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PEOPLE ARE WRITING MORE THESE DAYS.
Some written-word defenders apparently don’t like it.
Yeah, some of the same types of hibrow guys n’ gals who, just a few years ago, were all a-moanin’ about the supposed Death Of The Word are now all a-moanin’ about the exploding volume of words being issued by persons less astute than themselves.
In a recent NY Times piece, they kvetched to high heaven about e-mails and chat rooms and newsgroups and other online verbosity collectors wherein ordinary folk who don’t even have graduate degrees can show off their noun-‘n’-verb-wranglin’ skills (or lack thereof) for all to see, in almost-real time.
The careful discipline of written English will collapse if this is allowed to continue, cry these SNOOTs (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term of self-description in the April Harper’s).
I say bunk. Double bunk and triple bunk, even.
Fortunately, my longtime pal Rob Wittig was around to add a voice-O-sanity to the NYT piece. He (correctly, I believe) noted that online writing is an exciting, albeit no longer really new, medium, whose rules and conventions are still in great flux. We’re not seeing the end of Real Writing, or even the beginning of the end, but the slow beginning of our ever-evolving language’s next phase.
To Wittig’s statements, I’d add that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect (certainly there are dozens of awful fiction and poetry writers who’ve never goten significantly better and probably never will). But there’s no way to become a decent writer without it–especially if it’s in a medium that can give you near-instant feedback and criticism.
So yes! More chat rooms! More mail lists! More weblogs! More message boards! More personal websites!
Keyboard-and-mouse jockeys of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your would-be silencers!
NEXT: Et tu, KCMU?
ELSEWHERE:
THEY’RE BACK. Eight years or so ago, I thought we were rid of them for good. But now they’re reasserting themselves, and again threaten to subjugate us all under a numbing regime of enforced mindlessness.
I’m not talking about the Republicans but about the hippies.
Humans of my acquaintance, whom I thought were safe from the infestation, have succumbed one by one. Could you be the next? Take our handy quiz.
Patchouli smells like:
(B) Stale beer.
(C) The breath of the angels.
Television is:
(B) A pleasant-enough diversion.
(C) The root of all evil.
Spectator sports are:
(B) A great way to spend the afternoon with the guys and/or the family.
Lower-income working Americans are:
(B) The key toward establishing a permanent progressive movement in this country.
(C) All redneck fascists.
Tobacco is:
(B) An unfortunate addiction.
(C) Good for you if it’s American Spirits, right?
I buy my groceries:
(B) Where I get the best selection.
(C) Someplace small and dark where I have to bring my own unbleached cash-register paper.
Medical marijuana should be prescribed:
(B) To the extent it can be shown to relieve extreme pain among the seriously ill.
(C) For tummy aches and bad-hair days.
The answer to global warming is:
(B) Concerted efforts to make industry cleaner and reduce automobile use.
(C) Hemp.
The answer to racial inequality is:
(B) Diversity training in schools and workplaces.
The answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem is:
(B) Now believed to be known, but too complex to be quoted here.
The purpose of politics is:
(B) To realign society’s structures of power.
(C) To let me proclaim how perfect I am.
SCORING:
Score one point for every (A) answer.
Score two points for every (B) answer.
Score three points for every (C) answer.
RESULTS:
11-17 Points: You’re safe for now. But creeping hippiedom can occur to anyone, so be careful.
18-25 Points: You’re in serious trouble, dude. You should consider total-immersion therapy: Eighteen hours at the Riverside Inn casino, playing high-stakes poker in between line-dancing lessons.
26-33 Points: If you don’t act now, you might be just days away from tie-dying your bedsheets and taking up the hammer dulcimer. You need professional help; or at least a few days’ worth of sensory realignment at a Tokyo pachinko parlor.
If you didn’t even finish the quiz, you might have lost the ability to concentrate. Get to your nearest aerobics class or sports bar immediately, or as soon as you can gather enough energy to put some shoes on.
