It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
WE’RE ALL GONNA BE OLD ONE DAY, unless something drastic happens in the meantime. Might as well start preparing. And I don’t just mean buyin’ into no-load mutual funds or wearin’ earplugs at loud concerts or even buildin’ up the ol’ calcium intake. I mean psychologically preparing oneself to really enjoy the golden years.
Old age doesn’t have to mean sitting around with your large-print Reader’s Digest and right-wing talk radio, forever complaining about Those Kids These Days. No, millions of oldsters are out there having the time of their lives. Two high-profile documentaries at the recently-concluded Seattle International Film Festival showed widely different aspects of this.
Bingo: The Documentary, from local filmmaker John Jeffcoat, showed a more conventional side of senior shenanigans. Shot across America, Britain, and Ireland, and on a Caribbean cruise ship, it’s an hour of 50ish to 90ish ladies and gents having fun while keeping track of dozens of cards and losing small amounts of money (plus one 30ish recovering druggie who hangs out at his mom’s favorite bingo hall as a cheap, clean-and-sober way to pass the hours).
There’s also scenes from Seattle’s own Gay Bingo and an NYC nightclub with bingo nights for young clubbers. The latter’s one of the shortest scenes in the film, but it might be one of the most vital. These young adults who enthusiastically embrace an old folks’ game are asserting their membership in the continuum of life. They’re proudly eschewing the way-obsolete fallacy of generational superiority.
The Lifestyle, from David Schisgall, is just as light and frolicky about a less-common mature-folks’ scene, group-sex party houses. While swinging (or bingo, for that matter) isn’t just an oldster’s sport by any means, the filmmaker chose to emphasize groups your parents’ or grandparents’ ages, in places like Palm Springs and Orange County, CA and (yes!) Littleton, CO, talking about their fun times a-spouse-swappin’.
Besides the talk, we also get guided tours of the orgy rooms in subdivision basements, a topless fetish-fashion show at a big swingers’ convention, and a few brief scenes of naked former-hardbodies doing what women and men have been doing since before you were born. (Some young-adult audience members at the SIFF screening cringed at these shots, despite the director’s in-person pleading for them not to.)
Besides cringing, a viewer could take this all several ways. You could re-evaluate the sexual repression of your own birth family by seeing the film’s subjects as golden-years advocates of sexual liberation. You could cheer that the hypocrisy of Reagan Country is being challenged from within, however discreetly. Or you could simply dismiss it all as the actions of bourgeois hedonists who, like many other Americans, appear to be embracing the idea of sex as a leisure-time sport, no more or less personal than bingo, in order to avoid the more troublesome, reality-questioning aspects of real intimacy. (More about that latter idea in this space next week.)
But I prefer to think of it as a sign of hope, that as we all get older we’ll still get to assert the right to get it on with our fellow humans’ bodies–liver spots, upper-arm flab, and all.
I also have to admit, though, that the bingo players sure seemed to be having a lot more fun than the swingers.
Tomorrow: Why Seattle loves being the fictional headquarters of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers sequel.
What’s At Stake
Book feature, 6/2/99
THE STAKEHOLDER SOCIETY
by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott
Yale University Press
Now here’s one Big Idea To Save America that’ll likely get lotsa attention from certain media outlets dependent on the consumer buying power of young adults:
Give every young, non-criminally-convicted U.S. citizen $80,000 to spend as they damn well please, with no pesky bureaucrats telling them how.
If they wanted to spend it for college, they could get the dough right away at age 18. Otherwise, they’d get it in four annual installments starting at age 22.
Sure, it would vastly multiply the market for all the goods and services sold in “alternative” weeklies. But, asYale law profs Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott claim, it would also put America back on the road toward equality of opportunity, multicultural harmony, and even participatory democracy.
They admit some young “stakeholders” would undoubtedly foolishly fritter away their dough on cars, gambling, booze, pot, lap dances, designer clothes, genital piercings, killer stereos, and the other fine material temptations aimed at young adults. But they insist most would wisely use their “stakes” to start careers, go learn about the world, buy homes, have kids, help retire family debts, invest in no-load mutual funds, or otherwise make better lives for themselves while helping drive the engines of the producer/consumer society.
OK OK, so it’ll cost some bucks. About a quarter-trillion, they authors estimate. But we can always impose Swedish-level taxes on the really rich. Then, once stakes have been given out, we can hike inheritance taxes so past recipients will have to pay their 80 grand back upon death.
And besides, more young adults with money oughta eventually mean fewer young adults robbing gas stations or dealing dope to get money, so we’ll get to cut back on currently rapidly-escalating costs of cops, courts, and prisons.
The genius of the Stakeholder Society concept is it has something to offer radical leftists, pro-business Democrats, welfare defenders, affirmative-action defenders, and entrepreneurial Republicans (though not sanctity-of-property Republicans or government-as-root-of-all-evil Libertarians).
The way the co-authors plug their scheme, everybody would come out a winner except the really rich and certain low-wage employers who rely on a steady supply of desperate kids. (That rank of employers now includes the U.S. military, so any pay raises needed to keep attracting recruits would add to the stakeholder scheme’s final cost.)
