LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.

ONCE AGAIN, something I originally did for Everything Holidays. This time, the topic’s infamous Xmas gifts.

It’s said, “It’s not the gift but the thought that counts.” If so, some of these gifts represent less than the highest thoughts.

• Live pets for kids. Particularly if the kids are too young to know how (or have the attention span) to take proper care of the pet, or if the pet’s a species or breed that doesn’t play well with kids.
• Impractical “practical gifts.” If you’re not close to the recipient, you may be forgiven for giving film for a camera she doesn’t own, or Windows software if she’s a Mac user. But if her address includes an apartment number, you should at least know not to give her too many lawn ornaments.
• Gifts for the person you want your recipient to become. If your givee is already into the diet-and-exercise thing, some workout weights or a gym membership are OK. But the morning of 12/25 might not be the best time to “drop a hint” about what you think he ought to be doing.
• Gifts for the person your recipient’s trying to no longer be. An elegant crystal brandy snifter might not be the best present for a new AA member. More commonly, early-adolescents (especially female ones) will often pout silently after opening what would have been perfect gifts for the kids they insist they no longer are. Ask a knowing third party whether that 12-year-old niece is really still into Barbie.
• Cheesy seasonal trinkets. Do you really want to be known as the relative who gave the talking-Christmas-tree electronic doll?

Moving from the merely ill-advised to the totally dorky, American Express last year asked people to send in real, really dumb, presents. Some of the “Most Outrageous Gift Contest” entrants included:

• A red, furry Tickle-Me-Elmo toilet seat.
• A gift certificate to an out-of-business restaurant.
• An electric nose hair clipper that doesn’t work.
• A Bozo The Clown lamp.
• A one carat ring that was actually a carrot dangling on a string.

Some folks try to make up for less-than-stellar gifts by including a less-than-stellar card. Like so much of North American culture, modern Christmas cards let you buy a mass-produced item to express your individuality.

Some of the basic types:

• Ethnic. Remind your loved ones of the old country. Or, send that white-hipster college student in your family a card representing the race or nationality he wishes he belonged to.
• Identity-specific. Many of you have shopped at the last minute, only to find the only remaining cards on the shelf are addressed to Grandma, the in-laws, the next-door neighbors, the paperboy, the paperboy’s dog, or just about anybody except who you need a card for.
• Cartoon. Nothing says the spirit of the season quite like Angelica from TV’s Rugrats reciting all her materialistic wants for the holiday, with a wish for world peace snuck inside the flap.
• Funny (or at least trying to be). Perhaps the most common of this type is the bait-and-switch gag. The front announces a fantastic present (say, a new four-wheeler). Inside the flap, a picture of what the recipient will really get (say, a kid’s little red wagon).
• Erotic (or at least trying to be) “Risque” jokes about what Santa’s really looking at when determining who’s naughty or nice. Bosomy, bare women standing dangerously close to Christmas-tree needles. Hunky men sporting G-strings of gift-wrap ribbons. I suppose they could be thought of as ways to celebrate our ability to enjoy the parts of the life-giving process Mary didn’t get to enjoy.
• Photo. For at least one minute a year, the family’s shown all together with everybody well-groomed and nobody yelling.
• Laser-printer personalized. Besides serving as props for David Letterman skits (“Merry Christmas to My Chat-Room Lover”), they allow you to mix-and-match the verbal and visual messages. A drawing of a happy family at a Christmas dinner could, if you’re really cruel, accompany a written message to your adult daughter asking why she hasn’t given you any grandkids yet.

TOMORROW: Why digital cable TV ought to have more than just movies.

IN OTHER NEWS: 60 Minutes II last night juxtaposed the Eugene anarchists with the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia–who could be interpreted as having also dreamed of destroying industrial society and imposing a neo-agrarian regime upon a less-than-willing populace. If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d imagine an “objective” attempt to discredit the WTO window-breakers’ cause.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for Great Pumpkin worshippers everywhere.

