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THE FINE PRINT (warning on the side of a Frosted Mini-Wheats box): “CONTAINS WHEAT INGREDIENTS.”
IN OTHER WORDS (Rex Stout’s detective hero Nero Wolfe in Champagne for One, 1959): “Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman.”
ON OTHER SITES: Kindly reader Byron Jones typed “Clark” and “Misc.” into a search engine, and found a long-lost dog….
FURTHER PRINT FUTURES: It’s official. The print MISCmedia will be reborn as a broadsheet. That’s right, a magazine with the page size of a daily newspaper. Not only is it cheaper to print, but it leads to many wild layout possibilities while expressing the show-bizzy punch I’ve been looking for (so as to balance the sometimes borderline-dry content I’ve been producing). Look for it later this summer.
“WORDS: WHO NEEDS ‘EM?”
Says Word Culture “Passe;” Excited by Switch to Images
SEATTLE (May 3): Declaring the written word “a passe institution,” longtime Seattle writer Clark Humphrey has announced he’s changing careers to become a documentary photographer.
He’s holding a coming-out party for his vivid color images, titled Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, on Saturday, June 2, 7-9 p.m. at the Belltown Underground Gallery, 2211 First Avenue in Seattle (north of the Frontier Room).
The event will be held on the 15th anniversary of Humphrey’s original “MISC.” column in the old Belltown-based monthly Arts Focus (it later appeared for seven years in The Stranger). The exhibit will remain on display through July 5.
A professional writer for nearly 20 years, Humphrey wrote Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, still the most complete account ever written about the early-’90s “Seattle Music Scene” hoopla. In addition to his Stranger tenure, his material has appeared in The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle magazine, Washington Law & Politics, The Comics Journal, Tower Records Pulse!, Penthouse Hot Talk, and The Washington Post Book World.
He continues to contribute a biweekly column and crossword puzzle to Tablet, a new alternative arts tabloid. He also maintains an ongoing “online column” at www.miscmedia.com; and for the past year and a half has published MISCmedia magazine, a print version of the website.
But his future projects (books, exhibitions, and a revised print magazine), several of which will be previewed at Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, will all involve original photographs and art in one form or another.
Why the switch? After losing a dot-com crossword-writing gig, Humphrey trolled around for writing assignments and found the trough crowded by laid-off web writers. Realizing the online fad (email, chat rooms, personal web sites, etc. etc.) had reinvigorated written-word culture to the point of decimating it as a career profession, he turned to the not yet totally demystified world of visual images.
“Everybody’s writing these days,” Humphrey said. “Or, rather, everybody thinks they can write.”
At the show, Humphrey will offer previews of one upcoming book and two larger-scale exhibitions:
In addition to the Belltown Underground Gallery, the Belltown Underground space also houses the Ola Wyola Boutique, the Belltown Ballet and Conditioning Studio, and Internet radio station Belltunes.com.
Exhibit of new color photographs by Clark Humphrey
OPENING: Saturday, June 2, 2001, 7-9 p.m. (free admission, all ages)
ON DISPLAY UNTIL: July 5, 2001
AT: Belltown Underground Art Gallery, 2211 First Avenue, Seattle WA 98121
INFO: (206) 448-3325
NEXT: How I noted the seventh anniversary of the Cobain tragedy.
ELSEWHERE:
The Fiend Folio, Part 1
by guest columnist Matt Briggs
YOU DID NOT BELONG, JUSTIN KRAMER.
We wanted to believe that you fit in with us, or rather, we wanted to believe that we could fit in with you and wear your shirt.
You remember your black and white horizontal striped button-down shirt, the same as the one in the Def Leppard video, “Pour Some Sugar on Me?” I’m sure Betsy Toth bought you that shirt when she outfitted you at the Squire Shop after she had acquired your pretty freshmen face. She introduced you to beer and dope and the volleyball squad.
After Betsy Toth, you carried menthols and Schlitz to Kelly Yoshitomi’s weekly Friday evening Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. You were barred from his house after his mother found a beer can stuffed with butts behind the bonsai stand in her rock garden.
Now you came to my game, stumbling down the stairs an hour late smelling like cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.
