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THE SUMMER PRINT MISC is officially late (I’d wanted it out today), but it is coming.
As part of it, I’m writing an exhortive little essay entitled “No, Seattle Doesn’t Suck.”
For it, I’d like your participation. Tell me what you like about Seattle. (Only things that are actually in Seattle! Out-of-town scenery doesn’t count!)
Send it in to our handy email box, preferably before the end of the month. Thanx in advance.
THE NY TIMES quotes an Italian business analyst on the Enron-Arthur Andersen-WorldCom mess: “What is lacking in the U.S. is a culture of shame. No C.E.O. in the U.S. is considered a thief if he does something wrong. It is a kind of moral cancer.”
WHAT ADAM SMITH REALLY WROTE, as opposed to what the pro-corporate “libertarians” claim he wrote.
THE FREMONT SOLSTICE PARADE is tons-O-fun; equally zany (although only slightly more dressed) is the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.
LET’S ALL PLAY
SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPE
MYSTERY DATE!
This proposed role-playing game will involve two separately-shuffled decks of cards.
The female player draws a card at random from the Pink Deck to determine which of the following grossly overgeneralized female character types (taken from popular images in “mainstream” and “alternative” media) she must adopt.
Then the male player does the same from the Blue Deck, containing various one-dimensional male character types. The two players then proceed to have a bitter verbal argument, in their characters.
The loser: The player who breaks character first.
The winner: There are no winners.
The point of the game: NOT to have fun, but to be as adamant and as miserable as you can be.
THE FEMALE ROLES:
Description: Says she’ll love you; will really kill or at least totally humiliate you.
Visualization: Blonde, sultry, with a come-hither expression, cleavage, and a knife held behind her back.
Description: Stuck-up high school brat
Visualization: Perfect body, perfect hair, perfect clothes, the facial expression of someone who’s just confronted horse feces on the sidewalk.
Description: Believes stereotyping people by gender is the worst crime in the world, that it’s done by no women and all men, and if you disagree you’re part of the universal male conspiracy.
Visualization: Butch in leather with a permanent scowl.
Description: The emotionally abusive, all-purpose victim of everything. Transforms in an instant from bawling to anxious to wrathful.
Visualization: Overemotive Shakespearean actress; or the couch-swooner from that Edward Gorey book cover. Might be finishing a drink carried in one hand while pouring another drink with her other hand.
Description: Completely lacking a mind or will of her own. Enslaved by TV and magazine ads that don’t want her to buy stuff, just to make her feel miserable.
Visualization: mirror in her hand, standing on a scale, rail-thin but seeing herself in the mirror as voluminously obese
Description: Victim of the Mean Teen’s putdowns for merely looking insufficiently ladylike. Because she has the skankiest reputation in school, no boy will have her–and none ever has.
Visualization: Not seductive, merely “cheap” and semi-pathetic looking. Ill-fitting denim jacket, last year’s jeans style, the wrong brand of cigarettes, too much makeup.
Description: Her mischievous giggle and batting eyes can make men give her fortunes, which she’ll waste in an instant on one really fabulous consumer purchase.
Visualization: Carefully contrived fake absentmindedness.
Description: The woman every man’s supposed to go absolutely crazy about and if you don’t what’s wrong with you?
Visualization: An almost kabuki-like absurdist characterization made from her own thoroughly-surgeried body; plus overbleached and overteased hair, big vacant eyes, surgically-thickened pouting lips, impossibly high heels, and a vinyl or gold-lame jumpsuit.
Description: Diligently works to create a society where everything’s uniformly blah and anything that could even possibly be fun would be outlawed.
Visualization: Stern emotionless behind big round glasses, blah hair, blah clothes,
Description: Your new boss, who uses conniving and treachery to get to the top (whereas your old male boss simply used bluster and bullying).
Visualization: Nordstrom-suited adult version of the Mean Teen. Shoulder pads capable of playing football in.
Description: doesn’t want to kill you, just enslave you.
Visualization: Perect demure smile, bridal gown, holding handcuffs or a lasso, perhaps dreaming a “thought balloon” of screeching children and a minivan.