ELSEWHERE:

• One more reason Canada’s different: There, the current save-our-sports scheme involves transferring revenues from small-market teams to big-market teams!…
• It had been the only big team sport females didn’t play, not even in school. But no more….

ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.

Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.

And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.

Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.

Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.

In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.

Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.

It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.

Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.

The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).

While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.

Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.

Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.

Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).

And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.

Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.

On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.

The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.

The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.

UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).

MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.

ELSEWHERE:

• Writing new captions to old cartoon illustrations is a time-honored shtick, done for years in the pages of Punch. Here’s a site completely devoted to it: Daze of Our Lives….
• Someone who believes “a true Utopia is possible,” and has uploaded three volumes of texts to support his notion….

YESTERDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.

It’s brought thousands of bright, ambitious people and billions of the world’s dollars into our once supposedly backwoods region.

It changed the world’s image of Seattle from gritty to glamourous–and from poilte to predatory.

Among MS employees and even many perma-temps, any digression from official Bill-approved thought is increasingly treated as heresy. (Repeat, droning, over and over: “Freedom to innovate… freedom to innovate…”)

Boomtown Seattle’s behavioral trends (the hustling, the dealmaking, the backstabbing, the delusions of Godhood in God’s Country) seem, on the surface, to constitute a complete break from the town’s prior stereotype as The City of the Nice.

But actually, as I’ve noted on prior occasions, the new NW Aggression has deep regional roots.

It goes directly at least as far as the Nordstrom corporate culture; which applied ’70s “motivational training” shticks into an all-enveloping system of rewards, punishments, dominations, and submissions.

At the peak of what was known as “Nordy-ism,” you could not merely be a Nordstrom employee. You had to be a Nordstrom believer.

You had to cheerfully “volunteer” for unpaid overtime and off-the-clock tasks. You had to meet seemingly arbitrary sales or work goals. You had to regularly submit to performance reviews that judged not only your results but your team-player attitude. You had to attend est-like training seminars to become immersed in the mentality of Total Service (and servitude).

You had to work like hell. And you had to love it more than anything else in the world.

People I know who work at Nordstrom these days claim the manic excesses of Nordy-ism have been toned down a bit–partly to avoid lawsuits, partly to appease key workers in a tight labor market.

But its legacy lives on regionally in the ultra-aggressive cultures of Microsoft, Nike, Amazon, assorted dot-coms led by ex-MS principals.

Earlier in this decade, Seattle had a reputation nationally as a haven for nihilistic young cynics eager to proclaim a no-future of eternal ennui. (Though those guys were really quite entrepreneurial.)

Out-of-towners who never realized how assertive the “grunge” people were often mistakenly see it weird that the same small city would suddenly become the city whose suburbs house the company known by many PC-biz observers as “The Evil Empire.”

But cults, especially cults rising at the turns of their respective centuries or millennia, have often had an end-O-the-world aspect to their doctrine and their fervor.

In the case of the Bill Gates personality cult, the doctrine’s a millennial variant on the old-conservative stereotype of “Government Bad; Business Good.”

In the MS religion, Bill is the Great and Omnipotent Force rising to smite evil Government, reform backward Old Business, unleash the cleansing forces of New Business, tame the chaotic Internet, trample competing high-tech cults, and impose by his will (and the work of his minions) the dawn of a new era in civilization.

An era of one world, united by its dependence upon one operating system.

No wonder S/M’s so popular in Seattle.

It’s only appropriate for the fetishes of old empires (Rome, Britain) to become the favorite public sexual displays in a town increasingly populated by those who would build new empires.

P.S.: Some of you may remember “Building Empires” as the title a home-video collection by local hard-rockers Queensryche. They took it from railroad baron James Hill, who called himself (and his flagship passenger train) the Empire Builder. Another example of how the Northwest wasn’t all as progressive or egalitarian as it’s now supposed to have used to been.

P.P.S.: For a fictionalization of the Nordstrom corporate culture (and, hence, of the MS corporate culture), check your TV listings this month for Ebbie, a 1995 shot-in-Vancouver TV movie. It’s a sex-change Christmas Carol with Susan Lucci as “Elizabeth Scrooge,” who runs a fashionable department store by grinding her staffers into the rug and expecting them to love it.

