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RECENTLY I GOT me that AT&T digital-cable thangy, of which I’ve already written about in general terms.
One of the most intriguing and bizarre channels on the system is BBC America.
I hadn’t been a PBS pledge-giving Anglophile for umpteen years, but the BBC America package is something else. Like few cable channels since the early MTV, it’s a whole. It’s got a 24/7 unified programming aesthetic at work, due to its careful selection of BBC-controlled programs and the clear look-and-feel of its promo spots.
A brief explanation: The British Broadcasting Corp., as part of its continuing, government-directed drive to reduce its dependence on “license fees” to TV-set owners (kind of like a mandatory HBO subscription for all UK viewers), established two ad-funded cable/satellite channels for exporting its programs. BBC World is an all-news channel, beamed to cable systems and hotel rooms from Paris to Sydney to Santiago. BBC America is a mostly entertainment channel, aimed squarely at U.S. and Canadian cable and home-satellite systems.
Its schedule is aimed strictly for this niche, and emphasizes the types of BBC programs previously familiar to U.S. audiences on PBS stations. Hence, it doesn’t replicate the schedules of the BBC’s two U.K. broadcast channels (which include plenty of bizarre kiddie shows, collegiate quiz shows, fine-arts documentaries, morning talkfests, U.K. domestic newscasts, one or two Hollywood hit series per night, and day-long weekend coverage of darts and snooker tournaments).
What you do get are:
But’s the juxtaposition of all this hi-class programming fare with the cheap-tchotchke commercials that really puts BBC America over, at least to me. There’s nothing quite like the hushed dialogue and slick camera moves of a drama like Love Hurts (office politics and sexual intrigue at a charity agency) or Casualty (office politics and sexual intrigue in a hospital) being interrupted by the loud hawking of such “As Seen on TV” products as the Turbie Twist hair turban, the Craftmatic adjustable bed, and a wall clock with pictures of toy trains.
It sure beats those “underwriting announcements” for ExxonMobil.
TOMORROW: A pair of local zine reviews.
NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (P-I Bumbershoot preview by R.M. Campbell, 9/1): “Bumbershoot has a long history of supporting local dance groups. Most are local….”
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-’80s skate punks.
But that’s just part of a growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call “Reagan’s AmeriKKKa” are back.
With one difference.
A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the ’80s.
We couldn’t wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we’re still not fully beyond.
Herewith, an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.
This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)
But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.
Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren’t really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.
Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.
(In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman’s wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)
TOMORROW: The last of this for now.
ELSEWHERE:
NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)
I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.
The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.
Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).
In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–
…and lots, lots more.
The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:
But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.
TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….
IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a defense of a long-maligned political institution.
BRING ON THE SOUSA MARCHES: No, I don’t think major-party political conventions are a relic needing abolition. Those who so loudly proclaim the conventions’ obsolescence appear largely to be media people, frustrated that the Presidential nomination process is no longer a dragged-out drama leading to a climactic point of decision in a big arena with live TV cameras.
Yet these same critics use, as their main argument, the claim that the conventions have devolved into “a made-for-TV event.”
There have been many, many conventions, before and during the TV era (and will be in any post-TV era) in which the party’s ticket was known weeks in advance. The conventions all went on anyway. They gave the party faithful a, well, a party to reward their hard work and a big pep rally to inspire further efforts.
Today, conventions serve these purposes and a couple more.
They give the party, and by extension its candidate, an opportunity to prove its organizational skills. (George McGovern once told C-SPAN he knew his candidacy was doomed when he couldn’t get his acceptance speech started before 1 a.m. Eastern.)
And they provide a “long-form” forum for a candidate’s platform.
Yeah, call it an “informercial” if you like. But also call it a tool for unmediated communication with the populace.
The Presidential nomination process is broken, but it’s broken in its foresection–the primaries and the ultra-big-money fundraising. The conventions, largely, aren’t broken (though an equivalent mechanism for independent candidates still needs to be thought up).
GRAFFITO OF THE WEEK (in the Six Arms men’s room): “This town is a youth culture retirement home.”
THROWAWAY GAG OF THE WEEK: Was passing the Paramount Theater when a woman walking toward the theater’s touring production of Fosse told a friend she’d last been to the place “to see Lord of the Rings,–I mean Lord of the Dance.” Of course, I had to barge in; “It’s amazing how high Frodo can kick.”
