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I’VE TALKED HERE BEFORE of the uncomfortable similarities between what left-wing academic types call “Identity Politics” and what the media business calls target marketing.
The evidence is everywhere you look.
Earlier this week, we wrote about punk rock getting turned into soundtrack music for skateboarding exhibitions designed to sell athletic shoes and soda pop.
Then there was that bizarre Super Bowl commercial with a hospital nursery full of newborn girls throwing off their little pink caps.
It was for Oxygen, a commercial website and cable TV channel billed as being “For Women, By Women.” It’s really owned by some big media-conglomerate backing; but it’s run by Geraldine Layborne, the former Nickelodeon executive who infamously fired creator John Kricfakusi from The Ren and Stimpy Show.
The TV component of Oxygen is not yet available locally. But a Salon review of its initial offerings (mostly talk shows) claims it’s about as bad as one can imagine.
Essentially, according to the review and similar slams by other critics, the channel’s message is “Don’t obey those old corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. Obey our new corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. And now that we’ve established your material and psychological desires for you, buy these products.”
Marketers, of course, have exploited feminist identity politics at least as far back as the launch of Virginia Slims cigarettes in 1968. (When the cigarette’s makers bought the controlling sponsorship of pro women’s tennis in the ’70s, critics used lines like “I am woman, hear me cough.”)
Even before that, appliance makers used to tout such newfnagled contraptions as home freezers and electric clothes dryers as tools to help housewives cut down on household drudgery–not, like later ads for such items did, to make women feel such duties comprised the central definition of their lives.
Any “political” or “radical” ideology based not on action but on mere identity just plays into the norms and priorities of the Regime of Marketing.
Some “identity” subcultures will be more ripe for advertiser exploitation (say, college-educated white women) than others (say, homeless people).
But the principle’s still the same.
As long as you define yourself by marketer-exploitable definitions (age group, income level, gender, race, or “psychographics”), you identify yourself as a market, not as a soul.
And as long as you identify yourself by your perceived differences from (or your perceived moral superiority to) other market segments (subcultures), you’re doing nothing to build the human-to-human coalitions any real change will need.
MONDAY: One group’s attempt at defining a way out of the tyranny of marketing.
ELSEWHERE:
NOT TOO LONG BACK, we discussed the rise of a monoculture of global marketing.
But, sometimes hidden behind that trend, another trend lies–the accellerating decline of some of the companies that used to define American mass marketing and merchandising.
Late last month, Barron’s had a piece about stagnant times at J.C. Penney. The article suggested that unless the old-line chain retailer got its act together, it could go the way of Woolworth’s.
Shortly after that piece (not available online except to paid subscribers) appeared, a Newhouse wire-service article told of similar woes befalling Penney’s longtime arch rival, Sears Roebuck & Co.
Sears and Penney are trapped by their value-and-service heritage as much as by their squaresville reputations. Like Woolworth and its onetime variety-store brethern such as Kress had been, Sears and Penney are known for selling moderately-priced goods in full-service stores. They made working-stiff families feel like part of the great American consumer dream by treating these consumers with dignity and respect.
Also, their one-style-fits-all fashion sense helped forge a nation of immigrants into a single American mass market.
But these days, the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, with their ruthlessly efficient distribution systems and few-frills store layouts, are able to undersell full-service stores on many types of items.
These big-box chains are not only drawing customers away from independent retailers but also from the malls where Sears and Penney have most of their current outlets.
Many mall operators, meanwhile, are trying to reposition their properties around the all-powerful upscale demographic, that 20 percent of the population that now controls over half the spending power. They’re pushing Sears and Penney to either change their merchandising strategies (i.e., ditch the cheap stuff and those who buy it) or risk getting kicked out at the next lease-renewal time.
Seattle used to have Penney’s biggest store, and still has the oldest extant Sears store. This used to be a prodly middlebrow, work-ethic kind of place, and it supported these purveyors of middlebrow, work-ethic clothes, home furnishings, etc.
That’s changed, as you’ve likely noticed.
Everybody here’s supposed to be rich and at least a little trendy. Those who can’t afford, or don’t like, the costly wares sold at Nordstrom or Pacific Place are banished to the long checkout lines at Ross or the suburban purgatories of Target.
The days when Sears could correctly advertise itself as “Where America Shops” are gone, likely for good. The onetime mass market has evolved into scores of niche markets; and the current Sears/Penney niche (cheaper than other department stores, but nicer than big-box stores) is a precarious one at best.
Can these institutions move to a more reliable niche without losing everything they’re known for?
If I knew the answer to that, I’d be in the stock-advice business.
TOMORROW: Identity politics, target marketing–what’s the difference?