(Of course, the only nightmares our real-life local slavedriver bosses are probably getting these days involve the Spirits of WTO Protesters Past.)

P.P.P.S.: We previously mentioned a local indie movie, Doomed Planet, a broad comedy in which an end-of-the-millennium Seattle is the battleground for a couple of ruthlessly competitive religious cults. When I first saw it a couple months back, I thought it was just a comedy, with little real-world satirical meaning. In retrospect, the videomakers may have been more allegoric than I gave them credit for.

TOMORROW: Boomtown Seattle’s architectural legacy–real-world monuments bought by cyberspace money.

ELSEWHERE:

• All you ever wanted to know about good girls who love bad boys (found by Tiara)….
• If the economy really does collapse next year, you might want to check out some advice for living in your car….

THE PROBLEM WITH RADICALS, I’ve often said, is they’re just too conservative.

It’s especially true in the U.S., where there’s no real radical political movement–just a lifestyle subculture that pretends to be one.

Where a real Left would seek solidarity with working-class folk, America’s Lifestyle Left loves few things better than sneering at the sap masses.

Instead of proposing new socioeconomic arrangements to replace the apparently-dead Eurosocialist dream of enlightened central planning, the Lifestyle Left prefers to merely complain about the moral inferiority of meat eaters, suburb dwellers, TV viewers, church goers, and just about everyone else other than themselves.

And instead of organizing a movement to bring any new proposals into practice, they’d rather just protest.

Protesting alone, at its feeblest, can be little more than a display of Attitude (a way-overused commodity these days). It lets you feel good about yourself and bad about whatever enemy you’re protesting, and can bond you with your fellow protesters in a shared-group experience. But it won’t change a damn thing.

This week, as you may know, Seattle’s supposed to become Protest Central. The World Trade Organization’s holding a bigass international conference starting tomorrow. In what might be the biggest public “radical” showing since the Gulf War protests in ’91, as many as 50,000 demonstraters (a number far outnumbering the invited WTO guests) are expected to show up to tie up streets, disrupt daily life, and otherwise make their message heard.

Their message: The WTO is A Really Bad Thing.

It’s a tool of global corporations, out to make the world even safer for business by gutting tarrifs, environmental protections, child-labor prohibitions, and anything else that gets in the way of guys with money making even more money. It subverts democracy by making individual nations’ laws subject to rebuke or even dismemberment by unelected offshore bureaucrats.

What the protesters don’t say as loudly is that the governments within the WTO’s member nations (some more democratic, some less) have voluntarily agreed to listen to and, in most cases, abide by the WTO bureaucracy’s rulings; all in the name of Almighty Commerce. Any country that wanted to could just say no to WTO, resign from the group, and go back to negotiating individual commercial pacts on its own with every other nation.

WTO is an instrument of central planning–just like the old socialist and fascist central-planning schemes the WTO’s “conservative” advocates claim to have always hated, and which some leftists once advocated. (Many of the WTO protesters are self-styled anarchists–folks who don’t like any big central authority system, not even a socialistic system claiming to operate on “the people’s” behalf.)

As you’ve probably surmised, I don’t hold out the greatest of hopes for the WTO-protest spectacle. But by announcing their intentions so loudly, so far in advance of the conference, they’ve done at least one thing the Lifestyle Left seldom accomplishes.

They’ve gotten the local mainstream print media to mention their grievances, in detail.

Even protest coverage built on giving WTO defenders the final say publicizes the questions.

The Wired guys, the cyber-libertarians, the Global Business Network butt-kissers, and the techno-conservatives have spent the past half-decade gleefully proclaiming that history’s over and they won; that there’s no way any society can ever be organized that doesn’t worshipfully cede all real power to Sacred Business. The techno-corporatists predict lots of “revolutions” within business, but don’t want anyone to even imagine a future not led by big corporations running everything.

If we’re lucky, the WTO protests might lead a few people outside the Lifestyle Left to start imagining a post-corporate world, and then to start working toward one.

