmakers around the world (and a few notable Americans) have shown, this kind of screen sexuality can be used for drama, for farce, for plots heavy and light and everything in between.

But today’s Hollywood (and the theater chains, and the film-publicity and advertising businesses) can’t deal with that (cf. the censored U.S. release of von Trier’s Idiots).

IN OTHER NEWS: Acclaimed Florida-corrupation novelist Carl Hiaasen on recount-mania: “That the future occupant of the White House might be decided by a single county in South Florida is spine-chilling. Given our ripe history of scandal and skullduggery, the rest of the nation is wise to be worried.”

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: Florida crime writer Edna Buchanan on Miami’s history: “A steady stream of sun seekers and pirates, con men and hucksters have been drawn to the sea-level city at the bottom of the map. They still are. Geography makes it a magnet for people on the run.”

IN OTHER OTHER OTHER NEWS: “Manuel Recount Tired of All the Election Jokes” (found by Fark)

TOMORROW: What, besides recent big-budget movies, might not even possibly be entertaining.

ELSEWHERE:

• Comic-book ads circa 1983….
• One of the main disciplines of modern life, how to pack a carry-on suitcase (found by Larkfarm)….

MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate (perhaps the last batch, at least for a while). This time, we ponder why old fake architecture’s more durable than new fake architecture.

Just ’cause Seattle’s only 149 years old and in North America, that doesn’t mean we can’t have Roman ruins (well, sort of). The four, beautifully-decaying columns adorning this lookout point near Pine and Boren came from the original University of Washington building, which had been where the Olympic Hotel is now. These days, neighborhood activists are trying to preserve the lookout’s views, threatened by city plans to permit more high-rise buildings in the Denny Triangle district just beneath it.

Compared to the box-of-leaky-fake-stucco look of many modern “luxury” apartments and condominiums, Frederick Anhalt’s Capitol Hill buildings of the ’20s look more astounding than ever. His Tudor brick and Norman-style bungalow apartments featured individual entrances and felt more like homes than rental units. The Depression wiped out his company; until his death in 1996, he ran a garden-supply store and nursery near University Village. Many of Anhalt’s buildings today command premium rents or condo prices–including this classic on East Roy Street, known to ’80s comic-book readers as the “Sherwood Florist” building in DC’s “Green Arrow.”

The former Capitol Hill Methodist Church was built back in the late 1880s, as the area surrounding 16th and John was first filling with residences. In the 1990s, the dwindling congregation (one of the first in the state to openly welcome gay and lesbian churchgoers) formally dissolved. While the exterior is protected as a city landmark, the interior was redone as an architects’ office. (Former workers there claim the building’s haunted by a former pastor.) Now, One Reel Productions (producers of Bumbershoot, WOMAD USA, and Summer Nights on the Pier) are reportedly interested in the structure as an office for its growing entertainment empire.

The “golden ages” of some entertainment genres are hard to define. But many connisseurs of sex films define that form’s peak as the 1970-87 era of theatrical porno; after “stag films” emerged from the underground into real theaters, but before home video and zoning restrictions across the country put many of the theaters out of business. After ’87, when the last on-film theatrical porno was released, most remaining adult cinemas switched to video-projection systems. The Apple Theater was one of the last film-based porno houses left in the U.S. when it was razed in 1998, as part of an affordable-housing project. The new building’s storefront tenant is in a different “skin trade,” that of tattoos.

TOMORROW: Bremerton, just possibly the most surreal town on the planet.

IN OTHER NEWS: Perhaps never has so much fuss arisen over the firing of a prize-pointer.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can understand the guys who try to visit every Denny’s. But every Starbucks???
• Pick your favorite eschaton from this list of “20 Ways the World Could End” (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….

I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.