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SO I FINALLY SAW Survivor.
I’d planned not to, or at least not to write about it, as part of my ever-so-contrarian policy of avoiding whatever’s the only topic on Entertainment Tonight or the Fox News Channel during any particular month. In the past, that’s meant little-to-no remarks here about O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzales, flag burning, or the departure of Kathie Lee Gifford.
But this time, I took the bait (or rather, the edible grubworms).
What I found: A compelling-in-that-train-wreck-sorta-way show that, while nominally based on a European series, plays out more like a cross between The Real World (and is just as unreal as that show, from another Viacom-owned channel), Japan’s extreme-embarrassment game shows, and corporate-warrior ideology.
The latter is the show’s most disturbing ingredient. I suppose if the New Agers could routinely misinterpret various indigenous people’s rites and customs, so can the Glengarry Glen Ross/Gordon Gekko ilk. But the whole Survivor premise is so against what real survival is all about (either for indigenous peoples, for teens and adults play-acting in “survival camps,” or for soldiers and others who happen to find themselves stuck somewhere.
That prior CBS desert-island show, Gilligan’s Island, was closer to the essence of real survival, on an island or in North American society. It depicted people who had little in common except their unsuitedness for the task at hand, and who had to learn to get along and work together for their common goal of living through their situation.
The Survivor motto, “Outplay–Outwit–Outlast,” deliberately contradicts all of this. It’s all about the rugged individualism, backbiting, and looking-out-for-#1 championed by corporate idealogues dating back to Ford and Rockefeller’s “social Darwinism” theories. Philosophies that allowed those who’d schemed and stolen their way to the top to heartily justify everything they’d done.
But as I’ve been saying for some time, business isn’t everything. And as local author David C. Korten, whom I discussed yesterday, says, the established priorities and philosophies of business (particularly of big business) aren’t the same as those of life in general. Business’s priorities can even contradict or deny those needed for real living, real relating, and real (as opposed to merely fiscal) growth.
A society that tries to hard to be like Survivor will not, in the long run, survive.
TOMORROW: The nearly-annual ‘Why I Still Love Seafair’ column.
ELSEWHERE:
FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
THE NEXT FEW INSTALLMENTS of these virtual pages will discuss a topic seldom discussed here–my personal life. You are hereby warned.
I’M NOT SURE when I first became aware that I had misgivings with “America’s love affair with the automobile.” I only know it came at an early age.
I grew up in what at the time was the countryside of Snohomish County, over a mile away from even a convenience store, dependent upon grownups’ cars to even see a movie (the area had no transit system at the time, and the rudimentary one it later obtained has recently been decimated by the first of KV-Lie favorite Tim Eyman’s kill-transit initiatives).
I developed a lifelong disdain for the supposed paradise of the exurbs. I longed to live in a real neighborhood in a real town, even a small one. The countryside became something I wanted to escape from, not to. A sidewalk, a street grid, neighbors, stores that faced a street instead of a parking lot–these were my initial basic icons of a true civilized community (though I wasn’t educated enough yet to actually use such hi-falutin’ words as “community”).
In real farm territories, the automobile was a symbol of freedom and progress. From my vantage point in the far suburbs, it represented enforced isolation and loneliness.
I seemed at the time to have been the only kid anywhere who believed this. Eventually, I’d learn that many, many adults who’d come of age in the Blank and X generations felt the same. (Hence, the hyperinflated housing prices in “real” neighborhoods, and the economic rise of “restored” downtowns at the expense of malls and strip malls.)
But returning to the topic at hand, I finally escaped, eventually settling in Seattle. As a poor college student and an even poorer college graduate, I never got around to buying a car.
It meant that I was dependent on rides to and from places in the far suburbs (such as Boeing Surplus), and that certain other tasks have always been more problematic than they might otherwise have been (such as distributing magazines).
But it also meant that I could read while commuting to work, and that I never had to worry about the little things car owners seem to always worry about (gas prices, new tires, insurance, parking).
One Saturday earlier this month, I borrowed a friend’s late model station wagon. It was my first time behind the wheel in years. To my surprise, it was as easy as ever (even parallel parking). The leisurely, non-traffic-jam drive was even relaxing in a semi-hypnotic sort of way. I instantly understood the lure of the words “Road Trip,” beyond the urge to actually get anywhere.
