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I SAID LAST TIME THERE’D BE a new look for your favorite social-commentary site, and here ’tis. From now on, you’ll get a fresh Misc. World dose every darn weekday.
Usually, these mini-columns will contain only one item apiece, compared to the 13-year tradition (four years online) of a grab-baggy of three-dot juxtapositions. These daily installments will show up right here on the main miscmedia.com page, so you can start ruining your mind right away.
For those of you who can’t log on every day, you’ll still get to read a week’s worth (or more) thanks to the handy links right beneath each day’s installment.
These daily column-ettes will now incorporate the book, movie, and music reviews which for the past seven or eight months have had their separate section of the site, Clark’s Culture Corral. Recent review pieces will continue to be linked from the Culture Corral index page; and you’ll still be able to directly go from the reviews to get the works from Amazon.com.
And, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a slight name change here. The site itself is now known as miscmedia.com; the site’s former name, Misc. World, is now the name of the online column (previously known just as Misc.) that’s the site’s main feature. The short name lives on in The Big Book of Misc.
SPEAKING OF WHICH: The Big Book is out. It’s beautiful, if I may modestly say so myself. Those of you who’ve pre-ordered your copies should have ’em now; if not, please email me.
Thanks to all of you who attended the pre-release party last Tuesday at the Ditto. Highlights from the annual party questionnaire tomorrow.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, has read the hereby-linked, viciously beautiful review of the movie by that much-acclaimed, recently-crashed, Time art critic Robt. Hughes (Time wouldn’t run it, so the NY Daily News picked it up).
UPDATE: The Big Book of MISC. is now in the heat of production. By the time you read this, the covers should be printed and the insides should be ready to roll. Online ordering’s now available at this link.
Actual copies of the book should be ready for the big pre-release party and annual Misc.-O-Rama, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue near Bell Street (across from the back of the Cadillac lot). There’ll be outrageous snack treats, videos, strange DJ music, games, surveys, a live demonstration, and lots lots more. Free admission; 21 and over. Be there. Aloha.
RIDDLE: What do you call the last pint of Hefeweizen that causes a yuppie to total her fancy-ass luxury car? (Answer next week.)
TIMES OF THE SIGNS: There actually is one and only one piece of signage at the Broadway and U District Taco Bell outlets that’s in Spanish–the bottom half of the front-door warning sticker boasting of the joint’s anti-robbery systems.
SAY WHAT?: US West TV spots are currently promoting Caller ID boxes as ways to avoid those annoying life interruptions from pesky telemarketing calls. Besides the commercials, can you guess one other method the company’s using to try and sell the service? That’s right.
ON THE EDGE: Hope some of you noticed the name of the apartment-redevelopment company charged (as shown on both KIRO’s and KING’s late news Wednesday) with violating even Seattle’s wimpy tenant-rights laws: “No Boundaries.” The logo on the company’s possibly-illegal notices of eviction and attempted rate-hike retaliations against protesting tenants, as seen on the newscasts, looks just like the letterhead of some sci-fi video-game company. There’s some lesson somewhere here about today’s money-and-power mentality, in which strong-arm business tactics are mistaken for acts of daring rebellion by self-worshipping hotshots who can’t stand the idea of having to do anything they don’t want to.
(“No Boundaries” also happens to be the title of a new benefit CD for Kosovo refugees, with two Pearl Jam tracks.)
ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND OTHER EXPANSIONS: An LA Times story claims the latest thing in La-La land is affluent high-school girls asking for breast implants as graduation gifts, or paying themsleves for the procedure as soon as (or even a few months before) they reach legal adulthood. The article quoted a couple of doctors who noted some women are still well within the developmental process at age 17 or even 18, but an increasing number are just so darned vain and body-conscious as to want to immediately achieve the ol’ top-heavy look.
If I were still working in the realm of “alternative” weekly urban tabloids, I’d probably be expected to sneer at these women–or, even worse, condescendingly treat them as mindless victims of the fashion industry (the same fashion industry that’s recently been enamored of unbusty petite model looks, not that the industry’s critics ever notice).
The same urban-tribal folks who most loudly scoff at implants might themselves have tattoos, piercings, even (as a particularly exploitive KING-TV piece last Monday noted) brandings. Some of these critics might seem hypocrites on at least some level; but on another level, it’s perfectly OK to believe in the general concept of body-modification while having well-defined personal tastes about which modifications one prefers to have or to see on others.
