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.

ELSEWHERE:

• The disappearing American phone booth….
• Abandoned images left behind in America’s photo booths….

Welfare and Dog Tricks
(Part 1)

by guest columnist Rachel Jacobsen

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.”

Yeah right.

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• The real Reagan legacy: Chumminess with genocidal thugs (found by Follow Me Here)….
• Another second-string tourist attraction I’d like to see, the Museum of Beverage Containers & Advertising….

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Those ever boomer-centric squares at NPR include only two post-1980 works in their “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” One of those, though, is our all-time fave….

Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

“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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Sad to say, I’ve only read 19 of last year’s 100 most-often banned books….

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.

• That boring ol’ Helvetica typeface. Only a freak of nature (in the form of a once-hot piece of graphic-design software called Kai’s Power Tools) could have rehabilitated a blase font designed for Swiss chemical-company annual reports (and made even further unhip by its use as the text face in the Penthouse magazines).
• Those ugg-ly clothes. I mean, paying $50 or more just to become a walking billboard? Overblown golf jackets repurposed as “casual Friday” office garb? And let’s not even talk about male butt-cleavage.
• The commercial pop music. After a promising start early in the decade, things devolved into–well, I needn’t tell you.
• Virtual reality, “morphing,” hyperrealistic video games, et al.
• Not just ostentatious displays of wealth, but deliberately obscene such displays. As one loyal reader recently noted, “I still see a lot of ’97 Porsches in downtown Seattle. I don’t see any new Porsches.”
• Techno-optimism. At the decade’s start, certain rave-dance promoters liked to claim the would would be a better place if it became more “tribal.” Then came Rwanda, Chechnya, Kosovo, East Timor, Nigeria, Congo, and the continuation of messes in the Mideast and Northern Ireland–all of which can be considered tribal wars of one sort or another.

  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.

• Silly-dilly financial speculation. It’s as if all the boys who came of age in the late ’80s hoarding comic books failed to learn from that bubble and invested real money on the same faulty premise.
• “X-treme” sports as a marketing tool. “Show the world you’re an individual, a risk-taker, a devil-may-care stunt fool–drink our soda pop!”

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Can’t tell your Papa Roach from your Matchbox 20? Billboard now offers three-minute online highlights from many top-selling CDs…

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:

• We are sexual beings (“from womb to tomb,” as one fetish-wear website says).
• Sex is fun. Not that aggressive fake fun of video games and theme parks, but honest fun.
• Sex is passion.
• Sex is life.
• Sex is dirty after all, and that’s part of what makes it great.
• Anti-sex is anti-life, and is the worst of America.

  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.

• Pro-sex is pro-life (and I don’t mean the anti-abortionists’ meaning of “pro-life”), and is the best of America.

  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?

ELSEWHERE:

• “The Political Leanings of Selected Cartoon Characters….”

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.”

MONDAY: I love jazz. I hate Jazz.

ELSEWHERE:

• The Early ’80s Song of the Week….
• “Things That Must Be Destroyed, Part One” (found by Fark)….

SEVEN DISGRUNTLED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES (current and former) have filed this here $5 billion race-discrimination lawsuit. They claim there’s a “plantation mentality” at the software giant, in which black employees were routinely denied promotions and raises and were subject to retaliation if they complained.

In its statements of denial, MS officials essentially said such a thing could never, ever have occurred at a company so forthright, so diversity-conscious. The routine tech-media gang of MS defenders has gone on to share this line.

Why are some people so shocked to hear about the Microsoft discrimination suit? You all oughta know by now how the software giant’s got this corporate culture in which only a certain type of person (the Gates clone wannabe) gets ahead.

The MS corporate culture was, at least indirectly, inspired by that of Nordstrom (which, you may recall, faced its own discrimination suit a few years back).

In both companies, and in whitebread Seattle society in general, the real goal of preaching “diversity” isn’t to bring more minorities into the corridors of power but to allow the white folks already there to feel better about themselves. If corporate Seattle could figure out a way to support minority rights without having to actually deal with real black (or hispanic or American Indian) folks in their own offices, they would.

One quintessential example of this hypocrisy is the awful movie version of that breast-beating, locally-written novel Snow Falling On Cedars.