DROPPING THE POKEBALL: Apparently, the Pokemon phenomenon has passed its peak, at least in North America. Apparently, kids turning 10 are, like kids turning 10 oft do, renouncing the recreational fads associated with those immature 9-year-olds. Merchandising products with the 151 superpowered cute cartoon animals and their human pals are stagnating. The second theatrical movie faced disappointing box-office results. Sales of Pokemon gaming cards have reportedly plummeted. (If the latter’s the case, then Wizards of the Coast, the local outfit that made the U.S. version of the gaming cards, sold out to Hasbro just in time.)
TOMORROW: Monorail madness and its meaning.
AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.
It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.
I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.
Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.
Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.
I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.
He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.
At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).
It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.
Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.
Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.
It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.
And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.
He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.
Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.
But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?
TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?
SO I FINALLY SAW Survivor.
I’d planned not to, or at least not to write about it, as part of my ever-so-contrarian policy of avoiding whatever’s the only topic on Entertainment Tonight or the Fox News Channel during any particular month. In the past, that’s meant little-to-no remarks here about O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzales, flag burning, or the departure of Kathie Lee Gifford.
But this time, I took the bait (or rather, the edible grubworms).
What I found: A compelling-in-that-train-wreck-sorta-way show that, while nominally based on a European series, plays out more like a cross between The Real World (and is just as unreal as that show, from another Viacom-owned channel), Japan’s extreme-embarrassment game shows, and corporate-warrior ideology.
The latter is the show’s most disturbing ingredient. I suppose if the New Agers could routinely misinterpret various indigenous people’s rites and customs, so can the Glengarry Glen Ross/Gordon Gekko ilk. But the whole Survivor premise is so against what real survival is all about (either for indigenous peoples, for teens and adults play-acting in “survival camps,” or for soldiers and others who happen to find themselves stuck somewhere.
That prior CBS desert-island show, Gilligan’s Island, was closer to the essence of real survival, on an island or in North American society. It depicted people who had little in common except their unsuitedness for the task at hand, and who had to learn to get along and work together for their common goal of living through their situation.
The Survivor motto, “Outplay–Outwit–Outlast,” deliberately contradicts all of this. It’s all about the rugged individualism, backbiting, and looking-out-for-#1 championed by corporate idealogues dating back to Ford and Rockefeller’s “social Darwinism” theories. Philosophies that allowed those who’d schemed and stolen their way to the top to heartily justify everything they’d done.
But as I’ve been saying for some time, business isn’t everything. And as local author David C. Korten, whom I discussed yesterday, says, the established priorities and philosophies of business (particularly of big business) aren’t the same as those of life in general. Business’s priorities can even contradict or deny those needed for real living, real relating, and real (as opposed to merely fiscal) growth.
A society that tries to hard to be like Survivor will not, in the long run, survive.
TOMORROW: The nearly-annual ‘Why I Still Love Seafair’ column.
THOSE OF YOU who’ve already been living in the now two-thirds or so of King County that has AT&T Digital Cable already know about what I’m discussing today.
For most of the ’90s, Summit Cable (the feisty independent serving the few leftover Seattle neighborhoods other cable companies didn’t bother with) had a far better channel lineup than either Viacom or the cable operation successively run by TelePrompTer, Group W, and TCI. When Viacom Cable upgraded its local system (just prior to being bought up by TCI, leaving that company with two different sets of channels in different parts of Seattle), Summit remained either a step ahead of or a step behind in selection.
But TCI got bought out by AT&T, which is aggressively pursuing digital upgrades as a means toward eventually offering all sorts of services (including, down the line, a return of its old “Ma Bell” local phone service).
Summit, meanwhile, was bought out by Millennium Digital Media, a multi-regional independent with seemingly few immediate priorities beyond cash-milking its properties.
Thus, while Millennium’s digital-upgrade package includes only lots of pay-per-view movies, AT&T offers channels with real, short-form TV programming. (What the TV set was built for.)
In all, 35 channels are on the digital service, combined with the 73 channels on the system’s “expanded basic” package.
TCI’s ex-boss John Malone once claimed his company would eventually deliver as many as 500 channels to any home that wanted them. Besides the 108 channels mentioned here already, AT&T Digital has 73 premium and pay-per-view channels, plus 37 music audio channels.
No, that’s still not “enough,” programming-choice-wise.