NEXT: Boeing becomes just another global corporation.
CHICAGO, THEY LIKED TO SAY during the regime of the first Mayor Daley, was “a city that works.”
Seattle might be described as a city that works and works and works.
In the March issue of the spunky art zine The RedHeaded Stepchild, Jeff Miller suggests a focal point of the Seattle visual-art scene, and of the city as a whole: “Inasmuch as it has an identity, it’s about work.”
Quoting unidentified national mags, Miller sez LA’s schtick is the tits (“stuffed with silicone but fun to play with”); SF’s is the head (“tuned in or turned on, doing the brainwork”); Seattle’s is the foot (“working hard, shut up all day in socks and shoes, not welcome in polite company–pulling everything else along, but for no purpose, really, except hard work and money”).
“In Seattle,” Miller writes, “you work because it’s expected of you, because your dad did it, because you have no distractions; in short, because you’re a good Scandinavian. That’s also why–if I may stretch a little–you make and show your artn which means that Seattle’s response to the production/reception duality might be a different, but equally contemporary, kind of creation.”
Later on in his piece: “The fraction of our lives not taken up by work and sleep is occupied by home and television: if Los Angeles has claimed the latter two, then the former are left for the rest of us.
“I believe that Seattle’s spirit is shaped by exhausted American labor. The home of Microsoft understands, more than most, the sacrifice of life to paid employment. It has been a slacker haven, and an old-school blue-collar town. Artists, curators, and critics keep stopping by Seattle, looking for this city’s artistic voice, but the voice is never home: it’s too busy working a day job.
“In the end, I think the most striking feature of Seattle art might be the day job itself, or the negotiation between the job and artistic creation. Extraordinarily rich creations have sprung, perhaps, from LA’s strange preoccupation with domestic growth. The survival strategy that art negotiates in Seattle, the artistic response to the dominant features of this city’s environment, might then–as in LA–itself be the most compelling subject for the city’s art.”
Here we have an explanation for the MS workplace culture, and the Nordstrom workplace culture that preceded it.
It explains the homey, just-good-enough-without-being-showy aesthetic of the old Kingdome.
It explains the local theater scene’s historic emphasis on production rather than hype (and on accessible, workmanlike entertainment).
It explains the music scene’s emphasis on honesty and sincerity rather than hype and glamour. It explains the DIY obsession of the Olympia scene. Conversely, it also explains the powers-that-be’s historic distrust of bohemian culture and their abhorrance of youth culture.
It explains the REI culture’s vision of recreation not as “leisure” but as vigorous action.
It explains caffeine (the drug of active people) and Costco (where you have to work to shop).
It explains why we don’t care as much for passive icons such as beauty-pageant queens (unlike Portland).
It explains the neighborhood-activists’ drives to preserve Lake Union as “a working lake” and the Industrial District.
It doesn’t explain glass art (except the craftsmanship atttitudes associated with it), Kenny G (except as office music taken to the level of stardom), or the Hendrix cult (he was a soft-spoken, intelligent craftsman, but his public image among white boomers isn’t). But these could be exceptions that prove the rule.
It also might at least partly explain my own aesthetic preference toward honest working-stiff culture instead of the gussified-up prettiness emphasized in most Seattle picture books; and my abhorrance of the local media’s whole yup-leisure idolatry.
It explains why Greg Lundgren of the Vital 5 Productions gallery felt the need to start a little zine-and-poster “movement,” Artists for a Work-Free America. In someplace like Honolulu, Miami, or New Orleans, the value of letting-go and freeing your spirit aren’t things people need to be preached to about.
And it might explain civic leaders’ “world class” obsession (from the World’s Fair to the new fancy-schmancy buildings) as the expression of guys who wanted to be seen as constantly striving to be their best.
And it would certainly explain the city’s social schtick of uptight, polite “niceness.” It’s the schtick of a town that forever puts out the help-wanted sign “Now Hiring Smiling Faces,” and too often stigmatizes anyone guilty of insufficient perkiness.