It’s ostensibly about the WWII relocation camps and other racist acts against Japanese Americans in our state not too long ago. But the movie (in which no Asian-American actor is billed higher than eighth!), and the novel, are really all about raising audience sympathy for the nice white-boy hero, a noble hack journalist (and the author’s presumed alter ego).

This past week’s local Martin Luther King Day public-service ads further exemplify this faux-diversity mindset.

The ads all venerate King as a visionary, a leader, a forward-thinker (i.e., a representative of the values CEOs often imagine themselves to have). The ads then close with pats-on-the-ol’-back to the forward-thinking corporations who pitched in to pay for the ad space or time. Little or no mention is made of the real social issues King confronted, many of which still need confronting today.

So it stands to reason that a theoretical company that participated in these and other “diversity” themed self-celebrations (which theoretically might also include donations to inner-city schools, representatives at minority recruiting fairs, and internal sensitivity-training classes for white employees) might theoretically, and informally, decide it’s been doing enough to feel good about itself diversity-wise, and that it doesn’t have to go that extra, often-unpublicized step and actually demand fair treatment for actual minority persons within its own employment ranks.

If that’s what really went on, I (though perhaps not top company management) wouldn’t be the least surprised.

TOMORROW: I know what IT is. Will I tell you? Find out.

ELSEWHERE:

• How to add your own sounds to one of those talking mounted-fish robots! (found by BrainLog)….
• Somebody who actually likes the Interstate highway system….

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.

A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.

A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.

As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.

Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.

(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)

So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.

The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.

Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.

A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.

(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)

But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.

The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.

TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?

ELSEWHERE:

• A tribute to the roadside art of Chicago….

IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.

But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.

The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.

Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).

Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.

“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.

More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.

I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.

(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)

In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.

The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).

Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).

In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).

Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.

TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.

ELSEWHERE:

• The New Yorker reveals the hidden connection between Ed McMahon and the Veg-O-Matic….

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A LITTLE OVER A MONTH AGO, this virtual space contained a listing of certain groups of people who might consider themselves to be intrinsically superior to you, but who are not. (Go ahead and read it now if you haven’t; we’ll wait for you.)

This, in contrast, is a listing of groups of people you might consider yourself to be intrinsically superior to, but which you are not.

Here, therefore and with no further ado, are People You’re Not Better Than:

• TV viewers.
• Residents of small towns who didn’t move there from a bigger city.
• Adherents of religions other than yours.
• Members of races other than yours.
• Members of genders other than yours.
• People who shop at Wal-Mart.
• People who shop at non-coop grocery stores.
• People who listen to radio stations not affiliated with NPR.
• People who listen to ocuntry music (and not just that hipster-acceptable “alt.country” either).
• Fans of major sports teams.
• People who shop at thrift stores out of necessity, not fashion.
• Reader’s Digest subscribers.
• People without college degrees.
• People with college degrees in purely vocational fields.
• People who don’t have their own websites.
• People who don’t have home computers.
• People who don’t have homes.
• People whose drugs of choice (including non-chemical highs) are different from yours.
• Non-users.
• Julia Roberts fans.
• Carnivores.
• Clients of traditional western medicine.
• Non-car owners.
• Domestic-car owners.
• People who lived in White Center prior to 1998.
• People who live in the midwest or the south.
• People who wear polyester non-ironically.
• People who go, or have gone, to public schools.
• Romance novel readers.
• People younger than you.
• Athletes, brainiacs, and goody-two-shoeses.
• Cheerleaders, beauty queens, and models.
• Other females who have more sexual partners than you, or who simply look or act “cheap.”
• Other males who look or act less “macho” than you.
• Heterosexuals.
• That co-worker who seems to actually enjoy that shit job you share.
• Grunt-level employees of the farming, timber, manufacturing, transportation, and food-service industries.
• Men with pot bellies.
• Women with implants.
• Fast- and processed-food eaters.
• Bud Light drinkers.
• People who look, act, or talk too weird.
• People who look, act, or talk too “normal.”

MONDAY: Imagining, in a little more detail, a successor paper to the Seattle Union Record.

ELSEWHERE:

• Proof that the Web brings back everything great from pop-cult history–a tribute to the greatest achievement of post-1950 radio, Monitor! (Think of it as NPR without the Volvo-snob attitude problem)….
• Free the haggis smugglers!…

BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN year-2001 computer bugs, this will be the first MISCmedia entry for the year of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

So what might you, my loyal (in your own fashion) readers, expect here over the coming months?