(More anti-WTO stuff is at the Independent Media Center and SeattleWTO.org.)

TOMORROW: Visions of government as business’s enemy vs. government as business’s handservant.

IN OTHER NEWS: Babies are apparently still being lured by money on fishing rods…

ELSEWHERE:

• “Old telephone directories make ideal address books. Simply cross out the names and address of people you don’t know….”
• “Leave your phone off the hook for long periods when you know your friends are trying to reach you. That way, they’ll think you have an Internet dial-up account….”
• So it has come to this: Usenet flame wars leading to court orders (found by Macintouch)….

ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.

And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.

The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.

Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.

Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).

All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).

Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.

(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).

First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.

But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.

It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).

Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.

It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.

TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.

IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.

ELSEWHERE:

• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies….
• Just because I’ve read at one of their stores doesn’t mean I can’t share a cheap gag at a chain bookstore’s expense (found by Camworld)….
• The Bud Girls aren’t the first instance of companies trying to associate beer with one’s first beverage (found by the Obscure Store and Reading Room)….

ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.

But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.

It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.

We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.

We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.

As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)

In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.

The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.

We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.

TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.

ELSEWHERE:

• Who sez death can’t be creative?…
• Twin Peaks still holds up after 10 years, to me and to my ol’ pal Jim Emerson….
• The changing American workplace means new types of repetitive-stress injuries…

AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:

• Our species is still referred to as “Man,” and its chief players as “Men.” The big future benefits for women: One-stop shopping (in government-run warehouse-order stores); government-run restaurants called “public kitchens” (eliminating the need to cook); and housework-reducing technology.
• Racism apparently doesn’t exist, but the narrator apparently meets no nonwhite people in his future journeys and doesn’t seem to think that’s worth noting.
• The other big-industrial nations have adopted the same economic-governmental system; and “an international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union, and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.”
• Instead of cash, everybody carries a punch card (called by the then-novel name of a “credit card”), nontransferrable.
• Music is fed into every room of the home via telephone wires from central studios, where live musicians play edifying classical selections 24 hours a day.
• Consumer goods are distributed by hyper-efficient pneumatic tubes, which connect all the buildings in the major cities (and, the doctor promises to the narrator, will soon be built out to farm communities).
• Efficient calculating and industrial forecasting are a vital functions of the Industrial Army, but no computational devices are mentioned.
• With no poverty or homelessness, there’s almost no crime. The apparently only major taboo is “laziness” (refusal to perform one’s assigned job). Those convicted of this are detained and fed bread and water until they repent.
• Despite total government control of the means-O-production, ideas and arts are not censored. Rather, visual-art projects are voted by citizens (in what sounds alarmingly like today’s “public art” bureaucracy). Book and periodical publishers must raise their own startup costs (the closest thing to “capitalism” permitted in the system), ensuring artistic freedom while discouraging “mere scribblers.”
• And most importantly, just like in most utopias, Bellamy’s “Age of Concert” doesn’t just demand personal uniformity, it claims that’d be the inevitable result of everybody getting together and figuring out that a hyper-rational, planned-economy society’s the only way to go.

One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.

Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.

Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.

TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.

ELSEWHERE:

• A round, yellow icon celebrates 20 years of conspicuous consumption; but this story (found by MacSurfer’s Headline News) doesn’t mention the secret behind Pac-Man’s status as the first video game many women liked to play. As punk-rock cartoonist John Holmstrom once noted, “Some women couldn’t identify with games about shooting and other obvious male metaphors. But Pac-Man engulfs its opponents–the female sexual function….”/UL>
  

LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.

Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.

On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.

But the differences go deeper.

Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.

Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.

What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.

For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.

It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.

More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.

MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?

ELSEWHERE:

• A site devoted to collecting every known cover version of the ’72 synth-pop classic “Popcorn!” (found by Memepool)….
• My kinda magazine: Prepared Foods! Organic liquor, vodka coolers, fatty-acid fruit juice, “Curry in a Hurry,” and pate for kids with alien-head designs in every slice!

  A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….

I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.

Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.

(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)

Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.

Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.