I personally don’t viscerally care for the over-augmented look, but I can understand that certain women might wish it. A big bust projects you out and demands attention (along with the sneers from other women you can interpret as jealousy). But a large fake bust is also a shield, a kind of permanent garment keeping all others firmly away from your heart (and other vital organs).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Instant Planet isn’t just another new age tabloid. For one thing, it promises regular coverage of issues facing some of those indigenous peoples that the white new-agers love to take inspiration from. For another, it’s got some first-rate contributors, including master collage-illustrator James Koehnline and my former yoga trainer Kirby Jacobsen. Free at the usual dropoff spots, or $16/4 issues from P.O. Box 85777, Seattle 98145.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The Seattle-based New Athens Corp. has jumped on the herbal-beverage bandwagon with two odd-tasting concoctions. “Kick Start” promises to help you get “a robust, active feeling” with Gotu Kola, Ginkgo Bilboa, Guarana, Kava Kava, and ginseng, There’s also “No Worries,” a drink that’s supposed to “produce a relaxing effect that soothes and quiets your mood.” Both taste like Coke’s old OK Soda with a touch of peach flavoring. But unlike other pops marketed as all-ages treats, these have a label disclaimer: “Not intended for children under 6 or pregnant or nursing mothers.” Elsewhere in foodland…
Q BALLS: While small indie supermarkets in other neighborhoods have fallen with little more than a shrug of inevitability from area residents, the citizens of Wedgwood have rallied ’round to valiantly (and, apparently, futilely) defend Matthew’s Red Apple Market, set to close in less than two weeks after its landlord struck a deal to let the Kroger-owned QFC circuit take over the site.
At first peep, a media observer used to the recent unwritten rule that everything in Seattle had to be “unique” (in exactly the same way, of course) might not see what all the fuss is supposed to be about.
Matthew’s doesn’t have the fun neon of the old Wallingford Food Giant or the odd mix of food and variety departments of the old Holman Road Art’s Family Center (both of which were QFC bought up directly, rather than arranging for their eviction like it’s doing with Matthew’s).
Matthew’s doesn’t make a big fuss about a lot of those higher-profit-margin items and departments QFC and Larry’s lavish attention on (salad bars, hot take-out items, wine, cell phones, live lobster, “health” foods, etc. etc.)
It’s just a plain-looking, small supermarket in a slightly-run-down building, with a fried-chicken deli counter and fresh flowers and a Lotto machine.
But that’s the whole point. In a town increasingly weighted down by the expectation of pretentious “uniqueness,” and in a national retail landscape increasingly overrun by big-chain consolidations, Matthew’s is loved by its customers precisely because it’s just a good ol’ fashioned neighborhood indie grocery.
(“Red Apple,” by the way, is merely a franchised name belonging to Associated Grocers, the wholesale consortium to which Matthew’s and 200 or so other Northwest stores belong, including, at least for the time being, QFC.)
Matthew’s might not stock 17 different kinds of cilantro, but it more than makes up for that in that unstockable, uncatalogable quality known as community spirit. It’s different precisely because it’s refused to conform to the current-day standards of “uniqueness.”
The Wedgwood area’s well-stocked with well-off folks, some of whom offered to outbid QFC for the lease on the Matthew’s block. When that initially failed, the store’s supporters then offered to help Matthew’s find a new site. But usable commercial blocks are scarce in that dense residential area.
(One of the few supermarket-sized tracts in the area not currently used for retail is the Samuel Stroum Jewish Community Center, co-funded by and named for a longtime QFC exec.)
So this particular battle against the Forces of Consolidation may be lost–unless someone could design a Matthew’s-like store on a smaller real-estate footprint, a la Ken’s Markets or Trader Joe’s.
(Current status: Matthew’s management sez it stands a good chance of winning at least a little more time in court. It’s asking friends and neighbors to keep signing the petitions and engaging in nonviolent protests, while asking customers to bear with spot shortages of stuff on some of the shelves (it held off on ordering new stock while waiting for the legal action to progress.)
WE’RE STILL LOOKING for your ideas on What This Town Needs. Suggest yours at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, check out my page in the June Seattle magazine, work for peace, and consider the words of Marshall McLuhan: “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, is proud to announce The Big Book of MISC. has now gone to press. Even better, online ordering is now up, at this link! The prerelease party’s Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Ave. near Bell Street in Seattle’s glorious Belltown. Be there.
FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Denny’s Diner concept, first mentioned in Misc. about a year ago, will now be phased in at all U.S. Denny’s restaurants. From the looks of the prototype restaurant out by Sea-Tac Mall, it won’t be as big a revamp as the newspaper stories promise. The one I saw looks largely like a regular ol’ Denny’s. The interior’s done up in muted greens instead of garish orange shades, with a few touches of aluminum trim. Aside from a few soda-fountain items, there’s not much on the menu that’s not on the regular Denny’s menu. And there’s a reproduction juke box playing some oldies-rock CDs, along with many “hot country” and easy-listening stars.