As summarized on the cover blurb, the authors think it’s a great idea because it’d help lead to “a society that is more democratic, productive, and free,” and would “enhance each young adult’s real ability to shape his or her own future.”
It would jumpstart opportunity for the urban and rural poor, eliminate the burden of college loans, feed more technically-trained kids into a hi-tech 21st-century economy that’ll desperately need ’em, shove more dough through those stock-market “investment products” so many non-22-year-olds are depending on for their retirements, and let young women have babies without worrying about how they’ll support ’em.
And, Ackerman and Alstott include in an aside, it’d do wonders for “the arts.” Millions more would get to buy digital-video cameras and DAT recorders, paint pictures, stage performance-art pieces, publish zines, and/or hang out in Prague with other idea-laden folk.
Ackerman and Alstott include tons of details, crunched numbers, supplementary arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and endnotes to back up their proposal. But I have my skepticisms, natch.
Besides the difficulties in getting it underway (they’d basically have to turn a total about-face from 20-year national trends toward enriching the already-rich and disenfranchising the poor), would it work the way they imagine? It’s not hard to imagine the rich and their wholly-owned-subsidiary politicians demanding to burden the program with more restrictions and eligibility requirements year after year, to the point where it becomes an excuse to force all young adults (not just poor ones) to live under the thumb of bureaucrats telling ’em precisely how to live their lives.
Still, it’s good to at least have these two speaking out for the non-upscale, which darned near nobody else does these days (even on what used to be called the left).
It might be an idea that’s doomed to be little more than a fantasy in the current political climate. But you gotta credit Ackerman and Alstott for daring to propose it, and daring their readers to come up with something better.
YES IT’S A CHEAP COINCIDENCE, but Misc. couldn’t help but notice when KING-TV’s Saturday morning “objective” coverage of the Makah whale hunt was peppered with commercials showing a gracefully-swimming whale family to symbolize the feelings of security and strength Pacific Life Insurance promises to provide for your own family.
For over a year now, the Makahs have been using their long-threatened whale-hunt revival to reignite tribal pride and tradition (and to publicize their current-day plight in the media). The anti-whaling protesters, meanwhile, have latched onto the grey whale as, while no longer a threatened species, an icon of anthropomorphic identification, a “virtual pet” as it were, loaded with all sorts of new-agey baggage about the sacred continuum of nature. Both parties are using the creatures to embody their own ideologies. I’m beginning to think the poor whales would be better off if everybody just let them be animals for once. Elsewhere in misplaced-symbolism-land…
MORE POST-LITTLETON MUSINGS: I have to admit, a month or so after the tragedy, that I’ve eagerly lapped up all the print and online gunk by assorted grownups who saw a connection with the shooters–not with the shooters’ neo-Nazi affectations, obviously, but with the other kids’ descriptions of the shooters as the sensitive smart kids who were harassed out of any future adult self-esteem. By the time the monthly print and web magazines came out on the topic, it seemed like everybody who ever grew up to become a writer had been one of the shy, brainy, unpopular kids, a situation I could certainly identify with.
Besides the obvious self-ID part, I wistfully sighed whenever I read remarks that the popular kids, the blondes and the tuff guys, were the ones who’d never amount to anything beyond six kids, three ex-spouses, and a crumbling clapboard rambler in some godforsaken subdivision. Alas, since the mid-’80s it was the jocks and cheerleaders who’ve grown up to be the Limbaugh target audience, the patrons of “hot” nitespots and cigar bars, who drive the bigass SUVs and generally act like they own everybody else. Elsewhere in personal-achievement-land…
BIG BOOK UPDATE: By the time you read this, The Big Book of Misc. will be at the printers for second galley proofs. Design maestro Hank Trotter has come up with a great front cover, reminiscent of Saul Bass’s classic movie posters. It now looks like there will be two release parties. The “pre-release” release party, for loyal Misc. World online readers, will be part of the annual Misc.-O-Rama party held every June–this time on Tuesday, June 8, at the new Ditto Tavern on 5th near Bell. A few weeks later, there’ll be a more widely publicized event once it starts getting into a few stores. You can already pre-order your own copy by check or money order; full instructions are at this link. Online credit-card ordering may be up later this week. Elsewhere in print-land…
FONT OF WISDOM?: The triumphant and unexpected return of Helvetica, formerly the just-about-official Uncoolest Typeface on Earth, is now upon us. It’s the official typeface of ARO.Space and its sister business the Ace Hotel; it’s all over fancy-schmancy mags like Stuff and Surface; and teven he ever trend-following Urban Outfitters chain has adopted it. If it were just the case of a gay dance club, I’d have said it had to be a particularly gay trend–or, at least, that only gay men would see beauty in the typeface straight men have grown up associating with the utter dorkiness of the Penthouse group of magazines (as well as all the tacky little documents that appeared during the early years of desktop publishing, when Helvetica and Times were just about the only font families available on first-generation laser printers).
