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IT’S ‘STAY AWAY FROM SEATTLE DAY,’ according to a promotion at the downtown Borders Books. According to the in-store flyer:
“Today, the rest of the world gives our city a break from the influx of people moving to the ‘Best Place to Live’ by celebrating and honoring ‘Stay Away From Seattle Day.’ Memo to out-of-state web-masters, high-tech wizards, writers and musicians: Reschedule the U-Haul and let Seattle’s siren song tempt you another day–today the city is for those of us who are already here. Present your Washington State driver license between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and receive a free tall latte on Borders (limit one per customer, no substitution.)”
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO STAYED AWAY FROM SEATTLE: Yesterday, we had some music-related fun links. Today, something only slightly more serious, involving a local guy who split town at age 18 and only came back as an occasional visitor.
Boomer-nostalgia compulsives continue to rant on about the “revolutionary” aspects of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, as this recent news feature shows.
I was to have appeared last year at a “Northwest Music” conference (canceled at the last moment), to discuss the so-called “grunge era,” right after a panel discussion that would have discussed Hendrix’s national-anthem rendition.
(Never mind the fact that Hendrix never lived in the Northwest as an adult; to the boomers he’s still Seattle’s one true claim to rock fame.)
The boomer-nostalgists apparently never learned that the tune originally was an English drinking song. “To Anacreon in Heaven” was the official song of the Sons of Anacreon, a London private club named after an eighth-century Greek poet who, in turn, wrote bawdy verses about the larger-than-life carousing of Zeus and his mythical pals.
And so, as one of the song’s original verses ended,
“While thus we agree, Our toast let it be. May our club flourish happy, united and free! And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine, The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
Our toast let it be.
May our club flourish happy, united and free!
And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine,
The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
Hendrix had simply re-inserted the boistrous, Bacchanalian revelry the tune had originally expressed, and did so with gusto.
Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” lyrics were apparently specifically written to go with the tune of “To Anacreon In Heaven,” which shows the song had become popular well beyond the private club which had originally commissioned it.
But Key’s words (the official “National Anthem”) could theoretically go with any workable melody, even one amateur singers could better execute.
The theme song from Valley of the Dolls meters almost perfectly with Key’s words. I’ve tried it. Go ahead and try it yourself, in the privacy of your own homes if you must.
Then go back and read the original lyrics for “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Then sing them (you know the tune). If you’re like me, the tune sounds a helluva lot better when it’s used in the service of images of drinking, lovemaking, and other merriments than it sounds when recounting the Battle of Fort McHenry.
It’s almost enough to make you feel good about being an American again.
At least if you’re an American of British descent like me.
IN OTHER NEWS: Fortune’s list of North America’s “40 Richest Under 40” (excluding those with all-inherited wealth) includes two Seattleites, no women, and only three names not connected to the computer or Net industries (including the list’s only two Af-Ams, Michael Jordan and record producer Master P).
TOMORROW: Who’s afraid of digital movies?
ELSEWHERE:
ADVISORY: Today’s installment contains tasteful language about a topic some readers might find borderline-icky.
LAST FRIDAY, I reported on a recent in-person chat with some “amateur” adult-website operator-models.
Since that in-person meeting, I continued to correspond via email with Oasis, who’d organized the “bar meet” at which I’d met her and two other Netporn queens (and their ever-supportive husbands). Here’s some of our virtual conversation:
I first started my site a little more than three years ago. It started as a one-page ad to advertise a video Lance [the husband] and I had made together. The response from that one page was just completely overwhelming, and the entire site just grew from there.
When I first started there were only two or three of us. Now the number is probably somewhere in the high hundreds, if not in the thousands…
According to all my fans, the reason that they like my site so much is because it always looks like I’m having fun! Which I am!
It shows that we really do this because we enjoy it, and it’s our lifestyle, not just because we thought we could make some money off of it.
I also do my best to involve my fans in the site and in my life. I answer all my e-mail personally; I travel around the country hosting bar meets where fans can come out and party with us; and I even host parties in my house. I think all of this creates a bond between me and the surfers, and I think that bond is very important.
It basically means we are real people who mostly do this for fun. We’re not professional actresses or models or dancers…. Just the girl next door who happens to like getting naked in front of a camera and sharing herself over the web. 🙂
Do this because you want to do it, because it’s fun and you enjoy it.