Description: In high school she was the Mean Teen. In adulthood she will be the Dresser for Success. But now in college, she’s sowing more oats than Quaker–and will voraciously defend her right to do so.
Visualization: Standing up in the back seat of a convertible, either flashing or simply thrusting her bosom forward. Expression of out-of-control glee.
THE MALE ROLES:
Description: Ape-ish, vulgar, boorish, yet boistrously unaware.
Visualization: Abercrombie & Hilfiger designer slop, backward baseball cap, puking while holding a bottle of Goldschlager.
Description: Can’t read, speak, or think. Can barely stand. Yet fantasizes about being a drug-running, woman-beating street tough.
Visualization: Baggy butt-cleavage jeans, blank permanent-stoner expression, skateboard, lanky and hunched over.
Description: Believes in Breaking All The Rules, especially rules that prevent him from doing anything he wants to anything (or anyone) he wants.
Visualization: Loud “GQ” attire, Ray-Bans, smug smirk, cocky strut, posing in front of a huge-ass vehicle with anti-environmental and/or just plain rude bumper stickers.
Description: Wishes for the chance to create, from violence and chaos, a new world of total purity. Doesn’t yet realize such a world would immediately declare him not pure enough.
Visualization: Crew cut, huge-ass gun, stern stare, KKK robe showing beneath his fatigues.
Description: Watches TV and doesn’t read “alternative” newspapers; and hence is personally responsible for everything wrong in the whole world.
Visualization: The vacuous ’50s daddy figure from the cartoon This Modern World.
Description: Exists only to oppress women; dreams of a world where men are men and women stay barefoot & pregnant.
Visualization: Malicious-looking brute with slick hair and a slick thin moustache, in a disco suit with gold chains and a thick mound of fake chest hair.
Description: From man-bashing TV commercials, the clueless househusband who can’t even open a can of beans without a woman to help.
Visualization: Clumsy oaf in the middle of a pratfall.
Description: Believes the only way a male can have a soul is to renounce his body. Eats a special macrobiotic diet devised by Chinese monks to completely suppress the sex drive. Women frequently tell him of their platonic respect for him, in between relationships with Patriarchists.
Visualization: Ponytail down to here; paisley pajama-esque clothes, open-toed Earth Shoes.
Description: The school principal, college professor, company president, court judge, government official, parole officer, doctor, cop, father, banker, or other authority figure whose only joy in life is keeping you down.
Visualization: A sadistic yet somehow blasé expression, a more or less wrinkly face, and a more or less formal business suit.
Description: The perfectly trained mate. Ready and eager to perform any chore (from cunnilingus to grouting) without notice. Will be cheated on within a year and divorced within two.
Visualization: Sweater, tastefully poofy curly blond hair, the expression of a puppy dog eager to please. Perhaps cooking, gardening, or mending socks.
Description: White women see him as a potential stealer of purses. White men see him as a potential stealer of jobs.
Visualization: Thin; dressed in an overly-anxious-to-fit-in looking formal suit. Face is silhouetted (the particular ethnicity of this man, whatever it is, isn’t the point).
Description: Perfect BECAUSE he’s gay and therefore safely unavailable; the object/recipient of female fantasies involving every possible virtue.
Visualization: Perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, boyish looking (but not queen-y).
…to one of the true greats at the still-new art of web writing, Rodney O. Lain, who passed away over the weekend.
Lain, who at various times wrote for nearly every Macintosh-centric website, quickly established himself as an outspoken, well-written, detector of pomposity and dissecter of corporate hype. In perhaps his most memorable piece, he audaciously compared his status as a black man in a white world to his status as a Mac man in a Windows world.
AS WE APPROACH the 10th anniversary of the filmed-in-Seattle semiclassic Singles, Forbes magazine has placed Seattle right in the smack-dab mediocre middle of its listing of “America’s Best Cities for Singles.”
As you might expect from the magazine’s other priorities, its index included “cost of living” and “economic growth” among its criteria–areas in which the Nor’West is admittedly doing piss-poor these days. But SeaTown also ranked less than stellarly in the more subjectively-defined areas of “culture” and “nightlife,” areas in which I firmly believe we’re more than fully competitive with other cities in our population “weight class.”