But the truth of the matter lies beyond such superficial assumptions. Post-rave dance-graphics designers are really using Helvetica because it’s the main onscreen typeface of Kai’s Power Tools, a wildly-popular graphics software program. Power Tools’ chief software architect, the legendary Mr. Kai Krause, built his on-screen menus and instruction screens from Helvetica because (1) it’s a typeface most all computers these days have got; (2) it’s clean and compact; and (3) when used in just the right way, it symbolizes a particularly French-German-Swiss vision of urbane, late-industrial modernism, somewhere between post-Bauhaus architecture and space-age home furnishings. Before Kai’s Power Tools, dance-club flyers, ads, and interiors sported that neo-psychedelic look, all busy and color-saturated and passionate. After Kai’s Power Tools, everything became streamlined and direct and icy-hot.
Some observers might disdain this trend as a regression, away from nostalgia for the celebratory sensuality of 1969 and toward nostalgia for the disciplined, repressive coolness of 1961. I see it as something else, something a little more progressive. To me, the Kai’s Power Tools look is one of invitation and seduction. The old rave look was a very inward iconography, which could only be fully appreciated (or even decoded) if you were already part of the “tribe” (or if you had previously taken the same specific drug-trips the visuals were trying to imitate). The Kai’s incarnation of Helvetica invites newcomers into its deceptively ordered-seeming realm. Instead of an invite-only orgy, it’s a seduction. Elsewhere in early-’60s-relic-land…
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE `WORLD’: We’d previously written that the classic TV soap opera might be a doomed art form in the U.S., because overall network ratings might continue to diminish beyond the point of fiscal viability for these expensive, never-to-be-rerun drama episodes. This is essentially why NBC made the widely-predicted but still shocking decision to cancel the 35-year-old Another World, the network’s second-longest-running entertainment series. It’s been among the lowest-rated soaps for a decade (locally, KING-TV didn’t even run it for two years). But NBC’s dropping AW and keeping the even lower-rated Sunset Beach, because SB has a few more viewers in the prized young-female demographic.
Sure, there are the usual save-our-show fan movements and websites out there, and calls and faxes are descending on other broadcast and cable networks with pleas to keep AW going. But, so far, it’s been to no avail, and the last episode’s still scheduled for the end of June. These other networks probably view AW as unsalvagable. For too many years, too many popular characters have been killed off or otherwise written out, either in budget cuts or in moves to make AW more like NBC’s only successful soap, Days of Our Lives. Instead of stories of equally-sympathetic characters caught up in irreconcilably-conflicting motivations and goals, the producers and writers have gone the DOOL route of building everything around the machinations of one-dimensional supervillains. The largely unwatchable results turned off many longtime AW loyalists while failing to attract many new converts.
AW was originally conceived by soap genius Irna Phillips to be a spinoff of As the World Turns (hence the title). That aspect of the concept was dropped when the show landed on NBC instead of CBS, but it remained a more melodramatic, turmoil-ridden version of a regular extended-family story. (Appropriately enough for the angst-ridden storylines, it’s always been taped at the former Biograph silent-movie studios in Brooklyn, on the same stages where D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation.) AW found its peak during the ’70s under writer Harding LeMay. In 1974 it became the first soap to expand to an hour, a trend followed by most of the other successful serials and causing the squeezing-out of several long-running half-hour shows.
Now, it’s being squeezed out as a casualty of the new TV economics. A movie runs only a couple of hours but lives forever. A daytime soap is constructed to continue indefinitely, but when it ends it ends for good. When AW goes, an entire fictional universe carefully built up by successive writers, actors, and technicians, and taken to heart by generations of viewers, will disappear into the ether of the airwaves, preserved only on reels of archival videotape.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we start talking about the age-old issue of “what this town really needs,” continue to work for justice-and-or-peace, pray for warmth, and consider this remark by Seattle’s own Gypsy Rose Lee, referring to someone else as being “descended from a long line that her mother listened to.”
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.
MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.
CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…
THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.
On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.
On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.
Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.
(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)
In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.
But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.
Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.
Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.
But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)
Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.
On Your Marx
Original online film essay, 3/10/99
I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).
Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).
According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.
The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).
But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.
The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)
The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)
And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)
In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.
MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”
MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)
Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).
All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.
It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.
In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)
WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.
This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)
(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)
The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:
(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)
OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?
McLuhan Made Simple(r)
Book feature, 2/10/99
McLuhan for Beginners
by W. Terrence Gordon; illustrated by Susan Willmarth
Writers and Readers Publishing
The Mechanical Bride:
Folflore of Industrial Man
by Marshall McLuhan
Beacon Press
The Medium Is the Massage:
An Inventory of Effects
by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
HardWired
War and Peace in the Global Village
In the late ’70s, the U.K.-based Writers and Readers organization helped revitalize the sub-genre of educational comics with its series of cleanly-drawn, rigorously-edited trade paperbacks, many on leftist political topics that had become the domain of ponderous academic verbiage. After a falling-out around 1990 with Random House, which had issued the U.S. editions of its early books, Writers and Readers set up its own Stateside distribution arm for what it calls its “documentary comic books” (which are really more like heavily-illustrated texts). The “For Beginners” line’s topics have broadened from Marx and anti-nuclear-power activism to include opera, architecture, pan-Africanism, and the history of clowns.
But what happens when you try to use the illustrated-text format to simplify an author/philosopher/sociologist who already tried during his lifetime to issue illustrated and simplified expressions of his ideas?
