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IT’S A LONG ENTRY TODAY, and it starts with a question:
WHAT WILL BECOME of “alternative” culture? Until last Tuesday, the prospect of a recession seemed to mean we could all go back to being grumpy worrywarts, without all that new-economy exuberance getting in the way. But now along comes war-lust, and the potential revival of censorship and repression of dissent, not to mention changes in the whole social zietgeist.
Remember, WWII changed American culture even before the U.S. military got into it. In came the aggressive comedy of Abbott & Costello and Bugs Bunny. Out went the lighter antics of W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.
Even before the hijackings, there’d been talk for a year or two among the culture pundits of a “new sincerity,” spread among (or at least corporately targeted at) a new generation grown weary of cynicism and distanced irony. Among the trend’s purported examples: Dawson’s Creek, Lilith Fair, the WTO protests, Martha Stewart, Oprah, bottled water (as an alternative to fizzy drinks), the new soft-R&B divas, and those achingly cloying boy bands. When Tablet launched, one year ago next week, it sold itself as the sincere, prosocial, community-supportive alternative to what its creators claimed was The Stranger’s arrogance and irrelevance.
Will the new social and economic shudders further this trend? Quite possibly. Even among the potential opponents of a potential new war, the schtick’s gonna have to be about working together and working hard.
And will the culture of individual excess (the rich person’s equivalent to hip irony) become seen as not merely wasteful but unpatriotic?
I’ll tell you what I don’t want to see, and that’s a “Return to the Spirit of the Sixties.” A lot of tactics simply didn’t work then and won’t work now. Counterculture separatism, square-bashing, drug-assisted pomposity, and general rudeness won’t do anything except make a few self-promoters famous.
Indeed: Separatism, the belief that one (and perhaps one’s close circle of compatriats) constitute some superior species, is one of the poisonous ideas terrorist leaders always exploit.
WHICH BRINGS US to our next sermon topic: Who do YOU hate?
No, I’m not talking about who those people out in bad old Mainstream America hate.
I’m not talking about who your parents hate.
I’m not talking about who the guy next to you hates.
I’m talking about you. Yes, you.
It’s easy for members of one or another “alternative” social niche to admit how wrong it is to hate ethnic minorities, gays, women, and the poor.
But what about your own attitudes toward those who are different from you?
Do you ever sneer with disdain at people who eat meat, or at people who don’t smoke pot?
Do you dehumanize heterosexuals, men, suburbanites, hippies, bimbos, southerners, mall shoppers, tourists, headbangers, lawyers, bureaucrats, business executives, polyester wearers, pina colada drinkers, people who listen to non-NPR radio stations, or people who shop at non-co-op grocery stores?
Then you’re just being human. You’re not a superior species to the rest of homo sapiens; nobody is. But a lot of people like to imagine they are. Some use religion, nationalism, ethnicity, or caste as their excuse. Others use fashion sense, arcane knowledge, or claims of higher “enlightenment.”
The real enlightened ones aren’t the ones who boast of their separateness from humanity, but the ones who realize their connection to humanity, to the web of life.
The illusion of separateness is especially prevalent in times of war-lust. Every warring nation propagandizes that it’s the real greatest nation on earth, and that those opposing nations are vermin needing to be eradicated or heathen needing to be “civilized.”
That’s why a Unabomber can callously take lives and then claim it’s all to make a better world. That’s why combatants in Belfast can aim guns on schoolgirls. That’s why a handful of true believers, who may or may not be connected to similar cells elsewhere in the world, can devote their lives toward a mega-scale suicide bombing.
We need no more of that.
What we need, now more than ever, is to reconnect, to touch.
Build movements. Get closer to your neighborhood, your community. Go see bands, concerts, plays—anything that’s live. Take a class. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Make love as often as possible (safely and consensually). If you’ve got kids, hug them early and often. Have a good meal, a good drink, and/or a good laugh. Get involved in something greater than mere money and power.