But then we come to the most potentially damning part of the piece: “Seattle ‘solo artists’ say the town is still a bit tougher than other places when it comes to dating, as denizens tend to be more reserved than folks in sunnier spots…” As one who’s proud to call himself one of those reserved denizens, I think it a badge of honor that I don’t stoop to screaming dorky pickup lines at women; and I enjoy that my taste in the single ladies tends more toward smarties and less toward silicone.
Yes, Nor’Westers might be a little harder to get to know. But, like so many other advanced disciplines of life, we’re darned well worth it.
OPPONENTS OF MODERN ART have a new pet accusation. Instead of calling it obscene, at least one critic is now saying it’s bad for your mental health.
ONE OPINION WHY Americans might never get interested in the soccer World Cup: “The only way Americans are going to learn another country’s name is if it attacks us.”
FROM, OF ALL LEAST-LIKELY SOURCES, a straight-talkin’ non-exploitative essay on FoxNews.com:
…and why do so many humans obsess about it? Beautyworlds.com attempts to sort it all out.
A TRIBUTE PAGE by a woman who admires “women who have small breasts and still look amazing.”
a virtual exhibition of some 100 vintage 45 RPM record labels.
ANOTHER GENDER-MYTH CHALLENGED: As certain bestselling books have been noting lately, females can indeed do less-than-great things to other females.
F’rinstance, that Eastern Hemisphere ethnic tradition known there as “female circumcision” and around here as female genital mutilation is a practice passed on from mothers to daughters (see the item at the bottom of the page linked here).
NICHOLAS MURRAY WRITES: “Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere.”
JUST A WEEK AGO, I was cautiously optimistic but still slightly worried about the 2002 Mariners, who at the time were only 4-3. Since then, they’ve only won nine straight road games against division opponents. Oh, me of little faith…
THE SPRING PRINT MISC has now been distributed to almost all the local dropoff spots. If you still have trouble getting one, consider subscribing.
Letter From Astoria
from the Winter 2002 print MISCby Matthew Stadler
ASTORIA, OREGON is a city of 10,000, covering most of a hilly peninsula where the Youngs River meets the Columbia and the two empty into the Pacific. The weather is severe, astonishing, and the city itself is very old, first settled in 1811.
It is a city, not a town. Taxicabs navigate the narrow grid of downtown streets, shadowed by a tall art-deco hotel, office blocks, and brick apartment buildings. There are alleyways, canneries along the waterfront, secret tunnels under ground–all the stuff of literature, which Astoria has in fact become. It was a novel (Washington Irving’s eponymous international best-seller of 1836) 15 years before Seattle was even a single roofless cabin.
I moved here last year, to a huge, derelict house I bought for about two-thirds what my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle had cost.
THE UNIONTOWN Steam Bath, just below the porn shop, opened in 1928 and is still in business. I go there on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays too. On Saturday there’s a beer party in the “men’s public sauna”–a cooler full of Hamm’s, plus foam collars for the beers so the steam doesn’t warm them.
The talk is animated and coarse, sometimes clever: A call to bomb Berkeley for its rumored stance against the American war in Afghanistan is shouted down by bikers who point out that neighboring Oakland is world headquarters for the Hell’s Angels. Partisans take sides. New clearcutting on state forest land is both attacked and applauded. Bush is differentiated from Cheney, Cheney from Ashcroft, and each is allotted subtly calibrated degrees of contempt or admiration.
This steam bath is the kind of civil society I recall from Holland, the last place I lived where people conducted public discourse in the nude. Like Holland, Astoria enjoys a robust libertarianism that seems driven primarily by the capitalist instinct for free exchange, unhindered by morals.
I tell friends Astoria is just like San Francisco, if San Francisco had collapsed after the gold rush. The operative word is collapse.
Astoria has been failing for longer than most of the urban Northwest has existed. It is a comfortable, even attractive, place to fail. No city has done it longer.
