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THE AMERICAN DISTRIBUTOR of the Danish movie The Idiots demanded its frequent shots of male nudity be (crudely) censored, to insure an ‘R’ rating (and, therefore, the chance at mainstream theatrical bookings and big-newspaper advertising).
My first thought: What’s so horrible about a penis and a couple of testicles anyway? I think my own are just fine. I’ve been in locker rooms and at nude beaches, and my finely-attuned writerly senses were never offended by other men’s dangling participles.
As for female viewers, some sensitive ones might indeed feel confronted by the organs some women associate only with rape and violence, not with lovemaking. But such viewers, I believe, would be helped if they could see more male bodies in the nonthreatening environment of a cinema; they might learn to see them as symbols not of male power but of the ultimate male weakness.
(I’ve seen naked men running, in a nudist camp’s annual Bare Buns Fun Run, and it can be as silly and awkward a sight as one can imagine.)
In certain other jurisdictions of the civilized world (namely Britain and Japan), the formulaic, ritualized entertainment known as hardcore pornography does not legally exist, but less extreme sexual and/or anatomical exhibitions are freely and openly available (nudity in newspapers, cuss words in the comics, simulated film-sex on network TV).
In certain other jurisdictions (such as much of the European continent), this dichotomy is considered superfluous and just about anything goes.
Here, things are a little different.
The Motion Picture Association of America, the media conglomerates who control it, and the other media conglomerates who control major-newspaper advertising have conspired to keep anything more salacious than one Kate Winslet breast from being seen in anything that looks like a real movie theater (where IDs can be checked) and instead relegated to premium cable TV (where anyone living in a subscribing household can conceivably watch) or the adult-video market (where the use of sexuality to reveal characters or tell stories isn’t a high priority).
Anyhoo, I went to the U District and saw the censored version of The Idiots, with the quaint black censor bars around the male parts (and, in only one shot, around female parts).
The movie would’ve been a lot less disturbing if they’d shown the full nude scenes and cut out all the scenes with the cast wearing clothes.
Essentially, this is a story of six men and five women, all young adults of solid bourgeois upbringings, who crash in one of the men’s uncle’s second home and turn their lives into a performance-art project, by acting in a rude and obnoxious manner to anyone they meet. (I can see that sort of thing in the U District any day without spending $7.00 for the privilege, but that’s beside the point.)
Specifically, they do this by pretending to be from a group home for retarded adults. (You might expect me, as one with a retarded older brother, to be offended by this, and I was.)
Back at the house, the film’s characters continue the role-playing as a means of releasing their “inner Idiots.” They justify this with the age-old young-intellectual blather about overcoming everyday consciousness to become one with primal nature; but at least they don’t do this by pretending to be blacks or Indians.
In the last reel, we’re supposed to suddenly poignantly identify with the faux-Idiots, because at least three of them are revealed to have had real emotional problems, and to have been using the Idiot game as therapy. I didn’t buy it.
Nor did I buy the “purity” of the film’s Dogme 95 wobbly-cam technique, which (thanks to too many bad Amerindie fake-documentary films) already seems like just another gimmick.
Director Lars Von Trier has done far better stuff. Any regular filmgoer who tells you otherwise is a, well, you know.
TOMORROW: Flann O’Brien, my current Main Man.
ELSEWHERE:
IN THE FOUR MONTHS OR SO since we started the MISCmedia print magazine, we’ve been trying to resolve some of the differences between the print and online versions.
Right now, a lot of material appears online (including some stuff I’m rather proud of) that doesn’t make the cut for the limited print space we can currently barely afford to create.
One answer would be to revamp the online version.
All the print content would still appear on the site, but the concept of a full-length column every weekday would change–into something more like the group of short comments idea behind the original Misc. column.
I’ve been toying and experimenting offline with a site revamp that would have links to the print magazine’s pieces along one side of the page, and an ever-changing daily column thang on the other side. This would be made like those “Weblog” sites, with new items added at the top daily and old items eventually scrolling off the bottom.
On the ever-proverbial other hand, there is something nice about this here site being a refuge for semi-serious argumentative thought on the Web, where so much else seems to be a deluge of briefs, half-thought-out Attitude statements, and links to links to links.
Thoughts or ideas on any of this? Lemme know.
IN OTHER NEWS: Saw the Fremont Solstice Parade on Saturday. Besides the clever and fancy human-propelled floats (including a locomotive decorated with high-rise condos threatening to run over humans dressed as little houses) and the tight performing groups (including two dozen belly dancers in choreographed formations), the event was highlighted, as always, by the now world-famous Naked Bicyclists. (I met several spectators from out-of-state who’d read about the bikers in nudist-advocacy magazines and had gone to the parade just for them.)
