IT CLAIMS TO BE “Everybody’s Favorite City.” And it’s in trouble, being destroyed from within by its own economic “success.”

Tech-office-related real estate hyperinflation has gotten even worse down there than up here. It’s now the third costliest town in the world. It’s losing arts spaces, live-music clubs, and what few moderate-income residential stock it had.

Should we pity the San Franciscans yet? Do I have to give up my years-long defensive stance against The City That Thinks It’s So Superior To Everybody Else For No Good Reason?

(1) Yes. (2) No.

The demographic cleansing of Frisco, while sad and pitiable, isn’t a repudiation of the town’s bohemian-hipster heritage. Rather, it’s the logical conclusion of certain aspects of that aesthetic, gone to a cancerous extreme.

Let me explain.

As promoted over the years by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, R.U. Sirius, Tom Tomorrow, the original Wired editors, Jello Biafra, etc. etc. etc., a certain side of Frisco “alternative” ideology developed as an elitism that pretended to be populist. It loved “The People” but hated “The Sap Masses.”

It’s not that I think they were too liberal, but that I think they were too conservative. Too willing to settle for just feeling superior, rather than actually doing anything to make a better world for the hip and the square alike.

Whether superficially discussing politics, religion, art, punk rock, poetry, or ecology, its essential message remained the same: The supposed superiority of the speaker, and of San Francisco hipsters as a group, over all us redneck fascists out here in the allegedly-real America.

In their own minds they dressed better, ate better, had more and better sex, were more cultured, were more intelligent, loved the planet better, and imitated black people better than us poor non-San Franciscans ever could hope to. If any cultural scene anywhere else in America didn’t try hard enough to imitate whatever San Franciscans dictated was cool, the San Franciscans would declare said other scenes to be behind the times. You were only “empowered” or “self-realized” if you let San Franciscans tell you precisely how to be.

The dot-com hustlers merely took this arrogance for their own, added billions of other people’s speculation money, and produced an urban scene where money and attitude, in that order, are all that matter.

As such, the dot-com hustlers are proving that hipness, for its own sake, is not necessarily a progressive stance and probably never has been.

Hipness as an excuse for elitism was not invented in Frisco by any means. It’s one of those eternal human quirks; it’s popped up everywhere from Versailles-era France to Cotton Club-era NYC. The turning of “anti-authoritarianism” into just another authoritarianism is older than Oliver Cromwell. (Some San Franciscans have rebelled against the alterna-celebrity hype machine and unholier-than-thou ideology–the Residents’ “Theory of Obscurity,” the Dead’s party-for-everybody stance, R. Crumb’s championing of retro-jazz style instead of the modern world’s constant screeching self-promotion).

And Frisco had an elitist streak in its municipal ideology (from the upper-crust restaurants and hotels to the too-quaint-for-its-own-good residential architecture) long before Ginsberg and co. redefined it.

So it was only another step for the dot-com hustlers to invent a new hipness hierarchism, with themselves at its center.

The dot-com hype has probably peaked; at least a lot of people here, there, and across the continent hope it has. Here, the real estate hyperinflation seems to be ebbing. (Down there, it may take a while for the downturn to take hold.)

But the long-term trend remains that America’s population is rising, its workforce is more office-bound, and more of those office-based companies want to attract young professionals who like to think of themselves as too hip to be stuck in some suburban office-park cubicle.

So even if tomorrow’s offices house import-export attorneys rather than dot-coms, they’ll still be crowding the hip spaces, driving the artistic types out, unless something’s done to help make other places more attractive.

And that means spreading out the hipness across the continent.

And that means dumping, once and for all, the idea that there are just one or two capitals of coolness to which the rest of the continent must submit.

TOMORROW: The election aftermath.

ELSEWHERE:

• “I used to take great pleasure in not enjoying things” (found by Matthew Pearson)….
• “You know you are a geek when….”

HEARD THE CLASH’S “Hitsville UK” on the Linda’s Tavern jukebox (now, alas, CD-based) the other day. The song, from the premier political-punk band’s 1980 Sandinista! magnum opus, was full of contradictions then and bears even more today.

First, it was a tribute to indie labels (and a scathing indictment of major-label marketing practices) that came out on a major. The song’s British 45 release acknowledged this with a sleeve depicting a score of minor-label logos in a “background” color shade; while the CBS Records logo on the record itself was in a brighter shade of the same color.

Second, the song’s title, lyrics, and booming-beat arrangement all invoked the Motown label (originally known as “Hitsville USA”) as an inspiration and a model for artist-centered, commerciality-be-damned music making.

Perhaps to a Brit, a Black-owned company making and selling Black music all on its own from outside the media capitals (albeit within the established music-biz infrastructure; its ’60s classics were distributed in Britain by EMI) could be seen as having blazed a trail leading to the initial punk/indie revolution, and from there perhaps toward the destruction of the major labels and their prepackaged pap. And, as historian Suzanne Smith has shown, many Black Americans saw similar hopes in the label’s original success.

