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A MICROSOFT ‘PERMATEMP’ of my acquaintance recently described a heated political discussion she’d had with a co-worker. The co-worker, being a good manic Microsoftie, was insistant that those pesky governmental authorities oughta stop meddling in the inalienable right of big corporations to do any damned thing they wanted to do.
As she explained to me about him, “He’s a libertine.”
She meant he’s a Libertarian–part of an organized movement and political party whose ideology I won’t fully discuss here, but which basically hates both personal-morality laws (such as drug prohibitions) and business-regulation laws (such as antitrust and pollution controls).
But in retrospect, the term “libertine” might also have applied. I don’t know a thing about this particular co-worker, but I’ve certainly known a few other cyber-capitalist true believers who could easily fall under one or more of the dictionary definitions of a libertine–“One who acts without moral restraint,” “a dissolute person,” “one who defies established precepts.”
These cyber-libertines I know think nothing of sticking fraudulant handicapped-parking cards in the windows of their Benzos. They spend money not only to disable their Harleys’ mufflers, but to use mechanical tricks to make ’em louder. To these guys (they’re not all guys, just most), the ‘civil society’ is a crutch for weaklings and saps.
One alleged extreme libertine is Patrick Naughton.
You might remember Naughton as the high-rising Disney/Infoseek/Go Network exec who got caught up in a sting operation last month. The feds claim they caught him on an in-person meeting he’d arranged thru chat rooms with someone he thought was a 13-year-old female, but who was really a law-enforcement agent out to nab pedophiles. (As of last week’s arraignment, Naughton’s denied the charges and promised a vigorous defense.)
At the time of the arrest, some observers wondered out loud whether the very qualities that had propelled Naughton so high in the Net biz could also have driven him into imagining himself above the law of the land and one of the western world’s most universal social taboos.
One unnamed Net-biz person was quoted as saying he didn’t want to publicly dis Naughton because he might have to work with a Naughton supporter in some future gig. “The Internet industry now is not so much about technology; it’s about relationships and doing deals.”
Of course, “relationships” and “doing deals” were what got Naughton into this trouble in the first place, according to the prosecution.
But is his alleged behavior really a particular outgrowth of Internet-age hypercapitalism?
Is there something about that particular industry that rewards predatory, ruthless, monomaniacal mindsets, the kind of thinking that allows for no considerations beyond one’s own personal wants and obsessions?
I don’t think so.
Assorted adult straight and gay men, and a few adult women, have chased after teen and preteen mating targets in assorted times and places throughout the species’s history–in places as disparate as ancient Greece, George III-era England, and late-industrial Japan.
It’s a common sex-fantasy; but one many (probably most) Western Hemisphereans and Europeans feel should remain taboo, for very defensible reasons. (Some people, including a few who are also sympathetic to pro-business politics, have called for a reconsideration of the taboo and the laws enforcing it; their arguments, and the counter-arguments against them, are also beyond the scope of today’s discussion.)
But for now, let’s acknowledge that those accused of intergenerational sex, and those who’ve advocated its decriminalization, have been from all walks of life, from elective politics to insurance to religion. It’s not an Internet thing; it’s not a straight or gay thing; it’s not even a ‘guy thing.’
It’s a human thing.
MONDAY: So when’s this new millennium start anyway, and does it really matter?
ELSEWHERE:
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, in which she claims that there’s no universal male conspiracy against women and that the socio-emotional problems faced by many current males are due neither to any supposed innate male evility nor to feminist ball-busters, but rather to a social and economic system that values money and power, and which devalues the personal worth of individuals of all genders.
Still, it’s one thing for a female author of impeccible feminist credentials to speak out in sympathy toward men.
It might be even more provocative for a male to proclaim male equality–not superiority, but equality.
That’s what illustrator/performance artist Douglas Davis did recently in two essays for the New York Press, “The Wick vs. the Prick: Heterophobia and the Gender Wars” and “Phallus Rising: Or, the Prisoner of Joy.” (The original pieces are no longer on the paper’s site (it maintains only its current issue on its site), but Davis has put it up somewhere on the “Hyper Texts” section of his own site and also has a forum site based on some of the ideas in them.)
Some of his ideas:
We need yang as much as yin; masculine energy can be a force for good; it’s perfectly OK to be a male (or a female who actually likes males); and, if we play our cards right, the next century could lead toward a “Wild Future” in which we get beyond such superficial arguments and instead learn to celebrate our selves and our others’ selves–female, male, straight, gay, bi, wild, mild, and everything else.
