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ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
ELSEWHERE:
OF THE LAST 100 Amazon.com purchases from people who linked from the search box on my site, only 16 were items specifically mentioned anywhere on the site.
This means:
(1) many of you are choosing to help support MISCmedia by making your Amazon buys thru this site’s link, and
(2) I might not have the influence on your reading/viewing/listening habits I’ve liked to imagine having.
Nevertheless, few of these items were at all sucky, proving at least that many MISCmedia readers have quite good taste indeed.
Herewith, a few of the things you’re using this site to attain, in no particular order:
TOMORROW: What you’re writing.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.
And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.
Today’s case study: American Psycho.
Folks who’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.
Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn’t end; it just stopped.
Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman’s crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.
And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book’s psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.
Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who’d apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel’s chief character isn’t always a “hero.” The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).
When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.
But Ellis’s thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates. 2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get. 3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date). 4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her. Repeat step 1.
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.
2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.
3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date).
4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.
Repeat step 1.
The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book’s explicit violence, both to ensure an “R” rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.
She’s made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.
Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.
TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?
(NOTE: YESTERDAY AND TODAY, we’re running excerpts from “Tropisms,” a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
BY THE 1960s, one highway was insufficient and a ring-road was proposed to save downtown.
The Monson Plan, 1963. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal of a Radiant City, Seattle planned a ring-road and high rises to clear out open space in the downtown.
Four parking reservoirs, one at each corner of the ring (capacity, 13,000). Entire reconstruction of the waterfront, including the elimination of the Pike Place Market. A new government center. Leveling of Pioneer Square with slab towers to be built in the cleared open space. And more!
The battle of competing visions was carried out not only through bureaucracies and debate, but also through drawings. Most of the plans we’ve been looking at are just powerful drawings–political tools.
A professor of architecture at the UW, Victor Steinbrueck, published his own vision of Seattle, Seattle Cityscape (1961), just before Monson became a public plan. These competing visions could not have been more starkly realized:
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN SMITH TOWER BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
The Monson Plan.
SLIDE: STEINBRUECK SMITH TOWER STREET SCENE
Steinbrueck has taken us down to ground level–now we’re pedestrians, not planners; we live here, not lord over here.
Steinbrueck asserts so much with these drawings–with his style of densely overlapping lines he asserts that the urban fabric is so tightly, intricately woven that no one part of it can be removed without damaging the whole; he asserts this is a place of hidden, obscured lives, into which we may project/find our own fantasies and meanings.
Steinbrueck’s drawings were as powerful, even successful, a projection of the private imagination into civic realities as were the Monson drawings, or any of R.H. Thomson’s less delicate or graceful projections.
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN, OVERVIEW
The Monson plan was funded by the city in collaboration with the downtown business group, the Seattle Central Association. It was received enthusiastically by the Times, which helped argue for the $225 million in public money that was being asked to fill out the $575 million budget.
Within a few months, opposition news began appearing in the Times’s back pages.
Finally, the news (in Seattle, the equivalent of an obituary) of the decision to defer and “make a study.” (Headline: “Central Plan Foes Win Partial Victory”).
This process helped catalyze the ideology and infrastructure of preservation in Seattle: Allied Arts. Save the Market.
Also, drawing styles changed; so even the pro-Monson reports of the Urban Design Commission in the mid-’70s feature Steinbrueck-style populist street scenes.
By the late ’60s and early ’70s, both consciousness and practice in the city were well prepared to resist proposals such as John Graham’s 1966 proposed renovation of Pioneer Square.
The meaningful give-and-take that determined the place and impact of these projects–themselves the product of many private visions colliding–was as much effected by forms such as drawing, public speaking, even party-going, as they were by government and city planners.
There are no clean dividing lines between “real” projects and the fantasies from which action springs. Victor Steinbrueck’s drawings are merely different in scale or degree from R.H. Thomson’s regrades–they are not different in kind.