• Some more fiction experiments like the one serialized last week.
• Even more fun at MISCmedia Radio, our 24/7 streaming Net-music service. Perhaps even a second channel, devoted to the eclectic and exotic from all over.
• Attempts to play around with the online column’s currently standardized format (a single topic a day, running about the same length). Maybe I’ll return to my former threat to turn the daily site into something closer to a “weblog” or something close to the multi-topic format of the old Stranger column.
• Pieces of the new MISCmedia book (a photo-essay look at the city I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel with) as they emerge.
• Either more or fewer attempts to turn a financial profit from the site. It’s pretty clear the site’s current business model (or poor excuse for one) isn’t gonna work; but no new schemes (which might involve ads, subscriptions, special merchandise offers, etc.) have gelled in my viscous head.

  Many folk these days are claiming pure “content” websites, as business propositions, are molding corpses from 1998. I believe, now that the stupid money has largely abandoned the field, we can all get back to the work of figuring out just what might work in this crazy, still-new medium. Remember that broadcast radio was around almost a decade before the first national commercial networks started; and TV’s developers spent the whole of the 1940s working out the medium’s operational shticks.

• Possible new directions for the MISCmedia print mag. Scrapping the free distribution has put the print mag more or less in the black, but without real growth opportunities as it’s currently constructed.

  To make it more than a “personal zine,” albeit a professionally written and designed one, will require a move up to a thicker, slicker, and possibly more infrequent format. Perhaps something along the lines of the great old humor magazines (Punch, the original New Yorker); though for that I’d need some outside investment and a lot more content contributors.

• More of that “fun” factor, so easy to spot yet so elusive to define. Looking back at the past year’s entries, I see too many that, in retrospect, feel as if they were filler items, laboriously ground out to fit a self-imposed quota of work. There’ll be far less of that this year, I promise.
• More stuff by other people, adding the ever-valuable variety of points-O-view. Send your stuff in today. (Yes, we’re still picky and won’t run everything.)
• More chocolatey goodness.

TOMORROW: Two books, two different “radical” interpretations of the WTO protests.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Gore cared more about chads than about blacks….”
• That unsung savior of western civilization, beer! (found by Fark)….

IN OUR REGULAR EFFORT to copy whatever every other pundit large and small is doing, we hereby offer our own take on this week’s second most overhyped media topic (after the continuing post-election fun): The WTO Riots One Year Later.

The chief result, to these eyes, is a whole New Positivity among leftoids and progressives who, for as long as a quarter century, to believe everything they really wanted from society was hopeless, that all you could do was protest.

Initially, that was what the anti-WTO affair would be: Just a lot of people protesting really loudly against the biennial convention of the World Trade Organization (which, by striving to make governments do whatever corporations want, had become an all-purpose villain for anyone who had anything bad to say about a social order dictated by markets and profits).

It just happened that a lot more folks than anybody knew had something bad to say about such an order.

The sheer massiveness and breadth of the anti-WTO groups, and the degree of organization and choreography behind them, gave those 50,000 marchers, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers across North America and Europe, hope that the situation could actually be changed. That People Power really could mass up and stop, or at least call into question, the relentless reorganizing of the whole world around “market forces.”

Subsequent actions haven’t had the immediate impact that the anti-WTO affair did; but that’s only to have been expected. The AFL-CIO brass and some established environmental lobbies, for instance, wanted no part of the outsider protests at the US political conventions or with the Nader for President campaign; they still think they can get at least part of their agenda by continuing to Work Within The System.

And the Way-New Left that coalesced around Nader still has work to do in welcoming more true diversity (i.e., encouraging the participation of farmers, carnivores, and males without ponytails).

This ebb-and-flow, solidaritywise, is all to be expected. One chief aspect of the anti-WTO worldview is the battle between two visions of the future–the WTO’s, in which every activity on Earth would be controlled for the benefit of CEOs and financiers; and the protesters’, in which all manner of individuals, nations, and other groupings would maintain the right to forge their own priorities. Many of these are conflicting, or appear to be (jobs vs. environment, jobs vs. other people’s jobs, free expression vs. cultural tradition, etc.).

But that, as I wrote last year, is part of the whole point.

