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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.
ELSEWHERE:
“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.
CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW what it’s like to be constantly mistaken for someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything.
Phone calls in the wee hours from obsessed acquaintances demanding I relieve their self-made mental torture by telling them the answers to obscure conundrums I’ve never considered.
Couples spotting me from a block away and chasing me down, yelling at me to tell them the directions to someplace I’ve never heard of or the name of the best sushi restaurant in the neighborhood.
Guys in bars enlisting me to settle burly drunken men’s disputes over the most arcane sports or movie trivia; as if I (1) knew the answer, and (2) wanted to make either burly drunken guy mad at me.
For the record, let it stand that I do not know everything.
If I did, I sure wouldn’t be stuck with some dorky little website now, would I? I’d be independently wealthy from prescient stock trades and/or sports bets, which I’m most assuredly not.
(Okay, I did have one dream three years ago that focused on the office tower of a major company that, upon wakening, turned out to have suddenly announced a big merger; but that’s never happenned before or since.)
So, here’s but a very partial list of the many, many, many things I don’t know:
(On the other hand, I have known most of the answers on that TV show, even the toughies. I keep calling the hotline but I never get the random call-back. Oh well, maybe I can still learn day-trading….)
TOMORROW: Retro-progressivism.
IN OTHER NEWS:
ONCE UPON A TIME in the ’80s, when cable TV was just starting to grow and most of its customers still lived in rural areas, the Grand Ole Opry people started The Nashville Network.
It drew on the existing resources of the Opry radio show, the Opryland theme park, and the Opryland TV-studio facility (home of Hee Haw). Because few country acts had made music videos, the channel emphasized variety shows and other live-performance formats.
And it was good.
TNN’s amassed an invaluable trove of performance and interview footage with every major country star active since 1983; its archives contain rare film and video of most every country star who’d died before the channel’s debut.
TNN’s been instrumental in “breaking” most of those “Young Country” stars, and solidified a new, mainstreamed audience for the genre as a whole.
Its influence was proven in the mid-’90s, when the Billboard record charts switched from a survey format to listing actual record sales. The young-country acts were suddenly revealed to be bigger sellers than most of the corporate-rock superstars.
TNN’s Sunday-afternoon NASCAR coverage, meanwhile, had helped make the stock-car circuit into America’s most prominent racing sport.
But in 1997, the Opry’s original joint-venture partner in TNN, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, assumed control of the channel, just as it was merging with CBS (which in turn is being absorbed by Viacom).
The new management saw TNN not for its loyal audiences or its programming heritage, but for the millions of cable homes it reached (almost every cable system in the country carries it).
Hours of original live-music shows were axed from the schedule, replaced by advertiser-friendly “lifestyle” shows and cheap reruns. At first, the rerun shows were chosen for their more-or-less “country” settings (The Waltons, The Dukes of Hazard, Dallas). But now the schedule includes Cagney & Lacy, that two-woman cop show set in New York City. (You should all now yell out like in the Pace picante sauce ad, “New York CITY?!?”)
When new original shows did appear, they were either dorky action shows (of the type clogging the USA Network’s schedule) or trash-sports concepts aimed at teenage boys: Extreme Championship Wrestling, RollerJam, Arena Football, and most recently Rockin’ Bowl.
Last month, TNN dropped its last weekday music programming, a daytime hour of videos, so it could add reruns of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. (Ahh, nothing like faked “funny outtakes” with the stars of since-forgotten 1985 sitcoms.)
The only “Nashville” left in TNN is a three-hour Saturday night block, anchored by a half-hour simulcast of the Opry radio show, and a Biography-like documentary series on Monday nights. Viewers who write or email to complain are referred to to another CBS-owned channel, the video-clip based Country Music Television (carried on far fewer cable systems).
TNN will probably survive without country music. Can country music survive without TNN?
Already, CBS’s Infinity Radio Group, which owned both of Seattle’s country stations, has switched one of them to an ’80s-nostalgia format. We may have seen the peak of commercial “Young Country;” though the more critically beloved (and sometimes even younger) “alternative country” genre appears to still be going strong on its semi-underground level.
TOMORROW: No, I don’t know everything.
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
HAD A LOVELY CHAT a few weeks ago with some other local web-writers. Among the afternoon’s hypertextual topics: Our first modems.
Ahh, the good old days. Three-hundred-baud telephone modems that attached directly to telephone headsets via “acoustic couplers.” Text-only bulletin board systems that were run with such now-forgotten software as Minibin and Polaris, on TRS-80s, Apple IIs and kit-built CP/M computers. Real floppy discs, up to eight inches in diameter, holding as much as 400k.
The online world was a much smaller, though not always civil, place. (“Flame wars” and other breaches of sociability were rampant.)
And, like the worlds of science-fiction fandom and computer hobbyists (the real “hackers”) from which it sprung, it was a place teeming with fat guys.
Today’s more corporate online world doesn’t have many fat guys in charge. It has tall guys in charge instead. Lots of tall guys.
You can see them at any gathering of the dot-com hustlers and the Microsoft elite. They’re the movers and the shakers. The fast-talking, hard-handshaking, success-minded gents. The IPO success stories or wannabes. Many of them are tall enough to be Presidential candidates or even late-night talk show hosts.
They know their way around a business plan, or at least can fake it well. They can network and schmooze with the venture-capital gang like all get out.
But the fat guys were a helluva lot more fun to hang out with.
The fat guys knew how to drink and eat and make lovable fools of themselves. The tall guys are usually too self-conscious for that; too obsessed with making the right impression toward someone (often another tall guy) who has, or might one day have, money.
In the March Harper’s, Greg Critser has a cover essay (not available online) concerning “The Heavy Truths About American Obesity.”
“In upscale corporate America,” Critser writes, “being fat is taboo, a surefire career killer. If you can’t control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.”
Critser’s piece depicts the oft-reported “obesity epidemic” as a potential conspiracy by the corporate elite, so big food companies can get rich off of lower-caste people’s addictions–and also so that the elites can easily stereotype and demonize those supposedly lazy couch potatoes who’ll never amount to anything.
He also has nasty things to say against the fat-pride movement and anyone who doesn’t hate obesity as much as he does. (Last year, Critser wrote for the business magazine Worth about his own experience with a new prescription diet drug. Perhaps he thinks if he could go through the ordeal, everyone should be able to and want to.)
Anyhoo, Critser may indeed have a point about why the fat guys who did so much to invent online communication aren’t reaping more of the material rewards from the medium they pioneered. They were great programmers and tinkerers, totally devoted to their projects, and enthusiastic builders of some of the first electronic communities.
They just didn’t have the look of the Lean-‘n’-Mean. (Or the schmoozing or bossing-around skills, or the aura of invincibility.)
But with the old-media monopolists and the stock-bubble hustlers grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of Net “mindshare,” it’s way past time we recaptured more of the BBS era’s homespun, DIY spirit.
Bring back the fat guys.
MONDAY: Benetton, death row inmates, and the Monoculture.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remembering one of the old guard, master computer-journalist Don Crabb.
HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.
Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.
This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.
KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.
While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.
TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.