I’m afraid to make it too big of a habit. I remember the cautionary words from Repo Man: “The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.” (And Repo Man came out before the invention of hate-talk radio!) I suspect the kind of attention safe driving requires might rewire the brain over time, discouraging a certain type of wandering thought process in which certain great and/or stupid ideas can develop.
And as for acquiring my own low-mileage Clarkmobile, that won’t happen just yet. I’ve other major expenses these days, as we’ll discuss tomorrow.
TOMORROW: Misadventures in the housing market.
THE NYC-BASED KOZMO.COM was in the news a couple weeks ago when its Seattle division started firing delivery people and other workers if they refused to submit to background checks. The balking employees called the checks an unfair inveasion of their privacy. Management of Kozmo (which delivers videos, CDs, bestselling books, and fast foods to most of Seattle, and is preparing to branch into costlier goods) says it’s a necessary security measure.
I say the company could have avoided the bad vibes and the bad press. Instead of sicking private eyes on lowly delivery dudes, it could instead have them submit the following Kozmo Quiz:
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route. B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work. C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris. D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route.
B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work.
C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris.
D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Ignore the information. B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends. C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page. D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Ignore the information.
B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends.
C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page.
D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked. B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band. C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap. D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked.
B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band.
C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap.
D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer. B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour. C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour. D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer.
B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour.
C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour.
D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use. B. Respectfully turn him down. C. Accept the offer. D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use.
B. Respectfully turn him down.
C. Accept the offer.
D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities. B. Keep your big trap shut. C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence. D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities.
B. Keep your big trap shut.
C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence.
D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries. B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits. C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind. D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries.
B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits.
C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind.
D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Pass their request on to the management. B. Ignore them. C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors. D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Pass their request on to the management.
B. Ignore them.
C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors.
D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it. B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you. C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell. D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it.
B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you.
C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell.
D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors. B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors. C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos. D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors.
B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors.
C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos.
D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
Scoring:
Each “A” answer is worth four points.
Each “B” answer is worth three points.
Each “C” answer is worth two points.
Each “D” answer is worth one point.
Totals:
34-40: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so honest, you could be in the Secret Service, protecting the next President of the United States.
26-33: You’re honest enough to be trusted with Kozmo merchandise, yet dishonest enough to make good driving time delivering it.
18-25: You possess a valuable combination of superficial trustworthiness and deep-down duplicity. You shouldn’t be delivering goods on behalf of a dot-com. You should be running your own dot-com, collecting dough from day-trading speculators based on dubious business models.
10-17: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so dishonest, you could be the next President of the United States.
TOMORROW: An odd night on the town.
AFTER THE LAST ISSUE of our MISCmedia print magazine discussed various variations on the theme of “Utopias,” it seemed only proper to follow with a “Dystopias” theme.
Only thing is, I couldn’t find folks who wanted to write about nightmare worlds–other than ones they’d personally lived through.
Perhaps I just didn’t ask the right people.
Perhaps all the dystopia fans were heartbroken when Y2K failed to instantly end Civilization As We Know It.
Perhaps economic times really are good enough (or enough people believe they’re good enough) that they couldn’t imagine things ever getting really scary.
Perhaps everybody’s just so taken in by the talk about global corporate power representing the “End of History” (i.e., the world’s final and permanent socioeconomic configuration) that even those who protest against it can’t imagine any other system (let alone any other dysfunctional system).
Indeed, the cheap and easy way to construct a fictional nightmare future has been to predict the future will be exactly like the present, only more so.
In the past three or four decades, there have been fictional evil futures constructed wholly around single dominant trends of all types: air pollution, oil shortages, overpopulation, fundamentalist religion, nuclear war, the dehumanizing effects associated with big old mainframe computers, radical feminists, radical anti-feminists, humorless liberals, repressive conservatives, Communists, Fascists, Thatcherists, and (just about every dystopian writer’s all-purpose bad guy, in either a lead or supporting role) television.
Just maybe, all these authors’ different wrongnesses add up to one big accuracy–that any future elaborated from a single aspect of the present would be a dystopia.
History seldom flows in a single, linear progression or regression. There are multiple, competing influences in the course of events everywhere. There are trends, backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes. There are intercene fights, palace struggles, wars, and rumors of wars. There are serendipities, happy accidents, and unplanned disasters.
