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IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.
JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.
AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.
I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.
My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).
I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.
Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.
Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’
Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.
Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!
My life was forever changed.
No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.
Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:
never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”
TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.
ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to America’s only locally-produced sketch comedy show on commercial TV, Almost Live, now canned after 15 years. It means host John Keister, my old UW Daily staffmate, will now have to get more commercial gigs selling cell phones. It also dashes my hopes of ever getting paid and/or acknowledged for the occasional gag from this column they’ve stolen over the years. And, of course, it means the fine citizens of Kent, the suburb AL has always loved to chastize, can sleep a little easier.
Don’t put the blame for the show’s axing on “a changing Seattle,” but on a changing TV landscape. Every year, fewer viewers are patronizing the old-line network-affiliate stations (which have, by and large, reduced their definition of “local” programming to sports and mayhem-based news). This meant AL’s ratings declined to where it was only a break-even operation (not only did it have a full-time staff of ten writer-actors, it was the last show on KING to utilize a full studio crew, with humans operating the cameras and everything).
BACK-TO-SCHOOL DAZE: In the September Harper’s, the highly respected author Francine Prose (Guided Tours of Hell, Hunters and Gatherers) complains about the institionally-endorsed mediocrities assigned for reading by innocent high-school students.
Prose’s long rant piece, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” (not available online), asserts whole generations of potential lit-lovers have been permanently turned off from the joys of reading by the less-than-enticing stories they’re made to read in school, and by misguided approaches taken to teaching the kids about even the good writing that makes the English Lit cut.
Like some of her more politically-conservative fellow critics, Prose puts some of the blame on administrators and politicians obsessed with using English Lit to teach “diversity” and other life lessons. Prose figures that because these bureaucrats want to make sure the kids learn nothing more or less than the precisely intended lesson plan, they force-feed the kids really mediocre PC-lit.
She’s got a particular beef against Clinton’s fave poet Maya Angelou, the equally-sanctimonious Alice Walker, Harper Lee’s one-dimensional racism memoir To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Ordinary People, Studs Lonigan, and teachers who reduce all discussion of Huckleberry Finn to a mere rant about its author’s alleged received racism.
Prose says there are plenty of better stories out there about rape, racism, girls’ self-discovery, boys’ temptations to cruelty, etc. etc. But the schools keep on assigning the mediocrities.
She suggests many possible motivations and/or intended or unintended results of force-feeding Our Kids such bureaucratically-acceptable bad writing (it’ll turn the kids into TV-viewing, advertiser-friendly, thinking-challenged drones).
She skirts around a much more plausible consequence–that a diet of low-quality literature might raise a generation of potential school-administration bureaucrats, more interested in what which is collectively-acceptable than that which is really, really good.
What I would do: Divide high-school lit into two sequences. One would continue the life-lessons-thru-storytelling schtick (a technique well-used throughout the history of most civilizations), only using better-written stories. The other track would be strictly about intro’ing kids to some Great Kickass Writing.
This writing could still be from all sorts of races, genders, and nationalities; it’d even do a better “diversity” job ‘cuz it’d showcase some of the best stuff from all over, instead of causing kids to associate minority and/or female authors with dull verbiage or one-dimensional ideologies.
MONDAY:Some examples of Great Kickass Writing.
IN OTHER NEWS: Scientists now say they can genetically-modify mice to make them more intelligent. Only one response is possible: “Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?…”
ELSEWHERE: This woman wants “to ban the word ‘cool’ from the Web’s lexicon…”
According to this list, what you’re looking at right now is not a “webzine.” So be it.
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…
IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.
Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.
For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)
This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.
Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.
The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.
That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:
Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.
But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.
(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)
TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?
ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…
THREE WEEKS OR SO BACK, we discussed the latest online craze, the weblog–a kind of Website that contains little or no original content, but still expresses its author’s personality and tastes through a carefully-chosen set of links to content on other sites.
Online journals are sometimes listed in weblog sites’ link-lists of other weblogs, but they’re very different. They’re like weblogs’ mirror images. They’re all or almost-all made up of original writing, usually very personal writing.
Like the human race itself, web-journals are a diverse lot. Some are better designed than others. Some are better written than others. Some have a lot more to say than others.
But they all involve ordinary, usually non-pro writers taking an ongoing look at the worlds around them and putting short, pithy thoughts about them up for all to see.
(Well, maybe not “all”: Some journalers include home-page disclaimers along the lines of, “If you personally know me, please do not read this.”)
Some places where you can learn more:
Some examples:
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: Two new slick print mags, plus “social phobia” as a chemically-treatable condition.
ELSEWHERE:Day trading’s described as “Doom for lonely grownups, a single-shooter fantasy with NASDAQ supplying the mutant targets”…
AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.
A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.
It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)
Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.
As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.
To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.
So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.
(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)
To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).
And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.
And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.
But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.
And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.
Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.
TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.
ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…
IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.
The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.
Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.
And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.
I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.
For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).
Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.
One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”
Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.
The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.
As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.
But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.
MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.
ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.” MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked. HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked. AUDIENCE: So did we. TOM: Ha ha ha.
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT
NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION
TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.
HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.
AUDIENCE: So did we.
TOM: Ha ha ha.
REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.
Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”
While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).
So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.
A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.
Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:
Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.
Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.
So what to do?
Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”
That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?
Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.
More about that on Friday.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?
ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.
FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)
intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.
AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:
MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.
A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.
I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.
In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”
The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.
This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:
“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer). “I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to. “Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”
“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).
“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.
“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”
Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:
“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’ “Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill. “I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently. “If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong. “Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”
“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’
“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.
“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.
“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.
“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”
When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:
“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”
Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.
ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.
TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.
LAST FRIDAY, we mentioned the recent explosion in “Weblogs,” sites that contain little or no original content but instead provide highly selective links to articles and stories on other sites.
MISC. World isn’t turning into a pure Weblog. Don’t worry; there’ll still be all-new stuff here all the time.
But, from time to time, we like to mention some fun and/or serious stuff being written elsewhere in Netland. Such as these pieces:
For everybody who loves/hates the inanity of misspellings on huge public signage, it’s the Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks. A recent item: “A billboard for a bank in Idaho Falls reads: ‘We believe that “PEOPLE” should answer our phones.’ ‘PEOPLE’ are about the same things as ‘robots with Gap clothing,’ right?” Speaking of inanities…
Rocket writer Jason Josephes has a hilarious listing of “The Top 20 LPs Among People Who Hate Music,” as determined by what he sees most in thrift-store record bins. (I personally disagree with Josephes’ #1 choice, Abba’s Gold. I recently listened to a cassette somebody in Belgium had made, collecting every known cover version of “Dancing Queen,” from elevator to punk, and was blown away by the tune’s sheer endurance capability.) Speaking of hatreds…
Now that press coverage of the delayed Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale’s allowed journalists to revisit their post-Littleton pontifications, Philip Michaels has something called “Your Guide to High School Hate,” showing once again that the pontificators had it all wrong and Buffy has it metaphorically right–high school, too often, really is a Hellmouth. Speaking of teen insecurities…
Understanding Comics author-illustrator Scott McCloud is back with a wistful, beautiful reminiscence of his adolescent retreat from peer pressure into the ordered, rational universe of gaming, in “My Obsession With Chess.” It’s a comic strip meant to be read online, with panels arranged in the sequence of chess moves along a “board” that would be about 16 feet long in real life. Simply gorgeous.
TOMORROW: Continuing in this vein, some wacky search-engine keywords that brought people, perhaps mistakenly, to this site.
UPDATE #1: “Oh oh, must have been another Bite of Seattle riot!” That’s what certain Belltown bystanders muttered when they saw throngs of teens, about half of them Af-Am teens, streaming out of Seattle Center toward the surrounding sidewalks around 9:30 p.m. last Saturday night. But it wasn’t a riot. Center authorities had simply brought in cops to empty the grounds, including the Fun Forest amusement area, after the Bite’s scheduled 9 p.m. closing time. (The incident last year wasn’t really a “riot” either. Somebody made a noise in a crowded Fun Forest that sounded like gunfire but might have just been a leftover fireworks noisemaker, and a few dozen kids started running in panic.) Ah, the “enlightened, liberal, diversity-celebrating” city that still can’t grasp that dark-skinned teenagers are not necessarily gangstas… (sigh)…
UPDATE #2: In happier news, the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which previously was stripped of much of its entertainment-licensing authority by a federal judge, is now proposing rules that would allow afternoon or early-evening all-ages music shows in the dining areas of restaurant-lounge spots. The proposed rules would still be stricter than those in Oregon, but it’s a step.
IN THE SIX YEARS since the World Wide Web became an honest-to-gosh phenom with the first NSCA Mosaic browser, a helluva lotta buzzwords and hype schemes have vied to become the next Big Online Thing, with all the resultant news articles and magazine covers and venture capital and stock offerings.
A lot of these would-be cyber-smashes have failed to live up to their advance publicity. (Remember “push media”? Virtual communities? Sidewalk.com and the Microsoft Network “shows” concept? WebTV?)
About nine months ago, the catchword was “Portal.” Big commercially-run websites were going to gather banner-ad-viewin’ eyeballs (and demographic-database stats about those sets of eyeballs) by virtually being everything to everyone. Not by having all the content any Web user’d wanna look at, but by having organized directories of links to all that stuff.
The “portal” sites were going to be the new gatekeepers, collecting indirect “tolls” in the form of ad revenues from anybody who wanted to find anything on the Web, even directly charging big corporate Websites for prominent mentions on the portal pages. Netscape was going to use its browser as a loss leader, to make dough from its portal site.
Advocates of an open-access Web even issued dire fears that the more corporately-minded portals, such as MSN and AOL, might abuse the massive control over searchin’ and browsin’ everybody thought they were bound to attain.
