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Further Confessions of a Boss Chick
by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies
(LAST FRIDAY, our guest columnist began her reminiscence of being a lonely teenager in Philadephia during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. She’d befriended Kathy, a party-in’ girl who had few girlfreinds but many guy friends. They’d gotten summer jobs together at Philly’s legendary top-40 station WFIL. After one day in the back offices, Kathy had been promoted to a Boss Chick–a public promo person for the station, not unlike the KNDD jobs held by the Real World: Seattle cast.)
ONE NIGHT, at about 7 o’clock or so, that guy who hired me and Kathy, who I really pretty much hardly ever saw again, found me in the Addressograph room. “What time do you have to be home?” he asked.
I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me until he threw me a “uniform” and offered me double my salary to fill in for a Boss Chick who was out sick. “Be in front of the station in a half hour”, he said.
I was about to spend the evening asking grown men to dance at WFIL Night at the Windjammer Room in the Marriott on City Line Avenue.
For a shy 16-year-old girl with braces, a night from hell.
There’s nothing like putting on hot pants in a bathroom stall while thinking up a lie to tell your mom to make you feel like an authentic red-blooded American teenage girl.
I fit my pack of Marlboros perfectly in the pocket of my handbag, slid my lighter into my boot, and boarded the bus filled with veteran Boss Chicks. They were all blonde and beautiful. Mostly between 18 and 20. None with braces. They were having so much fun being them. No sign of Kathy; I figured she must be the one I was filling in for.
I thought she was ill; but I later found out that she was keeping a low profile while healing from a shiner, which she occasionally got from Mommy’s boyfriend.
The gals tumbled off the bus together like a spinning pinwheel. I watched them bounce through the lobby of the Marriott in front of me while I strolled behind them. As we passed the restaurant I caught a glimpse of where, not long ago, me and my mom sat eating sundaes at our favorite window table, looking out onto the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter.
I entered the Windjammer Room to the classic “sounds of Philadelphia”. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass “Bad Luck”–an ominous sign.
The other “chicks” began dancing as soon as they entered the room. One by one, they grabbed one of the guys at the bar, which was filled with traveling salesmen and lecherous locals who came out that night to dance with hot-panted-bell-heel-booted girls.
The guy that hired me came up to me and said, “Debra, you have to go ask one of those guys to dance with you–that’s why you’re here.”
I was horrified. I looked up and down the bar trying to find the loser who least disgusted me. They were all equally creepy.
The first guy I asked was slobbering drunk and kept falling into me during “Soul City Walkin’.” The next guy groped me all the way through “Me and Mrs. Jones” and proceeded to call me “Mrs. Jones” the rest of the night.
Finally, I found one guy who seemed just to be interested in dancing and having fun. He had lots of energy. And lots of coke, which he proudly snorted in front of everyone from a vile and spoon around his neck (which kept getting tangled up in his Italian Stallion medallion).
Suddenly he went nuts during “I Love Music” and shook his Pabst Blue Ribbon and sprayed it all over my T-shirt, screaming like a pig. I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back out ’til it was time to board the bus back to the station.
Needless to say, they never asked me to do the “Boss Chick” thing again. I resumed my survey and Addressograph work, which I liked a lot better, even if it was only half the pay.
Soon they asked me to assist a university student named Mark Goodman with telephone research. He and I became great friends. In my senior year of high school, he helped me obtain an internship at the leading FM rock station in Philly. Mark went on to become one of MTV’s very first VJs. WFIL went on to become a Christian talk station.
The summer ended and I returned to school with a new feeling of confidence. I quickly made a new set of friends.
One early fall night I was out with Flufffy, my evening ciggarette and my WFIL handbag. Kathy was on her steps in her Catholic school uniform, and a plaid waisted coat with a fur collar.
She was kissing Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
TOMORROW: The magazine glut.
ELSEWHERE:
Confessions of a Boss Chick
ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.
Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.
One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.
And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.
Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.
She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.
So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.
And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.
By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.
Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.
I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”
When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.
The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”
Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.
They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.
I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”
“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.
And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.
The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.
I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.
I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”
Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.
Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.
MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.
I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.
In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)
I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.
One of these was The Girls from Esquire.
That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.
(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)
The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)
The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).
