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Wine Dark Sea
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
GENERAL INTEREST MAGAZINES like Time are nice barometers of what a culture is supposed to be like, but give me an industrial trade magazine, any day. Who wouldn’t rather read Blackstockings than Playboy?
When it comes to my own trade, selling wine, I read the two main consumer mags, the glossy Wine Spectator with its fondness for California chardonnay and the fussy Wine Advocate with its preference for wine you can’t find (let alone afford), as well as an assortment of crass rags (Market Watch, Beverage Retailer) geared for managers of chain stores.
But the best publication for anyone who wants info on the wine industry is Wine Business Monthly.
It also happens to be very entertaining and, if you pass for an insider, free.
The seven-year-old monthly has the look and heft of Barrons, running about 80 legal-size pages of better-than-newsprint black and white articles illustrated by charts, graphs, and photos. Advertisements provide color as well as information about bottles, corks, fake corks, industrial machinery, and farm equipment.
The news can come across as the kind of no-bullshit approach you get in the Wall Street Journal news section (not to be confused with the editorial blather), although some pieces rely on too few sources. A recent story on Best Cellars failed to point out that these “bargain” boutiques actually sell the most expensive cheap wine around (in Seattle, at any rate, the same bottles can often be had across the parking lot at the U. Village QFC, for a buck less).
Much of the March 2000 issue is devoted to the theme of packaging, focusing on bottle and label designs; but two pieces leap out and grab casual reader/ drinkers and political activists: an op/ed primer on media relations and an article on the wine industry and the WTO.
“Winery Public Relations Is Changing,” by p.r. exec Judy Kimsey, presents a peppy mixture of common sense and stupefying bromides to inform as well as entertain. Unfortunately, Kimsey for the most part minds her diction, primly shielding readers from the array of argot neologisms that often make business writing more dazzling than language poetry.
She does, however, advocate exploring long-term pro-active strategies and maintaining an effective Internet presence by having a “sticky” website (i.e., a site people who don’t have a life in meat world will keep coming back to out of sheer boredom). A “sticky” website is, after all, “a vital part of your public relations arsenal.”
Rather than hold up a mirror to see ourselves as others see us, op-ed pieces like this let you see them as they see themselves.
Nothing against Gina Gallo (or against whatever data may indicate that Gallo sales are up), but how strange it is to read of the “Gina Phenomenon,” where the pretty celebrity/ heir/ winemaker drives sales by providing a “personality-driven image!”
And while the wine industry plunges into organic viticulture, there’s a “misperception” that it’s “the environmental bad guy” because it’s a monoculture and because of “novice owners whose vineyards slide off the hillside into the local creek.”
If that isn’t enough of a trip to Never Never Land, get this:
“Return press calls promptly. In most industries, not returning a press call within the day, if not the hour, is a firing offense.”
In the real world, as in prevalent practice in the wine world Kimsey chastises, p.r. flacks must get bonuses for not returning press calls; and when they do call back, the reporter is in for hours of happy talk in lieu of concise information.
“Wine Still Swirls as a Trade Issue,” by Lisa Shara Hall, came at an ideal time for me: en route to have dinner with some visiting Italian wine execs at a restaurant along the trail of tear gas that police blazed to drive protesters out of downtown and into the neighborhoods of lower Capitol Hill.
Simon Siegl, ex-Washington Wine Commission czar and current head of the American Vintners Association, was the only quoted source for the article. His message to winemakers? Shut up and join an organization like his. “This is an area where horizontal expansion of communications merely adds confusion,” he says.
As a WTO protester and a co-owner of a small wine shop, I remain skeptical of the WTO having any say in my industry. But thanks to this article, I was able to relate my skepticism to the Italians in a way that hit home.
