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OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
YESTERDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and the aforementioned Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”
They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.
Hughes and Rea could have listed some other potential sociocultural lessons from avant-improv:
But can the “creative music” aesthetic really work as a metaphor or object lesson for larger society?
Probably not. But that’s at least part of the whole point.
MONDAY: The last of this for now, I promise.
ELSEWHERE:
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
A Cursed World
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
THE WORST WORDS you can say in a foreign language usually reflect the culture’s phobias. The sacred and the profane are inextricabally tied together. So you can tell a lot about a country by the way it swears.
IN SWEDEN, for example, you say “777 Satans” when you’re really pissed. Seven is an evil number, and three sevens together is the evilest number ever. When you say 777 Satans, you are pratically calling the devil himself.
I know it’s hard to believe; but think how bizarre we sound when we say “Fuck!” To say “sexual intercourse!” when you’re angry just doesn’t make sense to most of the rest of the world. But it does reflect how the puritan roots of the U.S.-influenced sexual taboos.
When you think about it, 777 Satans just makes more sense. Sweden was once a very pagan culture and the Lutheran struggle of God vs. Satan really made an impact on the country. To even say the word “Satan” is considered somewhat of a sin. Say “fuck” in Sweden and they’ll just nod happily and invite you to a smorgasbord.
IN TURKEY, to call someone “Infidel” is pratically the worst thing. While we in America barely ever say our one word for infidel, the Turks have a few variations to chose from. Among others, you could choose “Gavur” (merciless infidel) or “Kafir” (mere non-believer) or “Ihanet” (trecherous infidel).
However, in Turkey the absolute worst thing you could call someone is “without family,” literally “red faced;” proving family is very important over there. If you meet a Turkish person, they will ask you all about your spouse and children, and probably will only yawn if you try to talk about your shitty American job.
IN TUNISIA, the worst thing you can say to someone is “Burn your God;” one of the more elaborate, effective curses I’ve ever heard. I think it implies they are not sharing the same (Muslim) God as you. It’s like “Infidel,” but with imagination.
IN GREAT BRITAIN they say “bloody,” and it’s considered pretty vulgar. No one knows exactly where it comes from; some say it goes as far back as the blood of Christ. I say that because us Americans go to England and try saying “bloody awful” and what we’re actually saying is “fucking awful” but we have no idea.
Same thing happened with the movie title Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me. Apparently “shag” is just as vulgar as “fuck” there, so it was a problem.
In Britain, everything is vulgar. You’re bound to offend our dainty forefathers just by calling their country Britain; but if you care, mostly try to avoid saying “Sod of.” or “Wank off,” variations of sodomy and masterbation respectively. I think it shows the famous British sexual repression we always hear about.
WHICH BRINGS US to our puritanical roots in America.
In America the worst thing you can say is “God damn it.” What does it say about us? We’re as religious and superstitious as the Swedish. It’s taking the name of the Lord God in vain, breaking one of the commandments.
Some of my friends argue the worst thing you can say in the U.S. is “fuck.” This would also speak about our weird Puritan upbringing. As I mentioned earlier, in most other countries it would be ridiculous to say the verb to have intercourse when you’re angry.
Anal intercourse is not a problem, though. Apparently all over the world (except for here), “Butt-Fuck!” is a common explicative. Don’t know if that implies homophobia or acceptance of homosexuality, ormaybe both. I do know we are the only country that’s made anal intercourse illigal in some states.
IN ITALY, while anal intercourse ranks high in vulgarity, the absolute worst thing is “cornuto,” which means a man whose wife is cheating on him. No, it doesn’t apply to a woman whose husband is cheating on her. Same is true in Central and South America. I guess this speaks to a woman’s faithfulness as sacred in those countries. More sacred than a man’s, anyway.
Once we hit Italy, we also get into “Minchia,” which means penis, and can be substituted for the word “fuck” in just about any American curse: “Ma che Minchia vuoi?” (literally, “But what the penis do you want?”).
The Italians also use a lot of references to the Madonna and moms in general, (Mamma mia), showing the importance of Catholicism and the worship of the mother.