Life is oscillation and vibration. Death is stasis. A static culture, no matter what it was, would be a living death.
MONDAY: Would “open media” do for (or to) journalists what Napster might do for (or to) musicians?
IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls are losing sales fast. Some analysts say half the nation’s current suburban shopping centers may be gone within 10 years. How does a crafty mall operator survive? Make the place look more like a ‘real’ downtown!…
I’VE BEEN SPENDING as much time as I can down in Seattle’s great old Duwamish industrial district; partly because it might not last much longer.
Oh, the land (recovered tide flats of the Duwamish River) and the streets will be there for years to come.
But the businesses there now, and the “family wage” jobs they provide, are endangered.
Last month, the Seattle City Council approved a master development plan for the industrial district (called by some real estate developers “SoDo,” as in “South of the Kingdome,” even though there’s no longer a “Do” for anything to be “So” of).
The scheme allows developers, aching to build as many square feet of dot-com office space as they possibly can, to take over the northern part of the area, almost south to the former Sears warehouse now mainly occupied by Starbucks’ HQ offices. A little further south, the Seattle School District is going ahead with plans to turn part of a former Post Office facility into administrative offices.
These encroachments can be interpreted as a Phase One. Once all those blocks have been cleared of warehouses, steel fabricators, garment shops, etc. and planted with office, retail, and restaurant uses, the developers are sure to come back and ask for more; to the eventual gentrification of everything down to Boeing Field (which itself is facing a gentrification issue, as small “general aviation” companies are starting to lose hangar space in favor of hi-tech moguls’ private planes.)
Seattle’s civic establishment hadn’t really cared about the industrial district for years. The last time they tried to master-plan the place was in the early ’90s, when they envisioned a (thankfully scrapped) scheme to evict dozens of smaller businesses, assemble the real estate into larger parcels, and dole out those lots to big corporations.
Even then, the idea wasn’t to save working-class jobs but to make deals with the big boys. The local powers-that-be have long been uncomfortable with Seattle as an industrial city. (They even prefer to think of Boeing as a high-tech engineering firm, not as a manufacturer.)
Their official vision for Seattle has always been that of a financial, administrative, and transportation hub for the region. Seattle would be the island of “progressive” (i.e., WASP and clean-cut, cultured and polite) civilization amid the wilderness. The unsightly business of actually making tangible, physical items (not to mention the Joe Six-Packs employed making them) was to be left to the likes of Renton, Tacoma, and Everett.
So it’s a natural that sweatshop-clothing companies like Generra and Unionbay developed here (and spiritually influenced their Oregon neighbor Nike); and that Bill Gates and co. would have devised a scheme to control the personal-computer industry without making any hardware more elaborate than a replacement PC mouse.
The rest of the country caught onto this anti-industrial aesthetic too; back in the mid-’90s “downsizing” fad and before. (A character in an ’80s Doonesbury cartoon proclaimed, “America doesn’t have to make anything–except SUCCESS!”)
So I encourage all our local-area readers to visit the industrial district while the rust, the rail lines, the diners, and the semi rigs are still there.
Many of the buildings themselves (at least those considered salvageable) will likely stay. Lotsa folks love “industrial design;” even gentrifiers who have no use for industry itself.
After all, there’s nothing that says “hip” to a high-tech office like the post-industrial fantasy, the “art loft look.”
It’s just so nostalgic, so “real.”
TOMORROW: Whatever happened to dystopias?
IT’S THE FOURTH OF JULY of a Presidential election year. Time for Silly Season to get underway–except that it’s been going for some time now.
On the Presidential end, we’ve got another of what Michael Moore likes to call “Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” pairs. Their economic and other policies are virtually identical.
Both Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils (heart symbol) big corporations, “free” trade, megamergers, and (despite occasional posturing otherwise) lobbyist-financed campaigns.
Each proclaims himself to be the one to lead America’s booming-as-never-before economy to even further heights–despite the several early-warning signals that the overheated economy’s starting to cool off, and despite the reality that the vast majority of folks have barely stayed economically even (or fallen behind) in these recent years of downsizings, manufacturing-job exports, stagnant wages, real-estate hyperinflation, and potentially dangerous stock-market speculations.
Should the stock markets (and the highly-speculative tech stocks in particular) continue their recent downward step-stumble, should gas prices remain high, and should interest rates stay up, the question will change from who’ll best continue our economic course to who’ll best redirect it.
