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YESTERDAY, we mentioned the pending Kingdome implosion as the perfect symbol of an old Seattle’s passing away.
For this particular installment, let’s try some superficial comparisons between the Seattle of the previous century (which I’ve called City Light) and the Seattle that’s emerged in the past few years (which I’m calling City Extra Light).
In City Light: The Boeing engineer.
In City Extra Light: The dot-com tycoon.
In City Light: Volvo (with a no-nukes bumper sticker).
In City Extra Light: Mercedes SUV (with a fraudulant handicapped parking sticker).
In CIty Light: Multi-purpose and thrifty (if less than durable).
In City Extra Light: Big and bold and for the PoMo ages.
In CIty Light: A modest yet homey bungalow.
In City Extra Light: Either a $2 million waterfront “cabin” or a $1 million “art loft.”
In CIty Light: “Gourmet” versions of regular-Joe staples (coffee, beer,hot dogs, burgers, gorp).
In City Extra Light: Either pan-Asian fusion cuisine or Italian “peasant food” at non-peasant prices.
In CIty Light: Tasteful cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce agenda.
In City Extra Light: Desperate cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce agenda.
In CIty Light: Smart and self-depricating wit (Almost Live, the Presidents, Young Fresh Fellows, Hate comics, early Lynda Barry).
In City Extra Light: No humor at all (beyond ice-breaker remarks at schmooze parties and racist jokes excused as “parodies” of racist jokes).
In CIty Light: Either Protestantism Lite (Unity Church, liberal Methodist) or neopagan goddesses.
In City Extra Light: The New Holy Trinity–money, power, and more money.
In CIty Light: The curious harmony of old-fashioned bourgeois tact and aging-boomer male-feminist submissiveness.
In City Extra Light: “If you don’t like my driving call 800-EAT-SHIT.”
In CIty Light: The curious mix of aging-boomer feminist sanctimony and post-sex-lib man-objectifying.
In City Extra Light: “I want to come back as Barbie–the bitch has everything.”
In CIty Light: The illusion of middle-class unanimity (the poor tried to live above their means; the rich demured away from ostentatious displays of wealth).
In City Extra Light: The Jell-O 1-2-3 economy (a thin creamy layer on top, a slightly thicker viscous layer just beneath the top, and a lot of gelled mass trapped on the bottom).
In CIty Light: Lovable losers.
In City Extra Light: Pissed-off near-winners.
In CIty Light: Prosaic glass bowls.
In City Extra Light: Big new arts buildings housing “major institutions” that spend more on janitors than on local artists-playwrights-composers.
In CIty Light: Funky/populist performance pieces and gallery shows in lo-rent surplus buildings.
In City Extra Light: Bam-bam-bam dance nights, all starring Californian DJs (with local DJs relegated to opening slots) and promoted in that Penthouse magazine Helvetica typeface.
More about this a little later.
MONDAY: How to make up for the canceled New Year’s celebration.
ELSEWHERE:
IT’S SUPER BOWL WEEK, and any day now we’re supposed to find out when the Kingdome’s going to finally get it.
That big concrete multi-purpose room, with a face only a structural engineer could love, built in a town ruled at the time by structural engineers, has been deemed obsolete. It will be imploded, probably just before baseball season begins at the new Safeco Field two blocks away.
The 24-year-old Dome’s not just an anachronism in today’s sports industry (with its quest for luxury boxes and costly amenities). It’s an anachronism in today’s Seattle.
The Dome, as I wrote in this online space last year, is as quintessential an icon of old Seattle as the more beloved Space Needle and its adjacent Seattle Center (built a mere 14 years before). Like the reused armory building, ice arena, Shrine temple, and other gathering spaces incorporated into the Center, the Dome was made to do many things cheaply, none of them extremely well.
It was an attempt by a town torn between ambition and repression to become “world class” without breaking the budget or going too outlandish about it.
Seattle’s always been a city in search of a new identity. Indeed, this civic dissatisfaction with its identity is a key component of its identity.