Hasn’t quite happened that way.
The Disney/Infoseek/Starwave consortium, f’rinstance, was going to have promoted its Go Network as the one-and-only place users had to go to to find anything (and whose own in-house sites would be the prime recommended source for most of that “anything”). Now, it’s redirecting its promotion toward the individual sites beneath the Go flag (ESPN.com, Mr. Showbiz, et al.).
Yahoo! has found the portal biz insufficient to keep the ol’ stock price up, and has been rapidly trying to expand into almost every conceivable Web-based operation other than porn or gambling.
The one-size-fits-all portals aren’t going away (at least not the better-funded ones). But they’re not gonna become the all-powerful “netcenters” either.
Indeed, reports last week claim they can’t even keep their search engines up to speed with the ever-expanding explosion of Web content out there.
Exit the portal as the big cyber-hype.
Enter the Weblog.
Small (often one-person or volunteer operations), specialized (either by topic or by the operator’s personal tastes), convenient (usually just one page per site), Weblogs are neither webzines (which emphasize original content), nor automated search engines, nor all-purpose portals.
They’re collections of hand-picked links to pages on other sites, curated to either service afficianados of a particular topic (movies, the Microsoft lawsuit, health care, etc.) or to express the curator’s personality via insights into the curator’s current obsessions.
Weblogs differ from the older style of link pages because, instead of merely listing ongoing links to whole sites, Weblogs link to specific articles, essays, or sections on those other sites. Many Weblog operators update their links every damn day (in some cases, even on the weekends).
Think of it as the Net equivalent of musical sampling. Only there’s no copyright-infringement issues, ’cause the Weblog operators quote no more than “fair use” excerpts from the linked-to pages.
Also think of it as one more stage in the ever-increasing bifurcation and “tribalization” of the Web, and of society at large.
A few Weblogs to start your exploration:
MONDAY: This site isn’t a Weblog, at least not yet, but the next installment will explore more wackiness from across the Net.
A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.
Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.
But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.
(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)
Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.
And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.
But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.
As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.
As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.
(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)
This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.
Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.
Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.
Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.
Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).
So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.
(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)
TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?
ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”
AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.
It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).
These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.
More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).
When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.
Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.
The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.
If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.
That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.
Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.
These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.
SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.
A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.
TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!
SIX MONTHS AGO, you couldn’t see a string of TV commercials without at least one website address flashing on-screen.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see a string of TV commercials (except maybe on Pax TV) without at least one ad that’s all about a website.
Yet despite the hype over e-commerce and the dubya-dubya-dubya as a marketing tool, the Web remains what I hoped it would become five years ago–an all-accessible repository for great, immediate writing.
Herewith, a few examples of fine online verbiage that are not Salon and heavens-not Slate:
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accompaniment to the print somewhat-less-than-quarterly McSweeney’s alterna-lit journal, but sharing no content with the paper version–just the same sense of literate whimsy and post-postmodern graciousness.
Rat Bastard. Washington, DC-based Don Bruns doin’ the personal-net-diary thang, with self-effacing wit to spare.
Exquisite Corpse. Andrei Codrescu’s little paper litmag is now indeed a corpse, but he continues to present brash-yet-thoughtful voices online.
My current fave: James Nolan on American doublespeak in the age of spin-control (a topic that gets beaten to death every election cycle, but he manages to bring it back to life).
Bittersweets. Each day, a one-paragraph narrative or observation about the wistfully-regretful side of life.
The Napkin. Like Bittersweets, but shorter, usually less bitter, and sometimes even cosmic (in a nice way).
Word. Besides the fun contemporary-art pages, the pages of found-objects pix, and the “Junk Radio” section full of moldy-oldies in streaming audio, the words on Word are themselves darned interesting and lively. Current best example: Philip Dray’s probably-fictional yet realistic reminiscence of being “a Jewish caddy at a WASP country club.”
You can tell the folks running Word have the right attitude if you hit “View Source” on your browser when you reach its homepage. There, amid all the HTML codin’, is this hidden (until now, anyway) treat:
“META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Forget about whatever you were searching for. It’s not important. You may not be aware of it consciously, but you really want to read Word instead. So go on — click here. You’ll be glad you did! Satisfaction guaranteed!”.”
Random Story Generator. I know it’s just an automated version of Mad Libs, but damned if it’s not a total laff-riot each and every time.
ELSEWHERE: There’s a big convention of ethnic-minority journalists in my town this week. The Seattle Times has been dutifully covering and previewing the event, but its big Sunday feature story tie-in was strictly about the “minority” the Times, and Seattle, are most comfortable with–upscale, white women (preferably blond and blue-eyed); in this case, TV anchorwomen.
TOMORROW: David Foster Wallace’s new fiction collection is anything but ‘hideous.’
PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).
Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.
“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”
Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.
(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)
At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.
Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.
In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.
I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).
The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.
What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:
“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”
MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…
