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LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.
And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.
Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).
Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.
When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.
I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”
Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.
But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.
The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.
But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.
(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)
Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.
Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:
“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”
Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.
TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.
IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.
ELSEWHERE:
Shifty Business
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE used to be a joke, a pathetic sort of capitalist propaganda that aimed to make suckers buy new cars with sharp fins or safety razors with finer blades.
Appeals to a consumer’s sense of style seemed as harmless as specious mechanical engineering claims. Even if these companies spent millions of dollars to persuade you to buy their stuff, the choice was yours. The insecure and the gullible were welcome to burn their money in quest of an identity makeover or scientific breakthrough; but thrifty cars and older model razors worked just as well and were just as available as the newer models.
In recent decades, however, there has been a new twist to the old concept of designing things that would have to be replaced while they still worked well.
Thanks to fundamental technological changes, you don’t get to choose anymore.
For many products (cars, computer software, CDs, to name a few), the choices are rigged. Older technologies are scrapped; not because they were less efficient, but because the new, improved systems cost more: i.e., cost a little more to manufacture and a lot more to buy or maintain.
It can be as difficult to buy a decent car that won’t cost a fortune to operate as it is to find an apartment in a city lousy with millionaires.
After hearing horror stories of relatives spending thousands on routine check-ups (the “electronic” tune-up), my partner set out to buy an old car that would be easy to keep and, for the most part, unnecessary to repair. It took weeks of picking through the classifieds and a flash of luck, but she managed to score a 1985 Toyota that looked and drove like it really had gone only 52,000 miles.
Conditioned to years of planned obsolescence on the part of car makers, I perversely admire them for structurally institutionalizing the need to buy newer, expensive-to-operate machines.
Besides, their attempts to provide a cheap model for people who just want a plain set of wheels (Chrysler K cars) have flopped.
What’s strange, though, is how the concept of forcing people to buy only one kind of new “improved” technology has caught on in areas where consumers might be thought to have more functional bullshit detectors, if only because the products are supposed to be the essence of simplicity: bicycles.
Like their four-wheeled nemeses, bicycles have undergone such technological “advances” in recent years, one shop owner told me some of his mechanics would have trouble repairing my old road bike, a 1980s Bianchi.
One problem with old bikes is that parts are getting scarce (unlike cars, bikes don’t have junkyards dedicated to giving Rottweilers something to do), so when things begin to break regularly, it makes sense to buy a new machine.
The problem with the new machines, though, is that designs can be driven by a need to flash something glitzy and needlessly complicated.
Take the shifters. Older models had two levers on the down tube or on the handlebar stem, where it was easy to reach down or up to get to them. Then they migrated to the ends of the handlebars and onto the handles of the handlebars. Although I prefer shifters on the down tube, between the legs, with a short run of cable to the derailleurs, the handlebar placements are elegant and convenient.
What doesn’t make sense to me is the system of shifting that has universally replaced the simpler set-ups. Now there are four levers instead of two. They are mounted on or next to the brake levers. Two levers shift up and two shift down for front and rear sprockets.
Although “index shifting” makes shifting more precise (it’s easier not to get caught between gears), practice makes any rider more precise.
The best arguments for the new shifters may be the demands of the widespread gear choices (as if anyone needs 24 gears, as if anyone HAS 24 speeds).
Some high-performance fans also tout the advantage of never having to take your hands off the brakes. Mostly, though, the new shifters’ function to help make bikes more expensive and harder to repair (unless you take them to the shop).
What’s really strange is the ubiquity of these gizmos. You want to spend $1000 on your main vehicle? The four-lever shifter is the standard.
The older, simpler systems have become quaint, customized options.
TOMORROW: Our recent Vancouver trek.
IF YOU KNOW THE NAME OF EMMETT WATSON, you might associate it with a weekly Seattle Times column, which usually consists of cute dog stories or reminiscences about Seattle’s quieter olden days.