The main enemies of people who drink, sell, and make wine that’s imported to the U.S. are tariffs and pressures to remove “subsidies.” Fortunately for us, the U.S. has the lowest tariffs on wine; and European farmers and vintners have resisted attempts to change the way they do business. So, as things stand, a good bottle of Chianti Classico is still $12-$15 and plenty of good Italian wine is still under $10 a bottle.
In other words, I said, the protesters in the streets of Seattle were not destroying property; we were defending our right to purchase Italian wine at fair prices.
The big U.S. wine interests may be too sophisticated to behave like hicks and demand an end to all, say, tax breaks that foreign wineries enjoy. After all, their main concerns involve exports: getting other countries to lower tariffs and to accept some kind of label standardization.
But, “Next on the list is the elimination of subsidies,” which is complicated because “The EU wants to protect its historical and culturally based subsidies.”
Make that, the EU, American consumers, American importers and dealers, and everybody else.
The only ones who don’t like this arrangement are outfits like Gallo, whose Gina Phenomenon doesn’t change a legacy of farm-worker exploitation and a line of rotgut sold under names swiped from Europe and then trademarked so the world could come to know Hearty Burgundy and Chablis.
(To receive Wine Business Monthly, pick up a sub form at a local wine shop or write to them at 867 W. Napa St., Sonoma, CA 95476. Make up an industrial position for yourself (retailer, grower, restaurateur, etc.) and don’t tell them I sent you.)
TOMORROW: Dave Eggers, Threat or Menace?
ELSEWHERE:
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
ANOTHER SOOPER TOOSDAY has come and gone, the party nominations are decided, and damned if I don’t remember a single one of the major Presidential candidates talk about anything like that onetime pie-in-the-sky official goal of Presidential candidates–progress.
These days, the politicians seem to propose nothing more ambitious than cleaning up various perceived governmental messes (soft-money campaign financing, gun-show regulatory loopholes) or restoring a supposed past golden age of integrity and authority in high places.
All our other problems are apparently supposed to be taken care of by that boomin’ private-sector wealth.
It’s a pleasant thought that ignores the extent to which that same boomin’ private-sector wealth is causing or at least exacerbating many of our problems (the money-corruption of elective politics, the rich/poor divide, the affordable-housing crisis, the affordable-health-care crisis, the stagnation in real wages for the non-rich, wrenching consolidations in industry after industry, etc.).
A few folks unconnected with any Presidnetial campaign are thinking about some of these things. Two of them are Harvard profs and prolific essayists Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. They recently issued a little manifesto-book, The Future of American Progressivism.
The term “Progressive” sometimes denotes a pretty specific strain of the American political tradition. It was strongest in the upper Midwest and here in the Northwest, from the turn of the century until the rise of “pro-business Democrats.”
It emphasized not just a governmental but a social, even an aesthetic, ideal of clean, rational leadership by a well-educated, well-groomed caste of dedicated public servants. Its various “reform” mechanisms (such as at-large city council races), however, often served to consolidate power among WASP farmers and homeowners at the expense of German or Irish Catholic urban-factory workers.
But Unger and West have a different idea of “Progressive” in mind. Theirs is essentially any and all political factions to the left of the corporate Democrats, but more practical than the separatist or ideologically-obsessed far-left cliques.
What’s more, their inclusive attitude extends to their agenda. They don’t have a single “magic bullet” economic or social scheme. Instead, they’re willing to try a lot of different programs in order to advance their general goals–social justice, economic opportunity, minority rights, environmental stewardship, etc.
America’s overriding current problem, as Unger and West (and many other left-O-center observers) see it, is that the old New Deal coalition devolved long ago. Big business rules the whole political agenda, across the board; all liberals seem willing to do these days is propose slightly more humane variations on corporate rule (a tax credit here, a land-use regulation there).
Unger and West want to re-popularize the notion that pro-active work for social progress is both good and possible. Within that framework, they offer up a lot of policy ideas (a value-added tax, job-retraining programs, venture-capital funds for small businesses, mandatory voting, labor-law reforms).
