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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.
ELSEWHERE:
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?
THE COMMIES USED to deride Western modern art as decadent and elitist, a tool of imperial idologists.
Turns out they were right, at least partly, about the latter accusation.
Frances Stonor Saunders’s new book The Cultural Cold War relates the now-it-can-be-revealed tale of how the Central Intelligence Agency organized and funded a series of foundations that funnelled cash into museums, galleries, publications, and arts promoters.
The CIA’s purpose: to promote a vision of American arts and letters as a font of modern progressiveness, boldly looking forward into a future of vigor and abstract sophistication.
The intended audience: Not really Americans, but ’50s-early ’60s European intellectuals tempted by the egalitarian promises of Soviet Communism (and by the more practicable, less cruelty-laden realities of the milder Euro-socialism).
If Saunders is to be believed, not just the success of certain artistic styles but the careers of specific individuals, most notably Jackson Pollack, could be credited to the spy agency’s indirect and uncredited support.
It wanted to brand America as a land of free thinkers and big ideas, of clean lines and industrious energy–as contrasted to those clumsily censorous Soviets with their oh-so-passe heroic realism and their brutalist architecture.
Other U.S. agencies were doing similar jobs at the time, more overtly. The U.S. Information Agency, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe regularly promoted the U.S. in western and eastern Europe in just these ways. The aspects that made the CIA program different were its scope, its covertness, and its role as an cultural patron (not just as a publicist).
From the present-day viewpoint, it’s ironic-‘N’-odd to imagine the federal government (particularly one of its most reactionary, militaristic segments) as a friend and proponent of rebellious creative folk. Thirty-two years or so of anti-government and anti-authority attitudes in much of the arts world, plus twenty or so years of anti-modernist and kill-the-NEA attitudes among prominent politicians (some of whom seem to prefer a Soviet-realist style aesthetic!), have put many in the boho-world onto a permanent distrust of federal largesse.
Besides, the real money these days, for any and every nonmilitary endeavor, really comes from big business.
Warhol, you may remember, was a mostly un-ironic champion of logos, brand names, and guys with money. More recently, that oh-so-controversial shock-art show in Brooklyn, N.Y. may have been housed at a partly government-supported space, but it was organized and funded by a British ad agency.
While much has been made lately of the problems some arts funders are having in raising money from the dot-com nouveau riche, overall it’s still business that’s increasingly the main patron of bigtime contemporary arts iin the U.S.
Why’s business doing this? The same reason the CIA used to: Branding.
Global marketers have long relied on images of America as the land of the open road, rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, and self-styled “rebels.”
By funding and promoting brash, loud art, corporations are further promoting this image of America–or at least of the America corporations would currently like to help create.
Again, artists are being utilized as part of an ideological crusade.
But these days, the mythical warrior figure is the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Cultural Rebel–first cousin to the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Corporate Rebel.
MONDAY: American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
WAS IT JUST a little over a year ago that I expressed a longing in these virtual pages for a real Left in America (i.e., a serious political organizing movement, not just an exclusionary subculture of sanctimony)?
Now there is one, or at least enough of one to get syndicated columnists all a-flustered and annoyed.
Whether they’re getting annoyed for the right reasons is still debatable.
You see, the critical depiction of certain Dreaded Eugene Anarchists in a recent Harper’s, as described here last week, is indeed a reasonable enough interpretation of certain elements of today’s Way-New Left. Yes, some young radicals are hedonistic, self-righteous, and more concerned with proclaiming their personal moral superiority than with really changing anything. Many of their third-of-a-century-ago precursors were like that as well; though the boomer-centric U.S. news media will rarely admit it.
But can the Way-New Left learn from the old New Left’s mistakes?
A look at the broader movement (or movements) that converged at WTO last fall and at the IMF convention in Washington, D.C. last month offers a hopeful vision.
Beyond the loud and easy-to-stereotype bandana kids, there’s a whole gaggle of Greens, Net-connected “dot commies,” ideologues of assorted stripes, agitators, disciplined direct-action planners, limo-liberals, Utne Reader yups, bohemians, aestetics, labor advocates, minority advocates, queer advocates, hangers-on, and many, many others.
