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I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue’s survey of various critics’ musical “guilty pleasures” of the past decade.
Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I’ve liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.
Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.
(Some of these following discs I’ve mentioned in prior articles on this site.)
American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can’t see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.
Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to ‘Ren & Stimpy’ and Russ Meyer movies.
One day, when the true obscurities of “Seattle Scene”-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!
More relics from the early “We’re Notgrunge, Dammit!” era of local indie bands (late ’93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.
Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.
Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed “atittude”), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he’s thus far never gotten to live.
Lounge arrangements of punk classics–a surefire formula for good times! I’ve done it myself. Try it in your own home.
Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?
The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents–proof that so-called “world music” need not be laid back or mellow.
India movie music–proof that so-called “world music” need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there’s a “guilty” part to this pleasure, it’s in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.
TOMORROW: An “off-off-year” election brings leftish “progressives” and rightish “populists” against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.
ELSEWHERE:
SHOULD’VE DONE IT YEARS AGO, I know, but the prospect of expiring dental insurance finally got me to getting my last three wisdom teeth out, in one big operation.
Because the lower two were impacted (not only stuck beneath the gums but down there sideways), it was a big-deal surgery, with full anesthetic and prescription painkillers (just ultra-strength Motrin, not anything narcotic–don’t even ask me to sell you any leftover pills), and a long at-home rehab.
Fortunately, I live in the age of cyber-capitalism and media saturation, so being groggy and alone at home all day wasn’t that much of a bother. Not with the modern conveniences available today.
Modern convenience #1: Kozmo.com. Begun in NYC last year and now operating in four cities, Kozmo (yes, the name’s a variant on Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer) delivers video rentals, snack foods, and a small selection of books and CDs. And it’s actually them doing the delivering, not some overnight service. That means in the approximate time-frame of a pizza delivery, you can start viewing any of 16,000 flicks. (Not enough of my favorite obscurities and cult-classics, but a serviceable-enough list.)
Modern convenience #2: CBC Television. My cable company finally brought the Canadian channel back, so once again view its unique public-broadcasting-with-commercials mix. In many ways it’s what PBS could’ve been if it ever had the nerve–investigative news-magazine shows, family dramas, un-cloying family dramas, late-night nudie “art” movies, sharp political satire, newscasts that actually cover foreign non-earthquake stories, great sports (currently: lotsa hockey; coming in January: curling!), and the venerable British soap Coronation Street!
Modern convenience #3: Home Grocer. They only deliver the day following your online order, but you don’t have to leave the house to be supplied with your post-oral-surgery dietary needs (diet shakes, yogurt, Gatorade, applesauce, cocoa, et al.).
Modern convenience #4: Modern oral-surgery technique. I went in and was promptly strapped to the operating chair, given the anesthetic gas and then a knockout shot. An hour later I was gently aroused and led, groggy, onto a day bed in a darkened “recovery room.” A half-hour after that, a friend led me downstairs to a waiting taxi. Except for three new mouth holes and an achy jaw, I was sufficiently clear-headed to resume working for at least a few hours the following day.
Old-fashioned inconvenience #1: Dry sockets. A surgical complication I was led to believe only smokers had to worry about. Instead, pieces of my first post-surgical meal (soft French fries with the skin on) got stuck deep in the gum folds of both lower extraction sites, beyond the reach of any salt-water rinse or Listerine, preventing the blood clot needed for wound-healing.
The result: Five days of excruciating pain, starting two days after the operation. Pain ultimately unrelievable by the pills prescribed to me or by any other legal substances (and I didn’t use any illegal ones). Pain that prevented sleep and caused near-hallucinatory states. All that, plus two bouts of nausea, before I could get back to the surgeon for a medicinal-gauze implant.
But walking to the Medical-Dental Building for the second appointment, I had to pass the Bon Marche’s breast-cancer-awareness window displays, and remembered my mother’s recent bout with the disease (she’s doing very well now, thank you).