And the menacing, near-psychotic grins on all the clean-cut yups’ faces in condo and restaurant ads? They’re the faces of characters who know they can’t ever let go of their passive-aggressive workplace personalities. Not even at home.
NEXT: A last look inside the OK Hotel.
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
SEATTLE’S PIONEER SQUARE MARDI GRAS began in the mid-’70s, under the Anglified/sanitized name “Fat Tuesday.” It was intended less as a public celebration than as a promotion for the neighborhood’s music clubs and their already-calcified formula of superficially aggressive but ultimately tame all-white “blues” bands.
After the first year, the New Orleans-style rowdiness so incensed the powers-that-be (a notorious Times headline called it “Lawless Tuesday”), that the organizers scaled back their offerings to special nighttime promotions within the bars and family-friendly, daytime-only outdoor events (such as the Spam carving contest and the “Miss No Fat” beauty contest).
But revelers in recent years have refused to be denied. They began to hold their own informal, unofficial “real” Mardi Gras bashes in the streets, here and in a few other big cities.
Last year’s Seattle bash, three months after WTO, felt a lot like WTO without the politics–young folk getting rowdy and mean; cops getting stern and meaner.
So this year (from which all of this page’s pictures date), Paul Schell’s Forces of Order announced plans to harshly deal with any attempts to create a giant outdoor moshpit in the streets. The result, last Saturday night, was a lot of rowdy overgrown boys (and a few flash-happy ladies), a few drunken fights, heavy police over-reaction to the fights, and heavier crowd reaction to the police-heightened violent atmosphere.
Monday night was a kind of halftime in the revelry, with more cops than partiers on the streets.
Then came Tuesday night.
Thousands crammed the area. Most were young and male. Some were attracted by hopes of a Woodstock ’99-style “rage rock” riot. Some, including the small but particularly violent black street gang the TV cameras particularly loved to point to, apparently wanted to hit at anyone and anything in sight. Some just showed up hoping to get shitfaced and to scream at women to raise their tops.
Most just wanted to share a non-mellow, non-rational bacchanalia–a universal human desire, and one for which any community worthy of the name provides regular outlets.
Yes, there were fights and other assorted rowdinesses. A poilce department (like New Orleans’s) trained for such an event would spend less effort tryng to impose order, and more effort stopping specific looting and fighting incidents while letting the rest of the crowd get happy, naked, and/or stupid.
For that matter, a city that was truly comfortable with human behavior in this “Xtreme” age would be prepared to welcome and channel this energy, to curate a celebration that would let young adults vent their energies in a more sociable manner, with folk having fun together without turning against one another.
The old Seattle image of an overgrown small town where everybody was a mellow, upscale, white baby boomer was never as real as the media and the politicians wanted it to be, and now has become a dated cliche.
So let’s lot fear or try to re-ban a big outdoor Mardi Gras, but instead start planning now to make it better.
We’re more diverse than we used to be, but we’re still not particulalry overflowing with cajuns, Latinos, or Catholics. The pre-Lenten excuse for Mardis Gras doesn’t really work here except on a rent-a-culture basis.
But we can purposefully stage a big, fun, inviting tribute to the lengthening days, the slightly drying climate (in most years), and the chance to get back outside. Imagine a spring-equinox party, only as long as a month before depending on the wandering Passover/Lent season. Let the noisy boys and flashy girls show up, but also make it inviting to a wider swath of the populace. Have mood-setting music, art, dance, street performers and other elements to add an infusing/diffusing element that would discourage violence more effectively than any baton-holding police stormtroopers ever could.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the mayoral race.
IF THERE’S ONE CONSTANT about my lifetime in the Northwest and particularly my adulthood in Seattle, it’s that somebody’s always complaining about anything and everything around them.
