YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.

Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”

And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.

Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.

If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.

I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.

Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.

(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).

Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.

He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.

Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.

MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).

By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)

But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.

NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.

The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)

MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Naked women linked to product desirability” (found by Fark)….
• Another look at one of our favorite topics, utopias….

Book Review Confidential

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE BOOK REVIEWS?

I used to think the whole point of this racket was to force publishers to pay attention to my own books. Editorial screeners, however, have little clout or they simply resent query letters that lead with a whiff of a tit-for-tat proposal for them to accept me as a potential supplier of literary merchandise in exchange for my support of their products.

The reviewer gig does offer some perks, like free samples; and it’s usually more lucrative to write about books than to write the damn things, even when you factor in all of the time it takes to read them.

Apart from industrial considerations such as personal career advancement, there’s an altruistic side to book reviewing. This ranges from the fairly innocent (I love books, therefore I write about them to spread my enthusiasm to others) to the reasonably corrupt (I love books that really matter–not the crap the NY Times thinks is important–so I aim to reward fiction that advances the art of fiction). And then, some people just like to criticize things (I love to write about what I hate).

Although most book reviews are written by freelancers for little or no money, newspapers and magazines often have staffers whose job is to review books. Beyond that, there are plenty of commercial opportunities for freelancers, even if you don’t specialize in quickies of under 200 pages for cash cows who pay more than $200 for a short review. By indulging in some tricks of the trade (reading a few pages and then cobbling together your review from quotes in the press pack), anyone can turn a buck on the book beat.

After all, the stylebook standards of reviews are child’s play. Basically, you dress up a plot summary with some toney opinionating (just go easy on the poststructuralist lingo), dangle a reservation or two, and close with a pick or a pan.

While some dream of being critics, nobody sets out to become a book reviewer. Primarily, reviewers are writers, editors, or professors who have or have had other lit projects more ambitious than review work.

Not that this means the reviews are slipshod knock-offs. The pros I know consider (reread, if necessary) an author’s previous books as well as similar books by others, seldom review books by friends or enemies, and skip rather than slam books by unknown writers.

Editors have some influence over quality, but nothing drives reviewers as effectively as the fear of hanging their asses out in public. You can toil in painstaking obscurity, cranking out reliable and incisive reviews, but if you compare Frankenstein to Gertrude Stein, you’re bound to be immortalized in a blurb.

Although experienced reviewers are better at covering their asses than beginners are, even the best ones can unwittingly look like fools. Some play the reference game. To put something in critical context, they nick so many literary luminaries that reading their reviews is like watching an arcade superstar play pinball. Others succumb to the towline effect (or its inverse, the backlash effect), where the value of the book is directly (or, inversely) proportional to the effort it took them to read and review it. Often the towline effect has a cart-pulling-the-horse dynamic (see the NY Review of Books): If the review is five times longer than it needs to be, the book must be important.

Reviewers new to the game may threaten to get personal, as they star-fuck their favorites and lay waste to their foes. This gets old fast, but generally, I think it’s good for a reviewer to have a personal stake in the book under review. Who better than an entomologist to review a book about entomology, even if she just wrote a book on the same topic?

Book review assignments may deserve another article or none at all: The topic is either too mysterious or too obvious. Everybody knows that a tiny percentage of published books get reviewed, that big names and bestsellers and commercial houses hog the ink, that tons of worthy books go undiscovered. Many suspect that reviewers despise the proliferation of books, even while the reviewers themselves feed the literary lottery pot with their own hopes to overcome the astronomical odds and win fame.

Few realize, however, that nobody determines what books get reviewed as much as the reviewers do (more through whim and inertia than through any flex of power), and that the most formidable obstacle an author wanting to be reviewed can face is the neglect or incompetence of his own publisher.

And why do people read book reviews?

So they don’t have to read books.

(Doug Nufer is an editor of and contributor to American Book Review. His book reviews have appeared in the Nation, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and currently appear in the Stranger and Rain Taxi. He hated to write book reports in school.)

TOMORROW: What might really be behind the recent frey over movie content.

ELSEWHERE:

• What if everything you know about time and history was wrong?…

TWO OR THREE SHORT THINGS TODAY, starting with a defense of a perennial, and perennially maligned, American institution.

YES, I LIKE NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS. The rest of the time, TV and radio commercials are all bright ‘n’ bouncy, overstuffed with that incessant mandatory happiness that’s pervaded American life from employee-motivation courses to theme-park architecture and even many evangelical churches. But during election season, suddenly the tenor of spots changes.

We get Our Man depicted in bright, cheery color, hugging the wife and kids. The Other Guy, meanwhile, gets portrayed in stern black-and-white still mug shots that get shrunk and darted across the screen; while buzzwords get electronically stamped on his face like canceled postage.

