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“DISINTERMEDIATION” is one of those buzzwords you hear in communications circles every now and then.
Applied to the online universe, the word is usually applied to individuals talking and/or writing to other individuals, rather than media professionals gathering huge massed audiences.
There’s a middle ground between these two extremes, though. It’s the e-mail list, discussion board, or website (such as this one) in which somebody puts together well-chosen words for a well-defined niche audience, or for anybody willing to read on.
We’ll look at a couple of local sites of this type today.
Seattle Stories is, as its name implies, an informal and friendly collection of little narratives. Most are seeded by the site’s creators Erik Benson, Stephen Deken, and Alan Taylor; but they’re soliciting, and starting to obtain, tales from the site’s readers.
These are tales of everyday life. Taking trips, going out jogging, falling in love, raising kids, surviving earthquakes, etc. They’re simple, pretense-free, and full of heart.
Pax Adicus is principally a rave-culture site; its “Philo” section is full of sermons by two guys who seem to imagine that taking ecstasy makes them a superior species to the rest of us squares, rehashing all the familiar techno-talk buzzwords. But its “Read” section features the same guys (using the bylines Mc Cutcheon and Ooh the Sloth 456) in a more honest and refreshing mode, relating incidents about their partyin’ lives (drinking too much, falling in lust, driving around, visiting pals, etc.).
The stories are officially billed as fiction, but they’re real (on a heart-‘n’-soul level). When the site’s authors go preachin’ about MDMA and global trance revolutions, they unwittingly depict themselves as stereotyped trend-followers. When they set that aside and turn to the details of living, they become more fully-realized “characters.”
NEXT: Don’t turn social services over to the churches, turn them into business opportunities.
ELSEWHERE:
A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti
It’s the moment that always freezes my heart.
I’m at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we’re entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we’re in the bedroom.
She smiles, nods to the other stereo–this one smothered with candles or books–and offers “Music?”
For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.
What do I say? I say nothing.
We wouldn’t be this far if we didn’t appreciate each other’s taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.
Forget it, I say “sure” and pray that the music isn’t crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates–along with our mood–into nothing.
As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.
Slow, moody jazz from the ’50s and ’60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn’t cut it.
Judging by the LP jackets from the ’70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.
Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can’t touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.
So where is my lust-inducing music?
While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari’s Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio’s Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.
Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.
Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music’s embrace.
Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.
NEXT: The heroism of America’s TV critics (or at least one of ’em).
Critical Mass Exodus
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist discussed the sudden, management-pushed retirement of longtime Seattle Times film critic John Hartl. Today, a look at a quite different critical voice, also disappearing–a highbrow- and experimental-music zine.)
IT’S OFFICIAL: The Tentacle is jettisoning its ink edition. The current spring issue will be followed by a final one in a few months. The web site, www.tentacle.org, will probably continue to list shows, but this activity, like any resumption of the print version, depends on a dwindling supply of volunteer labor.
Although money is always tight in the magazine world, the main reason Tentacle helmsman Dennis Rea gives for quitting is that he and other collective members (Mike Marlin, Christopher DiLaurenti, and Carl Juarez) need to spend more time on their own projects.
A larger problem is that the community The Tentacle serves is too small. Of the dozens who regularly do, as the cover says, “free improv, avant-rock, new composition, noise, electro-acoustic, out jazz,” and other unusual forms, not enough folks contribute to the one publication that pays much attention to them.
Twenty subscribers and a handful of ads pay the bills, and it takes another twenty people to write, edit, lay out, publish, and distribute this 24-page, 8.5 X 11 newsprint denizen of the resonant deep.
In a way, the narrow focus is what made The Tentacle one of the most fascinating magazines around. I speared it when it first surfaced, about three years ago. At the time, I was editing the Washington Free Press and so was drawn to it as a beautifully designed shoestring-budget journal rather than as a kind of lobbying ploy on the part of some artists to get themselves noticed.
As a writer who’s done my share of such lobbying, I was also intrigued by the spirit of this mad venture. To read The Tentacle was to confront the apparent reality of a vast music scene that thrived on presenting experimental work.
In music, writing, or any other artistic discipline, works that fool around with the conventions of their craft are hard to sell. Unlike larger publications that ignore or ridicule such an approach to art, The Tentacle had a sense of humor about its place in the cultural food chain.