The chain’s officially doing this because its research found younger eaters don’t identify with its established suburban-bland image, and thinks this way it can become perceived as slightly hipper without turning off the older crowd. Of course, Denny’s has had a bigger image problem than that in recent years. Amid allegations of racial discrimination in both employment and customer service, the company’s had to pull out all the PR-spin stops to proclaim it now welcomes everybody, and has put managers and franchisees thru sensitivity classes. So why, one might ask, is the chain re-imaging itself around nostalgia for those bad-old-days white-lower-middle-class hash houses where African Americans felt particularly unwelcome back in the day? (Remember, the first major sit-in of the civil rights movement occurred at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Elsewhere in bobbysoxer-land…
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge (which has hosted all-ages music shows these past six years in the former home of the punk-parody musical Angry Housewives) and the Colourbox (the rock venue that stuck with local bands after bigger bars turned their emphasis to touring acts) are closing in June, due (indirectly in the former case, directly in the latter) to Pioneer Square gentrification. RKCNDY will be demolished for a hotel sometime later this year. Nothing much could’ve been done to save the Colourbox (and, anyway, the nearby Rupert’s has been serving much the same function). But the VE’s another story. Its pretty-much-all-volunteer staff has every right to feel burned out and to move on, now that its recent sold-out Annie Sprinkle performances have paid off its debts. But there should’ve been some way they could’ve passed the torch onto a fresher crew, to keep the space going as long as it still had the lease. If someone can get such a crew together to assume the space, they’d better do so soon.
(Both the Colourbox and the Velvet Elvis got front-page pictures in the P-I‘s Saturday item about the city’s tuff new anti-noise law and schemes by some city councilmembers to relax those limits in designated “entertainment zones,” a little too late to save either club.)
BESIDES A DECENT ALL-AGES SPACE and zoned relief from anti-nightlife legal putsches, what does Seattle need? That’s your next question at the luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. And we’re still seeking your nominations about which 1995-99 Seattle bands oughta be mentioned in the forthcoming update of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Elsewhere in new-addition-land…
WATCH D.T.S., GET THE D.T.s: The Casbah Cinema, that beuatifully-designed but poorly-marketed boutique theater in Belltown, has been revamped by new owners as the Big Picture. It’s now a beer-and-wine bar with a fancy-schmancy digital video projection system in the old Casbah auditorium room. The owners believe, as I wrote here some time back, that theaters shouldn’t just be for feature films and tavern TVs shouldn’t just be for sports. They plan to have a whole schedule of fun programming events, ranging from cult movies and sports to X-Files episode screenings and music-video nights. It’s also available for private parties, software-company demonstrations, anime fan-club meetings, movie-studio sneak previews, etc.
I probably will continue seeing most of my movies-on-projection-video-with-beer at 2nd Avenue Pizza, but the Big Picture’s HDTV setup is truly awesome. It’s much sharper than the analog HDTV system I saw a couple years back at the old UA Cinemas; even a basketball game (live sports are the ultimate test of digital video) looked clean and crisp. Elsewhere in visual-entertainment-land…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: After years of the sleaze-sex mags getting closer and closer to The Act, Penthouse has finally started running apparent actual hardcore pix as of its June issue (in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy pictorial), and (along with its almost-as-explicit competitors) has faced the expected legal challenges in the expected southern and midwestern states. Either the publishers seem to think they can win the court cases and vend images of actual coitus thru mainstream magazine outlets, or the competition for wankers’ bucks has gotten so intense the publishers believe they have to do this to compete with hardcore videos, websites, CD-ROMS, etc.
The demand for explicitness in sex-entertainment has increased steadily in the three decades since hardcore films and images first went above-ground. Today, hardcore tapes can be rented in almost every non-chain video store (and can be purchased in non-chain convenience stores); while softcore tapes (other than those depressing , anti-intimacy “erotic thrillers”) are in far fewer outlets and often for sale only. Of all the new girlie mags in recent years, only Perfect 10 (and retro-zines like Kutie) appeal to a classic pin-up aesthetic instead of simply piling on as much raunch as the distribution channel will bear.
Some observers claim this trend signifies a failure of imagination, of good taste, or even of respect for women. I think it means something else–that smut consumers are, on the average, moving away from passive “pedastel” female ideals and instead prefer to fantasize about women who are active, enthusiastic participants in The Act.
Then, of course, there’s the little matter of what makes hardcore hardcore. It’s not how much you see of the women, but how much you see of the men. The triumph of hardcore means more and more straight-identifying men want to look at other men’s sex parts in action, photographed as sharply and clearly as possible. One recently-notorious subgenre, the “gangbang” video, shows its straight-male audiences dozens of male bodies surrounding just one woman.
But gangbang videos are ugly, as is hardcore in general. As I’ve previously mentioned, the hardcore anti-aesthetic literalizes the phrase “ugly as sin.” While the action scenes in Penthouse are at least competently lit and photographed, they still adhere to a formula of garish colors, contorted expressions, and grotesquely obvious implants. Historically, the formula leads out from the old days of underground smut, all dangerous and anti-propriety. Today, it leads from the porn-video industry’s ruthless combination of tiny budgets and strict requirements. But it’s also a look its target audience seems to prefer. Perhaps these men have such poor self body-images, they can only comfortably look at other men’s bodies when they’re depicted among ugly surroundings.