Get to know your fans and do what you can to connect with them… same as any other business. Know your target audience.
Women aren’t my main audience, but over the years I have had several female fans. On a couple occassions I’ve even had single women come to the bar meets to hang out with us 🙂
I think the Internet has done a whole lot in connecting the average woman to a part of their lives and a community that they might not have otherwise known existed. It has certainly brought into focus the fact that the average woman really does enjoy sex and isn’t afraid anymore to show it!
The most popular myth (and one I myself believed before I got into this whole thing) associated with this industry is that men control it and the women involved are being debased/manipulated/exploited. That may have some small truth in a few cases in mainstream (what I call L.A.) porn, but in the amateur adult Internet world it is absolutely false.
The absolute best part about this industry is that we women can be a part of it, and be extremely successful in it, by doing whatever we want to do, whenever and however we want to do it. There are no producers saying, “Do this or you’ll be fired.”
This is totally an outlet for our own sexuality, and as such it is very empowering. On the Internet, our boundaries have been lifted and we’re free to explore who we are at our own pace.
Running an amateur website is definitely a positive process of self-examination and personal growth. I can think of few other avenues that allow such freedom.
TOMORROW: A look ahead toward Halloween (a mere three months away).
ELSEWHERE: Minneapolis’s Museum of Questionable Medical Devices has everything from a “Foot Operated Breast Enlarger” (1976) to a “Violet Ray Generator” (1915)… Kinky fantasies from way back when, at a Page of Antique Weirdness…
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, thanx and a hat tip to all who attended my second live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. last night at Elliott Bay Book Co. Further events TBA.
(ADVISORY: The rest of today’s edition contains tasteful language about topics some of you might find borderline-icky. But that’s America for you.)
In his new book For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, the author-cellist Wayne C. Booth quotes Walt Whitman liking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing for the “amount of passion–the blood and muscle–with which it was invested, which lay concealed and active in it.”
That’s as close to a workable definition of “amateur” as I can find these days. The previously-dominant definition, of working without financial renumeration, was pretty much buried a few Olympic Games ago.
The “passion” definition’s also better than the “unpaid” definition to describe the thousands of “amateur adult” Websites out there these days.
Yes, a good proportion of those sites are trying to earn money. Many of them charge for access, to everything or to extra-hot “members’ areas.” Many of them sell videos, CD-ROMS, photos, autographed mementos, and/or undergarments.
But these sites (or at least the better ones) offer something you can’t get from the formulaic rites of corporate porn.
Call it a spirit, a joie de vivre, a feeling (even if in some cases it’s just an affectation of a feeling) that these women really like to do their varying degrees of wicked things (from nude posing on some sites all the way to, well, all the way on other sites) and to let you see them doing them.
Three of these webmistresses recently made a pair of joint public appearances in Seattle and suburban Des Moines, WA. One of them, Oasis, was having a west-coast tour of these “bar meets” with fans; two others, the local Gina and the Portland-based J, accompanied her on this stop.
All three have husbands (Gina for 20 years) who attended the bar meet; all have “open” relationships, at least for the purpose of gathering photo and video material for their sites. Oasis even invited some of her bar-meet guests to an “after-party” safe-sex photo shoot back in her hotel room. (I didn’t attend or ask to.)
All three women were extremely nice and personable. Even while legally dressed in the bars, they exuded an open sensuality and an enthusiasm for life. They were perfect hostesses, graciously leading the shier computer-nerd fans into the bar-table conversation. The women talked a lot about how they love bodies (their own and other people’s), they love sex, and they want to use their sites to help people overcome their own inhibitions and lingering prudish repressions.
But, just like “indie” rock, “amateur” webmistressing is still show business, which means it’s business. Oasis conducts her bar-meet tours so she can personally bring in new fans, so she can turn current occasional viewers into paid members, and so she can make cross-promotional photo ops with other webmistresses across North America. She and her hubby have also worked as consultants and server-providers to other amateurs. Their site claims,
“If you can be a consistant model, have the desire to attend functions, meet new people and promote a website then you could be an internet star! We won’t shit you, the pay-off is much faster being a model, but the long term investment is greater to have your own site. Don’t believe any of the ‘get rich quick’ crap you read on other sites… It takes a while to establish a website and turn a good profit. But if you have the drive, patience and charisma you can earn big bucks with your own website.”