Call it the new sincerity if you wish. Or just call it the best way to keep our species going, by breaking down some of the barriers between people and between cultures.
AN EMAIL CORRESPONDENT suggested I look up September 1, 1939, a poem by W.H. Auden about the reactions he witnessed in NYC to the outbreak of WWII in Europe:
“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”
Which Loss Is Worse?
by guest columnist Jenniffer Velasco
Everyone has losses, each one unique. It can make one stronger, or it can make one a victim.
For me, it’s the feeling that something is missing permanently.
It’s too difficult to re-examine the overwhelming losses in my life. I’m too busy right now, creating a life from pure dreams and fantasy.
So I leave journal-like writings that ache and bleed… still.
I tried to write in the Arboretum’s Japanese garden, but it was so zen; too peaceful, too calm. I ended up forgetting about loss; pretending I was a coy fish.
I attempted to write about loss in a coffee shop, but it would be too intense to cry in public. I’m so focused on plans, schemes, schmooze, booze, friends, art, and, oh yeah, life.
My apartment is open and friendly; yet the space where I sleep celebrates my sacred losses. One is of my failure to see my grandma, who raised me and protected me from the bad men. The other is the loss of being a mother.
In my bedroom, I’ve placed a painting of my grandmother Lola, half-young and half-old, and a painting of myself holding a child in my arms before giving him up for adoption at age 17.
EXCERPTS FROM OLD JOURNALS:
Aug. 28, 1993
Brandyn:
It’s been a month since I last held you. It had been so difficult that day. You looked so beautiful. How could anyone with a heart give you up without feeling?
But in my tears and heartbreak, I still put your well-being first. This is what matters to me: That I’ll know for sure you’ll be OK and well taken care of. In my ease of giving you up, I am giving up the chance to know or feel love for you. Your love will be for other parents.
I’ve been through a lot with you. You were born three and a half months before your time. I wanted to keep you. I fell in love and saw you in the prenatal hospital often, holding you for hours at a time, just enjoying my few moments.
It hurts so much to love you, knowing I’m going to lose you in a matter of time.
But I’ll tell you this: I was never afraid to love.
Sept. 7, 1998
This month has been testing.
I’ve been working hard, trying to save money for a ticket to the Phillipines. My mission was to see Lola (a Filipino word for “Grandma”). She is my mom’s mom.
I’ve been through an attempted muging for $400, the only way to buy a plane ticket. My Washington ID has been lost.
I waited for six hours with my dad, racing against time. The clock ticked away. I fought the passport agency–crying, yelling, hating everyone. I ended up having to drive to my old high school to get my freshman records, just to verify that I’m an American, I’ve lived here all my life.
In all this, I was thinking only of Lola. I needed to see those kind eyes of hers just one more time. I felt sick inside with fire and anxiety; trying to cut the red tape.
I finally relaxed, thinking all the proper papers are in order. I was finally going to see Lola.
As I was cleaning my closet, my mother called from New York, telling me Lola was dead.
I HAD KNOWN the love of my Lola. The fried rice with eggs in the morning, Sleeping next to her at night, arguing–me in broken Tagalog, her in her brittle English. She died thinking of me.
But with my child, I felt a slower grieving. I was too young and naive about my love for him; waiting for the hope the he’d look for me to explain how much I’ve wept for him. Every Christmas, every birthday, every Mother’s Day, every baby I see reminds me of my life without him.
The sun is coming up. It’s Thursday, I think. Many pains have carved my existence; yet I don’t identify with them.
I am at this moment, not by what I’ve lost but by what I’ve gained.
A research study publicized in July claimed conservative Republicans have worse dreams than persons of other political persuasions.
Maybe it’s due to the ol’ “angry white male” syndrome, in which rabid-right commentators try to whip up their secular congregations into all number of extreme fears (including but not limited to fears of women, gays, blacks, English professors, big cities and the people who live in them, civil servants, immigrants, nasty music, and any politician who doesn’t toe the GOP party line).