In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”

Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.

For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.

For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:

“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”

As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:

“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….

“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”

Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.

TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.

ELSEWHERE:

• The Great Predicto knows all, or at least claims to (found by Kempa)….
• The “Top 6 Uses for a Cell Phone….”
• Ah, the ol’ neighborhood just ain’t the same as it used to be….

YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.

If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.

The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.

But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.

As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.

And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.

So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?

In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.

To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.

Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.

But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.

Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.

As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.

TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.

ELSEWHERE:

• This year, look for “Pizza Logs” with roasted peppers….
• …or maybe eggs on a stick! (found by the Obscure Store and Reading Room)….
• Somehow, this uncovered FBI report gives me even higher respect for one of TV news’s past masters (found by Media Gossip)….

TODAY’S AN “OFF-OFF-YEAR” ELECTION, the kind where neither Presidents, Congresspeople, nor state legislators stand up for the picking.

My town holds its big municipal elections during odd-numbered years, so as to give its own politicians the spotlight.

And, as it happens, the Talk-Radio Right has one of its “across-the-board tax cut” schemes on the ballot, in the form of a state initiative.

And, as it also happens, the state initiative and the Seattle City Council elections both turn out to involve appeals to “We The People” against the common enemy of both rightish “populists” and leftish “progressives”–the corporate middle-of-the-road.

The eternally-lovable Jim Hightower likes to say there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But so far, the center has managed to hold, at least in segments of the American system–albeit as a center that’s drifted steadily rightward.

The Religious Right has had fewer successes in its attempts at “morals” legislation in recent years; the prog-left has been equally unsuccessful at reforming health care or getting working folks a fairer share of the economic boom.

Instead, big business and its wholly-owned politicians have pretty much had a free run in the U.S. Executive Branch, in the Federal Reserve System, and in many state and local jurisdictions. All the talk in the post-Reagan era about new paradigms or the end-of-politics-as-we-know it has, thus far, still found the entrenched old-line powers-that-be still being.

That doesn’t mean they’re not running scared, at least around these parts.

Seattle news media are chock full of heavy-handed wrangling over the potential devastating effects of Initiative 695, which would replace graduated-rate motor vehicle taxes with a flat $30 fee–and would impose tuff referenda requirements any time the Washington legislature wanted to add any new revenue source.

As phony-populist “across the board” tax cuts go, this is a particularly clever fraud. It cuts just enough from average folks’ car taxes to seem like a sensible bargain to average voters. But it cuts hundreds or even thousands from what the big boys pay for their Lamborghini SUVs.

And the funds it cuts from include funds targeted for transportation (including the new regional light-rail scheme as well as road-fixing) and those used by the state to prop up county governments.

I-695’s so extreme, the business lobby loathes it. It would potentially cripple some of the basic infrastructure business needs to get its goods trucked around, and the referendum part would make it damn difficult for the state to create new business-subsidy plans, like those used for the new baseball and football stadia.

But the Washington State Republican leadership felt it needed the talk-radio gang’s rabblerousing capabilities more than business’s patronage, and endorsed 695. No matter what happens in today’s vote, a possibly permanent rift has been created between the Rabid Right and the corporate powers who used to be its chief beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, five of the nine Seattle City Council seats are for grabs (all are citywide races).

In four of these contests, self-styled “progressive” candidates (Curt Firestone, Judy Nicastro, Charlie Chong, and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck) not only won their primaries but won by big enough margins that they’re threatening, with fellow prog-candidate Dawn Mason and incumbent prog Nick Licata (whose re-election bid comes in the next half-cycle), to form a majority coalition that could push for renters’ rights, slow the pace of gentrification, and block new subsidies for corporate-backed development plans.

And oh yeah–they also just might, if given half the chance, officially call BS on city attorney Mark Sidran’s “civility” laws, a systematic war on poor people, black people, young people, and anybody else who doesn’t fit the downtown business establishment’s upscale-boomer target market.

So some members of Sidran’s upscale fan base, led by a Microsoft executive (as if those guys knew a damn thing about “civility”), are spending “soft money” on behalf of the progs’ opponents.