Of course, the expectations of artists who book and promote their own shows are nothing if not realistic. Then again, maniacs who spend years composing pieces that nobody may want to play or hear, refining techniques that seem more suited to a carnival than a concert stage, and striving for a perfection that must alienate in order to succeed are so idealistic as to make monks seem like venal hedonists.
The critical questions The Tentacle addressed weren’t the case-by-case judgments the overnight critic makes, but idealistic concerns. Instead of CD reviews and celebrity profiles for fans, there were CD release notifications and interviews and articles for fellow artists. The Tentacle provided a forum to define “creative” music and to discuss the relationship of politics to art; a place for book reviews, concert reports, cartoons, a calendar, and oddball features.
What is art? Why is art important? Which art matters?
These are the lines of investigation John Hartl and The Tentacle have pursued in their various ways.
I know these people and have written for these publications, but my stake in all this is personal only insofar as it is intellectual.
That is, the idea of devolving into a society where attitude-packed cheap shots replace thoughtful reviews and where experience, civil discourse, and consideration give way to picks-‘n-pans arts coverage is a threat to what I write, read, hear, see, and know.
People retire, magazines sink out of sight, and newspapers wrap fish.
NEXT: More things we’re losing.
Best of ‘Times’
IN FEBRUARY, John Hartl and The Tentacle more or less called it quits.
Apart from the coincidence of timing, these events wouldn’t strike most people as being connected in any way. A daily newspaper movie critic and an avant-garde music magazine collective of editor/publisher/writers might even seem to be enemies.
Besides, what common cause could there be between a hugely commercial art form, as exemplified by the Hollywood blockbuster known to all, and an assertively bizarre artistic foray, as exemplified by performances where the players have been known to outnumber the audience?
Maybe nobody in management at the downsized Seattle Times now appreciates that publication’s erstwhile status as Washington’s “paper of record,” but John Hartl did.
He made it his business to review everything. No matter how obscure the film or broke the theater or short the run, for 35 years Hartl went out of his way to let you know what was out there and what he thought about it. His consistency of views, depth of experience, and breadth of interests made his writing a reason to subscribe to that paper.
Although he will continue to cover movies for the Times as a freelancer, this coverage is bound to be less comprehensive than it was.
In the aftermath of a six-week strike, in which the paper lost $21 million while resisting contract demands that would have cost the company $3-4 million over one year, paternalist rules force returning strikers to be nice to bosses and scabs while bosses are free to sneer as they please, and morale is about what you would expect it to be at an office run by zombies whose Bible is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By not calling most striking reviewers back to work (and by urging long-time employees like Hartl to take early retirement), the paper has slashed arts coverage.
NEXT: Another fond adieu, this one to a most peculiar music zine.
CHICAGO, THEY LIKED TO SAY during the regime of the first Mayor Daley, was “a city that works.”
Seattle might be described as a city that works and works and works.
In the March issue of the spunky art zine The RedHeaded Stepchild, Jeff Miller suggests a focal point of the Seattle visual-art scene, and of the city as a whole: “Inasmuch as it has an identity, it’s about work.”
Quoting unidentified national mags, Miller sez LA’s schtick is the tits (“stuffed with silicone but fun to play with”); SF’s is the head (“tuned in or turned on, doing the brainwork”); Seattle’s is the foot (“working hard, shut up all day in socks and shoes, not welcome in polite company–pulling everything else along, but for no purpose, really, except hard work and money”).
“In Seattle,” Miller writes, “you work because it’s expected of you, because your dad did it, because you have no distractions; in short, because you’re a good Scandinavian. That’s also why–if I may stretch a little–you make and show your artn which means that Seattle’s response to the production/reception duality might be a different, but equally contemporary, kind of creation.”
Later on in his piece: “The fraction of our lives not taken up by work and sleep is occupied by home and television: if Los Angeles has claimed the latter two, then the former are left for the rest of us.
“I believe that Seattle’s spirit is shaped by exhausted American labor. The home of Microsoft understands, more than most, the sacrifice of life to paid employment. It has been a slacker haven, and an old-school blue-collar town. Artists, curators, and critics keep stopping by Seattle, looking for this city’s artistic voice, but the voice is never home: it’s too busy working a day job.