It put my own non-life-threatening suffering into perspective.
TOMORROW: Could The Blair Witch Project be considered a Dogme 95 movie?
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: You’ve still one week to see the Pacific Science Center’s traveling exhibit honoring the career of Japanese cartoon pioneer Osamu Tezuka.
The exhibit (organized by the official Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Japan) is a small one, but it’s packed with power, pathos, and inspiration–just like Tezuka’s most enduring character, the flying child-robot hero Mighty Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy.
The exhibit consists of four video screens, a couple dozen panel displays, and a giant Astro Boy balloon figure “flying” on the ceiling. The panels chronicle Tezuka’s best known print and TV cartoon series through original cels and comic-book art. The video monitors play prime examples, not only of Tezuka’s own works but of the Japanese animation industry before and after his influence took hold.
A trained M.D. and a devout post-WWII pacifist, Tezuka (1928-89) brought a sense of morality and beauty to his work. His stories were “educational” without being preachy, because he used childlike characters such as Astro and Kimba the White Lion (the all-but-official inspiration for The Lion King to teach the kids about the complexities of life and of caring for one’s fellow creatures.
If Tezuka was a prime example of postwar Japanese antimilitarism, he was also a prime example of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had several serials running in different children’s magazines simultaneously, keeping the reprint and character-licensing rights.
The exhibit claims he produced 150,000 comic-book pages over his 41-year career. That averages out to almost 75 pages a week, a figure almost impossible without a cadre of assistants.
But he didn’t just produce quantity. He added many “cinematic” visual techniques and complex storylines (some of which stretched out over years) to what had been a formulaic manga scene.
Some critics might argue that manga’s still a formulaic scene; but Tezuka added many more ingredients to the formula. His influence brought a popularity (and an adult audience) to comics in Japan that the medium still has to fight for here.
These advances in technique worked to prepare Tezuka’s team for moving beyond elaborate-but-still drawings into primitive animation. Starting in 1961 (Astro Boy was Japan’s first TV cartoon series), he adapted many of his works for the small screen, produced by his own studio using, and expanding upon, Hanna-Barbera’s newly-established time-and-money-saving techniques (collectively known as “limited animation”).
Having already worked for over a decade at making print comics seem “cinematic,” Tezuka and his team were able to create stirring adventure stories and likeable characters on paltry early-TV budgets.
And as the boss of his own studio, animating characters already well-known in print form, Tezuka held a degree of both creative and business control U.S. TV animation has almost never seen, then or now. He used that authority to “smarten up” his shows with complex storylines, involving characters audiences could identify with.
Today, Tezuka is revered in his homeland and among the global manga/anime cult as “the God of Anime.” A review of the exhibit bore an unfortunately misleading headline, which may have sent kids in expecting to see Pokemon characters. Tezuka didn’t create Pokemon; he merely established the story structure, drawing style, and aesthetic tone which Pokemon, and dozens of other Japanese print, TV, and theatrical cartoon products have followed, to varying degrees of success.
If there’s a note-O-irony in this story, it’s that Tezuka, who regularly placed environmental messages into his stories, almost singlehandedly created an industry that destroys old-growth forests throught Asia (and imports whole logs from the U.S. Northwest) to make millions of throwaway, phone-book-sized manga magazines every week.
TOMORROW: Top candy picks for this Halloween.
JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.
All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.
The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.
It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.
P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.
That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.
But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.
They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.
Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.
(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)
Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.
I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.
Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.
TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.
AS IT APPARENTLY MUST to all local non-news TV shows in the U.S. these days, death came this summer to Almost Live, for 15 years an only-in-Seattle institution. (OK it was syndicated in two nonconsecutive years, and the national kiddie show Bill Nye the Science Guy was essentially an AL spinoff, but you get the idea.) The last AL reruns may have left the familiar Saturday time slot by the time you read this, with only occasional specials to be commissioned by KING-TV (the first is this Saturday). The cast members made an appearance earlier this month on their longtime spoof-target, KOMO’s Northwest Afternoon, during which they congratulated NWA for not having been cancelled yet.)
