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SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”
MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)
Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).
All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.
It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.
In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)
WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.
This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)
(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)
The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:
(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)
OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?
IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)
GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.
Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!
GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book
Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality
technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.
It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:
ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
THE LONG ORDEAL of the coup attempt is over at last. MISC., your thank-God-it’s-after-Valentine’s-Day online column, wishes it had something intelligent to say about it, but doesn’t. All that can be said now is Clinton won what may have been a calculated risk, putting his own career and the institution of the Presidency on the line in an attempt to break the Religious Right’s popularity base. After he spent his first term trying to woo big business away from the GOP, he’s spent his second term engaged in bringing the Right’s pious hypocrisies to a kind of public referendum. I’m not saying he tried to get caught cheatin’ on his wife. I am saying he and his team artfully managed the crisis, to turn it away from being a judgement on him and into a judgement on his accusers. Speaking of smut and its purveyors…
CLIMACTIC MOMENT?: A few weeks before Dan Rather tried to shock America’s TV news viewers with the “rise and rise” tale of Seattle cyberporn tycoon Seth Warshavsky, Business 2.0 magazine claimed his empire’s probably peaked. The cover story alleges Netporn (and specifically Warshavsky’s IEG group of paid-access sites) has hit the wall, can no longer commercially expand at its accustomed-to growth rates. The mag claims we oughta see pay-per-view skin sites consolidate and thin out this year. Warshavsky, as we’ve noted in previous weeks, has already planned for such contingencies by attempting to branch out into other Web-programming genres (gambling, stock quotes, even online surgery videos). Still, having come of age in a Seattle that thought itself to be just another sex-repressed northern city, there’s a kind of almost-kinky delight in knowing the world now thinks of our too-fair city as the cutting edge of sleaze spectacle. Speaking of entertainment dollars at work…
THE ART OF THE DEAL: So highbrow arts are worth the corporate/government investment, according to a highly publicized Corporate Council for the Arts report. It claims 200 King and Pierce County arts groups (specifically the bigger, more “professional” ones) generate $373 million in “economic impact,” hiring 16,000 people (mostly part-timers and contract workers) and selling 5.9 million tickets a year (almost 20 percent more admissions than major pro sports generate here). That’s all nice to know, but will the positive fiscal PR generated by the report be used to help promote more funding support for the arts, or just for more arts-related construction projects?
STRIKING: It’s spring training time, and the sports pages are once again spouting questions of Whither baseball? (Not again?) This time, the athletico-pundits claim that despite the recent NBA player lockout, pro basketball (and pro football) are in much better fiscal shape than baseball. With no salary cap to keep a few well-heeled team owners from grabbing all the top stars, the sport could become as uncompetitive as it had been in its alleged golden age, when the Yankees and the old New York Giants were always at or near the top. This time, the commentators warn, the deck’s so stacked against the less-rich teams that some might go under.
How about a better question: Whither major-league sports as we know them? Player-salary inflation can no longer be supported by TV contracts, now that the explosion of channels has decimated network sports ratings. Sneaker endorsements and team-logo merchandise may also be nearly tapped out as revenue sources. Almost every team in each sport either has a new luxury-box-beholden arena or is working to get one, so that particular money well’s just about maxed out as well. And with each of the big sports suiting up 30 teams or more, there aren’t many cities left to threaten to move a team to. The salary-cap sports have a few more years to deal with this trap than baseball, but they’ll have to deal with it eventually.
Here’s how I’d save major-league pro sports: All new teams, teams that get sold, and teams that move into publicly-funded stadia should be controlled on the league-franchise-contract level by regional, quasi-public corporations, similar to the organizations running many of the stadia. In turn, they’d contract out team operations to management companies, essentially turning team GMs and presidents from owners into contractors. Teams can only build new arenas or pay hyper-inflated salaries if the management companies can financially justify such moves. If a management company can’t make a team pay, it could let its contract to run it expire. Teams could move only if the regional authorities couldn’t land a feasible operator. Speaking of home teams worth saving…
THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: On the day after Stroh Brewing (current owners of Seattle’s Rainier Brewing and Portland’s Blitz-Weinhard Brewing) announced it was getting out of the beer business and selling off its brewing plants and beer brands separately, the sidewalk sandwich sign at 2nd Avenue Pizza read: “Keep Rainier in Seattle.” The loss of the Rainier Brewery (at 121, perhaps Seattle’s oldest manufacturing enterprise) would mean more than just the loss of some 200 jobs. It would mean the real end of one of our proudest local institutions, even if a beer continues to be sold under that name.
In the days before microbrews and Bud Light dogs, most of the beer drunk in the Northwest came from five places: Rainier in Seattle, Carling-Heidelberg in Tacoma, Olympia in Tumwater, General Brewing-Lucky Lager in Vancouver U.S.A., and Blitz-Weinhard in Portland. Rainier pretty much owned the Seattle market (and had a nice sideline with its drunkard’s-favorite Rainier Ale, whose dark green label inspired the nickname “The Green Death”); and Blitz-Weinhard (and its later flagship brand, Henry’s) likewise in Portland. But Oly was by far the biggest of the quintet, shipping enough product in 13 western states to qualify in some years as America’s #6 beer vendor (after Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Miller, Pabst, and Coors, which was also a western-only brand back then).
But industry-wide sales stagnations and the onward marketing pushes of Bud, Miller and Coors saw all these Northwest favorites tumble in the marketplace. The Lucky and Heidelberg plants closed down; the other three breweries changed owners several times. Now, perhaps only the Oly plant will be left. Oly’s facility is now owned by Pabst but is to be sold to Miller as an aspect of the complex Stroh asset sale (though it may still engage in “contract brewing” on behalf of Pabst, which would keep the Olympia trademarks and would buy the Rainier’s and Weinhard’s brands and distribution networks from Stroh). Because Oly used to sell so much more beer than Rainier and Blitz combined, that brewery has far more underused capacity; it could easily produce what all three now make, plus Miller’s brands.