Some of my takes on these ideas:
I’m just old enough (42) to have discovered sex at the exact same time the mass media did. I didn’t get the valuable lesson that if the media were lying to me about sex they must be lying to me about other topics. Nor did I grow up in an America where hardcore video was easily borrowable from your next-door-neighbor’s parents’ basement.
Early-’90s style hardcore porn turns me off, as do the Brit-inspired “bloke magazines” such as Maxim. Both are predicated on a soulless, brainless, heartless stereotype of male heterosexual desire; a stereotype ultimately not far from that of certain sexist female essayists.
Allegedly “sex positive” ideologies that try to limit the range of permissible nongay sexual behavior to masturbation, chaste S/M, and media-mediated fantasies only make things worse. They reinforce the ultimate loneliness of the late-modern condition. They promote the orgasm as just another consumer activity, no more life-changing or world-changing than a really good bottle of wine.
Yes, there will be a Wild Future. But not quite the way the “dildonics” advocates proposed it seven or eight years back. Rather, it will be a celebration of all sexualities (male as well as female; hetero as well as gay; “Total Woman” Christians as well as leather-Goth-neopagans). At its center will be the central act of biological existence, M/F coitus. In a post-mass world, all the countless other sex expressions (lesbian, gay, transgender, assorted fetishes and kinks) will continue to blossom; but the central act will remain the figurative maypole around which all these other variants dance their joyous dances, sometimes glancing back at the maypole and sometimes not.
I oppose the dichotomy that claims there can only be two kinds of nongay male sexuality: evil and suppressed. We must promote positive notions of masculinity, neither brutal nor emasculated, neither dominant nor submissive, not against women but with women.
TOMORROW: A few more old buildings and their hidden tales.
A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).
Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”
He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.
Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.
The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:
But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.
Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).
Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.
Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.
As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”
TOMORROW: Susan Faludi and other writers dare to insist that men are people too–why’s this treated as something shocking?
MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.
Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.
Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).
One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.
The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.
What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.
And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.
But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.
But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.
TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.
CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.
(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)
Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.
The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.
Selling movie tickets.
By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.
A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.
Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.
From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.
From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.
From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.
The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.
But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?
You get The Iron Giant.
A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.
But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.
The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.
What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.
The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.
But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.
TOMORROW: A new book treats strange-phenomena with Brit-reserve skepticism.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.
Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard.
While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.
Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today’s fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:
As late as the early ’70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy ’em all.
Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.
Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry’s forgotten.
IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin’ ideological “battles of the sexes”? Let’s get on with the real thing!
TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don’t.
IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.
WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.
I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”
The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.
This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.
Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”
Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”
Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”
Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.
If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.
Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”
But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?
As IF!
MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.
YOU KNOW THE SOUTH PARK EPISODE in which a “prehistoric ice man” goes bonkers trying to readjust to how massively his world has changed since he was frozen–in 1997?
Books about the high-tech culture can seem like that. They can seem outdated by the time they come out, and positively nostalgic if they resurface later as paperbacks.
Case in point #1: The previously-mentionedJoystick Nation by J.C. Hertz; a history of video games up to 1997 that failed to predict Nintendo’s comeback just as certain computer-biz analysts had failed to predict Apple’s comeback.
Case in point #2: Douglas Rushkoff’s Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Hertz’s book tried to depict video-gaming as a prosocial, synapse-building, mind-stimulating thing, something good for your children (even with all the fantasy violence, often in that “first-person shooter” mode that invites the user to get off on the fun of slaughtering).
Rushkoff’s book (written in ’95 and now in a slightly-revised paperback) takes a more generalized, and more hyper, POV. He rapidly jaunts around from video and role-playing gaming to snowboarding to raving to neopaganism to tattoos to chat-rooming (the World Wide Web’s only briefly mentioned) to “mature readers” comic books to MTV to Goths to Burning Man. His purpose–to state and re-state how today’s “screenagers” are increasingly equipped to lead society beyond its flaccid, industrial-age ideologies and into a millennial, tribal utopia.
Lord, Rushkoff tries all he can to assure us that Those Kids Today aren’t brain-dead slackers but instead the harbingers of a grand new future (he even uses rave-dance promoters’ self-congratulatory cliches about hedonistic E-addicts somehow being “the next stage of human evolution”).
But it all comes out like last year’s drum-and-bass; or, worse, like something out of the long-dormant mag Mondo 2000.
Chapters have titles like “The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos.” Every other page or so introduces another kid-culture or young-adult-culture phenomenon depicted to illustrate how us fogeys are just too darned stuck in passe pre-Aquarian mindsets about money, politics, religion, sports, dancing, music, etc. etc.; compared to the Wired Generation’s effortless surfing thru the waves of chaos theory and multiculturalism.