MONDAY: A little more of this.
ELSEWHERE: Some ex-Yugoslavs dream of Cyber Utopias; while others retreat to the paranormal… Probably not the ultimate ad-placement abomination, but the lowest for now…
AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.
Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).
TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.
ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…
I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)
IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?
ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”
I’M STILL TRYING to sort out how I felt after the last First Thursday, almost two weeks ago.
It was a big week for breasts in the Seattle arts scene. Jem Studios’ “Blue Boobs” group installation, the Tule Gallery’s two 10-foot-tall hyperrealistic bust paintings, and the usual other figurative-art stuff.
I’d have enjoyed it all as I usually do, except it was the week after my mother’s partial mastectomy.
Just after I’d come to terms with near-addictive fascination, acknowledging that I had nothing to feel guilty about i/r/t my hormonically pre-programmed craving for the sight and touch of female skin, I learned my favorite female body parts had threatened to kill the first and still most beloved female in my life.
The “Blue Boobs” installation was beautiful, but the close-up breast images in monochrome-blue paintings and videos looked too creepily like, not X-rays, but like some weird other kind of medical photography.
And the breasts in the Tule pix are exactly the scale (and eye level) of a mom as seen from the POV of a nursing infant, though the women’s faces aren’t really “maternal” looking as much as pop-art sendups of ’60s-mod fashion art.
I do know a few things at this perspective. I’m not going to stop loving women’s physiques. If anything, I hope I’ll be even more appreciative of precious gifts life and beauty are.
Especially after the Friday night right after First Thursday, when I witnessed the finish of the annual Belltown bicycle race. As the winner sped across the finish line in the alley behind the Rendezvous, an apparently drunken man suddenly stepped out and slapped him. The racer fell to the ground; Medic One quickly responded to a cell-phoned 911 call but took almost 15 careful minutes to get the guy into the vehicle and away.
(Last word: He’s apparently going to be all right. As, for now, is my mom.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: On a much lighter note, e-commerce is trying to get hip.
ELSEWHERE: The next step toward taming the arts: Quantifying them… A faux-Sassy webmag likes today’s incessant “positivity”… This is not, repeat, not, a real eBay auction; but this is…
AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.
A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.
It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)
Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.
As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.
To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.
So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.
(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)
To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).
And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.
And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.
But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.
And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.
Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.
TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.
ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…
YESTERDAY, I told of my not-all-that-painful-really adventures in acquiring a DSL line.
I knew in advance I’d be spending a lot of time playing with my new-and-way-improved connection, so I wrote or at least outlined several days’ worth of these columns before the scheduled installation day. What I didn’t know was how super-fast, always-on access would affect darn near every computer-based thing I do.
I’ve always resisted putting games on my hard drive, so to avoid the temptation to waste away my sittin’-at-the-screen time on diversions that won’t get any writing done or improve this site. Netting was different, because of its then-built-in limitations.
I couldn’t get on without spending at least a minute waiting for the modem to finish its groaning and wheezing. I couldn’t stay on without running the risk of missing a quasi-important phone call. I couldn’t download anything substantial without tying up the connection for 5 to 10 minutes per meg. I couldn’t move between Websites or pages without moments or minutes of load time; I kept a newspaper or magazine handy so I could keep my mind alert during these frequent delays.
But now, as you’ve guessed, that’s all different.
My browser can be on all day and all of the night. Emails load fast enough that I could go on every known mailing list, from “gas-pump-collectors-l” to “britney-spears-l.” Chat rooms, MOOs, MUDs, instant messaging, all called out for my attention.
I could spend moments-that-become-hours with the streaming-video hilarities at Honkworm International (Shockwave animations, some of which involve fish who sit at a bar, telling tall tales and drinking like, well, you know) and Trailervision (Hardware Wars-style parody movie previews).
Or, if in a more serious indie-film mood, I could spend many leisurely times with the DIY shorts at Atom Films or D.film.
I also could view all the hotnastywow movie files I wanted (only to very quickly find I didn’t really want most of them, which go beyond hardcore in inviting self-defined “heterosexual” male viewers to gaze in awe at other men’s parts in ultra-extreme close-up).
I could grab all the (legal and not-quite-legal) MP3 sound files I wanted, only to find it tuff to find any I wanted that didn’t turn out to be broken links. (MP3 search sites have a long ways to go before they’ll be even halfway useful.)