And judging from this year’s slander spots, the received ideas behind the buzzwords are ossifying into a formulaic ritual, of little relation to either the candidates or the voters. Republican consultants still expect the populace to get scared out of our wits by the mere mention of “bureaucrats,” “big government,” and especially “liberal,” as if the Reaganisms of 20 years ago were still a novelty instead of a bore. And the corporate Democrats can’t seem to think of anything to smear Republicans with besides the spectre of an anti-choice Supreme Court.

(There’s plenty of other legit complaints to be made against the Repo Men, of course; but the corporate Demos don’t want to bring up issues on which they could themselves be called to account.)

So if smear ads have become a rite engaged in strictly for its own sake, why haven’t other advertisers hopped on the trend? I’m still hoping to hear something like: “Pepsi says they’ve got the most refreshing soft drink. But take a look at the facts….”

‘SWING’ KIDS: Here’s a recommendation for a book you can’t get, at least not very easily.

Canadian author Billie Livingston was in town a month or two back, accompanying a friend of hers who’d gone to participate in a joint reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. While here, Livingston consigned a few copies of her new novel Going Down Swinging, thus far published only in Canada.

It’s a gorgeous, poignant little tale about a severely alcoholic mom whose second husband and teenage daughter have both abandoned her. Her only solace, besides bottles and pills and lines, is the seven-year-old second daughter she struggles to keep custody of and who loves her dearly, despite mom’s frequent blackouts and occasional hooking. It’s a tale of real family values and survival, mainly set in Vancouver’s threatened-with-gentrification east end.

You should try to get it, at Elliott Bay or thru a Canadian online bookseller such as Chapters.

UPDATE: Thanks for your emailed comments about our forthcoming experiment with fictional alter-ego characters in the online column. The first episode to include some of them will appear in the next week or two, and will be duly identified as fictional, maybe.

UN-SPOOKED: Halloween 2000 turned out about as expected, at least at the events attended by myself and our intrepid team.

There were the usual assortments of robots, furry critters (rabbits, cats, dogs, et al.), politicians, celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Elvis), lumberjacks, devils, ’70s disco dudes, loinclothed adventure heroes, bare-butted samba belles, firefighters, detectives, politicians, superheroes, and at least one woman dressed as a kitschy lamp (gold body paint, gold grass skirt and bra, a shade on her head).

Not seen, at least by our team were any of the characters that would’ve been really scary here and now:

• A WTO riot cop.

• John Carlson.
• A mummy wrapped in old copies of The Rocket.
• Mariners relief pitcher Arthur Rhodes.

OTHER WORDS (from Aldous Huxley): “I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”

TOMORROW: The Clash, Motown, and three generations’ notions of musical empowerment.

ELSEWHERE:

• According to Fortune’s dot-com-mania post-mortem piece, “Let’s face it: Nobody wants to buy shampoo over the Internet….”

Haunted Ground, Part 2

by Guest Columnist Donna Barr

(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started to explain how her adopted home of Bremerton, the town across Puget Sound from Seattle, just might be the most surreal town on the planet. Today, she continues.)

A FEW STRAINS of “pedigree” pets–especially Siamese cats, Pekingese and Pomeranian dogs, and pit bulls–are used in a Ponzi-scheme breeding system, to make a little cash.

A “Bremerton purebred”–one of several unoffical local strains, unrecognized by the regulation kennel clubs–a female, is bought, impregnanted, and then her kittens or puppies sold. No attention is paid to inbreeding; an uncle may be bred to a niece, with a hand-job to help ’em along, so long as saleable young are produced.

If they don’t sell, they’re dumped into a Humane Society and Animal Control system already overloaded by the transient naval population, and its habit of leaving its pets behind when it is transferred. The local naval commanders don’t do anything about the problem. Females who aren’t profitable are put down.

Pit bull fighting is common–it’s nothing to see a big uncut male missing an eye, or with a gash that runs half the width of his neck. And I don’t know any vet, even in Bremerton, who sews up wounds with dental floss.

The pit bull puppy-mill in the place across the alley didn’t get broken up until we had an attack. The big stud-dog tore after a little dog that was being walked down the alley, and when the little dog’s owner tried to save him, he got the stud-dog’s teeth in his ribs. The little dog was usually walked by a twelve-year-old boy whose throat was about rib-high. The dog was destroyed and the mill run out by the landlord.

Drug dealers aren’t much of a problem, not even the gangs that come in with the Navy ships. The block-watches are pretty easygoing. So long as a drug dealer doesn’t set up a crack house, or let the kids cut the crack on the front table with the door open, if the dealer doesn’t bring in customers all night, with cars coming and going and running up on the sidewalk, people will leave them alone. And no drive-bys. The block-watches know they’re not targeted, but the problem with druggies is they can’t shoot–and whenever a bullet goes loose, all the kids in the neighborhoods become bullet magnets.