HAD A LOVELY CHAT a few weeks ago with some other local web-writers. Among the afternoon’s hypertextual topics: Our first modems.
Ahh, the good old days. Three-hundred-baud telephone modems that attached directly to telephone headsets via “acoustic couplers.” Text-only bulletin board systems that were run with such now-forgotten software as Minibin and Polaris, on TRS-80s, Apple IIs and kit-built CP/M computers. Real floppy discs, up to eight inches in diameter, holding as much as 400k.
The online world was a much smaller, though not always civil, place. (“Flame wars” and other breaches of sociability were rampant.)
And, like the worlds of science-fiction fandom and computer hobbyists (the real “hackers”) from which it sprung, it was a place teeming with fat guys.
Today’s more corporate online world doesn’t have many fat guys in charge. It has tall guys in charge instead. Lots of tall guys.
You can see them at any gathering of the dot-com hustlers and the Microsoft elite. They’re the movers and the shakers. The fast-talking, hard-handshaking, success-minded gents. The IPO success stories or wannabes. Many of them are tall enough to be Presidential candidates or even late-night talk show hosts.
They know their way around a business plan, or at least can fake it well. They can network and schmooze with the venture-capital gang like all get out.
But the fat guys were a helluva lot more fun to hang out with.
The fat guys knew how to drink and eat and make lovable fools of themselves. The tall guys are usually too self-conscious for that; too obsessed with making the right impression toward someone (often another tall guy) who has, or might one day have, money.
In the March Harper’s, Greg Critser has a cover essay (not available online) concerning “The Heavy Truths About American Obesity.”
“In upscale corporate America,” Critser writes, “being fat is taboo, a surefire career killer. If you can’t control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.”
Critser’s piece depicts the oft-reported “obesity epidemic” as a potential conspiracy by the corporate elite, so big food companies can get rich off of lower-caste people’s addictions–and also so that the elites can easily stereotype and demonize those supposedly lazy couch potatoes who’ll never amount to anything.
He also has nasty things to say against the fat-pride movement and anyone who doesn’t hate obesity as much as he does. (Last year, Critser wrote for the business magazine Worth about his own experience with a new prescription diet drug. Perhaps he thinks if he could go through the ordeal, everyone should be able to and want to.)
Anyhoo, Critser may indeed have a point about why the fat guys who did so much to invent online communication aren’t reaping more of the material rewards from the medium they pioneered. They were great programmers and tinkerers, totally devoted to their projects, and enthusiastic builders of some of the first electronic communities.
They just didn’t have the look of the Lean-‘n’-Mean. (Or the schmoozing or bossing-around skills, or the aura of invincibility.)
But with the old-media monopolists and the stock-bubble hustlers grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of Net “mindshare,” it’s way past time we recaptured more of the BBS era’s homespun, DIY spirit.
Bring back the fat guys.
MONDAY: Benetton, death row inmates, and the Monoculture.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remembering one of the old guard, master computer-journalist Don Crabb.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
Microsoul, Part 2:
A Commodity In Six Pages
by guest columnist Weirdo U. Wanago-Toady
( our guest columnist began a resignation letter to Microsoft she never got around to sending. Today, she continues, with a discussion of the company’s periodic employee “Reviews.”)
Areas I need work on as a human being are elaborated upon by wealthy morons who think a game of hackysack and wearing shorts at work is a form of intellectual social rebellion. I’m given a number between one and five. Apparently five is unattainable. So much so, that there are rumors Bill Gates himself presents you with a bonus check if you get it. (Amounts of the check varied from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on who told me.)
If your parents didn’t give you a structure, rewards, allowances, or punishments, don’t worry. You can get them all from Microsoft. Microsoft is full of bonuses at work, penalties, reviews and latte cards doled out by condescending older-brother-like bosses who will play darts and get drunk with you on those lonely weekend nights. You don’t ever have to grow up.
A coddled adolescense is part of the Microsoft persona. You’ll fit right in, especially if you are one of those non-conforming conformists who likes to defiantly wear a button that says “fuck authority” while blindly obeying it.
The difference between this and high school is that in high school the kids KNOW the report cards, detention, pep rallies, and idiotic structures are bullcrap. Teenagers know they aren’t commodities, but human beings. Microsoft employees accept that they are a commodity, while deluding themselves to think they’re software “rebels” of some sort. They’re in a revolutionary company at a revolutionary time (in the best of all possible worlds).
And if you don’t buy it, you won’t be hired. No wonder most Microsofties are under 30.
My “Team Leader” reviewed me (not my “boss,” that would be too realistic a term for a company which feeds on illusions).
