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AS LONGTIME READERS KNOW, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the behind-the-scenes leveraging of power and influence.
I just believe it doesn’t work the way the conspiracy people claim. Power in modern-day America doesn’t flow through the Knights Templar or the Bildebungen. It flows through golf-course gladhanding, alumni dinners, and especially the flow of political campaign money. You don’t need to romanticize about the Illuminati–the ugly truth about the power elite is mostly out in the harsh bright open.
This has never been as true as it is with the current Presidential administration.
George W. Bush, appointed by appointed Supreme Court justices, has no electoral mandate and knows it. His First Hundred Days (aside from an overhyped diplomatic rift with China) was entirely devoted to proposing measures to help the only three groups of people he cares about:
Well, actually, that’s not exactly the case. Bush fils doesn’t even care about all the rich. He doesn’t care about manufacturing or shipping or agriculture or media or those troubled tech companies.
He only cares about the specific interest groups that funded his campaign–specifically, the oil, mining, and other extraction-based industries.
Which brings us to Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel
Underworld.
The book’s sprawling narrative encompasses many themes, but chief among them is a highly linear sense of American history. DeLillo’s trajectory follows the center of U.S. influence and money away from the Northeast (as symbolized by New York’s onetime domination of baseball) toward the inland west (as symbolized by giant chain-owned landfills).
At the time it first came out, I thought it was a kind of reverse nostalgia piece, a complaint about a trend that had already ended. The Yankees were back in dynasty mode, and finance was considered far more important than industry–especially those boring old resource industries, industries that deal in heavy-dirty things and don’t have hip urban offices with Foosball tables.
Oil was cheap, the metals markets were glutted with third-world imports, and in any event the future was going to be all about “pushing bits, not atoms,” as somebody at Wired once wrote.
I should have remembered something I always said in scoffing at linear-future sci-fi novels: Trends don’t keep going in the same direction forever. There are backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes.
The Age of W. is such a backlash. Call it the Revenge of the Oilmen. Bush’s sponsors/beneficiaries are the executives who were left behind by yesterday’s allegedly New Economy.
He’s doing his darnedest to put his friends back on top of the power-and-money heap, even if he has to put the whole rest of the country into a recession in the process.
If he has his way, he could try to turn all of America into an economy like that of certain rural Texas counties where a few oil and ranching families own everything and everyone else struggles.
NEXT: The real reason why delivery e-tailers are failing.
ELSEWHERE:
The Fiend Folio, Part 2by guest columnist Matt Briggs
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began to reminisce about a New Year’s Eve spent in a basement, playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to the Top 100 Rock Songs of All Time. Today, more of this memory.)
JERRY HOPEN HAD INVITED YOU, because in middle school he had been in Kelley’s game.
Jerry Hopen, because he was half Norwegian, was the biggest Chinese guy any of us had ever seen. We played in his basement, and when his mother came home, she stood on the threshold and asked him in Cantonese if he’d walked the dog. The name of the dog, Alamo, floated in her wavering syllables. Jerry often played the half-orc fighter character, decked out in heavy, sparkling armor. He dated Betsy Toth after Betsy finished with you, Justin, and would have married her if she hadn’t dumped him.
Greg Shupah was the first to go into the refrigerator and make everyone take a can of beer. He opened mine and told me to drink it. Greg was two years older than us and his friends had gradually stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, one by one, until he was playing with kids a year younger, and then he was playing with us.
Greg never attended school, and always showed up to the game an hour early and sat in the basement reading comic books. He read The Uncanny X-Men and kept the issues in Mylar bags. He held the glossy cover open in his palm and laughed to himself without explaining what he found amusing and then he would carefully close the cover and slip it into the shiny bag.
He was one of the tallest boys in the school, but because he didn’t like to sweat, he didn’t play basketball. He regarded the limit of absent days per quarter, seventeen, as a constraint to be creatively circumvented.
Greg didn’t fit in most chairs, and usually sat on the sofa. Greg often played wizards that threw strange objects. That News Year’s Eve he had spent five minutes explaining the way his character’s weapons looked–three-foot knives, with assorted nicks and repairs on the blades, and only one edge. “The back edge, remember, is flat.” His ideal character was always ambidextrous.
Mark Imel was short and perfectly formed and a red head with freckles and had a soft way of speaking that sounded like he was attempting to calm everyone down. Everything he did, he did as if it was important to sound sincere. Greg ribbed Mark until Mark jumped out of his chair and wrestled Greg to the ground and muttered, “Say you’re sorry Greg. Say it before I snap.”