They’re not in agreement on everything.
That they don’t have to be is part of the whole point.
Part of what they’re arguing for is the right to disagree, to publicly express and sort out the messy cacophanies and contradictions of human social existence–as opposed to letting big business and its wholly-owned politicians decide everything via backroom deals and unelected tribunals.
It’s this diversity-in-practice part that makes the Way-New Left more than just the latest generation of “lifestyle radicals” and square-bashers. Instead of just another “identity politics” (i.e., the continuation of target marketing by other means), it cuts across a lot of the age, race, gender, class, and tribal categories into which the marketers would prefer we remained set apart.
And that’s what might really be causing the corporate conservatives and the corporate liberals to fear it.
The Way-New Left has become influential enough for pro-corporate commentators to try really hard to discredit it. It’ll take a little longer (perhaps longer than the current U.S. election season) to see if it can become influential enough to really change things.
Nothing less than the survival of democracy is at stake.
TOMORROW: Dreaming a city into existence.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE still doesn’t have a full-content website, so I’ll have to tell you about its May issue, which has several items relating to topics we’ve been discussing here.
First up: The main article, “Notes From Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest,” in which writer David Samuels hangs out with some of those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
He essentially depicts them as well-meaning children of suburban affluence who’ve sadly but understandably gotten sidetracked from the complexities of the world, instead preferring oversimplified ideologies that allow them to imagine themselves as Totally Good and the culture of their upper- and upper-middle-class parents as Totally Evil (almost completely ignoring all other cultural and subcultural differentiations in late-modern society).
Anarchism, as Samuels interprets its young adherents, isn’t an ideology about empowering The People but an excuse for these girls and boys to imagine themselves as the world’s rightful would-be dictators, philosopher-kings who’d decide what’s best for the world on the basis of what feeds their own self-righteousness.
(Samuels’s depictions may have helped inspire P-I cartoonist David Horsey to recently depict young radicals as snot-faced idiots irresponsibly meddling in issues that should be left to the Real Experts.)
Samuels’s anarchist portrayals contrast with the memoir of oldtime radical Emma Goldman, excerpted elsewhere in the same issue. While Samuels essentially depicts anarchism as just another flavor of elitism, Goldman insists it’s a means toward the abolition of all elites. As an opponent of all centralized states, Goldman wound up seeing capitalism, socialism, and fascism as more or less equally repressive. She undoubtedly would have felt the same about philosopher-king fantasies.
Elsewhere in the issue are pieces that tellingly indict aspects of the current-day elitist regime, the rule of corporate power and money:
A reader who gets through the whole May Harper’s can easily conclude that Samuels’s Eugene anarchists, even if they’re really like his negative characterizations, might be more emotionally than rationally driven (like those now-fetishized ’60s radicals), still have a point. There’s got to be some way for society to seriously consider other priorities than just helping the rich get richer.
TOMORROW: Safeco Field, where the best seats are the worst.
JAMES TWITCHELL, a U. of Florida English prof, has written three books discussing, and generally praising, late-modern pop culture: Adcult (which I haven’t read), Carnival Culture (which I generally liked), and his newest, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (which I’ve mixed feelings about).
I had a chat the other night with one of Twitchell’s former students. This ex-student claims Twitchell loves to parade himself about as a Lone Wolf Conservative among all those pesky Marxist deconstructionists running amok within academe.
God, there are so many of these guys, and they all claim they’re the only one out there. Such double-faced smugness–to suck up to the real centers of power and money in this country, yet to still proclaim yourself a daring rebel of the “look at how un-PC I am” variety.
Twitchell at least acknowledges that he’s worked hard over many years to hone just such a self-image, and has used the acquisition and display of consumer goods for this purpose. In the last chapter of Temptation, he describes having bought a Mazda Miata (that favorite vehicle of 50-year-old boys) precisely to distinguish himself from all those other cult-studies profs with their identical ugly Volvos.
As for the book itself, it’s a mostly-defensive essay of praise, not necessarily for consumerism but for the impulses and desires upon which it feeds.