I hardly worked for him. I don’t know where he got all his wordy comments. He said I didn’t know the product thoroughly enough, which was bullshit. I lamely decided that to confront my boss would be to acknowlege the whole gullible corporate acceptance of The Review. But it changed me. Deep down, I accepted that I was an inferior “product” in some way. I think that was when I started working weekends.
The full-time employees get to review themselves first; then they give their scores to their team leader, who gives the final score. It’s all such incredible horse manure. It’s a highly intense, six-page summary evaluating everything from personal flaws to five-year goals. All the full-timers have their door closed. On that day there is a group email: “Do not disturb the full-timers; time for the yearly reviews.”
“Why don’t you just give yourself all fives?” I nonchalantly asked a co-worker, obviously absorbed in self-loathing at his desk. He looked up from his six-page summary of his own personal flaws and said, “I could NEVER do that!” This is a guy who works 60 hours a week and most weekends. He’s 25. He invented some brilliant program which saved the company some money; so it’s not like I’m asking him to vainly toot his own horn.
That’s cool, I thought, Microsoft gets him to sacrifice his youth, and then convinces him though a series of “Microsoft Lifestyle” seminars that he’ll never really be worthy.
I walk away from his office, closing his door as per his request. I’m walking away, and I’m wondering how bad he feels about himself.
I’m wondering how he’s going to try and make it up to the company next year–maybe by working 80-hour weeks this time. Maybe he’ll work every weekend next year.
I walk, and I keep walking. He’ll be a millionaire when he’s 35. A million isn’t good enough, he says; he’ll retire when he has 3 million (today’s economy, you know).
I’ve past my own door now. It’s really easy to keep walking.
He views himself as a product now, a commodity in six pages. At 35, sex will be a long-lost dream to him. It is for me, and I’ve only been here a year.
My free latte card falls from my hand, a two-dollar piece of my soul.
Now I’m outside, in the Redmond “Campus” (“office park” in regular English). The “Three Flags” fly overhead–that’s the United States flag, the Washington State flag, and the Microsoft flag.
“Where do you want to go today?” It asks.
Don’t know where I’m going today. Never did.
I only know where I’m not going.
TOMORROW: Requiem for an afternoon newspaper.
IN OTHER NEWS: The one sports team what was supposed to never threaten to move has just threatened to move (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room).
Microsoul, Part One:
A Former Permatemp Speaks
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein that but to be seen is to dispise yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” -Alexander Pope Moral Essays on Man
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein
that but to be seen is to dispise
yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
-Alexander Pope
Moral Essays on Man
I HAVE TO CONCENTRATE on decommodification of the human soul.
I quit my permatemp job at Microsoft after one year of self-commodification.That’s when you view yourself as a commodity, something to be bought and sold. (I got it from Walter Benjamin, a Frankfurt School member who had to flee Nazi Germany).
Through a series of bizarre events I just left Microsoft one day. I just walked out and kept on walking.
Here is what I wrote when I finished my walk that fateful day:
Dear Microsoft,
I have been here one year now, gotten a raise, gained 40 completely unnecessary pounds, and stopped having sex, strangely enough.
I have become a slave to my work; neglecting myself, my loves, my passions, all for the shallow victory of releasing a product.
I have sacrificed my soul for a latte card (you know, the ones that you hand us when we work a 60-hour week, that are only redeemable at Microsoft cafes).
No matter how ridiculously funny that sounds, it is happening to everyone here.
Selling out is the modis operandi of this company. People brag about 90-hour work weeks.
It’s A Christmas Carol gone awry. Scrooge, instead of insisting Bob Cratchet work Christmas Day, brainwashes him into wanting to work Christmas Day.
It’s the “Microsoft Lifestyle”(TM). Overtime is not compulsory (that would be illegal); but work overtime or else.
I worked 60-hour weeks during the last phases of our product release. It didn’t even show up in my “Review.” Why would it? It’s the norm. I’m supposed to brag about it, be proud of it, like everyone else.
Let me tell you why I’m not proud. I have sacrificed myself for a company that won’t even offer its temps sick pay. And this is something the temps themselves agree with!
How do I explain the temps’ feeling this way? How can I explain the my slow descent into the catatonic agreement of a Microsoftie?
I can give the example of the latte cards: At first when you get one, you look at your boss like he’s an idiot. “Um, oh, thanks,” you might say, just to be polite. (I would have to work five minutes to pay for this latte down in the cafeteria).
Then you start noticing some people get more latte cards than others. Some would even hoard them; a stack of unused latte cards on a desk–now THAT was status.
Then, when I could, I started keeping a noticable pile of two latte cards on my desk. Envious co-workers’ eyes would dart from them to my computer screen as I performed yet another show-stopping feat.