Mark had dropped out of Math Club shortly before you showed up Justin, and after this, you and Mark would go out to the pipeline and smoke a bowl during the morning break. Naturally, Mark often played the cleric because someone had to have the ability to heal the other players and he did not want to rock the boat.
John Segrist was a year younger than the rest of us. He had gigantic forearms like Popeye the Sailor Man. If the game slowed down, John would begin to twitch and we never knew what John would do. He and Jerry, because they hated cats, sometimes shared what-they-did-to-the-damn-cat stories, which often involved basketball hoops, bottle rockets, or Dobermans.
When John rolled the dice, he stood up on the couch where he sat next to Greg, blew on them, and thew them against the table, knocking over miniatures, and losing the twenty-sided dice under the coffee table. John almost always played thieves.
“Can I have a beer to celebrate? We can all have another beer, now? It’s New Year’s Eve,” you finally asked. “And I just spent an hour filling out this four-page form.” But it was my show and as Dungeon Master, I didn’t want anyone getting drunk.
We played for six hours of uninterrupted play when Jerry, under the guise of correcting one of my mistakes, threw a dice at my face.
This was the convention: If someone else made a mistake and I didn’t catch them, then they threw a dice at my nose. If there was any break in the continuity of the story, really, either in a flubbed improvisational line, an unrealistic character, some plot point or detail that changed, the players had the right to throw plastic objects–mostly the twelve sided dice because it was cast out of a slightly softer plastic resin–at my nose. I have a hollow notch about half way up my nose, and this was their target. Jerry’s throw flatly hit the notch and a sound like a wooden clacker knocked in the basement.
“Let me try that again,” Jerry said and then you and Jerry began hurling things at me and then, when you said, “It’s Miller time,” everyone, except me, got up and followed you to the refrigerator. After that, we were just all drinking and listening to the KZOK countdown. The songs went: “I have my back against the wrecking machine” and “Roxanne, Why do you sell your body to the night” and “Inna Godda DaVida, honey.”
Sitting there, I could feel the pieces of the four-year-old fantasy slipping away, and the scattered miniatures were no longer wizards and gnomes and hobgoblins, but hunks of lead.
Jerry Hopen went into the Navy and became a nuclear tech and was decommissioned at twenty-one years old.
Greg Shupah and Mark Imel–after discovering LSD, which they called Uncle for some inexplicable reason–anointed themselves ‘Cid Prophets and went to Texas to spread the word of lysergic acid and The Lord. They were arrested in a crowded church, so the story goes, somewhere down there.
John Segrist and I held onto that game, that game you were in the process of shattering, Justin. John and I played that game until John’s addiction to over-the-counter cough syrup, Robitussin that he called ‘tussin to be exact, became so severe that his parents sent him to Idaho.
I never did anything with you after that, and I don’t know what happened to you. But that night, we got drunk, and I was made fun of because I was drunk after only three beers, and we howled and played air guitar to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” that song that goes: mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah over and over again.
Do you remember, Justin, you hoped up on the coffee table and kicked the battle in progress, the polyhedron dice going everywhere, and ground the Chee-tos into Jerry’s couch, and you howled and we all howled along with you?
NEXT: The first of a new occasional series revisiting every home I’ve ever lived in.
The Fiend Folio, Part 1
by guest columnist Matt Briggs
YOU DID NOT BELONG, JUSTIN KRAMER.
We wanted to believe that you fit in with us, or rather, we wanted to believe that we could fit in with you and wear your shirt.
You remember your black and white horizontal striped button-down shirt, the same as the one in the Def Leppard video, “Pour Some Sugar on Me?” I’m sure Betsy Toth bought you that shirt when she outfitted you at the Squire Shop after she had acquired your pretty freshmen face. She introduced you to beer and dope and the volleyball squad.
After Betsy Toth, you carried menthols and Schlitz to Kelly Yoshitomi’s weekly Friday evening Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. You were barred from his house after his mother found a beer can stuffed with butts behind the bonsai stand in her rock garden.
Now you came to my game, stumbling down the stairs an hour late smelling like cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.
It was New Year’s Eve, and you were a normal American boy, so you had two half-racks of Milwaukee’s Best under your arms. Even so, you should have noticed the five-foot vinyl map with the inch grid calibrated to match the lead miniatures; you should have noticed the customized four page character sheets designed in MacWrite using the blackletter Old English typeface; you should have noticed the distinctly non-alcoholic odor of Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and damp Reeboks.