It was New Year’s Eve, and you were a normal American boy, so you had two half-racks of Milwaukee’s Best under your arms. Even so, you should have noticed the five-foot vinyl map with the inch grid calibrated to match the lead miniatures; you should have noticed the customized four page character sheets designed in MacWrite using the blackletter Old English typeface; you should have noticed the distinctly non-alcoholic odor of Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and damp Reeboks.
When I looked up and asked you, “Friend or Foe?” instead of laughing and saying, “We’ll see,” you should have taken the clue right then. You should have turned around and gone to the park and polished the beer off, alone. “You’re an hour late,” Jerry Hopen told you. “Sit down and roll up your character.” He confiscated the beer.
“Where did you get those?” John Segrist asked.
“I picked up it up on the way over,” you said vaguely, alluding to a bored familiarity with the whole process of getting beer.
“Can I have one?”
“No,” I said. “We have a game to play.”
Jerry put the cases in the refrigerator in the back room.
We were in an extended post-adolescent funk exacerbated not just by the pimply breakouts brought on by a pure 7-Eleven diet of hot dogs, nachos, and Super Big Gulps but because we hadn’t actually said anything substantial to each other out of role-playing game character since the age of thirteen.
We spent more time in the fantasy realm of extended wish fulfillment, devoted to the exquisite pleasures of not only rescuing damsels in distress but waltzing through remote towns as desperadoes swinging vorpal blades and bastard swords than we did sleep.
We disdained other players, and therefore you should have never even been invited, Justin.
One of the real pitfalls of playing role-playing games was the inflation fueled by the desire for omnipotence. Each player ended up with characters limited only by the individual player’s outer margin of imaginative hubris. These characters could stop the universe on a whim. The players squabbled to determine who was the baddest. When these players squabbled, universes exploded and the game collapsed back to five kids sitting around a dirty table in some dimly lit basement screaming at each other.
To prevent any break in the continuity of the fantasy, we had developed a complex manifesto describing the aesthetic of our game. This wasn’t kids’ stuff. We were wizards and shamans and there were rules to be obeyed in this fantasy as inviolable as the laws of physics.
You brought your own player character written on the thin, official TSR-issued player character sheet, and I said, “Put that away. You will have to start over again.” Our group allowed no outside characters because they had dubious experience in a different universe and brought with them foreign artifacts with dimly understood magical properties.
I recorded the features of our magical items in a private ledger, and we referred to each item by number. The detail of the game stayed with a single player, the official Dungeon Master, who couldn’t have a player character. I was the Dungeon Master and devised the metaphysical rules of the game, and determined everything from how gravity worked to the precise arc of a fireball. You didn’t understand that individual groups of players played the game as removed from each other as terrorist cells.
Our games proceeded slowly, each one taking progressively longer. They had at first dragged out for weeks, and then months, and the game that you broke up, Justin, had been going for over two years, and despite the interruption you had introduced, would continue until it sputtered out in 1989, with the members of the game spread out to the four corners of the US–Jerry Hopen as a corpsmen in California, Greg as an LSD-fueled prophet in Texas, Mark Imel as a busboy in Washington state, John institutionalized in Idaho, and me in basic training in New Jersey. I don’t know what happened to you.
The radio played “Barracuda.” We spent an hour drafting your character. While we played, we listened to KZOK (“Seattle’s Hardest Rock Station”) count down the hundred greatest rock n’ roll songs of all time. The songs reeled out, toward the grail of the greatest ten songs.
The entire list revolved the eternal roster of canonical of rock songs. They came, from our perspective, from the nameless past, somewhere in the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, from the time before we bought LPs. The sequence of songs seemed as solid as the stars and the constellations, moving toward Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watch Tower,” “We Will Rock You,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hotel California,” and finally, “Stairway to Heaven.”
An upsetting year when “Kashimer” replaced “Stairway.”
NEXT: The tale continues.
PEOPLE ARE WRITING MORE THESE DAYS.
Some written-word defenders apparently don’t like it.
Yeah, some of the same types of hibrow guys n’ gals who, just a few years ago, were all a-moanin’ about the supposed Death Of The Word are now all a-moanin’ about the exploding volume of words being issued by persons less astute than themselves.