Not the total redundancy one might expect.
Marshall McLuhan’s own illo-books (the early The Mechanical Bride and the later The Medium Is the Massageand War and Peace in the Global Village) still hold up today as prime examples in the marriage of word and picture to express a sequence of ideas and critical arguments. Bride, the Toronto media analyst’s first, now damn-hard-to-find book (1950), used the word-picture interplay not only as its technique but as one of its topics. At the time TV was just starting up, McLuhan (1911-80) found most of the things later curmuddeonny media-analysts would blame on TV in the existing realms of radio, movies, newspaper front pages, comic books, and especially magazine ads. While his fellow academics were coccooned away in their ivory towers (perhaps in hiding from the hordes of GI Bill kids then invading campuses south of the Canadian border), McLuhan saw the forces of corporate culture using every persuasive trick, not to inform the populace but rather to keep it in a passive, sleepwalking state of production and consumption.
After his long, detailed, and pictureless Understanding Media (1965) brought him fame and a modicum of critical respect, McLuhan returned to the illustrated format with Massage in ’67, followed-up the next year by Global Village. The two mass-market-paperback sized books, co-written by Quentin Fiore and designed by Jerome Agel, can be seen as one two-volume work. McLuhan called them “mosaics,” possibly referring to the old adage that America was a melting pot but Canada was a mosaic of still-differentiated identities. The McLuhan-Fiore-Agel team mixed New Yorker cartoons, ads, found images, and news and documentary photos to accompany short, pithy, universal pronouncements (“Art is what you can get away with,” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”).
By chopping up his remarks into micro-essays (more about that literary form in a future week) on nothing less important than the essence of modern social interactions, with lots of sharp black and white pictures, it’s easy to see he was trying to use the techniques he’d observed in commercial media to new, more enlightening ends. Unfortunately, readers and critics sometimes didn’t understand the difference between McLuhan’s and advertisers’ use of such visual-verbal techniques, and incorrectly presumed McLuhan was celebrating or approving of the social changes he was actually trying to warn us against.
McLuhan for Beginners author Terrence Gordon (whose work here was admired enough by McLuhan’s family for him to bag the assignment to write his estate-authorized biography) makes clear, to the point of redundancy, that the old Torontoan was trying to keep up with the ’60s, not to wallow in the go-go-go zeitgeist but to warn us about it, as a reserved yet kindly Canuck gentleman dismayed by the U.S.A.’s culture of excess. An excess which not only sent Americans into space but into the horrors of the Vietnam war, into cloverleaf freeways and decayed ghettos, into ever faster, busier, and more manic existences.
Massage and Global Village were intended to only explore pieces of McLuhan’s worldview. Gordon’s book, written nearly two decades after his subject’s death and a decade since his last posthumously-published work, gets to summarize the man’s whole life, career, and teachings. That he does an admirable, cohesive job of it is due partly to his skill, partly to the finely honed instincts of the Writers and Readers editors, and in no small part to the head start given him by his subject.
At a time when so many self-proclaimed “communication” experts can’t write a simple declarative sentence (to the point where you need a “documentary comic book” re-interpretation just to get what they’re trying to say), McLuhan’s knack for breaking down a complex argument into solid bite-sized points, learned largely from the mass media he studied and often opposed, still points the way toward not just understanding media, but making yourself understood in the process.
‘Life, The Movie’:
All the World’s a Multiplex
Book feature, 2/3/99
Life, The Movie:
How Entertainment Conquered Reality
by Neal Gabler
Knopf, $25
Seems most everybody these days hates the mass-media industry, including a lot of the folks who work in it.
Now, in Life, the Movie, we’ve got Hollywood biographer Neal Gabler complaining semi-coherently about Hollywood’s power to shape the popular zeitgeist. I’ve complained about that myself over the years. But my beef’s different from his.
I believe the six big studios (and the five big record labels, the three or four big networks, the 12 big cable-channel owners, and the similarly concentrated magazine and newspaper operators; most of which are cross-owned by a dozen or so media Goliaths) concentrate too much sway over the world’s visions, dreams, and consciousnesses.
Gabler, though, apparently has no problem with a nation (and, by extension, a world) beholden to a single set of ideas dictated by a small cultural elite. He just wants a different elite to be in charge. If anything, he thinks a society organized around mass media (and various interest groups’ need to attain publicity via mass media) istoo populist. From politics and warfare to religion and academia, from fashion and architecture to journalism and bestseller literature, any venture or idea Gabler surveys is one that has to become popular to succeed, and to become popular it has to put on the old razzle-dazzle, to gussy itself up in a narrative arc and a star system and a carefully-staged spectacle and a happy ending.
Gabler’s take will likely appeal to both liberal and conservative elitists. I suspect he’s personally on the left wing of what the webzine Salon calls “the literate overclass,” for the simple reason that Gabler, like a lot of left-elitists, is far more articulate about what he’s against than about what he’s for. He admires that sourpuss left-elitist prude Neil Postman, and he expresses wistful nostalgia for dour Puritanism with its repression of individual personality in favor of “character” (yet he disapproves of cynical politicians who preach about “character” while practicing stage-managed campaigns and market-researched platforms).