Or maybe the wealthy individuals who comprise the Right’s real beneficiary caste have more stress-related nightmares due to their supposedly more complicated lives.
Whatever the cause for this situation (if it even really exists), it’s a cool excuse to fantasize about what dreams and/or nightmares might typically befall humans of various political persuasions:
This person’s nightmare: That someone might start taking that line about We The People seriously.
This person’s nightmare: That someone might start taking that line about not serving both God and Mammon seriously.
This person’s nightmare: That too many workers might not want to remain workers.
This person’s nightmare: Either a hemp boll weevil or the threat that someone, someday, might actually want to live any differently.
This person’s nightmare: Finding himself in the Permatemp Caste.
As a former Marysville middle-school boy, I paid particular attention to the case of a teacher lady who lived in Marysville (but worked in nearby Mukilteo).
Second-grade teacher Susan Lemery, 37, was arrested in late June. She was charged with having sex with one 14-year-old boy and fondling another. Both alleged partners are friends of her own teenage son.
I can assure you I had no specific private fantasies about any of my instructors during my years of tender budding manhood. But it’s easy to imagine that I could have, given the right circumstances and the right instructor. Cross-generational desire (in both directions, and among all gender-persuasions) is one of the perfectly natural sexual occurrances. Countless adolescents have dreamed of the experienced awakener who would gently guide them toward intimate awakening. Countless grownups have yearned for the fresh-faced plaything who would help them recapture their lost youth.
But once reality sets in, there are all sorts of power and control games going on; particularly if the boy or girl is emotionally malleable and manipulable (as so many boys and girls that age are).
Even harsher power and control games begin once a relationship of this sort becomes public knowledge, as a community’s well-meaning adults rush in to proclaim their outrage and cry for strict punishment and social control mechanisms to prevent any future such abuses of power.
And thus it will always be in America, unless by some miracle American adults learn to be more grown up.
By that, I mean that we collectively accept that all these desires exist and learn to exist with them; concocting wholesome and supportive ways for these fantasies to be addressed, without turning any real-life kids into commodities or stunting their emotional growth.
And no, I don’t know what that would be. But it would start with the acceptance and understanding of human nature, not its inhibition or suppression.
I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE letters and emails asking me to stop using the word “yuppie” in the online column.
So, at least for today, I’ll use a different term to describe the only people Seattle’s political and media elites care about–the Monoculture.
In the Monoculture aesthetic, everyone who lives in Seattle (or at least everyone who deserves to live here) is affluent, childless, in an office-type profession, educated yet decidedly non-intellectual, “culturally aware” yet relentlessly middlebrow, “active in the community” yet devoutly pro-business, a devout attender of high-volume, high-priced restaurants, and a strong supporter of “diversity” just as long as everybody looks and behaves identically blandly.
Entire retail empires, publications, and political campaigns are built on this dubious premise.
And now, there’s a slick free monthly, Colors NW, showing that you don’t have to be of pale Euro descent to be part of the Monoculture.
The magazine’s second issue, out now, has a Bon Marche ad on the back (why, by the way, doesn’t the Bon still have a real website?), smaller inside ads for mortgage consultants and liposuction clinics, and features within about the Film Festival, a dot-com executive, and pricey restaurants.
The Bon model is Asian American. The liposuction ad’s before-and-after model and the dot-com exec are both African American. The restaurant reviews hype “upscale soul food” and “down home Japanese.” Otherwise, they’re hard to distinguish from similar features in Monoculture-obsessed media.
“Yeah,” you might be saying if you’ve already read the mag, “but what about the cover story on the history of Asian American political activism in Seattle? Or the profile of Samoan hiphop DJ Kutfather? Or the little back-page essay by a Seattle U student advisor on the identity confusion resulting from her own half-white, half-Filipino heritage?”
Yes, the mag has all those things. But these three pieces depict their subjects as ideal citizens of Seattle-The-Good. Even the Asian-activism story is written as a tale of earnest progressives striving to rectify wrongs that all nice Reagan Democrats can agree are wrong (racist ad images, for example).