“In the end, I think the most striking feature of Seattle art might be the day job itself, or the negotiation between the job and artistic creation. Extraordinarily rich creations have sprung, perhaps, from LA’s strange preoccupation with domestic growth. The survival strategy that art negotiates in Seattle, the artistic response to the dominant features of this city’s environment, might then–as in LA–itself be the most compelling subject for the city’s art.”
Here we have an explanation for the MS workplace culture, and the Nordstrom workplace culture that preceded it.
It explains the homey, just-good-enough-without-being-showy aesthetic of the old Kingdome.
It explains the local theater scene’s historic emphasis on production rather than hype (and on accessible, workmanlike entertainment).
It explains the music scene’s emphasis on honesty and sincerity rather than hype and glamour. It explains the DIY obsession of the Olympia scene. Conversely, it also explains the powers-that-be’s historic distrust of bohemian culture and their abhorrance of youth culture.
It explains the REI culture’s vision of recreation not as “leisure” but as vigorous action.
It explains caffeine (the drug of active people) and Costco (where you have to work to shop).
It explains why we don’t care as much for passive icons such as beauty-pageant queens (unlike Portland).
It explains the neighborhood-activists’ drives to preserve Lake Union as “a working lake” and the Industrial District.
It doesn’t explain glass art (except the craftsmanship atttitudes associated with it), Kenny G (except as office music taken to the level of stardom), or the Hendrix cult (he was a soft-spoken, intelligent craftsman, but his public image among white boomers isn’t). But these could be exceptions that prove the rule.
It also might at least partly explain my own aesthetic preference toward honest working-stiff culture instead of the gussified-up prettiness emphasized in most Seattle picture books; and my abhorrance of the local media’s whole yup-leisure idolatry.
It explains why Greg Lundgren of the Vital 5 Productions gallery felt the need to start a little zine-and-poster “movement,” Artists for a Work-Free America. In someplace like Honolulu, Miami, or New Orleans, the value of letting-go and freeing your spirit aren’t things people need to be preached to about.
And it might explain civic leaders’ “world class” obsession (from the World’s Fair to the new fancy-schmancy buildings) as the expression of guys who wanted to be seen as constantly striving to be their best.
And it would certainly explain the city’s social schtick of uptight, polite “niceness.” It’s the schtick of a town that forever puts out the help-wanted sign “Now Hiring Smiling Faces,” and too often stigmatizes anyone guilty of insufficient perkiness.
And the menacing, near-psychotic grins on all the clean-cut yups’ faces in condo and restaurant ads? They’re the faces of characters who know they can’t ever let go of their passive-aggressive workplace personalities. Not even at home.
NEXT: A last look inside the OK Hotel.
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
NOT LONG AGO, we reviewed a couple of books about the late-2000 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.
Today, we look at a couple of videotaped documentaries chronicling these same events, Trade Off and This Is What Democracy Looks Like.
Trade Off was directed by Shaya Mercer, produced by ex-LA filmmaker Thomas Lee Wright, and made with a centralized crew (though with liberal use of TV footage of the conference and the protests).
Democracy comes from the Independent Media Center (which opened as a clearinghouse for WTO-protest alterna-media coverage and remains open) and Big Noise Films. The IMC has issued two other tapes packaged from its collected WTO footage, but this is the one it’s most heavily promoting online and in “alternative” print media.
It’s also the slickest. Directors Jill Freidberg and Rick Rowley gathered footage from some 100 contributing IMC volunteers as well as a dozen or two core crew members. It’s narrated by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy rapper Michael Franti and bigtime actress Susan Sarandon. It’s got all the modern digital-editing schticks that can now be accomplished on a low budget.
Both tapes offer the same heroes (third-world feminists, steelworkers, Ruckus Society organizers), villains (corporations, politicians, cops), and storyline (a massive groundswell of concerned folk from all over gather to take over the streets, get inhumanely roughed up by bad cops, take credit for the breakdown of negotiations inside the WTO conference, and start an exciting new era of mass activism).
But there are differences, especially in what each tape’s curators choose to include.
Trade Off, while made by professionals who might have been expected to dwell on the story’s exciting visuals, spends more time discussing the issues behind world trade and the centralization of political and economic power by big business and international financiers.
