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WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)
KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.
THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.
Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.
Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.
WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:
Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)
WELCOME BACK TO THE ONE-&-ONLY ONLINE MISC., the pop-culture column that was as startled as you to find a full-color, almost full-page, atatomically-correct (more or less), side-view computer illustration of a male lower torso on the Lifestyles page of the 10/19 P-I. It was there, natch, for a long story encouraging prostate-cancer tests. But hey, if it takes the “educational” justification of a deadly disease to help demystify and de-demonize the Staff of Life, so be it.
STAGES: The Seattle Repertory Theatre now has a managing director named Benjamin Moore. So far, no scheduled productions of Paint Your Wagon.
AD OF THE WEEK (on the Stranger Bulletin Board page): “Lesbian Guitar Teacher.” Hmm, an instructor in the heretofore-underappreciated art of the Lesbian Guitar: I could go for the cheap anatomical-reference jokes every guitar student’s heard or said at one time, but instead will ponder “Lesbian Guitar” as a specific musical form. Could it be the ever-so-earnest acoustic fret-squeakin’ of Holly Near or Ferron? The somewhat more humanistic, yet still stolid, chord-thumpin’ of Phranc? The electrified “Torch and Twang” of early k.d. lang?
It’s the curse-in-disguise of all these women (and others of their various ilks) that they’re known first as statement-makers, second as stage presences, third as singers, and almost not at all as instrument-players. This neglect of the role of music in female-singer-songwriter-ing is at least partly responsible for the near-total lack of female instrumentalists on both Lilith Fair package tours. It dogged Bikini Kill throughout their career; it took that band’s co-leader Kathleen Hanna to start a whole new concept with a whole different instrumentation (Julie Ruin) for some critics to even notice that she’d been a darned-good musician all this time. (Lesbian-led bands that have gotten at least partial critical notice for their actual playing, such as Team Dresch, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Elsewhere in tune-land…
CLOSING TIME?: An NY Times story (10/15) discussed the precipitous decline of commercial rock as a music-biz force, noting sales charts now dominated by rap and rap/R&B hybrid acts. One quoted industry expert said “the Seattle bands” had been rock’s last best hope, but Nirvana ended and Pearl Jam got lost in its politics and the whole Rock Reformation got sidetracked. I’d put the blame on the suckiness of chain-run rock radio and MTV, which have bled the patient (themselves) to near-death with their repitition, selection of awful bland-rock acts, and stupidity. Of course, the suckiness of corporate rock radio (and of corporate rock promotion in general) is one of the things the Seattle bands had been trying to rebel against. Speaking of getting lost in politics…
BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK (seen in Belltown): “Chris Cornell for Mayor.” Actually, why not? If business success is the only prerequesite for a political career, Cornell sure counts. He and his Soundgarden bandmates started an enterprise from scratch, which grew steadily into a multimillion-buck operation that helped put Seattle on the music-biz map. (He’s even begun to assert a political worldview, having participated in that joint petition to Al Gore on behalf of old-growth forest preservation.)
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Steve Mandich’s Heinous #5 (the first issue in three years) is a professionally-written, DIY-printed mini-size zine, bound with strings of old audio-cassette tape. Topics include the Seattle Pilots (our ill-fated first MLB team), ’70s self-made celebrity The Human Fly, women’s motorcycle-jumping champ Debbie Lawler, rock records about Evel Knievel, and a Bob Newhart career retrospective for a change-O-pace. ($2 from P.O. Box 12065, Seattle 98102, or by email request to smandich@teleport.com.)
EX-LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Not only is commercial film production in Washington at an even lower ebb this year than last, but even MovieMaker, the slick magazine about indie filmmaking, suddenly moved from Seattle to L.A. over the summer. Does that mean no remaining hope for true indie (i.e., totally non-L.A.) filmmaking?