THE IRISH, also a really Catholic culture, will say an almost song-like string of words, which I always find poetic. Consider yourself lucky if you are ever around an Irish person who says, “Jesus, Joseph and Mary” or “Sweet Baby Jesus!” Although they have their fair share of wanking and sodding words from the British, the Irish tend to be more imaginative. Anyway, we like them better, don’t we?
IN FRANCE, the worst thing you could scream is “Putain” (whore)–although prostitution is practically legal there, and most French men don’t feel at all unusual about paying a visit to a prostitute. And what do French say when they are really angry? “Bordel!” (brothel).
The French also get kind of imaginative. One example: “Putain de bordel de merde!”, literally, “Whore from a shit brothel!” Maybe the word “putain” is extra evil there, because women are so venerated. In France, chivalry is not dead. While other countries have forgotten the worship of women, the cult of the Virgin Mary was founded and still exists in France.
“Enculee” (butt fucked) is a close second. And “Va te faire voir chez les Grecs”–literally, “Go show yourself to the Greeks”–is a colorful French way of saying to go have anal intercourse. Apparently, the French think you just “show yourself” to the Greeks and they take you. I still have to go to Greece and see if they say, “Go show yourself to the French.” This could be a fun trip.
SOME OTHERS:
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
(Apologies for the Eurocentricity of this article; I acknowlege that swear words from most of Asia and Africa are missing. Send comments, corrections, and suggestions to quinno99@hotmail.com. Thanks.)
MONDAY: Making glamour fun again.
IN OTHER NEWS: Donald Trump, that N.Y./N.J. real-estate guy sometimes mistaken for a national celebrity, now sez he won’t run for President after all. Fine with me. The only Atlantic City casino owner I’d ever vote for is Merv Griffin.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY, another bunch of assignments I’ve done for Everything Holidays.
This time, I had to write perky, upbeat, family-clean pieces about my least favorite holiday of them all.
Like many of my fellow involuntary singles, I’ve long loathed Valentine’s Day. I hated the entire commercial expectation–the demand, even–that everybody already have a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin.
Mind you, I still hate that aspect of the sorry spectacle. But I did get to learn a few other things during my research that made the season a little more tolerable.
Thing I Learned #1: Like most of the big dates on the Christian holiday calendar, V.D. was originally an old Roman “pagan” day with decidedly earthier iconography.
At the ides of February, a little more than halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, they held a fertility festival honoring (among other members of the godly populace) Lupercus, the god of shepherds, and Juno, the goddess of women and marriage. It was, to quote one tastefully written document, “a celebration of sensual pleasure, a time to meet and court a prospective mate.”
In other words, another orgy opportunity.
They’d hold “love lotteries” in which a teenage boy would draw the name of a teenage girl from a box. As another tasteful document puts it, “These pairs were encouraged to pair off as lovers.”
Those Romans didn’t expect everybody to be a whiz at personally marketing The Brand Called You. They knew folks might need help meeting their need to join-up, and had rituals to help ’em out.
Thing I Learned #2: After the emporer Constantine installed Christianity as Rome’s new official religion, the popes installed Christianized (i.e., dour and drab) versions of the old holidays. But the populace didn’t take to the first Valentine’s Day concept–a drab and dour remembrance of saints and martyrs.
Instead, they took one aspect of one particular martyr named Valentine, who (according to the legend) had performed secret marriage ceremonies in defiance of emporer Claudius (who’d believed single and frustrated men made more aggressive soldiers) as their excuse for carrying on with a cleaned-up version of the love holiday.
Thing I Learned #3: Romantic courtship and dating, as we know it today, began with the best of intentions.
Apparently, the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine set up a feudal court in the French town of Poitiers in 1168. She assigned her daughter, Marie de Champagne, to teach the teens and young adults of the palace to be proper young nobles. The etiquette guide Marie commissioned was specifically about how to properly, tastefully express and return romantic intentions.
The idea, besides training good servants, was to give women more power in what had been a muscle-bound society where females were seen as sex-and-birth machines. Under Eleanor’s ideals of “courtly love,” the man would have to prove the purity of his intentions and the woman would hold all the power to choose or reject.
Eight centuries after Eleanor’s ideals spread through Medieval Europe, we’re stuck with their devolved, corrupted legacy.
The “alpha males,” human Barbie dolls, rock stars, and bimbos get all the opportunities to date and mate and have dysfunctional relationships.