If folks aren’t complaining about the weather, they’re complaining about the economy. If it’s not the economy, it’s the politicians.
And if it’s not the politicians, it’s the whole town’s supposed total and incurable suckiness in regard to everything except natural scenery.
You know the drill. If folk in Seattle aren’t listening to (or wearing, or eating, or reading, or watching, or drawing or painting) whatever the folk in NY/LA/SF are, it just shows how we’re hopelessly behind the times. If we are doing what the bigger-city folk are doing, it just shows how we’re rote trend-followers who can’t think up anything “unique.”
Then there’s the rant I recently receivd in a bar from some musician who apparently still thinks he has to rebel against the dreaded Seattle Grunge Stereotype, 10 years later.
He apparently thought that (1) everybody in the music world would immediately love him if he simply got the hell out of hicksville Seattle (tell that to L7, the Beat Farmers, Concrete Blonde, the Minutemen, and all the other Calif. bands who never got their deserved due), and that (2) to be “Notgrunge” was to be a persecuted musical minority in this town (even though every single act in Seattle since ’92 has insisted it was “Notgrunge”).
But if you think I’m just here today to complain about all the complaining, you’re wrong. (I may be susceptible to many ideological recursive traps, but that’s not one of them.)
Whining about the supposed lack of a local identity actually is a longstanding, integral part OF our local identity. (It’s just one of the many traits we have in common with the Canadians.)
WTO could be seen as complaining taken to epic scale.
Kurt Cobain and co. could be seen as complaining taken to the level of art, or at least great entertainment.
But complaining can be good for you, and for the world around you. You wanna live someplace like Singapore where saying anything negative aboutalmost anyone or anything is not only legally but socially taboo? Didn’t think so.
So go ahead and bitch and moan. Get it out of your system. Feel the potentially healthy ego trip. Be proud of your willingness to speak up and call truth to power or whatever.
Just try, at least, to get to the next step–proposing a solution to your complaint (other than “screw it all to hell”)–and maybe even attempting to act upon this potential solution.
NEXT: WTO videos, the hot and the not-so-hot.
I’D BEEN TRYING FOR SOME TIME to write a fictional character who would be the perfect embodiment of the mythical “Northwest Lifestyle” as anointed by the local media and advertisers.
You know, the people portrayed by models in Nordstrom catalogs and condominium brochures. All grinning with a freshed-faced, fetishistic blandness. Always of child-bearing adult age, but seldom seen in the presence of children. Always white (or at least pretending to be).
A lover (but not too ardently) of mellow music, fancy restaurants, fine wines, outdoor recreation, winter vacations in Hawaii, upscale shopping, coffee jokes, gardening, and vaguely “outdoorsy” but still office-acceptable fashions.
A possessor of wealth, but never excessively ostentatious about displaying it.
A figure almost totally devoid of ethnicity, ideology, religious belief, strong emotins, or personality.
I couldn’t get inside this character’s soul; just what someone like that would think or feel. Then it hit me: This character isn’t the epitome of Northwest Lifestyle nothingness; she’s simply trying extremely hard to live up to the ideal. She’s trying to be someone she’s not, as a way to hide what she hates and/or fears about her real self.
Then it hit me: Perhaps the “Northwest Lifestyle” personality doesn’t really exist, at least as promoted.
I felt SUCH a sense of relief at the thought!
Maybe nobody really is as plain, soulless, appearance-perfect, and self-satisfied as the images. And if any real-life people (as opposed to models’ assigned personas) appear to fit the “Lifestyle,” they could themselves be faking it out of fear, dread, peer pressure, or some combo of the above.
So my challenge to you is: If you, or anyone you know, really does live the featureless, passionless “happiness” that is the Northwest Lifestyle, let me know. Bonus prizes will be yours if you’re willing to share your Lifestyle with our readers, and if you can explain, in detail, why you think the above rant is full of Zoo Doo.
NEXT: Turning this little business into a mighty media empire.