Twitchell’s main statement, which he keeps repeating throughout the volume: “Once adults are clothed, fed, and sexually functioning, their needs are cultural, not natural.”
So far, I’d agree. Give us bread but give us roses, as the old suffragette anthem said. Man does not live by bread alone, someone else said long before that. Various attempts at stern, utilitarian, no-fun cultural constructs (from the Puritans to Pol Pot to the utopian schemes of modern-day vegan prudes) have been short-lived precisely because (among other factors) they failed to address people’s needs for self-expression.
Twitchell’s right when he says advertisers don’t “manufacture needs” so much as they exploit (or at least try very hard to exploit) any and every impulse and urge; the more basic and visceral the better. Sexual attractiveness? There’s a product for that. Excitement? Relaxation? There’s stuff that’ll give it to ya. Want to speed up or slow down, to simplify or complicate your life? You can buy something to help. Want to rebel, to fit in, or (more likely) fit in with other rebels? Just wear the right look, eat the right food, listen to the right music, and (yes) read the right websites.
Twitchell’s also right when he notes that anti-materialism, as commonly practiced among North American “alternative” types, is really just another flavor of materialism. If you define youself with organic foods and grey sweaters and acoustic guitars and non-animal-tested soap, you’re still defining yourself by what you buy.
Where I essentially disagree with Twitchell is where he says it’s basically good that our urges and impulses have so largely become corporate assets. Just as there’s more behind the Quest for Stuff than just the satisfaction of primitive needs, so should there be more to human life than simply servitude to Sacred Business.
TOMORROW: The continuing story of CNBC.
YOU KNOW I LOVE JIM HIGHTOWER, that Texas tornado of progressive commentatin’.
So you can expect I’d recommend his latest book-length screed, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They’d Have Given Us Candidates.
Alternately angry, cynical, skeptical, alarmist, and hopeful, Hightower wittily offers detail after sordid detail on just how politics in the U.S. of A. has gotten so pathetic.
The short version of his argument is just as you might expect: All the past primary season’s main presidential candidates and both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate money, managed by slick consultants, and completely out of touch with the non-wealthy.
The nation’s fastest-rising political bloc, Hightower continues, is that of disgruntled non-voters. But the parties don’t mind this; because, like so many other corporate enterprises, they no longer care about “the masses” and only wish to persue niche markets (i.e., identifiable “likely voters” who can be easily manipulated by target marketing, attack ads, and loud speeches on non-issues such as flag burning).
So far, so good (or rather, so bad).
But then Hightower introduces one of his frequent radio topics: Two-Party-System Nostalgia.
He repeatedly insists that there was once a time when the Democrats stood for something more than just winning elections and building party bureaucracy at any cost.
As a Texan, living all his life on the edge of what used to be the territory of segregationist Dixiecrats, he oughta know better.
Through most of the past century, the Republican party has had three traditional constituencies, which sometimes have had contradictory goals but which have more or less stuck together in the party fold: Big business, rural churchgoers, and the Rabid Right.
The Democrats’ history is a lot more complicated.
It’s been the party of FDR and JFK, of George Wallace and the senior Richard Daley, of the AFL-CIO and AOL-Time Warner, of Tammany Hall grafters in New York and pious reformers in Minnesota.
Its chief organizational imperitave, through all these factions and eras, has been to amass whatever combinations of voting blocs, no matter how transient or fluid, could be cobbled together to win elections.
Many individual Democrats and groups within the party over the years have, of course, sincerely sought to improve the environment, help the poor and the working class, end bigotry, and/or promote world peace.
But the party’s also had plenty of cold-war hawks, Chamber of Commerce toadies, corrupt ward-heelers, Military-Industrial Complex lackeys, panderers to racism, and funnelers of public subsidies into private retail projects.
Currently, the party’s national bureaucracy’s thoroughly run by corporate butt-kissers. If you ask any of them why they’re such money-stooges (and I have), they’ll tell you the only way to hope to beat the Republicans is to play by the Republicans’ rules–to raise big money, spend it on ads and consultants, and upon election to do whatever the big money wants.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way.