The problem in this scenario is that Rainier’s and Henry Weinhard’s brand identities are closely tied to their sources of production. A Rainier beer not brewed in Seattle, or a Henry Weinhard’s not brewed in Portland, would not carry even a fraction of the decades-developed goodwill built into their names. For the Stroh people (who’d already collected the trademarks and a few branch plants of such prior fallen giants as Heilman and Schlitz) to sell the brands without the plants will only doom them to permanent secondary or tertiary status, like Pabst’s ownership has instilled upon such once-proud brands as Lone Star, Hamm’s, Lucky, and Olympia itself.
A better scenario would be for locals to make a counteroffer to Stroh to buy Rainier and Henry’s (the brand names AND the facilities). Could it happen? The Stroh folks would probably want a higher bid than it’s getting from Pabst for just the brands, and Pabst might also want some dough to walk away from an already-done deal. Could that kind of investment work out for a local buyer, given the stagnant state of both mainstream and upmarket “micro” beer sales? Just maybe. Could such a local buyer sell more Rainier and Henry’s than a Pabst-Miller-Olympia contract venture? Undoubtedly.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, join the drive to keep the soon-to-be AT&T/TCI combine from monopolizing high-speed Internet access, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building for our current survey via email or at the bubblicious Misc. Talk discussion boards, and heed these words from one Peter Wastholm: “All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy.”
‘Life, The Movie’:
All the World’s a Multiplex
Book feature, 2/3/99
Life, The Movie:
How Entertainment Conquered Reality
by Neal Gabler
Knopf, $25
Seems most everybody these days hates the mass-media industry, including a lot of the folks who work in it.
Now, in Life, the Movie, we’ve got Hollywood biographer Neal Gabler complaining semi-coherently about Hollywood’s power to shape the popular zeitgeist. I’ve complained about that myself over the years. But my beef’s different from his.
I believe the six big studios (and the five big record labels, the three or four big networks, the 12 big cable-channel owners, and the similarly concentrated magazine and newspaper operators; most of which are cross-owned by a dozen or so media Goliaths) concentrate too much sway over the world’s visions, dreams, and consciousnesses.
Gabler, though, apparently has no problem with a nation (and, by extension, a world) beholden to a single set of ideas dictated by a small cultural elite. He just wants a different elite to be in charge. If anything, he thinks a society organized around mass media (and various interest groups’ need to attain publicity via mass media) istoo populist. From politics and warfare to religion and academia, from fashion and architecture to journalism and bestseller literature, any venture or idea Gabler surveys is one that has to become popular to succeed, and to become popular it has to put on the old razzle-dazzle, to gussy itself up in a narrative arc and a star system and a carefully-staged spectacle and a happy ending.
Gabler’s take will likely appeal to both liberal and conservative elitists. I suspect he’s personally on the left wing of what the webzine Salon calls “the literate overclass,” for the simple reason that Gabler, like a lot of left-elitists, is far more articulate about what he’s against than about what he’s for. He admires that sourpuss left-elitist prude Neil Postman, and he expresses wistful nostalgia for dour Puritanism with its repression of individual personality in favor of “character” (yet he disapproves of cynical politicians who preach about “character” while practicing stage-managed campaigns and market-researched platforms).
While not explicitly calling for it, Gabler seems to want a society run, well, by people like him. A more ordered, rational society, such as that fantasized by the “civil society” movement. A society where a few urban-Northeast big thinkers ponder what’s best for everybody, then face few obstacles of authority in putting their decisions into action. A society where all of us residing outside the corridors of power work hard, save our money, and solemnly tend to our own affairs. Something like what those Seattle City Council members admired so much about Singapore on their junket there a year or two back, before today’s Asian recession discredited a lot of that paternalistic-central-planning ideal.
Besides, America isn’t and never was what Gabler seems to wish it was. Hell, the human race isn’t. We’re a sensual, sensuous species. From the Noh theater of Japan to the Greek tragedies to African tribal dances to Shakespeare to carny shows to museum mega-exhibitions to porn to the Indy 500 to the fashion runways to heavy metal to Japanese magazine ads showing fantasies of American cowboys, we want and love to have our passions stirred, and marketers and publishers and preachers and politicians would be fools to not know it. And, on at least one level, Gabler seems to know it too. In his long, tedious invective over the failings of all humans less brain-centric than himself, Gabler reveals himself to be what the gays call a “drama queen.”
MISC., your own four-man luge derailment-accident of online journalism, couldn’t help but be bemused by the awkward coincidence of Salt Lake City’s Olympics scandal (wherein local officials were forced to admit bribing Intl. Olympic Committee members as part of their successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games) just weeks after some Seattle movers-‘n’-shakers announced their overt displeasure with the City Council’s refusal to pursue a bid for the 2012 Summer Games. It also shows that they may profess to be sexual neo-Puritans over there in the Beehive State, but they know how to be corrupt when and where it proves materially valuable.
MADE FOR WALKING?: We still don’t have many nominations for our proposed, mythical, Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame. So we’ll keep the topic open one or two more weeks at our Misc. Talk discussion boards and by email to clark@speakeasy.org.
WHILE ROME BURNS DEPT.: I’m on two major e-mail lists these days, besides my own: One for the regional punk-rock community, and one for readers of the hi-brow novelist David Foster Wallace. Both lists descended to Nazi talk in recent weeks. On the punk list, a discussion about unfortunate fistfights and bullies at the Breakroom’s New Year’s show has descended into list members quibbling about Nazi skinheads (the general consensus: Not all skins are Nazis, and not all Nazis shave their skulls). On the Wallace list, somehow a discussion about an essay Wallace wrote about Dostoyevsky devolved into a shouting match about whether German philosopher Martin Heidegger was really a Nazi or just pretended enough to be one so they wouldn’t track him down & kill him like they did to so many other intelligentsia members in 1939-45 Europe. (Meanwhile, the Republican Sleaze Machine is attempting nothing less than the destruction of the U.S. electoral system, and nobody on either list (or I) has given it even a cursory mention.)
OF COURSE, the relative lack of public discourse over the coup attempt may be just what the coup plotters want. The Sleaze Machine may very well want you to be so completely disgusted by its coup attempt that you’ll stop paying attention. That way they can continue to ply their methodical annihilation of democratic governance with even less public scrutiny.
DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: I may have been overgenerous last month in wistfully nostalgizing about KSTW’s former ownership by Gaylord Entertainment (owner of the Grand Ole Opry radio show and theme park, and co-owner of cable’s Nashville Network). The Columbia Journalism Review just named Gaylord’s flagship property, the Daily Oklahoman, “the worst newspaper in America.” According to the CJR story, old man Gaylord allows his other media enterprises to be professionally run, but continues to lord over his Oklahoma City monopoly daily like a back-country version of those oldtime reactionary press lords like Hearst.
IT’S ONLY WORDS (via Joe Mabel): “Have you noticed the recent rise of `actionable’ used to mean `able to be acted upon’ rather than `giving cause for a lawsuit’? Last night at the Washington Software Alliance awards ceremony, the keynote speaker actually said `content on your web site must be actionable.’ I guess we all knew what he meant, but my oldspeak ear couldn’t help hearing this as `make sure you slander someone.'”
ACCESS BAGGAGE: No, P-I “Arts Beat” writer Douglas McLennan, you’re wrong to suggest the city exploit TCI’s default of its city cable contract (the company admitted it wouldn’t upgrade service to all city neighborhoods by a contract-imposed deadline of next week) by getting the cable company to fund an “improved” public-access channel–a city arts channel, in which a professional programming staff would ensure “quality control” by picking who got to be on it. That wouldn’t be real public access at all. The whole point of public access is nobody chooses. Anybody can get on it and many do–evangelists, female and male strippers, pot-legalization advocates, UFO conspiracy theorists, Y2K scare-mongers, rappers, racists, zither players, video artists, cabaret performers, karaoke singers, high-school football players, political activists, etc. etc. etc. The city already has a designated TCI channel it currently barely uses to document council meetings and public hearings. It could put quality-controlled arts shows on that channel whenever it wanted to. If the city can get production funds for such shows as part of its settlement from TCI, that’d be great. But leave public access to remain true public access.
FOX TAKETH AWAY, FOX GIVETH: The X-Files is no longer produced in Vancouver, but another prime-time network show is now being filmed 150 mi. from us–in the opposite direction. The PJs, that instant-hit Fox 3-D cartoon, is animated by our Portland pals at Will Vinton Productions from scripts and soundtracks generated in Hollywood. Instead of the modeling clay Vinton’s crew’s famous for (“Claymation” is their registered trademark, ya know), The PJs utilizes foam-rubber dolls with wire skeletons and detachable-replacable facial parts. The result looks sharper on the small screen, and (vital for a weekly series) is a heckuva lot more efficient than clay-sculpting every figure for every frame. This means The PJs is the only animated series besides South Park to use no overseas subcontractors. It also means you can judge for yourself whether these aging Oregon hippies can accurately visualize the show’s setting (a generic east-coast inner city neighborhood), or if in the necessarily-exaggerated world of animation that even matters.
GOING GOING…: J.K. Gill’s last mall-based paperback and stationery stores are closing sometime this month. This was a Portland-based chain that had bought the retail arm of Lowman & Hanford (which claimed to have been “Seattle’s Oldest Retail Business,” and whose old Pioneer Square building later housed the startup incarnations of both Aldus (now Adobe) and Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks)). Countless former junior-high girls have fond memories of going out to Gill’s to steal Shaun Cassidy notebooks and unicorn figurines. Speaking of youth-culture memories…
REVERTING TO TYPE: The Delaware-based House Industries, a purveyor of retro-hip computer typefaces, is now selling “Flyer Fonts,” a $99 computer disk containing “18 hardcore and punk fonts, based on type from punk and hardcore flyers of the ’80s.” For only several times the combined production budgets of the original posters, you can get exact digital re-enactments of hand-lettering, cut-out, stencil, and umpteen-generation-photocopy faces with such titles as Distortion, Vandalism, Straight, Filler, Malfunction, and All Ages. You also get 25 clip-art images (skulls, skateboards, a circle-A), a T-shirt, and a CD with ancient noise-rants by the likes of Suicidal Tendancies, Youth Brigade, and the Circle Jerks. You could call it high tech trying to ape the street credibility of low tech. Or you could call it a service for aging punks now stuck in commercial graphic-design careers who want to relive their former artistic styles without the bother of re-learning the use of X-Acto knives and rubber cement. (For the whole House catalog, call 800-888-4390.) Still speaking of youth-culture memories…
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Among the old buildings demolished in recent weeks for yet more homely office/retail/condo collossi was the old church just east of downtown known from 1977 to 1985 as The Monastery, an all-ages, primarily-gay disco. Its operators had Universal Life Church mail-order ordinations and called its DJ events “church services.” As a place where underage males publicly came out, it would’ve attracted negative scrutiny even without the rumored use of common disco and/or teen drugs. Rumors at the time (unconfirmed then and unconfirmable now) claim a dad with major city-government connections blamed the Monastery for his son’s emergence as an openly gay user of some substance or another; the dad then persuaded his politico pals that all-ages nightlife was A Menace To Be Stopped. The result: The infamous Teen Dance Ordinance, widely blamed for helping make (live or recorded) music shows for under-21s nearly impossible to profitably mount in this town. Only today, with a somewhat less reactionary faction on the council authorizing a Music and Youth Task Force, is anything being done to correct this past over-reaction. By now, though, it might be too late. The cost of real estate’s getting so damned high in town, even if larger booze-free clubs were legalized (small ones like the Velvet Elvis have been exempt from the ordinance), there might be no place available in which one might feasibly be operated.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, ponder these words from Leonard Maltin, made while discussing the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments: “Sometimes people laugh at silent films because they find them corny or feel superior to them. I can understand that. I felt the same way about Armageddon.”
IT’S A DOG-DAYS-OF-WINTER MISC., the online column that couldn’t help but be bemused by the huge, handsome “Iams Sold Here” poster advertising yupscale pet foods, a poster taped to a window at the Queen Anne Larry’s Market–specifically, a window directly above the store’s cafeteria.
NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The Downtown Seattle Association/Community Development Round Table clique, via one of its frequent planted front-page puff pieces in the P-I, believes the Seattle City Council doesn’t have enough big-business toadies on it? What’s wrong with this picture?