So if the dealers will just go down to the Callow Safeway, where a nice big concrete-pit parking lot has built to contain the bullets, then nobody will bother them. If they show up on the street, the old Detroit trick–the sign that says “Drug Parking, Fifteen Minute Limit”–will make them leave. Or you can sit on their cars and drink beer. They hate that. What is it with drug dealers that makes them think they don’t have a neon-green sign on their forehead that says “Get your smack here”?

Bremerton is only an hour from Seattle, and only an hour from the Olympic Penninsula, so you can go do the city or go camping without a lot of driving.

Getting out of town once in a while is important. You can drive out to the reservation and buy really great fireworks, at places like Ill Eagle and Pyro Mama’s. M-100s and nearly professional-level rockets, the kind that wake up all the dogs in the neighborhood and make Bremerton look like a war-zone, with all the blue smoke floating through the trees. My husband and I always get the impression that the locals sell ’em with the attitude of “Go ahead, you dumb white folks–blow your hands off.” Which we think is pretty funny, after what the U.S. government got away with up here, burning down Old Man house for one.

Once the U.S. officials tried to stop the white folks that were coming off the reservation with fireworks, and they ran into the reservation chiefs and their back-ups, who told them to get the hell away from their customers.

Everybody thought that was pretty funny.

All the plastic car fish-logos are here: Blank Christian, Darwin, Survival, Alien, ‘n Chips, and Gefilte.

Bumper sticker: The Christian Right is Neither.

The black drag queen dresses fine, but he seems to have a hard time finding quality shoes.

TOMORROW: A Halloween roundup, among other short items.

ELSEWHERE:

• The “real” Eve and Adam lived 84,000 years apart, geneticists claim. (That sort of thing can just ruin a relationship….)
• The next great retro graphic-design fad awaiting modern-day ripoffs: early Soviet children’s books….

Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 2)

by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley

YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started explaining why he’d first considered moving out of central Seattle; first to Rainier Beach and then to Kenmore. Today, more of this.)

AT THIS SAME TIME, rents were on the ascent at an ear-popping rate. Downtown had begun its conversion to the mold-formed Large American City it has since become, sidewalks cleared of humanity’s unsightly flotsom and jetsom by city hall so that the important people–the shoppers–could feel completely comfortable bringing their wads of freshly minted greenbacks down Pine and Pike, hurling their dollars into franchise clothing and home accessory boutiques by the armload, clogging the arteries of their bodies with another overpriced dinner out and the arteries of the city with yet another overpriced rolling status flag.

The heart of a city, its true essence, cannot, I believe, be found in its polarities. When we look at our environment through the skewing lenses of rage or lust, righteousness or nihilism, that environment becomes no more than a reflection of us. This sort of solopsism is both pathetic and dangerous.

And for me, it was easily remedied: We simply moved.

If I could no longer take a measure of my city’s soulfulness because I could no longer see its subtleties, clearly the thing to do was to get another vantage. This we did.

It worked. South Seattle wasn’t even on maps of town. Finding our way to the furthest reaches of upper Rainier Beach for the first time was thoroughly discombobulating; and for a week after the move I felt a sense of displacement that bordered on the existential.

It was much more of an ordeal to, say, walk to the store than I had experienced for perhaps fifteen years. And I became much more reliant on my automobile than I had ever hoped to be, a reliance I still admit to with great shame.

To be unhappy where you are in the world, geographically or otherwise, often results in a gradual abstraction, a reduction of that world to the very polarities by which it can no longer be truly lived in; the unhappy reality is consumed by a fantasy of other, better, more fulfilling, and satisfying worlds. By contrast, to be comfortable and at peace with the area in which you live, physically or otherwise, is to have made some distinction between the real and the illusory.

In a sense, to have moved outside of that dense urban area to the peripheral neighborhoods and eventually to an even more suburban address, I quickly gained a sincere appreciation for the amenities of both. A simple change of environment, and not only did the new place look good, the old place looked pretty good, as well.

I was born in Seattle, and, while I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, I have lived in this city since my late adolescence. I’ve always thought that people tended by degrees to live principally in the future or the past, mentally speaking, with a rare few who could be legitimately said to live in the present, in the moment. I myself definitely have my mind on what lies ahead, perhaps sometimes to the point of escapism.

It is perhaps for this reason that I only rarely have any wistfulness for Seattle as I have known it. I find that sort of nostalgia more haunting than comforting. Many of my friends, fellow artists, have left here in the hope that they might find something approaching fame or fortune.

I like to think that what they really got was a bigger world. Although my family and I will not always live in the suburbs, not always live in America even, it seems to me that a suburb can widen the world as well as any other dream.

MONDAY: Why old fake architecture’s better than new fake architecture.

ELSEWHERE:

• “What Don Knotts Means to Me” (found by Metascene)….

Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 1)

by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE where my family and I live, which is in Kenmore, I’ll often get a chuckle or smirk, and some reference to the general grimness of suburban life.