And I could follow Web link after Web link until I got totally and thoroughly lost–then start all over with a portal or Weblog site, leading me who-knows-where.
I could pretend to be a tall, financially-secure vegan in a singles-talk room. I could view each and every page found in a search for “‘clark’ ‘humphrey’ -‘gable’ -‘bogart'”.
I could, and still can, do all of these things and more. But I won’t do them all, at least not all immediately or all the time.
After all, I got this line so I could do more efficient research for this site and for my books. It’d go against the whole point of it if I had so much obsessive-compulsive fun that I never got around to workin’.
So fret not, MISC.-fans. The site will not only remain a daily, it’ll get better in the weeks to come, with select new features and new fun links. (It still won’t be a real Weblog ‘cuz it’ll still emphasize original content more than links to other folks’ stuff.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: Are material comforts, such as home-office DSL lines, the antithesis of what makes for real art?
ELSEWHERE: That other hi-speed Net connection, the cable modem, could be crippled by cable companies using tech-tricks to hobble access to sites the cable companies don’t approve of (or don’t have a financial stake in)… More bashing of the first Woodstock, by a relative of one of its organizers… The so-erudite-it-makes-you-squirm J.K. Galbraith calls the deregulated global economy a farce of crony capitalism…A hilar-ee-ous putdown of “Angry White Rappers…”
IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)
A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”
While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).
What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.
What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).
DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.
The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).
The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).
Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.
THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.
“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.
But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”
I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…
TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.
Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.
Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.
Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.
“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”
Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.
Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.
If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!
To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.
Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).
But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.
If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.
I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.
TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.
AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.
It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).
These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.
More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).
When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.
Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.
The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.
If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.
That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.
Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.
These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.
SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.
A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.
TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!
FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.
A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.
But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.
Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.
Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.
But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.
Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.
So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.
Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.
Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.
This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.
It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.
What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.
Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.
So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.
The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”
TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.
BOOKING A WOMEN’S CONVENTION by the religious-right pressure group Focus on the Family the same weekend as ArtsEdge was the best Seattle Center scheduling serendipity in years. Even better than situating the big Cobain memorial in ’94 right outside, and just after, a Sonics playoff game.
Alas, no catfights or shouting matches broke out between the blue-haired conservatives and the green-haired artsy-types–not even with the entrants in the tattoo contest, some of whom paid as little heed as was legally possible to the contest’s fine-print rule, “If your tattoo is in an area normally covered by clothing, please be prepared to wear clothing that reveals your tattoo but not the genital area. Ladies, that means nipples too–sorry, it’s the law!”).
The body art was among the highlights at the third ArtsEdge. Other notables: The parade of art cars, the Butoh Race (three women in angel-of-death-white makeup tried to run as slowly as possible without stopping), musical gigs by Rockin’ Teenage Combo and the Bosnian emigres of Kultur Shock, the neo-vaudeville of Circus Contraption and Cirque de Flambe, and Elaine Lee’s art installation in which short tales involving the artist’s “secrets” were stored inside beautifully-lit, small metal boxes.
A lot of it was fun and entertaining. Some of it was even art. Little of it, though, had any edge.
The problem: economics, natch. This year’s ArtsEdge, like the two prior installments, failed to attract many of the region’s best fringe art-theater-music people due to its policy of not paying them. (The event’s $100,000 budget goes entirely to Seattle Center staff and facilities services and to publicity.)
As long as the Seattle Center management’s allowed to think “edgy” art means art by young adults who’ll do anything for a public showcase, you’ll get an ArtsEdge that’s got little art and almost no edge. This year’s event proved it could be popular, even under less-than-ideal weather conditions. It could be more popular if more pro alterna-artists, with their already-built followings, were added.
Consider this another case of the “If-we-can-build-these-big-ass-sports-palaces-why-can’t-we-…” routine, which we’ll talk a little more about on Thursday and Friday.
Tomorrow: More reasons why Pokemon is such a hit with the kids and so incomprehensible to the grownups.
YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.
Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.
(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)
I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.
This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.
Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.
A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”
The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.
But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…
Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.
This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.
That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.
Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.
The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.
Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.
LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.
Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.
Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.
Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.
It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.
Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.
The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.
But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.
“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”
She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”
That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.
It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.
It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.
I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.
Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.
Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.