And since both candidates got their respective party nominations due to heavy up-front campaign donations and backroom influencing by the corporate crowd, don’t expect either to have any real ideas in that realm.
Instead, look to Gore and Bush to each continue his appeal to his respective party’s faithful based on what we could call market-segmentation partisan issues.
Gore will make the requisite half-sincere pronouncements about health care, the environment, women’s and gay rights, transit, arts funding, and protecting abortion rights.
Bush will make the requisite half-sincere pronouncements about turning Social Security over to the stock market, landowners’ rights, developers’ rights, family values, highway building, prison building, and repealing abortion rights.
The message of each candidate will be that he’s a big-money whore, but he’s our big-money whore.
Here in The Other Washington, meanwhile, we’ve a somewhat clearer choice in chief-executive wannabes.
Since right-wing Democrat Dixy Lee Ray’s single term ended in 1980, our state’s been governed by one centrist Republican (John Spellman), one true liberal Democrat (Mike Lowry), and two corporate Democrats (Booth Gardner and Gary Locke). Locke has caved in on health care and stadium subsidies and virtually every other issue on which corporate bucks have applied sufficient pressure.
That would make Locke vulnerable to a strong opposition candidacy by a progressive Republican of the old Northwest Dan Evans/Tom McCall school. To Locke’s luck, they don’t make that kind of Republican anymore.
Instead, the GOP’s handing its gubernatorial nomination to John Carlson, talk-radio demagogue and all-around power-grubbing twerp.
I’ve had more to say about Carlson in the past, and am sure to have more to say about Carlson later this election season. But for now, let’s suffice to say that, by giving Carlson the nomination, the state GOP has written off Seattle (heck, Carlson used to proudly proclaim on his radio hatefest how much he detested Seattle and its voting population), along with anybody elsewhere in the state who’s not part of the religious right or the Limbaughist religious cult.
All Locke will have to do is pick off enough votes from sane Republicans across the state, folks who might love entrepreneurism and hard work but who don’t particularly care for the scarier parts of the Carlson camp’s agenda.
Carlson’s role will be to simultaneously hold onto the cultists while insisting to non-cult members that he’s still normal enough to be trusted with the governor’s office.
Carlson’s proven himself to be a cagey, slick operator. But this task might be too challenging even for his duplicitousness.
TOMORROW: What the heck isMicrosoft.NET anyway?
IN OTHER WORDS: There won’t be any cherry pies served at the RR Diner for a while; bummer.
FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.
It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.
Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.
It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.
Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.
Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.
The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.
In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.
They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.
They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.
Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.
TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a few attempts to correct some commonly-believed but untrue “facts”:
THE FINE PRINT (in the masthead of the women’s bodybuilding magazine Oxygen, no relation to the women’s cable channel and website of the same name): “Oxygen reserves the right to reject any advertisement without reason.”
At last, someone strikes a blow for rational arguments in advertising!
JUNK E-MAIL OF THE WEEK: “The domain: www.miscmedia.com, is ranked #68919 out of 400118 domains in the WebsMostLinked.com database.”
Alllrigghhttt! This month, we’re gonna try to make it all the way up to #67324!
THE MAILBAG (via Nick Bauroth): “Enough with the baby-boomers already! Can’t you find something else to blame for your shortcomings? And no, yuppies and fratboys are not acceptable substitutes.”
Actually, when I criticize others it’s for the sake of criticizing others, not out of misplaced blame or jealousy or any other excuses.
And as for any “shortcomings,” they’re just about all my doing (or the doing of specific, deep-rooted, influences upon my individual personal/career development).
I come, after all, from the same age group and race/gender status, in the same metro region, as folks who’ve gone on to win Pulitzers and Emmys, get elected to public office, record triple-platinum albums, and/or threaten to permanently stifle all present and future competition in the software industry.
IN OTHER NEWS: It may be the end of the company Seattle’s landmark Smith Tower was named after.
MONDAY: Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.
TO OUR READERS #1: Due to problems uploading to our server, some of you may have missed Tuesday’s column. It’s linked here, and it has to do with Paul Allen’s architectural monumentalism. Read it, then come back to this page.
TO OUR READERS #2: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
I’M WRITING THIS a little over a week in advance, due to the potential circumstances listed above. As of this writing date, this year’s Seattle International Film Festival is four days old, and I haven’t been to it yet.