It’s no coincidence that this reaction is more typical to people still living in Seattle’s denser neighborhoods. For all the snideness that urban hipsters have traditionally had for the idea of suburbs, it took a move there for me to understand that, while they are clearly disasterous from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, nothing is all bad.

It took a move there for me to like Seattle again.

If there is an exodus of urban hipster types from the heart of Seattle into the ‘burbs, it begs the question of whether Seattle in fact has a heart at all; it goes without saying that it has no brain, another topic altogether.

If it is true that the creative types that have historically formed the core of Seattle’s artier neighborhoods are being driven out, a fact only an idiot would refute, then perhaps it indicates a few things beyond a flush economy and the cookie cutter tastes that such an economy can manifest. For some, perhaps you really do need to get away from something to appreciate it.

We moved out of the downtown area for some really simple reasons. I had been growing steadily wearier of the area we had been for over four years, one block away from Harborview, the constant wail of sirens rattling the windows of our basement apartment which, while spacious (if oddly laid out—it had earlier in the century been the building maids’ quarters) was perpetually dim.

The other residents of the neighborhood, a term I use very loosely here, were largely poor, ethnic-minority, coping with the inner city realities they lived with in a variety of manners.

Our building was in fact an anomoly, its residents typically youngish, white, professional or arts-related in occupation. The area’s poverty and ethnic diversity were themselves certainly not factors in our growing itchiness to get out. Rather, the hopelessness that can accompany poverty, an almost willful ignorance and a deadeyed lethargy seemed to be infecting my own perception.

I had lived in the city since I was a teenager, and in all that time, it had never seemed so stupid and ugly as it was beginning to seem to me then.

This reached an apex when a drunken man threw a huge piece of concrete through our living room window. I was home alone when it happened, and he just stood there, swaying and muttering about his son, how his son had done it. He swiveled around and lurched off slowly, and a quick phone call to SPD had him in custody within minutes.

I had not at any point been afraid, and had been angry only momentarily, as he had walked by me half a minute after the big smash. I had called 911 and dashed upstairs out to the street, and as he ambled by, he had no idea who I was, no idea what he had just done.

He walked by stinking and wretched, and my heart was broken for me and for him.

He would never get well, and neither would the city.

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

• An automatic generator of sex euphemisms….
• Las Vegas’s next big tourist attractor: art museums! (found by Arts Journal)….

NORTHWEST BOOKFEST isn’t really the Great Affirmation of Seattle As Book-Lovers’ Capital of America that its sponsors like to claim.

It’s merely a stop on a North America-wide circuit of consumer-oriented book confabs (as opposed to industry-oriented book confabs, like the annual trade fairs in Chicago and Frankfurt). Some of these confabs are older, bigger, and/or more prestigious than Seattle’s.

But the Seattle show’s organizers can take credit for having started big six years ago and just gotten bigger since. Originally held in a rustic old pier (where the cover image of Loser had been photographed, at one of Nirvana’s last shows), it’s moved, as of last week’s 2000 edition, to Paul Allen’s Stadium Exhibition Center next to Safeco Field.

There, spread over two of the hall’s three huge rooms, what had previously been a boistrous bazaar of literary hucksterism became little more than another exercise in feelgood moderation.

The front hall was only about two-thirds filled with booths and readings stages. A couple more stages, plus some activity areas and another dozen or so sales booths, were even more thinly spread across the cavernous rear hall. The spaciousness prevented the event from generating the kind of critical mass of people, noise, and energy it needs.

Face it: Reading is (and writing especially is) a lone, quiet entertainment. Even audio books are often listened to while one’s stuck alone in a car. A festival celebrating books and reading needs to be a coming-out event, a joyous gathering where people openly share the experiences, ideas, and fantasies they keep to themselves the rest of the year.

My suggestion: Play up the “fest” part of Bookfest. If it’s going to be held in a space built for auto and boat shows, it should adopt some of the showmanship of those events.

Make it a “World of Words Lit-O-Rama.”

I can see it now:

• A Vanna White lookalike letter-turning contest, with separate competitions for women, girls, and cross-dressers.

• An Algonquin Round Table re-creation, with actors portraying those 1920s wits while audience members listen in from other tables in the NYC-hotel bar setting.
• “Literary Concessions,” special foods and beverages tying in to favorite books (madelines, green eggs and ham), language in general (Alpha-Bits), or decadent-writerly fantasies (whiskey, absinthe). (If this special food and drink service contractually has to be arranged through the exhibition hall’s regular concessionaires, let it be done that way.)
• Readings and panel discussions that go beyond the mere hyping of new books. Actors and “local celebrities” (the usual crowd of athletes, musicians, TV newspeople, radio hosts, politicians, etc.) could share passages from their favorite (kid and grownup) authors. Authorities and scholars could discuss the past and future of written/spoken language. Book collectors could show off examples of once-popular genres and formats (pulp magazines, penny dreadfuls, nurse romances, underground comix).
• A book-arts demonstration area, only more diverse than the one Bookfest had in prior years. Besides the paper-making and hand-binding crafts, there could be brief tutorials in page-layout and web design, self-publishing, and agent-getting. There could even be hands-on demonstrations of those much-hyped but seldom-seen “eBook”-type devices (which were notably absent from Bookfest this year).
• More games. Not just the Scrabble mini-tourney but spelling bees, literary-trivia competitions, and add-on-story writing games.
• For the kids, a Harry Potter character costume contest.
• For the adults, a Pillow Book body-paint calligraphy exhibition.