Built projects can also be graceful, leaving a delicate trace, nimble, and mutable in the hands or minds of the present:
SLIDE: A.Y.P. AT NIGHT
Buildings from the Alaska-Yukon Exposition stayed with us (the architecture building on UW campus is the only structure still remaining, other than the Drumheller Fountain); the images have also persisted.
Even real buildings can function the way I think fictions and drawings do–flexible, intimate yet autonomous, available to each of us to be made or remade into meaning.
SLIDE: SEATTLE TOWER BUILDING IN FOG, WITH MT. RAINIER IN BACKGROUND
Notice how this most-beautiful, most flexible and graceful of the city’s buildings pays its respects to the humbling forms around it, the enormous ones on the horizon.
And, most astonishing of all, this vision is real, material, built here in this city, yet as it stands is as unreal and available as a novel or a dream of the city.
All our projections of the private imagination into the civic space should be so graceful.
TOMORROW: Yet another doomed cool place.
Dreaming the City
by guest columnist Matthew Stadler
(NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’re running excerpts from a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
EMMETT WAHLMAN proposed a salmon stream in 1977.
The stream would leave Volunteer Park, traverse south across Capitol Hill to Denny Way where it would turn west and cross the freeway into downtown, then run along Pine, forming a half-dozen pools between Fourth and Sixth on Pine, before turning north and running along Westlake to empty into Lake Union.
Emmett was a city engineer in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s. Reached by phone in Hawaii, he told me he couldn’t recall exactly when the idea occurred to him.
He said, “These things pop into your mind, all sorts of things are just popping and popping all the time, they keep bombarding you like Nissans. There’s just no shortage of them, is there? But I wanted my idea to have validity.”
Emmett talked about his idea. He sketched plans. He asked his friend, city engineer Paul Wiatrik, to asses its viability. He sought support from the city’s Department of Community Development.
“Working as a field engineer gave me some insight into what we are disrupting with these suggestions; you’re tearing right into the heartbeat of the city.”
This movement from ‘ideas popping and popping’ to engagement with civic discourse and its matrix of “validity” seems to me a fundamental challenge, even duty, of every city dweller.
It is in fact the founding act of our city—this projection of a private vision into civic space.
Faced with this:
SLIDE: TREES
Settlers saw this:
SLIDE: 1850s DOWNTOWN PLAT
And they drew it. Astonishing! Heroic!
SLIDE: SEATTLE PLAN, 1855
Already the purity of vision has been diluted by the demands of the civic space. Notice how competing [street] grids are made to co-habitate. The city grew, events continued apace.
SLIDE 6: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF 1890 SEATTLE
A truly fabulous metropolis.
By the 1890s, fabulation and projection insinuated themselves into the built environment. Where before, faced with trees men saw grids, now presenting a city, they sketched fantasies.
The cityscape itself had now become the ground for fantasies such as Sullivan’s Opera House, and a courthouse.
SLIDE 7: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE
The Seattle Opera House, as Louis Sullivan designed it in 1890, to be built at Second and University, the current site of a different concert hall entirely. This plan shocked me because I had once imagined so grand an opera house, years ago—as an indispensible part of my fictional Seattle—I had written it [in the novel The Sex Offender], never knowing the plan of this grand opera house had been real (and a failure) rather than made up (and a great success).
I was further astonished (while reading the self-published memoirs of Henry Broderick, real estate giant) to find a photograph of this fantasy, Seattle’s Grand Opera House (with the attendant throngs that I had thought were simply my outlandish fiction) built and standing in our city at the corner of Second and Cherry (admittedly less grand than Sullivan’s or my conception, but still).
SLIDE: CORT’S OPERA HOUSE
Such a scene had been caught on film featuring throngs of men pressing against the doors.
So the city and its exaggerated throngs had been real! But then, what’s this, the photo itself was a sham, the throngs, indeed great swaths of the very faÂade, had been painted in by amateur hands!
