REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.

Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”

While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).

So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.

A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.

Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:

• “The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essense, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources….
• “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even…. If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either….
• “…By packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.
• “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.

Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.

So what to do?

Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”

That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?

Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.

More about that on Friday.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.

TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?

ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.

Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.

Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.

Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.

“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”

Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.

Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.

If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!

To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.

Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).

But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.

If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.

I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.

TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).

Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.

“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”

Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.

(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)

At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.

Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.

In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.

I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).

The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.

What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:

“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”

MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…

A FEW MONTHS BACK, I wrote a few thoughts about the unexpected U.S. success of Nintento’s Pokemon franchise (involving video games, role-playing card games, a TV cartoon, and assorted ancillary merchandise; all set in an alternate-universe world where the non-human animal population consists of some 150 varieties of cute and super-powered “pocket monsters”).

Today, some additional thoughts.

Its complexity turns on kids and befuddles grownups. This is true of the games, and even more true of the TV show (which was conceived to somehow tie in entertaining cartoon plots with the characters and story elements originally devised for the far-different narrative rules of gaming). The first episode starts out with the assumption that viewers already know the basic premise of these creatures and the young humans who befriend and use them. Pieces of the metastory are doled out in each episode, along with at least one new Pokemon critter and hints about which of them can outbattle which other ones and how.

(In the English-language version of the show, the complexities and oddities are even wackier. The show’s three young human heroes, for instance, are forever talking about their tastes for such all-American teen foods as pizza and donuts, but are only shown eating rice and sushi.)

It’s got something for everyone. Younger fans can get into the cuter critters and the video game (whose plot involves capturing a personal menagerie of wild Pokemon). (By the way, “Pokemon” and all the species names are both singular and plural; just one of the complexities kids can get but grownups can’t.) Teens can get into the more strategic aspects of the card game (which centers around mock quasi-cockfights between opposing players’ trained super-critters). Older teens and young adults can get caught up even further in the games’ minutiae (sort of like Dungeons and Dragons but with a more attractive cast of characters), or proceed from the TV series to explore the whole maddenning multiverse of Japanese Anime.

The games reward strategy, not brute strength. A cute little creature like Pikachu or Psyduck, if equipped with the right powers and skill-levels, can outfight a huge brute like Onix or Charmeleon. On the TV show, the human villains of Team Rocket always scheme to steal “rare and valuable Pokemon,” and always fail because bullying never wins in the Poke-world. The schoolkids who try to bully other kids out of particularly useful Pokemon game cards, causing some schools to ban the cards on school property, are therefore only learning how to lose.

It teaches values. Most all kiddie TV these days makes a semblance of “educational” content, even if it’s just the hero coming on in the end telling the kids to drink their milk. Pokemon’s life lessons, however, are deeply incorporated into every plotline. The Pokemon battles themselves are imbued with a Sumo-like sense of tradition and honor. Many of the stories involve the humans learning about properly caring for one another, their environment, and their Pokemon. And the show’s chief plot element, preteen Ash Ketchum’s personal quest to “become the world’s greatest Pokemon master,” might parallel Japan’s current national soul-search to discover a sense of individual initiative after generations of training its youngsters for lives of self-sacrifice.

(Of course, the values the show teaches might not be the values some real-world humans would want to have taught. Animal-rights folks, f’rinstance, might object to a key element of the games and the show, of young humans learning to capture and train wild animals for show, for sport, and especially for fighting.)

(As you might expect, Poke-parodies are already being thought up. Here’s a particularly good one.)

Tomorrow: Speaking of Nintendo properties, management at the Nintendo-owned Mariners is acting like Team Rocket in attempting to extort ever more tax $$.

YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.

Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.

(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)

I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.

This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.

Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.

A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”

The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.

But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…

Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.

This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.

That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.

Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.

The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.

Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.

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:

• Real goths don’t collect assault weapons. They might get into fantasies about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith’s non-action image.)
• As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band’s career was winding down) played aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as “The Drug Against War.”
• The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect of their ideology is something you just don’t find in more orthodox nerd or goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with other outcast groups, including minorities).
• The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over themselves to get nearly everything wrong (“Guns don’t kill people, video games and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do”).
• The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks, smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone else who’s not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the “popular” kids to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
• The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton massacre to what they see as America’s “real” culture of violence–the one that presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn’t quite take it that directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis like to dream about.
• Violent media don’t kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan’s relative lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.) Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate control (especially on that bad-ol’ Internet). All these blowhards have done is exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
• If anything can be learned from the horror, it’s that kids can be, and are, cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain’s even crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the conceited, the athletic, and the “beautiful,” and disdains anybody with more than half a brain or more than half a conscience.

  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.

• Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called “the crazy ones.” I wouldn’t go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models. Instead, I’d honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor tried to be them. After all, it’s the geeks and the brains these days who (given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It’s the girls who stop worrying about becoming popular who’re more likely to get to 18 childless. It’s the boys who face the taunts and the name-calling who’re more likely to successfully weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It’s the kids who think learning’s too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it’s the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.