We, as a nation and a planet, can agree to disagree. We can forge our own paths, our own alliances, our own visions. We don’t have to accept an existence dictated by the single-minded whims of the Dow and NASDAQ. We can, as the X-Files movie said, “fight the future.”

We’re taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy.

TOMORROW: Amid all this, Tom Frank still finds plenty to bitch about.

ELSEWHERE:

• Let’s learn sex-organ synonyms with Aristophanes! (found by Arts & Letters Daily)…
• Discussion-board writers ganging up mercilessly on Nader….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

Favorite Videos and Worst Job

by guest columnist Ryan

(ED.’S NOTE: One of the email lists I’m on had a topic thread last month, in which members posted the books they’d least likely let anyone borrow. Thanks to the well-known factor of topic drift, that led to people listing their favorite videos. Ryan [last name redacted at his request] went a step further and added an additional topic-drift step, as printed by permission below.)

Delivered-To: clark@speakeasy.org

Reply-To: [email address redacted]

From: “Ryan” [email address redacted]

To: wallace-l@waste.org

Subject: RE: wallace-l: Top Videos/Degrading Job

Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:03:11 -0500

X-Priority: 3 (Normal)

Importance: Normal

Sender: owner-wallace-l@waste.org

TOP VIDEOS:

Apocalypse Now

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Dazed and Confused

The Usual Suspects

The Harder They Come

…and anything by Stanley Kubrick (esp. 2001)

MOST DEGRADING JOB:

Feel free to disregard this, but I must vent.

I worked for a company called DSMax. They call themselves an advertising and marketing firm. They are lying. I could probably write a book about what was horrible about this job, but here’s a handy list instead.

1. 4:45 a.m. Wake up, shower, put on mandatory shirt and tie.

2. 5:45 a.m.-7 a.m. Commute 1.25 hours to DSMax branch office in Norristown, PA.

3. 7 a.m.-9 a.m. Engage in motivational cheering sessions and spirit-building exercises with fellow “representatives.” (“Where we going?” “To the top!” “WHERE WE GOING?” “TO THE TOP!” “When?” “Now!” “When?” “Now!” “WHEN WHEN WHEN?” “NOW NOW NOW!!!” And other humiliations too numerous and depraved to list. Let me just say there was “hand jive” involved.) Listen in quiet horror as co-workers enthusiastically discuss pro wrestling/soap operas/fanatical, cultish commitment to DSMax/plans for all the money they’ll make once they get promoted to branch manager. Take note of surprising number of co-workers who’ve quit since you started. Envy them.

4. 9 a.m. Commute back to Philadelphia in order to walk door-to-door in the run-down ghetto business districts of West Philly. In December. Peddling long-distance phone service to local small business owners (i.e. hair salons, corner stores, dive bars (people drinking straight vodka at 10 a.m.), garages, endless parade of delis and other shithole restaurants, etc.) Do this until 5 p.m. Return to “office” (really just one large rumpus room) during rush hour.

4a. Locate potential client (e.g., sucker). Check soul at door. “Pitch.” Trudge, defeated, out door OR (rarely) attempt have customer sign multiple contracts and make multiple phone calls to complete sale. Trudge

forlornly out door when customer informs you that he/she “don’t have time for this shit.”

5. 6 p.m. Return to office. Ring small bell, large bell, or gong, according to your sales performance for the day. Calculate commission. Choke back tears at realization that commission will not pay rent and there is NO BASE PAY. Gather round for another session of cheering and practice pitching (just follow your five steps and your eight steps!–DSMax’s keys to success, in addition to trite little coffee mug aphorisms and the sort of pithy acronyms that Judge Judy would find clever: KISS–“Keep It Simple Stupid”). Fend off barrage of entreaties by over-zealous co-workers to attend post-work DSMax get-togethers at nearby Applebee’s.

6. 8 p.m. Return home. Microwave taste-free/nutrition-free food because you are too tired, beaten to cook. Complain to sig. other.

7. 9 p.m. Pass out on couch in front of mindless television.

8. 1 a.m. Wake up on couch. Get up and go to actual bed. Cry self back to sleep.

9. Repeat steps 1-8.

I lasted five weeks. I probably made a total of $1,500.

A part of me died that I will never get back.

TOMORROW: Unionizing a dot-com, an impossible dream?

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE:

• Meat: You can eat it, you can wear it on your head!…