The first permanent white settlement at present-day West Seattle (which we’ll discuss more fully next week) was called “New York-Alki” (“New York By and By” in Chinook jargon).
The city’s early leaders pushd and pushed for Seattle to become the regional railroad hub, despite the old Northern Pacific’s plan to promote its own company town of Tacoma.
In 1897, Seattle firmly became the region’s commercial capital (outpacing the older Portland) when it was successfully promoted as the place for Yukon gold-rushers to get bilked on pans and provisions.
Seven decades later, the ex-frontier shipping post had become Jet City, home of Boeing and the ’62 World’s Fair, a leader in public arts funding and medical research. But to our civic establishment, it still wasn’t enough. Seattle was told it had to become a Big League City; which meant a full complement of pro sports teams and a dome to put them into.
But even that still wasn’t enough. Now, Seattle’s told it has to be “world class.” To really become New York by-and-by (with atttitudes and housing prices to match).
So the relentless destruction of every structure or institution of the ’60s-’80s Seattle is perfectly in keeping with the town’s overall heritage of constant re-creation. So is the ’00s Seattle’s obsession with building architectural monuments to its own “Emerald City” self-image; including the two new gorgeous, luxury-box-festooned stadia replacing the Dome.
I hated a lot about the old Seattle. I used to call it “City Light;” comparing the name of the municipally-owned power company to an official aesthetic of mandatory mellowness, in which laid-back, comfortably affluent baby boomers were considered the only people who mattered.
But the new urban zeitgeist, in which relentless dot-com tycoons are the new more-equal-than-others, disturbs me in other, more serious, ways.
The Seattle I’d called “City Light” at least had some interstitial spaces–low-rent districts, cheapo apartments, punk houses, art studios, fringe theaters, dive bars, no-nonsense retail strips–in which other sociocultural constructs could be imagined. But all those are now either gone or threatened.
It’s not City Light anymore. It’s something harsher, faster, more abrasive.
It’s City Extra Light.
TOMORROW: Some more of this, in the form of oversimplified comparisons.
Praying for Turkey, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)
ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.
In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?
But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.
I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.
It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.
Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.
TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.
And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:
One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.
A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.
Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)
THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.
The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.
It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.
My prayer is always the same one.
“God, I pray that everyone prays.”
TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.
WITH THE LAUNCH OF MISCmedia MAGAZINE (copies should be in early subscribers’ mailboxes by today), it’s time to open up this site to the works of other commentators.
(You can submit proposed items if you wish. Just remember: This site does have a scope of subject matter, no matter how vague; so don’t be miffed if your submission isn’t used.)
Our first such installment comes in the form of a travelogue.
Praying for Turkey
I WENT TO TURKEY to film a documentary about the Amazons. I know, I know there was a big earthquake there and why would anyone do that?
Well, I’ve been wanting to go to Turkey for many years.
A few years ago I would’ve gone but we were (are) at war with Iraq (Turkey’s neighbor). Then there was all the confusing horror of the Balkans, just kissing Turkey to the northwest. Meanwhile, there’s the escalating civil war with the Kurds to the southeast (still going strong). There had been terrorist bombs in tourist sites all over Turkey due to the capture of Ocalan, the Kurdish leader. To the southwest, tensions with the Greeks were mounting into perhaps a larger dispute over Cyprus. I kept postponing, praying, waiting for a peaceful time to go see Turkey.
When the earthquake hit, I guess I realized that five years was enough. I prayed real loud, and, as usual, no one answered.
SO I WENT TO TURKEY. To Samsun, about 600 miles east of the epicenter. From there I explored the wild and dangerous Black Sea coast in search of Themiscrya, the supposed ancient homeland of the Amazons.
Did they talk about the earthquake in Samsun? Not much. It was in the air; and, from what I could gather in three weeks, the Turks suffer loudly and animatedly, but not for long. The earthquake would come up once in a while and everyone would say it was bad and unfortunate (two words I heard over and over again), and thank God for the Americans, and the Iraqis, and even the Greeks for helping out, and then there would be a deep silence until someone would mention how unlikely an earthquake would be in Samsun. On to the next subject.