But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.
Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.
A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.
And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.
Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.
Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.
TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Murray Morgan, the Sage of Tacoma and perhaps the finest historian and raconteur this region has ever had or will ever have.
LAST FRIDAY, we started fantasizing about what life might be like in a high-tech town such as this one should Internet-company stock prices collapse like some observers predict or even hope they do.
Today, a few more such ponderings.
Thousands of unemployed software developers and business-plan drafters are going to have to find new work at something actually useful, such as designing better bicycles or sewing underwear.
The affordable-housing shortage will be solved by (1) converting office-park buildings into artist live-work spaces (creating the new ‘art-cubicle’ aesthetic), (2) converting monster SUVs into mobile homes, and (3) converting suburban monster houses into apartments and rooming houses.
Thrift stores, once cleaned out by would-be eBay sellers, are again filled, this time with “shabby chic” furniture and now-worthless Beanie Baby collections.
The expensively-sold but cheaply-built condo buildings with those non-watertight fake stucco exteriors will become the new slums; while affluent families in non-Net professions (doctors, shipping brokers, janitors) will have snapped up every urban residential structure built before 1960–or even before 1980.
This means cities and towns with “real” streets, sidewalks, and houses will become more valuable to the affluent than suburbs and exurbs. The old parts of Tacoma and Everett could see higher average house prices than the new parts of Issaquah and Redmond.
Reality, as opposed to “virtual reality,” will be the next age’s entertainment craze. Live, in-person entertainment will be the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences–and not just computer-based ones. The “cultured” and the intellectuals will disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
One aspect of e-biz that will continue to thrive is that aspect which promises to help companies cut costs and fire workers. This means U.S. corporate annual reports will most proudly emphasize not how much money was made but how many workers were sacked (like the annual reports of British companies in the Thatcher era did).
This also means more just-in-time shipping and fewer goods sitting in warehouses.
Abandoned warehouses, then, will still become available for rave parties (with all-live performers) and art-colonizing. It’s just that they won’t be classic city brick buildings but suburban industrial-park windowless concrete boxes.
Of course, few or even none of these things might happen, or they might not happen quickly. Tech stocks (at least those not principally focused on dot-com business models) could take a gentle summer swoon (as they seem to be doing now), giving investors plenty of time to put their dough into real companies that make real things.
And some other, post-dot-com fad might begin to employ less-than-competent CEOs and an otherwise-surplus white-collar workforce, at least long enough to cushion the transition into whatever next-next-next-big-thing finally shows up.
TOMORROW: Some buildings that have been colonized by the dot-commers.
YESTERDAY, we began a praiseful discussion of of The Best of Myles, a collection of 1940s newspaper “humor” columns written by the sadly neglected Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66) under his alternate pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
Today, some examples of just why O’Brien/Copaleen is so damn great.
Was only five or six %.
The rest was only words and sound–
My reference is to Ezra £.”
“Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).
“‘And why should I not fiddle,’ he asked, ‘while Byrne roams?'”
“But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.
“Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting and sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.
“Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books.'”
“‘Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.–act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the rows of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprechaun’s denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a blasket, a ‘kur,’ a fiddler’s act of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s ‘farm,’ a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat’s stomach-pump, a broken–‘
“But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.”
The Copaleen columns also might not reach anywhere in particular. But they provide quite the entertaining and scenic ride.
TOMORROW: The dot-com bubble deflates.
REGULAR READERS of this feature might recall my ongoing devotion to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66; legal name: Brian O’Nolan; birth name: Brian O Nuallain), whose 1939 first novel At Swim-Two Birds first turned me on to the possibilities of Great Kickass Writing.
Today I want to talk about O’Brien’s other career, that of self-styled “newspaper funny man.”
A few months after the publication of At Swim, the conservative daily The Irish Times hired him to write a daily essay-and-humor column, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” For this work he took on another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
The alternate name was more than just an affectation; it was a character.
The “Myles” persona was that of a distinguished older gentleman (O’Brien was only 29 when the column began), comfortable enough in his nobility to mix drawing-room anecdotes with bilingual or trilingual puns, yet enough of a man-of-the-people to gently bash both elitist modern artists and elitist modern-art denouncers.