THE FINE PRINT (from the Internet service provider Xensei): “The requested URL was not found on this server. No further information is available. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And it looked so promising for a while there too.”
PUTTING-ON-AIRS DEPT.: A kindly reader did some seeking out on the FCC’s website and found some interesting license applications on file. KCMU’s applied for a power increase from 450 to 720 watts. Even more interesting–KSER, the Lynnwood-based successor to the late Seattle community station KRAB, has applied to move from 1000 to 5800 watts (will residents south of Shoreline be able to receive the station everybody in the Seattle area’s talked about but almost nobody’s heard?). And two more UHF TV channels are in the works: KHCV on channel 45 (which has been broadcasting black screens and computer graphics promising great shows any month now), and something called the African American Broadcasting Co. has filed a construction permit to start transmitting locally on channel 51.
I-KID-YOU-NOT-DEPT.: A headline in Variety announces a grim portent for our nation’s future: “Kids may be toddling away from television.” The story sadly relates, “Kids viewership is down a massive 13% so far in the fourth quarter compared with the same dime period a year ago,” across network, syndicated, and cable schedules; continuing and accellerating a two-year trend. Maybe the most recent demands that broadcast stations stick more educational content into their kidvid has worked to drive the tots away from the screen, something the anti-TV Luddites have wanted all along. Of course, it could mean the young’uns are simply switching to violent shoot-em-up video games on the Playstation instead.
The same Variety issue (12/21-1/3) also contained the trade magazine’s annual “International Locations Supplement” (containing absolutely no mention of any Washington location work but plenty of Vancouver stuff). It’s a document of either frustration or misplaced commercial ambition that all these cities, states, and countries are investing heavy amounts of public and/or private investment, not into making their own films but simply into providing scenery and/or cheap labor for Hollywood.
GAME THEORY: At a time when Hollywood rules the popcult globe, but Hollywood’s increasingly under foreign investment capital, The Price is Right has been running an opening banner “Made In the USA.” The show’s still churned out in LA, but it’s now owned by the British media conglomerate Pearson (owners of Penguin Books and a lot of other stuff), which acquired what’s left of Goodson-Todman Productions in order to strengthen its position as the global leader in administering foreign remake rights to new and old game show concepts. Indeed, it claims to either produce, co-produce, or control the rights to half the game shows now airing around the world, from the French version of The $25,000 Pyramid to the Australian version of Sale of the Century to the British version of Family Feud (retitled Family Fortunes). It’s even offering international remake rights to The Honeymooners (“Le Pow! Le Zoom! Dans la lune!”)
PHILM PHUN: The Faculty, that dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-space-aliens movie, is being hyped with an MTV video featuring the voice (and, for just a couple of seconds, the image) of erstwhile Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley (who’s otherwise still in his self-imposed hiatus from the stresses of the music biz), covering the Pink Floyd chestnut “Another Brick in the Wall.” The coincidence (well, maybe not a coincidence if Staley knows his local-film history): The onetime supergroup that recorded the track’s credited as Class of ’99. Very close to Class of 1999, the title of a dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-robots movie filmed ten years ago at Seattle’s old, now reopened, Lincoln High.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dinosaur Creamy Coolers are fruity drinks made with ultra-pasteurized milk, corn syrup, flavorings, a slight tinge of carbonation, and wild colors-not-found-in-nature. The label lists flavors by colors, just like Jell-O afficianados: “Red (cherry), orgnage (orange), blue (tropical punch), green (lime).” And it all comes in a little plastic miniature sports bottle, which you have to cut or rip open at the head of the built-in flexible straw. Made in California but sold at Uwajimaya.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jet City Maven is a feisty, independent free tabloid for the near-north-end neighborhoods of Seattle (Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, et al.), run by former North Seattle Press participants Clayton and Susan Park. Besides remiscinces by old North Central Outlook cofounder Stan Stapp, it’s got the usual business briefs, community-planning updates, neighborhood-vs.-developer articles, and arts-and-entertainment notices (by local journeyman musician Jason Trachtenburg). However, I’m personally a bit perturbed by the front-page editorial in its Jan. issue. The story involved Civic Light Opera musicians seeking union representation against management’s wishes, even while the company mounts a show (Rags) about old-timey working-folks’ struggles in 1900s NYC. Nick Slepko’s commentary on this not only is accurately summed up by its Newtesque headline, “BIG Labor takes on small community theater,” but goes on to Cold War-nostalgiac Red-baiting by gleefully describing picketers outside the show as including “UW Socialist Workers Party diehards outside blocking the theater.” I’ve worked for big employers and small employers, and trust me: workers at small outfits need a living wage and basic rights as much as workers at big outfits, and may require representation to attain ’em. (Free each month at drop-off sites in the targeted neighborhoods; by subscription from 12345 30th Ave. NE, Suite HI, Seattle 98125.)
DOUBLE DRIBBLES: The evening before the NBA’s belated return was announced, I witnessed Seattle Reign Appreciation Day at the Seattle Center House. The center floor of the cavernous old National Guard armory was full of mourning and love-festing fans–teenage girls, moms and daughters, dads and daughters, hand-holding lesbian couples, and more than a few gents like me who simply love the grace of the female form in action. To the corporate sports world, ABL pro women’s basketball may have been just another short-lived, underfunded wannabe league like the ones I mentioned two weeks ago (WFL, USFL, NASL, WHL, ABA, Liberty Basketball Association, several indoor-soccer attempts, Arena Football). But to the 500 or so at Reign Appreciation Day, and the two or three thousand regular gamegoers they represented, the ABL represented something different–a dream (albeit a commercially-exploited dream) that girls could one day be valued not merely for their bodies (as objects of desire) but for their bodies (as machines of active achievement), in an organization that understood the street-level, populist aspect of women’s-sports fandom and didn’t try to treat it as a junior version of all that’s icky about corporate sport.
(Meanwhile, a few pamphleteers at Reign Appreciation Day wanted to spread the news about some adamant fans in San Jose, CA who want to rescue the ABL by recruiting a few thousand of the league’s loyal followers to put up at least $1,000 each to collectively buy and resuscitate the league.)