While not explicitly calling for it, Gabler seems to want a society run, well, by people like him. A more ordered, rational society, such as that fantasized by the “civil society” movement. A society where a few urban-Northeast big thinkers ponder what’s best for everybody, then face few obstacles of authority in putting their decisions into action. A society where all of us residing outside the corridors of power work hard, save our money, and solemnly tend to our own affairs. Something like what those Seattle City Council members admired so much about Singapore on their junket there a year or two back, before today’s Asian recession discredited a lot of that paternalistic-central-planning ideal.
Besides, America isn’t and never was what Gabler seems to wish it was. Hell, the human race isn’t. We’re a sensual, sensuous species. From the Noh theater of Japan to the Greek tragedies to African tribal dances to Shakespeare to carny shows to museum mega-exhibitions to porn to the Indy 500 to the fashion runways to heavy metal to Japanese magazine ads showing fantasies of American cowboys, we want and love to have our passions stirred, and marketers and publishers and preachers and politicians would be fools to not know it. And, on at least one level, Gabler seems to know it too. In his long, tedious invective over the failings of all humans less brain-centric than himself, Gabler reveals himself to be what the gays call a “drama queen.”
The Ratio of ‘Alpha’ to ‘Pi’
Film review, 1/20/99
Alphaville
(1965) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Home Vision Cinema
Pi
(1997) dir. Darren Aronofsky
Artisan Entertainment
When I finally saw the video release of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (known on-screen, and on the video box, by the Greek letter), it was on the same day I happened to catch Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville on the Independent Film Channel. The two films turn out to be bookends of the modern information age.
Alphaville, as all good film-studies alums know, was Godard’s low-tech response to the popular fears generated by the high-tech advances of the late ’50s and early ’60s. His storyline involved hardboiled private eye Lemme Caution (Eddie Constantine) venturing to a far-off planet where one hyper-rational, central mainframe computer ran everything, and where the display of human emotion was a crime punishable by death. But it was shot on contemporary-modern locations with a small cast, off-the-rack costumes, and no special effects (the voice of the evil computer was played by a throat-cancer patient with an electronic voice-box implant). Godard’s statement against dehumanization was made with rigorously human-scale tools. Since its making, several films have referred to images or plot elements in Alphaville (from Blade Runner to Trouble In Mind to a no-budget ’80s indie called Betaville). But Pi’s the first to both do so successfully and to put a modern spin on the original film’s theme.
Like Alphaville, Pi’s shot in grainy, hi-contrast black-and-white, and utilizes lotsa extreme-close-up cutaway shots of flashing digits–its antihero Max Cohen (Sean Guillette) apparently dabbles in stock-market “day trading” to finance his lonely pursuit of mathemetical keys to the meaning of life. But where Lemme Caution seeks to reclaim human souls from the cold, inhumane hyper-rationality associated with IBM 360-era centralized computing (and visualized by stark, bureaucratic office buildings and harsh fluorescent lights), Max is the ultimate loner-male computer hacker, preferring literal “known quantities” to the chaos of humanity (as visualized by teeming NYC street scenes). Max finds relief from everyday existence’s humdrum disappointments in the burning heat of ultra-logic (literally–he’s addicted to the very intense thought processes that also aggrivate his severe migraines, which he can only partially relieve via massive prescription combos). Like some mid-’80s computer fanatics I knew, he’s devoted most of his small Manhattan apartment to a complex, personally-assembled “kludge” of a computer setup, which he’s even named (“Euclid”). To him, logic isn’t the enemy of life but the heart of its very being. He believes if he can master the ultimate mysteries of math and geometry (which, in his case, include Leonardo’s “magic rectangle,” numerological interpretations of the Hebrew Torah, and the ultimate math-mystery, the unending and unrepeating number at the heart of the circle and known by the greek letter pi), he can unlock the final mystery of–well, if he knew what it was, it probably wouldn’t torment him as much as it does.
Both films have thriller subplots to add on-screen action to their cerebreality. Lemme engages in espionage and chase scenes against the agents of Alphaville’s machine-controlled regime; Max is pursued in the subways and streets by the employees of a Wall Street financier (Pamela Hart) and by a cabal of Jewish mystics; each party seeks to exploit his way with figures for purposes only partly revealed by the film’s end.
Yet near the end, he proclaims to the mystics that they, and he, were mistaken to seek the ultimate truth in a mere number. “It’s not the number–it’s the meaning, the syntax, the spaces between the numbers.” Only after this (and the death of his only friend) does the film’s image briefly switch from stark b&w to shades of grey. Max Cohen understands the temptations of the desire for rational knowledge far better than Lemme Caution ever could, but ultimately reaches a similar conclusion in regards to logic’s frustrating limitations. Max realizes too late, it really isn’t what you know but who you know.
It should also be mentioned that Pi is a tour-de-force directoral debut blah blah blah; but more importantly, it’s a real independent film. It’s not a low-budget, “hip” version of a standard Hollywood formula. Despite the chase interludes, it’s not some commercially-released demo reel intended to show the director’s skill at orchestrating violence or mayhem. Nor is it a Sundance Festival-formula product, full of relatively-affluent WASPs standing around talking about relationships. It’s a real movie about real ideas–something rare in any age.