Theoretically, the cast (or however many members of it would be willing) could go to work for another station. But since none of those other stations seem any more interested in local entertainment fare than KING was (although Fox affilliate KCPQ’s reportedly pondering a morning show), that seems unlikely.
Call me overly optimistic, but I used to believe the increasing bevy of broadcast and cable channels would mean more opportunities for different kinds of shows–even shows that seamlessly mixed droll, low-key humor, broad sketch comedy, and cheap-shot jokes about local politicians.
Sure, a week’s episode might contain its share of groaners and easy gags. (The series almost never used writers beyond the eight cast members, two of whom also doubled as producer and director.)
But even in its weaker moments, AL had a pulse and a look all its own. And it exemplified a particularly Nor’Wester flavor of off-center humor. You could find traces of this in the writings of Lynda Barry (an old pal of AL host John Keister); the biting TV and print works of Matt Groening (an old pal of Barry); the cartoons of Jim Woodring, Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, et al.; the sardonic song lyrics of Scott McCaughey and Chris Ballew; and such former area-TV staples as Stan Boreson, J.P. Patches, and Spud Goodman.
Could anything like it appear again? Well, maybe.
Late last month, I got into a well-publicized preview screening for Doomed Planet, a shot-on-video movie directed by Alex Mayer and written by George Clark (who previously had created two issues of a Stranger parody tabloid, only to find most of their readers thought the Stranger staff had parodied itself).
Within a loose plotline involving two warring religious cults (a cult of sex-happy hippies vs. a cult of Armageddon-predicting Goths), the videomakers weaved in quite a bit of AL-esque bits, from genre-movie minispoofs to local popcult references (a fictionalized version of Mary Kay LeTourneau makes a brief appearance) to an atmosphere of knowing, late-century-cynical neo-burlesque.
While Doomed Planet, at least in the cut shown at the screening, is a much more rough-hewn work than Almost Live ever was (some of Mayer’s large, unpaid cast didn’t really know about comic timing, and much of the sound was muddied), it’s nice to know the no-budget, no-hype, no-pretensions NW comic spirit lives on.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another sign of hope for regionalism within the global-media landscape is Turner South, a new entertainment-and-sports cable channel to be offered only to cable systems in the southeastern states. I’d love an attempt at something like that up here; even though a NW entertainment channel would have fewer pre-existing movies and rerun series to prop up its schedule than a Southern channel would.
TOMORROW: That new alternative-art patron, Procter & Gamble.
CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.
(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)
Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.
The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.
Selling movie tickets.
By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.
A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.
Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.
From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.
From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.
From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.
The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.
But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?
You get The Iron Giant.
A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.
But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.
The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.
What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.
The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.
But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.
TOMORROW: A new book treats strange-phenomena with Brit-reserve skepticism.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.
Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard.
While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.
Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today’s fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:
As late as the early ’70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy ’em all.
Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.
Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry’s forgotten.
IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin’ ideological “battles of the sexes”? Let’s get on with the real thing!
TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don’t.
IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.
WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.
I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”
The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.
This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.
Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”
Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”
Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”
Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.
If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.
Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”
But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?
As IF!
MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.
CABLE COMPANIES FINALLY appear to be “getting it.”
They’re sluggishly rolling out the fiber-optic line upgrades they’d been promising for most of the decade.
(Here in Seattle, the now-AT&T-owned TCI is finally getting around to some of the neighborhoods it promised upgraded service to by one to five years ago.)
So, now that you can finally get Comedy Central and maybe even TV Land on your cable system, what use is there for those cable-killers, the home satellite dishes?