The morning after that celebratory wake for this now-deferred dream, the NBA owners (purveyors of the ABL-killing, corporate-as-all-heck WNBA) ended their player lockout (the sorriest demonstration of what’s wrong with corporate sport since, maybe, 1995). As many of you know, the Sonics are owned by local billboard czar Barry Ackerley; for almost a year, the team’s dedicated Ackerley billboard site outside its practice gym facing Aurora Ave. has borne a message encouraging fan noise: “Your voice will come back. Eventually.” During the lockout, it seemed like a desperate promise that games would again be played one of these months (or years). Now, though, maybe it could be a rallying cry to encourage all the frustrated fans to raise their own voices against corporate sport’s increasingly pathetic edifice.
BE SURE TO ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS for our still-hypothetical Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame by email to clark@speakeasy.org, or at our very own Misc. Talk discussion boards. Results will be announced in this space next week. Until then, see Elizabeth, pray for snow, and consider the potential application of these words from Samuel Butler to the current D.C. tragicomedy: “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
Her Throbbing Volvo:
My Troubles With Upscale Erotica
Book review feature, 1/6/99
SEDUCTIONS: Tales of Erotic Persuasion
Edited by Lonnie Barbach, Ph.D.
Dutton, $23.95
HIGH INFIDELITY: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors
Edited by John McNally
Quill/William Morrow, $13 (paperback)
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INFIDELITIES
Edited by Stephen Brook
Penguin, $12.95 (paperback)
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW EROTICA
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski
Carroll & Graf, $10.95 (paperback)
Every year, a group of British book critics gives out an award-O-shame for the most ridiculously-written sex scenes in contemporary mainstream novels. Sure they’re fun, but bad writing, when it’s done right (no, that’s not a contradiction), can make a sex scene sexier. After all, sex at its best is a release from the rigors of the intellect and the propriety of good taste.
Would that any of that contest’s winning examples of purple prose appeared in the ’80s-’90s specialty genre of upscale “literary erotica.” You know: those hardcover and trade-paperback collections sold in the back of Tower Books or the front of Toys In Babeland, promising ever-so-tasteful excursions into the lower passions, many of which proudly claim all-female and/or all-gay mastheads.
Instead, what you usually get are bland, mannered accounts of bland, mannered people, almost always upper-middle-class and ultra-caucasian (except in anthologies specifically ethnic-branded), for whom orgasms are merely another upscale leisure activity, and for whom discovering a new lover is no more or less exciting than discovering a new store.
Lonnie Barbach’s collections appear to be aimed at those readers who can only indulge in visceral-fantasy reading if it’s got a justifying patina of “education.” Her introductions in Seductions denote specifically what pleasures and psychological lessons the reader is expected to attain from each of the collection’s 20 stories. Only five of Seductions’ stories are written from a male point of view–in three, the men serve as helpless targets of women’s schemes; in one, a nice gay man pondes another man’s cute dimpled face (but never gets into discussing gay-male sex as explicitly as other stories in the book discuss lesbian sex); and in the other, a Renaissance-era rogue (i.e., a safe fantasy figure from a time and place far removed from ours) gives a lovemaking lesson to another man’s fiancee.
The book’s other stories are all about heroines, nice complacent heroines who have nice complacent fun with nice complacent men and/or women. Even when cheating on husbands or screwing compliant department-store workers in the fitting room, none of these women (except the ones who get converted to lesbianism) learn major life-changing things about themselves, and none of them does anything really mind-altering like falling in love.
(At least, however, the stories in Barbach’s collection present non-monogamous and recreational sex as something potentially beneficial and even wholesome. After 15 years of stupid “erotic thriller” movies and novels in which intercourse (even hetero intercourse among HIV-sparse population segments) was treated as a crime punishable by death, it’s welcome that fictional heroines can again enjoy their and others’ bodies this nonchalantly.)
In contrast to Seductions’ unbearable lightness of licking, the High Infidelity collection occasionally acknowledges the limitations of a lifestyle-centered sexuality. Indeed, its focus is not The Affair (let alone The Act) but about how affairs are great angst generators for self-centered, all-too-literate white people who seem to get off less on sex (or on the excitement of illicitness) than on the opportunity to wallow in their own guilt, confusion, and/or vengeance. This is a theme implicit in most of the book’s segments and is made explicit in one story (Robert Boswell’s “Flipflops”), wherein a philandrous couple vacationing at a Mexican seaside resort are only briefly, temporarily, disrupted from their vapid relationship-talking by the sight of a local man drowning just beyond their beach.
The Penguin Book of Infidelities tells more, and far better-written, tales of illicit couplings and the wide variety in cultural attitudes toward them in different places and times. While John McNally’s introduction to High Infidelitytreats extramarital play as an eternal problem, the Penguin collection notes it’s been considered more or less of a problem depending on where and when it happened. From Tunisian wives who found public veil-wearing advantageous while persuing local stable boys without being seen, to old French lords and ladies who sat for banquets as foursomes with their respective current lovers seated to each side, there’ve been plenty of social solutions to the stability/monotony dilemma, few of which (besides secrecy and guilt trips) find their way into the modern-day tales in High Infidelity.
If you want to find out about this genre without investing a whole lot of money, Carroll and Graf’s huge paperback collections give you a lot of different stories for not much money. Few are outstanding, but they do represent almost as much variety as you can expect in the scene. The best of them try to combine the visceral manipulation of the reader with a solid plot; such as The Mammoth Book of New Erotica’s centerpiece novella, Michael Hemmingson’s “The Dress.” A proper upper-middle-class British couple realize (unlike any of the protagonists in Seductions) the limitations of their mannered upscale life. The husband’s solution: Go out in public with the wife in highly revealing dresses. It revitalizes their sex life, but then leads them to further self-realizations that change their lives forever, as the wife goes from play-acting the “lead” role in the couple’s sex life (at her husband’s prodding) to taking charge for real. But still, all works out for the best; as both partners decide they’d rather enjoy their passions than sit around and brood about them. Perhaps a lesson to be learned by the characters in some of the other books discussed here.
IT’S A RELATIVELY POST-HANGOVER MISC., the column that looked for streetside strangeness at the full-moon New Year’s and found lots (unfortunately, none of it printable without violating either libel laws or personal discretion.)