THE VOICE OF DESCENT: On this Pearl Harbor Day, let us remember not too many years ago, when “the Japanese threat” meant their high-flying companies were going to take over our economy. Now, there’s a new Japanese threat–that their troubled companies, and those of other structurally-shaky Asian economies, might stop buying America’s soybeans, wheat, and jet aircraft.
Once again, as it has several times over the past 30-odd years, Boeing’s given a lump of coal to the Puget Sound region’s collective Xmas stockings. After all the manic growth, all the stupid growth, all the countryside-clearing growth and all the urban-life-draining growth, part of me actually looks forward to the more sluggish economy 48,000 layoffs and unfilled job vacancies might bring. Yet another part of me still feels sorry for the young adults and newcomers who’ve known nothing here but constant economic expansion, and who might find it more difficult to land decent jobs or backing for their dream restaurants.
ALREADY WE’VE ONE major business closure due to changing economic conditions. As you might expect, the last week of KSTW’s local news (mandated by the station’s current owner, Viacom) played out as both personal desparation (clips of old cute-dog stories strung together by a staff obviously intent on assembling demo reels for its resumes) and light pathos (co-anchorman Don Porter holding up a “Will Anchor For Food” sign). The headline graphic for the top story on the final newscast (a story about a newly-found cache of dynamite in Puyallup): “TNT Destroyed.” KSTW’s former call letters, several owners ago, were KTNT (from its original owner, the Tacoma News Tribune). Also throughout the final broadcast, the station ran the logo from its old ownership by Gaylord Broadcasting–not the ugly “UPN 11” symbol Viacom management had imposed. The cancellation means 62 newsroom and studio layoffs, and turns what had been one of the strongest non-big-three-network stations in the country into just another mere outlet for reruns and forgettable semi-network shows (can you even name any UPN original production other than Star Trek Voyager?).
PULP FRICTION: A couple weeks back, I mildly dissed a Stranger article dissing the retro-swing revival. Now I’ve something I never expected I’d say: Seattle Weekly, once one of the few “alternative” weeklies to be more conservative than its town’s daily papers, has lately become darn near pinko with Geov Parrish publicly questioning the canonization of the late Seattle School District PR machine John Stanford and Mark Worth listing Seattle’s equivalent of the “50 families” that run everything in certain Latin American countries. This is one case of a publication becoming more progressive under chain ownership. When it was locally owned, the Weekly was tied heavily into this town’s business and political elites, far more so than many urban weeklies in other towns. Founder David Brewster was a defender (to this day) of ’70s-style notions of leadership by an enlightened intelligentsia; as applied in his pages, it meant individual politicians and political decisions could be criticized but not the larger priorities of our Pro-Business Democrat machine. But after Brewster retired and sold out to the Hartz Mountain chain of papers, the paper’s rather suddenly started growing something resembling a spine. (And I’m not just saying these things ‘cuz I’m trying to get a job with them. Honest.)
CATHODE CORNER: Finally saw digital cable over the holidays, and was immediately taken by the way each channel first appears on screen as a collage of small screen areas, taking as long as a second before all the rectangles fill in. How long do you think it’ll take before the effect appears as a deliberately-planned schtick in music videos? (It’s already been used in series, if you count the “puzzle piece” effects that used to lead into and out of commercials on Get Smart! and The Streets of San Francisco.)
SCREEN DEFENSE: The same week the mighty Scarecrow Video store celebrated 10 years of rough-and-tumble survival, Capitol Hill’s smaller but equally feisty Video Vertigo posted photocopied trade-magazine articles on its wall, claiming 400 indie video-rental shops are going out of business each week in the US due to predatory pricing by, and sweetheart deals offered by studios to, Blockbuster. While some of these individual stores and small chains probably won’t be missed (I’m thinking of those stores offering only the same creaky action-hits and moldy ’80s sitcom movies as the big chains), there are also plenty which deserve to stick around (with more, or different or better, selections than the corporate stores, and/or better rates or looser return policies). Wanna see a flick at home tonite? Go to one of those joints first.
THIS MONTH’S FIRST-THURSDAY HIGHLIGHTS:
1. Gloria DiArcangelis’s stunning neo-realist paintings at Myerson & Nowinski. Nobody else (on this continent anyway) can make contemporary faces and figures look so much like they belong in the Renaissance.
2. Meghan Trainor’s tiny wall shrines (made from “authentic Boeing aluminum” and what look like labels from ancient brands of produce) at the relocated Roq La Rue.
3. Parris Broderick’s “Sitting Duck” series at Zeitgeist Espresso. You’ve seen his murals, sandwich signs, etc. all over town; now see his loving post-expressionist touch applied to images of ducks (or are they decoys?).
4. The abstract-installation piece at Oculus, a study in geometric form and color created by gluing hundreds of Starburst Fruit Chews to the wall.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Emerald City Connections (“Seattle’s #1 Meeting Place”) purports to be a slick singles’ resource with personal ads, relationship advice, and related articles. But six of the first issue’s 24 pages comprise ads for escorts, phone-sex lines, and other “adult services”–as if the publishers were admitting the personal ads might not work. (Free at vending boxes around town, or from 1767 15th Ave. S., Seattle 98144.)