This year, the bikers expanded upon their act. Most of the real nudies (as usual for the event, about two-thirds male) wore elaborate body paint; the faux-nudies in the group donned fig-leaf decorations atop their flesh-tone body stockings. As they’ve done in prior years, they not only appeared at the parade’s start but weaved back and forth, through and between the “official” parade attractions.
The regular parade performers also got into the act this year. Several troupes included one or more women wearing decorative pasties in lieu of tops. The final float starred a bare-breasted woman with henna body paint standing proudly atop a tall float (a la the Rio samba parades), waving to spectators young and old as the goddess she knew she was.
All in all: A great way to celebrate the human form and the summer sun, to playfully “rebel” for a moment against social put-ons, and to help teach children that bodies are nothing to be scared of or offended at.
(More about this tomorrow.)
TOMORROW: Will the real Idiots please stand up?
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.
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.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY, another bunch of assignments I’ve done for Everything Holidays.
This time, I had to write perky, upbeat, family-clean pieces about my least favorite holiday of them all.
Like many of my fellow involuntary singles, I’ve long loathed Valentine’s Day. I hated the entire commercial expectation–the demand, even–that everybody already have a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin.
Mind you, I still hate that aspect of the sorry spectacle. But I did get to learn a few other things during my research that made the season a little more tolerable.
Thing I Learned #1: Like most of the big dates on the Christian holiday calendar, V.D. was originally an old Roman “pagan” day with decidedly earthier iconography.
At the ides of February, a little more than halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, they held a fertility festival honoring (among other members of the godly populace) Lupercus, the god of shepherds, and Juno, the goddess of women and marriage. It was, to quote one tastefully written document, “a celebration of sensual pleasure, a time to meet and court a prospective mate.”
In other words, another orgy opportunity.
They’d hold “love lotteries” in which a teenage boy would draw the name of a teenage girl from a box. As another tasteful document puts it, “These pairs were encouraged to pair off as lovers.”
Those Romans didn’t expect everybody to be a whiz at personally marketing The Brand Called You. They knew folks might need help meeting their need to join-up, and had rituals to help ’em out.
Thing I Learned #2: After the emporer Constantine installed Christianity as Rome’s new official religion, the popes installed Christianized (i.e., dour and drab) versions of the old holidays. But the populace didn’t take to the first Valentine’s Day concept–a drab and dour remembrance of saints and martyrs.
Instead, they took one aspect of one particular martyr named Valentine, who (according to the legend) had performed secret marriage ceremonies in defiance of emporer Claudius (who’d believed single and frustrated men made more aggressive soldiers) as their excuse for carrying on with a cleaned-up version of the love holiday.
Thing I Learned #3: Romantic courtship and dating, as we know it today, began with the best of intentions.
Apparently, the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine set up a feudal court in the French town of Poitiers in 1168. She assigned her daughter, Marie de Champagne, to teach the teens and young adults of the palace to be proper young nobles. The etiquette guide Marie commissioned was specifically about how to properly, tastefully express and return romantic intentions.
The idea, besides training good servants, was to give women more power in what had been a muscle-bound society where females were seen as sex-and-birth machines. Under Eleanor’s ideals of “courtly love,” the man would have to prove the purity of his intentions and the woman would hold all the power to choose or reject.
Eight centuries after Eleanor’s ideals spread through Medieval Europe, we’re stuck with their devolved, corrupted legacy.
The “alpha males,” human Barbie dolls, rock stars, and bimbos get all the opportunities to date and mate and have dysfunctional relationships.
The awkward, the shy, and those without magazine-approved physiques, living in an isolation-inducing, suburbanized America without the fall-back option of family matchmakers, get to suffer through the soul-crushing rites of the “dating scene.” Either that, or settle for (for the guys) soulless porn or (for the gals) self-help books telling them they’re supposed to want to stay alone.
But one can take a lesson from old Eleanor. She saw a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanized women, and dreamed of something better. I see a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanizes most everyone, and should also be able to dream of something better.
If only I could imagine what that would be.
(P.S.: Applications for a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin are still being accepted at this email address.)
TOMORROW: Ken Griffey Jr. gets depicted alternately as nice, mean, and nice again, without changing a thing about himself.
IN OTHER NEWS: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; he’s my main man.
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the problems that can arise when folks try too hard to make the real world more like their Utopian dreams of a more perfect world–dreams that are almost always too rational, simplistic, and/or monocultural for the chaos that is real-life humanity.
