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For 31 of Seattle Center’s 39 years of existence, Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival has been its biggest annual event.
Devised from the start to encompass the entire former World’s Fair grounds (except the now separately-run Space Needle and Pacific Science Center), it’s also the last of Seattle’s annual lineup of big populist summer gatherings (starting in May with Opening Day of Boating Season and the Film Festival, then continuing with Folklife, the Bite of Seattle, and Seafair).
Bumbershoot’s premise: An all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet of culture. A book fair in one corner, short plays in another, contemporary art installations in another. At the big stages, bigname music celebs. At smaller stages scattered about, secondary performers of all types.
And between everything, the familiar sideshow attractions of Thai-food booths, street jugglers, balloon sellers, and fenced-off beer gardens.
In its early years, Bumbershoot was strictly aimed at a specific socioethnic caste then taking control of the city’s cultural identity–aging, increasingly square baby-boomers. Nonwhite performers were largely limited to boomer-friendly blues bands; mainstage shows were heavy on the likes of Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor.
In the late ’80s, that started to change slightly. Younger, hipper, and more diverse acts have steadily gained their way into the mix.
A bizarre P-I preview story called this year’s lineup “Bumberpalooza,” comparing it to the ’90s Lollapalooza rock package tours. I initially thought the article’s writer used the analogy to claim the festival was becoming more corporate-mainstream.
But the writer, still believing Lollapalooza’s original “alternative” hype, really wanted to say B’shoot had become edgier and more experimental. Fortunately, she was right.
With more hip-hop acts, a whole electronica stage, and a mainstage lineup ranging from Loretta Lynn to G. Love and Special Sauce, Bumbershoot 2001’s fulfilling its name’s promise of an all-covering umbrella of expression.
In these images: Happy crowds; the Book Fair (including, this year, only one small press with the word “heron” in its name!); local collectors’ caches of electric mixers and Harlequin Romance cover paintings; an information booth at the start of the slinking line into KeyArena; Posies legend Ken Stringfellow; a hula-hoop demonstration on the main lawn; and, below, our ex-Stranger colleague Inga Muscio.
Muscio, scheduled to perform on the Starbucks-sponsored literary stage, peppered her half-hour slot with plugs for smaller coffee brands. She ended it with a story about dreaming Starbucks boss Howard Schultz was her S&M slave.
Which Loss Is Worse?
by guest columnist Jenniffer Velasco
Everyone has losses, each one unique. It can make one stronger, or it can make one a victim.
For me, it’s the feeling that something is missing permanently.
It’s too difficult to re-examine the overwhelming losses in my life. I’m too busy right now, creating a life from pure dreams and fantasy.
So I leave journal-like writings that ache and bleed… still.
I tried to write in the Arboretum’s Japanese garden, but it was so zen; too peaceful, too calm. I ended up forgetting about loss; pretending I was a coy fish.
I attempted to write about loss in a coffee shop, but it would be too intense to cry in public. I’m so focused on plans, schemes, schmooze, booze, friends, art, and, oh yeah, life.
My apartment is open and friendly; yet the space where I sleep celebrates my sacred losses. One is of my failure to see my grandma, who raised me and protected me from the bad men. The other is the loss of being a mother.
In my bedroom, I’ve placed a painting of my grandmother Lola, half-young and half-old, and a painting of myself holding a child in my arms before giving him up for adoption at age 17.
EXCERPTS FROM OLD JOURNALS:
Aug. 28, 1993
Brandyn:
It’s been a month since I last held you. It had been so difficult that day. You looked so beautiful. How could anyone with a heart give you up without feeling?
But in my tears and heartbreak, I still put your well-being first. This is what matters to me: That I’ll know for sure you’ll be OK and well taken care of. In my ease of giving you up, I am giving up the chance to know or feel love for you. Your love will be for other parents.
I’ve been through a lot with you. You were born three and a half months before your time. I wanted to keep you. I fell in love and saw you in the prenatal hospital often, holding you for hours at a time, just enjoying my few moments.
It hurts so much to love you, knowing I’m going to lose you in a matter of time.
But I’ll tell you this: I was never afraid to love.
Sept. 7, 1998
This month has been testing.
I’ve been working hard, trying to save money for a ticket to the Phillipines. My mission was to see Lola (a Filipino word for “Grandma”). She is my mom’s mom.
I’ve been through an attempted muging for $400, the only way to buy a plane ticket. My Washington ID has been lost.
I waited for six hours with my dad, racing against time. The clock ticked away. I fought the passport agency–crying, yelling, hating everyone. I ended up having to drive to my old high school to get my freshman records, just to verify that I’m an American, I’ve lived here all my life.