In a recent NY Times piece, they kvetched to high heaven about e-mails and chat rooms and newsgroups and other online verbosity collectors wherein ordinary folk who don’t even have graduate degrees can show off their noun-‘n’-verb-wranglin’ skills (or lack thereof) for all to see, in almost-real time.
The careful discipline of written English will collapse if this is allowed to continue, cry these SNOOTs (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term of self-description in the April Harper’s).
I say bunk. Double bunk and triple bunk, even.
Fortunately, my longtime pal Rob Wittig was around to add a voice-O-sanity to the NYT piece. He (correctly, I believe) noted that online writing is an exciting, albeit no longer really new, medium, whose rules and conventions are still in great flux. We’re not seeing the end of Real Writing, or even the beginning of the end, but the slow beginning of our ever-evolving language’s next phase.
To Wittig’s statements, I’d add that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect (certainly there are dozens of awful fiction and poetry writers who’ve never goten significantly better and probably never will). But there’s no way to become a decent writer without it–especially if it’s in a medium that can give you near-instant feedback and criticism.
So yes! More chat rooms! More mail lists! More weblogs! More message boards! More personal websites!
Keyboard-and-mouse jockeys of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your would-be silencers!
NEXT: Et tu, KCMU?
OUR PROBLEM COULD BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY.
We’ve got about three dozen copies of Loser that got hurt in, or on their way to, bookstores. They don’t have any faults that would make them any less enjoyable, only less saleable (little bends on the cover, scratches on the spine, etc.) (I know, I know, people have been calling me slightly bent for years, but that’s not the issue here.)
These books have gotta go, and we’re willing to let ’em go cheap. If you already have the 1995 edition, this is your chance to get the new material in the update chapters. If you haven’t yet obtained your own copy of the most complete history ever written about the Seattle rock-music scene, here’s your best chance.
Deal #1: Start or renew a subscription to MISCmedia the print magazine, at $15 a year, and get a slightly-hurt but still ultimately readable Loser for just $10 more (yep, that’s a grand total of $25 US, postpaid.)
Deal #2: Not quite as great a deal as Deal #1, but still worth your trouble. Get an almost-imperceptibly blemished Loser on its own for $14 US postpaid, a whole third off the normal price for a perfect copy.
NEXT: Are self-published books any worse, on the average, than self-released CDs?
IN OTHER NEWS: The wrestling biz plays Monopoly, with WWF taking over onetime arch-rival WCW. Several readers tell me I should care about this.
“DISINTERMEDIATION” is one of those buzzwords you hear in communications circles every now and then.
Applied to the online universe, the word is usually applied to individuals talking and/or writing to other individuals, rather than media professionals gathering huge massed audiences.
There’s a middle ground between these two extremes, though. It’s the e-mail list, discussion board, or website (such as this one) in which somebody puts together well-chosen words for a well-defined niche audience, or for anybody willing to read on.
We’ll look at a couple of local sites of this type today.
Seattle Stories is, as its name implies, an informal and friendly collection of little narratives. Most are seeded by the site’s creators Erik Benson, Stephen Deken, and Alan Taylor; but they’re soliciting, and starting to obtain, tales from the site’s readers.
These are tales of everyday life. Taking trips, going out jogging, falling in love, raising kids, surviving earthquakes, etc. They’re simple, pretense-free, and full of heart.
Pax Adicus is principally a rave-culture site; its “Philo” section is full of sermons by two guys who seem to imagine that taking ecstasy makes them a superior species to the rest of us squares, rehashing all the familiar techno-talk buzzwords. But its “Read” section features the same guys (using the bylines Mc Cutcheon and Ooh the Sloth 456) in a more honest and refreshing mode, relating incidents about their partyin’ lives (drinking too much, falling in lust, driving around, visiting pals, etc.).
The stories are officially billed as fiction, but they’re real (on a heart-‘n’-soul level). When the site’s authors go preachin’ about MDMA and global trance revolutions, they unwittingly depict themselves as stereotyped trend-followers. When they set that aside and turn to the details of living, they become more fully-realized “characters.”
