It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture? Good. Get used to it. Learn to love the chaos.”
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
ELSEWHERE:
LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.
The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.
The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on “How to Dress for a Nudist Camp.” Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.
While the Nova story’s text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre’s, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something’s loony about males and un-“beautiful” females treating their bodies as unshameful.
Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I’ve yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I’ve written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone’s expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.
Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.
Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one’s inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.
As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement’s ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)
No, nudists aren’t weird in Bizarre’s usual definition. They’re normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.
Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.
(P.S.: I’ve been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I’ve found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn’t sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)
TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.
I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.
Call it the Proud Creep.
This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.
In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.
I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.
It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.
Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:
As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.
(In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)
I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.
It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.
ONE OF THIS COLUMN’S TRADITIONS has been the almost-annual defense of Seafair. We’re resuming it this year, as a vehicle for asserting a few points I strongly believe.
1. Corny is just all right with me. And I don’t mean self-conscious, wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody corny either. That’s for people who can’t handle real corny.
2. Everything in Seattle doesn’t have to be World-Fucking-Class. We can have a big parade (albeit not as big or as respected as Portland’s) and a beauty pageant (ditto) and it’s still OK because it’s ours.
3. Working-class people, and their cultural expressions, are not necessarily fascist. Every year I get the same sneers from hipsters who either are unaware of the Seafair parade (you know, the folk who only read the New York fucking Times and only listen to NP fucking R), or consider the parade’s only worthy purpose to be as an excuse to scornfully chortle at square people. (This year, I had an invite to work on a float. The writer of the invite thought I’d be turned on by his description of the parade as “a trip into the heart of darkness of America.”)
To me, the parade’s an important legacy of an older Seattle in which such pretentious elitism was simply not done.
4. Hydroplanes are all-time cool. The roar of the thunderboats, the sunburnt noses on the Miller-drunk dads, the waterborne tailgate parties on the log boom, the pin traders, the way the boats have only two speeds (140 m.p.h. or dead in the water), the sympathies of the underfunded racing teams trying to cobble enough spare parts together to last the day.
The only problem with the race is the same problem it’s had for over a decade: Its monopolization most years by the Budweiser-sponsored Bernie Little crew. The Unlimited Racing Association is afraid to impose any parity rules (of budgets or equipment stock) that would seriously impair the Bud, and has been unable to attract, for more than a one- or two-season stint, other big-bucks sponsors willing to compete against the Bud squad at its budget level.
(Now, management of the whole sport’s been bought out by a partnership of Little and Formula One promoter Don Garbrecht. How, and whether, Little will deal with his own dominance, in order to restore competitiveness to the sport, remains to be seen.)
Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool. Seattle, and America, is a huge and diverse place, much more complicated and chaotic than any oversimplistic hip-vs.-square duality. You have as much to learn (if not more) from people of other cultures in your own town than from the N.Y./Calif. gatekeepers of your own particular subculture.
Go to the parade (and one or more of the auxiliary neighborhood parades) next year. Go to the hydros this year. Observe the families (screeching kids, bored teens, grumpy grownups), the ethnic dance troupes, the bands, the floats, the vendors. Don’t treat them like your inferiors, because they’re not.
Become part of the celebration.
Even come to enjoy it.
You’ll be a better person for it. Really.
TOMORROW: The He-Man Woman Lover’s Club.
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.
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.