The awkward, the shy, and those without magazine-approved physiques, living in an isolation-inducing, suburbanized America without the fall-back option of family matchmakers, get to suffer through the soul-crushing rites of the “dating scene.” Either that, or settle for (for the guys) soulless porn or (for the gals) self-help books telling them they’re supposed to want to stay alone.
But one can take a lesson from old Eleanor. She saw a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanized women, and dreamed of something better. I see a mating-and-marriage system that dehumanizes most everyone, and should also be able to dream of something better.
If only I could imagine what that would be.
(P.S.: Applications for a cutesy-wootesy romantic sugar twin are still being accepted at this email address.)
TOMORROW: Ken Griffey Jr. gets depicted alternately as nice, mean, and nice again, without changing a thing about himself.
IN OTHER NEWS: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; he’s my main man.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the problems that can arise when folks try too hard to make the real world more like their Utopian dreams of a more perfect world–dreams that are almost always too rational, simplistic, and/or monocultural for the chaos that is real-life humanity.
Proclaiming a real-life place to already be a Utopia on earth can be even more problematic.
In the late ’70s, I was assigned a college sociology textbook that had a different indigenous tribe in New Guinea to represent each aspect of the authors’ dream society–matrilinear inheritance, collective decision-making, etc. The teacher didn’t like it when I questioned in class why the textbook’s authors had to find a different tribe for each social trait they wanted to promote, implying there was no one group that had it all.
Idealized societies seldom live up to their idealizers’ fantasies. Cuba’s egalitarianism and Singapore’s orderliness both turn out to be propped up by harsh authoritarian practices. “Unspoiled” rural places are often that way because everybody there is too impoverished to spoil them.
One of the most famous cases of Utopianization was Margaret Mead’s landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa. By now, almost everybody knows Mead’s book, a supposedly rigorous sociological study of “free love” and premarital guiltlessness among Pacific Island teens, wasn’t completely factual. Rather, it represented two urges at least as universal as teen sex-confusion:
Real-life Samoans had, and have, social structures and strictures just like organized societies anywhere on the planet. They might not, on the whole, have had the same specific types of sex-fear and sex-guilt as Westerners (at least before the missionaries did their work); but they had arranged marriages and adultery taboos and all the emotional awkwardness of growing up that you’ll find wherever there are conflicting hormones.
Still, the “Exotic Other” and “Sex-Positive Other” stereotypes remain. And after the Mary Kay LeTourneau TV movie of a few weeks ago, I got to wondering: Would this teacher and her prematurely-mature student have gotten into parental mode if she hadn’t seen those received ideas of innocent licentiousness in his Samoan heritage?
We’re not all one tribe, but we are one species. If we dream of a better way to do things, we shouldn’t force others to express them for us, any more than we should force our current social ways upon them.
(Though the anti-female-genital-mutilation advocates would surely disagree with the latter assertion.)
TOMORROW: Those rah-rah, way-new business magazines.
IN OTHER NEWS: Yep, the Web really is growing like weeds.
WITH Y2KOOKINESS long past by now, we might be able to resume talking about “The Future” without sounding too much like hype-followers.
We might even get to resume talking about ideal futures, a.k.a. Utopias.
Utopias may never exist here in the realm of the real (indeed, the name literally means “Nowhere”). But they express the kind of society certain people want to create. Thus, they can hold bold and sometimes dangerous dreams–especially if those dreams involve the destruction or subjugation of everyone outside the dreamer’s own group.
Last month’s Atlantic Monthly carried a roundup of “five and a half” currently popular Utopian dreams:
One could go on and on into ever more bifurcated Utopian fantasies; many of which would be someone else’s Reign of Terror.
There’s the one where all males would be held in bondage (if allowed to live at all). There’s the one where all meat eating would be unlawful. There’s the one where the total ideological rule of midtown Manhattan and southern California would be replaced by the total ideological rule of downtown Manhattan and northern California. There’s the one where the poor would be sent off to boot camps, to learn to become good submissive house boys. There’s the one where all drinkers would get stoned and all stoners would get shot.
What all these have in common is the dream of engendering a simpler, more predictable world by developing (by force if need be) a simpler, more predictable human race. None of these dream futures seems to have a place for anybody like me who believes society’s too simple and predictable already.