For one thing, the lineup’s weighted with multiple versions of channels AT&T partly owns (Discovery, TLC, BET, Fox Sports Net, QVC, Encore/Starz), as well as channels AT&T and/or its predecessors at TCI contracted to put on all its cable systems regardless of local interest (Oxygen, Fox News Channel, etc.).
It’s still missing several channels popular among satellite-dish owners and on cable systems in other locales (WGN, the Travel Channel, the Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Playboy TV, the computer-news channel ZDTV, the MTV alternative MuchMusic, the British/Canadian entertainment channel Trio, etc.).
And all those pay-per-view channels essentially show the same few movies, with scattered starting times. The concept of a video store inside your cable box is still too similar to the video racks some 7-Eleven stores used to have–just the same few mainstream Hollywood snoozers “everybody” but you supposedly loved.
And the official “Alternative” channel in the system’s audio section leaves even more to be desired. It plays almost nothing but those annoying “aggro” snothead bands and Pearl Jam impersonators.
On the plus side, there’s tons of fun stuff on AT&T Digital I just couldn’t get on Millennium:
All in all, a big step forward for TV lovers such as myself. But there’s still room for improvement, for even more diversity.
But I’m already in love with the way channels on digital cable appear in small image blocks, taking two seconds or more to fill the screen. Even though, one day soon, music-video and commercials directors are surely going to catch onto the schtick and imitate it to death.
TOMORROW: Is business the root of all evil?
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
If I ever rewrite my old list of ways to voluntarily complicate your life, I’d have to put “move to a new home” right up at the list’s top, next to “start taking heroin.”
I’d previously mentioned that during my starving-student and starving-graduate days, I’d lived in approximately 20 locations over a course of 10 years, including one stretch of nine addresses from June 1981 thru July 1984. That constant hassle left me pretty much wary of the whole process.
So when I got into a Belltown apartment that was soon taken over by the semi-subsidized Housing Resource Group (which meant rent increases were far below the prevailing market trends), I sat and stayed for a comfy nine years.
But the time came at last to get the heck outta Belltown and into a home of my own. It could’ve gone far easier than it did.
First step: Getting two weeks ahead in the ol’ online column, knowing my life (including my Net access) would be screwy for at least that long.
Second step: Boxing up everything, and throwing away everything else. As a devoted collector of pop culture’s ephemera and detrius of all types, this posed severe questions of what was worth carting and what deserved trashing. (Eek! The Cat toys: Keep. Ken Griffey Jr. cereal boxes (empty, no collector resale value): Dump.)
Third step: Arranging the move of my mail, phone, electric account, cable, bank statements, and especially DSL service.
Fourth step: Getting new furnishings for the new space, instead of the hobble of donated and Dumpster-saved items that had furnished the old space. Because the new space had one large room (plus a separate kitchen and bathroom), I knew I’d want a separate bed space. To conserve square footage, I chose to get a loft bed.
Fifth step: Arranging with my brother the naturopath and a pal of his to rent a U-Haul van and get everything on it, then off of it, within a time frame amenable to both of them and also to the management of my new building. This became the first impossibility. The brother’s friend could only get out of work and to my old space after 6:30 p.m. The management at the new space had a policy forbidding move-ins from starting after 7 p.m.
The result: Two and a half hours of loading all my belongings (except the furniture-to-be-trashed) into the van, which would then be parked overnight at the brother’s place in Wallingford. I was left overnight at the old space with nothing but the clothes on my proverbial back, the contents of my trusty shoulder bag, the contents of my old refrigerator, and the to-be-trashed old furniture.
The brother tried to put a positive-yet-ironic spin by saying the night of stufflessness would be “an adventure. It’ll be like being homeless.”
Actually, it was a case of having two homes, and nothing in either of them.
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
IN OTHER NEWS: Burger King suddenly quit its promo campaign for the movie Chicken Run, in which viewers were encouraged to “save the chickens” by eating more beef. Replacing the ads: New spots, which look very hastily-prepared, selling chicken sandwiches.
A FEW DAYS AGO, I briefly mentioned a vision I’d had of what social changes might potentially arise from a tech-company stock crash, should such a rapid downfall occur the way certain anti-dot-com and anti-Microsoft cynics around these parts hope it does.
(If you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and do so. I’ll still be here when you get back.)