Will this ugliness change as coitus imagery goes further beyond porn-specialty stores and into your local beer-and-cigarette shop? Many cultures around the world have found beautiful ways to depict coitus via the arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Contemporary erotic photography has produced many beautiful works, but almost all of them (even Robert Mapplethorpe’s) are predicated on The Pose, not The Act. Posing involves a person or persons openly displaying their personas out toward the viewer; actual sex (if it’s any good) constitutes two people becoming all caught up in one another and themselves, ignoring the rest of the world. I’ll still prefer softcore images, even if hardcore becomes less icky-looking, for this reason. I don’t want to vicariously imagine myself in some other man’s body, feeling what that other man gets to feel; I want to imagine my (real) self in the woman’s body.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we hope to have topics less prone to too-obvious puns, embrace the warmth, question the war, and consider this by Jane Austen: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
YES IT’S A CHEAP COINCIDENCE, but Misc. couldn’t help but notice when KING-TV’s Saturday morning “objective” coverage of the Makah whale hunt was peppered with commercials showing a gracefully-swimming whale family to symbolize the feelings of security and strength Pacific Life Insurance promises to provide for your own family.
For over a year now, the Makahs have been using their long-threatened whale-hunt revival to reignite tribal pride and tradition (and to publicize their current-day plight in the media). The anti-whaling protesters, meanwhile, have latched onto the grey whale as, while no longer a threatened species, an icon of anthropomorphic identification, a “virtual pet” as it were, loaded with all sorts of new-agey baggage about the sacred continuum of nature. Both parties are using the creatures to embody their own ideologies. I’m beginning to think the poor whales would be better off if everybody just let them be animals for once. Elsewhere in misplaced-symbolism-land…
MORE POST-LITTLETON MUSINGS: I have to admit, a month or so after the tragedy, that I’ve eagerly lapped up all the print and online gunk by assorted grownups who saw a connection with the shooters–not with the shooters’ neo-Nazi affectations, obviously, but with the other kids’ descriptions of the shooters as the sensitive smart kids who were harassed out of any future adult self-esteem. By the time the monthly print and web magazines came out on the topic, it seemed like everybody who ever grew up to become a writer had been one of the shy, brainy, unpopular kids, a situation I could certainly identify with.
Besides the obvious self-ID part, I wistfully sighed whenever I read remarks that the popular kids, the blondes and the tuff guys, were the ones who’d never amount to anything beyond six kids, three ex-spouses, and a crumbling clapboard rambler in some godforsaken subdivision. Alas, since the mid-’80s it was the jocks and cheerleaders who’ve grown up to be the Limbaugh target audience, the patrons of “hot” nitespots and cigar bars, who drive the bigass SUVs and generally act like they own everybody else. Elsewhere in personal-achievement-land…
BIG BOOK UPDATE: By the time you read this, The Big Book of Misc. will be at the printers for second galley proofs. Design maestro Hank Trotter has come up with a great front cover, reminiscent of Saul Bass’s classic movie posters. It now looks like there will be two release parties. The “pre-release” release party, for loyal Misc. World online readers, will be part of the annual Misc.-O-Rama party held every June–this time on Tuesday, June 8, at the new Ditto Tavern on 5th near Bell. A few weeks later, there’ll be a more widely publicized event once it starts getting into a few stores. You can already pre-order your own copy by check or money order; full instructions are at this link. Online credit-card ordering may be up later this week. Elsewhere in print-land…
FONT OF WISDOM?: The triumphant and unexpected return of Helvetica, formerly the just-about-official Uncoolest Typeface on Earth, is now upon us. It’s the official typeface of ARO.Space and its sister business the Ace Hotel; it’s all over fancy-schmancy mags like Stuff and Surface; and teven he ever trend-following Urban Outfitters chain has adopted it. If it were just the case of a gay dance club, I’d have said it had to be a particularly gay trend–or, at least, that only gay men would see beauty in the typeface straight men have grown up associating with the utter dorkiness of the Penthouse group of magazines (as well as all the tacky little documents that appeared during the early years of desktop publishing, when Helvetica and Times were just about the only font families available on first-generation laser printers).
But the truth of the matter lies beyond such superficial assumptions. Post-rave dance-graphics designers are really using Helvetica because it’s the main onscreen typeface of Kai’s Power Tools, a wildly-popular graphics software program. Power Tools’ chief software architect, the legendary Mr. Kai Krause, built his on-screen menus and instruction screens from Helvetica because (1) it’s a typeface most all computers these days have got; (2) it’s clean and compact; and (3) when used in just the right way, it symbolizes a particularly French-German-Swiss vision of urbane, late-industrial modernism, somewhere between post-Bauhaus architecture and space-age home furnishings. Before Kai’s Power Tools, dance-club flyers, ads, and interiors sported that neo-psychedelic look, all busy and color-saturated and passionate. After Kai’s Power Tools, everything became streamlined and direct and icy-hot.