Then the day came when I didn’t get a latte card: I bust my butt, I worked overtime, I gained the standard two extra pounds that week. and I didn’t get a latte card! I was thrown into a deep dark impenetrable depression.
Then I awoke.
“What?” I thought. “This had been a driving force in my life?”
I had been commodified.
I also found myself ignoring the total inequality that pervades the entire system. There is no such thing as equal pay for equal work in this illusionary world. And where are the black people? Where are the women? Where are the people over 40? Where is the ability to organize?
Ask anyone these questions at Microsoft and they’ll talk to you for an hour about how Microsoft is, well, different… special, you know.
No, I don’t know. Why is everyone here a young white male, Bill?
I realize I am leaving a church of some sorts. Microsoft is a religion to its workers. The blind loyalty to an obviously inferior product, the “rebellion” the workers seem to find in absolute conformity, fits a born-again Christian ideology. Redemption through Christ Gates. Bill is the infallible one.
I found, when I worked at Microsoft, it was pretty simple to figure out which side people where on before they even opened their mouths.
It’s a never-never land of agreement about how wonderful Bill is, and how horrible the government is for trying to interfere with something as sacred as capital gains. How could the creation of more millionaires be wrong?
And if you take this to its full conclusion, it’s eventually going to lead you to the idea that money really is a justification in itself. Money is salvation. Money is your reputation. If you’re a millionaire; who can put you down?
No one looks beyond the money, or asks question about how the money was made. Were products copied from other companies? Were unfair labor practices involved? Why is the government suing us again?
Since money is redemption, then all else is silly, idle chatter. At least it is to a Microsoftie.
These people take Microsoft’s side in EVERY court case.
Doesn’t anyone read the paper, you ask? Ask around and you’ll see the workers feel freedom of the press has gone a little too far. The papers are just full of anti-capitalist propoganda. The government is jealous of Microsoft’s wealth.
I ask, “What is so horrible about giving temps benefits?” and I find that even the temps here are on Microsoft’s side. “No, I won’t talk about my salary, the corporation doesn’t like it.” In fact, a huge amount of temps decided not to file for their retroactive stock benefits after a big court case win in 1999. It would be like losing their religion.
Then there is The Review, where aspects of my personality are scrutinized by people who don’t even know what personality is.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Providence hospitals in Seattle are merging with the Swedish Hospital circuit; ending the nun-managed Providence’s status as the largest women-owned company in Washington.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and 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.
A sociocultural movement based on the principles of DIY culture (real indie music, real indie filmmaking, real indie publishing) would probably never lead to any singular mass uprising that would seriously threaten the United States government or the World Trade Organization.
But consider the legacy of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution.”
Having seen the 1968 “Prague Spring” reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks, some underground musicians, writers, and thinkers set about, in spite of heavy censorship and repressions, to form a permanent alternative culture. A culture in which the very premises of authoritarian, top-down thinking would be replaced by notions of self-expression and voluntary association.
When the Soviets’ grip on eastern Europe finally loosened in the late ’80s, it was these folks who filled the void in both political and cultural leadership. The result: A country that made one of the smoothest post-Soviet transitions, that has a relatively healthy economy and political system, that even allowed the Slovaks’ bloodless secession.
The situation here’s much different than in the old Eastern Bloc, for sure.
Back there, back then, all non-official cultural expressions were tracked down and stomped on. Here, indie culture’s treated as corporate culture’s minor leagues (film festivals are promoted as showcasing “tomorrow’s Spielbergs;” indie rock scenes used to be hyped as “the Next Seattle”). If something shows no prospect for being “mainstreamed,” such as difficult-listening music, it’s ignored, left to wither in the shadows.
But the situation’s changing, at a speed faster than so-called “Internet Time.”
As this online column’s oft mentioned, the Net’s one-to-one and one-to-few modes of expression make standard U.S. notions of mass entertainment and mass marketing seem woefully outdated. The oldline TV networks, daily papers, movie studios, and record labels are only keeping their stock value up by consolidating with one another. The record giants in particular are losing market share worldwide, especially in places where local acts are taking back local audiences, away from the Anglophone superstars.
Folks everywhere are hungering for something more immediate, more personal, more “tribal” if you will, than the Time Warners and the Wal-Marts are equipped to provide.
This means an opportunity for avant-improv music (as well as other ground-level genres, from bluegrass to straight-edge) to form new audiences and alliances. And because I believe politics leads from culture and not the other way around, I also believe this is our best hope for forging a decentralized, bottom-up political movement the likes of which America’s never really had.
TOMORROW: Results of the latest MISCmedia questionnaire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