In a municipal system traditionally run by corporate-Democrat machine politics, we’ve got a real, essentially partisan, race here. Should be fun.

TOMORROW: A self-styled “alternative” magazine whines about not getting the opportunity to sell out to big advertisers.

ELSEWHERE:

• Audrey Hepburn’s beauty tips (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….
• In one country at least, it’s still possible to dress for media disapproval (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
• “I hear it does grow back eventually” (found by Kempa)….

HERE’S ANOTHER PIECE I wrote for Everything Holidays. It’s already generated some angry letters by millennium-in-2001 purists.

Some nitpickers insist the new millennium won’t start until the year 2001.

Their justification: There was no Year Zero (despite a ’50s science fiction film, Panic in the Year Zero).

So a decade, century, or millennium doesn’t really start with a “zero” year but a “one” year.

But these well-meaning attempts at precision ignore the fact that calendar-making has always been a less than precise art.

As University of Florida computer-network administrator Thomas Hintz writes, “The calendar is a man-made device. It is an artificial method for defining the passage of time.”

Most civilizations have tried to divide time according to the cycles of the sun and moon, to the best of their ability to do so. But the names of these divisions, and their start and end points, are a matter of human creativity.

The Western World runs on the Gregorian Calendar, established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and based largely on the suggestions of Naples physician Aloysius Lilius and Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius.

Gregory wanted a more accurate calendar than the Julian system, which had been Europe’s standard since the days of ancient Rome. It was Lilius who came up with a more refined system of leap years, to make up for the fact that the solar year takes a little longer than 365 exact days. He also erased eleven days, to make up for past slippage.

The first day of the Gregorian Calendar, October 15, 1582, directly followed October 4, 1582 under the Julian Calendar.

Some European countries (particularly Catholic countries) adopted the Gregorian Calendar right away; others took a while. Great Britain and its colonies didn’t adopt it until 1752.

That’s why George Washington was born on a February 11, but his birthday was celebrated with a holiday on February 22, until it was morphed into the always-on-a-Monday Presidents’ Day.

(Some other nations didn’t fully go Gregorian until the 1920s.)

If that’s not confusing enough, the Gregorian Calendar was built on top of an established year-numbering system that had been back-dated to start with what religious scholars at the time believed to have been the year Jesus Christ was born.

But even that’s become a matter of latter-day disputes. Some historians now believe Jesus could have been born anywhere from five years before to a year after the now-official Year 1.

The next year is called 2000 A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “Year of Our Lord”) because, about a thousand years prior to the Gregorian Calendar’s adoption, a Catholic monk named Dionysius Exiguus was asked by the church to calculate future years’ dates for Easter (based on the Jewish passover, which in turn is based on a complicated formula involving full moon and the vernal equinox).

According to calendar scholar Claus Tondering, “At that time it was customary to count years since the reign of emperor Diocletian; but in his calculations Dionysius chose to number the years since the birth of Christ, rather than honour the persecutor Diocletian.”

Dionysius chose to base his research on what he figured was the birth year of Jesus Christ. Eventually, the church officially adopted his figures, in the year that was proclaimed to be 523 A.D. (Some non-Christians prefer the alternate designation “C.E.,” for “Common Era”.)

So, since year-numbering is so arbitrary, go ahead and celebrate the millennium on 1/1/2000. Then next year, you can join the nitpickers and celebrate the millennium all over again.

I haven’t responded personally to the picky complainers’ emails, but I’ll do so collectively here: Hey, it’s just numbers! And Jesus was probably born over 2,000 years ago by now anyway!

(More info is at Calendar Zone and at Frequently Asked Questions About Calendars.)

TOMORROW: Everything Is Go, Astroboy!

ELSEWHERE:

• From the land that brought you Orson Welles, Joe McCarthy, and those Green Bay Packer fans’ “cheesehead” hats: It’s Weird Wisconsin! (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail….)
• Some of the vignettes on “My Miserable Life” are mildly young-adult angsty; but some are really tear-jerking….