Corporate-libertarian writer Virginia Postrel sees a common flaw in both Utopian and anti-Utopian future-fantasies: “A uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men.” She seems to find that a heresy against her own belief in capitalist hero figures continually emerging to seize the day.
I’d go even further, diversity-wise, than Postrel. My kind of Utopia’s one where entreprenurial crusaders wouldn’t get to run everything, because commerce wouldn’t be considered the totality or even the centrality of all human endeavor.
More about that some other time.
TOMORROW: The problems with proclaiming real-life Utopias.
JUST DAYS AFTER the AOL/Time Warner merger announcement caused a raft of speculation about even further monster media consolidations, the Federal Communications Commission made its first forward-looking move since possibly the Ford administration. It agreed to license as many as 1,000 “low power” FM radio stations to local noncommercial interests around the country.
At last!
Years of lobbying and petitioning by “microradio” advocates (community leaders, “new urbanists,” religious-right broadcasters seeking new syndication outlets for their shows, and pirate-station operators wanting to “go legit”) finally won over the commissioners, over the continuing hue and cry of Big Media’s lawyers and publicists.
Some reasons why this is so Damn Utterly Cool (at least until some jerk messes it all up):
(There’s nothing in the proposed rules, at least in the tiny summaries of them I’ve seen, that would prevent micro-stations from picking up syndicated shows or even 24-hour Net-fed audio. I’m just hoping the movement won’t devolve into just another centralized national network arrangement.)
Competition for available micro-frequencies could be fierce, particularly in already signal-crowded urban zones. So all ye who’ve dreamt of making real community broadcasting happen, ye who’ve wanted to run a pirate station but were afraid of getting caught, ye who’ve long insisted what the airwaves really need is non-Republican religious fare or non-corporate news or local hiphop or booming drum-‘n’-bass DJing or Asian-immigrant-language talk shows or neo-cruster punk rock or avant difficult-listening music or whatever–NOW is your time to get together with like-minded folks, form coalitions with some of these other programming interest groups, form a tax-exempt organization (or find an existing one to operate under), and get ready to file your license petition.
TOMORROW: The rise and rise of a media cliche.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned the pending Kingdome implosion as the perfect symbol of an old Seattle’s passing away.
For this particular installment, let’s try some superficial comparisons between the Seattle of the previous century (which I’ve called City Light) and the Seattle that’s emerged in the past few years (which I’m calling City Extra Light).
In City Light: The Boeing engineer.
In City Extra Light: The dot-com tycoon.
In City Light: Volvo (with a no-nukes bumper sticker).
In City Extra Light: Mercedes SUV (with a fraudulant handicapped parking sticker).
In CIty Light: Multi-purpose and thrifty (if less than durable).
In City Extra Light: Big and bold and for the PoMo ages.
In CIty Light: A modest yet homey bungalow.
In City Extra Light: Either a $2 million waterfront “cabin” or a $1 million “art loft.”
In CIty Light: “Gourmet” versions of regular-Joe staples (coffee, beer,hot dogs, burgers, gorp).
In City Extra Light: Either pan-Asian fusion cuisine or Italian “peasant food” at non-peasant prices.
In CIty Light: Tasteful cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce agenda.
In City Extra Light: Desperate cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce agenda.
In CIty Light: Smart and self-depricating wit (Almost Live, the Presidents, Young Fresh Fellows, Hate comics, early Lynda Barry).
In City Extra Light: No humor at all (beyond ice-breaker remarks at schmooze parties and racist jokes excused as “parodies” of racist jokes).
In CIty Light: Either Protestantism Lite (Unity Church, liberal Methodist) or neopagan goddesses.
In City Extra Light: The New Holy Trinity–money, power, and more money.
In CIty Light: The curious harmony of old-fashioned bourgeois tact and aging-boomer male-feminist submissiveness.
In City Extra Light: “If you don’t like my driving call 800-EAT-SHIT.”
In CIty Light: The curious mix of aging-boomer feminist sanctimony and post-sex-lib man-objectifying.
In City Extra Light: “I want to come back as Barbie–the bitch has everything.”
In CIty Light: The illusion of middle-class unanimity (the poor tried to live above their means; the rich demured away from ostentatious displays of wealth).