Some observers might disdain this trend as a regression, away from nostalgia for the celebratory sensuality of 1969 and toward nostalgia for the disciplined, repressive coolness of 1961. I see it as something else, something a little more progressive. To me, the Kai’s Power Tools look is one of invitation and seduction. The old rave look was a very inward iconography, which could only be fully appreciated (or even decoded) if you were already part of the “tribe” (or if you had previously taken the same specific drug-trips the visuals were trying to imitate). The Kai’s incarnation of Helvetica invites newcomers into its deceptively ordered-seeming realm. Instead of an invite-only orgy, it’s a seduction. Elsewhere in early-’60s-relic-land…
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE `WORLD’: We’d previously written that the classic TV soap opera might be a doomed art form in the U.S., because overall network ratings might continue to diminish beyond the point of fiscal viability for these expensive, never-to-be-rerun drama episodes. This is essentially why NBC made the widely-predicted but still shocking decision to cancel the 35-year-old Another World, the network’s second-longest-running entertainment series. It’s been among the lowest-rated soaps for a decade (locally, KING-TV didn’t even run it for two years). But NBC’s dropping AW and keeping the even lower-rated Sunset Beach, because SB has a few more viewers in the prized young-female demographic.
Sure, there are the usual save-our-show fan movements and websites out there, and calls and faxes are descending on other broadcast and cable networks with pleas to keep AW going. But, so far, it’s been to no avail, and the last episode’s still scheduled for the end of June. These other networks probably view AW as unsalvagable. For too many years, too many popular characters have been killed off or otherwise written out, either in budget cuts or in moves to make AW more like NBC’s only successful soap, Days of Our Lives. Instead of stories of equally-sympathetic characters caught up in irreconcilably-conflicting motivations and goals, the producers and writers have gone the DOOL route of building everything around the machinations of one-dimensional supervillains. The largely unwatchable results turned off many longtime AW loyalists while failing to attract many new converts.
AW was originally conceived by soap genius Irna Phillips to be a spinoff of As the World Turns (hence the title). That aspect of the concept was dropped when the show landed on NBC instead of CBS, but it remained a more melodramatic, turmoil-ridden version of a regular extended-family story. (Appropriately enough for the angst-ridden storylines, it’s always been taped at the former Biograph silent-movie studios in Brooklyn, on the same stages where D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation.) AW found its peak during the ’70s under writer Harding LeMay. In 1974 it became the first soap to expand to an hour, a trend followed by most of the other successful serials and causing the squeezing-out of several long-running half-hour shows.
Now, it’s being squeezed out as a casualty of the new TV economics. A movie runs only a couple of hours but lives forever. A daytime soap is constructed to continue indefinitely, but when it ends it ends for good. When AW goes, an entire fictional universe carefully built up by successive writers, actors, and technicians, and taken to heart by generations of viewers, will disappear into the ether of the airwaves, preserved only on reels of archival videotape.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we start talking about the age-old issue of “what this town really needs,” continue to work for justice-and-or-peace, pray for warmth, and consider this remark by Seattle’s own Gypsy Rose Lee, referring to someone else as being “descended from a long line that her mother listened to.”
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
Journeys of the Mind:
Yourgrau, Mygrau, Ourgrau
Book feature, 4/28/99
HAUNTED TRAVELLER:
An Imaginary Memoir
by Barry Yourgrau
Arcade Publishing, $23.95
Barry Yourgrau, as he insists on telling us (in the least interesting segment of his latest collection of “sudden fiction” sketches), is, in real life, yet another middle-aged, N.Y.C.-based author whose existence is centered around the old home office and whose “adventures” tend to involve sitting at the keyboard, trying to think stuff up.
Actually, his life’s been a little more exciting than that. He’s had side careers in acting and performance art (the latter basically involving telling his stories to live audiences). The bulk of the press packet for his new book,Haunted Traveller, consists of article clippings regarding the ill-fated film version of his last collection, The Sadness of Sex. (The movie, which alternated between readings and re-enactments of Yourgrau’s surrealistic mini-tales of obsession and low-key angst, remains unreleased after only a few producer-paid screenings in L.A.)
The Sex book, however, was and is a triumph. It can essentially be described as a sequence of brief, finely-described dream/nightmare imageries, mostly built not on erotic excitement but on sexuality’s other easy-to-push buttons–despair, loneliness, frustration, fear, embarassment, farce, compulsion, emotional turmoil, and the particularly hetero-male metaphor of finding oneself lost within an alien (and potentially unfriendly) environment, apprehensive yet compelled to continue surveying.
It’s no big stretch, then, for Yourgrau to switch to deconstructing travel-memoir cliches in his newest themed collection of fiction-oids.
I feel I’d spoil it if I mentioned too many of Yourgrau’s ingenious story premises here, because their downbeat, Kafkaesque revelation forms the whole point of many of his pieces. Like that mythical Japanese tour group that spends days on a bus to the Grand Canyon and then turns back after taking a few snapshots, Yourgrau never spends more time in any one fictive place than he deems necessary.
