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I’VE JUST FINISHED printing out the images for our new photo show, Words: Who Needs ‘Em?.
And I must say I’m damned proud of these pictures.
The Belltown Underground Art Gallery (2211 1st Ave., where the show premieres this Saturday night) is a long, narrow space with 72 linear feet of exhibition wall space. It’s an astounding piece of luck that a first-time exhibitor such as myself gets so much space for a solo show.
With this much room, and with the encouragement of gallery operator Elaine Bonow, I’m putting out no fewer than 120 luscious color photos, divided into four series:
There will also be the usual gallery-opening refreshments (fresh from Costco), exotic background music spun by yrs. truly, prints and books available for sale, and some lovely door prizes.
Thanks are due in advance of the opening to Lori Lynn Mason, who encouraged me harder than anyone to go with this project; to Bonow, who’s not only donating the space but has corralled some great press previews; to Jennifer Morales, who’s helping today with the setup and installation; and to my mom Jan Humphrey, who donated three vintage images and advanced me the dough to get my digital cameras.
The opening, once again, is this Saturday (June 2), 7-9 p.m., at 2211 First Ave., just north of the Frontier Room in formerly-hip Belltown.
Be there. Aloha.
NEXT:We switch to that popular weblog format (this time for sure!).
ELSEWHERE:
THERE’S A MOVIE OUT THESE DAYS called Shrek. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
It’s a computer-animated feature loosely based on (and expanded greatly from) a William Steig illustrated short story. The title character is a storyland ogre, hideous on the outside but with a heart of gold buried far beneath his gruff attitude.
One night, his peaceful valley’s invaded by all the characters from every famous fairy tale (rendered as funny, funky, colorful critters and humanoids). They tell Shrek they’ve been exiled there by the evil Lord Farquard, who’s determined to turn his realm of Duloc into “the perfect place” by ridding it of all but his own clean-cut sycophants.
Our perturbed ogre sets out for Duloc to confront Farquard. He finds a perfectly square walled city, with a perfectly cubical castle at its center. Inside the outer wall, he sees an unpopulated village of perfect tudor houses, and a troupe of mechanical dolls who sing a long list of rules of conduct.
Shrek finally finds the town’s remaining population all gathered at a jousting match just outside the castle. These humans are all tall and fair-skinned, and they respond as one to “Applause” signs held up by Farquard’s men. Apparently all honest emotion and imagination was lost from the citizenry when the fairy-tale characters were exiled.
Some critics have compared the repressive atmosphere of Duloc to the Disney theme parks; noting that Shrek was financed and released by the rival DreamWorks company. I, natch, have a different interpretation, whether or not the film’s makers intended it.
Duloc is a metaphor for today’s Seattle–and maybe also Manhattan and Frisco and other gentrifying towns. But especially Seattle, where everything has always supposed to have been perfect, but where now everything and everybody’s supposed to be even more perfect. And it’s a similar concept of perfection–cleanliness, order, and a uniformly pale, “beautiful,” compliant and conformist populace. A place bereft of conflicts, problems, or passions.
The fairy tale creatures of Shrek correspond to all the artsy types, working stiffs, freaks, and families who’ve been forced from their onetime urban homes by eviction, rent hikes, and other forms of demographic cleansing.
And Lord Farquard himself, the villain who loves to be hated, the mastermind and enforcer of all the dulling “perfection?”
I can think of a certain city attorney and mayoral candidate who’d fit the character description quite well indeed.
Anyhow, in the end Shrek defeats the evil lord, thanks to a combination of his own brash fighting spirit and his newly-found ability to gather allies around him. (In the final scene, the triumphant ogre is waved off into the sunset by the fairy-tale characters he originally despised.)
Perhaps we could learn a lesson from him. Learn to stop being such futilely individualistic loners, and start to form friendships and alliances against a common foe–which isn’t really one villain but a conflagration of forces combining to try and oust us from the “kingdom.”
NEXT:One last plug for our photo-show opening.
YESTERDAY, we began a discussion of how much different the world, and Seattle, was back in those halcyon days of September 1998 (when I last had a major role at a certain tabloid).