TWO FOR THE SHOW: At least one secret to understanding the eternal conflict of American culture can be found in the decades-old conflict of burlesque vs. vaudeville. Burlesque wasn’t just raw as in naked (or rather as naked as the law allowed or could be bribed into allowing). It was raucous; its dancers and skits and comic monologues celebrated the boistrous passions of turn-of-the-century urban immigrants. It also regularly barbed politicians, judges, bosses, and other authority figures. Vaudeville (as shown in a KCTS documentary late last year which still haunts my memory) was squeaky clean, celebrated “wholesome family entertainment,” and promoted a monocultural America of thorough white-middlebrow dominance (with just a few ethnic touches inserted for the mildest of spiciness).
Vaudeville led to the everywhere/nowhere America of Hollywood movies (several of the big studios trace their corporate history from vaudeville-theater chains), Lawrence Welk, Mickey Mouse, Reader’s Digest, Miss America, soft rock, light beer, weak coffee, and eventually to what The Nation and The Baffler call today’s global “culture trust.”
Burlesque, conversely, led to Milton Berle, Betty Boop, the prewar version of Esquire, drag-queen shows, the comedy-relief segments in early porn films, and (eventually and indirectly) to punk rock, S/M showmanship, and zine culture.
Despite its handful of often fondly-remembered burlesque “box house” theaters in and near today’s Pioneer Square, and our status as home to burlesque’s greatest star Gypsy Rose Lee (born into a vaudeville family), Seattle was a vaudeville town through and through. Seattle’s first corporate inroad on the national entertainment biz was the locally-founded Pantages vaudeville circuit.
The battle continues. Across the country, city governments are trying to banish strip clubs and adult video shops (slicker yet raunchier descendents of burlesque), sanitizing downtowns for the sake of Planet Hollywood and The Disney Store (dining and shopping as toned-down descendents of vaudeville).
At its best, the spirit of vaudeville represents precision, energy, showmanship, and a pleasant good time. And all those things are good. But at its worst, it represents cloying paternalism and sentimental “family entertainment” that bores kids and insults grownups’ intelligence. Burlesque’s descendents have their own downsides; particularly the recursive traps of parody and ironic detachment seen in so much pseudo-hip art, music, and advertising.
But we need more of burlesque’s assertive populism, its healthy skepticism about authority and its healthy affirmation of the life force. Somewhere between post-vaudeville’s mandatory naiveté and post-burlesque’s relentless cynicism lies the truth.
(Good, close re-creations of classic vaudeville can be found year-round at Hokum Hall in West Seattle. The best evocation of burlesque in town’s the “Fallen Women Follies,” held two or three times a year at Re-bar. You can also see the old days of burley-Q at the Exotic World museum out in the southwest.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, pray for snow, and be sure to enter your nominations for this year’s Misc. World In/Out List (the only worthwhile and accurate list of its type in the known world), either by email or in our lovely new >Misc. Talk discussion boards.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia”
Words Against Words
Original book feature, 12/7/98
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:
The Conflict Between Word and Image
by Leonard Shlain
(Viking) $24.95
THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD
by Mitchell Stevens
(Oxford) $27.50
Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.
Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.
His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.
In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).
Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.
NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).
While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.
Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Seems everything in this once-sleepy town’s Growing! Changing! Morphing!
Even in print.
The powers-that-be at The Stranger have decided they no longer want to publish this here little compendium of factoids and opinionoids.
The concept behind Misc., first in June 1986 at the old ArtsFocus monthly and since November 1991 at The Stranger, was to report aspects of the Seattle popular culture that didn’t fit a standard format of arts reviews, previews, and interviews.
Its schtick of assorted short and long items was never intended, as some have alleged, as a short-attention-span paean to any so-called “MTV generation” but rather a revival of the classic three-dot newspaper column as practiced by such past masters as Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I-era Emmett Watson.
The real value of a three-dot column isn’t depth but breadth. At a time when knowledge and careers are increasingly specialized, there’s a need for generalists who can explore the contexts, juxtapositions, and connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena, from something as general as global socioeconomic trends to something as specific as a candy bar.
This column’s treated fashion, food, politics, music, architecture, medicine, painting, porn, magzines, talk radio, etc. etc. as equally important disciplines, each with something to reveal about the larger world.
It’s treated its readers as intelligent humans, not as some target-marketing stereotype. It hasn’t told you what bands, movies, or shows to see; it hasn’t promised to make you wealthier or slimmer or more sociable or more orgasmic; just to inform and entertain. It’s taken a personal point of view, yet hasn’t tried to promote the author as its own biggest topic. It’s been opinionated, but without any in-your-face “Attitude.”
The column’s also tried to reflect and respond to today’s ever factioning, increasingly complex society. Canadians used to say the U.S. was a “melting pot” but Canada was a “mosaic,” where different ethnic and cultural groups got to maintain more of their own identities with less pressure to conform to a “mainstream” norm. Nowadays, the U.S. is getting more mosaic-y than ever (while Canada’s searching for some kind of social grout that’ll keep its tiles from flying apart).
