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Haunted Ground
by Guest Columnist Donna Barr
ASK ANYONE–the students and off-duty sailors and shipyard workers that hang out at the local coffee bars. Even the guy at the once-a-month Gay Bingo, that is held along with a spaghetti supper in the basement of the Episcopalian Church, the guy that just moved up from San Francisco.
They’ll all tell you Bremerton is the most surreal town they’ve ever known.
Bremerton isn’t really a consolidated town; it’s made up of different populations, the students at Olympic College, the floating drug-dealers barking like seals downtown, the poor down west and the not-so-poor up east.
In Bremerton “West” is actually south of the bridges, “East” actually north. Callow used to be a village on its own, like Manette, before they were both assimilated by Bremerton. Now one is a street, the other a neighborhood.
There aren’t any ethnic neighborhoods in this town; everybody is all mixed in together. At a block-watch party, you’re likely to be served chicken adobo, Cajun barbeque chicken, and chicken-and-rice soup. If there’s been a sale on chicken down at the Callow Safeway, there will probably be lemon chicken and chicken-foot soup.
On Callow is the world’s smallest native-people’s reservation. It takes up about of a city block, standing out among the surrounding houses by tall second-growth Douglas firs. It’s been reserved because it’s a graveyard.
The graves are marked by low stones, that lie between the trailers of the mobile-home park. The locals have always lived with their dead. There were a lot of locals here at one time, and they left a lot of dead, but this is all that’s left of their graves. The rest have been gouged up and paved over. You’re better off if you’re psychicly deaf; at night this town walks like Edinburgh.
On the Bremerton map, a very faint cross was used to mark the reservation; you’ll have to look hard to see it. Now it’s marked by a very faint bow-and-arrow. Some kind of politics went on, but I don’t know what.
The city graveyard on the south side has graves in it from the 1800s. Some of the people in it fought in the Civil War–there’s a little walled plot for them. The graveyard dog is a big black dumb Labrador named Brutus. If you call him The Graveyard Dog, you have to make sure you mean the LIVE one–otherwise, people get spooked.
When we came home from a funeral, we found the big fool locked up in our back yard, looking all confused and stupid. He wore a tag, so we called his owner, who came to get him, and had a hard time driving away with a big happy cloud of Brutus jumping all over the front seat with him.
If you walk in the city graveyard in the southeast corner in full daylight, you may catch a glimpse of a tall heavy man wearing a black suit and a white waistcoat out of the corner of your eye. If you turn and look at him, he’s not there. The old guys in town say that if you go down to the shipyard late at night and watch the mothballed ships, the old dead air-craft carriers and destroyers, you’ll see the crews lined up, faintly, in the moonlight.
The politics in Bremerton are pretty surreal, too. Water’s cheap, sewer’s expensive–Bremerton is paying for Gorst’s rebuilt sewer system.
The downtown is gutted, because everybody who’s holding the old, asbestos-laden houses won’t sell until they get full market prices, so no projects to improve the waterfront or the downtown can go forward. The businesses went to Silverdale, where the malls were built in the middle of an important salmon watershed–and get flooded out every time there’s a heavy rain.
Ha ha ha.
The boys catch bullheads in the bay and make “meat-puppets” out of them, partially gutting them with pocket-knives or nail-scissors, so they don’t die too quickly, then sticking their fingers through the torn bellies and making them “talk.” Or they catch the fish on lines, then whip them to death on the surface, laughing their heads off.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 2)
by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley
YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started explaining why he’d first considered moving out of central Seattle; first to Rainier Beach and then to Kenmore. Today, more of this.)
AT THIS SAME TIME, rents were on the ascent at an ear-popping rate. Downtown had begun its conversion to the mold-formed Large American City it has since become, sidewalks cleared of humanity’s unsightly flotsom and jetsom by city hall so that the important people–the shoppers–could feel completely comfortable bringing their wads of freshly minted greenbacks down Pine and Pike, hurling their dollars into franchise clothing and home accessory boutiques by the armload, clogging the arteries of their bodies with another overpriced dinner out and the arteries of the city with yet another overpriced rolling status flag.