Democracy, despite coming from an activist organization with a political agenda to sell, prefers to dwell more on the spectacle of the protests themselves. It depicts the protestors and their organizers as the new counterculture heroes, and emphasizes the feel-good aspects of the protesting experience (the shared community, the sense of empowerment).
But as I’ve been saying these past 15 months, the protests will have ultimately failed if their only legacy is as a future nostalgia topic for the middle-aged of tomorrow.
So it’s Trade Off that expresses the best hope for a worthwhile WTO-protest legacy, one in which more folk become informed about the complexities of the issues surrounding their lives and livelihoods, then take an active role in helping change them.
As the black activist site Seditionists.org quotes author Barbara Ehrenreich, “There is a difference, the true seditionist would argue, between a revolution and a gesture of macho defiance. Gestures are cheap. They feel good, they blow off some rage. But revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have learned how to count very slowly to ten.”
NEXT: ‘Porn for conservatives’ or just another commercial niche?
Fast, Rich, And Out Of Control
(LAST TIME, our guest columnist began a bus trek through Mexico. Today, more non-travelogue thoughts on the topic.)
TALK IS CHEAP, anecdotal evidence is practically worthless, and discussions of traffic tend to veer from the personal to the philosophical and back again, in a hit or miss attempt to get a grip on a topic which often seems to control our lives.
I believe that Seattle traffic is faster, nastier, and more reckless than it was five years ago, that drivers here are less considerate of others on the road than they used to be, and that those tandem emblems of wealth-coddled “rugged individualism,” the driver’s cell phone and the SUV, exemplify a spirit of self-interest that sets the pace of the American road.
Given more than its share of monied thugs, a geography that funnels traffic over bridges (and thwarts the installing of tracks), gas prices and highway taxes that subsidize car drivers, and a recent growth surge that clogs arterial streets that once were fairly clear, Seattle is the model of a city that desperately needs but rarely heeds the call for better public transportation. As much as we need better transit systems (or just more busses), we need even more a reason not to drive.
Compared to Seattle-area traffic, traffic in and around Guadalajara, on secondary roads between cities in the central highlands, and in the farm country of Michoacan is more mannered yet more unrestricted—that is, somewhat more polite and vehemently more stylized in its execution of certain wild maneuvers. Two-lane roads become four-lane superhighways, as passing vehicles create a middle lane or lanes around the center line, gently forcing other vehicles to drive on the shoulder. Bicycles be damned.
In the cities the pace is hectic, but drivers usually obey the laws and don’t attack the pedestrians, who may jaywalk at their own risk. Although the traffic seems a bit more relaxed in Mexico than it is in the U.S., stories of kids behind the wheel, drunks on highway killing sprees, and carjackers on patrol in cities loom like threats to urge people to take the bus.
Car ownership in Mexico, where the average annual income is less than the cost of a car, means a lot more than it does in the U.S., but the extra boost in respect or status a Mexican driver might assume doesn’t come loaded with a corresponding scorn for others on the road. This may be the most difficult rule of the road for an American to accept: That people aren’t automatically inferior because they don’t drive, that people who need to or choose to take public transportation deserve a decent ride.
Not that this custom is hard to take down there, but that such civility makes it a shame to come home.
NEXT: A beauty makeover gone hilariously wrong.
Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.
While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.
To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.
Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.
While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.
And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.
Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.
This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.
A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.
No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?
Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.
“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”
NEXT: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
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A MERE SIX MONTHS after the WTO riots, I predicted there’d be folks who’d spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of that singular protestorial moment, or (worse) using their participation in it (no matter how peripheral) as a badge of radical sanctimony, a way of defining their personal specialness. (I’d seen too much of that in ’60s fogeys.)
So it should come as no surprise that documents of this type are beginning to appear.
Case in point: The recent book Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond. It lists three “authors” on the front cover. One is really a photographer, Allen Sekula, whose color close-ups emphasize the more photogenic (or most visibly wounded) protestors, obscuring both the scope of the marches and the diversity of the marchers.
The text is by longtime lefter-than-thou essayist and syndicated columnist Alexander Cockburn and his colleague Jeffrey St. Clair. The main piece of text, the “Seattle Diary” chapter, is credited solely to St. Clair, and is our topic here.
And it disappoints greatly. And I’m not just talking about the many many typos.