This real opera house was itself the wishful fantasy of some past booster imagining a more glorious city than the one he truly occupied.
And this dizzying vertigo was typical of my encounter with the intersection of the private imagination and our civic realities.
SLIDE: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE FLOOR PLAN
Back to Louis Sullivan. The proposed building had a 1,200-seat auditorium, apartments and offices, and was budgeted at $325,000 (with the land costing an additional $300,000). By November 1890 the site had been cleared and construction was about to begin when a bank in England failed, and the money for the opera house dried up, but not soon enough to keep it off the attractive Bird’s Eye View maps city leaders distributed alongside brochures advertising this future metropolis to target markets in the Midwest and East.
As archivist and historian Dennis Andersen remarked, “What’s the difference between real and projected? The city was nine-parts plans and intentions, and these are what they advertised.”
The legal obligation of homesteaders in the American West was to clear and work the land—one did not own it until one worked upon it.
One thing the West promised was malleability. So there was an abundance of ideas and not much shyness about visions. The city’s evolution was powered by this promiscuous engine. On to every hill and valley, slide and swamp, private visions were projected, and sometimes realized.
Which made for conflicting visions.
SLIDE : WASHINGTON HOTEL ON DENNY DEGRADE
I find these competing visions equally beguiling: the fantasy of a grand European-style hotel and that of a port city of gently sloping hills.
What a delight to see the one fantasy trapped in the embrace of the other! James Moore, who owned the hotel, would not accede to the plan of R.H. Thomson, city engineer in charge of regarding, until after a long battle of wills.
SLIDE: WASTELAND OF REGRADE
Thomson was a very focused man with little room left between vision and action. His memoir is a straightforward, common-sense read, revealing a practical man whose field of action was unusually large.
Maybe Thomson’s greatest strength was his imperviousness to questions of scale. Judging from his archive and memoir, he doesn’t seem to have seen much of a difference between a hangnail and a 300-foot hill. He saw obstacles and removed them.
In the Denny Regrade the results look a little like the founding fantasy, though now the abstract geometry was real, while the fantasy to be projected on it was more hodge-podge.
SLIDE 18: BIRD’S-EYE REGRADE DRAWING
The cleared “real” land–now an abstract geometry–made a fresh canvas for the painting of visions and fantasies.
The abstract grid had been drawn with real dirt and earth; while the rich future “ecology” of the city became a pencil-drawn fantasy.
It was, thus, impossible to locate a “real” Seattle landscape separate from the projection of fantasy.
SLIDE: BOGUE’S PLAN VIEW
Despite the founding fantasy of the American grid, planners including Thomson and Virgil Bogue (of the 1910 Bogue Plan) studied European cities with their broad boulevards and plazas, to shape visions of our future city.
Thomson also imagined a subway and rail system for the city. Like most Seattle subway plans (Luther Griffith’s in 1907, A.H. Dimock’s in 1920, Carl Revves’s in 1926, D.W. Henderson’s and the DeLeuw Cather designs for Forward Thrust in the 60s and 70s) Thomson ran his main downtown line under Third Avenue. The central station was to be built at Riverside. Thomson’s plan, which included a region-wide rail system and the downtown subways, was budgeted at $1.3 million.
The Washington State Arts Association was going to build this state-of-the-art convention center to establish Seattle’s supremacy once and for all, in 1911. I am reminded of the dire promise, just a few years later, that the machine gun, recently developed, would be the unmatchable weapon that would end all wars.
Just last Friday, I watched an army of welders work on our Star Wars-scale convention center, which will surely establish Seattle’s supremacy, at least over San Diego.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
Dream of Fields
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE still doesn’t have a full-content website, so I’ll have to tell you about its May issue, which has several items relating to topics we’ve been discussing here.