But I’d only begun to touch on the flip side of the tech boom–whose repercussions persist to this day.
The money was a-flowin’ from the venture capital funds and the day-traders, into the tech companies, and from there into hyper-energized markets in real estate and luxury goods.
But the non-techie workforce (and the less privileged classes within the tech firms) shared little in that largesse and suffered from the responding upheavals.
You know the drill: Evictions, obscene rent hikes, stagnant real wages, Microsoft’s “perma-temp” fiasco, funky old buildings replaced by pretentious/expensive new ones, monster SUVs clogging the streets, cell phones blaring in movie theaters, and “market price” foodie restaurants popping up everywhere.
The meta-result: A highly visible socioeconomic caste system, in a town that used to pretend not to have one.
Those supposedly halcyon days may have passed (or at least peaked), but the divisions remain, and so do the stereotypes popular then.
To many of today’s Demographically Correct, the Demographically Incorrect were lazy good-for-nothings who can’t get with the program.
To many of today’s Demographically Incorrect, the Demographically Correct were snotty bullies who’ve sacrified their souls on the altar of unrestrained greed.
Now, thousands of onetime dot-com hot-shots face layoffs, foreclosures, bankruptcy, and underwater stock options. Maybe they, and we, can start learning to see one another as just folks trying to get by.
NEXT:The movie Shrek and the Seattle mayoral election.
MY RECENT RETURN to a certain weekly tabloid started me to thinking about the last time I was a major part of that operation.
It was September 1998. A far different time, for me and for the town.
You could even say, as they always say in nostalgia pieces, that it was A Simpler Time.
We still had the Kingdome, that beautifully homey/homely feat of structural engineering, built back when engineers still ruled Seattle. Randy Johnson had just bugged out of the Mariners, but Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez were still around and knocking plenty of cheap Dome homers. (Not that it would’ve mattered that year, as the damn Yankees had no less than 107 regular-season wins.)
But the Kingdome was doomed, as the Bigger and Better was going up all over town. Either going up or already done were a new ball park (or two!), a mostly-new basketball arena, a new art museum, a new music museum, a new symphony hall, a new library, a new city hall, new big downtown chain stores, new bright-‘n’-clean techno dance clubs, and lotsa new offices, condos, mixed-use projects, and bix boxy view houses presenting blank white walls to the street.
Everywhere you turned, there was the look of Prosperity. It was an illusion, we now know, built on stock-option speculation and investment confidence schemes and stock-option madness. But it sure seemed real enough, to enough people.
And it wasn’t just the usual prosperity that always seemed to gravitate just to the old upper-crust. No, this was a prosperity anybody could presumably get into with just a small money and/or education stake. Just take out a second mortgage and schlep it into one of those high-tech mutual funds; or be a real player and start day-trading.
Or, even better, you could latch on to one of them New New New Economy companies, preferably pre-IPO. They were seemingly taking everybody–non-programmers, non-techies, even (gasp!) liberal arts graduates! Amazon.com, for one, was known for asking temp agencies to “send them their freaks,” according to ex-employees’ accounts.
Why, there were even jobs in the New Economy for alternative-creative types to do alternative-creative things (and you didn’t have to move to N.Y. or Calif. to do them)! Design Flash-y, Java-y web pages and banner ads. Produce MSN “shows.” Compose video-game soundtracks. Run deep-house Net-radio stations. Show yourself off at your own “amateur” adult site. Write “content” pages for Go.com or RealNetworks. Devise short videos or animations for Atom Films or Honkworm. Supply paintings and small sculptures to the Microsoft office art collection.
And if you weren’t working directly for a Tech-Boom outfit, you could tap into the spillover wealth by selling stuff to the tech-wealthy (houses, yachts, jewelry, cars, car alarms, Dania home furniture, Herman Miller office chairs, B&O stereos, helicopter rides, funky vintage doodads, rare books, pool-cleaning, house-painting, investment advice, etc. etc.).