And in the context of the magazine’s more consumerist material, the profiled activists get the same overall aura you see in corporate-sponsored Martin Luther King Day ads. That is, they become seen as out-of-the-box-thinkin’ political entrepreneurs, the social-justice equivalents of “new economy” CEOs.
But that’s not necessarily all that bad. After all, there’s something to be said for the idea that ethnic striving oughta be about making it, succeeding in the melting-pot and taking pride in that success.
Even if it means conforming to the white-dominated zeitgeist of the Monoculture, and not to the “true diversity” zeitgeist of white lefties such as myself.
IN OTHER NEWS:A tiny news brief reveals what critics of “get tuff” welfare policies have long claimed–that draconian aid regulations cost more in paperwork and enforcement costs than they save in denied benefits.
NEXT:“The arts” as an economic development scheme.
ELSEWHERE:
Some folk in Boston are archiving those “we’ll set your poem to music” records. The ones they don’t consider good enough to reissue on CD, they’ve posted online (found by The Interstellar Cafe)….
THE DEMISE OF PUNK PIONEER JOEY RAMONE, of lymphoma at age 49, struck me more than that of Elvis Presley (at an even younger age).
Not just because, unlike Presley, I’d actually seen the Ramones live several times, but because of their respective places in the advancement of rock as an art form.
Presley hadn’t been the first white white singer to copy a hard R&B style. But he was the first to make a huge business from it. The process of his schtick was to bleach the blackness out of black music, to make it just acceptable enough for white consumption while still being “wicked” enough to draw prudes’ ire.
When that territory got too crowded, he turned on himself in a series of self-deconstruction movies. This inward obsession finally manifested itself in drug-influenced lethargy and obesity.
Joey and his fellow faux-bros. emerged on the scene as Presley had disappeared into the recursive trap of self-parody. The Ramones took self-parody as one of the four corners of their group persona (along with ’60s garage-rock, Phil Spector-Brill Building pop, and biker leather wear).
But instead of retreating further into self-referentiality, they started by jokingly depicting themselves as cretins and pinheads, then expanded outward with a hard, fast recapturing of the vital energy that had been sucked out of rock by the post-1960 Presley (and by flower power, Sgt. Pepper, prog rock, soft rock, mullet-head metal, etc.). As Joey allegedly once said, “We wanted to play rock n’ roll, not drum solos.”
Along the way, they reinvigorated rock, launched (not singlehandedly but almost) the punk revolution, directly and/or indirectly inspired thousands of bands (yes, including many here), and churned out dozens of mini-masterpieces of two-minute, three-chord perfection.
While Presley turned ever-inward until he died alone, Ramone kept spinning out toward the allegedly-real world. Joey eventually (at least indirectly) renounced the just-kidding aspect of his original schtick with the anti-Reagan song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” In it, the singer who used to sport swastikas on his leather jacket as a cheap anti-PC gag got serious to denounce a president who’d become too forgiving about the real Nazis.
Also, nowhere in Ramone’s originals or his carefully-chosen cover recordings did he ever pretend to be black. (Ex-bandmate Dee Dee Ramone did, on a misguided rap CD, but that’s another tale.) A strange ’90s book called Hole In Our Soul saw this lack of minstrelism as a renunciation of the whole R&B tradition and, hence, of everything wonderful and heartfelt about America’s cultural heritage. I think that’s bunk. What Joey and his punk pals and proteges did was find themselves enough heart and, yes, soul in the garage-rock heritage, and could express themselves while respecting black music enough to not try to take it over.
P.S.: The afternoon Ramone died, I happened to be at the Museum of Flight and happened to see U2’s elaborately painted private jet taking off from Boeing Field following their Tacoma Dome gig. U2 would never have had that jet, let alone a career, if it hadn’t been for Ramone–one who, at least publicly, decried the whole material-excess lifestyle and rock-star aesthetic U2 now relishes.
NEXT: A chant, re: The art of Art Chantry.
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?
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!