First up: The main article, “Notes From Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest,” in which writer David Samuels hangs out with some of those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
He essentially depicts them as well-meaning children of suburban affluence who’ve sadly but understandably gotten sidetracked from the complexities of the world, instead preferring oversimplified ideologies that allow them to imagine themselves as Totally Good and the culture of their upper- and upper-middle-class parents as Totally Evil (almost completely ignoring all other cultural and subcultural differentiations in late-modern society).
Anarchism, as Samuels interprets its young adherents, isn’t an ideology about empowering The People but an excuse for these girls and boys to imagine themselves as the world’s rightful would-be dictators, philosopher-kings who’d decide what’s best for the world on the basis of what feeds their own self-righteousness.
(Samuels’s depictions may have helped inspire P-I cartoonist David Horsey to recently depict young radicals as snot-faced idiots irresponsibly meddling in issues that should be left to the Real Experts.)
Samuels’s anarchist portrayals contrast with the memoir of oldtime radical Emma Goldman, excerpted elsewhere in the same issue. While Samuels essentially depicts anarchism as just another flavor of elitism, Goldman insists it’s a means toward the abolition of all elites. As an opponent of all centralized states, Goldman wound up seeing capitalism, socialism, and fascism as more or less equally repressive. She undoubtedly would have felt the same about philosopher-king fantasies.
Elsewhere in the issue are pieces that tellingly indict aspects of the current-day elitist regime, the rule of corporate power and money:
A reader who gets through the whole May Harper’s can easily conclude that Samuels’s Eugene anarchists, even if they’re really like his negative characterizations, might be more emotionally than rationally driven (like those now-fetishized ’60s radicals), still have a point. There’s got to be some way for society to seriously consider other priorities than just helping the rich get richer.
TOMORROW: Safeco Field, where the best seats are the worst.
JAMES TWITCHELL, a U. of Florida English prof, has written three books discussing, and generally praising, late-modern pop culture: Adcult (which I haven’t read), Carnival Culture (which I generally liked), and his newest, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (which I’ve mixed feelings about).
I had a chat the other night with one of Twitchell’s former students. This ex-student claims Twitchell loves to parade himself about as a Lone Wolf Conservative among all those pesky Marxist deconstructionists running amok within academe.
God, there are so many of these guys, and they all claim they’re the only one out there. Such double-faced smugness–to suck up to the real centers of power and money in this country, yet to still proclaim yourself a daring rebel of the “look at how un-PC I am” variety.
Twitchell at least acknowledges that he’s worked hard over many years to hone just such a self-image, and has used the acquisition and display of consumer goods for this purpose. In the last chapter of Temptation, he describes having bought a Mazda Miata (that favorite vehicle of 50-year-old boys) precisely to distinguish himself from all those other cult-studies profs with their identical ugly Volvos.
As for the book itself, it’s a mostly-defensive essay of praise, not necessarily for consumerism but for the impulses and desires upon which it feeds.
Twitchell’s main statement, which he keeps repeating throughout the volume: “Once adults are clothed, fed, and sexually functioning, their needs are cultural, not natural.”
So far, I’d agree. Give us bread but give us roses, as the old suffragette anthem said. Man does not live by bread alone, someone else said long before that. Various attempts at stern, utilitarian, no-fun cultural constructs (from the Puritans to Pol Pot to the utopian schemes of modern-day vegan prudes) have been short-lived precisely because (among other factors) they failed to address people’s needs for self-expression.
Twitchell’s right when he says advertisers don’t “manufacture needs” so much as they exploit (or at least try very hard to exploit) any and every impulse and urge; the more basic and visceral the better. Sexual attractiveness? There’s a product for that. Excitement? Relaxation? There’s stuff that’ll give it to ya. Want to speed up or slow down, to simplify or complicate your life? You can buy something to help. Want to rebel, to fit in, or (more likely) fit in with other rebels? Just wear the right look, eat the right food, listen to the right music, and (yes) read the right websites.