TOMORROW: Here today, gone to Kenmore.

ELSEWHERE:

• It’s the return of big hair. Be afraid. Be very afraid….
• Learn the business basics of Net porn with Letterman’s ex, Merrill Markoe (found by Media News)….

A WHILE BACK, we discussed the idea that the most successful ideas in business were the really simple, direct ones–even the ones that were so simple they were impracticably stupid.

Since then, I’ve found wht might be the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever made–Who Moved My Cheese?

It was written by Spencer Johnson, who’s made a career out of easy-reading material for self-improvers. His most famous was The One-Minute Manager, which launched a fleet of sequels including The One-Minute Father (don’t way too many guys treat fatherhood as a one-minute experience already, or maybe a five-minute experience with Viagra?).

Anyhoo, Who Moved My Cheese? has an extremely simple lesson–change is inevitable; learn to enjoy the adventure.

It teaches this lesson with a very short, very simply-written parable. It’s a story set in a maze, involving two lab mice and two mouse-sized but human-minded “littlepeople.”

As the story opens, our four maze-runners have found a cache of cheese and decide to stop their daily running. They settle down by the cheese station and feast heartily. But as the days go by, the cheese supply keeps getting staler and smaller. One day, it’s all gone.

After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, the two mice set off in search of “New Cheese.” The Littlepeople sit around moaning and asking the titular question, until one of them (named Haw) finally gets mad enough to act.

As he heads back out into the maze, he realizes he always liked his old life of running around for cheese. He has a sequence of epiphanies about the value of change and adapting to new life conditions, and writes each on the maze walls (in the book, they’re printed as full-page slogans).

Haw finally finds the New Cheese, which the mice already are now at. The story ends with Haw hoping the other Littleperson (named “Hem”) will eventually get off his Littleass and get back into the maze.

Johnson wants us to get our heads in gear to the inevitabily of change. Accept that your job’s going to be downsized; your home’s going to be demolished for luxury condos; your current job skills are going to become worthless in four years or less; your neighborhood store’s going to be clobbered by Wal-Mart; your dot-com’s going to go phhhhft. But it’ll all be to your betterment; just as long as you get with it, give up any futile quest for stability, and become a good little manic-conformist corporate warrior.

In Johnson’s worldview it’s the Littlepeople, the ones with the thinking going on, who have all the troubles coping. It’s the mice who instinctually know what to do and set out to do it without all that time-wastin’ cognition. The mice don’t wonder why they’re stuck in a maze; they just seek out their next given-from-on-high cube of cheddar wherever, within the maze’s confines, it may be.

When Johnson asks if you’re a man or a mouse, he hopes you’ll strive to become the latter.

The book’s implied answer to the titular question is that nobody took away any cheese; the maze-runners merely exhausted their allocated supply.

But that answer begs another question, left unasked in Johnson’s tiny book: Who put the cheese, the mice, and the Littlepeople in the maze in the first place?

TOMORROW: A Pokemon guide to the Presidential candidates.

ELSEWHERE:

• A combo made in hell: ABC News Nightline and hiphop culture! (found by Mister Pants)….
• Brian Hinshaw delivers strange, not-completely-true stories about the lives of your favorite authors at American-Lit.com….

LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.

And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.

Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).

Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.

When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.

I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”

Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.

But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.

The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.

But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.

(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)

Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.

Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:

“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”

Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.

TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.

IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.

ELSEWHERE:

• The role of human values in design….
• “The folks who move to Pioneer Square and bitch about the drunks are as bad as the yuppies who move to Carnation and complain about the smell of cow shit….”
• Send a banned book to censor-wannabe Joe Lieberman today!…

Shifty Business

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE used to be a joke, a pathetic sort of capitalist propaganda that aimed to make suckers buy new cars with sharp fins or safety razors with finer blades.

Appeals to a consumer’s sense of style seemed as harmless as specious mechanical engineering claims. Even if these companies spent millions of dollars to persuade you to buy their stuff, the choice was yours. The insecure and the gullible were welcome to burn their money in quest of an identity makeover or scientific breakthrough; but thrifty cars and older model razors worked just as well and were just as available as the newer models.

In recent decades, however, there has been a new twist to the old concept of designing things that would have to be replaced while they still worked well.

Thanks to fundamental technological changes, you don’t get to choose anymore.

For many products (cars, computer software, CDs, to name a few), the choices are rigged. Older technologies are scrapped; not because they were less efficient, but because the new, improved systems cost more: i.e., cost a little more to manufacture and a lot more to buy or maintain.