In all this, I was thinking only of Lola. I needed to see those kind eyes of hers just one more time. I felt sick inside with fire and anxiety; trying to cut the red tape.
I finally relaxed, thinking all the proper papers are in order. I was finally going to see Lola.
As I was cleaning my closet, my mother called from New York, telling me Lola was dead.
I HAD KNOWN the love of my Lola. The fried rice with eggs in the morning, Sleeping next to her at night, arguing–me in broken Tagalog, her in her brittle English. She died thinking of me.
But with my child, I felt a slower grieving. I was too young and naive about my love for him; waiting for the hope the he’d look for me to explain how much I’ve wept for him. Every Christmas, every birthday, every Mother’s Day, every baby I see reminds me of my life without him.
The sun is coming up. It’s Thursday, I think. Many pains have carved my existence; yet I don’t identify with them.
I am at this moment, not by what I’ve lost but by what I’ve gained.
Teenage girls across North America are snapping up T-shirts with risque slogans on them, including assorted variations on the number 69, Playboy, and declarations of general naughtiness.
Parents, journalists, and even a few politicians are getting predictably perturbed. (My, aren’t these grownups just so immature?)
News flash: Adolescents have hormones, and love to make a big tease among their peers. Adolescents also love to proclaim their independence and impending grownuphood, and there are few better ways to do that than by publicly announcing one’s sexual arrival.
What’s new? Just the particular pride and explicitness in these T-shirt statements.
Three years ago, one of my ex-Stranger colleagues tried to get a deal to write a book about high school girls who were really virgins but were branded as sluts by other girls, merely for looking or acting insufficiently ladylike. Three years, of course, is the standard turnover rate for teen trends; so the younger sisters of those ‘90s shunned girls are now proudly proclaiming slutdom as a status symbol.
(Of course, today’s assertions of slutdom probably have as little to do with reality as yesterday’s accusations of slutdom.)
In keeping with a more-or-less annual tradition around these cyber-parts, here comes another fantabulous MISC Late-Summer Reading List. Its purpose: To let you know what you should’ve been investing your time with this warm-weather season, instead of frittering it away on needless time-wasters such as jobs and sex.
High Drama in Fabulous Toledo by Lily James: A raucous, giddy little novel that lives up to its title with nary a tinge of irony. Our heroine is the bored, easily distracted fiancee of a borderline-suicidal bar owner. She gets kidnapped from a 7-Eleven parking lot one night, and turned over to become the captive bride of a rich computer genius completely lacking in social skills.
After the initial shock she comes to like the adventure of her predicament; but soon becomes bored again as she realizes her captor’s domestic-suburban plans for her life. Meanwhile, her distraught boyfriend is consoled by a mysterious policewoman with, shall we say, personal issues of her own. To tell any more would spoil the ride.
High Drama is a great light-comic caper story that also happens to be classifiable as “post-feminist” or “genre-deconstucting” (the genre here being romance-novel ravishment). It’s also a highly accessible, engaging read that, in a better world, would bring wealth and renown to James and to the literary-press publisher FC2, which put it out.
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser: One of the dozen or more tomes I’d left stacked at home from the Tower Books closing sale back in February. Shouldn’t have waited this long to read it.
This guy’s one helluva prose stylist, and he spins great yarns too. His sentences and paragraphs, lovely as they are, are always held subordinate to his fantastical plots–which, clever as they are, are always held subordinate to the heart and dignity with which he endows his characters.
Many of these tales have to do with the dark side of small-town existence, and the light hidden behind such shadows. The finest example of this is “The Sisterhood of Night,” in which a gentleman relates his town’s newest teenage fad: Girls who sneak out of their homes in the middle of the night to gather in the woods and, apparently, do nothing. No drugs, no sex, no Satanic rites; but also no peer pressure, no parental shrieks, no requirements to do or say anything. The narrator ends by wondering whether this could be more potentially subversive than any cult or gang; Millhauser leaves you feeling like it just might.
The Bellero Shie by Jay Davis: A gem of a tiny paperback. When the author was here on a reading tour in June, he left some promo copies at Confounded Books (now at 2nd & Bell in Belltown). Behind the circa-1961 corporate-manual cover are eight stories which amaze and confound in their finely-tuned haunting alienation.
In “Family Food and Drug,” an unwitting supermarket customer is put through militaristic interrogation, for the “crime” of refusing to provide personal demographic-marketing information. In “Sparky,” a man retreats from his wife and family to his only consolation, the family dog, which happens to be dead and stuffed. Yeah, it’s PoMo, but it’s PoMo with a soul–and a quietly aching one at that.
(The apparently closest thing the publisher has to an online presence is this review, which lists a California address for the outfit even though the inside cover says it’s from Illinois.)
Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad, edited by Lucretia Stewart: Great premise: Literary nonfiction passages from many times and places, all about having sex far from one’s home, with someone the author didn’t set out from home with. But the adventures become repetitious after a while; particularly the ones involving hookers with the invariable hearts-O-gold and the ones involving anonymous gay-pickup sex. But it is a very handsomely-manufactured volume; and it’s fun to read some of the troubadoric descriptions from male diarists, languishing wistfully over the bodily and other charms of their long-separated meaningless-encounter partners.
Mike Daisey, the comic actor and monologuist who became the conscience of Seattle E-business with his show 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, has signed a (reputed six-figure) deal to turn it into a book.
The bad news: Daisey’s taking the money to finance a move to NYC. Don’t leave us, Mike! We need you!
ELSEWHERE:
Odd recipes including “Tofu Sex Aids” and “Liquid Meat” (found by Robot Wisdom).
Singles to Jingles
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
IN THIS WACKY WORLD, TV ads create the music hits.
The radio stations wouldn’t touch Sting’s new album, but suddenly got bombarded with requests for his new song after the Jaguar commercial aired. So now we have greedy and artless ad execs chosing our records for us (rather than greedy and artless radio producers).
Then there is Moby, who deserves brief mention, since he sold every song on his album Play to advertisers. The Chemical Brothers sold out to Nike, but most horrible of all is, of course, the old Nair commercial that some how got the rights to “Short Shorts.”
This leaves us with the obvious question: Is there any dignity left?
I wonder if it has anything to do with 100 TV channels, or the MTV generation, or the gradual coorporate overtake of the music industry, or… oh whatever! Truth is, when this generation gets older, our favorite songs, the anthems of our generation, will be fuel for Rolaids, Paxil, and feminine itch products.
Here are some possible ads we may see in the future:
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have, as local readers might guess, been postponed.
When last I wrote about Emmett Watson, the dean of Seattle newspapermen, I described him as “possibly the greatest self-proclaimed hack writer in Northwest history.”
He was a helluva lot more than that.
He was a city’s chronicler, in a three-dot item column and occasional longer essays, then in three volumes of memoirs (all, alas, out of print).
He was also a city’s conscience, though he’d never admit to such a potentially pretentious appellation.
He would, however, freely admit to being a throwback to both the old days of newspapering and the old days of Seattle.
The former meant he was a master of the now largely-forgotten Art of the Column and the heritage of the classic newspaperman character type, the ink-stained wretch who drank with two fists and typed with two fingers. Watson wasn’t really like that, but he endearingly pretended to be such for droll-comic effect.
The latter meant he gave a damn about this once-forgotten corner of America and the humans of all social strata who inhabited it. He hobnobbed with the powerful, and dropped many a local-celeb name in his columns, but felt at home with the working stiffs, the unsung men and women who actually did things. (It’s sad but appropriate that his final published column appeared in last fall’s strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.)
Even his “Lesser Seattle” schtick, a running semi-gag about trying to “Keep the Bastards Out” and put the brakes on regional development, was really a not-so-disguised paean to the Seattle and the Northwest that he knew, the gruff but lovable place of honest curmuddgeons and simple dreamers–a culture he saw being steadily eroded, not just by loud-talkin’ Calif. immigrants but by local boosters who seemed to hate everything that was great about this place and desperately wanted to turn it into something “World Class” at any cost.
Watson tweaked and stretched the format of the three-dot column so it could say just about anything he wanted it to. He was outspoken (and on what I consider the right side of) just about every big political and social issue of the past half-century.
And it’s not an exaggeration to note that all I’ve done in this online (and sometimes print) column was an attempt, however misdirected and feeble, to try to write like he did.
NEXT: My print future.
“WORDS: WHO NEEDS ‘EM?”
Says Word Culture “Passe;” Excited by Switch to Images
SEATTLE (May 3): Declaring the written word “a passe institution,” longtime Seattle writer Clark Humphrey has announced he’s changing careers to become a documentary photographer.
He’s holding a coming-out party for his vivid color images, titled Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, on Saturday, June 2, 7-9 p.m. at the Belltown Underground Gallery, 2211 First Avenue in Seattle (north of the Frontier Room).
The event will be held on the 15th anniversary of Humphrey’s original “MISC.” column in the old Belltown-based monthly Arts Focus (it later appeared for seven years in The Stranger). The exhibit will remain on display through July 5.
A professional writer for nearly 20 years, Humphrey wrote Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, still the most complete account ever written about the early-’90s “Seattle Music Scene” hoopla. In addition to his Stranger tenure, his material has appeared in The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle magazine, Washington Law & Politics, The Comics Journal, Tower Records Pulse!, Penthouse Hot Talk, and The Washington Post Book World.