St. Clair seems less interested in getting to the grit of global trade and its discontents, of the miraculous breadth of the anti-WTO coalition, than in (1) name-dropping all the radical personal friends he runs into at the marches (all of whom seem to be from San Francisco), and in (2) berating everyone he sees at the marches or accompanying events whom he considers insufficiently radical.
These not-good-enough types include the respected populist-progressive commentators Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins; folks who’ve made plenty of unkind words about the rule of Global Business and its political lackeys, but whom St. Clair, for reasons apparently perceptible only by the sort of people who read The Nation, considers to be less than ideologically pure.
In short: Where the WTO protests were a grand coming-together of all sorts of people who had all sorts of agendas and priorities, and who wanted to persue these agendas and priorities without a global-corporate monoculture’s repressions, St. Clair saw the protests as a big party to which only persons meeting his doctrinal standards should have been allowed.
St. Clair, I’m afraid, is a ’60s-style radical who Doesn’t Get It about the way-new left. It’s not about bringing back the allegedly-good-old-days of self-aggrandizing counterculture hustlers and sectarian schisms. It’s about working together with people who don’t necessarily belong to the same subcultural “tribe,” but who share a dream for a more just, more democratic, and more healthy world.
For a more thoroughly researched, more serious account of the events on and surrounding Nov. 30, 1999 in Seattle, pick up Janet Thomas’s The Battle in Seattle. Thomas (who’s actually lived in the Seattle area) takes the issues behind global trade and corporate power seriously and soberly. Instead of St. Clair’s oversimplified us-vs.-them dichotomies, Thomas finds patterns of power and influence, and people from all continents and walks-O-life who’ve been finding ways to work together to change those patterns even after the last tear-gas canisters were discharged on Capitol Hill.
She even includes dozens of addresses and websites in the back for those of you who’d like to get in on the hard work of building a better society, not just protesting against the one we’ve got.
TOMORROW: How to publish an arts magazine in the Post-Funding Era.
Favorite Videos and Worst Job
by guest columnist Ryan
(ED.’S NOTE: One of the email lists I’m on had a topic thread last month, in which members posted the books they’d least likely let anyone borrow. Thanks to the well-known factor of topic drift, that led to people listing their favorite videos. Ryan [last name redacted at his request] went a step further and added an additional topic-drift step, as printed by permission below.)
Delivered-To: clark@speakeasy.org
Reply-To: [email address redacted]
From: “Ryan” [email address redacted]
To: wallace-l@waste.org
Subject: RE: wallace-l: Top Videos/Degrading Job
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:03:11 -0500
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
Sender: owner-wallace-l@waste.org
TOP VIDEOS:
Apocalypse Now
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Dazed and Confused
The Usual Suspects
Kids
The Harder They Come
…and anything by Stanley Kubrick (esp. 2001)
MOST DEGRADING JOB:
Feel free to disregard this, but I must vent.
I worked for a company called DSMax. They call themselves an advertising and marketing firm. They are lying. I could probably write a book about what was horrible about this job, but here’s a handy list instead.
1. 4:45 a.m. Wake up, shower, put on mandatory shirt and tie.
2. 5:45 a.m.-7 a.m. Commute 1.25 hours to DSMax branch office in Norristown, PA.
3. 7 a.m.-9 a.m. Engage in motivational cheering sessions and spirit-building exercises with fellow “representatives.” (“Where we going?” “To the top!” “WHERE WE GOING?” “TO THE TOP!” “When?” “Now!” “When?” “Now!” “WHEN WHEN WHEN?” “NOW NOW NOW!!!” And other humiliations too numerous and depraved to list. Let me just say there was “hand jive” involved.) Listen in quiet horror as co-workers enthusiastically discuss pro wrestling/soap operas/fanatical, cultish commitment to DSMax/plans for all the money they’ll make once they get promoted to branch manager. Take note of surprising number of co-workers who’ve quit since you started. Envy them.
4. 9 a.m. Commute back to Philadelphia in order to walk door-to-door in the run-down ghetto business districts of West Philly. In December. Peddling long-distance phone service to local small business owners (i.e. hair salons, corner stores, dive bars (people drinking straight vodka at 10 a.m.), garages, endless parade of delis and other shithole restaurants, etc.) Do this until 5 p.m. Return to “office” (really just one large rumpus room) during rush hour.