But they’re not firmly committed to any one of those. It’s the results they want, not necessarily any of these specific mechanisms. If one program doesn’t work, try another. They’d put up different pilot programs in different jurisdictions to speed up the process of finding which ones work best.
And that, in itself, might be their most radical idea.
U.S. society has become awfully project-oriented during this Age of Global Business. That Internet “stock bubble” is pouring investment into companies not on the basis of how much money they’re making but on the size of the organizations they’re building. Governmental programs often become entrenched entities most concerned with their own self-preservation, in spite of “sunset laws” devised to stem this.
A neo-prog movement organized around goals, not around organizations or specific projects, could provide just the worldview-shiftin’ kick this world really needs if it’s gonna make any real progress.
MONDAY: It’s an X-treme world.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
A Cursed World
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
THE WORST WORDS you can say in a foreign language usually reflect the culture’s phobias. The sacred and the profane are inextricabally tied together. So you can tell a lot about a country by the way it swears.
IN SWEDEN, for example, you say “777 Satans” when you’re really pissed. Seven is an evil number, and three sevens together is the evilest number ever. When you say 777 Satans, you are pratically calling the devil himself.
I know it’s hard to believe; but think how bizarre we sound when we say “Fuck!” To say “sexual intercourse!” when you’re angry just doesn’t make sense to most of the rest of the world. But it does reflect how the puritan roots of the U.S.-influenced sexual taboos.
When you think about it, 777 Satans just makes more sense. Sweden was once a very pagan culture and the Lutheran struggle of God vs. Satan really made an impact on the country. To even say the word “Satan” is considered somewhat of a sin. Say “fuck” in Sweden and they’ll just nod happily and invite you to a smorgasbord.
IN TURKEY, to call someone “Infidel” is pratically the worst thing. While we in America barely ever say our one word for infidel, the Turks have a few variations to chose from. Among others, you could choose “Gavur” (merciless infidel) or “Kafir” (mere non-believer) or “Ihanet” (trecherous infidel).
However, in Turkey the absolute worst thing you could call someone is “without family,” literally “red faced;” proving family is very important over there. If you meet a Turkish person, they will ask you all about your spouse and children, and probably will only yawn if you try to talk about your shitty American job.
IN TUNISIA, the worst thing you can say to someone is “Burn your God;” one of the more elaborate, effective curses I’ve ever heard. I think it implies they are not sharing the same (Muslim) God as you. It’s like “Infidel,” but with imagination.
IN GREAT BRITAIN they say “bloody,” and it’s considered pretty vulgar. No one knows exactly where it comes from; some say it goes as far back as the blood of Christ. I say that because us Americans go to England and try saying “bloody awful” and what we’re actually saying is “fucking awful” but we have no idea.
Same thing happened with the movie title Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me. Apparently “shag” is just as vulgar as “fuck” there, so it was a problem.
In Britain, everything is vulgar. You’re bound to offend our dainty forefathers just by calling their country Britain; but if you care, mostly try to avoid saying “Sod of.” or “Wank off,” variations of sodomy and masterbation respectively. I think it shows the famous British sexual repression we always hear about.
WHICH BRINGS US to our puritanical roots in America.
In America the worst thing you can say is “God damn it.” What does it say about us? We’re as religious and superstitious as the Swedish. It’s taking the name of the Lord God in vain, breaking one of the commandments.
Some of my friends argue the worst thing you can say in the U.S. is “fuck.” This would also speak about our weird Puritan upbringing. As I mentioned earlier, in most other countries it would be ridiculous to say the verb to have intercourse when you’re angry.
Anal intercourse is not a problem, though. Apparently all over the world (except for here), “Butt-Fuck!” is a common explicative. Don’t know if that implies homophobia or acceptance of homosexuality, ormaybe both. I do know we are the only country that’s made anal intercourse illigal in some states.