He’s 81 now. It’s OK in my book for him to take his life, and his writing, a little easier these days.
But you should’ve seen him in his prime.
Unfortunately, the only way you can do that (besides coming through newspaper microfiches in the library) is to stumble upon Watson’s three volumes of memoirs–all of which are, apparently, out of print.
Aside from a handful of ex-UW Daily cartoonists (Mike Lukovich, Lynda Barry), Watson may be the only truly great creative mind the Seattle newspaper industry has generated. (And yes, I’m fully aware that Tom Robbins had been a newspaperman here.)
During his peak years (essentially the era of his main P-I column, 1959-82), he was one of the master practitioners of the three-dot column, that now nearly-forgotten American art form in which dozens of seemingly unrelated items would share the same space, rattled off in crisp stacatto brevity.
But Watson did more than just chronicle the comings and goings of local politicians, business bigwigs, TV-news personalities, and other “celebrities.” He captured the soul of the city he loved.
Each of Watson’s books fits as a discrete part of a whole, like the items in a three-dot column.
The first, Digressions of a Native Son, was put out in 1982 by the Pacific Institute, an employee-motivation-seminar outfit Watson was copywriting for after the P-I reduced him to part-timer status. (How that Lovable Curmuddgeon wound up, even temporarily, with such a Think Positive Thoughts outfit is one story he’s never completely told.) Digressions is mostly autobiography, with long pauses to reminisce about the World’s Fair, press agents, colorful local characters past and present, etc.
A decade later, Watson’s own Lesser Seattle Press came out with Once Upon a Time In Seattle. This slim volume profiled a dozen local leaders and characters; most of whom, like Watson, came of age in the Prohibition and Depression years.
He immediately followed that with My Life In Print. It starts by reprinting the most important autobiographical scenes from Digressions. That’s followed by some 370 pages of Watson’s old newspaper writings, culled and edited for Watson by longtime friend Fred Brack. After a few examples of his early work as a sportswriter (he was 40 before he got to write general-interest columns), My Life gets down to business with brilliant examples of his P-I and more recent Times work.
The three-dot material isn’t included; that, apparently, has proven too perishable, its shortness necessitating an audience pre-familiarity with the eprsons and topics at hand. Rather, My Life collects the single-topic, full-length essay columns that would fill his daily slot once or twice a week. It’s not that he was doing the daily goings-on-about-town stuff to draw a salary and a forum for the longer material; rather, he put into these 900-word profiles and rants everything he continued to learn on the daily grind about pacing, brevity, and writing for impact.
That’s what makes the pieces in My Life still work so well; whether they’re profiling authors and senators and Supreme Court justices, complaining about all the skyscrapers going up downtown even then (he says their massiveness reduces street-level humans to the insignificance of ants), crowing for the preservation of the Pike Place Market, or promoting his only-partly-joking anti-civic-boosterism crusade, “Lesser Seattle Inc.”
Get any or all of Watson’s books. Look on the auction boards for them, if they’re not at a library near you.
Learn about the heartbeat of a community, and read some of the best prose ever “forgotten tomorrow” while you’re at it.
WE’LL BE OUT OF TOWN THE REST OF THIS WEEK, BUT ON MONDAY: Paul Schell’s latest miscalculation.
IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.
There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).
There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).
There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.
There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.
There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).
There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).
Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.
But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.
Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.
(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.
For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)
Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.
Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)
But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.
There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.
But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.
(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)
(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)
TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.
TODAY WE DISCUSS two of the topics we’ve been obsessing with of late: “deviant” Northwest fiction and the now-allegedly-fabulous 1980s.
The editors of the recent anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions claimed they were doing something wildly outre by compiling tales based on strong plots, well-defined characters, and urban settings; instead of adhering to a nature-travelogue vision of “Northwest writing” emphasizing birds and sunsets and massively de-emphasizing humans. (What the Northwest Edge folks really did, natch, was to reassert some universal rules of good storytelling, in the guise of breaking other, less workable or appropriate, rules.)