They realized I was the representative of the tourist industry. Nothing negative, oh, no. One person said, “You gave us 10 million dollars, but Iraq gave us 20 million in oil.” That’s kind of embarrassing, considering I think we have some airbase in Turkey from which we are refueling to bomb Iraq.
Just before I left for Turkey a news story struck my attention from the back pages of the newspaper. Americans had mistakenly launched a missile at an entire Muslim family’s home in Iraq. They were murdered while they slept. Mothers, uncles, children–everyone was dead. Two cousins who were outside at the well survived. This was brought up in conversation while I was in Turkey. I felt too humiliated by my own country to say anything. Most Americans, I wanted to tell them, don’t know we are still bombing Iraq at all.
I HAD READ IN MY LONELY PLANET GUIDEBOOK not to discuss politics with the Turks. Turns out the people I talked to were not at all opposed to arguing politics. We shared our unhappiness and frustration about nearly every country. (America shouldn’t be bombing Iraq to hell, we decided). I argued for the legalization of prostitution; they didnt agree.
This is from a society which is highly censored. You can’t speak against the government.You can’t say anything negative about Ataturk, the man who westernized Turkey in the 20s. If you do, it’s straight to jail. And the Turkish police are not opposed to torture; although since Midnight Express they are really really nice to Americans. I’m not kidding.
While most unmarried turkish couples can’t get a hotel room, even in Istanbul, tourists can be an heathen as they like. In a country which needs tourists more than ever now, there is a great deal of pressure on the whole country to treat tourists like royalty.
STILL, DON’T PUT DOWN ATATURK. On every pedistal, in every town square, every school, mosque, etc. there is Ataturk, who gave the Turks their last names, their westernized letters, and their secular goverment. You can go to prison for criticizing him. I made an off joke, saying something like, “Oh, another Ataturk statue”, and I noticed some self-censorship on the part of my friends. Laughter was stiffled, heads were turned, the subject was changed. Best to avoid Ataturk altogether.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
THE NEW YEAR is well upon us.
By now, even the most trenchant black-helicopter-fearing militia-cult members have risen from their bunkers, surveyed industrial civilization’s failure to have failed, and begun to reassess their past stances.
Or maybe not.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about True Believers (religious, political, dietary, or otherwise), it’s that the really ardent ones almost always find a reason to insist they weren’t ever wrong.
So it’s quite interesting to see the Y2K scaremongers like Gary North (who, it turns out, has been predicting nasty fates for everyone not in a militia cult for many years, under many excuses) backtracking from, and making justifications for, their predictions of a glorious fire-‘n’-brimstone end awaiting all of us who didn’t belong to their guns-and-bunkers subculture.
When the calendar rolled over into the big two-ought-ought-ought, all the world’s mainframe computers didn’t go crazy. The power didn’t go out. Guys with computer-chip-enhanced pacemakers didn’t keel over. All there have been, nearly three weeks into the year, are normal everyday technical glitches of the type we’re all used to.
One of the funniest such glitches was on North’s own website. For the first week or so, it continued to warn of how horrible everything was going to be after 1/1/00. The only new material on the site was on the message-board pages, with readers entering sarcastic comments about North’s nonexistent apocalypse.
The year-date on these message-board posts: 19100.
The continued existence of urban societies and their related infrastructure, however, won’t stop the most fanatical militias, white-supremacists, and compound-dwellers scattered across the inland west. But it leaves many of their less dedicated followers, and non-believers who prepared themselves just in case the scaremongers had been right, with a lot of unused survival food.
Stuff that’s supposed to stay “good” for years. Which may be what it’ll take to eat through it all.
Complicating the situation further is the fact that a lot of these food and drink supplies are going to be dispersed among people who didn’t originally buy them. Editorials in some U.S. newspapers are asking former would-be survivalists to donate their canned and freezed-dried hoards to local food banks. And some survivors will undoubtedly pawn some of their pantry-fulls onto friends and relatives.