I am comfortable saying all the stories are based on the same premise: A first-person narrator travels, usually by foot, across strange and distant lands where he happens to speak the local language well enough to get involved (usually against his better judgement) with assorted citizenry and strange phenomena. It’s a classic storytelling setup (used everywhere from The Odyssey and Gulliver’s Travels to TV’s Route 66 and even Pokemon). But in Yourgrau’s deft hands, it serves less to introduce colorful short-term characters than to illuminate glimpses of his unnamed protagonist’s own persona. Through the 40 or so vignettes, we end up learning a lot less about the assorted places and people the Haunted Traveller meets than we do about the Traveller’s own rootlessness, his restlessness, his need to keep seeing more and more places and to never see too deeply into any one of them.
I will also reveal that the last piece, “Music,” finds the Traveller’s soul finally at rest, only after he’s no longer capable of continuing his lifelong escape from his own mortality.
In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau deconstructed lust. In Haunted Traveller, he deconstructs wanderlust. In both collections (and in two earlier books Arcade’s reissuing), he uses the precision techniques of the short-short story to provide a well-balanced exhibition of tiny glimpses into the human condition. Think of it as literary pointillism, or as the use of breadth to tell what depth cannot.
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:
Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.
Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.
Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”
How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…
TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…
GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.
History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.
In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.
Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.
There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.
Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)
Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).
AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.
AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).
SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…
SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)
But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…
BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”
Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.
Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.
Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.
So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
Precious Is As Precious Does:
Tell It To McSweeney
Alterna-journal feature, 3/31/99
Hard not to like a magazine whose almost all-text cover starts out, “People, People—Stop blaming yourselves! Have you forgotten: Timothy McSweeney’s Blues/Jazz Odyssey? (For short, say ‘McSweeney’s’) Also known as: ‘Pollyanna’s Bootless Errand.'” This sort of quaint, literate entertainment doesn’t stop for the next 192 pages and back cover.
For decades now (even before TV’s ascendancy), left- and right-wing Puritans alike have bemoaned Americans’ supposed disinterest in The Word; when actually it’s been dull word-packages that’ve drawn all the yawns. If literary journals, political position papers, and highbrow essays could be presented with this sense of smart whimsey, the verbal marketplace could be a quite different landscape indeed.
The origins of McSweeney’s are somewhat remarkable. David Eggers used to edit Might, one of those San Francisco magazines that claim to be “regional” or even “national” in scope but which end up almost never writing about anything outside San Francisco. Might’s post-Spy brand of smug satire wasn’t all that hot in this reviewer’s opinion, but it generated enough impressive portfolio clippings that, upon its demise, Eggers shipped off to NYC to make his way in the “real” magazine racket. There, he plies his way through what he describes as mind-numbing day-job employment at dumb, audience-despising corporate publishing; while by night, from his Brooklyn home office, he puts out McSweeney’s and its associated web site, both as an outlet for his and other writers’ “real” work and as a low-budget example of how word-wrangling ought to be done.
The second McSweeney’s finally arrived in local stores, a little over four months after the first issue of the “Quarterly Concern” appeared. Worth the wait? Yeah.
Within the densely-typeset covers are slightly less densely-typeset interior pages, comprising a variety of pleasant and often insightful prose, fiction, and humor. Of particular note is “Hooper’s Bathhouse” by co-editor Todd Pruzan. It’s a neat, tidy, precise send-up of children’s adventure fiction (one of those genres frequently touted by self-proclaimed defenders of The Word as something we must force-feed our kiddies whether they like it or not), in particular the 1980s “choose your own adventure” subset of that genre. Some of the paths in the story (spread out throughout the magazine) lead to nothing but afternoon boredom. Some lead to afternoon boredom amplified by underage pot smoking. And one path leads to the child heroes discovering some real old-time sea pirates—who promptly slay the kids.
With such a perfect example of exposing the predictability of formula fiction, it’s almost silly to refer to the magazine’s factual stories as “stranger than fiction.” Yet that tired phrase well applies to Sean Wilsey’s “The Republic of Marfa,” a long, leisurely account of an extremely remote west Texas hamlet that got turned into one of those southwest art-colony towns more commonly found in New Mexico and Arizona, and which hosted an international conference on modern architecture whose visiting egos barely fit in the region’s wide open spaces.
Many other delights await within the second McSweeney’s. I’ll leave it for you to find them, in the magazine and on the website. Just remember two of the slogans on issue #2’s cover, “Have Pity,” and “Precious Is As Precious Does.”
Perhaps if it came out more often, I could get tired of the preciousness. But 4x/year, plus weekly-or-so online doses, works out just fine. Beyond the preciousness, though, could McSweeney’s help spur a revival of fine copywriting and editing, of reading for pleasure? Couldn’t hurt trying. Or, as the motto on the bottom of issue #1’s cover states, “We Mean No Harm.”