IN ITALY, while anal intercourse ranks high in vulgarity, the absolute worst thing is “cornuto,” which means a man whose wife is cheating on him. No, it doesn’t apply to a woman whose husband is cheating on her. Same is true in Central and South America. I guess this speaks to a woman’s faithfulness as sacred in those countries. More sacred than a man’s, anyway.
Once we hit Italy, we also get into “Minchia,” which means penis, and can be substituted for the word “fuck” in just about any American curse: “Ma che Minchia vuoi?” (literally, “But what the penis do you want?”).
The Italians also use a lot of references to the Madonna and moms in general, (Mamma mia), showing the importance of Catholicism and the worship of the mother.
THE IRISH, also a really Catholic culture, will say an almost song-like string of words, which I always find poetic. Consider yourself lucky if you are ever around an Irish person who says, “Jesus, Joseph and Mary” or “Sweet Baby Jesus!” Although they have their fair share of wanking and sodding words from the British, the Irish tend to be more imaginative. Anyway, we like them better, don’t we?
IN FRANCE, the worst thing you could scream is “Putain” (whore)–although prostitution is practically legal there, and most French men don’t feel at all unusual about paying a visit to a prostitute. And what do French say when they are really angry? “Bordel!” (brothel).
The French also get kind of imaginative. One example: “Putain de bordel de merde!”, literally, “Whore from a shit brothel!” Maybe the word “putain” is extra evil there, because women are so venerated. In France, chivalry is not dead. While other countries have forgotten the worship of women, the cult of the Virgin Mary was founded and still exists in France.
“Enculee” (butt fucked) is a close second. And “Va te faire voir chez les Grecs”–literally, “Go show yourself to the Greeks”–is a colorful French way of saying to go have anal intercourse. Apparently, the French think you just “show yourself” to the Greeks and they take you. I still have to go to Greece and see if they say, “Go show yourself to the French.” This could be a fun trip.
SOME OTHERS:
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
(Apologies for the Eurocentricity of this article; I acknowlege that swear words from most of Asia and Africa are missing. Send comments, corrections, and suggestions to quinno99@hotmail.com. Thanks.)
MONDAY: Making glamour fun again.
IN OTHER NEWS: Donald Trump, that N.Y./N.J. real-estate guy sometimes mistaken for a national celebrity, now sez he won’t run for President after all. Fine with me. The only Atlantic City casino owner I’d ever vote for is Merv Griffin.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the problems that can arise when folks try too hard to make the real world more like their Utopian dreams of a more perfect world–dreams that are almost always too rational, simplistic, and/or monocultural for the chaos that is real-life humanity.
Proclaiming a real-life place to already be a Utopia on earth can be even more problematic.
In the late ’70s, I was assigned a college sociology textbook that had a different indigenous tribe in New Guinea to represent each aspect of the authors’ dream society–matrilinear inheritance, collective decision-making, etc. The teacher didn’t like it when I questioned in class why the textbook’s authors had to find a different tribe for each social trait they wanted to promote, implying there was no one group that had it all.
Idealized societies seldom live up to their idealizers’ fantasies. Cuba’s egalitarianism and Singapore’s orderliness both turn out to be propped up by harsh authoritarian practices. “Unspoiled” rural places are often that way because everybody there is too impoverished to spoil them.
One of the most famous cases of Utopianization was Margaret Mead’s landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa. By now, almost everybody knows Mead’s book, a supposedly rigorous sociological study of “free love” and premarital guiltlessness among Pacific Island teens, wasn’t completely factual. Rather, it represented two urges at least as universal as teen sex-confusion:
Real-life Samoans had, and have, social structures and strictures just like organized societies anywhere on the planet. They might not, on the whole, have had the same specific types of sex-fear and sex-guilt as Westerners (at least before the missionaries did their work); but they had arranged marriages and adultery taboos and all the emotional awkwardness of growing up that you’ll find wherever there are conflicting hormones.