Some random examples of the book’s numbing hyperbole:
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.” “We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.” “Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.”
“We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.”
“Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
Besides the unnerving tone, inaccuracies abound.
Rushkoff repeatedly refers to Marvel Comics’ multilinear storylines (which he sees as one of the kids’ influences in growing up to appreciate a complex, complicated world) as the creative invention of Jack Kirby. (While Kirby established Marvel’s look, designed most of its early star characters, and played an underappreciated role in the plotting of individual issues, it was editor/head writer Stan Lee who devised the “Marvel Universe” concept of heroes and villains and plotlines endlessly crossing over from title to title.)
Rushkoff also uses “the long-running TV talk show The Other Side” as evidence for the popularity of New Age and supernatural topics (the show only lasted one year).
But still, at least Rushkoff, in his annoyingly hyperbolic way, at least has unapologetically nice things to say about a younger generation forever damned by aging hippie-elitists, patronized by cynical advertisers, and stereotyped by clueless mainstream media.
One of Rushkoff’s positive points is that those Gen-Y gals n’ guys seem increasingly unpersuaded by the manipulative language of ads and marketing.
If true, this would mean they’d also be skeptical of Rushkoff’s own marketing blather on their supposed behalf.
IN OTHER NEWS: If America’s power grids and financial systems could survive Hurricane Floyd with disruptions like this, the whole Y2K scare won’t be all that scary.
TOMORROW: Home satellite dishes–still worth it?
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
LOCAL NOTE: Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival ended its Sunday fare with ex-local film collector Dennis Nyback showing off some old reels of vaudeville stars. Highly appropriate, since Bumbershoot itself is like a vaudeville show exploded onto a bigger time/space canvas (four days and 17 stages). It’s a big all-you-can-eat buffet of darn near every performing- and visual-art genre, designed to pack in a huge, mongrel audience. Increasingly, those audiences are responding to the more challenging, unfamiliar entrees. Cibo Matto played to a packed KeyArena throng; and many of the “adventurous music” acts completely filled their own smaller stages. Enough to give you renewed faith in humanity. (Speaking of faith and the future….)
TWO ‘K’S, MUCHO KALE: For a recent freelance gig with Everything Holidays, I was assigned to research a short piece about Year-2000 survivalist camps.
I’d expected to find a lot of the separatist compounds out in the hills, like I’d seen when I first explored the topic last year. Folks who’d previously used rumors of the “new world order,” UN black helicopters, race war, nuclear war, the Red Scare, flouridated water, religious Armageddon, and countless other excuses to call true believers to set up a self-contained utopia of true believers, equipped with canned goods and guns.
People who now were applying the same supposed solution to a new supposed problem–the belief, nay the hope, that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00, all of the western world’s industrial, communications, and transportation infrastructure will immediately and irrepairably go Ka-blooey.
A global computer crash that would leave the cities (especially the parts where those minorities live) in ruins, the phones out of whack, the airlines grounded, the banks busted, the electrical grid down forever, and even late-model cars with computer-chip-controlled systems undriveable.
I found a few ranters of that type. But I also found several hundred more folks who claimed to believe in one-person, or one-family, survival schemes–and were, and are, ready and eager to equip such an effort, for a modest fee.
And such a cornucopia of personal-survival tools have they!
Foodstuffs dried, canned, vaccuum-sealed, dehydrated, concentrated, irradiated, flash-pasteurized, and/or ready-to-eat.
Farm tools, implements, and “Y2K seeds,” so you can grow your own food without depending on the patent-protected, non-perennial products of the big seed companies (which, of course, will go away with the rest of corporate society).
Generators, co-generators, solar panels, battery rechargers.
First-aid kits and more elaborate medical supplies, so you can fill your kids’ cavities after all the dentists get killed in the urban riots.
Radios and shortwave transceivers that run on batteries, gasoline, or wind-up springs.
And, of course, plenty of the gold and silver coins and ingots that’re bound to become the New Currency once the global monetary system evaporates.
In a way, all this leaves me hopeful.
You see, it all means many Americans aren’t really buying the Y2K Scare as the End of the World As We Know It. Instead, they’re taking it like we take so many things–as an opportunity to do our part to keep capitalism going.
The hundreds of Y2K Scare outfitters out there are preaching disaster, but they’re practicing the all-American religion of entrepreneurialism.
And so am I. When January rolls around, and our infrastructure (as predicted by most experts who aren’t selling survival gear) doesn’t crumble, I hope to have a line of cookbooks on the market, teaching folks how to make tasty near-gourmet meals out of their three-years’ supplies of freeze-dried apricots, beef jerky, and army-surplus crackers.
