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A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
ELSEWHERE:
MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).
Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”
He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.
Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.
The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:
But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.
Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).
Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.
Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.
As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”
TOMORROW: Susan Faludi and other writers dare to insist that men are people too–why’s this treated as something shocking?
MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.
Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.
Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).
One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.
The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.
What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.
And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.
But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.
But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.
TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.
YOU KNOW THE SOUTH PARK EPISODE in which a “prehistoric ice man” goes bonkers trying to readjust to how massively his world has changed since he was frozen–in 1997?
Books about the high-tech culture can seem like that. They can seem outdated by the time they come out, and positively nostalgic if they resurface later as paperbacks.
Case in point #1: The previously-mentionedJoystick Nation by J.C. Hertz; a history of video games up to 1997 that failed to predict Nintendo’s comeback just as certain computer-biz analysts had failed to predict Apple’s comeback.
Case in point #2: Douglas Rushkoff’s Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Hertz’s book tried to depict video-gaming as a prosocial, synapse-building, mind-stimulating thing, something good for your children (even with all the fantasy violence, often in that “first-person shooter” mode that invites the user to get off on the fun of slaughtering).
Rushkoff’s book (written in ’95 and now in a slightly-revised paperback) takes a more generalized, and more hyper, POV. He rapidly jaunts around from video and role-playing gaming to snowboarding to raving to neopaganism to tattoos to chat-rooming (the World Wide Web’s only briefly mentioned) to “mature readers” comic books to MTV to Goths to Burning Man. His purpose–to state and re-state how today’s “screenagers” are increasingly equipped to lead society beyond its flaccid, industrial-age ideologies and into a millennial, tribal utopia.
Lord, Rushkoff tries all he can to assure us that Those Kids Today aren’t brain-dead slackers but instead the harbingers of a grand new future (he even uses rave-dance promoters’ self-congratulatory cliches about hedonistic E-addicts somehow being “the next stage of human evolution”).
But it all comes out like last year’s drum-and-bass; or, worse, like something out of the long-dormant mag Mondo 2000.
Chapters have titles like “The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos.” Every other page or so introduces another kid-culture or young-adult-culture phenomenon depicted to illustrate how us fogeys are just too darned stuck in passe pre-Aquarian mindsets about money, politics, religion, sports, dancing, music, etc. etc.; compared to the Wired Generation’s effortless surfing thru the waves of chaos theory and multiculturalism.
Some random examples of the book’s numbing hyperbole:
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.” “We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.” “Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.”
“We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.”
“Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
Besides the unnerving tone, inaccuracies abound.
Rushkoff repeatedly refers to Marvel Comics’ multilinear storylines (which he sees as one of the kids’ influences in growing up to appreciate a complex, complicated world) as the creative invention of Jack Kirby. (While Kirby established Marvel’s look, designed most of its early star characters, and played an underappreciated role in the plotting of individual issues, it was editor/head writer Stan Lee who devised the “Marvel Universe” concept of heroes and villains and plotlines endlessly crossing over from title to title.)
Rushkoff also uses “the long-running TV talk show The Other Side” as evidence for the popularity of New Age and supernatural topics (the show only lasted one year).
But still, at least Rushkoff, in his annoyingly hyperbolic way, at least has unapologetically nice things to say about a younger generation forever damned by aging hippie-elitists, patronized by cynical advertisers, and stereotyped by clueless mainstream media.
One of Rushkoff’s positive points is that those Gen-Y gals n’ guys seem increasingly unpersuaded by the manipulative language of ads and marketing.
If true, this would mean they’d also be skeptical of Rushkoff’s own marketing blather on their supposed behalf.
IN OTHER NEWS: If America’s power grids and financial systems could survive Hurricane Floyd with disruptions like this, the whole Y2K scare won’t be all that scary.
TOMORROW: Home satellite dishes–still worth it?
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
HERE’S THE SECOND essay I wrote this summer for Seattle magazine. (The mag’s under new management; I don’t know if the new folks will want me back.)
The occasion of my new book collection of old newspaper columns gives me an excuse to look at the art form’s sorry current state.
I don’t claim to write the funniest or wisest or sharpest columns around. I just wish more of today’s working columnists tried (or were allowed) to be better than they currently are.
The newspaper column just might be America’s greatest literary invention. Yet, like so many great American inventions, America seems to have largely forgotten how to do it right.
Seattle’s dailies haven’t had a columnist worthy of the title since the Times either allowed or persuaded professional gadfly Terry McDermott to move on a year or two back.
Back in the day, when Emmett Watson was in his prime and the likes of Byron Fish and even John Hinterberger were going strong, the P-I and Times relied on columns the way buildings rely on them–to prop up the whole superstructure of the edifice.
Even stronger stuff could be had in The Washington Teamster, wherein editor Ed Donohoe’s weekly “Tilting At Windmills” corner poked light fun at politicians who supported the union’s agenda and struck heavier barbs at politicians who didn’t.
Now, though, the columns in the local dailies are mightily staid affairs.