The heart of a city, its true essence, cannot, I believe, be found in its polarities. When we look at our environment through the skewing lenses of rage or lust, righteousness or nihilism, that environment becomes no more than a reflection of us. This sort of solopsism is both pathetic and dangerous.
And for me, it was easily remedied: We simply moved.
If I could no longer take a measure of my city’s soulfulness because I could no longer see its subtleties, clearly the thing to do was to get another vantage. This we did.
It worked. South Seattle wasn’t even on maps of town. Finding our way to the furthest reaches of upper Rainier Beach for the first time was thoroughly discombobulating; and for a week after the move I felt a sense of displacement that bordered on the existential.
It was much more of an ordeal to, say, walk to the store than I had experienced for perhaps fifteen years. And I became much more reliant on my automobile than I had ever hoped to be, a reliance I still admit to with great shame.
To be unhappy where you are in the world, geographically or otherwise, often results in a gradual abstraction, a reduction of that world to the very polarities by which it can no longer be truly lived in; the unhappy reality is consumed by a fantasy of other, better, more fulfilling, and satisfying worlds. By contrast, to be comfortable and at peace with the area in which you live, physically or otherwise, is to have made some distinction between the real and the illusory.
In a sense, to have moved outside of that dense urban area to the peripheral neighborhoods and eventually to an even more suburban address, I quickly gained a sincere appreciation for the amenities of both. A simple change of environment, and not only did the new place look good, the old place looked pretty good, as well.
I was born in Seattle, and, while I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, I have lived in this city since my late adolescence. I’ve always thought that people tended by degrees to live principally in the future or the past, mentally speaking, with a rare few who could be legitimately said to live in the present, in the moment. I myself definitely have my mind on what lies ahead, perhaps sometimes to the point of escapism.
It is perhaps for this reason that I only rarely have any wistfulness for Seattle as I have known it. I find that sort of nostalgia more haunting than comforting. Many of my friends, fellow artists, have left here in the hope that they might find something approaching fame or fortune.
I like to think that what they really got was a bigger world. Although my family and I will not always live in the suburbs, not always live in America even, it seems to me that a suburb can widen the world as well as any other dream.
MONDAY: Why old fake architecture’s better than new fake architecture.
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 1)
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE where my family and I live, which is in Kenmore, I’ll often get a chuckle or smirk, and some reference to the general grimness of suburban life.
It’s no coincidence that this reaction is more typical to people still living in Seattle’s denser neighborhoods. For all the snideness that urban hipsters have traditionally had for the idea of suburbs, it took a move there for me to understand that, while they are clearly disasterous from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, nothing is all bad.
It took a move there for me to like Seattle again.
If there is an exodus of urban hipster types from the heart of Seattle into the ‘burbs, it begs the question of whether Seattle in fact has a heart at all; it goes without saying that it has no brain, another topic altogether.
If it is true that the creative types that have historically formed the core of Seattle’s artier neighborhoods are being driven out, a fact only an idiot would refute, then perhaps it indicates a few things beyond a flush economy and the cookie cutter tastes that such an economy can manifest. For some, perhaps you really do need to get away from something to appreciate it.
We moved out of the downtown area for some really simple reasons. I had been growing steadily wearier of the area we had been for over four years, one block away from Harborview, the constant wail of sirens rattling the windows of our basement apartment which, while spacious (if oddly laid out—it had earlier in the century been the building maids’ quarters) was perpetually dim.
The other residents of the neighborhood, a term I use very loosely here, were largely poor, ethnic-minority, coping with the inner city realities they lived with in a variety of manners.
Our building was in fact an anomoly, its residents typically youngish, white, professional or arts-related in occupation. The area’s poverty and ethnic diversity were themselves certainly not factors in our growing itchiness to get out. Rather, the hopelessness that can accompany poverty, an almost willful ignorance and a deadeyed lethargy seemed to be infecting my own perception.
I had lived in the city since I was a teenager, and in all that time, it had never seemed so stupid and ugly as it was beginning to seem to me then.
This reached an apex when a drunken man threw a huge piece of concrete through our living room window. I was home alone when it happened, and he just stood there, swaying and muttering about his son, how his son had done it. He swiveled around and lurched off slowly, and a quick phone call to SPD had him in custody within minutes.