He continues to contribute a biweekly column and crossword puzzle to Tablet, a new alternative arts tabloid. He also maintains an ongoing “online column” at www.miscmedia.com; and for the past year and a half has published MISCmedia magazine, a print version of the website.
But his future projects (books, exhibitions, and a revised print magazine), several of which will be previewed at Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, will all involve original photographs and art in one form or another.
Why the switch? After losing a dot-com crossword-writing gig, Humphrey trolled around for writing assignments and found the trough crowded by laid-off web writers. Realizing the online fad (email, chat rooms, personal web sites, etc. etc.) had reinvigorated written-word culture to the point of decimating it as a career profession, he turned to the not yet totally demystified world of visual images.
“Everybody’s writing these days,” Humphrey said. “Or, rather, everybody thinks they can write.”
At the show, Humphrey will offer previews of one upcoming book and two larger-scale exhibitions:
In addition to the Belltown Underground Gallery, the Belltown Underground space also houses the Ola Wyola Boutique, the Belltown Ballet and Conditioning Studio, and Internet radio station Belltunes.com.
Exhibit of new color photographs by Clark Humphrey
OPENING: Saturday, June 2, 2001, 7-9 p.m. (free admission, all ages)
ON DISPLAY UNTIL: July 5, 2001
AT: Belltown Underground Art Gallery, 2211 First Avenue, Seattle WA 98121
INFO: (206) 448-3325
NEXT: How I noted the seventh anniversary of the Cobain tragedy.
IN LAST SUNDAY’S Seattle Times Sunday magazine, my ol’ pal Fred Moody had a memoir piece about his 20-plus years as a freelancer, staff writer, and/or editor at Seattle Weekly. It’s a nice little read; but two aspects particularly struck me:
1. Moody appears to believe, unless he’s being really sarcastic (and he’s been known to get that way), that the original Weekly incarnation under founding publisher David Brewster was a daring, status-quo-challenging “alternative” rag.
Bull doo-doo. Claiming the Brewster-era Weekly had ever been “alternative” is as phony a boomer-generation conceit as claiming Linda Ronstadt had ever been a rock singer.
From the start, the Weekly had been an attempt to put out the content of a slick upscale city monthly on once-a-week newsprint. (Brewster had previously worked on the first Seattle magazine.) The second cover story was about a “foodie” restaurant (the now-defunct Henry’s Off Broadway). Restaurant covers outnumbered arts covers most years, as best as I can recall.
From its political priorities to its entertainment coverage, everything in it was aimed at a small but well-defined target audience–the New Professionals who wore Nordstrom dress-for-success suits to jobs at the big new downtown office towers, attended watered-down “art” movies such as Harold and Maude, and dined on “gourmet” versions of American comfort foods. (The paper’s original backers included Gordon Bowker, who also helped start Starbucks and Redhook.)
If it ever took a “non-mainstream” approach to its topics, it was the same approach as that taken by early NPR or such PBS shows as Washington Week In Review–not the elite speaking to the masses, but the elite speaking to itself.
And if it ever took anything approaching an “irreverent” attitude toward regional politics, it was only firmly placed within official worldview–that The Sixties Generation, no matter how blanded-out and comfortably ensconced in premature middle age, was the absolute ultimate apex of human evolution.
In this worldview, oldsters (including oldster politicians) constituted a squaresville presence to be placated or patronized.
And anyone too young to have needed (or too proletarian to have attained) a college deferment from Vietnam didn’t even count as a full human being.
Thus, rock n’ roll music was never, ever, a priority at the old Weekly. Nor was any black culture too young to have been taken over by whites.
If you think this is just my Blank Generation whining, it isn’t. The Weekly has been sold and totally revamped twice, but old Weekly worldview lives on in the current mayoral campaign of Mark Sidran, whose demographic-cleansing campaigns as city attorney are based squarely on the assumption that upscale white baby boomers are the only “real” people in this town.
2. Moody was right on the button when he noted that, just as the success of the early Stranger proved how old and unhip the old Weekly was (or at least as it had become), so is today’s Stranger heading in the same direction.
But that’s a topic for another day.
NEXT: People who want me to plug their sites.
AS LONGTIME READERS KNOW, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the behind-the-scenes leveraging of power and influence.
I just believe it doesn’t work the way the conspiracy people claim. Power in modern-day America doesn’t flow through the Knights Templar or the Bildebungen. It flows through golf-course gladhanding, alumni dinners, and especially the flow of political campaign money. You don’t need to romanticize about the Illuminati–the ugly truth about the power elite is mostly out in the harsh bright open.
This has never been as true as it is with the current Presidential administration.