Just don’t try to sell local, contemporary artworks to the techies. (One gallery owner at the time confided, “The richer Microsoft people get, the more they want to only buy from New York.”) And don’t hope to be an architect on one of those big new buildings. The whole premise of “becoming a world class city” was that we supposedly weren’t one already; therefore only out-of-staters deserved to create our new constructed image. (The exception: NBBJ’s designs for Safeco Field.)
NEXT: Some more of this, including the boom’s dark side and the hints of its transitory status.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since we last visited the friendly denizens of Caffe Generique, including the mom-and-daughter punk rockers Janis and Anais.
A lot’s gone on in their drama-enriched lives, needless to say, during that time. But what’s worried Janis lately is what hasn’t happenned. She’s been all a-moaning and forlorn over the fact that her otherwise-perfect punk daughter is still a virgin at, what, almost 17!
Janis is beside herself with fret, and won’t stop asking her coffeehouse friends what’s the matter with Anais anyway. Is she just foolishly saving herself for Mr. Wrong (the man who will overtake her heart and leave her with a wrecked car and thousands in debts, to her lifelong sighful appreciation) or what?
Janis is sure Anais must have spied on at least a few of the many Janis boyfriends who’ve paraded through the house in assorted stages of undress over the years. Hasn’t the girl learned from her mom’s example about the wisdom and joys that come from sampling from the ever-vast variety of penile experience?
“But that’s probably it,” exclaims Kirsten, the sullen barista at the coffeehouse. “Your kid thinks of sex and promiscuity as mom things, and therefore as that which must be rebelled against, or at least as something dull and passe. The kid has to define her own sexual personality. It’s your job to show her the way without letting her know you’re doing it. And the best way to do that is to overtly look like you’re trying to steer her in the total opposite way.”
So Janis does all she can to set Anais up with a Riot Grrrl boyfriend–a repressed, almost mute, short haired boy of slight build, a child of a badly divorced mom, a boy forever ridden by universal-male-guilt trips, a boy so afraid of his own masculinity that he can’t even look at a girl without worrying whether he’s looking misogynistically.
Janis’s initial plan is to show Anais, through the boy’s example, that obsessive virginity is a no-fun way to live, to make the girl crave a real boyfriend relationship with all the fun, all the heartache, and all the drama-queen turmoil that make female adolescence such a special stage of life.
But instead of outright rejecting the boy, Anais falls in hopeless teenage crush with him. What’s worse, they announce to Janis, after coming home from their school clique’s “anti-prom” party suspiciously early, that they’re agreeing to take the intimacy part of the relationship slowly, because the boy still has to learn to love his own body.
Still, Janis loves Anais and the meeting ends in a big hug–albeit one in which Janis tries to maneuver her daughter’s hand toward the boy’s butt.
NEXT: The British TV you’ve probably never seen.
THERE WILL BE AT LEAST ONE MORE issue of the MISCmedia print mag in its current format, probably out at or shortly after our big art opening (see left column of this page).
Beyond that, I’m wrestling with a conundrum.
It’s unprofitable, and doomed to stay that way, in its current incarnation as a 12- to 16-page newsletter of rather refined, esoteric taste. It needs to either shrink to something one person can easily put out (a la the original Misc. newsletter of 1989-94) or grow into something sturdy enough to carry its own weight (a real magazine with multiple contributors, quality printing, real ads, etc.).
Lemme know your thoughts in either direction.
MEANWHILE, some more hype for my upcoming Seattle coffee-table photo book (still tentatively titled City Light), in the form of the introductory passage to a pitch package I’m preparing for potential backers:
Photography books about Seattle invariably serve up the image of a bright, antiseptic “Emerald City.” An aggressively bland fantasy realm bereft of problems, or of passions. This book won’t. CITY LIGHT will offer a highly personal look at a real city, a place where real people work and play; as depicted in short-but-sweet text blocks and at least 200 vivid color photographs. It will also tell a story of a city that had always struggled to find its own identity, only to have a new identity thrust upon it by an unprecedented wave of high-tech wealth–a wave which just might have now finally crested. While almost its images are new, and its few old pictures are only a few years old, it will still be a work of history. Its text will explain the pasts of the places it covers, providing a sense of continuity to a city forever bent on reinventing itself. It will be a narrative book, rather than a tourist or entertainment guide (or an institutional promo device). It will tell of a city of smug contentedness yet perpetually trying to prove itself, a hotbed of “progressive” politics that still sees official crackdowns on minority and youth cultures; a high-tech capital full of simple-living advocates.