NEXT: Don’t turn social services over to the churches, turn them into business opportunities.
TODAY WE DISCUSS two of the topics we’ve been obsessing with of late: “deviant” Northwest fiction and the now-allegedly-fabulous 1980s.
The editors of the recent anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions claimed they were doing something wildly outre by compiling tales based on strong plots, well-defined characters, and urban settings; instead of adhering to a nature-travelogue vision of “Northwest writing” emphasizing birds and sunsets and massively de-emphasizing humans. (What the Northwest Edge folks really did, natch, was to reassert some universal rules of good storytelling, in the guise of breaking other, less workable or appropriate, rules.)
The ’80s nostalgia fetish, meanwhile, speaks to more than just the longing to recapture one’s younger days. At least around here, it recalls a time when everything wasn’t about making money and feeling pressured to make even more. A time when the dominant local paradigm wasn’t wealth but mellowness; when all you had to do to be a paradigm-subverter was to assert your right to a passionate life of any kind.
Which brings us to The Cornelius Arms, a trade-paperback suite of fifteen interconnected stories by ex-local guy Peter Donahue (now teaching lit in the Carolinas) and put out by still-local dude Von G. Binuia’s Missing Spoke Press.
Set at some indeterminate point between 1983 and 1990, Donahue’s tales revolve around the denizens of a decaying Belltown apartment building. The building’s obviously based on the real Cornelius Apartments at 3rd and Blanchard, a place I’d frequently visited at the time. (It’s still standing, now providing student housing for the Art Institute of Seattle.) Donahue’s descriptions of the building (a once-stoic place, reduced to near-unlivability by a spendthrift slumlord) are accurate, as is the running plotline of tenant activism against the slumlord.
The stories are dotted with other (mostly now-gone) real places (the Tugs gay disco, the Unique Cafe, a renamed version of the Magazine City store, and the still-extant Virginia Inn). A couple of real-life Seattleites also get cameo appearances (housing activist John Foxx, the late Virginia Inn bartender Homer Spence).
Donahue’s resident characters are well-written and well-defined. They comprise a fine cross-section of Belltown life in the pre-dot-com days. There are retired pensioners, druggies, a young recovering alcoholic, a gay party dude who’s already lost one lover to AIDS, a Korean immigrant, some racist skinheads, a female young executive with a confusing sex life, a former WWII refugee, some lonely middle-aged men, a Native American woman struggling to better her condition in life, a young man at the crossroads of his life, and an old man who’s proclaimed himself President of the World.
All are treated as sympathetically and as humanly as possible (even the skinheads, whose philosophy of violence is eventually revealed as just a sad attempt by these lost boys to forge a substitute family).
By the book’s end, the Cornelius Arms building has fallen into the hands of redevelopers, who’ve rebuilt it with gaudier fixtures and tinier, costlier apartment units. The residents have scattered.
It’s not the loss of a “community” that the reader may mourn; most of the residents never really met one another except at tenant-activist meetings.
It’s the loss of a place, a shadow-space of sorts where society’s marginalized (by choice or by force or by a combo of the two) might live in squalor, but at least can live in relative peace and with relative dignity.
TOMORROW: Why I’ve never been to Burning Man.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a defense of a long-maligned political institution.
BRING ON THE SOUSA MARCHES: No, I don’t think major-party political conventions are a relic needing abolition. Those who so loudly proclaim the conventions’ obsolescence appear largely to be media people, frustrated that the Presidential nomination process is no longer a dragged-out drama leading to a climactic point of decision in a big arena with live TV cameras.
Yet these same critics use, as their main argument, the claim that the conventions have devolved into “a made-for-TV event.”
There have been many, many conventions, before and during the TV era (and will be in any post-TV era) in which the party’s ticket was known weeks in advance. The conventions all went on anyway. They gave the party faithful a, well, a party to reward their hard work and a big pep rally to inspire further efforts.
Today, conventions serve these purposes and a couple more.
They give the party, and by extension its candidate, an opportunity to prove its organizational skills. (George McGovern once told C-SPAN he knew his candidacy was doomed when he couldn’t get his acceptance speech started before 1 a.m. Eastern.)