It can be as difficult to buy a decent car that won’t cost a fortune to operate as it is to find an apartment in a city lousy with millionaires.

After hearing horror stories of relatives spending thousands on routine check-ups (the “electronic” tune-up), my partner set out to buy an old car that would be easy to keep and, for the most part, unnecessary to repair. It took weeks of picking through the classifieds and a flash of luck, but she managed to score a 1985 Toyota that looked and drove like it really had gone only 52,000 miles.

Conditioned to years of planned obsolescence on the part of car makers, I perversely admire them for structurally institutionalizing the need to buy newer, expensive-to-operate machines.

Besides, their attempts to provide a cheap model for people who just want a plain set of wheels (Chrysler K cars) have flopped.

What’s strange, though, is how the concept of forcing people to buy only one kind of new “improved” technology has caught on in areas where consumers might be thought to have more functional bullshit detectors, if only because the products are supposed to be the essence of simplicity: bicycles.

Like their four-wheeled nemeses, bicycles have undergone such technological “advances” in recent years, one shop owner told me some of his mechanics would have trouble repairing my old road bike, a 1980s Bianchi.

One problem with old bikes is that parts are getting scarce (unlike cars, bikes don’t have junkyards dedicated to giving Rottweilers something to do), so when things begin to break regularly, it makes sense to buy a new machine.

The problem with the new machines, though, is that designs can be driven by a need to flash something glitzy and needlessly complicated.

Take the shifters. Older models had two levers on the down tube or on the handlebar stem, where it was easy to reach down or up to get to them. Then they migrated to the ends of the handlebars and onto the handles of the handlebars. Although I prefer shifters on the down tube, between the legs, with a short run of cable to the derailleurs, the handlebar placements are elegant and convenient.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the system of shifting that has universally replaced the simpler set-ups. Now there are four levers instead of two. They are mounted on or next to the brake levers. Two levers shift up and two shift down for front and rear sprockets.

Although “index shifting” makes shifting more precise (it’s easier not to get caught between gears), practice makes any rider more precise.

The best arguments for the new shifters may be the demands of the widespread gear choices (as if anyone needs 24 gears, as if anyone HAS 24 speeds).

Some high-performance fans also tout the advantage of never having to take your hands off the brakes. Mostly, though, the new shifters’ function to help make bikes more expensive and harder to repair (unless you take them to the shop).

What’s really strange is the ubiquity of these gizmos. You want to spend $1000 on your main vehicle? The four-lever shifter is the standard.

The older, simpler systems have become quaint, customized options.

TOMORROW: Our recent Vancouver trek.

ELSEWHERE:

• “A compassionate solace for the tortured & battered souls of past, present and future Burger King employees….”

IF YOU KNOW THE NAME OF EMMETT WATSON, you might associate it with a weekly Seattle Times column, which usually consists of cute dog stories or reminiscences about Seattle’s quieter olden days.

He’s 81 now. It’s OK in my book for him to take his life, and his writing, a little easier these days.

But you should’ve seen him in his prime.

Unfortunately, the only way you can do that (besides coming through newspaper microfiches in the library) is to stumble upon Watson’s three volumes of memoirs–all of which are, apparently, out of print.

Aside from a handful of ex-UW Daily cartoonists (Mike Lukovich, Lynda Barry), Watson may be the only truly great creative mind the Seattle newspaper industry has generated. (And yes, I’m fully aware that Tom Robbins had been a newspaperman here.)

During his peak years (essentially the era of his main P-I column, 1959-82), he was one of the master practitioners of the three-dot column, that now nearly-forgotten American art form in which dozens of seemingly unrelated items would share the same space, rattled off in crisp stacatto brevity.

But Watson did more than just chronicle the comings and goings of local politicians, business bigwigs, TV-news personalities, and other “celebrities.” He captured the soul of the city he loved.

Each of Watson’s books fits as a discrete part of a whole, like the items in a three-dot column.

The first, Digressions of a Native Son, was put out in 1982 by the Pacific Institute, an employee-motivation-seminar outfit Watson was copywriting for after the P-I reduced him to part-timer status. (How that Lovable Curmuddgeon wound up, even temporarily, with such a Think Positive Thoughts outfit is one story he’s never completely told.) Digressions is mostly autobiography, with long pauses to reminisce about the World’s Fair, press agents, colorful local characters past and present, etc.

A decade later, Watson’s own Lesser Seattle Press came out with Once Upon a Time In Seattle. This slim volume profiled a dozen local leaders and characters; most of whom, like Watson, came of age in the Prohibition and Depression years.

He immediately followed that with My Life In Print. It starts by reprinting the most important autobiographical scenes from Digressions. That’s followed by some 370 pages of Watson’s old newspaper writings, culled and edited for Watson by longtime friend Fred Brack. After a few examples of his early work as a sportswriter (he was 40 before he got to write general-interest columns), My Life gets down to business with brilliant examples of his P-I and more recent Times work.