‘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:

• Thea Foss, matron of a regional tugboat and shipping dynasty and inspiration for the beloved ’30s film heroine Tugboat Annie.
• Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth and prominent waterfront figure until her death in 1896.
• Gypsy Rose Lee, all-time undisputed monarch of burlesque, who combined a great body (and the willingness to show much of it off), a sharp wit, and an instinct for publicity.
• Gracie Hansen, nice middle-aged lady hired as hostess for the Seattle World’s Fair’s burlesque show; ahead of her time in announcing through her presence that nice girls enjoyed sex.
• Frances Farmer, actor and Depression-era socialist sympathizer, who probably would’ve been blacklisted from the movies in the late ’40s even if she hadn’t been put away by her equally strong-willed mother.
• Dyan Cannon, who went from a quiet West Seattle childhood to marrying and divorcing Cary Grant, among other accomplishments.
• Pat Suzuki, Broadway’s first Asian-American star.
• Carol Channing, singer-belter whose performances can not only be heard but seen from the third balcony.
• Ernestine Anderson andMarilee Rush, vocalists-living legends.
• Amy Denio and Lori Goldston, instrumental geniuses who continue to prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean singing magazine-cover icons.
• The women in the rock scene: The assorted members and ex-members of Seven Year Bitch,Kill Sibyl,Maxi Badd Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Mavis Piggott, Violent Green, etc. etc.; and such frontwomen and soloists as Kim Warnick, Laura Love, Anisa Romero,Lisa Orth,Shannon Fuchness, Dara Rosenwasser, etc. etc. They continue to collectively prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean out-machoing the men.
• The women behind the rock scene: Caroline Davenport, Stephanie Dorgan, J.A. Anderson, Lori LeFavor, Kate Becker, Trish Timmers, Kerri Harrop, Susan Silver, Candice Pedersen, Barbara Dollarhide, etc. etc. The level-headed facilitators who keep the chaos possible.
• Mia Zapata, Kristen Pfaff, and Stefanie Sergeant, who, if nothing else, proved there’s nothing romantic at all about rockers dying too young.
• Jini Dellaccio, Etiquette Records cover photographer; visualizor of the finely-honed edge of pop and noise behind the Sonics’ and Wailers’ garage classics.
• Imogen Cunningham, maker of photographic art at a time when many art-snobs still disdained the idea that such a thing could exist.
• Lori Larsen, first lady of the Seattle theater circuit and an unsung force in forging the art-as-fun aesthetic still seen today at places like the Annex.
• 33 Fainting Steps and Pat Graney, dancer/choreographers helping modern dance find new ways to tell stories and express particular aspects of particular human conditions.
• Anne Gerber, art collector-patron responsible for helping support and publicize the ’50s “Northwest School” painters.
• Guendolen Pletscheff, fashion collector and advocate of the community-building institution known as high society, something few others here really bothered with in her day.
• Nellie Cornish, founder of Cornish College. (So when are they gonna start a football team, the Game Hens?)
• Kay Greathouse, longtime Frye Musuem empress and defender of visual traditionalism (as jazz teachers know, you need to know the rules before you can properly break ’em).
• Ruby Chow, restaurateur, politician, and early patron of Bruce Lee.
• Chow’s sister Mary Pang, whose frozen-food plant was the unfortunate target of a son’s misplaced sympathy.
• Ethel Mars, co-founder of a family candy dynasty still Snickering along today (and name-inspiration for its Las Vegas-based upscale division, “Ethel M”).
• Linda Tenney and Sunny Kobe Cook, frontline soldiers in the battles to preserve locally-owned retail and locally-produced advertising.
• Mary Ann Boyer (“Madame Damnable”), Seattle’s first madam; she and her successors kept Seattle going as a weekend destination for outlying lumberjacks while the town’s “legitimate” early economy went through massive ups and downs.
• Anna Louise Strong, organizer-publicist of the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
• Hazel Wolf, 100-esque year old environmental activist and thorn in the side of the likes of…
• Dixy Lee Ray, Pacific Science Center cofounder and one-term governor; elequently advocated a number of political-economic theories I completely disagreed with.
• Barbara Hedges, UW athletic director; repeatedly makes bold moves which defy the wishes of the influential football “boosters.”
• Patty Murray, successful soccer-mom icon and less-successful Senator.
• Bertha K. Landes, America’s first female big-city mayor.
• Elizabeth Montgomery (Julesberg), creator of the Dick and Jane books; envisioned a very Seattle quiet-bourgeois fantasy universe.
• Nicola Griffith, scifi writer (Slow River); envisions a different, but still very Seattle, fantasy universe.
• Rebecca Welles, K.K. Beck, J.A. Jance, Ann Rule, and Jayne Ann Krentz, masters of mass-market storytelling.
• Stacey Levine and Rebecca Brown, pioneers of Po-Mo (or is it Neo-Mo or Avant-Pop?) storytelling techniques.
• Lynda Barry, chronicler of the inner dysfunctional child within most of us.
• J.Z. “Ramtha” Knight, propagator of a revisionist “ancient warrior” mythology that allowed rich people to feel a little less guilty.
• Mary McCarthy, author, satirist, and chronicler of the futility of intellectualism.
• Sandy Hill; Good Morning America’s sucked ever since it fired her.
• Ruth “Wunda Wunda” Prins, early local kids’-TV hostess and curator of a potted-flower puppet known alternately as Wilting Willie or Stand-Up Willie (you never knew, when she watered it each day, which he would become).
• Mary Kay LeTourneau, romantic rebel. So what if the rest of the world doesn’t understand?

(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:

by Marshall McLuhan

Beacon Press

The Medium Is the Massage:

HardWired

War and Peace in the Global Village

HardWired

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.