In City Extra Light: The Jell-O 1-2-3 economy (a thin creamy layer on top, a slightly thicker viscous layer just beneath the top, and a lot of gelled mass trapped on the bottom).
In CIty Light: Lovable losers.
In City Extra Light: Pissed-off near-winners.
In CIty Light: Prosaic glass bowls.
In City Extra Light: Big new arts buildings housing “major institutions” that spend more on janitors than on local artists-playwrights-composers.
In CIty Light: Funky/populist performance pieces and gallery shows in lo-rent surplus buildings.
In City Extra Light: Bam-bam-bam dance nights, all starring Californian DJs (with local DJs relegated to opening slots) and promoted in that Penthouse magazine Helvetica typeface.
More about this a little later.
MONDAY: How to make up for the canceled New Year’s celebration.
IT’S SUPER BOWL WEEK, and any day now we’re supposed to find out when the Kingdome’s going to finally get it.
That big concrete multi-purpose room, with a face only a structural engineer could love, built in a town ruled at the time by structural engineers, has been deemed obsolete. It will be imploded, probably just before baseball season begins at the new Safeco Field two blocks away.
The 24-year-old Dome’s not just an anachronism in today’s sports industry (with its quest for luxury boxes and costly amenities). It’s an anachronism in today’s Seattle.
The Dome, as I wrote in this online space last year, is as quintessential an icon of old Seattle as the more beloved Space Needle and its adjacent Seattle Center (built a mere 14 years before). Like the reused armory building, ice arena, Shrine temple, and other gathering spaces incorporated into the Center, the Dome was made to do many things cheaply, none of them extremely well.
It was an attempt by a town torn between ambition and repression to become “world class” without breaking the budget or going too outlandish about it.
Seattle’s always been a city in search of a new identity. Indeed, this civic dissatisfaction with its identity is a key component of its identity.
The first permanent white settlement at present-day West Seattle (which we’ll discuss more fully next week) was called “New York-Alki” (“New York By and By” in Chinook jargon).
The city’s early leaders pushd and pushed for Seattle to become the regional railroad hub, despite the old Northern Pacific’s plan to promote its own company town of Tacoma.
In 1897, Seattle firmly became the region’s commercial capital (outpacing the older Portland) when it was successfully promoted as the place for Yukon gold-rushers to get bilked on pans and provisions.
Seven decades later, the ex-frontier shipping post had become Jet City, home of Boeing and the ’62 World’s Fair, a leader in public arts funding and medical research. But to our civic establishment, it still wasn’t enough. Seattle was told it had to become a Big League City; which meant a full complement of pro sports teams and a dome to put them into.
But even that still wasn’t enough. Now, Seattle’s told it has to be “world class.” To really become New York by-and-by (with atttitudes and housing prices to match).
So the relentless destruction of every structure or institution of the ’60s-’80s Seattle is perfectly in keeping with the town’s overall heritage of constant re-creation. So is the ’00s Seattle’s obsession with building architectural monuments to its own “Emerald City” self-image; including the two new gorgeous, luxury-box-festooned stadia replacing the Dome.
I hated a lot about the old Seattle. I used to call it “City Light;” comparing the name of the municipally-owned power company to an official aesthetic of mandatory mellowness, in which laid-back, comfortably affluent baby boomers were considered the only people who mattered.
But the new urban zeitgeist, in which relentless dot-com tycoons are the new more-equal-than-others, disturbs me in other, more serious, ways.
The Seattle I’d called “City Light” at least had some interstitial spaces–low-rent districts, cheapo apartments, punk houses, art studios, fringe theaters, dive bars, no-nonsense retail strips–in which other sociocultural constructs could be imagined. But all those are now either gone or threatened.
It’s not City Light anymore. It’s something harsher, faster, more abrasive.
It’s City Extra Light.
TOMORROW: Some more of this, in the form of oversimplified comparisons.
Praying for Turkey, Part 2
(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)
ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.
In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?
But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.
I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.
It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.
Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.
TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.
And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:
One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.
A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.
Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)
THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.
The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.
It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.
My prayer is always the same one.
“God, I pray that everyone prays.”
TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.
WITH THE LAUNCH OF MISCmedia MAGAZINE (copies should be in early subscribers’ mailboxes by today), it’s time to open up this site to the works of other commentators.