One aspect of this vision was that a general public backlash against “virtual realities” (computer-generated and otherwise) could lead to a craze for any personal or cultural experience that could be proclaimed as “reality.”
Let’s imagine such a possible fad a little further today.
I’m imagining a movement that could expand upon already-existing trends–
It’s easy to see these individual trends coalescing into a macro-trend, coinciding with a quite-probable backlash against the digitally-intermediated culture of video games, porno websites, chat rooms, home offices, cubicle loneliness, et al.
As I wrote on Monday, live, in-person entertainment would, under this scenario, become the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences. The self-styled “cultured” folks and intellectuals could come to disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
(Not coincidentally, this disdain would emerge just after technology has allowed the masses to fully create and distribute their own books, movies, recorded music, etc.)
Society’s self-appointed tastemakers could come to insist on live theater instead of films, lecturers and storytellers instead of writers, participant sports (including “X-treme” sports) instead of spectator sports, and concerts (or playing one’s own instruments) instead of CDs.
The arts of rhetoric and public speaking could enjoy a revival on the campuses. The slam poetry and political speechifiying beloved by Those Kids of late just might expand into a full-blown revival of Chataqua-style oratory. On the conservative side of politics, Limbaugh wannabes might take their rhetorical acts away from radio and further into staged rallies and intimate breakfast-club meetings.
Jazz, the music that only truly exists when performed live, could also have another comeback.
Even “alternative” minded music types could get into this line of thinking; indeed, there are already burgeoning mini-fads in “house concerts” and neo-folk hootenaneys.
As packaged entertainment becomes more exclusively associated with nerds, squares, and people living outside major urban centers, it might come under new calls for regulation and even censorship; while live performance could become an anything-goes realm.
(If carried to its extreme, this could even lead to the recriminalization of print/video pornography, and/or the decriminalization of prostitution.)
The rich and/or the hip would demand real shopping in real stores (maybe even along the model of the traditional British shopkeepers, in which the wife rang up sales in the front room while the hubby made the merchandise in the back.)
Those without the dough might be expected (or even made) to use online instead of in-person shopping; much as certain banks “encourage” their less-affluent customers to use ATMs instead of live tellers.
In this scenario, what would become of writers–or, for that matter, cartoonists, filmmakers, record-store clerks, etc.?
(One group you won’t have to worry about: The entertainment conglomerates. They’ll simply put less capital into packaged-goods entertainment and more into theme parks (manmade but still “live” entertainment), Vegas-style revues, touring stage shows, music festivals, and the like.)
MONDAY: Another local landmark gets defaced a little more.
IN OTHER NEWS: There’s one fewer employer for washed-up baseball stars.
IT’S A COUPLE OF DAYS since the massive pre-opening hype and the opening weekend concerts for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, and a couple of days before the tape-delayed cablecasts of the concerts show up on MTV and VH1.
So maybe you’ll be able to stand reading a few items about it today:
1. It’s done now. We’re stuck with it. The building was fun to look at while it was going up. Its form and silhouette changed almost daily. But now, it’s in its final shapeless shape. Will it age gracefully into a welcome part of the skyline, or will it become a premature eyesore? (A few observers not bought-and-paid-for by Allen’s PR bucks suggest the latter.)
2. It really is World Class, and that’s one of its biggest problems. Its out-of-scale gaudiness clearly marks it as the product of a town trying too damn hard to prove it had “made it,” too concerned with becoming “New York By-And-By” (The Chinook-jargon translation of “New York-Alki,” Seattle’s original name).
3. We won’t stop hearing about it. Allen sank nearly a quarter-billion into building the thing, but wants the museum to pay back its operating expenses. That means selling annual memberships and bringing casual visitors (local and tourist) over and over. That, in turn, means installing and promoting new attractions (unlike zoo-goers, museum-goers tend not to visit the same old exhibits repeatedly.)
4. Music in Seattle is now a Big Business to stay. EMP’s need to keep itself in the local and national media spotlight means big-name rock and rap stars will be continually trotted out here, at no small expense, to perform or speak at the place or to announce the donation of some collectible trifle. Bigtime concerts and “once in a lifetime” festivals will take place at EMP, or will be sponsored by EMP at other venues, for years to come.