When I looked up and asked you, “Friend or Foe?” instead of laughing and saying, “We’ll see,” you should have taken the clue right then. You should have turned around and gone to the park and polished the beer off, alone. “You’re an hour late,” Jerry Hopen told you. “Sit down and roll up your character.” He confiscated the beer.
“Where did you get those?” John Segrist asked.
“I picked up it up on the way over,” you said vaguely, alluding to a bored familiarity with the whole process of getting beer.
“Can I have one?”
“No,” I said. “We have a game to play.”
Jerry put the cases in the refrigerator in the back room.
We were in an extended post-adolescent funk exacerbated not just by the pimply breakouts brought on by a pure 7-Eleven diet of hot dogs, nachos, and Super Big Gulps but because we hadn’t actually said anything substantial to each other out of role-playing game character since the age of thirteen.
We spent more time in the fantasy realm of extended wish fulfillment, devoted to the exquisite pleasures of not only rescuing damsels in distress but waltzing through remote towns as desperadoes swinging vorpal blades and bastard swords than we did sleep.
We disdained other players, and therefore you should have never even been invited, Justin.
One of the real pitfalls of playing role-playing games was the inflation fueled by the desire for omnipotence. Each player ended up with characters limited only by the individual player’s outer margin of imaginative hubris. These characters could stop the universe on a whim. The players squabbled to determine who was the baddest. When these players squabbled, universes exploded and the game collapsed back to five kids sitting around a dirty table in some dimly lit basement screaming at each other.
To prevent any break in the continuity of the fantasy, we had developed a complex manifesto describing the aesthetic of our game. This wasn’t kids’ stuff. We were wizards and shamans and there were rules to be obeyed in this fantasy as inviolable as the laws of physics.
You brought your own player character written on the thin, official TSR-issued player character sheet, and I said, “Put that away. You will have to start over again.” Our group allowed no outside characters because they had dubious experience in a different universe and brought with them foreign artifacts with dimly understood magical properties.
I recorded the features of our magical items in a private ledger, and we referred to each item by number. The detail of the game stayed with a single player, the official Dungeon Master, who couldn’t have a player character. I was the Dungeon Master and devised the metaphysical rules of the game, and determined everything from how gravity worked to the precise arc of a fireball. You didn’t understand that individual groups of players played the game as removed from each other as terrorist cells.
Our games proceeded slowly, each one taking progressively longer. They had at first dragged out for weeks, and then months, and the game that you broke up, Justin, had been going for over two years, and despite the interruption you had introduced, would continue until it sputtered out in 1989, with the members of the game spread out to the four corners of the US–Jerry Hopen as a corpsmen in California, Greg as an LSD-fueled prophet in Texas, Mark Imel as a busboy in Washington state, John institutionalized in Idaho, and me in basic training in New Jersey. I don’t know what happened to you.
The radio played “Barracuda.” We spent an hour drafting your character. While we played, we listened to KZOK (“Seattle’s Hardest Rock Station”) count down the hundred greatest rock n’ roll songs of all time. The songs reeled out, toward the grail of the greatest ten songs.
The entire list revolved the eternal roster of canonical of rock songs. They came, from our perspective, from the nameless past, somewhere in the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, from the time before we bought LPs. The sequence of songs seemed as solid as the stars and the constellations, moving toward Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watch Tower,” “We Will Rock You,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hotel California,” and finally, “Stairway to Heaven.”
An upsetting year when “Kashimer” replaced “Stairway.”
NEXT: The tale continues.
PEOPLE ARE WRITING MORE THESE DAYS.
Some written-word defenders apparently don’t like it.
Yeah, some of the same types of hibrow guys n’ gals who, just a few years ago, were all a-moanin’ about the supposed Death Of The Word are now all a-moanin’ about the exploding volume of words being issued by persons less astute than themselves.
In a recent NY Times piece, they kvetched to high heaven about e-mails and chat rooms and newsgroups and other online verbosity collectors wherein ordinary folk who don’t even have graduate degrees can show off their noun-‘n’-verb-wranglin’ skills (or lack thereof) for all to see, in almost-real time.
The careful discipline of written English will collapse if this is allowed to continue, cry these SNOOTs (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term of self-description in the April Harper’s).
I say bunk. Double bunk and triple bunk, even.