Latte jokes. Slug jokes. Endless paeans to why the baby-boom generation is even more darned important to the course of western civilization than it already thinks it is. A woman who claims it’s safe to walk the streets of Bellevue, as if anyone ever does. Political harrangues about why citizens are too chicken to dream bold dreams unless they go along with the latest scheme to subsidize private developers. Tirades about how Those Kids Today are either too lazy (unlike the diligent kids from The Sixties Generation) or too work-driven (unlike the value-centered kids from The Sixties Generation).
And, of course, oversimplified ideas about modern society, told in one-sentence paragraphs.
Really simple one-sentence paragraphs.
At least the sports pages still have the likes of Laura Vescey, Art Thiel, and Steve Kelley. But it’s sadly telling that the papers will only permit really good columnists to do really good work if it’s about a topic that doesn’t really matter.
The situation’s not much better in the “alternative” press.
My ex-stomping ground, The Stranger, was once full of strong, personal voices, from Anna Woolverton to “Spikey’s Coffee Corner;” but now apparently prefers formula concepts like restaurant briefs and a police blotter.
Seattle Weekly’s “columns” are essentially beat-reporting corners, not classic columnar-style commentaries.
Why this state of affairs? As print media become ever more corporate and bureaucratic, it’s harder for idiosyncratic voices to please the powers-that-be. You’ve gotta be either predictably “analytical” (bland) or predictably “outrageous” (dumb).
Yet it’s just these individualists who add the spark of personality to a paper, who make it a must-read even on slow news days.
There are still a few great ones churning out verbiage across the country. The feisty Texan Molly Ivins is a national treasure. The P-I’s new syndicated contributor Sean Gonsalves has the rare audacity to criticize not just politicians but the economic interest groups who own them. And Larry King’s weekly “King’s Things” in USA Today show he’s as skilled at short-form writing as he is at long-form talking. On the conservative side, at least George Will still tries to rationally argue his points, without succumbing to Limbaughesque bully tactics.
These, and a few others, know that a great column should have its own point of view, not merely rehash what all those other media commentators are doing. (A good case of the latter came back in April, when most everybody in the papers and on the air made the same three or four, equally misinformed and inane, arguments about violent suburban teens.)
It should tell a story, or several stories. It should provide insights into the day-to-day flow of events that straight reporting or dry analysis just can’t.
And it should make its points with personality but also with efficiency, and then stop.
IN OTHER NEWS: A short while back, I suggested the violent atmosphere that led to the Woodstock ’99 rapes might have had something to do with the aesthetic of amoral aggression propagated by the likes of Limp Bizkit. Similar allegations have now been separately made, in a libelous email supposedly from a certain ex-Seattleite rock star (found by Metascene).
TOMORROW: A look at some of the city’s remaining (for now) old buildings.
PASSAGE (from Lindsay Marshall): ” If the word ‘moving’ appears on the cover and the book is not about transport then avoid it like the plague.”
YESTERDAY, I discussed the potential partial demise of the Gothic Surf Shop, a group of four adjacent Lower Queen Anne houses where several artists and photographers live and work.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
I’d been there at a party which was centered in the houses’ joint back yard and trailed off into the various live-work spaces. I found myself repeatedly wandering back to one particular room, where a prominent photographer showed off some of her exquisite hand-tinted, neoclassical portraits and nudes.
This lusciously sensual exhibition, and the path leading toward it, reminded me a lot reminded me, in a low-budget DIY way, of a book I’d read that week–The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, an odd 18-century short story by Jean-Francoise De Bastide.
In the story, a wealthy French libertine nobleman has commissioned a country estate for the specific purpose of seduction. Every inch of the place, from the entrance-court to the gardens to the individual rooms, is meant to stir a woman’s senses (except her sense of resistance).
It’s published in an elegant, tiny paperback by none other than the Princeton Architectural Press, in an edition loaded with introductory remarks about the use of storytelling to explain principles of architecture and decoration.
You don’t have to approve of the story’s antihero and his predatory motives to admire his devotion to the home arts and his obsession with detail (as illustrated in the Princeton edition with period line drawings of real chateaus similar to the story’s fictional one.)
And you don’t have to be a nostalgist for pre-revolutionary France’s ornate architectural excesses to long for a sense of design that cared this much about the human spirit, about nurturing the senses, instead of just about mounting the most square footage for the least amount of money (or, in the case of most rich-people’s residential construction, intimidating people with out-of-scale behemothness).
TOMORROW: The Amtrak Cascades train and the America that once was.
IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.
JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.
AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.
I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.
My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).
I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.
Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.
Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’
Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.
Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!
My life was forever changed.
No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.
Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:
never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”
TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.
ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to America’s only locally-produced sketch comedy show on commercial TV, Almost Live, now canned after 15 years. It means host John Keister, my old UW Daily staffmate, will now have to get more commercial gigs selling cell phones. It also dashes my hopes of ever getting paid and/or acknowledged for the occasional gag from this column they’ve stolen over the years. And, of course, it means the fine citizens of Kent, the suburb AL has always loved to chastize, can sleep a little easier.