AS PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN HERE, I used to hate Valentine’s Day.
Now, I llluuuuuvvv it.
And it’s not just because (at least as of the time of this writing) I’m in head-over-heels infatuation with someone bright and down-to-earth (which I am).
It’s because I’m now convinced that human connection, in all its forms (including sex and romance) is one of the keys to moving human society beyond its current power-and-money obsessions and toward something healthier and more stable.
Things I’ve learned during the process:
By that I don’t mean masturbation, and I don’t mean obsessive self-absorption, and I don’t mean that “be your own best friend” self-help junk. I just mean treat yourself the way you’d like a lover to treat you, with honest respect and kind appreciation.
And since it’s the lovers’ day, give yourself a present. Maybe a handsome little decorative tchotchke; maybe some dark chocolate and raspberry truffles; maybe even a day-spa massage or a couch dance if that’s what moves ya.
Again, this doesn’t refer to salacious solicitations; (i.e., don’t sue me if you come on rudely to some stranger in a bar and responds with a punch in the nose. Indeed, that kind of unsubtlety is the mark of a selfish wolf, not of a lover.
No, I mean spreading as much of all the kinds of love (familias, agape, eros, etc.) in the appropriate form to the appropriate recipients. This is hard for many of us repressed-Calvinist northern Caucasians; damn hard for some. But it’s worth it.
So lots of huggs, kisses, and/or kind words to you and yours, this little-over-midway point between solstice and equinox, when the world is just starting to come back to life.
NEXT: Re-editing Star Wars was one thing, but re-editing Red Dwarf is a potential abomination!
Welfare and Dog Tricks(Part 2)
by guest columnist Rachel Jacobsen
(LAST TIME, our guest columnist began her true-life story of being a cash-strapped single mom trying to avoid the state’s three-month cutoff of benefits, which would force her to work away from home and hire strangers to care for her kid. Her only apparent alternative is to take a two-week “transitioning to work” seminar.)
I’VE CALLED THE SEMINAR PEOPLE. They aren’t welfare; they are a private corporation.
A high-school cheerleader type answers. She says they have no credentials but the owner of the company is “really good;” she used to give motivational seminars to “really big companies, like Fortune 500 companies.” But she stopped and is now working only with welfare mothers because “they are so committed to their community.”
Yeah right.
I am getting a mental picture of another has-been from New York transplanted to Seattle for a last hurrah of aggressiveness. She’s wearing shoulder pads and a big bow on her neck. Her motivational seminars in L.A. or New York (doesn’t matter) are fizzling, and the temp company which employs her is not paying enough.
She finds out that people are required to prove they are “transitioning to work” or lose their welfare benefits, and she develops an easy money scheme: She’ll hire people with no qualifications, pay them nothing, and charge welfare for the “transitioning to work” classes. (Which, I’m told, are mainly “discussion groups” with different themes every day).
I bet the classes are costing welfare a fortune; maybe $100 a day for each participant.
In the midst of all my questions about the “program” (I tell her it is discrimination to say that just because I am poor I need to learn how to parent), the peppy receptionist says, “We don’t want anyone to come to the class if they don’t want to.”
Then she asks my name. I tell her I’d rather not say; I’m only calling to get information. She starts insisting the class isn’t “designed for me.” I want to scream at her that if I don’t take this class I won’t be able to pay rent. She must know that though, so I keep my mouth shut. I never tell someone they are evil if they already know it. She tells me of other classes, but we both know I can’t bring my child to them. She’s got me where she wants me. I hang up defeated.
Now thoroughly convinced I’m not going to take this class, I’m told the gritty truth from my social worker. If I don’t take the class I would lose 40 percent of my benefits.
But that’s not all! The measly $264 left over would go to a “guardian,” a friend or relative of my choosing, who would dole the money out to me, since I’m clearly a derelict.
I have no idea who I would choose for this honored task. I’m on welfare secretly. It’s not exactly something I’m going to print on a T-shirt.