ST. PETER TO NORMAN FELL: “Come and knock on our door…”
COFFEE PRESS: Starbucks is starting an in-store magazine. But Seattle writers and editors need not apply–or rather, they’ll need to apply to NYC. The yet-untitled quarterly, due out in May, is being produced by Time Warner’s “custom publishing” unit under contract to the espresso chain. An NY Daily News report claims it will be “modeled on The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, with contributions from both established and emerging writers and photographers.” If it’s anything like the chain’s in-store brochures (or CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir Pour Your Heart Into It ), you can expect material that’s nice, laid-back, mellow, and ultimately forgettable.
MARKET EXPOSURE: Seattle’s own cybersmut magnate Seth Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group has become notorious for its sex websites (the official Penthouse magazine site; the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee hardcore video). But now, with the commercial skin-pic trade apparently plateauing, IEG’s expanding into new e-commerce realms. Some of these expansions are a little further from the company’s original shtick (an online casino, a home-mortgage buying-guide); some are a little closer. One of the latter’s a nude stock-trading site, sexquotes.com (“the mage-merger between high finance and high society”), mixing business news and stock prices with small but free pinup pix. You can choose the gender, explicitness level, and general physique type of your temporary beloveds, who appear on the left side of the screen; you can also choose up to 20 stock and mutual-fund prices to scroll across the right side. It’s free, with plenty of ads for Warshavsky’s other sites. One of those other sites is ready to show you how Net-porn starlets are made–www.onlinesurgery.com!
CATHODE CORNER#1: Viacom management may have killed KSTW’s local-news operation, but at least they’ve let the station maintain one of its traditions–the annual alkie movie on, or shortly after, the hangover-strewn Jan. 1. In years past, the station’s assauged the suffering viewers with Under the Volcano, When A Man Loves a Woman, and more. This Jan. 2 (the night of Jan. 1 was, unfortunately, taken up by Viacom’s dumb UPN shows): Clean and Sober.
CATHODE CORNER #2, or BANDWIDTH ENVY:A couple months or so ago, the feisty indie Summit Cablevision finally added a bunch of the cable channels viewers have been pleading for for two years or more. Most TCI customers elsewhere in Seattle (as well as viewers stuck with similarly outmoded cable systems across the country) are still wondering what all these supposedly great channels with these supposedly great shows are really like. Herewith, a few glimpses:
I just wished I could feel a little less guilty about finding such screen-magnetism and loveability in a host whom you know as the monotoned droner from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, and Clear Eyes commercials, but who in “real” life is a former Nixon lawyer who writes virulently anti-choice, pro-impeachment screeds for Rabid Right journals such as the American Spectator–and who keeps a home-away-from-Hollywood at the infamous compound collection that is Sandpoint, Idaho.
Besides finally giving lifelong Looney Tunes fans an at-last reference to the original sources of many cartoon running gags (Technicolor travelogues ending “as the sun sinks slowly in the west,” etc.), they fill in a vital hole in any film buff’s historical knowledge. And any aspiring filmmaker (or storyteller) could learn a thing or two about how these shorts told complete stories in seven to 10 minutes.
So instead of weightlifting and other tests of pure strength, each contestant performs two minutes of Flashdance-esque athletic dancing, then returns to the stage for a short swimsuit-modeling stroll. The swimsuits (and the dance costumes) are often of the bare-bunned variety; and the dances often display a vigorous eroticism that would probably be particularly popular among western-states men (it’s in our blood to admire a woman who’s no dainty waif, but who instead looks like she probably could’ve survived a frontier winter in the years before rural electrificaiton).
But don’t for a second think the show’s “male oriented”–the ads are all for women’s vitamin supplements, women’s workout gear, and Stayfree. This is intended for a woman who likes to admire other women’s bodies, but who’d slug you in the stomach if you accused her of maybe, just maybe, having closet lesbian desires.
Also of note: During set changes beetween segments, an announcer narrates short taped clips of past champions, most of whom are described as now working as “fitness celebrities.” Our fame-ridden culture’s gone so far, we not only have people who are famous merely for “being famous,” we have obscure people who make a living for merely “being famous” among relatively small subcultures–lingirie models, motorcycle-magazine centerfolds, pro wrestling’s “managers” and other outside-the-ring costars, CNN “expert commentators,” “celebrity greeters” at Vegas casinos, and, yes, Internet-based commentators.
But the producers and writers have gotten further and further afield from the original talk-show-spoof concept over each of the show’s five seasons (CN often pairs a new and an old 15-minute episode in the same time block). It’s now the ultimate metashow, deconstructing not just cliché host-guest banter and backstage politics (the stuff of so many, many other self-parody shows from Conan to Shandling) but the very narrative structures of TV and of commercial entertainment in general.
The show sometimes plays so fast and furious with viewer expectations, one can leave it fully forgetting how clean it is. (Its self-imposed rating is the squeaky TV-Y7.) Two or more generations have grown up equating avant-garde artistic styles with risqué subject matter (an assumption spread in part by CN’s sister channel HBO). But one of the most innovative Hollywood films of the’60s, Head, was rated G. Maya Deren’s experiments in filmic form and storytelling could have passed the old Hollywood Production Code; Satyajit Ray’s exquisite films all passed India’s even-tougher censorship.
I’m not saying artists, filmmakers, or TV producers should be prohibited from creatively using what used to be called “blue” material. I am saying they shouldn’t feel they have to, either. Space Ghost can thoroughly alter your notions about well-made comedy while still being funny, and without a single poop joke.
The answer: Stretch the shows into an hour and a half! That way, they could add even more commercials, promos, etc. To pad the remaining time, Shatner and Nimoy have been propped up to offer ponderous behind-the-scenes commentaries. (Q: Just how do they manage to speak in segments totalling 10 to 13 minutes about the making of even the minor, budget-balancing episodes? A: Very patiently.)
Most viewers I know claim they tape the shows and fast-forward past the ads and extraneous material. But I like the new segments, for the sheer unadorned Shatnerity of them.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, consider these seasonally-appropriate words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches fifty, and a fool if he doesn’t drink afterward.”