Two collections of Myles columns have finally been issued in the U.S., by the Dalkey Archive Press (named after O’Brien’s fifth and final novel). The Best of Myles covers his 1940s work. The just-domestically-issued Further Cuttings follows the column into the ’50s.
I’ve just finished reading the first volume. On one level, it’s a remarkable account of normal daily life in one of the few European countries that had anything approaching “normal daily life” at the time. (Ireland, which had only become an independent country in 1920, stayed out of WWII, partly as an act of defiance against Britain.)
O’Brien writes nostalgically about old steam locomotives; relates fictional yet believable tales about his father, brother, and “married sister;” and makes droll comments upon such issues of the day as preserving the Irish language and coping with wartime shortages of consumer goods.
But O’Brien/Copaleen’s writing works on dozens of other levels.
Almost-too-clever-for-its-own-good wordplay meets up with de- and re-constructions of traditional columnist and “humorist” formats (fake inventions, wise bartenders, social-improvement campaigns, good-old-days reminiscences, etc. etc.), and gets cooked up within O’Brien’s astoundingly beautiful prose.
It’s enough to make any would-be modern funny writer, such as myself, give in and surrender all hope of ever becoming good enough.
But I won’t. At least not just yet.
TOMORROW: A few examples of O’Brien/Copaleen’s genius.
ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
OF THE LAST 100 Amazon.com purchases from people who linked from the search box on my site, only 16 were items specifically mentioned anywhere on the site.
This means:
(1) many of you are choosing to help support MISCmedia by making your Amazon buys thru this site’s link, and
(2) I might not have the influence on your reading/viewing/listening habits I’ve liked to imagine having.
Nevertheless, few of these items were at all sucky, proving at least that many MISCmedia readers have quite good taste indeed.
Herewith, a few of the things you’re using this site to attain, in no particular order:
TOMORROW: What you’re writing.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.
And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.
Today’s case study: American Psycho.
Folks who’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.
Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn’t end; it just stopped.
Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman’s crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.
And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book’s psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.
Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who’d apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel’s chief character isn’t always a “hero.” The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).
When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.
But Ellis’s thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates. 2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get. 3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date). 4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her. Repeat step 1.
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.
2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.
3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date).
4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.
Repeat step 1.
The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book’s explicit violence, both to ensure an “R” rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.
She’s made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.
Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.
TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?
(NOTE: YESTERDAY AND TODAY, we’re running excerpts from “Tropisms,” a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
BY THE 1960s, one highway was insufficient and a ring-road was proposed to save downtown.
The Monson Plan, 1963. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal of a Radiant City, Seattle planned a ring-road and high rises to clear out open space in the downtown.
Four parking reservoirs, one at each corner of the ring (capacity, 13,000). Entire reconstruction of the waterfront, including the elimination of the Pike Place Market. A new government center. Leveling of Pioneer Square with slab towers to be built in the cleared open space. And more!
The battle of competing visions was carried out not only through bureaucracies and debate, but also through drawings. Most of the plans we’ve been looking at are just powerful drawings–political tools.
A professor of architecture at the UW, Victor Steinbrueck, published his own vision of Seattle, Seattle Cityscape (1961), just before Monson became a public plan. These competing visions could not have been more starkly realized:
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN SMITH TOWER BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
The Monson Plan.
SLIDE: STEINBRUECK SMITH TOWER STREET SCENE
Steinbrueck has taken us down to ground level–now we’re pedestrians, not planners; we live here, not lord over here.
Steinbrueck asserts so much with these drawings–with his style of densely overlapping lines he asserts that the urban fabric is so tightly, intricately woven that no one part of it can be removed without damaging the whole; he asserts this is a place of hidden, obscured lives, into which we may project/find our own fantasies and meanings.
Steinbrueck’s drawings were as powerful, even successful, a projection of the private imagination into civic realities as were the Monson drawings, or any of R.H. Thomson’s less delicate or graceful projections.
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN, OVERVIEW
The Monson plan was funded by the city in collaboration with the downtown business group, the Seattle Central Association. It was received enthusiastically by the Times, which helped argue for the $225 million in public money that was being asked to fill out the $575 million budget.
Within a few months, opposition news began appearing in the Times’s back pages.