Photography books about Seattle invariably serve up the image of a bright, antiseptic “Emerald City.” An aggressively bland fantasy realm bereft of problems, or of passions.
This book won’t.
CITY LIGHT will offer a highly personal look at a real city, a place where real people work and play; as depicted in short-but-sweet text blocks and at least 200 vivid color photographs.
It will also tell a story of a city that had always struggled to find its own identity, only to have a new identity thrust upon it by an unprecedented wave of high-tech wealth–a wave which just might have now finally crested.
While almost its images are new, and its few old pictures are only a few years old, it will still be a work of history. Its text will explain the pasts of the places it covers, providing a sense of continuity to a city forever bent on reinventing itself.
It will be a narrative book, rather than a tourist or entertainment guide (or an institutional promo device). It will tell of a city of smug contentedness yet perpetually trying to prove itself, a hotbed of “progressive” politics that still sees official crackdowns on minority and youth cultures; a high-tech capital full of simple-living advocates.
NEXT: We revisit our Krazy Koffeehouse Kharacters.
YEAH, THERE WASN’T A NEW PIECE YESTERDAY. Things are just that wacky here.
So wacky (between increasing freelance gigs and preparing for the big art show) that I’m not even halfway through Sally Denton and Roger Morris’s weighty new tome, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America.
But what I have read of it is dramatic, even scary.
It’s not that Denton and Morris have suddenly uncovered any particular pieces of shocking news, at least not in what I’ve read thus far.
It can be considered given knowledge, conventional wisdom, that Vegas (America’s newest and fastest-growing city) was started by mobsters and mob-connected financiers; that its resorts vaccumed and laundered cash from assorted places (Teamsters, Mormons, drug runners, and shady types with big political connections); that Vegas, and the inland west in general, has become a major power base for Republican politics, corporate finance, and the whole suburban-sprawl zeitgeist.
No, what makes The Money and the Power such a, well, powerful work is the way Denton and Morris tell how all these things interconnect. Theirs is a huge, sprawling desert highway metropolis of a narrative, with many off-ramps and intersections connecting seemingly disparate elements.
Among the elements of their tale:
And it wasn’t just romantic “vice” mob money but pimping, extortion, and drugs–especially heroin, in cahoots with the CIA going back decades.
This is deliberate. The authors have clearly intended to depict Vegas, and the new America they claim it represents, as a milieu of masculine aggression and greed without a needed balance of feminine morals or compassion.
The authors depict Vegas as the heart of a post-democratic American system, in which greed and manipulation are everything, and shady backroom deals have been replaced by open, publicized corruption. A world with nothing, real or potential, to alleviate or counteract brute power.
Such a depiction, even if only partly true, would mean bleak prospects for any progressive (let alone radical) change. I choose not to believe things are that hopeless. (Even in arch-conservative Vegas, the resorts were eventually integrated and many were successfully unionized.)
I also have a few reservations with the authors’ more overarching claims, such as the claim that Vegas has become the “shadow capital” of the brave new America. It’s an economic powerhouse, and a symbol of what Tom Frank has called “the global entertainment state.” But its affairs are increasingly controlled by such chain operators as Hilton and Starwood, who would abandon the town in an instant if better opportunities arose elsewhere (and, with the spread of legal gambling across the country, such opportunities increasingly are).
Indeed, implicit in the authors’ thesis (again, based on what I’ve read of the book thus far) is the idea that social progress can only come about when “vice” industries such as gambling and prostitution are diminished in influence–essentially, when the wilder aspects of human nature are suppressed. Millennia of social history have proven otherwise.
As I’ve written before about the limits of bohemian politics, hedonism isn’t a sufficient premise for true political change. But neither is moralistic prudery. Gambling, displays of feminine flesh, drinking and drugging have always been with us, and likely always will.