George W. Bush, appointed by appointed Supreme Court justices, has no electoral mandate and knows it. His First Hundred Days (aside from an overhyped diplomatic rift with China) was entirely devoted to proposing measures to help the only three groups of people he cares about:
Well, actually, that’s not exactly the case. Bush fils doesn’t even care about all the rich. He doesn’t care about manufacturing or shipping or agriculture or media or those troubled tech companies.
He only cares about the specific interest groups that funded his campaign–specifically, the oil, mining, and other extraction-based industries.
Which brings us to Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel
Underworld.
The book’s sprawling narrative encompasses many themes, but chief among them is a highly linear sense of American history. DeLillo’s trajectory follows the center of U.S. influence and money away from the Northeast (as symbolized by New York’s onetime domination of baseball) toward the inland west (as symbolized by giant chain-owned landfills).
At the time it first came out, I thought it was a kind of reverse nostalgia piece, a complaint about a trend that had already ended. The Yankees were back in dynasty mode, and finance was considered far more important than industry–especially those boring old resource industries, industries that deal in heavy-dirty things and don’t have hip urban offices with Foosball tables.
Oil was cheap, the metals markets were glutted with third-world imports, and in any event the future was going to be all about “pushing bits, not atoms,” as somebody at Wired once wrote.
I should have remembered something I always said in scoffing at linear-future sci-fi novels: Trends don’t keep going in the same direction forever. There are backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes.
The Age of W. is such a backlash. Call it the Revenge of the Oilmen. Bush’s sponsors/beneficiaries are the executives who were left behind by yesterday’s allegedly New Economy.
He’s doing his darnedest to put his friends back on top of the power-and-money heap, even if he has to put the whole rest of the country into a recession in the process.
If he has his way, he could try to turn all of America into an economy like that of certain rural Texas counties where a few oil and ranching families own everything and everyone else struggles.
NEXT: The real reason why delivery e-tailers are failing.
The Fiend Folio, Part 2by guest columnist Matt Briggs
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began to reminisce about a New Year’s Eve spent in a basement, playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to the Top 100 Rock Songs of All Time. Today, more of this memory.)
JERRY HOPEN HAD INVITED YOU, because in middle school he had been in Kelley’s game.
Jerry Hopen, because he was half Norwegian, was the biggest Chinese guy any of us had ever seen. We played in his basement, and when his mother came home, she stood on the threshold and asked him in Cantonese if he’d walked the dog. The name of the dog, Alamo, floated in her wavering syllables. Jerry often played the half-orc fighter character, decked out in heavy, sparkling armor. He dated Betsy Toth after Betsy finished with you, Justin, and would have married her if she hadn’t dumped him.
Greg Shupah was the first to go into the refrigerator and make everyone take a can of beer. He opened mine and told me to drink it. Greg was two years older than us and his friends had gradually stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, one by one, until he was playing with kids a year younger, and then he was playing with us.
Greg never attended school, and always showed up to the game an hour early and sat in the basement reading comic books. He read The Uncanny X-Men and kept the issues in Mylar bags. He held the glossy cover open in his palm and laughed to himself without explaining what he found amusing and then he would carefully close the cover and slip it into the shiny bag.
He was one of the tallest boys in the school, but because he didn’t like to sweat, he didn’t play basketball. He regarded the limit of absent days per quarter, seventeen, as a constraint to be creatively circumvented.
Greg didn’t fit in most chairs, and usually sat on the sofa. Greg often played wizards that threw strange objects. That News Year’s Eve he had spent five minutes explaining the way his character’s weapons looked–three-foot knives, with assorted nicks and repairs on the blades, and only one edge. “The back edge, remember, is flat.” His ideal character was always ambidextrous.
Mark Imel was short and perfectly formed and a red head with freckles and had a soft way of speaking that sounded like he was attempting to calm everyone down. Everything he did, he did as if it was important to sound sincere. Greg ribbed Mark until Mark jumped out of his chair and wrestled Greg to the ground and muttered, “Say you’re sorry Greg. Say it before I snap.”
Mark had dropped out of Math Club shortly before you showed up Justin, and after this, you and Mark would go out to the pipeline and smoke a bowl during the morning break. Naturally, Mark often played the cleric because someone had to have the ability to heal the other players and he did not want to rock the boat.
John Segrist was a year younger than the rest of us. He had gigantic forearms like Popeye the Sailor Man. If the game slowed down, John would begin to twitch and we never knew what John would do. He and Jerry, because they hated cats, sometimes shared what-they-did-to-the-damn-cat stories, which often involved basketball hoops, bottle rockets, or Dobermans.
When John rolled the dice, he stood up on the couch where he sat next to Greg, blew on them, and thew them against the table, knocking over miniatures, and losing the twenty-sided dice under the coffee table. John almost always played thieves.