4a. Locate potential client (e.g., sucker). Check soul at door. “Pitch.” Trudge, defeated, out door OR (rarely) attempt have customer sign multiple contracts and make multiple phone calls to complete sale. Trudge
forlornly out door when customer informs you that he/she “don’t have time for this shit.”
5. 6 p.m. Return to office. Ring small bell, large bell, or gong, according to your sales performance for the day. Calculate commission. Choke back tears at realization that commission will not pay rent and there is NO BASE PAY. Gather round for another session of cheering and practice pitching (just follow your five steps and your eight steps!–DSMax’s keys to success, in addition to trite little coffee mug aphorisms and the sort of pithy acronyms that Judge Judy would find clever: KISS–“Keep It Simple Stupid”). Fend off barrage of entreaties by over-zealous co-workers to attend post-work DSMax get-togethers at nearby Applebee’s.
6. 8 p.m. Return home. Microwave taste-free/nutrition-free food because you are too tired, beaten to cook. Complain to sig. other.
7. 9 p.m. Pass out on couch in front of mindless television.
8. 1 a.m. Wake up on couch. Get up and go to actual bed. Cry self back to sleep.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.
I lasted five weeks. I probably made a total of $1,500.
A part of me died that I will never get back.
TOMORROW: Unionizing a dot-com, an impossible dream?
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
SCOTT MCCLOUD first emerged on the independent-comics scene in the ’80s with Zot!, one of the most intelligent and character-driven (and, for the time, least violent) superhero series around.
But he found his real calling in discussing comics, and making comics that discussed comics.
He’s now followed his ’93 bestseller Understanding Comics with a bigger, even more ambitious work, Reinventing Comics.
McCloud’s first volume was an introductory explanation of the art form, and an argument about why it should be considered an art form instead of the kiddie pap many Americans have treated it as.
His new one also has two tasks, divided into two sections.
In the first half, he bemoans the sorry state of the comics scene in North America as both an art form and a business. Daily strips are following the newspapers they appear in on a slow road toward oblivion or at least irrelevance in many people’s lives. Comic book stores, and the publishers and creators supplying them, took a financial shellacking in the mid-’90s when the speculator market collapsed. The so-called “mainstream” comic book publishers still concentrate too tightly on selling one genre (superheroes) to one niche audience of white male fanboys, neglecting the diversity of subjects, styles, and creators that could attract a wider clientele.
(Although, he acknowledges, some strides have been made in creator’s rights; and indie publishing has slightly increased the breadth of both content and diversity of contributors.)
In the second half, McCloud looks to possible solutions to comics’ artistic and business dilemmas. Guess what? They all have to do with the medium on which you’re reading this.
NASDAQ speculators and venture-capital funds may have written off the Net as a content medium, but McCloud insists its only problems are simply bugs to be worked out; mainly involving most users’ slow modem speeds and still-developing display technologies.
McCloud remains a mostly-unwavering advocate of the Internet (or what it can evolve into) as a force for decentralization, disintermediation, and creative breakthroughs.
The thing is: If and when all these revolutions come into being, will the result be anything approaching comics (or “sequential art”) as we know it?
If you define “comics” as printed documents comprising hand-drawn still images in linear sequence (sometimes with written narration and/or dialogue), maybe not.
If you define comics according to McCloud’s definition, maybe.
By the time Web comics really take off, they could become something closer to today’s Flash animations or the narrative elements of CD-ROM games than to silent still images in frames.
A new art form, perhaps; or at least a new blend of existing forms (comics, animation, film/video).
But it still wouldn’t mean the preservation of the existing comics form; many of the strengths of which lie in the disciplines of its limitations (no motion, no sound).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist remembers the worst job he ever had.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE UPDATE: Just as the excitement of a Presidential non-election finally wound down, the Seattle scab newspapers returned to their previous levels of bulk and dullness. Indeed, with their no-name staffs they’re even duller than before. Meanwhile, the Seattle Union Record has quickly blossomed into quite the spunky li’l alterna-rag. I still want it to go permanent and daily.
Generation S&M, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)
MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.
Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.
And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.
I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.
Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)
On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.
Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.
These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.
In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.
We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.
Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.
In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.
In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.
The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.
In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.
And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.
Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?
I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.
Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.
That would be SO Catwoman of me!
TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.
IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.