Fortunately, my longtime pal Rob Wittig was around to add a voice-O-sanity to the NYT piece. He (correctly, I believe) noted that online writing is an exciting, albeit no longer really new, medium, whose rules and conventions are still in great flux. We’re not seeing the end of Real Writing, or even the beginning of the end, but the slow beginning of our ever-evolving language’s next phase.
To Wittig’s statements, I’d add that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect (certainly there are dozens of awful fiction and poetry writers who’ve never goten significantly better and probably never will). But there’s no way to become a decent writer without it–especially if it’s in a medium that can give you near-instant feedback and criticism.
So yes! More chat rooms! More mail lists! More weblogs! More message boards! More personal websites!
Keyboard-and-mouse jockeys of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your would-be silencers!
NEXT: Et tu, KCMU?
WITH THE STEADY RISE of DIY culture, and the increased hype over electronic books, printing-on-demand, and other newfangled verbal-delivery systems, has come a mild (so far) outcry from defenders of publishing’s old guard.
This is somewhat different from the Napster uproar and related rants against the music industry. In regard to music, there’a a general consensus among the ranters that the big corporations running the show are slick, corrupt money-grubbers and always have been.
But book publishing, the conventional wisdom goes, is, or was, or is supposed to be, a fraternity of tweed-clad, nice old men who live for the passion of nuturing capital-L Literature. Instead of rebelling against the book biz’s middlemen, these critics claim we should defend their importance.
Publishing’s current obsession with hype and market-share, under the control of some of the same media conglomerates that run the music business, is seen by these critics as a mere unfortunate anomaly, a digression from some Platonic ideal of the book trade.
That, as you might expect me to say by now, is a crock of bull.
Publishing’s always been about profit. it’s just that the tweed-suited guys worked for little companies before they got big, before they were fully integrated into media-conglomerate “synergies.”
As noted in a recent Times essay by my ol’ pal Fred Moody, who’s put out two books thru major NY publishers and seen scant return for the trouble, “authors have stored up so much enraged aggrievance that that alone could propel electronic publishing and distribution into being, with enough energy left over to fill California’s electricity needs forever.”
And a small-press or even self-published book doesn’t have to be an unreadable mess. It can be, of course, but so are many (if not most) corporately-published works.
There are thousands of self-released CDs out there, and I’d say they aren’t, on the average, as bad as some self-published books. My idea why: Most musical performers still have to learn their trade in front of live audiences. A band-made CD might not have slick 24-track production (although with digital recording, it often does), but it does carry, if it’s any good, a sense of the performer’s live act.
Too many self-published books contain material nobody’s read, heard, or critiqued before. Some author with a credit card just puts it out, hopes it’ll be loved, and gets disappointed when it isn’t.
There are ways to avoid that dreary fate, and they’re well-known ways. Authors should do what they can to make their works known and their schticks honed. Conferences, workshops, zines, live readings, broadsides, etc. etc.
And concerning the argument that some authors still need good editors to shape their work into readable form, an author who does need that help (like most of ’em) shouldn’t be ashamed of asking for it. If a writer’s gonna spend money to get a book or e-book out, s/he oughta spend just a little more on a good editor, designer, and/or packager.
Such as my humble self.
NEXT: Remember rain?
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about the Boeing Co.’s stunning news that it would set up a new, slimmed-down head office–which would be located away from the offices of any of its main operating groups (i.e., not in Seattle).
And yes, the media were right to give the story the big play they did (including NY Times and USA Today front page stories as well as wall-to-wall local coverage).
Only 500 or so of Boeing’s 78,000 Washington state staffers will go away or be laid off (local dot-coms alone have collectively topped that in some weeks this year). And Boeing’s vast Commercial Airplane Group (with all its own execs, engineers, salespeople, and assemblers) is staying put.
But a corporate HQ, even a rump holding-company HQ, still means something. It symbolizes an organization’s commitment to an on-the-ground community. Its removal to some neutral site, as we’ve already mentioned, is Boeing brass’s (expensive) statement that it’s turning its back on that “old economy” heritage, that it’s just another player on the global-corporate stage, untied to anyplace, anything, or anyone other than the transnational elite of financiers and dealmakers.
Of course, the idea that Boeing doesn’t want to be associated anymore with any one specific place doesn’t make things any nicer for the civic-leader types at this specific place.
Seattle, as you may know, has cared a lot more about Boeing than Boeing has about Seattle. True, the company continued to build planes here when it might’ve constructed plants in the home states of important defense-appropriation Senators.