MISC., your post-print column for (what the Times Personal Tech section calls) the post-television age, was amused by the double standards and double dribbles in that front-page P-I headline on 12/22/98: “Reign star Enis judges basketball, parenthood.” Y’ever see a headline like that about, say, Shawn Kemp?
Alas, that P-I story was one of the last written in the local dailies about the Seattle Reign before the team’s parent American Basketball League announced its sudden, permanent shutdown, leaving fans as bereft of pro women’s b-ball as it is of the men’s game. One could lay the blame for the ABL’s demise on the rival WNBA, with its megabucks backing, its marketable-superstar orientation, and its stranglehold on sponsors and TV outlets. But a less-discussed factor was the league’s management structure. While it claimed to be a grassroots, fan-level outfit, it was really a centralized company which owned all its teams, hired and assigned all its players, and otherwise tightly ran all operations and marketing–just like the Roller Derby, Arena Football, and other assorted marginal team-sports ventures of the past three decades.
The graveyard of new team-sports organizations in North America is full of four decades’ worth of great and less-great visions, from the American Basketball Association to the World Football League and the U.S. Football League, to World Team Tennis and several attempts at indoor soccer. Aside from the American Football League (which got all its teams merged into the NFL in the late ’60s), none were long-term successes. (The only current such ventures with a chance at making it are Major League Soccer and the aforementioned WNBA.) None of those attempts found the formula for nationwide popularity and profits; though some tried to find such a formula thru centralized management. A single-ownership league structure (like that of the ABL) can present a unified public image and prevent a single well-heeled team owner from attaining an uncompetitive dynasty situation (like that which ruined the old North American Soccer League). But it also means local team managers can’t build their own squads, around personalities or playing styles popular in their own towns. And when league HQ runs out of cash and/or ideas, there aren’t local team owners (or buyers) to come up with individual solutions other teams can copy.
But for now, the WNBA (with its emphasis on megabucks and celebrity-driven advertising, and its neglect (or worse) of any lesbian fan base) is the remaining structure for women’s pro hoops, at least until the parent NBA can no longer afford to subsidize it (which, if there’s not even a mini-NBA season, might be more likely and sooner). Wish I had more encouraging news for stranded Reign fans, but a pro league of any sort, especially one with teams scattered across the continent, is an undertaking requiring immense logistics, savvy, and long-term backing. The ABL way didn’t work, and neither has just about any other way.
THE HOLIDAY TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 13th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical Misc. In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions via private email and the public Misc. Talk discussion boards; and apologies to those whose board postings I accidentally erased last week. (I think I’ve gotten the hang of the discussion-board software scripts by now.) As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of ’99; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Tickle Me Elmo dolls to sell you.
INSVILLE
OUTSKI
Apple “P1” laptop computer
Y2K scare tactics
Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce
Washington CEO
Pipes
Cigars
Caffe Vita
Tully’s
“Got __?”
“Yo Quiero __”
The WB
Fox
Asian (economic) Flu
“The Long Boom”
BBC America
PBS
Elan
Panache
Linux
Windows 2000
Cracked Divx videos
Pirated MP3 music files
Pic-N-Save
Pacific Place
Saving the Kalakala
Stopping the Makah whale hunt
Digital video camcorders
Furby
Dipsy
Po
Win Ben Stein’s Money
New Hollywood Squares
The PJs
King of the Hill
Philosophy
Semiotics
`Enough Is Enough’
Christian Coalition
Falcons
Forty-Niners
Lions Gate Films
DreamWorks SKG
New Rocky and Bullwinkle
New Star Wars
Felicity
Ally McBeal
Ed Norton
Leo DiCaprio
Todd Solondz
Gus Van Sant
Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth)
Meg Ryan
Mammoth Records
Universal Music Group
Perfect 10
Barely Legal
Mode
Vogue
Bento
Pan-Asian Cuisine
Less Than Jake
Better Than Ezra
Brita
Bottled water
Fruitta
Jones Soda
Westwood Village
University Village
Nude shuffleboard
Pro wrestling
Kroger/Fred Meyer
DaimlerChrysler
Bibliofind.com
Barnes & Noble/Ingram merger
ESPN The Magazine
Esquire
Sympathy for Kathi Goertzen
Sainthood for John Stanford
Last Supper Club
Ned’s
eBay fraud
Junk e-mail
Independent Film Channel
USA Network
Ken’s Market
Larry’s Market
New Cyclops restaurant
New baseball stadium
Imploding the Kingdome on 1/1/2000
Lighting bridges on 1/1/2000
Love lotteries
Personal ads
Pachinko
Megatouch
McSweeney’s
Bikini
Lovers
Survivors
Deliberately obvious toupees
Propecia
Female all-instrumental bands
Lilith Fair singers
Pabst
Miller
Pyramid
Redhook
Bars subsidized by pulltab sales
Bars subsidized by cigarette ads
Black
“The new black”
Tiffany Anders
Celine Dion
Pinot noir
Merlot
Psychographics
Demographics
Cubs
Braves
Co-housing conversions
Condo conversions
Mutts
Dilbert
Teen drinking
Pre-teen makeup
White Center
Duvall
Death Cab For Cutie
Dudley Manlove Quartet
Mystic pseudo-science
Fundamentalist pseudo-science
Hedy Lamarr
Marilyn Monroe
Tweedy & Popp’s (Wallingford)
Restoration Hardware
Pokemon
Rugrats
South Park (the Seattle neighborhood)
South Park (the TV show)
Promoting real diversity
White and/or male guilt-tripping
Neo-syndicalism
Global Business Network
Hungarian operettas
Raves
NBA death watch
Apple death watch
The Tentacle
Downtown Voice
Istanbul
Berlin
Sound Transit commuter rail
Trucks
Airstreams
Minivans
Plane-crash videos
Animal-attack videos
Creators
Celebrities
Outlandish heteros
“Mainstreamed” gays
Tycoons (the band)
Day traders
In-group patronization
Pious indignation
Direct action
“civil society”
Streaming net video
Cable access
Partying naked
Wearing `Party Naked’ T-shirts
“I love everybody and you’re next”
“Do I look like I give a damn?”