MISC. HAS FAIRLY GOOD local news and confusing/depressing international news to comment upon this week, but first your update about the best-of-Misc. book (titled, for the time being, The Misc. Book). Layout and proofreading are proceeding apace; a couple different potential cover designs are being worked on; distribution arrangements are being negotiated. Right now, we’re aiming for a June release. As for the reissue of the old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, that might come a month or two later. More details forthcoming. (In the meantime, please suggest which local musical acts of the past four years should be in the new edition; via email or at our plangent Misc. Talk discussion boards.
ON THE STREET: Misc. was momentarily confused by the proliferation of street posters up on E. Pike Street (pasted onto plywood construction scaffolds, not light poles) for TheStreet.com. When I showed this to someone who’d just moved here last year, she said “only in Seattle,” with its now-mythical corps of under-30 techno-rich, would bohos perusing this form of sidewalk commercial-graffiti be considered potential clients of an online stock brokerage and investment-advice site. I’m not so sure about the “only” part. If anything, Seattle has (or used to have) fewer trust-fund hipsters than the larger media towns. Now, though, with the cost of living around Capitol Hill creeping toward NYC levels, it might be getting to the point where you have to have money in order to live the antimaterialist ideology. Either that, or the posters were aimed at the upscale gay-dance-club clientele also swarming the Pike-Pine corridor these days. Speaking of which…
NOSTALGIA FOR THINGS NOT ALL THAT WORTHY OF REMEMBERING: The ARO.Space club recently promoted an ’80s-nostalgia dance night under the moniker “Star 80.” As if anybody who remembers the era would find exciting, joyous connotations from that sleazy movie (which starred Mariel Hemingway as a real-life Vancouver model-actress stalked and slain by the sicko hubby she’d left behind).
SUCH OCCASIONAL LAPSES OF TASTE ASIDE, though, the one-year anniversary of ARO.Space (in a club climate, particularly a dance-club climate, where high-budgeted spaces sometimes go under interior construction for eight months only to close after three) means something. Last week I ran into the Dutch journalist who interviewed me about the post-“grunge” aftermath last year; among other recent insights, she said she was surprised ARO.Space had apparently succeeded despite being so unlike anything in “The Seattle Scene.” I begged to differ. First of all, there’s always been an audience of inferiority-complexed hipster wannabes here who’ll rush to anything billed as an authentic copy of whatever’s hot in NY/SF. Of course, to get them to keep coming back means you have to have something they’ll actually like on a non-imitative level.
That’s the place’s genius: It seems alien, not at all like “The Seattle Scene,” yet it fits right in. The Nordic-cool furnishings, the MS “new money” feel, the sleek blandness, the polite aloofness of the place, all complement the current and the classic Seattle-bourgeois zeitgeist. They complement different aspects of that zeitgeist than the grungers did, but then again the grungers were, at least on one level, rebelling against the affluent, self-satisfied mindset ARO.Space gloriously celebrates. I wrote when the place opened that, on one level, it looked like the product of gay men trying to assimillate into regular upper-middle-class society. I’ve since realized it’s more like the product of gay men taking their rightful place among the taste-definers of regular upper-middle-class society.
It’s taken time, a long time, for me to accept this, but modern-day affluent Seattle really is a lot more like the fictional universe of TV’s Frasier than I’ve ever wanted to admit. Its cold aloofness can seem to outsiders as arrogance, though it’s really due more to emotional repression. It wallows in superficial benchmarks of “good taste,” often involving gourmet dining and starchy social propriety. It believes in stark, spare design, complete with pastel shades not found in nature. It defines itself by its consumer choices (even the “anti-consumerists” and the “downshifters”). And while it’s proud as heck of its town, it’s afraid to try to do its own thing. So a place that promises the hottest, beat-iest imported dance-music fads, in seemingly bold yet ultimately retro-modern surroundings, is more comfortably, reassuringly “Seattle style” than it might seem.
(Its owners should’ve been expected from the start to know this. ARO.Space’s owners are part of the informal clique of local hip-capitalists whose various members, in various combinations and partnerships, have various stakes in Tasty Shows, Sweet Mother Records, Linda’s, the Capitol Club, the Baltic Room, Bimbo’s Bitchen Burrito Kitchen and Cha Cha Lounge, Rudy’s Barber Shops, and the soon-to-open Ace Hotel.)
This also means (not as ironically as it might seem) that the dance-music scene isn’t as un-Seattle as its biggest local fans might wish it to be. Passive-aggressive consumption of imported sounds, looks, and attitudes is as endemic to Seattle as it is to any city in the “other 48” states. In an age of corporate-media consolidation, nothing’s more timely (or less “alternative”) than “live” entertainment that’s all “in the can” (or on CDs and 12-inch vinyl records), whose only human components (the DJ/curators) are themselves often NY/Calif. fly-ins. What would be out of place in this particular aspect of Seattle would be to develop dance musicians, DJs, and audiences who were less afraid of trying to create their own sounds.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WAR: That’s how it seemed this week. The town was collectively bored by the Sonics’ irregular performance during the NBA’s irregular regular season, and indeed generally blase; as the long dreary winter refused to completely go away. The Fringe Festival had come and gone, leaving the small-time theatrical promoters exhausted and burned-out. Downtown, more excitement came from a high speed chase on Friday (cop cars had followed a carful of bank robbers all the way from Shoreline to the GameWorks block) than from the now-familiar ritual of antiwar protests. It just might be that Clinton’s lite-right Pentagon-coddling has finally succeeded in silencing the pacifist left and the isolationist right (or, rather, cowering them into a stance of hopelessness to change the situation).