But in return for that, the company sought, and almost always got, total subservience from local politicians, media people, and ordinary citizens. (The cover of the late Bill Speidel’s book The Wet Side of the Mountains: Exploring Western Washington included a cartoon image of hard-hatted workers kneeling and praying at the gates of a Boeing hangar.)
Seattle’s civic-development establishment has spent the past half-century or so trying to make sure this town became, and remained, the kind of town Boeing would want to keep calling home.
A place where top executives could retreat to their waterfront dachas, unbothered by the outside world.
A place where level-headed engineers could enjoy sane, tasteful leisure opportunities in sane, tasteful surroundings (with the hardhat workers and their rough-hewn ways exiled to the outskirts, a la Soweto).
A place of quiet intelligence and modest personal ambition, but also a place that would do anything within (or slightly beyond) reason to become “World Class.” We’ll build World Class stadia and convention facilities. We’ll host World Class trade confabs. But we’ll pretend we’re still an overgrown small town, where everybody’s laid-back and mellow and ultra-bland and ultra-white. This schizophrenic drive to be simultaneously big and small, aware and innocent, world-wise but not worldly (similar to the New Testament ideal to be “in the world but not of the world”) served Seattle, and Boeing, relatively well for many years, until its contradictions started becoming too apparent in recent years.
Now, Boeing–the company that made the International Jet Set possible, thus spawning today’s rootless global financial elite–is redefining itself as neither in nor of the world, but as belonging to the Everywhere/Nowhere of that aforementioned elite.
The New Boeing will supply aircraft and satellite-communications equipment to keep the elite’s members in actual or virtual contact with one another and their assorted fiscal empires, while treating the rest of Planet Earth as one big “flyover zone.”
NEXT: A special offer.
“DISINTERMEDIATION” is one of those buzzwords you hear in communications circles every now and then.
Applied to the online universe, the word is usually applied to individuals talking and/or writing to other individuals, rather than media professionals gathering huge massed audiences.
There’s a middle ground between these two extremes, though. It’s the e-mail list, discussion board, or website (such as this one) in which somebody puts together well-chosen words for a well-defined niche audience, or for anybody willing to read on.
We’ll look at a couple of local sites of this type today.
Seattle Stories is, as its name implies, an informal and friendly collection of little narratives. Most are seeded by the site’s creators Erik Benson, Stephen Deken, and Alan Taylor; but they’re soliciting, and starting to obtain, tales from the site’s readers.
These are tales of everyday life. Taking trips, going out jogging, falling in love, raising kids, surviving earthquakes, etc. They’re simple, pretense-free, and full of heart.
Pax Adicus is principally a rave-culture site; its “Philo” section is full of sermons by two guys who seem to imagine that taking ecstasy makes them a superior species to the rest of us squares, rehashing all the familiar techno-talk buzzwords. But its “Read” section features the same guys (using the bylines Mc Cutcheon and Ooh the Sloth 456) in a more honest and refreshing mode, relating incidents about their partyin’ lives (drinking too much, falling in lust, driving around, visiting pals, etc.).
The stories are officially billed as fiction, but they’re real (on a heart-‘n’-soul level). When the site’s authors go preachin’ about MDMA and global trance revolutions, they unwittingly depict themselves as stereotyped trend-followers. When they set that aside and turn to the details of living, they become more fully-realized “characters.”
NEXT: Don’t turn social services over to the churches, turn them into business opportunities.
A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti
It’s the moment that always freezes my heart.
I’m at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we’re entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we’re in the bedroom.
She smiles, nods to the other stereo–this one smothered with candles or books–and offers “Music?”
For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.
What do I say? I say nothing.
We wouldn’t be this far if we didn’t appreciate each other’s taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.
Forget it, I say “sure” and pray that the music isn’t crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates–along with our mood–into nothing.
As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.
Slow, moody jazz from the ’50s and ’60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn’t cut it.
Judging by the LP jackets from the ’70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.
Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can’t touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.
So where is my lust-inducing music?
While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari’s Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio’s Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.
Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.
Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music’s embrace.
Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.
NEXT: The heroism of America’s TV critics (or at least one of ’em).
Critical Mass Exodus
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist discussed the sudden, management-pushed retirement of longtime Seattle Times film critic John Hartl. Today, a look at a quite different critical voice, also disappearing–a highbrow- and experimental-music zine.)
IT’S OFFICIAL: The Tentacle is jettisoning its ink edition. The current spring issue will be followed by a final one in a few months. The web site, www.tentacle.org, will probably continue to list shows, but this activity, like any resumption of the print version, depends on a dwindling supply of volunteer labor.