Doing your own thing
Following advice found on web sites
UNTIL NEXT WE MEET in the year so great there’s a Washington highway named after it, pace yourself by toasting the New Year once for each North American time zone (starting with Newfoundland at 7:30 p.m. PST), and ponder these thoughts attributed to Lillian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”
‘I Was A Teenage Hacker’
Book review roundup, 12/23/98
EXTRA LIFE:
Coming of Age in Cyberspace
by David S. Bennahum
Basic Books ($23)
Bennahum’s is merely one of many stories that could be told about the teen and young-adult males who played a huge, under-documented role in the 1974-84 dawn of personal computers and online communication, back when the word “hacker” still meant a guy who got kicks from high-intensity programming, not from crime.
Bennahum (a Manhattan rich kid who got to learn programming in a prestigious private high school with its own DEC PDP mini-mainframe computer) isn’t the most typical early-’80s compu-teen. But his story’s close enough to the subculture’s norm for his memoir to reveal its era. As he sees it, it was an era marked by specific phases in technology, after the very first personal computers but before the Mac and Windows stuck the guts of computing behind user-friendly (but programmer-hostile) interfaces.
True hackers (of the old definition), like true auto mechanics, didn’t just want to make their machines go–they wanted to know every aspect of how they ran, from the hexadecimal codes to the 8-bit processor chips. Popular sentiment derides guys of such obsessions as geeks. But, as Bennahum’s tale shows, it’s just this kind of obsession that can change the world (or at least one’s own life).
REDHOOK, BEER PIONEER
by Peter J. Krebs
Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)
What’s a nice ultra-highbrow house like Four Walls Eight Windows doing with a lightweight business “success” story like this? (The Redhook book’s existence isn’t mentioned at its publisher’s website; often an omen.)
Not that the book’s a total puff piece. You will learn a lot about the ’80s-’90s microbrew phenomenon if you can get past the fawning portrayals of Redhook founders Gordon Bowker and Paul Shipman. Peter Krebs (author of Microsoft Press’s Building Microsoft Exchange Applications; not to be confused with the beloved singer-songwriter Pete Krebs) pours out every cliché from hokey business-magazine profile articles (the kind usually titled “The Rise and Rise Of…”).
Read how Shipman (previously an up-n’-coming exec at Chateau Ste. Michelle) and Bowker (also involved in the launches of Starbucks and Seattle Weekly), armed with the dream to do for American beer what Starbucks had done with American coffee, hit up all the available moneybags in town, barely collecting enough loot to install some used brewing equipment in a former Ballard transmission shop.
Share the pain as the original Redhook Ale’s released in 1982, to near-unanimous cries of “This tastes funny.”
Feel the struggle as the founders, abetted by original brewmaster Charles McElevey, kept fiddling with the original Redhook, only to abandon it as better-selling flavors (Blackhook, Ballard Bitter, Redhood ESB, Winterhook, Blonde Ale) come along.
Sense the pride as the Little Brewery That Could starts getting its wares out to such exotic outposts as Denver and Spokane; then shudder the dreaded word “Sellout” as Shipman abandons the “craft brewing” mystique in favor of state-of-the-art plants (one later chapter’s entitled “You Can’t Taste the Automation”) and distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch.
Cringe as the great microbeer glut of 1996-97 leaves Redhook badly overextended, causing the closing of the brew part of its Fremont brewpub.
If, after all this, you still think of Redhook as the quaint little upstart, just read Shipman’s closing words of encouragement, insisting his outfit will survive because of its “combination of distribution, quality control, brewery efficiency, and resources deep enough to survive the current shakeout.”
(For a different, slightly more craft-devoted, take on the dawn of microbeer, Redhook’s Yakima archrival Bert Grant’s got his own memoir just out, The Ale Master (Sasquatch, $19.95). Of course, Grant’s own company’s now owned by the snuff-tobacco people who also own Ste. Michelle.)
CIRCUS OF THE SCARS
by Jan T. Gregor with Tim Cridland;
illustrated and designed by Ashleigh Talbot
Brennan Dalsgard Publishers ($26)
First thing anyone will notice is what a beautiful, elegant tome this is; easily the best-looking thing to come from a Northwest indie publisher this year. It’s not just a document about high-profile show people, it is a work of showmanship.
Second thing you’ll find is how utterly long it is. It takes over 500 pages to tell about a little over two years in the lives of the first Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. At the risk of boring the supposed short-attention-span audience the sideshow lived for, ex-Rose roadie Gregor has tried to recreate the pace of life on the road, hour after hypnotic hour of driving somewhere punctuated by moments of onstage thrills and the occasional round of groupie sex and/or tourism. So far, it might seem like a rock band’s tale; appropriately, since the sideshow essentially toured as a rock n’ roll attraction that performed stunts instead of songs.
But venues notwithstanding, these particular freaks were and are very serious about seeing themselves as a revival of the old-time carny tradition. Long interludes compare the Rose troupe’s travels to the apparently fictional (but thoroughly research-based) life story of a turn-of-the-century carny performer.
Rose himself is depicted not so much as the bad-boy persona he offered in his own book Freak Like Me (cowritten by Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi) and more like a clever, energetic entrepreneur who put the show on the map, staged near-perfect publicity coups, then let go of performers like Tim Cridland (“Zamora the Torture King”) and Matt Crowley (“The Tube”) when he chose to move the act into a more mainstream direction.
Whatever lingering personal rancor Rose and his ex-troupers might have, they did and do follow in an honorable tradition of showmanship. They may see themselves as rebels, but they’ve eschewed the now-30-year-old “generation gap” schtick. We’ve always had freaks, geeks, and outrageous stage people. If the current and former Rose troupers have their way, we always will.
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….
WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).
WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?
WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.
WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.
WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.
THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.
LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….
Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)
SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”
THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”
HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?
NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.
As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:
“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”
A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car. “When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court. “In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.
“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.
I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’
YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”
Words Against Words
Original book feature, 12/7/98
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:
The Conflict Between Word and Image
by Leonard Shlain
(Viking) $24.95
THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD
by Mitchell Stevens
(Oxford) $27.50
Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.
Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.
His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.
In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).
Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.
NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).
While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.
Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.
IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)
HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.
SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?
AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.
MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.
This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!
SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.
The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)
Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.
SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)
Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.
Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”
Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.
Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?
NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.