The ’80s nostalgia fetish, meanwhile, speaks to more than just the longing to recapture one’s younger days. At least around here, it recalls a time when everything wasn’t about making money and feeling pressured to make even more. A time when the dominant local paradigm wasn’t wealth but mellowness; when all you had to do to be a paradigm-subverter was to assert your right to a passionate life of any kind.
Which brings us to The Cornelius Arms, a trade-paperback suite of fifteen interconnected stories by ex-local guy Peter Donahue (now teaching lit in the Carolinas) and put out by still-local dude Von G. Binuia’s Missing Spoke Press.
Set at some indeterminate point between 1983 and 1990, Donahue’s tales revolve around the denizens of a decaying Belltown apartment building. The building’s obviously based on the real Cornelius Apartments at 3rd and Blanchard, a place I’d frequently visited at the time. (It’s still standing, now providing student housing for the Art Institute of Seattle.) Donahue’s descriptions of the building (a once-stoic place, reduced to near-unlivability by a spendthrift slumlord) are accurate, as is the running plotline of tenant activism against the slumlord.
The stories are dotted with other (mostly now-gone) real places (the Tugs gay disco, the Unique Cafe, a renamed version of the Magazine City store, and the still-extant Virginia Inn). A couple of real-life Seattleites also get cameo appearances (housing activist John Foxx, the late Virginia Inn bartender Homer Spence).
Donahue’s resident characters are well-written and well-defined. They comprise a fine cross-section of Belltown life in the pre-dot-com days. There are retired pensioners, druggies, a young recovering alcoholic, a gay party dude who’s already lost one lover to AIDS, a Korean immigrant, some racist skinheads, a female young executive with a confusing sex life, a former WWII refugee, some lonely middle-aged men, a Native American woman struggling to better her condition in life, a young man at the crossroads of his life, and an old man who’s proclaimed himself President of the World.
All are treated as sympathetically and as humanly as possible (even the skinheads, whose philosophy of violence is eventually revealed as just a sad attempt by these lost boys to forge a substitute family).
By the book’s end, the Cornelius Arms building has fallen into the hands of redevelopers, who’ve rebuilt it with gaudier fixtures and tinier, costlier apartment units. The residents have scattered.
It’s not the loss of a “community” that the reader may mourn; most of the residents never really met one another except at tenant-activist meetings.
It’s the loss of a place, a shadow-space of sorts where society’s marginalized (by choice or by force or by a combo of the two) might live in squalor, but at least can live in relative peace and with relative dignity.
TOMORROW: Why I’ve never been to Burning Man.
Cirque du Simoleans
SOMEWHERE AFTER your credit-card account has been nicked to the tune of $35-$70, after a musical of uplifting fusion schmaltz that should have died in the Bloch’s Restaurant men’s room in 1978, the real show begins in the Cirque du Soleil production of Saltimbanco.
A squad of up to 16 acrobats spins up and down four poles arranged in a quadrangle. Inventive, daring, and visually dazzling, this is the kind of act I’ve been led to expect from what has been widely acclaimed as the new greatest show on earth.
While other shows have replaced cage acts, death-defying stunts, and the seedier legal and illegal attractions of the midway with sophisticated presentations of the circus arrts, Cirque du Soleil is the show against which others are measured, while it thrives in a class by itself.
Even champions of the loaded-for-bear traditional shows, as epitomized by Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey, give Cirque du Soleil its due. While there are traditional circus acts some shows do better, nobody tops the Cirque for sheer presentational panache.
The sound and lighting quality (as opposed to the quality of the music) have the production values of a Broadway show.
Rather than rattle off a revue of stunts, the Cirque builds each show around a story or theme. The costumes, at best, reinforce this unity of purpose. Clowns are not only expert mimes and accomplished acrobats, they sing and dance.