Finally, the news (in Seattle, the equivalent of an obituary) of the decision to defer and “make a study.” (Headline: “Central Plan Foes Win Partial Victory”).
This process helped catalyze the ideology and infrastructure of preservation in Seattle: Allied Arts. Save the Market.
Also, drawing styles changed; so even the pro-Monson reports of the Urban Design Commission in the mid-’70s feature Steinbrueck-style populist street scenes.
By the late ’60s and early ’70s, both consciousness and practice in the city were well prepared to resist proposals such as John Graham’s 1966 proposed renovation of Pioneer Square.
The meaningful give-and-take that determined the place and impact of these projects–themselves the product of many private visions colliding–was as much effected by forms such as drawing, public speaking, even party-going, as they were by government and city planners.
There are no clean dividing lines between “real” projects and the fantasies from which action springs. Victor Steinbrueck’s drawings are merely different in scale or degree from R.H. Thomson’s regrades–they are not different in kind.
Built projects can also be graceful, leaving a delicate trace, nimble, and mutable in the hands or minds of the present:
SLIDE: A.Y.P. AT NIGHT
Buildings from the Alaska-Yukon Exposition stayed with us (the architecture building on UW campus is the only structure still remaining, other than the Drumheller Fountain); the images have also persisted.
Even real buildings can function the way I think fictions and drawings do–flexible, intimate yet autonomous, available to each of us to be made or remade into meaning.
SLIDE: SEATTLE TOWER BUILDING IN FOG, WITH MT. RAINIER IN BACKGROUND
Notice how this most-beautiful, most flexible and graceful of the city’s buildings pays its respects to the humbling forms around it, the enormous ones on the horizon.
And, most astonishing of all, this vision is real, material, built here in this city, yet as it stands is as unreal and available as a novel or a dream of the city.
All our projections of the private imagination into the civic space should be so graceful.
TOMORROW: Yet another doomed cool place.
Dreaming the City
by guest columnist Matthew Stadler
(NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’re running excerpts from a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
EMMETT WAHLMAN proposed a salmon stream in 1977.
The stream would leave Volunteer Park, traverse south across Capitol Hill to Denny Way where it would turn west and cross the freeway into downtown, then run along Pine, forming a half-dozen pools between Fourth and Sixth on Pine, before turning north and running along Westlake to empty into Lake Union.
Emmett was a city engineer in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s. Reached by phone in Hawaii, he told me he couldn’t recall exactly when the idea occurred to him.
He said, “These things pop into your mind, all sorts of things are just popping and popping all the time, they keep bombarding you like Nissans. There’s just no shortage of them, is there? But I wanted my idea to have validity.”
Emmett talked about his idea. He sketched plans. He asked his friend, city engineer Paul Wiatrik, to asses its viability. He sought support from the city’s Department of Community Development.
“Working as a field engineer gave me some insight into what we are disrupting with these suggestions; you’re tearing right into the heartbeat of the city.”
This movement from ‘ideas popping and popping’ to engagement with civic discourse and its matrix of “validity” seems to me a fundamental challenge, even duty, of every city dweller.
It is in fact the founding act of our city—this projection of a private vision into civic space.
Faced with this:
SLIDE: TREES
Settlers saw this:
SLIDE: 1850s DOWNTOWN PLAT
And they drew it. Astonishing! Heroic!
SLIDE: SEATTLE PLAN, 1855
Already the purity of vision has been diluted by the demands of the civic space. Notice how competing [street] grids are made to co-habitate. The city grew, events continued apace.
SLIDE 6: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF 1890 SEATTLE
A truly fabulous metropolis.
By the 1890s, fabulation and projection insinuated themselves into the built environment. Where before, faced with trees men saw grids, now presenting a city, they sketched fantasies.
The cityscape itself had now become the ground for fantasies such as Sullivan’s Opera House, and a courthouse.
SLIDE 7: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE
The Seattle Opera House, as Louis Sullivan designed it in 1890, to be built at Second and University, the current site of a different concert hall entirely. This plan shocked me because I had once imagined so grand an opera house, years ago—as an indispensible part of my fictional Seattle—I had written it [in the novel The Sex Offender], never knowing the plan of this grand opera house had been real (and a failure) rather than made up (and a great success).