Anyway, after I take this really stupid class, where I will be asked to participate in what sounds like group therapy lea by not even a social worker or qualified nurse or even someone who used to be a welfare mother herself, then and only then will I have a respite from hoop jumping (I think like a month, but I couldn’t get a clear answer) until I have another hoop to jump through. Which I will dutifully obey.
During all this I have to breast feed round the clock too. I’m doing three jobs now, one with my child and one for welfare and one that is under-the-table work so I can actually pay rent and bills.
I do have an ace in the hole. To quote Ariel Gore, editor of Hip Mama magazine, “When they don’t give a family enough to survive on at the beginning of the month and that family is still alive at the end of the month–well, obviously some fraud has taken place.”
Strangely, welfare never asks me how I made rent this month, or how my newborn infant suckling at my breast is taking my “transition to work” seminars. They never ask me how I’m feeling about my government devaluing motherhood so much that they think I’d be better off in the work force and leaving my newborn with a “child care expert.”
Welfare only asks me constantly to jump through hoops, hoping perhaps to keep me primed for the working world.
I don’t know why else they would do this to a mother and her newborn.
NEXT: Learning to like Valentine’s Day.
Welfare and Dog Tricks(Part 1)
WHEN I WAS 21, I told myself I wanted to experience everything there was to experience in this human body. And sure enough, I’m finally on welfare.
Now I am a “welfare mother.” A stigma is placed on me. I am a caricature, white trash, sex craved and fat, yelling vulgarities in public, wearing stained clothing, a befuddled alcoholic cigarette and crack addict loser and all the other stereotypes that come to mind.
My social worker is a kind hearted Filippina woman, with a tendency to repeat carefully and loudly everything she says to me. She says that women used to be able to receive welfare for six years with no questions asked. Then it was three years, then one year, then six months, and now it’s three months. Believe it or not, it might change to six weeks.
My kid just turned three months; and isn’t it just the way, I’m finally swallowing my pride and applying for welfare. So in order to receive the welfare grant (a mere $440 a month) I have to jump through some hoops to prove I am “transitioning to employment.”
My kid can’t even support his neck by himself, and I’m supposed to be out there looking for a job.
The American Medical Association recommends breast feeding for at least six months; but some moron in Congress decided that three months would do. Probably a man; probably not a doctor; probably an old fart with hemorrhoids who golfs.
Luckily, I can “pump” my breast milk. This feels a little like pressing a bruise very hard repeatedly, for a half hour, then doing it to the other tit. I can then refrigerate it and give bottles to the underpaid babysitter who will watch my child for ten hours a day (eight while I work and two commuting).
I’ll get to spend four waking hours with my child a day. He will share his first crawl, steps and words with a stranger whom I do not know. Perhaps many strangers whom I do not know.
This is what welfare wants me to do.
But there is an option, the nice social worker lady says. I could prove to the government that I am “transitioning to work.”
In other words, I have to take a class of some sort. There is one offered, but I have to leave my newborn with a “child care expert” while I attend it. I say no way.
She is sympathetic. There is one more option, I can take a parenting/working mother class; this one allows me to bring my newborn.
Oh joy.
I’m not a derelict, or stupid, or a bad parent. I’m just poor. I try to tell this to my kind-hearted social worker. She gets kind of weird.
Suddenly I feel like a five-year-old; she is repeating things three times now. She’s used to dealing with irate welfare mothers like me. I can tell. But I don’t want to take the class. It’s the weather; my kid might get sick. It’s too far. It’s a two-week intensive seminar.
I don’t tell her this. But I’ve called the seminar people.
NEXT: The rest of this, as our guest columnist reveals her reservations about the seminar people.
Fast, Rich, And Out Of Control
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(LAST TIME, our guest columnist began a bus trek through Mexico. Today, more non-travelogue thoughts on the topic.)