Twitchell’s also right when he notes that anti-materialism, as commonly practiced among North American “alternative” types, is really just another flavor of materialism. If you define youself with organic foods and grey sweaters and acoustic guitars and non-animal-tested soap, you’re still defining yourself by what you buy.
Where I essentially disagree with Twitchell is where he says it’s basically good that our urges and impulses have so largely become corporate assets. Just as there’s more behind the Quest for Stuff than just the satisfaction of primitive needs, so should there be more to human life than simply servitude to Sacred Business.
TOMORROW: The continuing story of CNBC.
YOU KNOW I LOVE JIM HIGHTOWER, that Texas tornado of progressive commentatin’.
So you can expect I’d recommend his latest book-length screed, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They’d Have Given Us Candidates.
Alternately angry, cynical, skeptical, alarmist, and hopeful, Hightower wittily offers detail after sordid detail on just how politics in the U.S. of A. has gotten so pathetic.
The short version of his argument is just as you might expect: All the past primary season’s main presidential candidates and both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate money, managed by slick consultants, and completely out of touch with the non-wealthy.
The nation’s fastest-rising political bloc, Hightower continues, is that of disgruntled non-voters. But the parties don’t mind this; because, like so many other corporate enterprises, they no longer care about “the masses” and only wish to persue niche markets (i.e., identifiable “likely voters” who can be easily manipulated by target marketing, attack ads, and loud speeches on non-issues such as flag burning).
So far, so good (or rather, so bad).
But then Hightower introduces one of his frequent radio topics: Two-Party-System Nostalgia.
He repeatedly insists that there was once a time when the Democrats stood for something more than just winning elections and building party bureaucracy at any cost.
As a Texan, living all his life on the edge of what used to be the territory of segregationist Dixiecrats, he oughta know better.
Through most of the past century, the Republican party has had three traditional constituencies, which sometimes have had contradictory goals but which have more or less stuck together in the party fold: Big business, rural churchgoers, and the Rabid Right.
The Democrats’ history is a lot more complicated.
It’s been the party of FDR and JFK, of George Wallace and the senior Richard Daley, of the AFL-CIO and AOL-Time Warner, of Tammany Hall grafters in New York and pious reformers in Minnesota.
Its chief organizational imperitave, through all these factions and eras, has been to amass whatever combinations of voting blocs, no matter how transient or fluid, could be cobbled together to win elections.
Many individual Democrats and groups within the party over the years have, of course, sincerely sought to improve the environment, help the poor and the working class, end bigotry, and/or promote world peace.
But the party’s also had plenty of cold-war hawks, Chamber of Commerce toadies, corrupt ward-heelers, Military-Industrial Complex lackeys, panderers to racism, and funnelers of public subsidies into private retail projects.
Currently, the party’s national bureaucracy’s thoroughly run by corporate butt-kissers. If you ask any of them why they’re such money-stooges (and I have), they’ll tell you the only way to hope to beat the Republicans is to play by the Republicans’ rules–to raise big money, spend it on ads and consultants, and upon election to do whatever the big money wants.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way.
And it might not stay this way anyway.
Ultra-big-money campaigning games, as currently constructed, are predicated on Reagan-era presumptions about the social and media landscapes.
In particular, they’re built on the dichotomy of the corporate Mainstream Media (three TV networks, monopoly daily newspapers) and the parallel Conservative Media (talk radio, televangelists, “action alert” newsletters), with no true liberal-advocacy counterpart.
In the Cyber-Age, this doesn’t have to last. Over the next few years, no matter who’s President, we’ll see a flowering of thousands of local and national niche-movements. Many of them will be progressive. Many others will comprise ideological conservatives who don’t want to feed money and votes to corporate Republicans anymore. The WTO protests included a loose coalition of dozens of niche movements and sub-movements, which may or may not agree on any other issue besides the power of global companies.
Hightower, I’m glad to say, does recognize at least some of this stirring-O-discontent, and sees how it might be put to effective use in organizing for a post-corporate politics.