IT WAS FOUNDED by a New York fur trader and venture capitalist named John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world at the time (described in his obituary as a “self-invented money-making machine”). Astor financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia to build a city that would monopolize the nascent Pacific fur trade. It was America’s first infusion of capital into the region; the rest, as they say, is history.
I like to call the whole Northwest “Greater Astoria,” as a reminder that its operative ecology has been shaped as much by the circulation of capital as by the circulation of water, an assertion made by the detestable name “Cascadia.” “Cascadia” is this region’s last nature poem; I prefer Greater Astoria’s tale of heedless capital and urbanization.
If anything marks us, it is that capital–with all of its hunger for motion and speed–arrived here, free from the burden of institutions that in every other place had slowed its movement: Family, church, even rudimentary humanist values like decency, self-determination or respect, were, in effect, absent here as capital made its giant sucking sound and mobilized every dormant resource (from trees to fish to minerals to men) with impunity.
This unbridled behemoth also brought a rich harvest of delayed, reactionary initiatives: The defense of human rights through organized labor; utopian experiments proposing economies free of money; an abiding ecological sensibility. Greater Astoria’s marriage of great exploitation and reactionary retrenchments is simply what unhindered capital looks like.
Astor failed here (though his name stuck), fur dwindled, and fisheries, canning, and logging rose to replace it. These three collapsed and returned, variously, from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, while inland vacationers arrived to pursue their seasonal entertainments. Then people like me began to settle, modems in hand.
MIRACULOUSLY–and uniquely among this region’s many failed emporia–Astoria today belongs to no one faction. It is a heterogenous city where no single industry nor social stratum dominates.
Stray tourists endure the stink of fish processing to watch sea lions scarf guts off the pier. Out-of-work loggers swim laps with seniors at the new city pool. An ex-Marine peddles his lefty newspaper (in its 26th year) from the used bookstore where he clerks on Saturdays. Job Corps kids from Tongue Point gather in knots by the movie theater. Idle salmon fishermen strategize over cocktails at the Feed Lot. A German software genius learns carving from a guy in Warrenton who’s now part-time at the mill. In Astoria everyone stays “afloat” because the water level has dropped so low.
Everything’s cheap here, and there’s a lot of it. I live in a towering 100-year-old house built by a riverboat captain on his retirement. I had thought I was very lucky to find it; but it turns out Astoria has hundreds of such houses (and mine is an especially run-down example). The city has never had enough money for urban renewal; so everything stays as it was, most of it in poor repair.
Victorian and craftsman houses dominate, the legacy of 19th century maritime and logging wealth, while downtown there’s a lot of art deco. (A fire wiped out downtown’s center in 1922; the next year it was rebuilt in brick and terra cotta.)
Amidst the older stuff there are surpassing examples of post-WW II design, from a ’60s four-story apartment complex (in a fabulous double-winged “V”) perched near the hill’s crest, to a neatly modulated necklace of woodsy ’70s apartments stair-stepping down the slope, to an astonishingly brutal Soviet-style apartment block straight out of Zagreb, pitched up out of the river on concrete pillars.
The result is a kind of encyclopedic mini-museum of architecture, small enough to wander in. Late at night, while most of the city sleeps and only the restless taxis drift through the empty streets, I go out to observe these treasures (most of which are, for better or worse, for sale).
OH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS. Astoria has no decent wine store. (You should start one.) Local sheriffs nearly killed a tree-sitter by driving him batty with lights and loud music, then cutting all the branches off his tree. Those Job Corps kids hang out at the movie theater because there’s no place else to go except a Christian-only youth center. Live music is generally lousy.
Fishermen can’t make a profit, no matter how big the runs get. Poverty drives a lot of lives here. In Astoria it’s all pretty visible, but at least there’s no higher station toward which to claw.
As a result, the bars are friendly. Denizens of the High Climber Room don’t turn their hickory-shirted backs to book-toting wine-drinkers like me. In Forks, WA, by contrast, I never dared ask about wine. The cocktail slinger at the Voodoo lounge takes food stamps (don’t rat on him), while in Port Townsend bars courting tourists treat local poverty as the mark of the devil (unless it’s that cultivated brand of poverty self-righteously called “voluntary simplicity”). Meanwhile, down on Astoria’s waterfront, hippies dance with fishermen at the Wet Dog.