And they provide a “long-form” forum for a candidate’s platform.
Yeah, call it an “informercial” if you like. But also call it a tool for unmediated communication with the populace.
The Presidential nomination process is broken, but it’s broken in its foresection–the primaries and the ultra-big-money fundraising. The conventions, largely, aren’t broken (though an equivalent mechanism for independent candidates still needs to be thought up).
GRAFFITO OF THE WEEK (in the Six Arms men’s room): “This town is a youth culture retirement home.”
THROWAWAY GAG OF THE WEEK: Was passing the Paramount Theater when a woman walking toward the theater’s touring production of Fosse told a friend she’d last been to the place “to see Lord of the Rings,–I mean Lord of the Dance.” Of course, I had to barge in; “It’s amazing how high Frodo can kick.”
DROPPING THE POKEBALL: Apparently, the Pokemon phenomenon has passed its peak, at least in North America. Apparently, kids turning 10 are, like kids turning 10 oft do, renouncing the recreational fads associated with those immature 9-year-olds. Merchandising products with the 151 superpowered cute cartoon animals and their human pals are stagnating. The second theatrical movie faced disappointing box-office results. Sales of Pokemon gaming cards have reportedly plummeted. (If the latter’s the case, then Wizards of the Coast, the local outfit that made the U.S. version of the gaming cards, sold out to Hasbro just in time.)
TOMORROW: Monorail madness and its meaning.
REGULAR READERS of this feature might recall my ongoing devotion to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66; legal name: Brian O’Nolan; birth name: Brian O Nuallain), whose 1939 first novel At Swim-Two Birds first turned me on to the possibilities of Great Kickass Writing.
Today I want to talk about O’Brien’s other career, that of self-styled “newspaper funny man.”
A few months after the publication of At Swim, the conservative daily The Irish Times hired him to write a daily essay-and-humor column, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” For this work he took on another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
The alternate name was more than just an affectation; it was a character.
The “Myles” persona was that of a distinguished older gentleman (O’Brien was only 29 when the column began), comfortable enough in his nobility to mix drawing-room anecdotes with bilingual or trilingual puns, yet enough of a man-of-the-people to gently bash both elitist modern artists and elitist modern-art denouncers.
Two collections of Myles columns have finally been issued in the U.S., by the Dalkey Archive Press (named after O’Brien’s fifth and final novel). The Best of Myles covers his 1940s work. The just-domestically-issued Further Cuttings follows the column into the ’50s.
I’ve just finished reading the first volume. On one level, it’s a remarkable account of normal daily life in one of the few European countries that had anything approaching “normal daily life” at the time. (Ireland, which had only become an independent country in 1920, stayed out of WWII, partly as an act of defiance against Britain.)
O’Brien writes nostalgically about old steam locomotives; relates fictional yet believable tales about his father, brother, and “married sister;” and makes droll comments upon such issues of the day as preserving the Irish language and coping with wartime shortages of consumer goods.
But O’Brien/Copaleen’s writing works on dozens of other levels.
Almost-too-clever-for-its-own-good wordplay meets up with de- and re-constructions of traditional columnist and “humorist” formats (fake inventions, wise bartenders, social-improvement campaigns, good-old-days reminiscences, etc. etc.), and gets cooked up within O’Brien’s astoundingly beautiful prose.
It’s enough to make any would-be modern funny writer, such as myself, give in and surrender all hope of ever becoming good enough.
But I won’t. At least not just yet.
TOMORROW: A few examples of O’Brien/Copaleen’s genius.
ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to actor-director Paul Bartel, whose Eating Raoul remains the most true-to-life cinematic portrayal of a baby-boomer generation grown hostile to the essential life-forces and obsessed with individual lifestyle “perfection.”
THANKS TO THE WEB, annoying marketing cliches and concepts can emerge, rise, and burn out at up to ten times their previous rate.
Today’s case in point: All those “My __” sites.
How it works:
(1) Take any portal site, news site, sports-stat site, MP3-download site, online-retail site, or burlap-sack-fetish site.