Well, there are several reasons to consider the little dish instead of the long wire, even though the dish costs you up-front plus monthly programming fees at least comparable to those charged by cable. Among them:
You live where there’s still no upgraded cable. South Park might be getting passe, but there’s still Strangers With Candy to make a Comedy Central-less cable hookup a little less valuable each day. Not to mention the Food Network, the Game Show Network, BBC America, MuchMusic, etc. etc.
You live where there’s no cable. The cable companies may have finally gotten around to certain “inner city” neighborhoods they’d previously shunned, but there are still some industrial, art-loft, rural, and isolated-town environments without the black coaxial running in.
You want lotsa extra-price movies and/or sports. If you’re a hockey fanatic or if you’re a fan of teams shown principally on some other region’s Fox Sports variation or if you really, really want five different HBOs, the satellite’s the only way to go.
You want porn. Some satellite dish companies offer channels displaying uncensored human-mating spectacles, or at least channels offering more lightly censored human-mating acts than the Spice channel or Skinemax offer.
You want certain channels even upgraded cable in your town doesn’t offer. Different dish services offer various ethnic and foreign-language channels for folks from China, Brazil, India, etc. And there are some “mainstream” but third-string cable channels that now have only spotty pickups on local cable systems: BET On Jazz, Style, Discovery People, MTV’S M2, ESPN Classic, CNNfn, the Golf Network, Outdoor Life, MSNBC, Bloomberg Business News.
You want ZDTV. From the Softbank/Ziff-Davis computer-magazine empire, 24 hours (actually, more like six hours repeated four times) of talk shows and news-magazine shows about hi-tech, PC buying, and life on the ol’ Internet. The Internet Tonight show’s particularly valuable as a televisual “Weblog.”
Unfortunately, its site only offers streaming live video during special events (speeches by tech-biz leaders, mostly); the short clips on its site only make you want to get a dish so you can see the whole thing.
Which, of course, is probably the management’s goal.
Cable, however, still will have certain things satellite services don’t. Local channels and major-network affiliates. Regional news channels such as NorthWest Cable News. And, of course, public access.
IN OTHER NEWS: Was a little amused by the headline, “Energetic Beck hasn’t lost a beat with time.” I thought to myself, “Sure he hasn’t had anything close to a hit since ’96, but Beck’s not that old.” Then, alas, the story turned out to be about Jeff Beck….
TOMORROW: What kids don’t know that grownups assume is ubiquitous; and vice versa.
YOU KNOW THE SOUTH PARK EPISODE in which a “prehistoric ice man” goes bonkers trying to readjust to how massively his world has changed since he was frozen–in 1997?
Books about the high-tech culture can seem like that. They can seem outdated by the time they come out, and positively nostalgic if they resurface later as paperbacks.
Case in point #1: The previously-mentionedJoystick Nation by J.C. Hertz; a history of video games up to 1997 that failed to predict Nintendo’s comeback just as certain computer-biz analysts had failed to predict Apple’s comeback.
Case in point #2: Douglas Rushkoff’s Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Hertz’s book tried to depict video-gaming as a prosocial, synapse-building, mind-stimulating thing, something good for your children (even with all the fantasy violence, often in that “first-person shooter” mode that invites the user to get off on the fun of slaughtering).
Rushkoff’s book (written in ’95 and now in a slightly-revised paperback) takes a more generalized, and more hyper, POV. He rapidly jaunts around from video and role-playing gaming to snowboarding to raving to neopaganism to tattoos to chat-rooming (the World Wide Web’s only briefly mentioned) to “mature readers” comic books to MTV to Goths to Burning Man. His purpose–to state and re-state how today’s “screenagers” are increasingly equipped to lead society beyond its flaccid, industrial-age ideologies and into a millennial, tribal utopia.
Lord, Rushkoff tries all he can to assure us that Those Kids Today aren’t brain-dead slackers but instead the harbingers of a grand new future (he even uses rave-dance promoters’ self-congratulatory cliches about hedonistic E-addicts somehow being “the next stage of human evolution”).
But it all comes out like last year’s drum-and-bass; or, worse, like something out of the long-dormant mag Mondo 2000.