Fortunately, some folks have prepared for a post-preparedness era.
MRExcellence sells a cookbook covering creative uses for those Army-style Meals Ready to Eat.
For that canned staple of meat-esque goodness, Hormel has an entire Spam recipe site.
Another site, Y2Kitchen, offers a cookbook with more general tips about the broader range of never-spoil, no-cooking-necessary foodstuffs, from hard crackers to that chalky dehydrated ice cream.
And please bring your own concoctions to our book release party Monday, Jan. 31 at the glorious Two Bells Tavern, 4th and Bell in Seattle.
But you might hold on to the bottled water for a few months. You might want to water your lawn with it if we have another dry summer.
TOMORROW: The lucrative industry of being an ex-liberal.
IT’S SO NICE TO KNOW that I’m not the seemingly only person who’s tired of Internet-stock inflation.
Indeed, there seems to be a game going on among amateur and semipro market observers. They’re waiting for the dot-com stock bubble to pop. Some have been waiting for months. So have I.
It’s not that I particularly want those young families with mutual funds to lose their kids’ college money; or for those overworked young workers at venture-capital-dependent Net companies to lose their jobs.
But it would be nice if some of the money-lust mania got out of the game.
It hurts the economic fabric, all that inpouring of wealth into the virtual casino that is tech speculation.
And it hurts the social fabric, all that reverse distribution of wealth into the already-wealthy classes. Behind the media-hype over garage entrepreneurs turning into instant IPO-zillionaires, the fact remains that just about all the massive new wealth North America’s created in the past couple of decades has flowed to the richest 20 percent or so of the populace.
Where the great American middle-class dream once stood (and yes, I know I used to scoff at that dream while it was alive, but that’s beside the point), now there’s a new caste system gelling, like that old Jell-O 1-2-3 dessert mix: The Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets sitting rich and creamily on top; the lower-upper and upper-middle-class professionals and the dot-com mogul wannabes in a semi-fluid layer beneath the top; and all the rest of us Kmart shoppers gelatinously stuck as a mass of goo at the bottom.
Net-stock mania didn’t cause this by any means. It just symbolizes it.
By the end of last year, there were two main stock markets–not NYSE and NASDAQ per se, but the speculation-bloated tech stocks and the sluggish everything else. But as January began, the tech issues began to slide and stumble like a beginning skier, while “flight to quality” investors propped up traditional industrial stocks and bond issues.
But by mid-month, the sector had already gained back its declines and seemed to be a-roarin’ again; thanks in part to the AOL/Time Warner consolidation mania and rumors of a forced Microsoft breakup.
So maybe the tech-stock bubble might not pop.
Maybe it’ll just gently deflate instead.
Mind you, I still think the Internet is, and will continue to be, changing darn near everything humans do; from product-supply chains to underground-art movements. And I realize these new ventures are risky. And I hope the folks investing in them understand the risks. And I also hope they understand even the “winners” in the Net-biz universe may take longer than “Internet time” to show real profits. (Heck, in old-fashioned media a big new venture like a splashy national magazine isn’t expected to turn a profit for three to five years.)
It’s just that this transitoriness is the way things are now. Nothing to get that excited about; nothing to risk one’s life savings on. Unless you really want to.
MEANWHILE: Only an ego-big-as-all-outdoors such as Bill Gates would manufacture an excuse to kick himself upstairs (into a position of just as much big-picture authority, just fewer day-to-day duties)–the excuse being he needs to oversee stratagems to make Windows even more obligatory; i.e., even more of what the Justice Dept. says it’s too much of already…. And here’s a Microsoft permatemp (an old college pal of mine, in fact) who worked three years of up to 90-hour weeks and still didn’t get to be a “regular employee.”
TOMORROW: Looking at real-life film locations.
A FEW WEEKS BACK, we discussed how the punk rock subculture has changed over the past quarter-century.
One of these changes has been an attitude adjustment.