“Can I have a beer to celebrate? We can all have another beer, now? It’s New Year’s Eve,” you finally asked. “And I just spent an hour filling out this four-page form.” But it was my show and as Dungeon Master, I didn’t want anyone getting drunk.
We played for six hours of uninterrupted play when Jerry, under the guise of correcting one of my mistakes, threw a dice at my face.
This was the convention: If someone else made a mistake and I didn’t catch them, then they threw a dice at my nose. If there was any break in the continuity of the story, really, either in a flubbed improvisational line, an unrealistic character, some plot point or detail that changed, the players had the right to throw plastic objects–mostly the twelve sided dice because it was cast out of a slightly softer plastic resin–at my nose. I have a hollow notch about half way up my nose, and this was their target. Jerry’s throw flatly hit the notch and a sound like a wooden clacker knocked in the basement.
“Let me try that again,” Jerry said and then you and Jerry began hurling things at me and then, when you said, “It’s Miller time,” everyone, except me, got up and followed you to the refrigerator. After that, we were just all drinking and listening to the KZOK countdown. The songs went: “I have my back against the wrecking machine” and “Roxanne, Why do you sell your body to the night” and “Inna Godda DaVida, honey.”
Sitting there, I could feel the pieces of the four-year-old fantasy slipping away, and the scattered miniatures were no longer wizards and gnomes and hobgoblins, but hunks of lead.
Jerry Hopen went into the Navy and became a nuclear tech and was decommissioned at twenty-one years old.
Greg Shupah and Mark Imel–after discovering LSD, which they called Uncle for some inexplicable reason–anointed themselves ‘Cid Prophets and went to Texas to spread the word of lysergic acid and The Lord. They were arrested in a crowded church, so the story goes, somewhere down there.
John Segrist and I held onto that game, that game you were in the process of shattering, Justin. John and I played that game until John’s addiction to over-the-counter cough syrup, Robitussin that he called ‘tussin to be exact, became so severe that his parents sent him to Idaho.
I never did anything with you after that, and I don’t know what happened to you. But that night, we got drunk, and I was made fun of because I was drunk after only three beers, and we howled and played air guitar to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” that song that goes: mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah over and over again.
Do you remember, Justin, you hoped up on the coffee table and kicked the battle in progress, the polyhedron dice going everywhere, and ground the Chee-tos into Jerry’s couch, and you howled and we all howled along with you?
NEXT: The first of a new occasional series revisiting every home I’ve ever lived in.
The Fiend Folio, Part 1
by guest columnist Matt Briggs
YOU DID NOT BELONG, JUSTIN KRAMER.
We wanted to believe that you fit in with us, or rather, we wanted to believe that we could fit in with you and wear your shirt.
You remember your black and white horizontal striped button-down shirt, the same as the one in the Def Leppard video, “Pour Some Sugar on Me?” I’m sure Betsy Toth bought you that shirt when she outfitted you at the Squire Shop after she had acquired your pretty freshmen face. She introduced you to beer and dope and the volleyball squad.
After Betsy Toth, you carried menthols and Schlitz to Kelly Yoshitomi’s weekly Friday evening Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. You were barred from his house after his mother found a beer can stuffed with butts behind the bonsai stand in her rock garden.
Now you came to my game, stumbling down the stairs an hour late smelling like cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.
It was New Year’s Eve, and you were a normal American boy, so you had two half-racks of Milwaukee’s Best under your arms. Even so, you should have noticed the five-foot vinyl map with the inch grid calibrated to match the lead miniatures; you should have noticed the customized four page character sheets designed in MacWrite using the blackletter Old English typeface; you should have noticed the distinctly non-alcoholic odor of Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and damp Reeboks.
When I looked up and asked you, “Friend or Foe?” instead of laughing and saying, “We’ll see,” you should have taken the clue right then. You should have turned around and gone to the park and polished the beer off, alone. “You’re an hour late,” Jerry Hopen told you. “Sit down and roll up your character.” He confiscated the beer.
“Where did you get those?” John Segrist asked.
“I picked up it up on the way over,” you said vaguely, alluding to a bored familiarity with the whole process of getting beer.
“Can I have one?”
“No,” I said. “We have a game to play.”
Jerry put the cases in the refrigerator in the back room.
We were in an extended post-adolescent funk exacerbated not just by the pimply breakouts brought on by a pure 7-Eleven diet of hot dogs, nachos, and Super Big Gulps but because we hadn’t actually said anything substantial to each other out of role-playing game character since the age of thirteen.
We spent more time in the fantasy realm of extended wish fulfillment, devoted to the exquisite pleasures of not only rescuing damsels in distress but waltzing through remote towns as desperadoes swinging vorpal blades and bastard swords than we did sleep.