Chapters have titles like “The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos.” Every other page or so introduces another kid-culture or young-adult-culture phenomenon depicted to illustrate how us fogeys are just too darned stuck in passe pre-Aquarian mindsets about money, politics, religion, sports, dancing, music, etc. etc.; compared to the Wired Generation’s effortless surfing thru the waves of chaos theory and multiculturalism.
Some random examples of the book’s numbing hyperbole:
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.” “We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.” “Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.”
“We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.”
“Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
Besides the unnerving tone, inaccuracies abound.
Rushkoff repeatedly refers to Marvel Comics’ multilinear storylines (which he sees as one of the kids’ influences in growing up to appreciate a complex, complicated world) as the creative invention of Jack Kirby. (While Kirby established Marvel’s look, designed most of its early star characters, and played an underappreciated role in the plotting of individual issues, it was editor/head writer Stan Lee who devised the “Marvel Universe” concept of heroes and villains and plotlines endlessly crossing over from title to title.)
Rushkoff also uses “the long-running TV talk show The Other Side” as evidence for the popularity of New Age and supernatural topics (the show only lasted one year).
But still, at least Rushkoff, in his annoyingly hyperbolic way, at least has unapologetically nice things to say about a younger generation forever damned by aging hippie-elitists, patronized by cynical advertisers, and stereotyped by clueless mainstream media.
One of Rushkoff’s positive points is that those Gen-Y gals n’ guys seem increasingly unpersuaded by the manipulative language of ads and marketing.
If true, this would mean they’d also be skeptical of Rushkoff’s own marketing blather on their supposed behalf.
IN OTHER NEWS: If America’s power grids and financial systems could survive Hurricane Floyd with disruptions like this, the whole Y2K scare won’t be all that scary.
TOMORROW: Home satellite dishes–still worth it?
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
THE LAST REEL: The final issuance of technical specs for digital, high-definition video has opened the speculative floodgates: Whither film?
This summer, a few scattered movie theaters have staged test runs of digital-video movie projection. Audiences apparently liked what they saw; so trials and tests will continue.
Distributors look forward to being able to “ship” their shows to theaters via satellite, instead of trucking film prints around. Theater chains look forward to no longer worrying about film breakage and scratchage, and really look forward to the chance to fire even more projectionists.
In a recent issue of the New York Press, Godfrey Cheshire looked ahead toward the final replacement of “film” as we know it by digital-video projection, and (like the self-described “videophobe” he is) foresw only bad things ahead.
I beg to differ.
For one thing, digital-video features will undoubtedly still include many of your favorite movie cliches. “A female lead with feminist leanings will always despise a macho hero–until the first time he rescues her from certain death. She will then become totally conventional and dependent…. Time will stand still when when the hero is in the presence of a company logo….”
For another, regular-definition digital video production’s already on the verge of revolutionizing independent moviemaking. The makers of Doomed Planet (which they describe as “America’s favorite low-budget Armageddon comedy!”) say they were able to complete the feature for $10,000 with digital video, but it “would have easily cost a half million dollars had we shot it on 16 or super-16mm film.”
(Our local readers can see the results at the Doomed Planet premiere party, next Friday (9/24) at Sit & Spin, 2219 4th Ave. in Seattle.)
Once hi-def camcorders become widely available on the indie level, ground-level directors would be able to realize their visions and make them look just as slick as the big-boys’ movies (if they wanted to).
Of course, as anybody who’s seen some of the abundant Amerindie-film dross of the ’90s knows, just because these tools become available to more would-be auteurs it doesn’t mean you’ll get viewable results.