I have been out, mind you–hanging with chums, going to alt-country music shows and non-SIFF movies, seeing U District Street Fair bands risking short-circuits by playing their guitars and amps in the late-May rain.
Last year I went to nine SIFF films. Some years I’ve been to as many as 15; some none at all. I know, you all just assumed I had a full series pass every year, but no.
Mind you, I love foreign and/or true indie films. The best ones tell great stories with great characters, while de- and re-constructing the language of audio-visual communication (the language we’re all used to receiving, and an increasing number of us are learning to speak).
But I’ve never been an all-out SIFF “film orgy” obsessive.
But I still love to observe those who are. While the universe of film has utterly changed several times over the past quarter century, the hardcore SIFF fan base remains as it ever was (albeit slightly older in its average age).
The traditional SIFF target audience: professional, educated, practical, sensible, of middle-class origin but upper-middle-class present circumstances. Likes to see her/himself as an “arts” lover, but is simply less intrigued by live theater, dance, etc. than by film.
And it’s easy to understand why.
The highbrow performing arts are the sorts of stuff someone who didn’t come from an affluent or intellectual background would grow up familiar with, except thru sometimes dreary culture-in-the-schools programs.
But film’s different. It can be enjoyed as the more challenging, more socially acceptable version of “the movies”–something even the daughters and sons of G.I. Bill parents had grown up loving.
The two Canadians who started SIFF knew this was their target market. Over the years, they carefully nurtured this audience with an ever-larger melange of serious art-film, midnight-style fun film, bloated-budget Hollywood product, classic Hollywood oldies, other countries’ commercial-entertainment movies, films for women, films for gays, those emerging Miramax-formula “indie” U.S. films, and every year’s new B-movie trend (slackers, hip violence, AIDS musicals, etc.); all served up with healthy portions of hoopla and hype.
(Even the local TV newscasts, which abandoned arts coverage several years ago, still cover SIFF, at least when there’s a Hollywood celebrity visiting it.)
While filmmaking in Seattle has had its fits and starts, the curation and attendance of SIFF have done as much as any actual film to reveal the tastes and character of the pre-Microsoft Seattle. SIFF, like the city it grew up in, is (or was) often predictably bourgeois and monocultural, interested in other lands principally as sources of exotic Other-ness–but also sincerely receptive to new ideas and experiences (as long as they’re at least mildly entertaining and not too noisy), and proud to proclaim itself a crossroads of the world.
Other film festivals may have more celebs, more prestige, more deal-making action, or more industry clout. But SIFF’s got more total films, and in so many different flavors.
And it’s all because the “film orgy” hardcore audience likes it that way.
TOMORROW: Life dies again.
IN OTHER NEWS: For the first time, the Indy 500 had two women. They quickly crashed into one another. But before you go “so much for gender solidarity,” note that the crash was caused by a third driver.
YESTERDAY, we talked a little about the irony some clueless big-media outlets continue to find in the fact that symbols of Bohemian hipness have become the driving forces of so many marketing campaigns.
Today, a little more about why hip (or rather, a highly specific image of hip) fits so well with corporate agendas.
What marketers like to show off as hip is an updated version of the old Rugged Individualist archtype from an earlier age of corporate largess. The corporate hipster is faster, spryer, sexier, more fashionable, more energetic, and more athletic than ordinary people. He or she (and, yes, it’s often a she, at least in ads) has no use for limits, boundaries, rules, or regulations. He or she either sneers or patronizes with kitsch anything old-fashioned, such as thrift, moderation, caution, humility, or cooperation.
He or she is unjustly scorned by all those pathetic squares–not because he or she’s a weirdo but because he or she’s just so darned superior.
It’s exactly the image admired by certain Wall St. corporate raiders and tech-biz bullies and sweatshop moguls.
Our Oregon neighbors at Nike are continuing to lose invaluable PR goodwill by their insistence on doing as little as absolutely possible for the workers at overseas subcontractors they get their merchandise from. It’s gotten, or will eventually get, to the point that the company will lose more money from its intransigent stance than it will save by treating its manufacturing as something to be done as cheaply as possible, so as to put more money into advertising.