We disdained other players, and therefore you should have never even been invited, Justin.
One of the real pitfalls of playing role-playing games was the inflation fueled by the desire for omnipotence. Each player ended up with characters limited only by the individual player’s outer margin of imaginative hubris. These characters could stop the universe on a whim. The players squabbled to determine who was the baddest. When these players squabbled, universes exploded and the game collapsed back to five kids sitting around a dirty table in some dimly lit basement screaming at each other.
To prevent any break in the continuity of the fantasy, we had developed a complex manifesto describing the aesthetic of our game. This wasn’t kids’ stuff. We were wizards and shamans and there were rules to be obeyed in this fantasy as inviolable as the laws of physics.
You brought your own player character written on the thin, official TSR-issued player character sheet, and I said, “Put that away. You will have to start over again.” Our group allowed no outside characters because they had dubious experience in a different universe and brought with them foreign artifacts with dimly understood magical properties.
I recorded the features of our magical items in a private ledger, and we referred to each item by number. The detail of the game stayed with a single player, the official Dungeon Master, who couldn’t have a player character. I was the Dungeon Master and devised the metaphysical rules of the game, and determined everything from how gravity worked to the precise arc of a fireball. You didn’t understand that individual groups of players played the game as removed from each other as terrorist cells.
Our games proceeded slowly, each one taking progressively longer. They had at first dragged out for weeks, and then months, and the game that you broke up, Justin, had been going for over two years, and despite the interruption you had introduced, would continue until it sputtered out in 1989, with the members of the game spread out to the four corners of the US–Jerry Hopen as a corpsmen in California, Greg as an LSD-fueled prophet in Texas, Mark Imel as a busboy in Washington state, John institutionalized in Idaho, and me in basic training in New Jersey. I don’t know what happened to you.
The radio played “Barracuda.” We spent an hour drafting your character. While we played, we listened to KZOK (“Seattle’s Hardest Rock Station”) count down the hundred greatest rock n’ roll songs of all time. The songs reeled out, toward the grail of the greatest ten songs.
The entire list revolved the eternal roster of canonical of rock songs. They came, from our perspective, from the nameless past, somewhere in the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, from the time before we bought LPs. The sequence of songs seemed as solid as the stars and the constellations, moving toward Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watch Tower,” “We Will Rock You,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hotel California,” and finally, “Stairway to Heaven.”
An upsetting year when “Kashimer” replaced “Stairway.”
NEXT: The tale continues.
PEOPLE ARE WRITING MORE THESE DAYS.
Some written-word defenders apparently don’t like it.
Yeah, some of the same types of hibrow guys n’ gals who, just a few years ago, were all a-moanin’ about the supposed Death Of The Word are now all a-moanin’ about the exploding volume of words being issued by persons less astute than themselves.
In a recent NY Times piece, they kvetched to high heaven about e-mails and chat rooms and newsgroups and other online verbosity collectors wherein ordinary folk who don’t even have graduate degrees can show off their noun-‘n’-verb-wranglin’ skills (or lack thereof) for all to see, in almost-real time.
The careful discipline of written English will collapse if this is allowed to continue, cry these SNOOTs (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term of self-description in the April Harper’s).
I say bunk. Double bunk and triple bunk, even.
Fortunately, my longtime pal Rob Wittig was around to add a voice-O-sanity to the NYT piece. He (correctly, I believe) noted that online writing is an exciting, albeit no longer really new, medium, whose rules and conventions are still in great flux. We’re not seeing the end of Real Writing, or even the beginning of the end, but the slow beginning of our ever-evolving language’s next phase.
To Wittig’s statements, I’d add that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect (certainly there are dozens of awful fiction and poetry writers who’ve never goten significantly better and probably never will). But there’s no way to become a decent writer without it–especially if it’s in a medium that can give you near-instant feedback and criticism.
So yes! More chat rooms! More mail lists! More weblogs! More message boards! More personal websites!
Keyboard-and-mouse jockeys of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your would-be silencers!
NEXT: Et tu, KCMU?
WITH THE STEADY RISE of DIY culture, and the increased hype over electronic books, printing-on-demand, and other newfangled verbal-delivery systems, has come a mild (so far) outcry from defenders of publishing’s old guard.
This is somewhat different from the Napster uproar and related rants against the music industry. In regard to music, there’a a general consensus among the ranters that the big corporations running the show are slick, corrupt money-grubbers and always have been.
But book publishing, the conventional wisdom goes, is, or was, or is supposed to be, a fraternity of tweed-clad, nice old men who live for the passion of nuturing capital-L Literature. Instead of rebelling against the book biz’s middlemen, these critics claim we should defend their importance.