It’s just that in a global-corporate regime, such vices will be controlled according to global-corporate means, such as shown in today’s Vegas mega-resorts.
NEXT: Another plug for my art show, and an explanation about the print mag.
(TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED CONTENTS, as you might guess, will appear on a future date.)
SHORTLY BEFORE 11 FRIDAY NIGHT, I was doing my typical Friday bar- and gallery-hopping jaunt, and happened to step in at the Lava Lounge.
Within a minute of my arrival, someone ran in and yelled something at the bartender, who turned down the stereo and shouted aloud.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Speakeasy is now on fire.”
I joined the throngs rushing outside and up to the corner of Second and Bell. The building’s entire second floor was already fully inflamed. Window glass and even streetlight lamps were melting in the heat. Fire crews were already there (the place is three blocks from a fire station); a second alarm would draw crews from as far as Fremont.
The fire, while spectacular and lurid, was conquered within a half hour. The cafe and its back performance room had been quickly evacuated (as had been the Marvin Gardens apartments across the alley). Musicians at the back room’s show that night (a Mount St. Helens anniversary-themed show called “Eruptive Dissonance”) had even been able to get some of their instruments out.
Outside, the people who had gathered from the Belltown bars were soon joined by Speakeasy employees and friends who’d heard about the fire from phone calls and the 11:00 newscasts. They shared reminiscences about the place, worried about its future, or just stood silently.
The Speakeasy, which first opened six years ago this month, was Seattle’s first Internet cafe. But it was intended from the start to be more than just a refuge for e-mailers and gamers.
It was a gathering place for real communities as well as virtual ones. Its 5,000-square-foot space (half the main floor of a two-story-and-basement building) hosted art openings, political rallies (including WTO teach-ins), eclectic music shows (all-ages at first), experimental film screenings, plays, and comedy shows (including Mike Daisey’s one-man show about his Amazon.com employee misadventures).
The Internet side of the operation, meanwhile, created websites for many local progressive groups, and hosted many other folks’ sites (including, since June 1995, this one).
Over the years, the cafe became a vestigial side operation to Speakeasy’s Internet business (it now offers DSL hosting in over 20 U.S. cities, and has over 135 employees). Owners Mike and Gretchen Apgar even talked in 1999 about shuttering the cafe altogether.
Instead, late last year they acquired the leases on the rest of the building (including the former 211 pool hall upstairs). At the time of the fire, renovation work had begun on putting Speakeasy’s DSL offices in the upstairs and turning the downstairs into an expanded cafe with full liquor service.
So what’s going to happen to the place now?
As of this writing, nobody knows.
Speakeasy has the lease, and apparently insurance, on the whole building. The daily papers and TV stations say preliminary structural reports show it basically sound. The cafe itself only suffered water damage, amazingly.
But the building owner might just use it as an excuse for some high rise project, possibly preserving only the old building’s facade.
The latter possibility is, for now, just speculation on my part. But if that’s tried, it’ll be a whole community’s tempers that will turn ablaze.
NEXT: A new book treats Las Vegas as a symbol of everything gaudy, corrupt, and crazy about America. And it wasn’t even written by the French.
I’VE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH BRITISH TELEVISION ALL OVER AGAIN.
Specifically, with the parts of British television most Americans haven’t seen, not even on BBC America.
The source of this newfound fascination: Transdiffusion, a website (or rather, a network of individually-maintained sites) dedicated to UK TV ephemera.
That means, as one of the network’s sites describes it, “Everything but the programmes:” Station ID logos, test-pattern cards, jingles, on-camera (“in vision”) and off-camera (“in sound”) announcer bits, sign-on (“startup”) and sign-off (“closedown”) routines, technical-difficulties apologies, promos, and the “interval” music that would be played during long breaks (up to an hour or more!) between programs.
It’s led by one Kif Bowden-Smith, who started in 1964 (at age 12) to collect off-air audio tapes and still photos from across Britain, particularly the station-ID jingles and logos of the various local commercial stations. He kept this archive all these years, and it forms the basis of the Transdiffusion Project.