This means this president (and probably the next one) will get to use the last-remaining-superpower-blah-blah-blah not to “fight two major wars simultaneously” (the Pentagon planners’ latest excuse for ever-escalating weapons budgets) but to push around any little regime anywhere, within carnage-levels the domestic opinion polls say the U.S. voting public will tacitly accept, and when and where it’s deemed strategically valuable to do so. It’s true the Serb regime’s despotic and genocidal.
It’s also true the Kosovo war is essentially a war of secession, like the U.S. Revolutionary and Civil wars (and Chechnya, Bangladesh, Tibet, East Timor, Eritrea, and other wars in which the White House either stayed out or supported the existing regimes). So, after a decade of Serbs and their vassals and ex-vassals fighting and killing and retaliating with too-little-too-late U.S./UN/NATO involvement, why bomb Belgrade now? Maybe becuase it’s politically feasible now. Maybe because the realpolitik gamers decided to take down one of Europe’s last vestiges of Soviet-style rule. Maybe because the realpolitik guys felt they needed to support a Muslim-dominated self-rule movement for a change, after verbally or physically bashing Islamic fundamentalists in so many other lands. And maybe because our leaders could somehow identify with the Kosovars’ plight to an extent they couldn’t with the Timorese or the Eritreans.
But now that the bombs have fallen, the situation can’t help but keep getting stickier and bloodier and more intractable. The bombing strafes might be promoted as clean, modern warfare minimizing potential U.S. casualties, but war’s never as clean in real life as it seems on paper (or in role-playing games).
UNTIL NEXT TIME, when we hope there’ll be happier news to report, ponder these thoughts from Aldous Huxley: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards..”
Going to ‘The Dogs’
Original book essay, 3/24/99
The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary
by Rebecca Brown
City Lights Books, $10.95 (paperback)
First, the behind-the-scenes stuff you might remember from a few months back: Seattle author Rebecca Brown made the highly acclaimed The Gifts of the Body, a slightly fictionalized memoir about her days as a volunteer caregiver to AIDS patients. Then, she got a healthy deal with HarperCollins for her next novel. Then, HarperCollins proprietor Rupert Murdoch ordered management to cut expenses, after the company vastly overspent on celebrity books (including one by Murdoch’s pal Newt Gingrich). Brown’s The Dogs was one of the titles dropped, after it had already been announced in company publicity documents. It finally came out months later from a smaller press, for a smaller advance.
But enough of that. Now let’s talk about the book itself, for it’s truly a fine little piece of work which ought to stand on its own rather than as a survival story of the publishing-consolidation wars. To understand the premise, you have to start with the back cover text, which defines a “bestiary” as a “medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” The lesson taught in this tale isn’t as clear as something the Brothers Grimm or Aesop might have told (especially in the original, violent versions), but it still haunts.
Our nameless heroine/narrator, an introverted young adult living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with little need or desire for companionship, meets, or runs into, or is run into by, a doberman pinscher. The narrator takes the dog into her tiny studio apartment, names her Miss Dog, and establishes an emotional bond with the creature beyond any she’d known with her fellow humans.
Then, somewhere around page 32, things get spooky. Miss Dog has a litter of puppies. Then the narrator also gives birth to a litter of puppies. Then more dogs of various ages and demeanors start appearing, as if from nowhere, in the apartment. They follow the narrator wherever she goes, seen by nobody else yet all too physically real to her. Then Miss Dog surgically removes the narrator’s heart, then feeds it back to her chopped up into hors d’ouvres. Then she’s ritually deflated, as a balloon, so there’s more room in the apartment for the ever-increasing numbers of dogs.
As strange as this reads in this summary form, it all makes perfect dream-logic as Brown tells it. She gradually increases the surrealism quotient, patiently (well, as patiently as can be done in a 166-page tale) luring her readers into the heroine’s otherworldly plight.
Brown also never gives an “it was just a dream” cop out. Instead, she ends the heroine’s tale of woe and harrassment on a thickly-disguised therapeutic note, as the heroine finally learns what the dogs had come to her for, to show her what had been missing from her own soul (or something like that). I also cannot do justice here to Brown’s elegant, exquisite prose. Mere excerpts wouldn’t show you the tone, the delicate pacing, of her work. You’ve really got to pick this up for yourself.
THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)
SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)
AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.
BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”
SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.
For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).
Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:
You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.
‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”
SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.
As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).
Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.
NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)
During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.
SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.
Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…
BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.
Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…
WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.
This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)
Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”