5. Local bands of any degree of street-cred will be regularly “invited” to become shills for EMP (performing at it, appearing at kids’ workshops under its aegis, donating stuff). Will any significant artists (other than Pearl Jam and the Kill Rock Stars label roster) refuse? Will the Seattle Scene be divided into EMP-Friendly and EMP-Unfriendly camps?
6. Rock music is a corporate institution, as if all the previous evidence of this fact (Hard Rock Cafes, House of Blues, Rolling Stone, MTV, the Grammies, Mr. Allen’s former ownership of Ticketmaster, the record industry’s suit to kill Napster, the use of James Brown songs to sell laxatives) hadn’t convinced you.
(A lesson in rock as big business: The reason EMP exists in its present form was because Allen was thwarted in his original scheme to create a “Jimi Hendrix Museum,” honoring the rock god of all Seattle white baby boomers (who himself left Seattle promptly after turning 18, only came back on tour, and told everybody how much he hated it).
Seems Allen had helped the Hendrix family pay for its umpteen-year suit to get back the rights to his music. In return, Allen only wanted the right to create a Hendrix Museum–and, he later decided, the right to control all rights to Hendrix’s music, name, and image for the next 100 years. The family decided to part ways with Allen.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The locally-based Home Grocer is combining with a similar grocery-delivery operation, Webvan. Webvan’s actually a smaller company than Home Grocer, operating in fewer metro areas. But one of those areas is San Francisco, which means Webvan is regularly covered as “the” Net grocery company by those ever so Frisco-centric computer news outlets. Hence, the Webvan name’s far better known than Home Grocer among investors; so that’s the name (and the management team) that will survive the merger.
“DOT COMS MUST DIE!”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that phrase, or phrases like it, over the past month or so.
It seems more and more Seattleites, in and out of the computer and Internet industries, have become ever-sicker of these companies–and not just of Microsoft either.
These various observers are offended, in differing amounts, by the real-estate hyperinflation, the SUVs, the traffic jams, the condos, the “market price” fancy-pants restaurants, the new chain stores full of useless luxury tchochkes, the cell phones a-bleating in theaters and parks, the rude and humorless public behavior, the slavedriving conditions and disposable-commodity treatment placed upon employees, the destruction of so many funky little places, and all the other civic ills that are popularly blamed, justly or unjustly, on the 300 or more “new economy” companies in King County.
Dot-coms might not be dying. But they’re not as robust as they were six months ago either.
And their decline and/or fall won’t be pretty. (Layoffs, closures, paranoid management behaviors, stock roller-coasters, cash-flow hiccups, pension-fund bankruptcies, avalanches of neo-modern furniture flodding Goodwill stores, you know the drill.)
But it could be entertaining to watch.
Besides, what else did you expect? Most new retail and other business ventures fail in their first five years–even when they’re backed by big stable corporations. Why did so many day traders and CNBC viewers mistakenly assume this law would be wiped away just by putting a “.” into a company’s name?
But they did. So did venture capital outfits, ploughing billions into business plans that would look dubious to any sane observer.
The result: A national economy, particularly the urban economies of a dozen specific metro areas including ours, increasingly organized around a “new prosperity” where many of the most acclaimed corporate “success stories” have lost millions and expect to lose millions more for the indefinite future–if they have one.
MONDAY: Imagining a post-Net-stock-crash world.
IN OTHER NEWS: The guy who’s spent the past half-decade or more defining himself as the anti-BS, anti-hype crusader joins Monday Night Football. Huh?
SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.
IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly. 2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold. 3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.
2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.
3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.
MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.
Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.
Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:
“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”
RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)
In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.
FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.
It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.
Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.
It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.
Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.
Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.
The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.
In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.
They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.
They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.
Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.
TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s tonight at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT TOOK THE P-I to point out one of those startling bookends-O-history:
“Mount St. Helens blew at exactly 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday. Nearly 20 years later, the Kingdome was imploded at 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday.
“Coincidence?”
Actually, even if the eerie time synchronicity hadn’t happened, I’d have thought of St. Helens and the Dome as the defining boom-booms of the late-modern PacNW.
St. Helens killed 57 people, thousands of trees, and dozens of old codger Harry Truman’s cats, and disrupted thousands of folks’ routines. The Kingdome only killed two ceiling-tile workers, who had a construction-crane accident a couple years before it was deemed unworthy of continued existence.
The pre-blast St. Helens was considered by most a jewel of a peak. The pre-blast Kingtome was considered by many an eyesore.