His book’s last line insists it’s a great time to be an American. I couldn’t agree more.
MONDAY: Remembering when downtown retail wasn’t just for the gold-carders.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 2)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
(YESTERDAY, we visited a Seattle poet/salesman who is forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is more of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.)
Salesman: What’s really bugging you?
Poet: Well, when you read the PSBJ you start thinking how much richer everyone is than you are.
Look at the numbers they throw around on the first few pages. Venture fund X raises $340 million. Y Store contemplates a $20 million dollar placement. Z Company launched with a startup stake of $50 million.
Then, by extension, you start thinking how much smarter everyone is than you are.
Then, when you flip to the back section called Briefcase, you see the pictures of all the men and women being promoted in their various professions. You reflect how much better looking they are than you.
And the writing is generally wretched. A completely depressing experience.
S: Well, I can’t cave into your inferiority complexes. I have to get out and sell things to keep you in poems and theories; so let me do my little duty here.
I open the paper and head straight for the For the Record section. This is where I can find out if company Zlab has been hit with a federal tax lien, a civil suit or is selling off pieces of itself. If so, stay away.
On the other hand, if company Zlab is moving into a brand new 900,000-square-foot warehouse on Monster Road, they could probably use a few new pencils. Time for a sales call. See? That’s all there is to it. We’re just about done.
P: That’s a relief.
S: You’re such a bohemian.
The PSBJ ain’t so bad. It’s better than the flimsy scenarios of murder and mayhem that are the truck and fare of the daily papers. You’re supposed to be interested in people, right? When you’re reading through the PSBJ, don’t you feel you’re getting a deeper sense of what your fellow citizens; are up to?
Maybe if more of you literary types read the PSBJ you wouldn’t write such ephemeral twaddle. Maybe it’s not so imaginative but it’s just what it is: it’s the record of balls and enterprise it takes to generate wealth.
P: Well, I’m much moved, Mr. Businessman. Excuse me while I go blow my nose into the American flag. You’re really taken in by this stuff, aren’t you?
S: Like I say, it pays the rent.
P: Oh, Balls. The PSBJ is nothing but a tear sheet of pasted together public relations flyers. Puff pieces smelling strongly of the heavy oil of the region’s marketing engines.
S: That may be; but there is something here, rather than nothing. There’s a lot of money around. That’s news. Just because you feel inferior in front of all this wealth, you shouldn’t take it out on me when I try to read the PSBJ.
P: It’s not that I feel inferior. I just feel there’s something missing in all this craven mammon worship. You said you feel like you’re getting deeper knowledge about our fellow citizens; but that’s an illusion.
Look at the PSBJ. There is no analysis here. It’s all pompoms and cheers. There’s not a bad dollar spent anywhere. Dollars don’t kill people; people kill people.
Look at what assholes most rich people are. They’re fearful, pinched, shrewd, selfish. You don’t see any of that reflected in the PSBJ.
S: OK Mr. Poet, do you have to be so insufferably ’60s? What do you propose?
P: I object to mindless dollar adoration as embodied in the PSBJ. The exaltation of money as the supreme good becomes a kind of religion. It allows us to slough off the questions of what our life is for of how to treat our neighbor or what kind of future we want for our kids. It pretends to stand for Art but all we get are toasters.
S: I’m going to have to stop here. I’ve got to go to work.
TOMORROW: Copyrights and wrongs.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 1)
DOUG ANDERSON IS a Seattle poet/salesman forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is a record of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.
Poet: If art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight…
Salesman: You’ve just described a toaster.
P: You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, if art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight when conjoined with imagination, then I don’t see much art around here.
S: Hey, take it easy. I’m just a meat-and-potatoes man.
P: Yeah, right.
S: Besides, there’s plenty of art. We’ve got full theaters, crowded art galleries and bookstores are so hot the big ones act like Mafia families trying to rub each other out.