It takes a generalist to detect the patterns among the tiles, the developing harmonies and disharmonies and color schemes–without excessively oversimplifying the patterns, without invoking obsolete stereotypes of one “dominant culture” vs. one “counterculture.”
While having fun with the convoluting minutae of modern urban life, the column’s tried to advocate the idea that this unmelting of the melting pot’s an overall good thing. Much as I enjoy the documentation and ephemera of our cultural past (movies, magazines, postcards, records), I’ve no wish to return to any “good old days” when racism was official national policy, or when book publishing was firmly controlled by a few tweed-suited men in Manhattan.
We need more tribes, more virtual communities, more ways for individuals to find their own voices and form their own affinity groups. But along with that we need ways for these communities to learn about, and from, one another.
Thanx and a hat tip to all my loyal readers, sources, and informants over the years, and to the Stranger staffers who’ve helped to keep it accurate, pretty, and properly-spelled. A special nod goes to Matt Cook and James Sturm, who helped get the column into the paper back in ’91, and to Alice (no relation) Savage, who commissioned its first incarnation at ArtsFocus.
The column existed before The Stranger did, and will continue online at Misc. World, www.miscmedia.com. There’ll continue to be non-columnar material by me elsewhere in the paper (“Cyber Stuff” and the new “Diversions” in the Calendar section, “X-Word,” reviews, one-shot essays and articles). And I’ll be working on new projects, including a long-threatened “Best of Misc.” book and a new edition of my local music-history book Loser.
‘Til then, some closing words from the last broadcast by ex-Seattleite and pioneer network newscaster Chet Huntley: “Keep the faith; there will be better and happier news, one day, if we work at it.”
> iMPRESSIONS: The Stranger office just got a couple of them new iMac computers. They’re gorgeous; they’re screamingly fast; they’re just plain fun. The iMac’s the first “home” computer designed as a piece of home decor, like old “cathedral” radios used to be (one old radio name, Motorola, makes the CPU chip in the iMac). Just as importantly, it expresses the MacOS’s superior visual aesthetic into tangible, physical form. This has the practical effect of reducing the dissonance, the trance effect a computer user may have while really concentrating on the “mindspace” of working or running software. On plain beige-box computers, an advanced user can become almost unaware of his/her physical presence (unless, of course, something goes wrong with the hardware). The iMac’s more noticable, yet pleasant, presence might help hardcore gamers and Net-skimmers keep at least partly aware of the tangible world surrounding them. That, in turn, might help relieve or prevent the loneliness and depression cited among hardcore computer jockeys by some Carnegie Mellon U. sociologists.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Usually for weird potato-chip flavors you’ve gotta go to Canada. But Benson’s T-Bone Steak Crisps are imported directly from England to local spots like the Old Pequliar tav in Ballard. They don’t taste like steak, but have an oddly smoky flavor without being overly spicy. The slow frieght, tho’, can leave ’em a little less fresh-tasting than domestic chips.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Swaank (no relation to the porn mag Swank) is a rip-rollickin’, stylish-as-all-get-out chronicle of local swing-revival happennings. Besides musician and dancer interviews, it’s got a valuable jazz-history lesson and retro-fashion tips that thankfully go beyond the semiannual “Return to Elegance” nonsense in larger publications. There’s even a cartoon demonstrating how a neo-bopper can revise an outdated death-rock tattoo! (Free at clubs with swing nights, or $12 for four issues from 12437 110th Lane NE, #P101, Kirkland 98034.)
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: Who’da thunk The Stranger (originally a li’l 12-page sheet of coupon ads, movie listings, sex advice, and cartoons) would become such a robust force in alterna-media, reaching some 150,000 readers and revered nationwide? The growth of the paper has parallelled the growth of its “virtual community” of readers and advertisers. While a lot of beloved stores, bands, clubs, eateries, performance troupes, galleries, etc. have left us since late Sept. ’91, a lot of others have joined us. And while the corporate-rock biz has largely left Seattle alone lately (local bands no longer even feel they have to insist on how “not grunge” they are), there are more pro musicians doing more different kinds of things here now than maybe ever. (How many of them are really good at it is another question.)
But what’s in store? Wasn’t too long ago when the stock market was supposedly on a never-to-end rise, when Wired magazine predicted a “long boom,” when the only question anybody asked about the economy was how to keep up with (or survive) the megagrowth. Nowadays, things seem a bit more uncertain, particularly among anyone with direct or indirect dependencies upon Canada, Mexico, Russia, east Asia, or the U.S. stock market (as you might guess, that’s a lot of dependents). Can’t say what’ll happen next, but it might not be all on the upswing.
If there really is a recession later this year or early next, how will it affect our community? Seattle ain’t the same place it was when we lived on the trickle-down from Boeing and its subcontractors. But now the $$ coming into Seattle isn’t merely trickling down from overall national business conditions. It’s coming from whole consumer-economy sectors (software, chain coffeeshops) centered here, shipping cash into head offices that directly employ many art-worlders and art-biz customers. Of course, an overall slowdown will slow down these companies as well; just perhaps more moderately and slowly than Boeing slumps used to be. For whatever it’s worth, the nothing-ever-happens pre-Stranger Seattle ain’t coming back.