Reading the Transdiffusion sites, and the similar sites listed on their links pages, provides a perfect evocation of seven decades in British social history. Their story starts in the George V reign of the ’30s, as EMI (part of a patent pool with RCA and US inventor Philo Farnsworth) battled with Scottish inventor John Logie Baird to create a working TV system. The BBC politely tried Baird’s mechanical system for a few weeks in 1936, then dropped it in favor of EMI’s electronic TV. The reason became clear three years later, when WWII began, the experimental BBC TV station in London immediately ceased operations, and its engineering team went to work developing a similar technology, radar. TV had been the British establishment’s way of jump-starting radar R&D.
In 1946, a year after the war, the BBC started a regular program schedule. It was, and still is, funded by annual “license fees” on every TV set in the country (sort of like mandatory HBO). It was extremely stoic and paternalistic (it even shut down from 6 to 7 p.m. so parents could put young children to bed!). It was quiet and respectable, befitting a nation still worn down by postwar recessions and shortages, but lacked in showbiz pizzazz.
In the mid-’50s, Parlaiment finally agreed to allow commercial telecasters, under very heavy regulation. A government agency would build the transmitters and rent out the airtime on them to a different company in every region. In the London, Midlands, and North regions (with more than half the country’s population between them), one company would broadcast on weekdays, another on weekends. “Adverts” were limited to six minutes per hour; total airtime was limited to 70 hours a week (spread out over a broadcast day from 9:30 a.m. to midnight); and a quarter of those hours had to be used for educational and public-service shows.
Despite these hardships, the member companies of what would be known as the ITV network created shows that have lasted the ages (Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, Ready Steady Go, The Avengers, Coronation Street), plus many that were never shown Stateside and live on in stills and audio files on the Transdiffusion websites (The Tingha and Tucker Club, A Show Called Fred, The Wibbledy Wobbley Way, Join Us For Bridge, Bootsie and Snudge, Criss Cross Quiz, Blackpool Night Out)–shows never intended for reruns or export, and therefore wonderful examples of what the British public in the pre-Beatle years was expected to like.
But, as noted above, Transdiffusion’s principal emphasis isn’t cult-classic series nostalgia but a more generalized remembrance of the entire viewing experience, particulary the “presentation and continuity” that branded each station.
From the BBC’s original “bat wing” logo, to the bold-as-brass identities of early ITV members, into color and computer graphics, one can track the evolving nature of a medium and its surrounding national culture–from patrician authority to welfare-state compromise, to Swinging ’60s sass, to corporate consolidation and obsession with the Almighty Stock Price.
Now play those old Thames Television horns one more time, won’t you?
NEXT: Remembering the allegedly good old days of 1998.
THANKS TO THE WEB, a helluva lot of pop-cult ephemera just keeps reappearing that one might have presumed to have been lost forever (or at least locked up in private collections).
Today’s case in point: Reel Radio, which has assembled hours upon hours of disc-jockey patter (complete with commercials and jingles, but not the songs) from the golden days of Top 40 radio (approximately 1955-80).
A quick search of the site finds several long clips from Seattle stations KOL, KING-AM, and especially KJR.
This particular promo tape of KJR-AM top-40 radio jingles from my teens proves that (1) commercial radio was just as corporate and mercenary then as it it is now, and (2) it had a helluva lot more classic-showbiz energy and entertainment value back then.
It was loud, brassy, tinny, and fun. Bigtime radio doesn’t have much room for real fun these days, especially with all the surly bad-boy “attitude” shock jocks and right-wing talk firebrands blathering about.
Yet it’s also easy to discern how this venerable format burned out. Listening to one of these air-check tapes for ten minutes or longer can be a challenge of endurance (the stations’ live sound, as padded out by the songs, was a bit more pleasant). And as those pesky boomers kept aging, Top 40 became increasingly sneered at as teenybopper crap, to the point where even teens didn’t like it anymore.
But nowadays, these strong personalities and their nonstop-party atmosphere are so easily missed. So is their treatment of teenagers and young adults as smart, respectable citizens worthy of being pandered to in this way.