Still, the “Exotic Other” and “Sex-Positive Other” stereotypes remain. And after the Mary Kay LeTourneau TV movie of a few weeks ago, I got to wondering: Would this teacher and her prematurely-mature student have gotten into parental mode if she hadn’t seen those received ideas of innocent licentiousness in his Samoan heritage?
We’re not all one tribe, but we are one species. If we dream of a better way to do things, we shouldn’t force others to express them for us, any more than we should force our current social ways upon them.
(Though the anti-female-genital-mutilation advocates would surely disagree with the latter assertion.)
TOMORROW: Those rah-rah, way-new business magazines.
IN OTHER NEWS: Yep, the Web really is growing like weeds.
WITH Y2KOOKINESS long past by now, we might be able to resume talking about “The Future” without sounding too much like hype-followers.
We might even get to resume talking about ideal futures, a.k.a. Utopias.
Utopias may never exist here in the realm of the real (indeed, the name literally means “Nowhere”). But they express the kind of society certain people want to create. Thus, they can hold bold and sometimes dangerous dreams–especially if those dreams involve the destruction or subjugation of everyone outside the dreamer’s own group.
Last month’s Atlantic Monthly carried a roundup of “five and a half” currently popular Utopian dreams:
One could go on and on into ever more bifurcated Utopian fantasies; many of which would be someone else’s Reign of Terror.
There’s the one where all males would be held in bondage (if allowed to live at all). There’s the one where all meat eating would be unlawful. There’s the one where the total ideological rule of midtown Manhattan and southern California would be replaced by the total ideological rule of downtown Manhattan and northern California. There’s the one where the poor would be sent off to boot camps, to learn to become good submissive house boys. There’s the one where all drinkers would get stoned and all stoners would get shot.
What all these have in common is the dream of engendering a simpler, more predictable world by developing (by force if need be) a simpler, more predictable human race. None of these dream futures seems to have a place for anybody like me who believes society’s too simple and predictable already.
Corporate-libertarian writer Virginia Postrel sees a common flaw in both Utopian and anti-Utopian future-fantasies: “A uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men.” She seems to find that a heresy against her own belief in capitalist hero figures continually emerging to seize the day.
I’d go even further, diversity-wise, than Postrel. My kind of Utopia’s one where entreprenurial crusaders wouldn’t get to run everything, because commerce wouldn’t be considered the totality or even the centrality of all human endeavor.
More about that some other time.
TOMORROW: The problems with proclaiming real-life Utopias.
Praying for Turkey, Part 2
(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)
ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.
In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?
But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.
I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.
It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.
Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.
TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.
And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:
One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.
A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.
Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)
THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.
The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.
It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.
My prayer is always the same one.
“God, I pray that everyone prays.”
TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.
BAD WRITING has seemingly always been with us.
So has bad writing by academics, self-styled “communications” experts, and others who presumably ought to know better.
I’ve certainly attempted to read a lot of it as part of my cultural-critiquing career. And some of the worst comes from self-styled political leftists–guys ‘n’ gals who supposedly want to overthrow existing elitist institutions in favor of a sociopolitical regime more responsive to The People.
The teaching-biz trade mag Lingua Franca came out last month with a whole article on the topic of whether bad writing was necessary. It’s apparently a big issue in certain ivory-tower circles, according to writer James Miller: “Must one write clearly, as [George] Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively–or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly?”
Some campus-leftist obscurantists, of course, aren’t really dreaming for a Dictatorship of the Prolateriat but rather, whether they admit it or not, for a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia–a society in which learned theoriticians will rationally decide what’s best for everyone (a sort of cross between Sweden and Singapore). Such ideologues will naturally go for ideological discourse that doesn’t make a whiff of sense to outsiders.
Others, according to Miller, actually defend their writing style with anti-authoritarian arguments.
Miller quotes ’50s German philosopher Theodor Adorno as proclaiming that “lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision” are merely “ideologies” that have been “invented” by “editors and then writers” for “their own accommodation….” “Concrete and positive suggestions for change merely strengthen [the power of the status quo], either as ways of administering the unadministratable, or by calling down repression from the monstrous totality itself.”