I had not at any point been afraid, and had been angry only momentarily, as he had walked by me half a minute after the big smash. I had called 911 and dashed upstairs out to the street, and as he ambled by, he had no idea who I was, no idea what he had just done.
He walked by stinking and wretched, and my heart was broken for me and for him.
He would never get well, and neither would the city.
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.
And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.
Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).
Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.
When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.
I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”
Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.
But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.
The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.
But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.
(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)
Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.
Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:
“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”
Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.
TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.
IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.
THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.
Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.
Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.
And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.
They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.
But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.
The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:
Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.
So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?
Yes.
If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).
You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:
As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.
As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.
And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.
TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we discussed the growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Today, we continue an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
By the latter part of the decade there were the centrally-controlled Prodigy and AOL, with their sloooow graphics and censored chatrooms.
Now, there are at least enough jobs to go around for college graduates (i.e., those who could still get into college after the ’80s decimation of student aid), for nice suburban scions who haven’t gotten stuck into manufacturing or farm labor.
All you had to do to proclaim your radicalness was to distribute posters of U.S. politicians with Hitler moustaches. You didn’t have to organize any coalitions, propose any agendas beyond protesting, or reach out to any constituency beyond your own drinking buddies.
Indeed, you could boast that you were “too political” to get involved in anything as morally impure as politics.
Eighties radicalism wasn’t about getting anything done. It was just about proving your own superiority over all those know-nothing squares out there in the Real America. Today’s way-new left appears to be getting beyond this tired nonsense, thankfully.
It also helped forge a vague unity-of-purpose among a vast assortment of subcultures, from drag queens and performance artists to sex-yoga teachers and health-food elitists. With the years, many of these groups drifted apart from one another, or just plain drifted apart.
In fact, there’s a lot I miss about the ’80s Seattle I hated then. The money-mania was not quite so pronounced; there were more low-rent spaces; there seemed to be more non-life-controlling jobs around; downtown stil had Penney’s and didn’t have penne.
But do I want the ’80s back? Hell no! I’d rather be forced to listen to nonstop Linda Ronstadt ballads for eternity (which, circa 1982, was what I was doing in office-drone jobs).
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for the Bell System.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Tomata du Plenty, 52, who’d cofounded Ze Whiz Kidz (a gay-camp theater troupe that pretty much established the funky-but-chic tone of Seattle nonprofit theater) and the Tupperwares (a drag vocal trio that included the man who inherited and closed the Dog House restaurant), before heading off to be an L.A. punk rocker, a Miami painter, and assorted other roles in assorted other towns.
LAST SATURDAY, those wacky petrifiers of ephemeral art forms at the Experience Music Project held a museum-piece tribute to that one musical/subcultural genre one would never expect to ever see turned into a museum piece, the skate punks.
Those late-’70s-early-’80s skater boyz had been vilified by many “intellectual punks” at the time. In this scenario, the Black Flag/TSOL/Germs gang had singlehandedly turned punk rock in L.A. (and by 1981 in the U.S. as a whole) from an attempted populist musical revolution into an exclusive, often violent, “hardcore” clique dominated by white male suburbanites of questionable intelligence and serious drinking-drugging-fighting proclivities.
But that young white male suburban demographic was just what ad agencies craved a decade later.
Skate punk’s somewhat more respectable next generation, and the overlapping snowboarding and “beach sports” scenes, became favorite iconographies for the selling of everything from soda pop to cereal.
Skate punk has become the illegitimate parent of “good” and “evil” twins–the clean-cut, corporate “rebellion” of the ESPN X Games and the Hollywood-promoter-contrived, white-trash trash talk of the “aggro” music scene.
And the skater doodz were from L.A., which is always a geopolitical plus to the marketing biz. TV networks, record labels, and ad agencies forever want impressionable teens across the globe to believe their own lives are empty; that you’re not a true “rebel” unless you look, talk, and behave just like someone in N.Y./L.A./S.F. is doing; and that the only way to keep up with these style dictates is to keep buying what you’re told to buy.