But both blasts were popular spectacles that generated marathon TV coverage, souvenir sales, and “where were you when…?” popular memories.
In 1980, a spectacular natural “disaster” was about what it took to get the Evergreen State on the network news. (The eruption didn’t make the top of the NY Times front page for two days; the paper being otherwise occupied covering Miami race riots.)
In 2000, hardly a week goes by without big headlines about Microsoft, Starbucks, police brutality, or gypsy moths.
But the near-universal thrill at watching the Dome go kablooey proves we haven’t lost our ability to find wonder and thrills in the sights and sounds of mass-scale destruction.
P.S.: I can never get tired of reruns of the TV footage of St. Helens.
For one thing, despite having been five years into the era of minicams and even home VCRs, and despite the weeks of warnings and buildup on the mountain, the only real footage of the blast itself came from a still photographer who simply hand-forwarded his film as fast as he could.
For another thing, it was one of the last domestic TV news events at least partly covered with 16mm film cameras, rather than live video feeds. To folks my age and up to 10 years older, the scratchy, dark, washed-outy look of 16mm reversal film will always signify scruffy, raw news footage (or the exterior scenes of British miniseries that were otherwise shot in brightly-lit studios on video).
I find myself having to tell Those Kids Today that there was a time when prime-time news promos really did say “Film at 11,” and when local newscasts weren’t burdened by endless, uninformative, live “standup” chats with reporters on the scene of something that had ended hours before.
TOMORROW: Those annoying “My __” websites.
A YEAR AGO, I wrote in this space about NBC’s callous treatment and eventual dumping of what had been its longest-running soap opera, Another World.
At the time, I’d neglected to notice the network had, and has, another daytime drama incorporating many of the classic soap elements (heroes, villains, cliffhangers, short- and long-term plotlines, convoluted relationships, petty power battles) in a modern format, highlighting modern-day priorities and personal obsessions.
I speak, of course, of NBC’s business-oriented cable channel, CNBC.
I’ve taken lately to having it on while I’m writing during the mornings.
The past two or three weeks have provided for especially gripping viewing, as you might imagine.
Last Friday, particularly it looked as if the great tech-stock bubble “pop,” which I and many other market observers have impatiently awaited lo these past six months, had finally arrived.
In soap terms, it could be seen as an act of vengeful retribution by the established investors against those upstart bitch-goddess dot-coms and their coming-on-too-strong day-trader speculators. Comeuppance for all the concentration-of-wealth guys, those oh-so-easy-to-stereotype overgrown boys with their big-ass SUVs and their ever-beepin’ cell phones. (Not to mention the billions of on-paper wealth lost by a certain Mr. Gates overnight.)
Of course, in the soaps as well as in real life, the relatively innocent may also suffer when the villains are brought down. A soap baddie might blurt out some devastating family secret in court, or might even commit suicide and set it up so a good guy will be framed with a marder charge.
In the case of the tech stocks, or the stock markets in general, millions of folks who’ve never even bought anything at Restoration Hardware have put their savings and their retirement funds into what market pundits had called the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com-led bull market. With adjusted-for-inflation wages stagnant over the past decade or two for most non-wealthy folks, mutual funds and other stock-based investments have provided one way for middle-class and some upper-middle-class households to keep up with the rising costs of real estate, college tuition, etc. (My own family is such a beneficiary of such investments.)
And soap villains usually don’t conveniently go away when they’re found out. Not only do many of them avoid long jail terms, they can repeatedly cheat death itself.
And sure enough, the tech stocks you-love-to-hate came roaring back this Monday and Tuesday.
Similarly, we’ll all be living for some time to come with the tech-stock hustlers and the enterprises they’ve built on the shaky foundation of stock speculation. The recent stock drops might have been relative or virtual, but the money these companies are burning through is real enough that a widespread Net-company depression could jeopardize thousands of careers.
(One contributing factor in last week’s slump was an analyst’s report claiming most of those new online retail ventures will fail within the next two years. But most new retail ventures of any type fail in their first five years, as anyone’s who’s been involved in a fledgling restaurant or flower store can tell you.)
One last comparison: On the soaps, storylines drag on more often than they crash and disappear. Same with stock-market storylines. And since the stock markets pay no attention to “sweeps weeks,” anthing could happen on any particular day.
The next few weeks should be gripping viewing indeed.
MONDAY: Some short stuff.