TALK IS CHEAP, anecdotal evidence is practically worthless, and discussions of traffic tend to veer from the personal to the philosophical and back again, in a hit or miss attempt to get a grip on a topic which often seems to control our lives.
I believe that Seattle traffic is faster, nastier, and more reckless than it was five years ago, that drivers here are less considerate of others on the road than they used to be, and that those tandem emblems of wealth-coddled “rugged individualism,” the driver’s cell phone and the SUV, exemplify a spirit of self-interest that sets the pace of the American road.
Given more than its share of monied thugs, a geography that funnels traffic over bridges (and thwarts the installing of tracks), gas prices and highway taxes that subsidize car drivers, and a recent growth surge that clogs arterial streets that once were fairly clear, Seattle is the model of a city that desperately needs but rarely heeds the call for better public transportation. As much as we need better transit systems (or just more busses), we need even more a reason not to drive.
Compared to Seattle-area traffic, traffic in and around Guadalajara, on secondary roads between cities in the central highlands, and in the farm country of Michoacan is more mannered yet more unrestricted—that is, somewhat more polite and vehemently more stylized in its execution of certain wild maneuvers. Two-lane roads become four-lane superhighways, as passing vehicles create a middle lane or lanes around the center line, gently forcing other vehicles to drive on the shoulder. Bicycles be damned.
In the cities the pace is hectic, but drivers usually obey the laws and don’t attack the pedestrians, who may jaywalk at their own risk. Although the traffic seems a bit more relaxed in Mexico than it is in the U.S., stories of kids behind the wheel, drunks on highway killing sprees, and carjackers on patrol in cities loom like threats to urge people to take the bus.
Car ownership in Mexico, where the average annual income is less than the cost of a car, means a lot more than it does in the U.S., but the extra boost in respect or status a Mexican driver might assume doesn’t come loaded with a corresponding scorn for others on the road. This may be the most difficult rule of the road for an American to accept: That people aren’t automatically inferior because they don’t drive, that people who need to or choose to take public transportation deserve a decent ride.
Not that this custom is hard to take down there, but that such civility makes it a shame to come home.
NEXT: A beauty makeover gone hilariously wrong.
Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.
While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.
To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.
Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.
While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.
And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.
Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.
This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.
A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.
No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?
Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.
“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”
NEXT: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.
YESTERDAY, we riffed on a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
That, of course, presumes that such an era is imminent, or at least that one can imagine it to be imminent.
I know I’m far from the only observer who’d like the current socio-economic-political zeitgeist to change. And I can’t think of a better way to help it happen than by making positive affirmations that it already has.
In that spirit, let’s imagine the components of the ’90s nostalgia craze, sure to hit just as soon as the rest of the nation realizes how over the era is.
And as for that other form of techno-optimism, that John Perry Barlow-propagated idea that we should just let big businesses run everything (in the name of the Internet Revolution) took a rather substantial dip in credibility around late ’99 and early ’00.
Of course, my having listed these trends under the “nostalgia” rubric implies they’re not just going away, but will roar back with a vengeance. And with the ever-shortening revival cycles, you can expect them back sooner rather than later, ensconced with all layers of hip-ironic sensibility.
Consider yourself warned.
NEXT: The wrong way to turn an Internet startup into an established respectable firm.
YESTERDAY, we began to ponder a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
For better or for worse, sex gets redefined in every generation. So let’s imagine what an early-century, post-NASDAQ-crash vision of sex might be:
Sterile modern office buildings, barren strip-mall landscapes, flavorless cuisine, unsatisfying mass entertainment, socially isolating subdivisions. Virtually everything wrong with American culture can be described with adjectives of sexual dysfunction.
Hot jazz, early rock n’ roll, western swing, blues–it’s all sex, the joys and sorrows and confusions of sex. Passion and lust-for-life are also eminently visible in the late-19th-to-mid-20th-century era’s gleaming art-deco skyscrapers, churning industrial plants, streaming railroads, gaudy Broadway spectacles, teeming downtowns, and fruited plains.