Publishing’s current obsession with hype and market-share, under the control of some of the same media conglomerates that run the music business, is seen by these critics as a mere unfortunate anomaly, a digression from some Platonic ideal of the book trade.
That, as you might expect me to say by now, is a crock of bull.
Publishing’s always been about profit. it’s just that the tweed-suited guys worked for little companies before they got big, before they were fully integrated into media-conglomerate “synergies.”
As noted in a recent Times essay by my ol’ pal Fred Moody, who’s put out two books thru major NY publishers and seen scant return for the trouble, “authors have stored up so much enraged aggrievance that that alone could propel electronic publishing and distribution into being, with enough energy left over to fill California’s electricity needs forever.”
And a small-press or even self-published book doesn’t have to be an unreadable mess. It can be, of course, but so are many (if not most) corporately-published works.
There are thousands of self-released CDs out there, and I’d say they aren’t, on the average, as bad as some self-published books. My idea why: Most musical performers still have to learn their trade in front of live audiences. A band-made CD might not have slick 24-track production (although with digital recording, it often does), but it does carry, if it’s any good, a sense of the performer’s live act.
Too many self-published books contain material nobody’s read, heard, or critiqued before. Some author with a credit card just puts it out, hopes it’ll be loved, and gets disappointed when it isn’t.
There are ways to avoid that dreary fate, and they’re well-known ways. Authors should do what they can to make their works known and their schticks honed. Conferences, workshops, zines, live readings, broadsides, etc. etc.
And concerning the argument that some authors still need good editors to shape their work into readable form, an author who does need that help (like most of ’em) shouldn’t be ashamed of asking for it. If a writer’s gonna spend money to get a book or e-book out, s/he oughta spend just a little more on a good editor, designer, and/or packager.
Such as my humble self.
NEXT: Remember rain?
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about the Boeing Co.’s stunning news that it would set up a new, slimmed-down head office–which would be located away from the offices of any of its main operating groups (i.e., not in Seattle).
And yes, the media were right to give the story the big play they did (including NY Times and USA Today front page stories as well as wall-to-wall local coverage).
Only 500 or so of Boeing’s 78,000 Washington state staffers will go away or be laid off (local dot-coms alone have collectively topped that in some weeks this year). And Boeing’s vast Commercial Airplane Group (with all its own execs, engineers, salespeople, and assemblers) is staying put.
But a corporate HQ, even a rump holding-company HQ, still means something. It symbolizes an organization’s commitment to an on-the-ground community. Its removal to some neutral site, as we’ve already mentioned, is Boeing brass’s (expensive) statement that it’s turning its back on that “old economy” heritage, that it’s just another player on the global-corporate stage, untied to anyplace, anything, or anyone other than the transnational elite of financiers and dealmakers.
Of course, the idea that Boeing doesn’t want to be associated anymore with any one specific place doesn’t make things any nicer for the civic-leader types at this specific place.
Seattle, as you may know, has cared a lot more about Boeing than Boeing has about Seattle. True, the company continued to build planes here when it might’ve constructed plants in the home states of important defense-appropriation Senators.
But in return for that, the company sought, and almost always got, total subservience from local politicians, media people, and ordinary citizens. (The cover of the late Bill Speidel’s book The Wet Side of the Mountains: Exploring Western Washington included a cartoon image of hard-hatted workers kneeling and praying at the gates of a Boeing hangar.)
Seattle’s civic-development establishment has spent the past half-century or so trying to make sure this town became, and remained, the kind of town Boeing would want to keep calling home.
A place where top executives could retreat to their waterfront dachas, unbothered by the outside world.
A place where level-headed engineers could enjoy sane, tasteful leisure opportunities in sane, tasteful surroundings (with the hardhat workers and their rough-hewn ways exiled to the outskirts, a la Soweto).
A place of quiet intelligence and modest personal ambition, but also a place that would do anything within (or slightly beyond) reason to become “World Class.” We’ll build World Class stadia and convention facilities. We’ll host World Class trade confabs. But we’ll pretend we’re still an overgrown small town, where everybody’s laid-back and mellow and ultra-bland and ultra-white. This schizophrenic drive to be simultaneously big and small, aware and innocent, world-wise but not worldly (similar to the New Testament ideal to be “in the world but not of the world”) served Seattle, and Boeing, relatively well for many years, until its contradictions started becoming too apparent in recent years.
Now, Boeing–the company that made the International Jet Set possible, thus spawning today’s rootless global financial elite–is redefining itself as neither in nor of the world, but as belonging to the Everywhere/Nowhere of that aforementioned elite.
The New Boeing will supply aircraft and satellite-communications equipment to keep the elite’s members in actual or virtual contact with one another and their assorted fiscal empires, while treating the rest of Planet Earth as one big “flyover zone.”
NEXT: A special offer.