YESTERDAY, we resumed a countdown to the gigantic MISCmedia 15th Anniversary celebratory fete on June 2 (details at the left side of this virtual page), with another glimpse of the art show that’ll be part of the festivity–randomly-ordered pix of every home yr. web-pal had lived in. Today, just one more.
#6: 4245 Thackeray Avenue NE. A small but clean room in the basement of a small but clean house in Wallingford, just south of Winchell’s Donut Shop. Occupied June-August 1976.
This house has three levels. The upper level was rented out to a young couple. The main floor was occupied by the owner, a cranky and cleanliness-obsessed elderly woman. I shared the basement with the owner’s mild-mannered husband. Both of us had very restricted access to the main-floor kitchen and shower, and were expected to prepare our meals in a toaster-oven and hot plate supplied downstairs.
NEXT: Memories of top-40 radio.
I JUST MIGHT BE the only “personal webzine” writer who’s never been to Burning Man and has never really wanted to go there. There’s something about the annual combo of a hippie “country fair” and a rave party on steroids that scares me.
It’s not the rampant nudity, for sure. As I’ve written before, I can go naked in public. (Even in BM’s 110-degree Nevada desert site, so long as I’m supplied with a gallon of SPF-1,000 sunburn lotion.)
It’s not the official “All Participants, No Spectators” artistic policy. I’ve plenty of wacky talents I could offer to the BM public. (Heck, I could even sing selections from The Mikado dressed in a Hot Dog on a Stick uniform while perched on a forklift, if the price was right.)
It’s not the line I hear all year round, every year, from BM fans that whichever is the current year will surely be the last edition of BM worth going to; that it just keeps getting too popular (particularly among non-insiders) for its own good. I’ve never been one for that elitist pretension that says I have to love “The People” but hate “The Sap Masses.”
And it’s not even necessarily the types of folk I know will be there. I’ve often successfully dealt, in smaller gatherings with 55-year-old hippie males out to ogle young feminine flesh; with teens who continually pronounce the exclamatory phrase “right on” in the form of a question; with self-proclaimed “native American shamen” who may never have even met a real native American; and with dot-com ultra-capitalist hustler boys who think blowing up fireworks and donning body paint makes them “rebels.”
It’s one thing, a simple and primal thing:
I’m deathly afraid of finding myself the only meat-eating non-pot-smoker for 200 miles, stuck for up to eight days with RV-mates intolerant of my nonconformity to their nonconformity, pleading with the drinking-water-truck drivers for a lift back to Reno (a place I have been to, and would love to go to again).
I know what some of my former counselors and Jungian therapists might say: that I must learn to overcome my fears by directly confronting them.
But there oughta be a way to confront these fears that would still allow me to sleep indoors, far from the racket of any all-night drum circles.
MONDAY: Fun with the BBC America cable channel.
FROM MY FREELANCE work for Everything Holidays, here are some last-minute Xmas gift ideas. MISCmedia takes no responsibility if anything breaks the first time it’s used, or if your beloved takes one look at the gift and decides you’re getting nothing next year.
TOMORROW: Is indie film on a comeback?
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I do try to maintain a positive, solution-focused attitude here at MISCmedia.
But sometimes negativity just can’t be helped.
This is one of those times. It’s something that’s built up within me, like corals on a sea-dump of old tires.
It’s music. The sort of music that’s everywhere, whether you want it or not. In restaurants, bars, shops, hair salons, dentist’s offices, telephone hold systems, workplaces, streets, vanpools, and just about everywhere else one happens to be in urban/suburban/exurban North America.
At one time, companies like Muzak created tuneage just for these uses, and it was good. But nowadays, that approach is considered out of mode. You get “real” songs by “real” hit artists from today’s canned-music services.
And, as often as not, it’s one of the several artists or genres I can’t stand but just about everybody else seems to love.
Herewith, a modest hit-list of these:
But to close on a positive note, some acts that could be played in public places a lot more than they currently are (I also love a lot of more “difficult listening” music than I’m listing here, but appreciate that’s an acquired taste):
TOMORROW: Do cyber-capitalists really think they can do anything they want?
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…
IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.
Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.
For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)
This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.
Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.
The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.
That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:
Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.
But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.
(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)
TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?
ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…