The three-dot material isn’t included; that, apparently, has proven too perishable, its shortness necessitating an audience pre-familiarity with the eprsons and topics at hand. Rather, My Life collects the single-topic, full-length essay columns that would fill his daily slot once or twice a week. It’s not that he was doing the daily goings-on-about-town stuff to draw a salary and a forum for the longer material; rather, he put into these 900-word profiles and rants everything he continued to learn on the daily grind about pacing, brevity, and writing for impact.

That’s what makes the pieces in My Life still work so well; whether they’re profiling authors and senators and Supreme Court justices, complaining about all the skyscrapers going up downtown even then (he says their massiveness reduces street-level humans to the insignificance of ants), crowing for the preservation of the Pike Place Market, or promoting his only-partly-joking anti-civic-boosterism crusade, “Lesser Seattle Inc.”

Get any or all of Watson’s books. Look on the auction boards for them, if they’re not at a library near you.

Learn about the heartbeat of a community, and read some of the best prose ever “forgotten tomorrow” while you’re at it.

WE’LL BE OUT OF TOWN THE REST OF THIS WEEK, BUT ON MONDAY: Paul Schell’s latest miscalculation.

ELSEWHERE:

• How to tell when your dot-com is going belly-up (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room)…

IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.

There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).

There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).

There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.

There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.

There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).

There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).

Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.

But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.

Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.

(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.

For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)

Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.

Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)

But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.

There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.

But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.

(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)

(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)

TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could Gore-Lieberman be more liberal than Clinton-Gore?…
• If it’s not a major (i.e., corporate) newspaper, you won’t find it at Starbucks….

TODAY WE DISCUSS two of the topics we’ve been obsessing with of late: “deviant” Northwest fiction and the now-allegedly-fabulous 1980s.

The editors of the recent anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions claimed they were doing something wildly outre by compiling tales based on strong plots, well-defined characters, and urban settings; instead of adhering to a nature-travelogue vision of “Northwest writing” emphasizing birds and sunsets and massively de-emphasizing humans. (What the Northwest Edge folks really did, natch, was to reassert some universal rules of good storytelling, in the guise of breaking other, less workable or appropriate, rules.)

The ’80s nostalgia fetish, meanwhile, speaks to more than just the longing to recapture one’s younger days. At least around here, it recalls a time when everything wasn’t about making money and feeling pressured to make even more. A time when the dominant local paradigm wasn’t wealth but mellowness; when all you had to do to be a paradigm-subverter was to assert your right to a passionate life of any kind.

Which brings us to The Cornelius Arms, a trade-paperback suite of fifteen interconnected stories by ex-local guy Peter Donahue (now teaching lit in the Carolinas) and put out by still-local dude Von G. Binuia’s Missing Spoke Press.

Set at some indeterminate point between 1983 and 1990, Donahue’s tales revolve around the denizens of a decaying Belltown apartment building. The building’s obviously based on the real Cornelius Apartments at 3rd and Blanchard, a place I’d frequently visited at the time. (It’s still standing, now providing student housing for the Art Institute of Seattle.) Donahue’s descriptions of the building (a once-stoic place, reduced to near-unlivability by a spendthrift slumlord) are accurate, as is the running plotline of tenant activism against the slumlord.

The stories are dotted with other (mostly now-gone) real places (the Tugs gay disco, the Unique Cafe, a renamed version of the Magazine City store, and the still-extant Virginia Inn). A couple of real-life Seattleites also get cameo appearances (housing activist John Foxx, the late Virginia Inn bartender Homer Spence).

Donahue’s resident characters are well-written and well-defined. They comprise a fine cross-section of Belltown life in the pre-dot-com days. There are retired pensioners, druggies, a young recovering alcoholic, a gay party dude who’s already lost one lover to AIDS, a Korean immigrant, some racist skinheads, a female young executive with a confusing sex life, a former WWII refugee, some lonely middle-aged men, a Native American woman struggling to better her condition in life, a young man at the crossroads of his life, and an old man who’s proclaimed himself President of the World.

All are treated as sympathetically and as humanly as possible (even the skinheads, whose philosophy of violence is eventually revealed as just a sad attempt by these lost boys to forge a substitute family).

By the book’s end, the Cornelius Arms building has fallen into the hands of redevelopers, who’ve rebuilt it with gaudier fixtures and tinier, costlier apartment units. The residents have scattered.

It’s not the loss of a “community” that the reader may mourn; most of the residents never really met one another except at tenant-activist meetings.

It’s the loss of a place, a shadow-space of sorts where society’s marginalized (by choice or by force or by a combo of the two) might live in squalor, but at least can live in relative peace and with relative dignity.

TOMORROW: Why I’ve never been to Burning Man.