But then, it may occur to you that those clowns can’t dance half as well as the dancers in a Broadway show, let alone as well as the dancers in a soda-pop commercial; that the choreography is better when they change sets than when they just dance; that you’ve really had enough clever miming to last a lifetime; and that the production values are nice, but the clock is ticking and, apart from the acrobats on the poles, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Couldn’t they cut corners on the lights and sound and hire a few more acrobats?
There is a terrific juggling act–a woman who does a quick flash of balls after working her way up through a variety of cascades, fountains, and bouncing patterns with three, four, and five balls.
My favorite act was a high-wire routine where a woman does back flips between parallen wires at different heights and finishes off with a “walk of death” slide down a wire at a 45-degree angle to the ground.
An act where acrobats catapult, twisting and flipping, to land on each other’s shoulders was also quite good.
Flamenco-dancer twins in the first half of the show find symmetry in the second half’s twin strong men. A mime dressed as a boy who makes funny noises in the first half also cavorts in the second half, idulging himself and mime lovers (wherever they may be).
There is, however, an interesting twist to his second set, when our hero snatches someone out of the audience and drags him to the ring. The rube played along so well, I thought he was a plant, doing a variation of the old Pete Jenkins act (some hotshot rider masquerades as a drunk in the crowd and then stumbles to the nearest horse and out-rides everyone in the ring); but others who attended different performances saw different folks pulled from the audience (one of whom told Bret Fetzer that he was there with his family).
This breakdown of barriers between performers and audience is noteworthy; particularly in view of the traditional adversarial relationship between circus people and rubes. Rather than knife you with gaffed games of “chance” on the old midway, though, at Cirque du Soleil clowns roam the stands, sitting on laps, stealing a shirt, grabbing a gal and running around with her, throwing popcorn. Whether you find this irritating or funny, it does the essential chore of policing the stands to make sure some rube doesn’t start popping flash bulbs.
Not one to revel in the opportunity to touch clowns, I prefer the old separation of ace and rube, where the aces do stunts that verge on the impossible. Of the newer shows, Circus Chimera is the best I’ve seen for presenting consistently audacious (if inconsistently executed) acts. Rather than cheapen the show, the occasional failures of performers attempting feats of supreme difficulty only enhance the value of their eventual success.
The circus acts of the Saltimbanco show I saw were flawlessly done and, in the case of the stationary trapeze act, mundane. A semi-flying trapeze/bungee jump has more variation, but the spectacle of aerialists bouncing back up to their trapezes is a pale reminder of “The Cranes” of the Russian Circus.
(Not that every new aerial act ought to be compared to perhaps the single greatest flying exhibition ever done, but the problem with shows that rely on wired “mechanics” to tether flyers rather than safety nets to catch them is that these compromised newer acts can seem eternally outdone by even tame versions of the centerpiece aft of the traditional circus.)
Maybe it’s unfair to compare Cirque du Soleil to Ringling or to Cats, unfair to violate the first principle of criticism by failing to prioritize or even consider what the artist framing the show is trying to do.
To me, the story is beside the point of seeing great performers do incredible feats; but what, after all, is the story? For the added cost of the program, this information is available, along with the names of those on the show.
In the Cirque du Simoleans, production values talk.
Notions like giving credit where credit is due walk.
(Saltimbanco is extended thru Sept. 9 at the Renton Boeing plant, southeast corner of Lake Washington. 1-800-678-5440.)
TOMORROW:Figuring out this whole ’80s nostalgia business.
NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)
I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.
The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.
Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).
In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–
…and lots, lots more.
The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:
But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.
TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….
IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!
BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture? Good. Get used to it. Learn to love the chaos.”
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
YESTERDAY, I discussed my ongoing ponderings about my career future. I closed with a brief remark about the burgeoining mini-industry in guidebooks, lectures and courses aimed at people with this same obsession to worry about their own career futures.
One of these books is Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, excerpted in a recent Fast Company cover story.
Godin, who’s posted his book’s full text online, is one of those many commentators who treat, as an unspoken “given,” the idea that business is, and ought to be, the single driving force and operating metaphor for human life.