Proclaiming a real-life place to already be a Utopia on earth can be even more problematic.
In the late ’70s, I was assigned a college sociology textbook that had a different indigenous tribe in New Guinea to represent each aspect of the authors’ dream society–matrilinear inheritance, collective decision-making, etc. The teacher didn’t like it when I questioned in class why the textbook’s authors had to find a different tribe for each social trait they wanted to promote, implying there was no one group that had it all.
Idealized societies seldom live up to their idealizers’ fantasies. Cuba’s egalitarianism and Singapore’s orderliness both turn out to be propped up by harsh authoritarian practices. “Unspoiled” rural places are often that way because everybody there is too impoverished to spoil them.
One of the most famous cases of Utopianization was Margaret Mead’s landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa. By now, almost everybody knows Mead’s book, a supposedly rigorous sociological study of “free love” and premarital guiltlessness among Pacific Island teens, wasn’t completely factual. Rather, it represented two urges at least as universal as teen sex-confusion:
Real-life Samoans had, and have, social structures and strictures just like organized societies anywhere on the planet. They might not, on the whole, have had the same specific types of sex-fear and sex-guilt as Westerners (at least before the missionaries did their work); but they had arranged marriages and adultery taboos and all the emotional awkwardness of growing up that you’ll find wherever there are conflicting hormones.
Still, the “Exotic Other” and “Sex-Positive Other” stereotypes remain. And after the Mary Kay LeTourneau TV movie of a few weeks ago, I got to wondering: Would this teacher and her prematurely-mature student have gotten into parental mode if she hadn’t seen those received ideas of innocent licentiousness in his Samoan heritage?
We’re not all one tribe, but we are one species. If we dream of a better way to do things, we shouldn’t force others to express them for us, any more than we should force our current social ways upon them.
(Though the anti-female-genital-mutilation advocates would surely disagree with the latter assertion.)
TOMORROW: Those rah-rah, way-new business magazines.
IN OTHER NEWS: Yep, the Web really is growing like weeds.
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.
SOME WOMEN SPEND FORTUNES trying to look sexy. But none would ever spend a dime directly for sex.
That’s the message of an article in the print version of the sex-workers’ zine Blackstockings. (It’s not available on the zine’s website as of this writing.)
The piece’s writer wants to be mean to any het-male readers of the zine–men who are probably picking it up out of support and/or sympathy for the women and gay men in the escort, stripper, phone sex, and porn trades, and should be thanked instead of scolded.
But no, this writer wants to talk trash to any guys out in her reading audience who have the common but unrealistic fantasy of sexually servicing women for money.
It’s an intriguing dream, to imagine oneself such a great lover as to charge cash from ladies. As long as you don’t think of having to go through some of the everyday hassles women in the sex-biz face–from having to mate with unattractive people (as spoofed in the recent farce movie Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo) to legal troubles, cruel pimps, personal-safety threats, and the other stuff Blackstockings regularly reports in detail.
While women directly buying sex is rare in North America’s cities, a lot of more common transactions come close. Women have often “paid” indirectly to satisfy their hormones–day-spa treatments from Senor Bruno; costly singles-bar apparel; affairs that put a woman’s marriage and/or career at risk; abusive relationships a woman might stay in because of her addiction to the intense sex; seductions that lead to confidence-game scams.
Some of these costly behaviors might theoretically be better replaced by discreet, professional encounters with men trained to completely please a woman and to expect nothing in return but the bucks. (That could also be a potential godsend to older or shier women, or professional women who don’t have the time or patience for the dating grind.)
And it is happenning; just not anywhere around here.
Early last year, I mentioned how, in the Caribbean, the sex-tourism industry had discovered female customers. There’s an extensive item about it in the latest Utne Reader, called “In Search of the Big Bamboo.”
The story describes island “beach boys” who troll the resorts and tourist zones, offering their toned, dark-skinned bodies to visiting women in exchange for “gifts,” some of which are in the form of cash. The story adds that similar scenes take place in Brazil, the Philippines, Greece, Spain, India, and that sex-biz stalwart Thailand–spots where the weather’s warm, the scenery’s exotic, no gossipy neighbors are around, and women with money can meet studly young men with much less money.
This means certain females, under certain conditions, will indeed behave as “johns–” the behavior certain radical-feminists used to point to as evidence of the universal ickiness of all males and the universal victimhood of all females.
But it makes a little more sense if you can abandon such narrow gender stereotypes and accept that women really can do everything men can; including things an ’80s radical-feminist might disapprove of.