(You can submit proposed items if you wish. Just remember: This site does have a scope of subject matter, no matter how vague; so don’t be miffed if your submission isn’t used.)
Our first such installment comes in the form of a travelogue.
Praying for Turkey
I WENT TO TURKEY to film a documentary about the Amazons. I know, I know there was a big earthquake there and why would anyone do that?
Well, I’ve been wanting to go to Turkey for many years.
A few years ago I would’ve gone but we were (are) at war with Iraq (Turkey’s neighbor). Then there was all the confusing horror of the Balkans, just kissing Turkey to the northwest. Meanwhile, there’s the escalating civil war with the Kurds to the southeast (still going strong). There had been terrorist bombs in tourist sites all over Turkey due to the capture of Ocalan, the Kurdish leader. To the southwest, tensions with the Greeks were mounting into perhaps a larger dispute over Cyprus. I kept postponing, praying, waiting for a peaceful time to go see Turkey.
When the earthquake hit, I guess I realized that five years was enough. I prayed real loud, and, as usual, no one answered.
SO I WENT TO TURKEY. To Samsun, about 600 miles east of the epicenter. From there I explored the wild and dangerous Black Sea coast in search of Themiscrya, the supposed ancient homeland of the Amazons.
Did they talk about the earthquake in Samsun? Not much. It was in the air; and, from what I could gather in three weeks, the Turks suffer loudly and animatedly, but not for long. The earthquake would come up once in a while and everyone would say it was bad and unfortunate (two words I heard over and over again), and thank God for the Americans, and the Iraqis, and even the Greeks for helping out, and then there would be a deep silence until someone would mention how unlikely an earthquake would be in Samsun. On to the next subject.
They realized I was the representative of the tourist industry. Nothing negative, oh, no. One person said, “You gave us 10 million dollars, but Iraq gave us 20 million in oil.” That’s kind of embarrassing, considering I think we have some airbase in Turkey from which we are refueling to bomb Iraq.
Just before I left for Turkey a news story struck my attention from the back pages of the newspaper. Americans had mistakenly launched a missile at an entire Muslim family’s home in Iraq. They were murdered while they slept. Mothers, uncles, children–everyone was dead. Two cousins who were outside at the well survived. This was brought up in conversation while I was in Turkey. I felt too humiliated by my own country to say anything. Most Americans, I wanted to tell them, don’t know we are still bombing Iraq at all.
I HAD READ IN MY LONELY PLANET GUIDEBOOK not to discuss politics with the Turks. Turns out the people I talked to were not at all opposed to arguing politics. We shared our unhappiness and frustration about nearly every country. (America shouldn’t be bombing Iraq to hell, we decided). I argued for the legalization of prostitution; they didnt agree.
This is from a society which is highly censored. You can’t speak against the government.You can’t say anything negative about Ataturk, the man who westernized Turkey in the 20s. If you do, it’s straight to jail. And the Turkish police are not opposed to torture; although since Midnight Express they are really really nice to Americans. I’m not kidding.
While most unmarried turkish couples can’t get a hotel room, even in Istanbul, tourists can be an heathen as they like. In a country which needs tourists more than ever now, there is a great deal of pressure on the whole country to treat tourists like royalty.
STILL, DON’T PUT DOWN ATATURK. On every pedistal, in every town square, every school, mosque, etc. there is Ataturk, who gave the Turks their last names, their westernized letters, and their secular goverment. You can go to prison for criticizing him. I made an off joke, saying something like, “Oh, another Ataturk statue”, and I noticed some self-censorship on the part of my friends. Laughter was stiffled, heads were turned, the subject was changed. Best to avoid Ataturk altogether.
THE NEW YEAR is well upon us.
By now, even the most trenchant black-helicopter-fearing militia-cult members have risen from their bunkers, surveyed industrial civilization’s failure to have failed, and begun to reassess their past stances.
Or maybe not.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about True Believers (religious, political, dietary, or otherwise), it’s that the really ardent ones almost always find a reason to insist they weren’t ever wrong.
So it’s quite interesting to see the Y2K scaremongers like Gary North (who, it turns out, has been predicting nasty fates for everyone not in a militia cult for many years, under many excuses) backtracking from, and making justifications for, their predictions of a glorious fire-‘n’-brimstone end awaiting all of us who didn’t belong to their guns-and-bunkers subculture.