(2) Fix it up to add even a tiny bit of user customization. Maybe let a user pick the background colors, or set it up to show soybean-futures prices but not flaxseed-futures prices.
(3) Congratulations! No longer have you a mere “Notarysojac.com”. You can now proudly offer “My Notarysojac.com”!
Always ones to believe in taking dumb ideas and running them further into the ground, we hereby pre-announce plans to (one of these quarters, eventually, as soon as we finish reading CGI-BIN Scripting for Dummies) revamp this site so you can create “My MISCmedia.”
MONDAY:The next Great Anti-Microsoft Hope: Is it open-source software Or is it Napster? Neither?
SOME SHORTS TODAY:
THE MAY ISSUE of the MISCmedia print magazine may be delayed a week or so, for reasons to be discussed later. (I’m feeling fine and everything; just job and personal complications have taken their time toll.)
THE FOLLOWING is the actual text of the story in the bottom-left corner of the Seattle Times front page on Sunday, 4/16, under the headline, “In Europe’s eyes, America becomes uglier and uglier”:
Newspaper This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 3 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. With standard tracking, H & J. It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches. This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx
Newspaper
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready.
You have 3 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading.
With standard tracking, H & J.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with
PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx
STACKED: More fascinating info keeps emerging about Rem Koolhaas, the “world class” (code word for out-of-state) architect picked to design the new main Seattle library. For one thing, he just got his profession’s top award. Even cooler, the Times reported he once wrote an unproduced screenplay for everybody’s favorite sexploitation filmmaker, Russ Meyer! (I don’t know if it had anything to do with the naked-in-the-library fantasies occasionally reported on with bemusement in the Abada Abada weblog.)
DID YOU FEEL TIRED last Friday? Everyone I met that day said so. At least those who had enough energy to get out of the house. I was in line at Tower Records at 4 p.m. and everybody was yawning.The bars I hopped among were nearly deserted later that evening; folks who should’ve been bouncing and dancing were shuffling and moping instead.Was it just the arrival of cool weather after a week of warm temps, or was it a post-full-moon energy drop, or unconscious Good Friday solemnity?
TOMORROW: Seattle as photo-copyright capital of the world.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 1)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
DOUG ANDERSON IS a Seattle poet/salesman forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is a record of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.
Poet: If art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight…
Salesman: You’ve just described a toaster.
P: You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, if art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight when conjoined with imagination, then I don’t see much art around here.
S: Hey, take it easy. I’m just a meat-and-potatoes man.
P: Yeah, right.
S: Besides, there’s plenty of art. We’ve got full theaters, crowded art galleries and bookstores are so hot the big ones act like Mafia families trying to rub each other out.
P: I disagree. Theater has devolved into solo performers debasing themselves before the bourgeoisie, painting is going nowhere and literature has become the billionth retelling of adolescence angst.
S: You intellectual snob, I notice you conveniently left out poetry.
P: Poetry, in English, especially in the Northwest, seems to be alive and kicking.
S: Stop pimping yourself and let me read the Puget Sound Business Journal. It’s what pays the rent. Remember?
I do business to business sales and this is where you find out which businesses are going under, which are suing or being sued, which are launching IPOs and which are flush and expanding into the Kent Valley. Your theories of art are not really helpful just now.
P: Well I’m reading right along with you and I don’t want you to get overly impressed by all the money that’s flying around.
Art has hung up its imaginative spurs and gone over to technology. Craft when divorced from the imagination becomes technology and that’s what we have a lot of now.
Toasters, like you said. In the absence of art we get lots of toasters.
S: You’re saying technology doesn’t demand imagination? That makes a whole lot of fuckin’ sense.
P: I’m saying that technology is the extension of what we already have. In our five senses. The stethoscope turns your ear into a hose, ultrasound lets your eyeballs roll around like a snake into a young mom’s womb, the web has turned us all into audio-visual spiders.
Technology works within a narrow mandate: demolish time and distance by extending our senses. We don’t need imagination to develop what we already have, therefore…
S: Do you mind? Can I get on with this?
P: Feel free. I’m not stopping you.
S: No but you’re trying to distract me.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