In short (just the way Adorno wouldn’t want it): Readable writing can’t help but reflect standardized, conformist ways of thinking. To imagine a truly radical alternative to the way things are, you’ve gotta use different thought processes, and use written forms that reflect these processes.
I don’t buy it.
You see, there’s this little discipline called “technical writing.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. A lot of ladies and gents in this hi-tech age are studying it.
One of the tenets of good tech writing is that some topics are naturally complex–such as PC hardware and software design, operation, and maintenance. But they still can and should be explained as clearly as reasonably possible, without losing necessary detail or treating the reader as an idiot. Certain works of tech writing necessarily require that the reader have a basic familiarity with the topic at hand, and will use certain nouns and verbs not used in everyday discourse, but should still strive to communicate what they’re trying to communicate effectively and efficiently.
Political and social theories can be as complex as circuit-board schematics and C++ programming code, if not more. But, as shown in the products of Common Courage Press and Seven Stories Press, among others, these ideas can still be expressed in readable, persuasive ways.
TOMORROW: The one sexual behavior women never do–or do they?
NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
IT’S A POST-SOLSTICE MISCmedia, the online column that had just gotten used to less than 8.5 hours of sunlight when the nights suddenly started getting shorter again.
For one thing, the long nites have left me plenty-O-time, and the right climactic setting, to get caught up in all the reading matter I’d obtained at the last Tower Books clearance sale six months before.
That, in turn, meant I could turn my eye toward some of the literary zines that have popped up of late.
Such as August Avo and Doug “Das” Andersson’s Klang.
It first appeared almost three years ago, disappeared after one issue, and has now reappeared, with three tabloid installments produced thus far.
Each issue mixes two serials with one-shot short stories, poems, line art (including some old Durer woodcuts), and other supplementary material.
Andersson’s serial, “The Transformation,” starts with an antihero who applies a sexual-enhancement salve and turns into a donkey. The first, origin-story installment has its lame parts (such as its fictional names for Seattle and Woodland Park Zoo); but the next two segments go places Kafka never nightmared. In the third part, that includes a Fundamentalist Y2K survivalist farm, where our protagonist (a literal “ass man”) is enslaved to run an old-fashioned flour mill.
Avo’s serial, “Badge” (purported to be a translation of a “bestselling Russian novel by Sasha Klinokov”), is even more ambitious. Since it’s now online at the above link, I won’t try to explain or summarize it. I will say that, no matter what its true origins, it does a grand job of capturing the epic-tragedy spirit of classic pre-USSR Russian lit; as situated in the epic tragedy that much of post-USSR Russia has become.
But the zine’s best part is “Notes on the American Novel” by the pseudonymous “JAD,” appearing on the back pages of issues 1 and 3. These pithy aphorisms revolve around a pair of premises: (1) The Novel, in the classical definition, is a European art form unsuited to capturing U.S. social realities; and (2) this inadequacy reveals fundamental flaws about U.S. society:
Slightly more optimistic views on fin-de-siecle American writing can be found in Context, an in-bookstore tabloid review from the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press. Besides tributes to great authors from other times and places (Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Henry James, Samuel Beckett), it’s got thoughtful praise for Diane Williams, David Markson, and McSweeney’s. (Dalkey publishes Williams and Markson; and its placement of its own authors as implied heirs to modern-lit’s greats is a PR move for sure; but, at least in the case of Williams, it’s deserved.)
Whether Williams’s tight, internalized short-shorts; Markson’s hibrow story-essays; or McSweeney’s high whimsy mark new directions for storytelling in the new whatever-period-of-time-you-wanna-call-it will, natch, have to be answered later.
But at least they, and the Klang guys, are asking some of the right questions.
TOMORROW: A festive holiday message.
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