But to some old R&B purists and modern-day indie idealogues, Motown was as ruthless and centralized as the majors. It was an assembly-line operation that produced one product (the “Motown Sound” hit single, an R&B subgenre engineered in every detail for white teenybopper consumption) in assorted models and upholstery schemes. Its stars had to fight for any degree of creative or career control (only Smokey and Stevie really succeeded).

When the Motown Sound had finally played itself out as a top-40 commodity, boss Barry Gordy shut down the factory and split Detroit for L.A., taking all his remaining stars out there with him. (Aretha Franklin, the one Detroit R&B legend who stayed, recorded for Atlantic.)

Still, “Hitsville UK” and its themes of empowerment and innocence regained struck a powerful point in 1980. Its (oversimplified?) depiction of art-loving, street-credible outfits like Factory and Rough Trade reclaiming music from the industry’s “mutants, freaks and musclemen” provided as much hope as a progressively-minded young adult could reasonably expect to have at that time of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s rise to power. Maybe we couldn’t stop the assaults on public education and the environment, the military buildups, or the revival of racism; but at least we could gain control of what was on our own turntables and in our own Walkmen.

Twenty years later, the song’s main message still reverberates. Music-making technology has become so democratized that almost anyone can put out a recording (and, if you look at the post-your-MP3 sites, it seems almost everyone has). Virtually every aspect of music production, performance, and marketing has been, or is being, demystified and popularized. The majors, meanwhile, are consolidating ever further, relying more heavily on rosters of ever blander and/or dumber superstar acts to justify their bloated organizations and their intellectual-property lawsuits.

If these dual trends continue, the whole Napster fracas may prove to have been the least of the majors’ problems.

The song’s proclamations might even come true: No slimy deals with smarmy eels, no consumer trials, no AOR, in the new Hitsville USA.

MONDAY: A pre-election rant of sorts.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Limp Bizkit is the new corporate rock, the new Whitesnake….”
• The march of globalized corporate culture goes on, reaching one place that had thus far largely resisted its siren song….

Haunted Ground, Part 2

by Guest Columnist Donna Barr

(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started to explain how her adopted home of Bremerton, the town across Puget Sound from Seattle, just might be the most surreal town on the planet. Today, she continues.)

A FEW STRAINS of “pedigree” pets–especially Siamese cats, Pekingese and Pomeranian dogs, and pit bulls–are used in a Ponzi-scheme breeding system, to make a little cash.

A “Bremerton purebred”–one of several unoffical local strains, unrecognized by the regulation kennel clubs–a female, is bought, impregnanted, and then her kittens or puppies sold. No attention is paid to inbreeding; an uncle may be bred to a niece, with a hand-job to help ’em along, so long as saleable young are produced.

If they don’t sell, they’re dumped into a Humane Society and Animal Control system already overloaded by the transient naval population, and its habit of leaving its pets behind when it is transferred. The local naval commanders don’t do anything about the problem. Females who aren’t profitable are put down.

Pit bull fighting is common–it’s nothing to see a big uncut male missing an eye, or with a gash that runs half the width of his neck. And I don’t know any vet, even in Bremerton, who sews up wounds with dental floss.

The pit bull puppy-mill in the place across the alley didn’t get broken up until we had an attack. The big stud-dog tore after a little dog that was being walked down the alley, and when the little dog’s owner tried to save him, he got the stud-dog’s teeth in his ribs. The little dog was usually walked by a twelve-year-old boy whose throat was about rib-high. The dog was destroyed and the mill run out by the landlord.

Drug dealers aren’t much of a problem, not even the gangs that come in with the Navy ships. The block-watches are pretty easygoing. So long as a drug dealer doesn’t set up a crack house, or let the kids cut the crack on the front table with the door open, if the dealer doesn’t bring in customers all night, with cars coming and going and running up on the sidewalk, people will leave them alone. And no drive-bys. The block-watches know they’re not targeted, but the problem with druggies is they can’t shoot–and whenever a bullet goes loose, all the kids in the neighborhoods become bullet magnets.

So if the dealers will just go down to the Callow Safeway, where a nice big concrete-pit parking lot has built to contain the bullets, then nobody will bother them. If they show up on the street, the old Detroit trick–the sign that says “Drug Parking, Fifteen Minute Limit”–will make them leave. Or you can sit on their cars and drink beer. They hate that. What is it with drug dealers that makes them think they don’t have a neon-green sign on their forehead that says “Get your smack here”?

Bremerton is only an hour from Seattle, and only an hour from the Olympic Penninsula, so you can go do the city or go camping without a lot of driving.