Back in the soft-rock ’70s and the Reagan ’80s, you weren’t supposed to have what was known then as a “bad attitude.” Conservatives demanded you get with the program and stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself. New Agers and aging Deadheads condescendingly pitied you if you refused to conform to a “positive mental attitude.” The radio-TV stations and the newspapers depicted an urban America composed almost exclusively of “successful” upscale baby boomers; and snidely scoffed at anyone too young, too poor, or too dissatisfied with the way things were.
So: Attitude, with a capital A, became a quick and simple stance of rebellion.
A visible minority of young adults who’d spent their adolescence in the ennui days of Watergate, stagflation, and gasoline shortages took their worldview from youths in the much-drearier place that was early-Thatcher-era Britain.
An American punk was somebody who chose alienation as often as alienation chose him or her. Somebody who deliberately picked at any perceived open sores in U.S. society; who scoffed at “positivity” as a means of brainwashing imposed by society’s powerful onto an all-too-supplicant populace.
Century’s end finds the country in a somewhat different situation.
Ad-bloated magazines such as Fast Company and Business 2.0 cheerlead for a supposedly new way of doing business, a new way of working, a new way of living.
And it’s all got Attitude coming out its ass.
You’re not supposed to work your fingers to the bone in quiet desperation. You’re supposed to work your fingers to the bone and beg for more. You’re a “rebel” if you break free from those nasty old-fashioned restrictions (such as a personal life, a mind of your own, or pesky health-and-safety laws) and muster up all the Attitude you can to produce-produce-produce, sell-sell-sell, hustle-hustle-hustle, or schmooze-schmooze-schmooze.
Attitude’s everywhere else, too: SUV highway hogs; Young Republicans on Harleys; cigar bars; Road Rage; “morning zoo” radio; hate-talk radio; potty-mouthed comedians. I swear, you can’t sneeze without infecting a piece of Attitude.
Even that hokiest of entertainment enterprises, the World Wrestling Federation, now uses “Attitude” as its one-word corporate slogan.
So today, any true attitude of rebellion would be a rebellion against Attitude.
That, more than any perceived “death of irony,” could be the reason Those Kids Today increasingly flock to The WB’s hyper-sincere youth dramas, away from Fox (the network that used to boast of “Fox Attitude”).
It could be at least one reason why the sincerely “realistic” horror of The Blair Witch Project took to movie viewers’ hearts in ways the bombast of, say, the Mummy remake couldn’t.
For several years now, black music audiences have been flocking to embrace what someone like me might call sappy love songs, leaving the gangstas to play to the white mall kids.
The heavy youth presence at the WTO protests (in all of the protests, not just the media-beloved “violent” ones) may or may not mean the Post-Blank Generation’s searching for a way to do things that matter, rather than just to show off their own transgressiveness.
But one caveat remains, as it remained in the prospects of a post-ironic age: How’s someone of my in-between generation, who grew up believing in Loud Fast Rules and disdaining anything laid-back or mellow, going to handle the flip-flop of the zeitgeist toward rebel communitarians battling establishment rugged-individualists?
By muddling through, just like everybody in this not-just-on-the-calendar New Era.
TOMORROW: Should Netzines go print?
NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
FIRST, A LOYAL THANX to all of you who responded to yesterday’s piece on the Grinch who stole New Year’s.
BY NOW, you may be quite tired indeed of reviews of the century and of the millennium.
You might even have noticed a few Year-in-Review feature stories out there.
But one thing we haven’t seen at all (except for Michael Wolff, MTV, and CBC) are reviews of the decade.
You know, that epoch in time long enough to seem substantial, but short enough that people old enough to go to bars have been through at least two of them.
So in our effort to always remain out-of-step with what everybody else is doing, here’s MISCmedia’s own Eighty-Six to the Nineties:
Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution:
We’ll Look Back and Laff At:
Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated:
We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without:
Future Nostalgia Icons of the Decade:
We’ll Wonder What All the Fuss Was About:
Sources of Hope:
Top Local Stories:
TOMORROW: The 14th annual MISCmedia In/Out List.