Although money is always tight in the magazine world, the main reason Tentacle helmsman Dennis Rea gives for quitting is that he and other collective members (Mike Marlin, Christopher DiLaurenti, and Carl Juarez) need to spend more time on their own projects.
A larger problem is that the community The Tentacle serves is too small. Of the dozens who regularly do, as the cover says, “free improv, avant-rock, new composition, noise, electro-acoustic, out jazz,” and other unusual forms, not enough folks contribute to the one publication that pays much attention to them.
Twenty subscribers and a handful of ads pay the bills, and it takes another twenty people to write, edit, lay out, publish, and distribute this 24-page, 8.5 X 11 newsprint denizen of the resonant deep.
In a way, the narrow focus is what made The Tentacle one of the most fascinating magazines around. I speared it when it first surfaced, about three years ago. At the time, I was editing the Washington Free Press and so was drawn to it as a beautifully designed shoestring-budget journal rather than as a kind of lobbying ploy on the part of some artists to get themselves noticed.
As a writer who’s done my share of such lobbying, I was also intrigued by the spirit of this mad venture. To read The Tentacle was to confront the apparent reality of a vast music scene that thrived on presenting experimental work.
In music, writing, or any other artistic discipline, works that fool around with the conventions of their craft are hard to sell. Unlike larger publications that ignore or ridicule such an approach to art, The Tentacle had a sense of humor about its place in the cultural food chain.
Of course, the expectations of artists who book and promote their own shows are nothing if not realistic. Then again, maniacs who spend years composing pieces that nobody may want to play or hear, refining techniques that seem more suited to a carnival than a concert stage, and striving for a perfection that must alienate in order to succeed are so idealistic as to make monks seem like venal hedonists.
The critical questions The Tentacle addressed weren’t the case-by-case judgments the overnight critic makes, but idealistic concerns. Instead of CD reviews and celebrity profiles for fans, there were CD release notifications and interviews and articles for fellow artists. The Tentacle provided a forum to define “creative” music and to discuss the relationship of politics to art; a place for book reviews, concert reports, cartoons, a calendar, and oddball features.
What is art? Why is art important? Which art matters?
These are the lines of investigation John Hartl and The Tentacle have pursued in their various ways.
I know these people and have written for these publications, but my stake in all this is personal only insofar as it is intellectual.
That is, the idea of devolving into a society where attitude-packed cheap shots replace thoughtful reviews and where experience, civil discourse, and consideration give way to picks-‘n-pans arts coverage is a threat to what I write, read, hear, see, and know.
People retire, magazines sink out of sight, and newspapers wrap fish.
NEXT: More things we’re losing.
Best of ‘Times’
IN FEBRUARY, John Hartl and The Tentacle more or less called it quits.
Apart from the coincidence of timing, these events wouldn’t strike most people as being connected in any way. A daily newspaper movie critic and an avant-garde music magazine collective of editor/publisher/writers might even seem to be enemies.
Besides, what common cause could there be between a hugely commercial art form, as exemplified by the Hollywood blockbuster known to all, and an assertively bizarre artistic foray, as exemplified by performances where the players have been known to outnumber the audience?
Maybe nobody in management at the downsized Seattle Times now appreciates that publication’s erstwhile status as Washington’s “paper of record,” but John Hartl did.
He made it his business to review everything. No matter how obscure the film or broke the theater or short the run, for 35 years Hartl went out of his way to let you know what was out there and what he thought about it. His consistency of views, depth of experience, and breadth of interests made his writing a reason to subscribe to that paper.
Although he will continue to cover movies for the Times as a freelancer, this coverage is bound to be less comprehensive than it was.
In the aftermath of a six-week strike, in which the paper lost $21 million while resisting contract demands that would have cost the company $3-4 million over one year, paternalist rules force returning strikers to be nice to bosses and scabs while bosses are free to sneer as they please, and morale is about what you would expect it to be at an office run by zombies whose Bible is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By not calling most striking reviewers back to work (and by urging long-time employees like Hartl to take early retirement), the paper has slashed arts coverage.
NEXT: Another fond adieu, this one to a most peculiar music zine.
CHICAGO, THEY LIKED TO SAY during the regime of the first Mayor Daley, was “a city that works.”
Seattle might be described as a city that works and works and works.