A pro-sex worldview is the needed antithesis to a worldview centered around the cold passions of power and money.
It won’t solve all the world’s problems (many of which have to do with the side effects of too-successful procreation), and can eventually lead to new problems (some of history’s most militaristic cultures (cf. Rome, Japan, precolonial India) made some of the world’s greatest erotic art).
But a neo-sexual revolution is still needed. I don’t mean the ’60s free-love schtick that got so quickly exploited by fashion marketers and predatory hustlers. And I don’t mean the dependency-building, intermediating commercial sex-biz that offers little more than loveless porn to men and masturbation toys to women.
I mean something forward-looking.
Something incorporating current sexual subcultures (suburban swingers, middle-class fetishists, gays and lesbians, etc. etc.).
Something that treats orgasms not as a merely pleasurable experience but as a way to get to know people. A way to build couples and friendships, to form virtual families as well as biological ones.
So have some great sex tonight. (If you don’t have someone to have sex with, keep looking and don’t ever stop.)
Don’t have it just for yourself. Have it to help save the world.
NEXT: Is it time to remember the ’90s yet?
EVERYBODY WANTS ‘IT.’
Everybody seems to think IT will change the world.
Nobody who knows what IT is is apparently willing to talk.
For those who tuned in late, IT (all capital letters), also code-named “Ginger,” is a mysterious invention being cleverly hyped by its creator, one Dean Kamen.
The Harvard Business School Press is said to have paid $250,000 for a book about IT, to be issued at the same time the invention itself is revealed, sometime next year. The press’s press release about the book deal claims Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and some venture capital tycoons have seen the thing but are sworn to non-disclosure agreements not to discuss it.
The release also offers some hypeworthy clues: that the invention isn’t a computer or a medical device, that the model shown to Jobs and Bezos (which may or may not be full size) can be assembled quickly from pieces carried in a large gym bag, and that it would be so revolutionary that, quoting Jobs, people will “architect cities around it.”
This clever tease campaign has led to some serious speculation and rumor-mongering.
While some mighty wacky theories have popped up, ranging from an antigravity device to a Star Trek-like teleportation machine. Some amateur sleuths have discovered patent applications in Kamen’s name for a sort of Razor scooter on steroids (one of Kamen’s past inventions was an all-terrain wheelchair); but that thing could very well be an abandoned Kamen project, or one unrelated to the “Ginger” code name.
I, however, will be your IT boy today, for I have it on very good authority indeed just exactly what IT is.
And just because you’ve been extra-nice, I’ll share it.
The definitive and accurate description comes from Kieren McCarthy at the UK tech-news site The Register:
“What can it be? What can it be? Is it a hoax?, cry the cynics. Will it stop my hair falling out? Will it make my sad, pathetic existence better for a few minutes? Well, folks, we can tell you what Ginger is. It’s a manifestation of the sick modern world where style is more important that substance, where perception is king, where people screw their neighbour to buy an overpriced bit of clothing with a particular name on and where the press report a story because other parts of the press have reported it and so it must be a story. It could also, possibly, be an interesting bit of technology. But we’re not holding our breath and we don’t care until we see it. And you shouldn’t either. Call up your wife and tell her you love her. That’s real.”
“What can it be? What can it be? Is it a hoax?, cry the cynics. Will it stop my hair falling out? Will it make my sad, pathetic existence better for a few minutes?
Well, folks, we can tell you what Ginger is.
It’s a manifestation of the sick modern world where style is more important that substance, where perception is king, where people screw their neighbour to buy an overpriced bit of clothing with a particular name on and where the press report a story because other parts of the press have reported it and so it must be a story.
It could also, possibly, be an interesting bit of technology. But we’re not holding our breath and we don’t care until we see it. And you shouldn’t either.
Call up your wife and tell her you love her. That’s real.”
MONDAY: I love jazz. I hate Jazz.