Getting out of town once in a while is important. You can drive out to the reservation and buy really great fireworks, at places like Ill Eagle and Pyro Mama’s. M-100s and nearly professional-level rockets, the kind that wake up all the dogs in the neighborhood and make Bremerton look like a war-zone, with all the blue smoke floating through the trees. My husband and I always get the impression that the locals sell ’em with the attitude of “Go ahead, you dumb white folks–blow your hands off.” Which we think is pretty funny, after what the U.S. government got away with up here, burning down Old Man house for one.

Once the U.S. officials tried to stop the white folks that were coming off the reservation with fireworks, and they ran into the reservation chiefs and their back-ups, who told them to get the hell away from their customers.

Everybody thought that was pretty funny.

All the plastic car fish-logos are here: Blank Christian, Darwin, Survival, Alien, ‘n Chips, and Gefilte.

Bumper sticker: The Christian Right is Neither.

The black drag queen dresses fine, but he seems to have a hard time finding quality shoes.

TOMORROW: A Halloween roundup, among other short items.

ELSEWHERE:

• The “real” Eve and Adam lived 84,000 years apart, geneticists claim. (That sort of thing can just ruin a relationship….)
• The next great retro graphic-design fad awaiting modern-day ripoffs: early Soviet children’s books….

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:

• Let’s get this straight: The “Century of Song” site chooses one pop song from every year of the 20th century, then records and posts its own version of it….

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• “What Don Knotts Means to Me” (found by Metascene)….

Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 1)

by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley

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.

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

• An automatic generator of sex euphemisms….
• Las Vegas’s next big tourist attractor: art museums! (found by Arts Journal)….

‘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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Among the TV classics that were callously destroyed by overzealous tape-erasers over the years: the original Hollywood Squares….

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• The role of human values in design….
• “The folks who move to Pioneer Square and bitch about the drunks are as bad as the yuppies who move to Carnation and complain about the smell of cow shit….”
• Send a banned book to censor-wannabe Joe Lieberman today!…

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:

• His personal devotion to Orthodox Judaism, expressed in terms Old Testament-knowledgable Christians can identify with; and
• his stoic disgust at That Filth Out There invading our movie/TV screens, our computer monitors, our CD shelves, and our magazine racks.

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:

• Public outcries against raunchy songs (which, if past outcries are any prediction, will come mostly against black artists and/or indie labels);
• Calls for more restrictive and more consistent movie ratings;
• Further restrictions against indie and foreign films that attempt to get released uncut or unrated;
• Mandatory “V-chips,” “family hour” restrictions, and pressures on advertisers against raunchy TV shows (especially raunchy TV shows airing on channels not owned by Viacom, Time Warner, or Rupert Murdoch); and
• Mandatory (or at least really heavily encouraged) Internet “content rating systems,” censorware filters on all school and library computers, and other measures to make sure you’re unable to read nothing online that has as much sex and violence as, say, the Old Testament.
• Zoning and other pressures against outlets offering XXX videos (which, coincidentally, entirely involves video stores other than Blockbuster) and parental-warning-stickered CDs (i.e., stores smaller than Wal-Mart).

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Today’s most vigilant defenders of artistic freedom and crusaders against censorship–TV wrestling fans!…
• From would-be Net censors to Presidential candidates, the New Sanctimony isn’t just a threat from the rabid Right anymore….

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:

• Onlne Communication: Before there was the WWW, there was the BBS (Bulletin Board System) and Usenet, and also the early all-text version of CompuServe. I still run into folks from those days who miss the cameraderie of the old nerd underground (though I recall many, many insult trades and “flame wars”).

  By the latter part of the decade there were the centrally-controlled Prodigy and AOL, with their sloooow graphics and censored chatrooms.

• Economics: The rich got ever-richer; the poor got ever-poorer; young people faced an apparent permanent shortage of real opportunities.

  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.

• Politics (conservative): Despite the poster image popular at the time with both his fans and his haters, Ronald Reagan was not Rambo. He was a doddering yet personable script reader, a front man for the financiers and weapons contractors who really ran things (and still do).
• Politics (liberal): The last whiffs of the New Deal coalition, in which labor unions and teachers and “mainstream” environmentalists toned down any serious demands in exchange for “a place at the table.” By ’89, Clinton, Lieberman, and Co. made sure corporate power would rule the Democratic Party feast from then on.
• Politics (radical): The Reagan/Thatcher crowd was in seemingly firm control, propping up every genocidal despot who used anticommunism as his excuse. No viable alternative appeared on the horizon. That made it easy to get into apparently unviable alternatives.

  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.

• The ‘Alternative’ Scene: We really did think there was just one (1) “mainstream culture” and just one (1) “alternative” to that culture. This way-oversimplified dualism conveniently allowed many white, middle-class suburban kids to believe themselves part of, if not the entirety of, “The Other.”

  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.

ELSEWHERE:

• The “future of urban transportation,” Taxi 2000…
• Another listing of real eBay weirdness, “Disturbing Auctions” (found by Larkfarm)….

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• We’re almost over “Admit You’re Happy Month”….
• A cautionary guide against the worst cliches of TV-inspired erotic fan fiction….