It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
This is the first preview of the autumn print MISC, which will have a kids & families theme:
THERE ARE TWO kinds of families in the U.S. today.
There are real families.
And there is “The Family.”
Real families come in infinite assorted colors, shapes, sizes, and styles. A few of these variants even superficially resemble, at least in appearance, the look of “The Family.”
“The Family” is available in only one factory-set configuration. Married middleclass parents (dad works, mom doesn’t); one to four obedient children; house, car, picket fence, pets. “The Family” can be ordered in a small choice of colors—but no mix-n’-matching is allowed.
Real families have arguments and conflicts. Pieces of them sometimes split off, and some of those pieces sometimes combine to form other real families.
“The Family” is a command/response unit of military precision. Kids happily obey mom, mom happily obeys dad, dad happily obeys his boss, and everybody happily obeys their political and religious authorities.
In real families, people have sexualities (active, budding, frustrated, confused, etc) and ambitions (ditto).
In “The Family,” mom and dad have mated for life (though they don’t mate very often). Male offspring’s sexualities are always hetero, and are always successfully suppressed. Female offspring have no sexualities.
Real families really exist.
“The Family” doesn’t exist. It never did exist. It was a fantasy developed over the years (particularly the post-WWII years) by advertisers, housing developers, and social engineers. Persons living in real families were pressured into wanting to live up to the ideal of “The Family,” and were often ostracized (by their surrounding communities or by other family members) when they didn’t or couldn’t.
Even in the 1950s, there were pregnant unwed teens (more, proportionately, than there are now). There were hoodlum boys. There was racial turmoil. There were abortions (clandestine and often harmful to the women’s health). There were drugs. And, yes, there were homosexuals.
In spite of its nonexistence, “The Family” holds a mighty influence on the American imagination.
Anarchists call for its vilification and derision.
Politicians call for its defense; even while they pursue economic policies that hurt real families.
Art-worlders and white mall gangstas like to imagine they’re offending it.
Radio demagogues invoke its preservation to justify the harassment of gays and lesbians, the censoring of music, the banning of strip clubs, the imposition of school dress codes, and the war on drugs. “The Family” long ago replaced racial “purity” as bigots’ favorite excuse (though the “war on terror” might have now jumped into the #1 slot).
Civic planners still use it as the basis for suburban zoning and building codes, in which single-family homes (ever bigger, ever further apart) exist in isolation, strung together by sidewalkless roads, which in turn lead to strip malls anchored by “Family”-oriented chain stores.
Second- and third-tier TV channels mount one-hour drama shows extolling its wholesome American virtues (whilst being filmed on the cheap in non-union states or in Canada). Yet even these shows find the need, for the sake of compelling storytelling, to regularly acknowledge the difference between their characters’ messy real lives and their far simpler ideal lives.
THE ADVOCATES, marketers, and critics of “The Family” all presume its existence, at least tacitly, at least as an ideal.
But what if more of us recognized its nonexistence?
What if we each looked at our own past and/or present families and admitted they weren’t, aren’t, and could never be anything like the sterile abstraction that is “The Family?”
We could stop expending so much time, energy, and money either building up or tearing down something that was never more corporeal than a magazine lifestyle concept. We could build communities real families could more likely thrive in. We could demand wages real families could live on, and schools where the offspring of real families were welcomed and encouraged to excel.
We could remember that even families that try (often too hard) to become “The Family” are actually real families, with real idiosyncracies and diversities. We in the urban arts scene could stop ridiculing those families and start encouraging them to express their own weirdnesses.
Go ahead and call this a dream. Call it unrealistic. It’s still more realistic, and more likely, than “The Family” ever was.
…the two most bizarre spectacle on yesterday’s all-day, almost-every-channel memorial marathon. The No. 1 most bizarre sight was eminently predictable: The merchandising of gaudy flag-ribbon trinkets, bald-eagle collector plates and such on the shopping channels. The No. 2 most bizarre spectacle was much more unexpected: ESPN senior announcer Chris Berman reciting from the Gettysburg Address between inninngs of a Yankees-Red Sox baseball game.
AUTHOR-CRITIC NEAL GABLER has a different way to describe what some other critics call ironical PoMo entertainments. He calls ’em “simulated entertainment.”
I KNOW UPDATES HAVE BEEN SPARSE this past week. But the print MISC is out now, so we’ll be adding more stuff soon (including pix taken in the past few weeks, and some recent print MISC texts).
UPDATE: You recall that recent flap over a proposed civilian-snitch empire to be launched under “anti-terrorist” excuses? Some Senators want to scrap it.
GOOD NEWS: The long-delayed midsummer print MISC is finally almost done, and oughta be out by the end of the month. This might be the last one to be printed on cheapie newsprint.
AND THERE’S GONNA BE a public coming-out event for the ish. MISCosity Breakdown will occur on the convenient Friday evening, Aug. 16, at the early timeslot of 7-9 pm, at the always-lovely Rendezvous at Second north of Bell. As many print MISC contributors as can make it will appear. And we hope you do too.
A LOT OF WEBSITES have been playing up this Australian newspaper article that claims the U.S. government is “planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies.” An actual careful reading of the story reveals a lot of speculation on the writer’s part about the Feds’ proposed “Terrorism Information and Prevention System.” Few actual details on the program have been revealed. But that doesn’t stop the speculation. And it shouldn’t stop you from being wary of such schemes.
…at their advertised uses, but those “diet belts” on TV infomercials turn out to be great vibrators.
AUTHOR KEVIN PHILLIPS has a simple theory for all the corporate scandals: When the rich get too rich, you end up with “a taste for speculation and highly developed sense of “gimme” that winds up jeopardizing both the American economy and the vitality of the American democracy.”
…an unexpected tribute to the True North from the once-promising novelist Douglas Coupland. (His comments about the “Canadian character” toward the end are, unremarkably, a lot like what I’ve been saying about the Seattle character.)
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).