Don’t put the blame for the show’s axing on “a changing Seattle,” but on a changing TV landscape. Every year, fewer viewers are patronizing the old-line network-affiliate stations (which have, by and large, reduced their definition of “local” programming to sports and mayhem-based news). This meant AL’s ratings declined to where it was only a break-even operation (not only did it have a full-time staff of ten writer-actors, it was the last show on KING to utilize a full studio crew, with humans operating the cameras and everything).
BACK-TO-SCHOOL DAZE: In the September Harper’s, the highly respected author Francine Prose (Guided Tours of Hell, Hunters and Gatherers) complains about the institionally-endorsed mediocrities assigned for reading by innocent high-school students.
Prose’s long rant piece, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” (not available online), asserts whole generations of potential lit-lovers have been permanently turned off from the joys of reading by the less-than-enticing stories they’re made to read in school, and by misguided approaches taken to teaching the kids about even the good writing that makes the English Lit cut.
Like some of her more politically-conservative fellow critics, Prose puts some of the blame on administrators and politicians obsessed with using English Lit to teach “diversity” and other life lessons. Prose figures that because these bureaucrats want to make sure the kids learn nothing more or less than the precisely intended lesson plan, they force-feed the kids really mediocre PC-lit.
She’s got a particular beef against Clinton’s fave poet Maya Angelou, the equally-sanctimonious Alice Walker, Harper Lee’s one-dimensional racism memoir To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Ordinary People, Studs Lonigan, and teachers who reduce all discussion of Huckleberry Finn to a mere rant about its author’s alleged received racism.
Prose says there are plenty of better stories out there about rape, racism, girls’ self-discovery, boys’ temptations to cruelty, etc. etc. But the schools keep on assigning the mediocrities.
She suggests many possible motivations and/or intended or unintended results of force-feeding Our Kids such bureaucratically-acceptable bad writing (it’ll turn the kids into TV-viewing, advertiser-friendly, thinking-challenged drones).
She skirts around a much more plausible consequence–that a diet of low-quality literature might raise a generation of potential school-administration bureaucrats, more interested in what which is collectively-acceptable than that which is really, really good.
What I would do: Divide high-school lit into two sequences. One would continue the life-lessons-thru-storytelling schtick (a technique well-used throughout the history of most civilizations), only using better-written stories. The other track would be strictly about intro’ing kids to some Great Kickass Writing.
This writing could still be from all sorts of races, genders, and nationalities; it’d even do a better “diversity” job ‘cuz it’d showcase some of the best stuff from all over, instead of causing kids to associate minority and/or female authors with dull verbiage or one-dimensional ideologies.
MONDAY:Some examples of Great Kickass Writing.
IN OTHER NEWS: Scientists now say they can genetically-modify mice to make them more intelligent. Only one response is possible: “Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?…”
ELSEWHERE: This woman wants “to ban the word ‘cool’ from the Web’s lexicon…”
According to this list, what you’re looking at right now is not a “webzine.” So be it.
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…
IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.
Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.
For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)
This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.
Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.
The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.
That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:
Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.
But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.
(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)
TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?
ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…
THREE WEEKS OR SO BACK, we discussed the latest online craze, the weblog–a kind of Website that contains little or no original content, but still expresses its author’s personality and tastes through a carefully-chosen set of links to content on other sites.
Online journals are sometimes listed in weblog sites’ link-lists of other weblogs, but they’re very different. They’re like weblogs’ mirror images. They’re all or almost-all made up of original writing, usually very personal writing.
Like the human race itself, web-journals are a diverse lot. Some are better designed than others. Some are better written than others. Some have a lot more to say than others.
But they all involve ordinary, usually non-pro writers taking an ongoing look at the worlds around them and putting short, pithy thoughts about them up for all to see.
(Well, maybe not “all”: Some journalers include home-page disclaimers along the lines of, “If you personally know me, please do not read this.”)
Some places where you can learn more:
Some examples:
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: Two new slick print mags, plus “social phobia” as a chemically-treatable condition.
ELSEWHERE:Day trading’s described as “Doom for lonely grownups, a single-shooter fantasy with NASDAQ supplying the mutant targets”…
AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.
A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.
It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)
Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.
As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.
To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.
So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.
(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)
To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).
And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.
And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.
But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.
And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.
Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.
TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.
ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…
IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.
The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.
Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.
And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.
I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.
For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).
Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.
One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”
Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.
The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.
As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.
But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.
MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.
ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.” MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked. HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked. AUDIENCE: So did we. TOM: Ha ha ha.
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT
NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION
TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.
HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.
AUDIENCE: So did we.
TOM: Ha ha ha.
REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.
Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”
While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).
So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.
A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.
Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:
Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.
Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.
So what to do?
Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”
That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?
Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.
More about that on Friday.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?
ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.
FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)
intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.
AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:
MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.
A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.
I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.
In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”
The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.
This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:
“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer). “I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to. “Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”
“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).
“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.
“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”
Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:
“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’ “Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill. “I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently. “If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong. “Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”
“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’
“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.
“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.
“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.
“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”
When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:
“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”
Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.
ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.
TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.