TOMORROW: Yet another retro-futuristic bar, plus the possible end of a private art-garden.
ELSEWHERE: Ghosts of end-of-the-world prophecies past… And what if everything had a Y2K bug, not just computers?… “In the chaos following the collapse of Western civilization, your first objectives will be to procure food, clean water, shelter, and fresh breath…”
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.
AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.
(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)
Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:
The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.
TOMORROW: We play with our food again.
ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, thanx and a hat tip to all who attended my second live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. last night at Elliott Bay Book Co. Further events TBA.
(ADVISORY: The rest of today’s edition contains tasteful language about topics some of you might find borderline-icky. But that’s America for you.)
In his new book For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, the author-cellist Wayne C. Booth quotes Walt Whitman liking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing for the “amount of passion–the blood and muscle–with which it was invested, which lay concealed and active in it.”
That’s as close to a workable definition of “amateur” as I can find these days. The previously-dominant definition, of working without financial renumeration, was pretty much buried a few Olympic Games ago.
The “passion” definition’s also better than the “unpaid” definition to describe the thousands of “amateur adult” Websites out there these days.
Yes, a good proportion of those sites are trying to earn money. Many of them charge for access, to everything or to extra-hot “members’ areas.” Many of them sell videos, CD-ROMS, photos, autographed mementos, and/or undergarments.
But these sites (or at least the better ones) offer something you can’t get from the formulaic rites of corporate porn.
Call it a spirit, a joie de vivre, a feeling (even if in some cases it’s just an affectation of a feeling) that these women really like to do their varying degrees of wicked things (from nude posing on some sites all the way to, well, all the way on other sites) and to let you see them doing them.
Three of these webmistresses recently made a pair of joint public appearances in Seattle and suburban Des Moines, WA. One of them, Oasis, was having a west-coast tour of these “bar meets” with fans; two others, the local Gina and the Portland-based J, accompanied her on this stop.
All three have husbands (Gina for 20 years) who attended the bar meet; all have “open” relationships, at least for the purpose of gathering photo and video material for their sites. Oasis even invited some of her bar-meet guests to an “after-party” safe-sex photo shoot back in her hotel room. (I didn’t attend or ask to.)
All three women were extremely nice and personable. Even while legally dressed in the bars, they exuded an open sensuality and an enthusiasm for life. They were perfect hostesses, graciously leading the shier computer-nerd fans into the bar-table conversation. The women talked a lot about how they love bodies (their own and other people’s), they love sex, and they want to use their sites to help people overcome their own inhibitions and lingering prudish repressions.
But, just like “indie” rock, “amateur” webmistressing is still show business, which means it’s business. Oasis conducts her bar-meet tours so she can personally bring in new fans, so she can turn current occasional viewers into paid members, and so she can make cross-promotional photo ops with other webmistresses across North America. She and her hubby have also worked as consultants and server-providers to other amateurs. Their site claims,
“If you can be a consistant model, have the desire to attend functions, meet new people and promote a website then you could be an internet star! We won’t shit you, the pay-off is much faster being a model, but the long term investment is greater to have your own site. Don’t believe any of the ‘get rich quick’ crap you read on other sites… It takes a while to establish a website and turn a good profit. But if you have the drive, patience and charisma you can earn big bucks with your own website.”
MONDAY: A little more of this.
ELSEWHERE: Some ex-Yugoslavs dream of Cyber Utopias; while others retreat to the paranormal… Probably not the ultimate ad-placement abomination, but the lowest for now…
SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).
True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.
True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.
Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.
Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.
It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.
The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.
The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.
The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.
In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”
A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)
This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.
I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.
And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).
But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.
TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
TOMORROW (on the site): The beauty that is The Imp.
IN OTHER NEWS: The good news is Seattle’s public-access cable channel’s getting a massive infusion of new studio equipment. The bad news is the whole studio will be out of commission for at least two months during the renovation, so everything on Channel 29 (probably starting in October) will be pre-taped on location, or a rerun of an older studio show.
ELSEWHERE: This new learning-tools site for schoolkids features some of the dumbest adult-writers-trying-to-sound-young slang ever attempted–even in the plot summaries of major books!… Speaking of learning tools, will Microsoft’s new print dictionary include nonstandard definitions for “monopoly,” “coercion,” or “protection racket”?… Now, for a limited time only, you can make up your own Netcolumn. The professionally-constructed ones you find here at Misc. World, of course, will still be better….