And it might not stay this way anyway.
Ultra-big-money campaigning games, as currently constructed, are predicated on Reagan-era presumptions about the social and media landscapes.
In particular, they’re built on the dichotomy of the corporate Mainstream Media (three TV networks, monopoly daily newspapers) and the parallel Conservative Media (talk radio, televangelists, “action alert” newsletters), with no true liberal-advocacy counterpart.
In the Cyber-Age, this doesn’t have to last. Over the next few years, no matter who’s President, we’ll see a flowering of thousands of local and national niche-movements. Many of them will be progressive. Many others will comprise ideological conservatives who don’t want to feed money and votes to corporate Republicans anymore. The WTO protests included a loose coalition of dozens of niche movements and sub-movements, which may or may not agree on any other issue besides the power of global companies.
Hightower, I’m glad to say, does recognize at least some of this stirring-O-discontent, and sees how it might be put to effective use in organizing for a post-corporate politics.
His book’s last line insists it’s a great time to be an American. I couldn’t agree more.
MONDAY: Remembering when downtown retail wasn’t just for the gold-carders.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT TEASED HERE YESTERDAY: I didn’t get the final random phone call from that TV quiz show on Tuesday, after having made it thru the prior qualifying rounds. Therefore, I won’t be out of town any week soon, and will be right by the ol’ computer dutifully uploading your daily doses of popcult ennui.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about how so many of the folks moving into gentrified artist spaces are info-biz professionals who want to live amid an “artistic” community without the insecurities of personally trying to depend upon an artistic career.
There are some things these movers-in could do to help the painters, performers, writers, et al. they’re displacing.
The first thing they could do to help save the local arts community: Buy some art.
Specifically, buy some works by local street-level artists, not just from out-of-town big-name gallery stars.
The superficial response to this superficial suggestion is that too many alternative-contemporary artist types don’t want to make the kinds of slick, pleasant room decor rich folks like to have in their homes.
But that response neglects that a lot of the ladies ‘n’ gents moving into former artist spaces aren’t the bankers and lawyers who used to have all the money in this town, and who never cared much for non-glass Seattle artists.
A lot of the loft and condo folks are info-biz and software-biz studs. Folk with the inclination, or at least the potential inclination, to see themselves as outre “rebels” and connisseurs of the odd and wonderful.
To a large extent, the Seattle galleries aren’t tapping into this. They probably have wanted to, but haven’t yet figured out how.
Seattle’s Old Money never cared all that much for the contemporary arts. Seattle’s New Money could probably be trained to care; but a lot of it’s in the hands of former middle-class kids who didn’t grow up learning about the wonderful world of patronage.
I recently talked about this with my ol’ pal Matt Richter, who now co-runs the Consolidated Works performance/exhibition space, for a piece I wrote in Washington Law and Politics.
Richter said arts administrators he knew had been having some success getting new-money folks to chip in for one-shot or emergency donations; but that the nouveaus don’t yet “understand the meaning of an annual gift. They’ll be the hero once; but people in the arts have to train these people in the basics of giving. I don’t think that’s as big a problem as some make it out to be.”
I’m thinking an education campaign (what the heck, let’s go ahead and call it advertising) is in order.
Instead of nice, safe ads cajoling nice, safe people to “Support the Arts,” this campaign would run loud, brash ads inviting loud, brash people to, say, “Join the Party.”
The ads would emphasize the beauty, the vicarious emotions, the stories, the alternate lives, the points-O-view, and the experiences you can get from the visual, aural, literary, and performance milieus. The ads would beckon and/or seduce New Money folks into first becoming arts consumers, then into getting more deeply immersed and involved.
You may have already guessed the potential slogan for these ads:
“Art. The Original Virtual Reality.”
TOMORROW: A drink to free trade.
THERE’S A BOX somewhere near the lower-right corner of this page. Click it and you get invited to take a demographic survey about this site.
Actually, I already know more than a few things about the sorts of folks who read this site and its associated print magazine:
MONDAY: The savior of daily newspapers?
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