(But on the flip side: While many U.K. and N.Y. punk bands got released on major labels, L.A. skate punkers had to rely on feisty indie outfits like Tommy Boy (now selling ESPN soundtrack CDs), Frontier, and Slash. These supposedly nihilistic self-destructors turned out to have helped jump-start the whole indie rock phenomenon, from within the shadows of the Hollywood entertainment oligopoly.)
Hence, skate punk really is a topic deserving of museum-piece recollection.
And, yeah, there’s irony up to the armpits in those no-future crusters not only turning 40 but becoming idols to hundreds of fresh-faced young ‘uns at the municipal skate park across from EMP.
And a few looks at those old punkers, especially their hands and their kneecaps, gave me a revelation. I may be “sex-positive,” but I can still find certain body parts to be completely icky.
MONDAY: The larger ’80s nostalgia problem.
IN OTHER NEWS: Speaking of being stuck in the past, Mayor Schell has vetoed the Seattle City Council’s repeal of the onerous, censorious 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance; making his own re-election next year even more doubtful.
BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture? Good. Get used to it. Learn to love the chaos.”
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.
The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.
The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on “How to Dress for a Nudist Camp.” Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.
While the Nova story’s text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre’s, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something’s loony about males and un-“beautiful” females treating their bodies as unshameful.
Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I’ve yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I’ve written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone’s expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.
Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.
Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one’s inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.
As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement’s ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)
No, nudists aren’t weird in Bizarre’s usual definition. They’re normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.
Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.
(P.S.: I’ve been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I’ve found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn’t sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)
TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.
I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.
Call it the Proud Creep.
This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.
In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.
I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.
It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.
Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:
As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.
(In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)
I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.
It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.
ONE OF THIS COLUMN’S TRADITIONS has been the almost-annual defense of Seafair. We’re resuming it this year, as a vehicle for asserting a few points I strongly believe.
1. Corny is just all right with me. And I don’t mean self-conscious, wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody corny either. That’s for people who can’t handle real corny.
2. Everything in Seattle doesn’t have to be World-Fucking-Class. We can have a big parade (albeit not as big or as respected as Portland’s) and a beauty pageant (ditto) and it’s still OK because it’s ours.
3. Working-class people, and their cultural expressions, are not necessarily fascist. Every year I get the same sneers from hipsters who either are unaware of the Seafair parade (you know, the folk who only read the New York fucking Times and only listen to NP fucking R), or consider the parade’s only worthy purpose to be as an excuse to scornfully chortle at square people. (This year, I had an invite to work on a float. The writer of the invite thought I’d be turned on by his description of the parade as “a trip into the heart of darkness of America.”)
To me, the parade’s an important legacy of an older Seattle in which such pretentious elitism was simply not done.
4. Hydroplanes are all-time cool. The roar of the thunderboats, the sunburnt noses on the Miller-drunk dads, the waterborne tailgate parties on the log boom, the pin traders, the way the boats have only two speeds (140 m.p.h. or dead in the water), the sympathies of the underfunded racing teams trying to cobble enough spare parts together to last the day.
The only problem with the race is the same problem it’s had for over a decade: Its monopolization most years by the Budweiser-sponsored Bernie Little crew. The Unlimited Racing Association is afraid to impose any parity rules (of budgets or equipment stock) that would seriously impair the Bud, and has been unable to attract, for more than a one- or two-season stint, other big-bucks sponsors willing to compete against the Bud squad at its budget level.
(Now, management of the whole sport’s been bought out by a partnership of Little and Formula One promoter Don Garbrecht. How, and whether, Little will deal with his own dominance, in order to restore competitiveness to the sport, remains to be seen.)
Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool. Seattle, and America, is a huge and diverse place, much more complicated and chaotic than any oversimplistic hip-vs.-square duality. You have as much to learn (if not more) from people of other cultures in your own town than from the N.Y./Calif. gatekeepers of your own particular subculture.
Go to the parade (and one or more of the auxiliary neighborhood parades) next year. Go to the hydros this year. Observe the families (screeching kids, bored teens, grumpy grownups), the ethnic dance troupes, the bands, the floats, the vendors. Don’t treat them like your inferiors, because they’re not.
Become part of the celebration.
Even come to enjoy it.
You’ll be a better person for it. Really.
TOMORROW: The He-Man Woman Lover’s Club.