Justice for subcontract workers is antithetical to the whole Nike corporate culture. It brings to mind square ’50s-esque mental images like security, stability, teamwork, providing for family, and industry. It sees itself as a hyper-aggressive design and marketing company for the globalized, post-industrial era. It doesn’t actually make anything and doesn’t want to. Making things, having visible factories or directly employing manufacturing workers in North America, is too Organization-Man ’50s.
By contrast, everything Nike’s associated its name and logo with involves images of individual hustlers, strivers, and go-getters. Even Nike endorsers who play team sports are always depicted individually, as lone-wolf superheroes, forever young, never shown with spouses or other adult encumbrances.
Many in the Way-New Left get this.
As described in a recent Nation cover story, politically-minded students across many U.S. campuses are moving beyond the smug self-aggrandizement of “identity politics” and are actively embracing such old-Left ideals as social justice and working-class solidarity.
They’re pushing for their colleges to enact fair-employment policies for their own workers and for the workers of the colleges’ suppliers, including the suppliers of athletic equipment.
Nike, natch, has been decidedly less than cooperative.
But then, being known for cooperation is like getting the “Plays Well With Others” line check-marked on your report card.
It’s just so square.
TOMORROW: The coolest product fad of the year, those hi-tech scooters.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s tonight at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT TOOK THE P-I to point out one of those startling bookends-O-history:
“Mount St. Helens blew at exactly 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday. Nearly 20 years later, the Kingdome was imploded at 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday.
“Coincidence?”
Actually, even if the eerie time synchronicity hadn’t happened, I’d have thought of St. Helens and the Dome as the defining boom-booms of the late-modern PacNW.
St. Helens killed 57 people, thousands of trees, and dozens of old codger Harry Truman’s cats, and disrupted thousands of folks’ routines. The Kingdome only killed two ceiling-tile workers, who had a construction-crane accident a couple years before it was deemed unworthy of continued existence.
The pre-blast St. Helens was considered by most a jewel of a peak. The pre-blast Kingtome was considered by many an eyesore.
But both blasts were popular spectacles that generated marathon TV coverage, souvenir sales, and “where were you when…?” popular memories.
In 1980, a spectacular natural “disaster” was about what it took to get the Evergreen State on the network news. (The eruption didn’t make the top of the NY Times front page for two days; the paper being otherwise occupied covering Miami race riots.)
In 2000, hardly a week goes by without big headlines about Microsoft, Starbucks, police brutality, or gypsy moths.
But the near-universal thrill at watching the Dome go kablooey proves we haven’t lost our ability to find wonder and thrills in the sights and sounds of mass-scale destruction.
P.S.: I can never get tired of reruns of the TV footage of St. Helens.
For one thing, despite having been five years into the era of minicams and even home VCRs, and despite the weeks of warnings and buildup on the mountain, the only real footage of the blast itself came from a still photographer who simply hand-forwarded his film as fast as he could.
For another thing, it was one of the last domestic TV news events at least partly covered with 16mm film cameras, rather than live video feeds. To folks my age and up to 10 years older, the scratchy, dark, washed-outy look of 16mm reversal film will always signify scruffy, raw news footage (or the exterior scenes of British miniseries that were otherwise shot in brightly-lit studios on video).
I find myself having to tell Those Kids Today that there was a time when prime-time news promos really did say “Film at 11,” and when local newscasts weren’t burdened by endless, uninformative, live “standup” chats with reporters on the scene of something that had ended hours before.
TOMORROW: Those annoying “My __” websites.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the newly-ascending adolescent sex-role stereotypes. Instead of depicting boys as all privileged-and-powerful and girls as all suppressed waifs, the new stereotype depicts girls as empowered achievers and boys as lost, clumsy oafs.
Part of the reasoning behind this new conventional wisdom is the notion that boys, particularly boys with feminist teachers and/or divorced moms, are growing up receiving a steady dose of overt and covert anti-male messages. These boys, the argument goes, come to see themselves as inherently and irrepairably stupid, insensitive, brutal, and immature; even as personally responsible for every bad thing any male ever did to any female.
These depictions, and the explanations used to justify them, are just as irresponsibly oversimplified and overgeneralized as any stereotypes. Still, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, there are a few young males who have been caught up in the futile trap of self-gender guilt tripping.
I’ve seen a few such young and less-than-young males out there. For them, and for any of you who may be caught up in this self-esteem ruination, some words to ponder:
MONDAY: WIth or without the antitrust hoopla, is Microsoft’s era over anyway?