I was further astonished (while reading the self-published memoirs of Henry Broderick, real estate giant) to find a photograph of this fantasy, Seattle’s Grand Opera House (with the attendant throngs that I had thought were simply my outlandish fiction) built and standing in our city at the corner of Second and Cherry (admittedly less grand than Sullivan’s or my conception, but still).
SLIDE: CORT’S OPERA HOUSE
Such a scene had been caught on film featuring throngs of men pressing against the doors.
So the city and its exaggerated throngs had been real! But then, what’s this, the photo itself was a sham, the throngs, indeed great swaths of the very faÂade, had been painted in by amateur hands!
This real opera house was itself the wishful fantasy of some past booster imagining a more glorious city than the one he truly occupied.
And this dizzying vertigo was typical of my encounter with the intersection of the private imagination and our civic realities.
SLIDE: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE FLOOR PLAN
Back to Louis Sullivan. The proposed building had a 1,200-seat auditorium, apartments and offices, and was budgeted at $325,000 (with the land costing an additional $300,000). By November 1890 the site had been cleared and construction was about to begin when a bank in England failed, and the money for the opera house dried up, but not soon enough to keep it off the attractive Bird’s Eye View maps city leaders distributed alongside brochures advertising this future metropolis to target markets in the Midwest and East.
As archivist and historian Dennis Andersen remarked, “What’s the difference between real and projected? The city was nine-parts plans and intentions, and these are what they advertised.”
The legal obligation of homesteaders in the American West was to clear and work the land—one did not own it until one worked upon it.
One thing the West promised was malleability. So there was an abundance of ideas and not much shyness about visions. The city’s evolution was powered by this promiscuous engine. On to every hill and valley, slide and swamp, private visions were projected, and sometimes realized.
Which made for conflicting visions.
SLIDE : WASHINGTON HOTEL ON DENNY DEGRADE
I find these competing visions equally beguiling: the fantasy of a grand European-style hotel and that of a port city of gently sloping hills.
What a delight to see the one fantasy trapped in the embrace of the other! James Moore, who owned the hotel, would not accede to the plan of R.H. Thomson, city engineer in charge of regarding, until after a long battle of wills.
SLIDE: WASTELAND OF REGRADE
Thomson was a very focused man with little room left between vision and action. His memoir is a straightforward, common-sense read, revealing a practical man whose field of action was unusually large.
Maybe Thomson’s greatest strength was his imperviousness to questions of scale. Judging from his archive and memoir, he doesn’t seem to have seen much of a difference between a hangnail and a 300-foot hill. He saw obstacles and removed them.
In the Denny Regrade the results look a little like the founding fantasy, though now the abstract geometry was real, while the fantasy to be projected on it was more hodge-podge.
SLIDE 18: BIRD’S-EYE REGRADE DRAWING
The cleared “real” land–now an abstract geometry–made a fresh canvas for the painting of visions and fantasies.
The abstract grid had been drawn with real dirt and earth; while the rich future “ecology” of the city became a pencil-drawn fantasy.
It was, thus, impossible to locate a “real” Seattle landscape separate from the projection of fantasy.
SLIDE: BOGUE’S PLAN VIEW
Despite the founding fantasy of the American grid, planners including Thomson and Virgil Bogue (of the 1910 Bogue Plan) studied European cities with their broad boulevards and plazas, to shape visions of our future city.
Thomson also imagined a subway and rail system for the city. Like most Seattle subway plans (Luther Griffith’s in 1907, A.H. Dimock’s in 1920, Carl Revves’s in 1926, D.W. Henderson’s and the DeLeuw Cather designs for Forward Thrust in the 60s and 70s) Thomson ran his main downtown line under Third Avenue. The central station was to be built at Riverside. Thomson’s plan, which included a region-wide rail system and the downtown subways, was budgeted at $1.3 million.
The Washington State Arts Association was going to build this state-of-the-art convention center to establish Seattle’s supremacy once and for all, in 1911. I am reminded of the dire promise, just a few years later, that the machine gun, recently developed, would be the unmatchable weapon that would end all wars.
Just last Friday, I watched an army of welders work on our Star Wars-scale convention center, which will surely establish Seattle’s supremacy, at least over San Diego.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
Dream of Fields
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