He’s also one of those who proclaims that business, in this supposedly post-industrial age of global trade and info hi-ways, is entirely about marketing.
And the key to marketing, according to Godin, is The Idea.
But not every idea makes it in this ruthless, hectic world. The ideas that succeed are the ones with the capacity to spread among people like a contagion; hence the “Ideavirus” rubric.
Godin is also one of those business writers who treats the hipster-vilified Nike as an ultimate success story. He sees the Nike concept as a quintessential Ideavirus. The idea was turning athletic shoes from a commodity into a high-profit-margin fashion statement, by spending lavishly on advertising and outsourcing the manufacturing to those cheap overseas subcontractors. The flashiness of the shoes and their ever-prominent logos comprised the “virus” that helped spread that idea.
Another of Godin’s great Ideaviruses is the now Microsoft-owned Hotmail. It was not only a simple idea with a powerful promise (free e-mail forever), but it advertised itself within its own product (every free e-mail message ended with a blurb for the service).
Indeed, looking at other hot or recently-hot local companies through Godin’s prism can be quite instructive.
Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Many enterprises start out with potentially lucrative concepts, but fail to profitably execute them. Or, the concepts are imitated by bigger outfits. Or, the concepts are successfully quashed or discredited by bigger outfits with their own agendas to push (remember solar energy?).
But simplification is what Ideaviruses appear to be all about.
It’s certainly what best-seller business books appear to be all about.
MONDAY: Should I reinvent myself according to the Ideavirus concept?
BACK IN THE ’80S, I used to complain about what passed for “regional” literature here in the PacNW, as officially defined by a certain clique. Quaint little nature poems depicting still-life scenes devoid of human presence; humorless prose about rugged living-off-the-land types.
Back in the ’90s, I noted the apparent passing of nature-lit, and also recounted some of the diverse writings that have come from here that weren’t like that.
Now, a few of these other strains have finally gotten their recognition as a “genre” of sorts, thanks to the new trade-paperback anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions, edited by Lidia Yuknavitch and L. N. Pearson and published under their Portland-based Two Girls imprint.
It’s a fast-paced, well-rounded revue of stories and experimental prose-works, with a few photo-narrative pieces (mostly by Richard Kract and L.N. Pearson) mixed in for relief.
Among the highlights:
Virtually none of the pieces revel in the old nature-poet Northwest of herons and seals and sunsets on the beach. And some of them simply reflect a global bohemian zeitgeist.
But the best of them depict a Northwest state of mind. It’s a hard thing to encapsulate, but it comprises hefty doses of droll skepticism, dry humor, and a BS detector set to eleven.
MONDAY: Political conventions–I say let’s keep ’em.
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
THE 2000 NORTHWEST BOOKFEST is still more than two months away. But I can already predict two of its most overhyped topics of discussion will be:
1. Falling stock prices for online booksellers, whether this portends doom for these dot-coms, how any such doom would affect small publishers’ inventory and debt situations, and whether any such doom would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
2. The much-hyped “eBook” craze, whether the electronic distribution of consumer literature is finally taking off, whether any such takeoff would threaten the power base of big publishing companies, and whether any such takeoff would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
I can safely state that at this point, the eBook and its various rival portable reading-pad electronic devices are novelties. The technology doesn’t appear to have seriously improved since the models I saw at last year’s Bookfest. The screens are still too hard to read in less-than-optimum light; there are still software incompatibilities among the various devices (and between them and regular computers); and they still cost too much.
Last month’s publicity stunt by the ever-hype-savvy Stephen King, in which he put pieces of a serialized horror novel (based on a leftover manuscript from 1982) online and invited those who downloaded it to pay shareware-esque fees, provided what mainstream media always seem to need in order to proclaim a new medium as “arrived”–a celebrity.
The story itself, thus far, isn’t much. But King and his associates have solved a lot of the distribution and formatting issues quite elegantly.