SOMETHING STILL STICKS in my mind from the scattered anti-WTO vandals so long ago (was it really just four weeks?).
The most blatant, deliberate vandalism I saw involved a team of boys in black clothes with punk-anarchist insignia, pounding on Gap windows with small hammers until the windows finally cracked. They were communicating to (or at least greeting) one another with fake gangsta hand signals.
Back in my day, sonny, punk-anarchists didn’t pretend to be black. They pretended to be English.
But I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.
After all, it was at least five years ago that I realized punk had become older than hippie had been when punk started. As we approach a quarter-century since the first Ramones and Richard Hell gigs at CBGB’s in NYC, some two dozen or more variants on the old three-chord garage sound have come, gone, and in many cases come back–hardcore, queercore, emocore, mathcore, etc. etc.
But for the purposes of gross oversimplification (and what could be more punk than that?), let’s compare, in excessively broad definitions, punk (as I’d known it in the late-’70s-early-’80s timeframe) with today’s neopunk (the subculture that the Gap and Van’s Shoes, among other marketers, have been trying to exploit, to the anarchists’ disgust):
PHENOM..............PUNK...............NEOPUNK Food................Greaseburgers.......Vegan burritos Beverage............Jaegermeister.......Mountain Dew Drug................Smack (alas)........Ecstasy (alas) Summer..............Tour van overheats..Skateboarding Winter..............Van stuck in snow...Snowboarding Emotional stance....Glum ennui..........Exuberance Footwear............Converse............Docs Economic prospects..Dim indeed..........Where's my stock options? Af-Am hero..........James Brown.........Ice-T McDonald's..........Reliably mediocre...Root of all evil Sex.................Simple time-waster..Too complicated by gender Porn................Simple time-waster..Only OK if gay or fem-dom Athletics...........Root of all evil....X-treme, man! Vehicle of choice...Beat-up Chevy van...Rebuilt mountain bike Baseball cap........Frontwards..........Backwards Video game..........Atari 2600..........Dreamcast Christians..........Annoying fascists...Tonight's opening band Britain.............Rebel role models...No snow or surf Corporate America...Trying to stop us...Trying to take us over Fave hibrow author..Wm. Burroughs.......Edward Abbey Hippies.............Old farts...........Young, cute, often naked Major labels........Won't sign us.......Drop us, leave us in debt Girlfriend..........Supports me w/job...My drummer Boyfriend...........Sucks...............Licks Future death-cause..Liver damage........Broken neck
PHENOM..............PUNK...............NEOPUNK
Food................Greaseburgers.......Vegan burritos
Beverage............Jaegermeister.......Mountain Dew
Drug................Smack (alas)........Ecstasy (alas)
Summer..............Tour van overheats..Skateboarding
Winter..............Van stuck in snow...Snowboarding
Emotional stance....Glum ennui..........Exuberance
Footwear............Converse............Docs
Economic prospects..Dim indeed..........Where's my stock options?
Af-Am hero..........James Brown.........Ice-T
McDonald's..........Reliably mediocre...Root of all evil
Sex.................Simple time-waster..Too complicated by gender
Porn................Simple time-waster..Only OK if gay or fem-dom
Athletics...........Root of all evil....X-treme, man!
Vehicle of choice...Beat-up Chevy van...Rebuilt mountain bike
Baseball cap........Frontwards..........Backwards
Video game..........Atari 2600..........Dreamcast
Christians..........Annoying fascists...Tonight's opening band
Britain.............Rebel role models...No snow or surf
Corporate America...Trying to stop us...Trying to take us over
Fave hibrow author..Wm. Burroughs.......Edward Abbey
Hippies.............Old farts...........Young, cute, often naked
Major labels........Won't sign us.......Drop us, leave us in debt
Girlfriend..........Supports me w/job...My drummer
Boyfriend...........Sucks...............Licks
Future death-cause..Liver damage........Broken neck
TOMORROW: The Grinch who stole New Year’s.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