ELSEWHERE:

• Learning to appreciate the roadside attractions of Canada! (found by Arts Journal)….

Cirque du Simoleans

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

SOMEWHERE AFTER your credit-card account has been nicked to the tune of $35-$70, after a musical of uplifting fusion schmaltz that should have died in the Bloch’s Restaurant men’s room in 1978, the real show begins in the Cirque du Soleil production of Saltimbanco.

A squad of up to 16 acrobats spins up and down four poles arranged in a quadrangle. Inventive, daring, and visually dazzling, this is the kind of act I’ve been led to expect from what has been widely acclaimed as the new greatest show on earth.

While other shows have replaced cage acts, death-defying stunts, and the seedier legal and illegal attractions of the midway with sophisticated presentations of the circus arrts, Cirque du Soleil is the show against which others are measured, while it thrives in a class by itself.

Even champions of the loaded-for-bear traditional shows, as epitomized by Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey, give Cirque du Soleil its due. While there are traditional circus acts some shows do better, nobody tops the Cirque for sheer presentational panache.

The sound and lighting quality (as opposed to the quality of the music) have the production values of a Broadway show.

Rather than rattle off a revue of stunts, the Cirque builds each show around a story or theme. The costumes, at best, reinforce this unity of purpose. Clowns are not only expert mimes and accomplished acrobats, they sing and dance.

But then, it may occur to you that those clowns can’t dance half as well as the dancers in a Broadway show, let alone as well as the dancers in a soda-pop commercial; that the choreography is better when they change sets than when they just dance; that you’ve really had enough clever miming to last a lifetime; and that the production values are nice, but the clock is ticking and, apart from the acrobats on the poles, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Couldn’t they cut corners on the lights and sound and hire a few more acrobats?

There is a terrific juggling act–a woman who does a quick flash of balls after working her way up through a variety of cascades, fountains, and bouncing patterns with three, four, and five balls.

My favorite act was a high-wire routine where a woman does back flips between parallen wires at different heights and finishes off with a “walk of death” slide down a wire at a 45-degree angle to the ground.

An act where acrobats catapult, twisting and flipping, to land on each other’s shoulders was also quite good.

Flamenco-dancer twins in the first half of the show find symmetry in the second half’s twin strong men. A mime dressed as a boy who makes funny noises in the first half also cavorts in the second half, idulging himself and mime lovers (wherever they may be).

There is, however, an interesting twist to his second set, when our hero snatches someone out of the audience and drags him to the ring. The rube played along so well, I thought he was a plant, doing a variation of the old Pete Jenkins act (some hotshot rider masquerades as a drunk in the crowd and then stumbles to the nearest horse and out-rides everyone in the ring); but others who attended different performances saw different folks pulled from the audience (one of whom told Bret Fetzer that he was there with his family).

This breakdown of barriers between performers and audience is noteworthy; particularly in view of the traditional adversarial relationship between circus people and rubes. Rather than knife you with gaffed games of “chance” on the old midway, though, at Cirque du Soleil clowns roam the stands, sitting on laps, stealing a shirt, grabbing a gal and running around with her, throwing popcorn. Whether you find this irritating or funny, it does the essential chore of policing the stands to make sure some rube doesn’t start popping flash bulbs.

Not one to revel in the opportunity to touch clowns, I prefer the old separation of ace and rube, where the aces do stunts that verge on the impossible. Of the newer shows, Circus Chimera is the best I’ve seen for presenting consistently audacious (if inconsistently executed) acts. Rather than cheapen the show, the occasional failures of performers attempting feats of supreme difficulty only enhance the value of their eventual success.

The circus acts of the Saltimbanco show I saw were flawlessly done and, in the case of the stationary trapeze act, mundane. A semi-flying trapeze/bungee jump has more variation, but the spectacle of aerialists bouncing back up to their trapezes is a pale reminder of “The Cranes” of the Russian Circus.

(Not that every new aerial act ought to be compared to perhaps the single greatest flying exhibition ever done, but the problem with shows that rely on wired “mechanics” to tether flyers rather than safety nets to catch them is that these compromised newer acts can seem eternally outdone by even tame versions of the centerpiece aft of the traditional circus.)

Maybe it’s unfair to compare Cirque du Soleil to Ringling or to Cats, unfair to violate the first principle of criticism by failing to prioritize or even consider what the artist framing the show is trying to do.

To me, the story is beside the point of seeing great performers do incredible feats; but what, after all, is the story? For the added cost of the program, this information is available, along with the names of those on the show.

In the Cirque du Simoleans, production values talk.

Notions like giving credit where credit is due walk.

(Saltimbanco is extended thru Sept. 9 at the Renton Boeing plant, southeast corner of Lake Washington. 1-800-678-5440.)

TOMORROW:Figuring out this whole ’80s nostalgia business.

ELSEWHERE:

• Finally, a new Godzilla movie that knows the proper, Japanese way to treat the character, as opposed to the one made by Sony….