THERE ARE BATTLES here, but what is there to win?
Astoria’s future pivots on a handful of questions: Will the community college be allowed to move onto a downtown site that could revitalize year-around pedestrian business in the city? Will environmental concerns curtail logging of old growth and other rare forests in the surrounding county? Will the planning board relax long-standing laws against larger chain stores and allow them inside the city limits? Will opposition to the deepening of the Columbia River channel succeed and make Astoria a much busier port by preventing upriver traffic? How will fishermen survive the reductions in bottom fish quotas and populations?
AFTER THE STEAM bath I drink at the Elks Lodge, sitting by the bandstand of an art-deco ballroom looking out on downtown.
Delinquents loiter by the courthouse. Taxis speed past, on their way to pick up drunks in Uniontown, where bars cluster in the shadow of the bridge. Noise from the cannery echoes up the hill, running all night to handle this year’s freakish sardine run, the biggest in 95 years. Container ships taller than downtown slip past the docks and block out the sky.
I can’t think of a better place to spend hard times.
The biggest Seattle print-media news this month is the debut of Matte, an ambitious square-bound quarterly arts review started by sometime Comics Journal employees Anne Elizabeth Moore and Carrie Whitney. It essentially covers “alternative”/”indie” music, film, comics, and visual art in the Comics Journal writing style–long and leisurely, full of verbatim interviews and philosophical reviews.
The editors and writers spend a lot of space promising what they’ll get around to in future issues and explaining their sociocultural stances. These statements frequently invoke the familiar premise that all of American culture can be nearly divided into The Mainstream and The Alternative, or The Corporate and The Independent. (Music reviewer Tizzy Asher repeatedly invokes “white,” “male,” and “heterosexual” to decry America’s ruling elite, as if everyone who fit one or more of those adjectives was rich and powerful).
Please note: By critiquing the Matte writers, I am not trying to shut them up. I’m asking them to be more challenging; to question their own preconceptions instead of just complaining about those held by others; to explore the more complex realities of how influence and pressure really work in this society. (Remember: Most rich people are white, but most white people aren’t rich.)
Anyhoo, on to the parts of Matte I enjoyed. Robin Laananen contributes a haunting photo essay about people wasting away their evening hours. Greg Lundgren, of Minus 5 Gallery and Artists for a Work-Free America, waxes elequantly on the contradictions of working oneself to death in a culture that idolizes “leisure.” Beautiful, well-told one-page comix stories are supplied by Jesse Reklaw, Laurenn McCubbin, Tatiana Gill, and several others. Jennifer Daydreamer and Phil Yeh debate whether the recession can lead to a DIY renaissance. And, scattered among the back acreage of record and book reviews, are quotations from various “radical” (left and right) manifestos over the years, showing how too often dreams for a “perfect” world would involve the suppression (or worse) of persons significantly different from the particular dreamer.
…because it is the most childish, and therefore the most creative and daring.”
…a leftist but not a cynic.
…who’ve complained about my continual use of the perjoratives “boomer” and “yuppie,” I’ve been searching for new cliches-in-the-making. In Chicago, I’m happy to report, they’ve coined a new name for style-conscious, career-concerned, and sex-savoring young-adult white females–“Trixies.”
THANX TO THE NEARLY 100 souls who braved the blustery Feb. night to attend our suave Signifying Nothing exhibition opening last night. The rest of you can see it seven days a week until March 6 at the 2nd & S. Jackson.
BACK ON THE POP-CULT FRONT, that PBS workhorse Sesame Street got a major format overhaul this week. The kiddie-ed show now features far fewer one-minute-or-less blackout skits and films, instead favoring longer segments (up to 10 minutes) with narratives and familiar characters. Producers say this restructuring is the result of intense audience research into what Those Kids Today prefer to see.
This, of course, begs the question: What will come in future years, as this long-attention-span generation enters adolescence? I’m no corporate futurologist a la Faith Popcorn, but there are certainly intriguing possibilities to imagine emergine sometime in the mid-2010s:
