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FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
ELSEWHERE:
IN THE FOUR MONTHS OR SO since we started the MISCmedia print magazine, we’ve been trying to resolve some of the differences between the print and online versions.
Right now, a lot of material appears online (including some stuff I’m rather proud of) that doesn’t make the cut for the limited print space we can currently barely afford to create.
One answer would be to revamp the online version.
All the print content would still appear on the site, but the concept of a full-length column every weekday would change–into something more like the group of short comments idea behind the original Misc. column.
I’ve been toying and experimenting offline with a site revamp that would have links to the print magazine’s pieces along one side of the page, and an ever-changing daily column thang on the other side. This would be made like those “Weblog” sites, with new items added at the top daily and old items eventually scrolling off the bottom.
On the ever-proverbial other hand, there is something nice about this here site being a refuge for semi-serious argumentative thought on the Web, where so much else seems to be a deluge of briefs, half-thought-out Attitude statements, and links to links to links.
Thoughts or ideas on any of this? Lemme know.
IN OTHER NEWS: Saw the Fremont Solstice Parade on Saturday. Besides the clever and fancy human-propelled floats (including a locomotive decorated with high-rise condos threatening to run over humans dressed as little houses) and the tight performing groups (including two dozen belly dancers in choreographed formations), the event was highlighted, as always, by the now world-famous Naked Bicyclists. (I met several spectators from out-of-state who’d read about the bikers in nudist-advocacy magazines and had gone to the parade just for them.)
This year, the bikers expanded upon their act. Most of the real nudies (as usual for the event, about two-thirds male) wore elaborate body paint; the faux-nudies in the group donned fig-leaf decorations atop their flesh-tone body stockings. As they’ve done in prior years, they not only appeared at the parade’s start but weaved back and forth, through and between the “official” parade attractions.
The regular parade performers also got into the act this year. Several troupes included one or more women wearing decorative pasties in lieu of tops. The final float starred a bare-breasted woman with henna body paint standing proudly atop a tall float (a la the Rio samba parades), waving to spectators young and old as the goddess she knew she was.
All in all: A great way to celebrate the human form and the summer sun, to playfully “rebel” for a moment against social put-ons, and to help teach children that bodies are nothing to be scared of or offended at.
(More about this tomorrow.)
TOMORROW: Will the real Idiots please stand up?
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to that timeless vaudeville comic of the Stiff Records era, Ian Dury.
WATCH THIS SPACE: No sooner had we printed the precarious status of the Frontier Room than rumors spread about potential changes at Belltown’s other remaining old-folks’ drinking house, the venerable Rendezvous.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers, some background: The area surrounding Second Ave. and Battery St. used to be Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the major studios had their regional distribution offices. The Rendezvous restaurant and lounge was built on this block in the ’30s by a company that built and furnished movie theaters. Its back room, a former private screening room where the movie distributors previewed their latest offerings to theater managers, was designed as a miniature version of the auditoria this company designed and supplied.
In recent decades, the Rendezvous has had two simultaneous main uses. The beautiful back room has been a reasonably-priced rental hall for Belltown’s young hipsters to hold birthday parties, film screenings, performance-art pieces, and music shows. (At least three music videos have been shot there.)
The crowded barroom, meanwhile, has proudly served strong cocktails and cans of Rainier beer to merchant seamen, fishing-boat shoreleavers, old-age pensioners, working-class widows, and young adult alkies-in-training. As building after building in Belltown has gotten torn down or upscaled, the Rendezvous is one of the neighborhood’s last remaining unpretentious dive bars.
But for how much longer?
Here’s all we’ve been able to confirm: The building’s been sold. The new landlors have evicted the apartments, band-rehearsal spaces, and bicycle shop, which had all been on month-to-month.
The Rendezvous itself, and the Sound Mail Services private-mailbox service next door, have long-term leases, which will apparently be adhered to for now.
But eventually, rumor-mongers claim, the new landlords would like to assume management of the restaurant-lounge and (yes, that dreaded word arises once more) “restore” it.
As one who’s held public events in the Rendezvous’s classy old meeting room, I’d loathe any changes that would make the pensioners and fishing-boat people less welcome there.
Maybe we could hold a benefit toward keeping the Rendezvous more or less as-is. I’m sure we could get Dodi, the local band named after the Rendezvous’s legendary veteran barmaid, to play at it.
TOMORROW: Boy, we’ve sure got some demographics.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and ambient-improv musician Dennis Rea.
THE NIGHT AFTER the “Save the Jem Studios” rally I’ve already written about, I went back to the building for the launch party of something called “Glamour Girls International.”
The name was at least partly a misnomer. There were slightly more men than women among the 100 or so folks at the party; including one fab-looking drag queen, an Austin Powers impersonator, and a neo-pagan dude in orange body paint and a black loincloth (having seen some of the backstage preparation, I can assure you he was painted even where he wasn’t showing).
The women, not to be undone or out-glammed, were all dolled up in an array of retro cocktail dresses, neo-Twiggy minidresses, Lewinsky black wigs, feather boas, and at least one authentic-looking hesher metal costume (complete with Twisted Sister T-shirt).
Besides the showing off and dancing and drinking and eating and chatting, there was a brief runway fashion show in which some of these glamour girls ‘n’ guys strutted their well-dressed stuff under some improvised spotlights. There was also much photography and videography, some of which involved a Barbie Polaroid camera.
The point of the party, besides dressing up and having fun? To launch further opportunities for dressing up and having fun.
Shannon Lindberg, the ceramics-and-glass artist who devised the event (under the pseudonym “Eva New Dawn”), wants to use the names and addresses she gathered at the event (and any income from selling people prints of the photos taken of them) in order to stage bigger, lovelier parties and fashion shows; and to eventually start a website and maybe even a print magazine. (The website will be at “glamourgirlsinternational.com”; the URL “glamourgirls.com” is already used by a soft-porn site.)
Lindberg told me she sees her Glamour Girls parties as a social movement, one that would reassert women’s innate values and strengths after too many years of patriarchal society.
I saw the kickoff party as something only slightly less vital.
I saw it as reasserting the kind of funky, DIY glam that used to be the hallmark of Seattle bohemia in the years before three-story rave clubs with dot-com sponsorships and recessed lighting. The kind of glam you used to see at the old Vogue or Tugs Belltown. That was about making friends/lovers and being fabulous, not about making business contacts and being what NYC magazines thought was hot.
It’s the kind of real beauty we need tons more of.
TOMORROW: Yes, it’s still chicken.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Smoking Gun has uncovered that the mysterious title personage in the infamous Fox TV special Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? is really an actor and “corporate comedian”–who was served with a restraining order back in ’91 after an ex-fiancee made allegations of abuse.
BEFORE WE BEGIN, one last request for you to attend our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine; both at 7:30 tonight at the gorgeous Two Bells Tavern, 4th & Bell in Seattle’s not-as-hip-as-it-used-to-be Belltown area.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we superficially discussed how the complacently affluent Seattle I used to know and get frustrated by, which I used to call City Light, has been succeeded by an aggressively caste-divided City Extra Light.
It’s a town where the ruling elite’s become openly afraid of its own citizenry; as witnessed by Mayor Schell’s pathetic cancellation of the municipal public New Year’s party (while $150 private bashes went on as scheduled).
The first thing the city gov’t can do to overcome its own paranoia is to quickly reschedule as much of the scuttled 1/1 gala as possible; especially artist Carl Smool’s “Fire Sculpture” interactive installation/performance piece.
One letter-to-the-editor writer suggested a bigger, better New Year’s fete this next 12/31, for what math nerds insist will be the “real” new century mark. I think that’s too far off.
Seattle Center had already announced it had given up on mounting a third installment of its struggling ArtsEdge festival, which had exposed a number of (unpaid) cuttin’-edge visual, performing, and musical artists in early June. The dumped New Year’s acts could be shuffled into a reconstituted ArtsEdge. Alternately, Smool’s piece and some of the performing acts could be incorporated into the still-going Folklife Festival in May.
Or, we could go one better and start our own new tradition. Call it “Seattle Day.”
It just so happens that we’re less than two years from the sesquicentennial of the first permanent white settlement in Seattle’s present-day city limits. The first settlers showed up at what’s now Alki Point on Sept. 25, 1851. The city dates its official founding to that Nov. 12, when those first settlers and a few subsequent arrivals chartered what they originally called “New York-Alki” (“…By and By” in Chinook Jargon, a short language invented by white pioneers to facilitate trading with different indigenous groups in the region).
The NYC-eventually bit we’ve essentially reached by now. Our once-remote harbor town’s become a hotbed of financiers, tycoons, media entrepreneurs, arrogant jerks, awful car traffic, shameful race- and class-division politics, immigrant-smugglin’, terrorist scares, and many other NYC-esque urban features.
(Indeed, the Rudolph Giuliani administration in NYC has all but officially borrowed its civic agenda from many of Seattle’s longstanding “mandatory mellowness” crusades–crackdowns on nightlife, the homeless, and the poor; sweetheart deals with tourist-restaurant and millionaire-housing developers.)
Anyhoo, we can and should start right now to turn all of 2001 into a 150th anniversary jubilee year, climaxing on Nov. 12, 2001 with an all-day, all-night, mellowness-be-damned party at Alki.
We don’t need to hold off until this November to kick off the fete, either.
We can hold the 2000 edition of Seattle Day as soon as it can be arranged. It can be as big or as small as we can schlep together.
We can hold it at Seattle Center if feasible; or at any other large public space within the city limits. If Mayor Schell’s minions don’t like it, we can hold it without city approval, on non-city-owned property if we must (the UW campus, the Stadium Exhibition Center, a Boeing Field hangar, the Consolidated Works arts space, etc.). We also shouldn’t become too dependent upon city funding for this, either. There’s enough private wealth lying around here; if we can pitch this to them as a celebratory party all our own, a positive rejoinder to the awful global PR Schell’s given the town, and a chance to bring everybody together to honor the town’s heritage and future.
We’ll talk about this some more, most likely. ‘Til then, contribute what you’d like Seattle Day to feature at our lovely MISCtalk discussion boards.
TOMORROW: At last, some Microsoft money’s being spent on something worthwhile.
ALL LONGTIME READERS of this print-turned-online report have read of my early-childhood visit to, and continuing fascination with, the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
Its theme: How wonderful everything was going to be in the 2000s.
At the time, I used my already blossoming mathematical skills to figure how old I was going to be in the year 2000 (nobody then used unelegant rubrics such as “Y2K”). Turned out I’d be in the alleged prime of my life. I could hardly wait.
Hence, when the big 0-0 finally approached, I knew exactly where I’d be. Despite having a paid-up credit card and no work or family obligations to speak of, I could only see myself being at the site of the fantasy Century 21 to celebrate the arrival of the real Century 21.
(And yes, I know there are literalists out there who insist the century doesn’t start ’til the following year. I treat these people with the same distanced acknowledgement with which I treat people who complain about explosions in outer-space movies making sounds.)
Only it ain’t happening.
Just like my folks used to announce cool vacation trips and then announce the week before that I couldn’t go along, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell cancelled the big free Seattle Center New Year’s bash on just three days’ notice.
The official reasoning: An international gadabout, with suspected terrorist ties, was caught trying to enter Wash. state from Canada on 12/14, with stuff in his car that might be useful in making bombs. He also turned out to have had a motel reservation near the Center for 12/31.
Since then, and despite highly media-publicized border crackdowns, no further evidence of any plot to blow up civilians in Seattle has been revealed. Nonetheless, and after several days of promising not to, Schell canceled New Year’s.
The free, open-to-the-public New Year’s, that is.
Paid-admittance events elsewhere in town, including some run by Schell’s pals in the local mover-‘n’-shaker community and costing from $50 to $500, will continue to occur.
If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m still not), I’d ponder whether Schell and his upscale-baby-boomer cohorts wanted to jump-start ticket sales at these costly commercial bashes; some of which are nowhere near selling out.
Or, I’d at least ponder whether the nouvelle cuisine-chompin’, Lexus-drivin’ corporate stooges surrounding Schell just didn’t really care about keeping a for-the-people New Year’s, as long as the hi-ticket private parties they’re going to stay on track.
The media spin on the cancellation, and Schell’s own official statement, are invoking the WTO-protest-response fiasco from Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 as a contributing factor to Schell’s decision.
In that disaster, you recall, Schell and his team over-reacted to a few deliberately-planned (and announced-in-advance) acts of “anarchist” property damage against big chain stores by sicking large goon squads, with tear gas and pepper spray, on non-vandalous protesters and civilian bystanders.
That was a panicky over-reaction; evidence of a lack of trust by the city’s elite toward its populace. So is this.
Despite this Grinchesque act, the new century will still start on time. I, for one, refuse to give up the dream of a better “World of Tomorrow.”
Already, before the terrorism hype, a friend had invited me to a private party in an apartment-building basement, to be redecorated as a mock Y2K-survivalist “concrete bunker.” I’ll probably go to it for a while. But I also insist we still have a public celebration, at the proper time if not at the proper place.
We should all gather as close to the Center as they’ll let us. Let’s surround the gated Center grounds with a human chain of defiant frivolity. No drinking or drugging or vandalism–just an insistence on enjoying a good loud midnight, whether the powers-that-be want us to have one or not.
I don’t expect Schell’s heart to grow three sizes that day, but it’s worth trying.
TOMORROW: Remembering the ’90s, a time segment lost in the century/millennium hype.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a look at part of what was canned: Local art veteran Carl Smool’s Fire Celebration. It’s a funky, populist spectacle; and hence expendable in the eyes of the Brave New Seattle’s power structure.
TODAY, A BREAK from the heavier topics we’ve covered of late, for some slightly-odd short stuff.
FASHION-VICTIM ASSAULT WEAPON OF THE WEEK: Rolling Stone magazine now has its own brand of sunglasses. Presumably just the thing if you want to look like a washed-up, clueless, verbose rock critic (you know, the oldest and squarest guy at the concert).
WHICH PAPER D’YA READ?: Times headline, 11/12: “University District: Rail’s last stop.” P-I headline, following day: “Support for Northgate link gains momentum.”
ART UPDATE: Several weeks ago, I wrote about a poster advertising a “Butch Erotica” cabaret, which looked from afar like it was instead advertising “Butoh Erotica.” At the most recent First Thursday art openings, I finally saw some Butoh erotica.
It took place at the Jem Studios (currently doomed-for-gentrification), in a room filled with video monitors showing footage of one nude model moving about extremely slowly. In the middle of the room, the artist/model herself appeared, “dressed” only and entirely in white body paint (applied by a male assistant with a house-paint roller). She then slowly walked about the room, slowly climbed a step ladder, slowly smoked a cigarette (handed to her by another male assistant), and slowly gazed at the art-viewers.
She became the voyeur; we became the spectacle. Nothing had turned me on as much in months.
WORST JUNK EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (needless to say, from a “friend” I’ve never heard of, at an apparently nonexistant email address)
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉 From: asynergy@quixnet.net To: clark@speakeasy.org Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;). Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites. when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉
From: asynergy@quixnet.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;).
Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites.
when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
BEST EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (from a David Foster Wallace mailing list)
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted] To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized! I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill
From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted]
To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org
Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized!
I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
I can see it now. Probably colors, patterns, and logo “wallpaper.” I think we can all imagine some of the advertisers more likely to use this medium:
TOMORROW: I’ve complained about rude, pretentious San Franciscans. But are Seattleites these days any better?
YESTERDAY, we discussed one way for contemporary visual artists to survive in a boomtown era of rising rents and stagnant incomes–work for advertisers.
But not everybody’s suited for painting corporate-friendly images onto five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs. And a few commercial commissions don’t by themselves solve the problem of alterna-art’s place in urban society.
Ex-Stranger theater critic Matt Richter claims to have a potential answer: Consolidate.
Consolidated Works, the new exhibition/performance space Richter and Meg Shiffler just opened in Seattle, is, on one level, an attempt to make alterna-art into a series of Big Events (big enough to get big newspaper coverage and attract big donations). It ain’t no little hole-in-the-wall gallery space; it’s a 30,000-square-foot ex-warehouse, arranged like a movie multiplex into three big rooms (film and live-stage theaters surrounding a visual-art exhibition area).
Not only will the three areas feed audiences to one another, but their programming will be coordinated under overarching themes (the first, showing thru the end of November, is “Artificial Life”).
While the existing Center on Contemporary Art also arranges one or two “theme” shows per exhibition season, it mainly mounts or imports single-artist (or single-group-of-artists) installations. Good for aesthetic unity, but not as good for marketing as CW’s big-event concepts. COCA regularly schedules music and discussion events as adjuncts to its visual-art presentations, but CW’s more ambitious scheme is to give equal emphasis to visuals, performance, and film/video.
One thing CW is doing that COCA originally did is to start out by building the organization (and the fundraising) before settling into a permanent space. CW’s current ex-warehouse building is rented cheaply from Paul Allen, who will raze the building early next year (shortly before he razes the Kingdome). CW plans to keep mounting huge shows in temporary quarters at soon-to-be condo or office sites, while soliciting business-community support for a building it would eventually own.
By being big enough from Day One to compete with other bigtime organizations for software-millionaires’ dough, CW hopes to stem the recent arts-funding trends that have seen hundreds of millions going to fancy new buildings for the big prestigious institutions (next in line for a new palace: the Seattle Opera), while second-tier outfits like COCA stagnate and DIY-level outfits (fringe theaters, alterna-galleries, studio spaces) are threatened by the lack of affordable spaces.
But you can easily see the limitations built into the concept.
For one thing, works that don’t easily fit into one of CW’s scheduled big-theme concepts, that’s too idiosyncratic or too astray from what other artists are currently up to, might not get in there. And any big institution runs the risk of over-institutionalization, letting artistic decisions become subsurvient to bureaucratic or fundraising considerations. And it doesn’t solve the space problems faced by established-but-smaller organizations.
But for now, let’s welcome the Consolidated Works concept. If it works, it just might be copyable elsewhere, igniting new levels of public interest in alternate visions.
IN OTHER NEWS: So much for Seattle’s supposed “civility”….
TOMORROW: The music everybody but me likes.
AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.
A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.
It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)
Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.
As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.
To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.
So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.
(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)
To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).
And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.
And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.
But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.
And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.
Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.
TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.
ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…
IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)
A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”
While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).
What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.
What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).
DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.
The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).
The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).
Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.
THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.
“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.
But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”
I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…
TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
BOOKING A WOMEN’S CONVENTION by the religious-right pressure group Focus on the Family the same weekend as ArtsEdge was the best Seattle Center scheduling serendipity in years. Even better than situating the big Cobain memorial in ’94 right outside, and just after, a Sonics playoff game.
Alas, no catfights or shouting matches broke out between the blue-haired conservatives and the green-haired artsy-types–not even with the entrants in the tattoo contest, some of whom paid as little heed as was legally possible to the contest’s fine-print rule, “If your tattoo is in an area normally covered by clothing, please be prepared to wear clothing that reveals your tattoo but not the genital area. Ladies, that means nipples too–sorry, it’s the law!”).
The body art was among the highlights at the third ArtsEdge. Other notables: The parade of art cars, the Butoh Race (three women in angel-of-death-white makeup tried to run as slowly as possible without stopping), musical gigs by Rockin’ Teenage Combo and the Bosnian emigres of Kultur Shock, the neo-vaudeville of Circus Contraption and Cirque de Flambe, and Elaine Lee’s art installation in which short tales involving the artist’s “secrets” were stored inside beautifully-lit, small metal boxes.
A lot of it was fun and entertaining. Some of it was even art. Little of it, though, had any edge.
The problem: economics, natch. This year’s ArtsEdge, like the two prior installments, failed to attract many of the region’s best fringe art-theater-music people due to its policy of not paying them. (The event’s $100,000 budget goes entirely to Seattle Center staff and facilities services and to publicity.)
As long as the Seattle Center management’s allowed to think “edgy” art means art by young adults who’ll do anything for a public showcase, you’ll get an ArtsEdge that’s got little art and almost no edge. This year’s event proved it could be popular, even under less-than-ideal weather conditions. It could be more popular if more pro alterna-artists, with their already-built followings, were added.
Consider this another case of the “If-we-can-build-these-big-ass-sports-palaces-why-can’t-we-…” routine, which we’ll talk a little more about on Thursday and Friday.
Tomorrow: More reasons why Pokemon is such a hit with the kids and so incomprehensible to the grownups.
DISCIPLINE, I heartily believe, is one of the most important ingredients in any artwork. Especially in any artwork based on one of the “popular” (or formerly-popular) art forms. As any decent jazz teacher will tell you, you must know the rules before you can properly break them.
Herewith, some important disciplinary elements of time and space for the true pop-culture scholar.
0.2 seconds (five frames of film; determined by animation legend Tex Avery to be the minimum time for the human eye to “read” a motion gag such as a falling anvil).
0:58 (actual content length of a 60-second TV commercial, dating back to when most spots were edited and distributed on film, so local stations could splice spots onto one reel without worrying about the two-second differential between a frame of film and its corresponding soundtrack segment).
1:00 (standard length of a TV commercial break in the ’50s).
2:10 (average minimum length of a TV commercial break these days).
3:30 (more-or-less maximum length of a Top 40 single in the ’50s and ’60s, so radio stations could expect to fit 1:30 of commercials and DJ patter into a 5:00 segment).
4 minutes (limit of a 78 rpm record).
6 minutes (the final standard length of a Warner Bros. cartoon; 540 feet of film).
7 minutes (maximum length of a side of a 45 rpm record, without using analog sound compression).
10 minutes (standard length of an act in a vaudeville revue; later the maximum length of a one-reel film comedy or newsreel).
16-20 minutes (average and maximum lengths of a two-reel film comedy).
24 minutes (length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, before they started cramming more ads into prime-time; nowadays a sitcom can be as short as 19.5 minutes).
30.5 minutes (maximum length of a side of an LP record when using analog sound compression).
72 minutes (maximum length of a standard audio CD).
80 minutes (considered the minimal length of a commercial studio feature film; the standard length of most U.S. animated features).
300-400 words (average length of a book page).
750 words (standard length of a newspaper op-ed column).
800 words (standard length of an old New Yorker “casual” humor story.)
1,000-1,400 words (typical length range of a magazine page).
5,000 words (standard length of an old Saturday Evening Post short story).
90,000 words (maximum length of a mass-market-paperback novel in the ’50s, when publishers were still trying to stick to a 25-cent price).
6 episodes (minimum duration of a BBC sitcom season).
13 episodes (standard duration of a ’30s movie serial).
39 episodes (original duration of a TV season on the U.S. big-three networks, derived from the days of live radio; now whittled down to as few as 20 and as many as 30).
65 episodes (standard duration of the first season of a weekday animated series; the episodes may be in production over two years before premiering).
100 episodes (generally considered the minimal duration of a TV series to succeed in syndicated reruns; also the typical duration of a Mexican telenovela).
Monday: More on the end of Another World.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that always loves cool, dark places, couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the totally not-getting-it blurb for SIFF installed at the top of some of those HotStamp postcard racks around town: “And you thought Sundance was crowded… Be sure to catch the 25th Seattle International Film Festival. The largest movie gathering in the U.S. is sure to showcase movies from Hollywood’s heavyweights to the next Quentin Tarantino.” SIFF, at its best, is about film as art (or at least film as bougeois-boomer quasi-art), not about stupid marketing-driven Hollywood hype. More about that, sorta, a few items down.
UPDATE #1: By the time you read this, The Big Book of MISC. will be printed, bound, and shipping to those of you who’ve graciously pre-ordered it. If you’re reading this early in the week, you can get a copy for your very own live and in person at our luscious MISC.-O-Rama party, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue in seedy Belltown (just north of 5th and Bell, across from the backside of the Cadillac lot). If you’re reading this after the event, you can still get a copy in person at the Pistil and M. Coy book shops, with more outlets to roll out in the next few weeks. And, of course, you can buy it directly online at this link.
ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: The $25,000 Pyramid.
UPDATE #2: Mark Murphy’s back as artistic director of On the Boards. Kudos to all the OTB supporters and members of the Seattle performing-arts community who successfully got OTB’s board to reverse its initial firing of the much-loved Murphy.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: “After Dinner Nipples” mints at Urban Outfitters are described by the woman who recommended them to me as “better than the real thing.” I’d heartily disagree, but I did find these mint-chocolate drops tasty and great to lick (but not all that soft to the touch, and without the creamy center that would’ve made the gag-concept more complete).
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: The 13th year of this little collection of odd-stuff-from-all-over called Misc. hasn’t been the luckiest. Something once read in print (or at least glimpsed at) by a third of Seattle’s adult population now has a much smaller, though steady and growing, on-screen audience.
I’m not going away, and neither is the site.
But it’s perhaps time to reconsider a few things:
(1) The online column is still based on the concept of the print Misc.–filling a more-or-less predetermined (albeit self-pre-determined) word count, at intervals corresponding to the column’s former appearance in a weekly tabloid.
(2) One of the column’s premises has been to passionately advocate urban life and specifically Seattle life. It started back when suburban flight was still considered an inexorable trend, and when everybody (especially Seattleites) thought Seattle was a hick town where nothing ever happenned and nothing ever would. Nowadays, even Newsweek has noted big downtown “revivals” across the country. And Seattle, whose downtown never really needed reviving, is creaking under the real burdens of the cyber-wealthy, buying up everything and making borderline-boho existences even less possible.
(3) Another recurring theme has always been to assert the worthiness of the punk-rock generation and its values. Far from defeatist or nihilistic, punks have strongly believed in community, in self-expression, in taking charge of their culture and their lives. Certain fogeys such as Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran still hate punks, but the media corporations came to love ’em. And the kids younger than me haven’t rebelled against punks and their allies the way I rebelled against aging hippies. Clueless mass-media reporters can still find goths and industrial-rockers in high schools and mistakenly believe these kids are doing something new.
(What many current white kids have done has been to ignore rock in general, turning away from the major labels’ glut of fake-Pearl-Jam bands and toward post-gangsta hiphop; which in turn has caused many young blacks to run from that and toward newer acts considered either too advanced or too lovey-dovey for the mallrats.)
(4) Punks also believe the “lowly” medium of rock ‘n’ roll music is, or can be, an art form; not via the bombast of early-’70s “art rock” but by being the best damn rock ‘n’ roll music it can be. That strident belief has fueled the column’s whole defense-of-pop-culture premise–once something few other ambitious writers attempted, but now commonplace.
In the mid-’80s, when the column first appeared in ArtsFocus (a publication mainly devoted to local fringe-theater and ethnic-dance activities), many intellectuals and art-worlders still believed there was a rigid dichotomy between “high” and “low” culture. This notion was perhaps best depicted in the 1990 “High and Low” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which purported to compare and contrast works from the two realms but which really turned into a long, desperate defense of this artificial division.
When “popular culture” was seriously talked about (in places like Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a whole department about it), it was usually treated in the post-leftist “cultural studies” manner, as a set of sociological and political phenomena to be dissected and theorized about–never as “real” art or even entertainment, never as the work of creative people who might be trying to express something.
That, of course, was the era of only three major TV networks, monopoly newspapers, and CD plants who’d only do business with the major labels. It was a time when the book business was still considered too marginal for big corporations to want to muscle in on (at least on the retail end). It was easy to still think of “popular” culture as “low” culture, as something factory-produced and best considered in industrial terms.
Things are a little different now, sorta. There’s dozens of cable channels, hundreds of book imprints, thousands of indie record labels, and scores of “alternative” weekies (though each business mentioned still has a few high-rollers at its top, struggling to stay on top via increasingly-frenetic dealmaking). Despite the current dropping-off of exhibitor interest in “indie” films (due at least partly to the glut of fake-Tarantino “hip” bloodfests from the big studios’ pseudo-indie divisions), true-indie filmers and videotapers continue to shoot and edit away.
Then there’s this World Wide Web thang. Whole books and magazines have been devoted to how the web and associated technologies are affecting marketing, shipping, TV viewing, music-listening, dating, masturbation, etc. etc. I liked to think when the web first took off, and I still like to believe, that it’s doing much more than that.
It’s vindicating the whole punk-DIY ethos. It’s helping to build real as well as virtual communities. It’s giving voices to tens of thousands of heretofore-obscure subcultures (some of whom I empathize with, some of whom I loathe; but that’s the whole point). Among these subcultures are the fan movements for popcult genres previously considered by the “cultural studies” snobs to be only liked by illiterates. I’m no longer a lone-voice-in-the-wilderness in my insistence that pop culture is real culture.
And what’s more, the web’s accellerating acceptance of the notion that art, music, literature, fashion, decor, graphics, video, and even movies need no longer be the exclusive products of the N.Y./L.A./S.F. elites.
Some elite forces realize this and are running scared (like Time and the censorous Australian parlaiment).
Other elite forces are trying to tame the Web into something safe for Conde Nast. Despite the failure of the Microsoft Network’s “shows” concept, corporate website-makers are still trying to launch online magazine sites with predictable texts and features aimed at rigidly defined demographic target audiences. I like to think web users are smarter than that.
Which gets us back to item (1), this here site’s print-legacy format. With The Big Book of MISC. now a-born, look in upcoming weeks for further changes to the miscmedia.com website. Don’t know for sure yet what they’ll be. But they’ll be designed to keep it all apace with an ever-changing, ever-Misc.-er world.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Saturnine.”
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, is proud to announce The Big Book of MISC. has now gone to press. Even better, online ordering is now up, at this link! The prerelease party’s Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Ave. near Bell Street in Seattle’s glorious Belltown. Be there.
FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Denny’s Diner concept, first mentioned in Misc. about a year ago, will now be phased in at all U.S. Denny’s restaurants. From the looks of the prototype restaurant out by Sea-Tac Mall, it won’t be as big a revamp as the newspaper stories promise. The one I saw looks largely like a regular ol’ Denny’s. The interior’s done up in muted greens instead of garish orange shades, with a few touches of aluminum trim. Aside from a few soda-fountain items, there’s not much on the menu that’s not on the regular Denny’s menu. And there’s a reproduction juke box playing some oldies-rock CDs, along with many “hot country” and easy-listening stars.
The chain’s officially doing this because its research found younger eaters don’t identify with its established suburban-bland image, and thinks this way it can become perceived as slightly hipper without turning off the older crowd. Of course, Denny’s has had a bigger image problem than that in recent years. Amid allegations of racial discrimination in both employment and customer service, the company’s had to pull out all the PR-spin stops to proclaim it now welcomes everybody, and has put managers and franchisees thru sensitivity classes. So why, one might ask, is the chain re-imaging itself around nostalgia for those bad-old-days white-lower-middle-class hash houses where African Americans felt particularly unwelcome back in the day? (Remember, the first major sit-in of the civil rights movement occurred at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Elsewhere in bobbysoxer-land…
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge (which has hosted all-ages music shows these past six years in the former home of the punk-parody musical Angry Housewives) and the Colourbox (the rock venue that stuck with local bands after bigger bars turned their emphasis to touring acts) are closing in June, due (indirectly in the former case, directly in the latter) to Pioneer Square gentrification. RKCNDY will be demolished for a hotel sometime later this year. Nothing much could’ve been done to save the Colourbox (and, anyway, the nearby Rupert’s has been serving much the same function). But the VE’s another story. Its pretty-much-all-volunteer staff has every right to feel burned out and to move on, now that its recent sold-out Annie Sprinkle performances have paid off its debts. But there should’ve been some way they could’ve passed the torch onto a fresher crew, to keep the space going as long as it still had the lease. If someone can get such a crew together to assume the space, they’d better do so soon.
(Both the Colourbox and the Velvet Elvis got front-page pictures in the P-I‘s Saturday item about the city’s tuff new anti-noise law and schemes by some city councilmembers to relax those limits in designated “entertainment zones,” a little too late to save either club.)
BESIDES A DECENT ALL-AGES SPACE and zoned relief from anti-nightlife legal putsches, what does Seattle need? That’s your next question at the luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. And we’re still seeking your nominations about which 1995-99 Seattle bands oughta be mentioned in the forthcoming update of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Elsewhere in new-addition-land…
WATCH D.T.S., GET THE D.T.s: The Casbah Cinema, that beuatifully-designed but poorly-marketed boutique theater in Belltown, has been revamped by new owners as the Big Picture. It’s now a beer-and-wine bar with a fancy-schmancy digital video projection system in the old Casbah auditorium room. The owners believe, as I wrote here some time back, that theaters shouldn’t just be for feature films and tavern TVs shouldn’t just be for sports. They plan to have a whole schedule of fun programming events, ranging from cult movies and sports to X-Files episode screenings and music-video nights. It’s also available for private parties, software-company demonstrations, anime fan-club meetings, movie-studio sneak previews, etc.
I probably will continue seeing most of my movies-on-projection-video-with-beer at 2nd Avenue Pizza, but the Big Picture’s HDTV setup is truly awesome. It’s much sharper than the analog HDTV system I saw a couple years back at the old UA Cinemas; even a basketball game (live sports are the ultimate test of digital video) looked clean and crisp. Elsewhere in visual-entertainment-land…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: After years of the sleaze-sex mags getting closer and closer to The Act, Penthouse has finally started running apparent actual hardcore pix as of its June issue (in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy pictorial), and (along with its almost-as-explicit competitors) has faced the expected legal challenges in the expected southern and midwestern states. Either the publishers seem to think they can win the court cases and vend images of actual coitus thru mainstream magazine outlets, or the competition for wankers’ bucks has gotten so intense the publishers believe they have to do this to compete with hardcore videos, websites, CD-ROMS, etc.
The demand for explicitness in sex-entertainment has increased steadily in the three decades since hardcore films and images first went above-ground. Today, hardcore tapes can be rented in almost every non-chain video store (and can be purchased in non-chain convenience stores); while softcore tapes (other than those depressing , anti-intimacy “erotic thrillers”) are in far fewer outlets and often for sale only. Of all the new girlie mags in recent years, only Perfect 10 (and retro-zines like Kutie) appeal to a classic pin-up aesthetic instead of simply piling on as much raunch as the distribution channel will bear.
Some observers claim this trend signifies a failure of imagination, of good taste, or even of respect for women. I think it means something else–that smut consumers are, on the average, moving away from passive “pedastel” female ideals and instead prefer to fantasize about women who are active, enthusiastic participants in The Act.
Then, of course, there’s the little matter of what makes hardcore hardcore. It’s not how much you see of the women, but how much you see of the men. The triumph of hardcore means more and more straight-identifying men want to look at other men’s sex parts in action, photographed as sharply and clearly as possible. One recently-notorious subgenre, the “gangbang” video, shows its straight-male audiences dozens of male bodies surrounding just one woman.
But gangbang videos are ugly, as is hardcore in general. As I’ve previously mentioned, the hardcore anti-aesthetic literalizes the phrase “ugly as sin.” While the action scenes in Penthouse are at least competently lit and photographed, they still adhere to a formula of garish colors, contorted expressions, and grotesquely obvious implants. Historically, the formula leads out from the old days of underground smut, all dangerous and anti-propriety. Today, it leads from the porn-video industry’s ruthless combination of tiny budgets and strict requirements. But it’s also a look its target audience seems to prefer. Perhaps these men have such poor self body-images, they can only comfortably look at other men’s bodies when they’re depicted among ugly surroundings.
Will this ugliness change as coitus imagery goes further beyond porn-specialty stores and into your local beer-and-cigarette shop? Many cultures around the world have found beautiful ways to depict coitus via the arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Contemporary erotic photography has produced many beautiful works, but almost all of them (even Robert Mapplethorpe’s) are predicated on The Pose, not The Act. Posing involves a person or persons openly displaying their personas out toward the viewer; actual sex (if it’s any good) constitutes two people becoming all caught up in one another and themselves, ignoring the rest of the world. I’ll still prefer softcore images, even if hardcore becomes less icky-looking, for this reason. I don’t want to vicariously imagine myself in some other man’s body, feeling what that other man gets to feel; I want to imagine my (real) self in the woman’s body.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we hope to have topics less prone to too-obvious puns, embrace the warmth, question the war, and consider this by Jane Austen: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