In the March issue of the spunky art zine The RedHeaded Stepchild, Jeff Miller suggests a focal point of the Seattle visual-art scene, and of the city as a whole: “Inasmuch as it has an identity, it’s about work.”
Quoting unidentified national mags, Miller sez LA’s schtick is the tits (“stuffed with silicone but fun to play with”); SF’s is the head (“tuned in or turned on, doing the brainwork”); Seattle’s is the foot (“working hard, shut up all day in socks and shoes, not welcome in polite company–pulling everything else along, but for no purpose, really, except hard work and money”).
“In Seattle,” Miller writes, “you work because it’s expected of you, because your dad did it, because you have no distractions; in short, because you’re a good Scandinavian. That’s also why–if I may stretch a little–you make and show your artn which means that Seattle’s response to the production/reception duality might be a different, but equally contemporary, kind of creation.”
Later on in his piece: “The fraction of our lives not taken up by work and sleep is occupied by home and television: if Los Angeles has claimed the latter two, then the former are left for the rest of us.
“I believe that Seattle’s spirit is shaped by exhausted American labor. The home of Microsoft understands, more than most, the sacrifice of life to paid employment. It has been a slacker haven, and an old-school blue-collar town. Artists, curators, and critics keep stopping by Seattle, looking for this city’s artistic voice, but the voice is never home: it’s too busy working a day job.
“In the end, I think the most striking feature of Seattle art might be the day job itself, or the negotiation between the job and artistic creation. Extraordinarily rich creations have sprung, perhaps, from LA’s strange preoccupation with domestic growth. The survival strategy that art negotiates in Seattle, the artistic response to the dominant features of this city’s environment, might then–as in LA–itself be the most compelling subject for the city’s art.”
Here we have an explanation for the MS workplace culture, and the Nordstrom workplace culture that preceded it.
It explains the homey, just-good-enough-without-being-showy aesthetic of the old Kingdome.
It explains the local theater scene’s historic emphasis on production rather than hype (and on accessible, workmanlike entertainment).
It explains the music scene’s emphasis on honesty and sincerity rather than hype and glamour. It explains the DIY obsession of the Olympia scene. Conversely, it also explains the powers-that-be’s historic distrust of bohemian culture and their abhorrance of youth culture.
It explains the REI culture’s vision of recreation not as “leisure” but as vigorous action.
It explains caffeine (the drug of active people) and Costco (where you have to work to shop).
It explains why we don’t care as much for passive icons such as beauty-pageant queens (unlike Portland).
It explains the neighborhood-activists’ drives to preserve Lake Union as “a working lake” and the Industrial District.
It doesn’t explain glass art (except the craftsmanship atttitudes associated with it), Kenny G (except as office music taken to the level of stardom), or the Hendrix cult (he was a soft-spoken, intelligent craftsman, but his public image among white boomers isn’t). But these could be exceptions that prove the rule.
It also might at least partly explain my own aesthetic preference toward honest working-stiff culture instead of the gussified-up prettiness emphasized in most Seattle picture books; and my abhorrance of the local media’s whole yup-leisure idolatry.
It explains why Greg Lundgren of the Vital 5 Productions gallery felt the need to start a little zine-and-poster “movement,” Artists for a Work-Free America. In someplace like Honolulu, Miami, or New Orleans, the value of letting-go and freeing your spirit aren’t things people need to be preached to about.
And it might explain civic leaders’ “world class” obsession (from the World’s Fair to the new fancy-schmancy buildings) as the expression of guys who wanted to be seen as constantly striving to be their best.
And it would certainly explain the city’s social schtick of uptight, polite “niceness.” It’s the schtick of a town that forever puts out the help-wanted sign “Now Hiring Smiling Faces,” and too often stigmatizes anyone guilty of insufficient perkiness.
And the menacing, near-psychotic grins on all the clean-cut yups’ faces in condo and restaurant ads? They’re the faces of characters who know they can’t ever let go of their passive-aggressive workplace personalities. Not even at home.
NEXT: A last look inside the OK Hotel.
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
NOT LONG AGO, we reviewed a couple of books about the late-2000 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.
Today, we look at a couple of videotaped documentaries chronicling these same events, Trade Off and This Is What Democracy Looks Like.
Trade Off was directed by Shaya Mercer, produced by ex-LA filmmaker Thomas Lee Wright, and made with a centralized crew (though with liberal use of TV footage of the conference and the protests).