As for the ’90s “sex-positive” feminism of Blackstockings, the existence of overseas “beach boy” hooking proves that females have (1) females have desires, and (2) in a monetary-based society, desires will be traded for currency.
It just probably won’t involve any would-be Deuce Bigalows in the Blackstockings readership, at least not soon.
MONDAY: More on the MP3 glut.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.
Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.
A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.
That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.
Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.
That one notion, natch, led to more.
There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:
Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.
TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.
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?
AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.
CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).
But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.
“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.
But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.
So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.
But there’s nothing like the original.
The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.
The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.
There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.
What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.
A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.
USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.
TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.
(Advisory: Today’s installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)
IN THE ’80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.
You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.
Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize “arty” camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.
The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of “Fo’ mo’, three mo’, two mo,’ and one. Take it down.”)
While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.
Later, Harris went on to producing softcore “erotic” videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.
Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won’t work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful ‘n’ sexy.
Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris’s nudie videos, “Not all pussy was created equal.”
To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris’s supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they’re doing this because they don’t want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris’s video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.
(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris’s other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on “Ron’s Angels” and also on Harris’s more explicit sites.)
Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women,” Harris vows, “will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come.”
Particularly if they’re willing to appear in “tasteful” photo shoots called “Girls Who Love Girls.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.
Maybe Harris is a better showman than I’d given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.
IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company’s just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel–sorta. On the cable system’s schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I’m getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions–particularly during commercial breaks….
MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, in which she claims that there’s no universal male conspiracy against women and that the socio-emotional problems faced by many current males are due neither to any supposed innate male evility nor to feminist ball-busters, but rather to a social and economic system that values money and power, and which devalues the personal worth of individuals of all genders.
Still, it’s one thing for a female author of impeccible feminist credentials to speak out in sympathy toward men.
It might be even more provocative for a male to proclaim male equality–not superiority, but equality.
That’s what illustrator/performance artist Douglas Davis did recently in two essays for the New York Press, “The Wick vs. the Prick: Heterophobia and the Gender Wars” and “Phallus Rising: Or, the Prisoner of Joy.” (The original pieces are no longer on the paper’s site (it maintains only its current issue on its site), but Davis has put it up somewhere on the “Hyper Texts” section of his own site and also has a forum site based on some of the ideas in them.)
Some of his ideas:
We need yang as much as yin; masculine energy can be a force for good; it’s perfectly OK to be a male (or a female who actually likes males); and, if we play our cards right, the next century could lead toward a “Wild Future” in which we get beyond such superficial arguments and instead learn to celebrate our selves and our others’ selves–female, male, straight, gay, bi, wild, mild, and everything else.
Some of my takes on these ideas:
I’m just old enough (42) to have discovered sex at the exact same time the mass media did. I didn’t get the valuable lesson that if the media were lying to me about sex they must be lying to me about other topics. Nor did I grow up in an America where hardcore video was easily borrowable from your next-door-neighbor’s parents’ basement.
Early-’90s style hardcore porn turns me off, as do the Brit-inspired “bloke magazines” such as Maxim. Both are predicated on a soulless, brainless, heartless stereotype of male heterosexual desire; a stereotype ultimately not far from that of certain sexist female essayists.
Allegedly “sex positive” ideologies that try to limit the range of permissible nongay sexual behavior to masturbation, chaste S/M, and media-mediated fantasies only make things worse. They reinforce the ultimate loneliness of the late-modern condition. They promote the orgasm as just another consumer activity, no more life-changing or world-changing than a really good bottle of wine.
Yes, there will be a Wild Future. But not quite the way the “dildonics” advocates proposed it seven or eight years back. Rather, it will be a celebration of all sexualities (male as well as female; hetero as well as gay; “Total Woman” Christians as well as leather-Goth-neopagans). At its center will be the central act of biological existence, M/F coitus. In a post-mass world, all the countless other sex expressions (lesbian, gay, transgender, assorted fetishes and kinks) will continue to blossom; but the central act will remain the figurative maypole around which all these other variants dance their joyous dances, sometimes glancing back at the maypole and sometimes not.
I oppose the dichotomy that claims there can only be two kinds of nongay male sexuality: evil and suppressed. We must promote positive notions of masculinity, neither brutal nor emasculated, neither dominant nor submissive, not against women but with women.
TOMORROW: A few more old buildings and their hidden tales.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.
Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard.
While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.
Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today’s fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:
As late as the early ’70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy ’em all.
Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.
Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry’s forgotten.
IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin’ ideological “battles of the sexes”? Let’s get on with the real thing!
TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don’t.