When the calendar rolled over into the big two-ought-ought-ought, all the world’s mainframe computers didn’t go crazy. The power didn’t go out. Guys with computer-chip-enhanced pacemakers didn’t keel over. All there have been, nearly three weeks into the year, are normal everyday technical glitches of the type we’re all used to.
One of the funniest such glitches was on North’s own website. For the first week or so, it continued to warn of how horrible everything was going to be after 1/1/00. The only new material on the site was on the message-board pages, with readers entering sarcastic comments about North’s nonexistent apocalypse.
The year-date on these message-board posts: 19100.
The continued existence of urban societies and their related infrastructure, however, won’t stop the most fanatical militias, white-supremacists, and compound-dwellers scattered across the inland west. But it leaves many of their less dedicated followers, and non-believers who prepared themselves just in case the scaremongers had been right, with a lot of unused survival food.
Stuff that’s supposed to stay “good” for years. Which may be what it’ll take to eat through it all.
Complicating the situation further is the fact that a lot of these food and drink supplies are going to be dispersed among people who didn’t originally buy them. Editorials in some U.S. newspapers are asking former would-be survivalists to donate their canned and freezed-dried hoards to local food banks. And some survivors will undoubtedly pawn some of their pantry-fulls onto friends and relatives.
Fortunately, some folks have prepared for a post-preparedness era.
MRExcellence sells a cookbook covering creative uses for those Army-style Meals Ready to Eat.
For that canned staple of meat-esque goodness, Hormel has an entire Spam recipe site.
Another site, Y2Kitchen, offers a cookbook with more general tips about the broader range of never-spoil, no-cooking-necessary foodstuffs, from hard crackers to that chalky dehydrated ice cream.
And please bring your own concoctions to our book release party Monday, Jan. 31 at the glorious Two Bells Tavern, 4th and Bell in Seattle.
But you might hold on to the bottled water for a few months. You might want to water your lawn with it if we have another dry summer.
TOMORROW: The lucrative industry of being an ex-liberal.
IT’S SO NICE TO KNOW that I’m not the seemingly only person who’s tired of Internet-stock inflation.
Indeed, there seems to be a game going on among amateur and semipro market observers. They’re waiting for the dot-com stock bubble to pop. Some have been waiting for months. So have I.
It’s not that I particularly want those young families with mutual funds to lose their kids’ college money; or for those overworked young workers at venture-capital-dependent Net companies to lose their jobs.
But it would be nice if some of the money-lust mania got out of the game.
It hurts the economic fabric, all that inpouring of wealth into the virtual casino that is tech speculation.
And it hurts the social fabric, all that reverse distribution of wealth into the already-wealthy classes. Behind the media-hype over garage entrepreneurs turning into instant IPO-zillionaires, the fact remains that just about all the massive new wealth North America’s created in the past couple of decades has flowed to the richest 20 percent or so of the populace.
Where the great American middle-class dream once stood (and yes, I know I used to scoff at that dream while it was alive, but that’s beside the point), now there’s a new caste system gelling, like that old Jell-O 1-2-3 dessert mix: The Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets sitting rich and creamily on top; the lower-upper and upper-middle-class professionals and the dot-com mogul wannabes in a semi-fluid layer beneath the top; and all the rest of us Kmart shoppers gelatinously stuck as a mass of goo at the bottom.
Net-stock mania didn’t cause this by any means. It just symbolizes it.
By the end of last year, there were two main stock markets–not NYSE and NASDAQ per se, but the speculation-bloated tech stocks and the sluggish everything else. But as January began, the tech issues began to slide and stumble like a beginning skier, while “flight to quality” investors propped up traditional industrial stocks and bond issues.
But by mid-month, the sector had already gained back its declines and seemed to be a-roarin’ again; thanks in part to the AOL/Time Warner consolidation mania and rumors of a forced Microsoft breakup.
So maybe the tech-stock bubble might not pop.
Maybe it’ll just gently deflate instead.