P: I disagree. Theater has devolved into solo performers debasing themselves before the bourgeoisie, painting is going nowhere and literature has become the billionth retelling of adolescence angst.
S: You intellectual snob, I notice you conveniently left out poetry.
P: Poetry, in English, especially in the Northwest, seems to be alive and kicking.
S: Stop pimping yourself and let me read the Puget Sound Business Journal. It’s what pays the rent. Remember?
I do business to business sales and this is where you find out which businesses are going under, which are suing or being sued, which are launching IPOs and which are flush and expanding into the Kent Valley. Your theories of art are not really helpful just now.
P: Well I’m reading right along with you and I don’t want you to get overly impressed by all the money that’s flying around.
Art has hung up its imaginative spurs and gone over to technology. Craft when divorced from the imagination becomes technology and that’s what we have a lot of now.
Toasters, like you said. In the absence of art we get lots of toasters.
S: You’re saying technology doesn’t demand imagination? That makes a whole lot of fuckin’ sense.
P: I’m saying that technology is the extension of what we already have. In our five senses. The stethoscope turns your ear into a hose, ultrasound lets your eyeballs roll around like a snake into a young mom’s womb, the web has turned us all into audio-visual spiders.
Technology works within a narrow mandate: demolish time and distance by extending our senses. We don’t need imagination to develop what we already have, therefore…
S: Do you mind? Can I get on with this?
P: Feel free. I’m not stopping you.
S: No but you’re trying to distract me.
THERE’S AN AUTHOR named Dave Eggers. He just put out a slightly-fictionalized memoir, immodestly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
It’s gotten a lot of press attention.
Some reviewers criticize Eggers’s audacity for daring to publish his life story at age 29; and then for writing it in a modified PoMo, self-reflexive, hip-ironic manner.
Other reviewers praise all that.
For the most part, neither group of reviewers seems to know what Eggers’s book is really about.
It’s not about Eggers being a smarty-pants hipster.
It’s about his journey through that stance and finding a way beyond it.
The plot in brief: Eggers is a 21-year-old college grad who returns to his home in a patrician Chicago suburb to tend to his cancer-striken mom. Only his dad turns out to also have the Big C, and both parents die within weeks of one another.
Dave, his big sister Beth, and his orphaned seven-year-old brother “Toph” (short for Christopher) then head out for hyper-hyper San Francisco. There, Dave takes a day job in P.R. while spending much of his inheritance starting Might, a magazine that’s first going to have been The Voice of A New Generation but which quickly turns into typical S.F. fare: Attitude-overdosed hipsters proclaiming how with-it they are and how out-of-it the Rest of America is.
The Might years are rightly disclaimed in Eggers’s long intro as the dullest section of the book. He says they “concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.”
Indeed, the book ends with Dave realizing the meaningless treadmill his life and work had become, as he returns to Illinois for a friend’s wedding and reconnects with the world of his past. The book’s story, Eggers’s personal journey from extended post-adolescence to budding adulthood, ends there.
This personal journey corresponds with Eggers’s professional journey–from merely sneering at mainstream media to exploring a pro-active alternative, and finding it in Lawrence Sterne-esque serious whimsey.
After folding Might and moving to N.Y.C., he took a day job at Esquire. Then, after signing his book deal, he quit that job and started Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a beautifully-made occasional paperback journal of gentle (but never wimpy) humor and pro-social texts of many types.
In a cultural milieu that values bad-boy hipster Attitude ahead of all other possible values, A Heartbreaking Work and McSweeney’s are attempts to reconnect with what’s great and eternal about human communication and community.
The Eggers of Might was a writer-editor of his period; the Might book collection already seems quite dated indeed.
The Eggers of McSweeney’s is a writer-editor of the timeless.
Perhaps he’s not really a “staggering genius.” But that’s not really what we need right now.
MONDAY: Literary lessons from the business papers.