The story’s available in several formats, compatible with most computers, eBook-type devices, and Palm-type hand-held machines; but King’s site recommends Adobe’s Acrobat Reader format, which offers real page layout features for PCs and Macs (even though many potential “early adopters” of e-publishing are Macintosh true-believers, most eBook-esque software is not Mac-compatible); in a relatively quick-downloading form, and which lets you, the reader, increase the type size up to half an inch high without losing detail.
Of course, what you’re reading now is on-screen, Net-delivered “literary” content of a sort. Like many hundreds of other such efforts out there, this one has tried to pay the bills via advertising and “affiliate” programs with online merchants. So far, these have paid the bills, but just that.
If King can figure out how to make this pay, I’m certainly willing to listen. (More about this a little later.)
Meanwhile, digital and online text is indeed making inroads in areas outside “trade” bookselling. Computer manuals, technical-training documents, legal databases, professional reference works–lotsa stuff people have to read at work rather than for pleasure. Online posting of this data provides immediacy; CD-ROM publishing of it provides compact permanence.
I can easily see more home-market books of a factual-matter basis move toward digital formats (how-tos, learning guides, diet and investment manuals, and many of the other workhorse categories that make a major part of many bookstores’ balance sheets).
Even if reading-for-pleasure categories (fiction, art books, celebrity memoirs, etc.) principally remain the domain of physical printed documents (which they very well may), it will still behoove independent bookstores to figure out how to grab their piece of the e-lit action.
(Other views on today’s topic: Author Mark Mathabane believes electronic distribution “lets authors control their literary fate;” John Kelsey and Bruce Scheiner propose a “Street Performer Protocol” to fund Net-distributed works by audience donations; Random House gets into the e-act; so does Barnes & Noble.)
TOMORROW: Beyond the “No Logo” movement.
SO I FINALLY SAW Survivor.
I’d planned not to, or at least not to write about it, as part of my ever-so-contrarian policy of avoiding whatever’s the only topic on Entertainment Tonight or the Fox News Channel during any particular month. In the past, that’s meant little-to-no remarks here about O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzales, flag burning, or the departure of Kathie Lee Gifford.
But this time, I took the bait (or rather, the edible grubworms).
What I found: A compelling-in-that-train-wreck-sorta-way show that, while nominally based on a European series, plays out more like a cross between The Real World (and is just as unreal as that show, from another Viacom-owned channel), Japan’s extreme-embarrassment game shows, and corporate-warrior ideology.
The latter is the show’s most disturbing ingredient. I suppose if the New Agers could routinely misinterpret various indigenous people’s rites and customs, so can the Glengarry Glen Ross/Gordon Gekko ilk. But the whole Survivor premise is so against what real survival is all about (either for indigenous peoples, for teens and adults play-acting in “survival camps,” or for soldiers and others who happen to find themselves stuck somewhere.
That prior CBS desert-island show, Gilligan’s Island, was closer to the essence of real survival, on an island or in North American society. It depicted people who had little in common except their unsuitedness for the task at hand, and who had to learn to get along and work together for their common goal of living through their situation.
The Survivor motto, “Outplay–Outwit–Outlast,” deliberately contradicts all of this. It’s all about the rugged individualism, backbiting, and looking-out-for-#1 championed by corporate idealogues dating back to Ford and Rockefeller’s “social Darwinism” theories. Philosophies that allowed those who’d schemed and stolen their way to the top to heartily justify everything they’d done.
But as I’ve been saying for some time, business isn’t everything. And as local author David C. Korten, whom I discussed yesterday, says, the established priorities and philosophies of business (particularly of big business) aren’t the same as those of life in general. Business’s priorities can even contradict or deny those needed for real living, real relating, and real (as opposed to merely fiscal) growth.
A society that tries to hard to be like Survivor will not, in the long run, survive.
TOMORROW: The nearly-annual ‘Why I Still Love Seafair’ column.
FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