Mind you, I still think the Internet is, and will continue to be, changing darn near everything humans do; from product-supply chains to underground-art movements. And I realize these new ventures are risky. And I hope the folks investing in them understand the risks. And I also hope they understand even the “winners” in the Net-biz universe may take longer than “Internet time” to show real profits. (Heck, in old-fashioned media a big new venture like a splashy national magazine isn’t expected to turn a profit for three to five years.)
It’s just that this transitoriness is the way things are now. Nothing to get that excited about; nothing to risk one’s life savings on. Unless you really want to.
MEANWHILE: Only an ego-big-as-all-outdoors such as Bill Gates would manufacture an excuse to kick himself upstairs (into a position of just as much big-picture authority, just fewer day-to-day duties)–the excuse being he needs to oversee stratagems to make Windows even more obligatory; i.e., even more of what the Justice Dept. says it’s too much of already…. And here’s a Microsoft permatemp (an old college pal of mine, in fact) who worked three years of up to 90-hour weeks and still didn’t get to be a “regular employee.”
TOMORROW: Looking at real-life film locations.
A FEW WEEKS BACK, we discussed how the punk rock subculture has changed over the past quarter-century.
One of these changes has been an attitude adjustment.
Back in the soft-rock ’70s and the Reagan ’80s, you weren’t supposed to have what was known then as a “bad attitude.” Conservatives demanded you get with the program and stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself. New Agers and aging Deadheads condescendingly pitied you if you refused to conform to a “positive mental attitude.” The radio-TV stations and the newspapers depicted an urban America composed almost exclusively of “successful” upscale baby boomers; and snidely scoffed at anyone too young, too poor, or too dissatisfied with the way things were.
So: Attitude, with a capital A, became a quick and simple stance of rebellion.
A visible minority of young adults who’d spent their adolescence in the ennui days of Watergate, stagflation, and gasoline shortages took their worldview from youths in the much-drearier place that was early-Thatcher-era Britain.
An American punk was somebody who chose alienation as often as alienation chose him or her. Somebody who deliberately picked at any perceived open sores in U.S. society; who scoffed at “positivity” as a means of brainwashing imposed by society’s powerful onto an all-too-supplicant populace.
Century’s end finds the country in a somewhat different situation.
Ad-bloated magazines such as Fast Company and Business 2.0 cheerlead for a supposedly new way of doing business, a new way of working, a new way of living.
And it’s all got Attitude coming out its ass.
You’re not supposed to work your fingers to the bone in quiet desperation. You’re supposed to work your fingers to the bone and beg for more. You’re a “rebel” if you break free from those nasty old-fashioned restrictions (such as a personal life, a mind of your own, or pesky health-and-safety laws) and muster up all the Attitude you can to produce-produce-produce, sell-sell-sell, hustle-hustle-hustle, or schmooze-schmooze-schmooze.
Attitude’s everywhere else, too: SUV highway hogs; Young Republicans on Harleys; cigar bars; Road Rage; “morning zoo” radio; hate-talk radio; potty-mouthed comedians. I swear, you can’t sneeze without infecting a piece of Attitude.
Even that hokiest of entertainment enterprises, the World Wrestling Federation, now uses “Attitude” as its one-word corporate slogan.
So today, any true attitude of rebellion would be a rebellion against Attitude.
That, more than any perceived “death of irony,” could be the reason Those Kids Today increasingly flock to The WB’s hyper-sincere youth dramas, away from Fox (the network that used to boast of “Fox Attitude”).
It could be at least one reason why the sincerely “realistic” horror of The Blair Witch Project took to movie viewers’ hearts in ways the bombast of, say, the Mummy remake couldn’t.
For several years now, black music audiences have been flocking to embrace what someone like me might call sappy love songs, leaving the gangstas to play to the white mall kids.
The heavy youth presence at the WTO protests (in all of the protests, not just the media-beloved “violent” ones) may or may not mean the Post-Blank Generation’s searching for a way to do things that matter, rather than just to show off their own transgressiveness.
But one caveat remains, as it remained in the prospects of a post-ironic age: How’s someone of my in-between generation, who grew up believing in Loud Fast Rules and disdaining anything laid-back or mellow, going to handle the flip-flop of the zeitgeist toward rebel communitarians battling establishment rugged-individualists?
By muddling through, just like everybody in this not-just-on-the-calendar New Era.
TOMORROW: Should Netzines go print?