Meanwhile, the current Wired (which won’t be available online until after it leaves the newsstands, approx. Oct. 17) has a cover-story package all about digital moviemaking, including two (count ’em!) Nor’wester stories: one about Seattle’s “microcinema” producers and disseminators (including Blackchair Productions, 911 Media Arts, Atom Films, and Honkworm Entertainment), and one about Myst/Riven video-game legend Robyn Miller putting his share of the games’ earned millions into a movie-production venture right in the Spokane suburbs (about as off-Hollywood as you can get without running into the Hollywood second-homers who’ve infiltrated so many other inland-west towns).
IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls ban studs. (Insert your own teen-boywatching joke here.)
MONDAY: Taking the personality out of print journalism.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to America’s only locally-produced sketch comedy show on commercial TV, Almost Live, now canned after 15 years. It means host John Keister, my old UW Daily staffmate, will now have to get more commercial gigs selling cell phones. It also dashes my hopes of ever getting paid and/or acknowledged for the occasional gag from this column they’ve stolen over the years. And, of course, it means the fine citizens of Kent, the suburb AL has always loved to chastize, can sleep a little easier.
Don’t put the blame for the show’s axing on “a changing Seattle,” but on a changing TV landscape. Every year, fewer viewers are patronizing the old-line network-affiliate stations (which have, by and large, reduced their definition of “local” programming to sports and mayhem-based news). This meant AL’s ratings declined to where it was only a break-even operation (not only did it have a full-time staff of ten writer-actors, it was the last show on KING to utilize a full studio crew, with humans operating the cameras and everything).
BACK-TO-SCHOOL DAZE: In the September Harper’s, the highly respected author Francine Prose (Guided Tours of Hell, Hunters and Gatherers) complains about the institionally-endorsed mediocrities assigned for reading by innocent high-school students.
Prose’s long rant piece, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” (not available online), asserts whole generations of potential lit-lovers have been permanently turned off from the joys of reading by the less-than-enticing stories they’re made to read in school, and by misguided approaches taken to teaching the kids about even the good writing that makes the English Lit cut.
Like some of her more politically-conservative fellow critics, Prose puts some of the blame on administrators and politicians obsessed with using English Lit to teach “diversity” and other life lessons. Prose figures that because these bureaucrats want to make sure the kids learn nothing more or less than the precisely intended lesson plan, they force-feed the kids really mediocre PC-lit.
She’s got a particular beef against Clinton’s fave poet Maya Angelou, the equally-sanctimonious Alice Walker, Harper Lee’s one-dimensional racism memoir To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Ordinary People, Studs Lonigan, and teachers who reduce all discussion of Huckleberry Finn to a mere rant about its author’s alleged received racism.
Prose says there are plenty of better stories out there about rape, racism, girls’ self-discovery, boys’ temptations to cruelty, etc. etc. But the schools keep on assigning the mediocrities.
She suggests many possible motivations and/or intended or unintended results of force-feeding Our Kids such bureaucratically-acceptable bad writing (it’ll turn the kids into TV-viewing, advertiser-friendly, thinking-challenged drones).
She skirts around a much more plausible consequence–that a diet of low-quality literature might raise a generation of potential school-administration bureaucrats, more interested in what which is collectively-acceptable than that which is really, really good.
What I would do: Divide high-school lit into two sequences. One would continue the life-lessons-thru-storytelling schtick (a technique well-used throughout the history of most civilizations), only using better-written stories. The other track would be strictly about intro’ing kids to some Great Kickass Writing.
This writing could still be from all sorts of races, genders, and nationalities; it’d even do a better “diversity” job ‘cuz it’d showcase some of the best stuff from all over, instead of causing kids to associate minority and/or female authors with dull verbiage or one-dimensional ideologies.
MONDAY:Some examples of Great Kickass Writing.
IN OTHER NEWS: Scientists now say they can genetically-modify mice to make them more intelligent. Only one response is possible: “Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?…”
ELSEWHERE: This woman wants “to ban the word ‘cool’ from the Web’s lexicon…”
According to this list, what you’re looking at right now is not a “webzine.” So be it.
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.
AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.
(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)
Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:
The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.
TOMORROW: We play with our food again.
ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…