Democracy comes from the Independent Media Center (which opened as a clearinghouse for WTO-protest alterna-media coverage and remains open) and Big Noise Films. The IMC has issued two other tapes packaged from its collected WTO footage, but this is the one it’s most heavily promoting online and in “alternative” print media.
It’s also the slickest. Directors Jill Freidberg and Rick Rowley gathered footage from some 100 contributing IMC volunteers as well as a dozen or two core crew members. It’s narrated by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy rapper Michael Franti and bigtime actress Susan Sarandon. It’s got all the modern digital-editing schticks that can now be accomplished on a low budget.
Both tapes offer the same heroes (third-world feminists, steelworkers, Ruckus Society organizers), villains (corporations, politicians, cops), and storyline (a massive groundswell of concerned folk from all over gather to take over the streets, get inhumanely roughed up by bad cops, take credit for the breakdown of negotiations inside the WTO conference, and start an exciting new era of mass activism).
But there are differences, especially in what each tape’s curators choose to include.
Trade Off, while made by professionals who might have been expected to dwell on the story’s exciting visuals, spends more time discussing the issues behind world trade and the centralization of political and economic power by big business and international financiers.
Democracy, despite coming from an activist organization with a political agenda to sell, prefers to dwell more on the spectacle of the protests themselves. It depicts the protestors and their organizers as the new counterculture heroes, and emphasizes the feel-good aspects of the protesting experience (the shared community, the sense of empowerment).
But as I’ve been saying these past 15 months, the protests will have ultimately failed if their only legacy is as a future nostalgia topic for the middle-aged of tomorrow.
So it’s Trade Off that expresses the best hope for a worthwhile WTO-protest legacy, one in which more folk become informed about the complexities of the issues surrounding their lives and livelihoods, then take an active role in helping change them.
As the black activist site Seditionists.org quotes author Barbara Ehrenreich, “There is a difference, the true seditionist would argue, between a revolution and a gesture of macho defiance. Gestures are cheap. They feel good, they blow off some rage. But revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have learned how to count very slowly to ten.”
NEXT: ‘Porn for conservatives’ or just another commercial niche?
Fast, Rich, And Out Of Control
(LAST TIME, our guest columnist began a bus trek through Mexico. Today, more non-travelogue thoughts on the topic.)
TALK IS CHEAP, anecdotal evidence is practically worthless, and discussions of traffic tend to veer from the personal to the philosophical and back again, in a hit or miss attempt to get a grip on a topic which often seems to control our lives.
I believe that Seattle traffic is faster, nastier, and more reckless than it was five years ago, that drivers here are less considerate of others on the road than they used to be, and that those tandem emblems of wealth-coddled “rugged individualism,” the driver’s cell phone and the SUV, exemplify a spirit of self-interest that sets the pace of the American road.
Given more than its share of monied thugs, a geography that funnels traffic over bridges (and thwarts the installing of tracks), gas prices and highway taxes that subsidize car drivers, and a recent growth surge that clogs arterial streets that once were fairly clear, Seattle is the model of a city that desperately needs but rarely heeds the call for better public transportation. As much as we need better transit systems (or just more busses), we need even more a reason not to drive.
Compared to Seattle-area traffic, traffic in and around Guadalajara, on secondary roads between cities in the central highlands, and in the farm country of Michoacan is more mannered yet more unrestricted—that is, somewhat more polite and vehemently more stylized in its execution of certain wild maneuvers. Two-lane roads become four-lane superhighways, as passing vehicles create a middle lane or lanes around the center line, gently forcing other vehicles to drive on the shoulder. Bicycles be damned.
In the cities the pace is hectic, but drivers usually obey the laws and don’t attack the pedestrians, who may jaywalk at their own risk. Although the traffic seems a bit more relaxed in Mexico than it is in the U.S., stories of kids behind the wheel, drunks on highway killing sprees, and carjackers on patrol in cities loom like threats to urge people to take the bus.
Car ownership in Mexico, where the average annual income is less than the cost of a car, means a lot more than it does in the U.S., but the extra boost in respect or status a Mexican driver might assume doesn’t come loaded with a corresponding scorn for others on the road. This may be the most difficult rule of the road for an American to accept: That people aren’t automatically inferior because they don’t drive, that people who need to or choose to take public transportation deserve a decent ride.
Not that this custom is hard to take down there, but that such civility makes it a shame to come home.
NEXT: A beauty makeover gone hilariously wrong.
Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.
While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.
To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.
Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.
While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.
And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.
Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.
This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.
A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.
No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?
Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.
“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”
NEXT: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.