SCREEN PATTERNS: Actually, the reasons for the repertory program’s move to the Egyptian have little to do with the filmgoing tastes of college students and more with Landmark (née Seven Gables) Theaters’ schemes. 7G started repertory movies in Seattle at the Moore, which was where the Seattle International Film Festival also had started. Then Landmark came to town and bought the Neptune in the U District, driving 7G out of the repertory side of the biz until Landmark bought 7G. From there, Landmark decided to use the Neptune for hi-profile new releases, shunting the rep films to the smaller Varsity. Now it’s repositioning the Egyptian as the “Year Round Film Festival” theater.
(Still no word, by the way, about Landmark’s corporate fate. Last we heard, its current owner, financier John Kluge (who made a fortune selling five TV stations to Rupert Murdoch and promptly lost much of that fortune in Orion Pictures) had put the chain up for sale.) Meanwhile, Seattle’s other ex-locally-owned theater chain, the onetime Sterling Recreation Organization circuit now part of Cineplex Odeon, quietly had a change of management in recent months. CO’s now jointly owned by Sony and Seagram (whose respective studio units, Columbia and Universal, were the only major Golden Age Hollywood studios that hadn’t been connected to theater chains back in the ’40s).
MATERIAL BOY: Last week, I asked for your suggestions on new career moves I, your long-underemployed author, could take. A few of you didn’t quite get the “career” part of it (such as those who thought I should start a cable-access show or other unpaid stuff). Other responses generally fell into a few main categories, among them the following:
TO CLOSE, some words-O-wisdom from the recently-deceased former TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Amory: “`Action-packed’ means the boys can’t act but the girls are stacked.”
(Our next reader quiz: What does Seattle need? The full essay and invite will appear in next week’s column, but you can send in your ideas now to clark@speakeasy.org.)
AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Seems everything in this once-sleepy town’s Growing! Changing! Morphing!
Even in print.
The powers-that-be at The Stranger have decided they no longer want to publish this here little compendium of factoids and opinionoids.
The concept behind Misc., first in June 1986 at the old ArtsFocus monthly and since November 1991 at The Stranger, was to report aspects of the Seattle popular culture that didn’t fit a standard format of arts reviews, previews, and interviews.
Its schtick of assorted short and long items was never intended, as some have alleged, as a short-attention-span paean to any so-called “MTV generation” but rather a revival of the classic three-dot newspaper column as practiced by such past masters as Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I-era Emmett Watson.
The real value of a three-dot column isn’t depth but breadth. At a time when knowledge and careers are increasingly specialized, there’s a need for generalists who can explore the contexts, juxtapositions, and connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena, from something as general as global socioeconomic trends to something as specific as a candy bar.
This column’s treated fashion, food, politics, music, architecture, medicine, painting, porn, magzines, talk radio, etc. etc. as equally important disciplines, each with something to reveal about the larger world.
It’s treated its readers as intelligent humans, not as some target-marketing stereotype. It hasn’t told you what bands, movies, or shows to see; it hasn’t promised to make you wealthier or slimmer or more sociable or more orgasmic; just to inform and entertain. It’s taken a personal point of view, yet hasn’t tried to promote the author as its own biggest topic. It’s been opinionated, but without any in-your-face “Attitude.”
The column’s also tried to reflect and respond to today’s ever factioning, increasingly complex society. Canadians used to say the U.S. was a “melting pot” but Canada was a “mosaic,” where different ethnic and cultural groups got to maintain more of their own identities with less pressure to conform to a “mainstream” norm. Nowadays, the U.S. is getting more mosaic-y than ever (while Canada’s searching for some kind of social grout that’ll keep its tiles from flying apart).
It takes a generalist to detect the patterns among the tiles, the developing harmonies and disharmonies and color schemes–without excessively oversimplifying the patterns, without invoking obsolete stereotypes of one “dominant culture” vs. one “counterculture.”
While having fun with the convoluting minutae of modern urban life, the column’s tried to advocate the idea that this unmelting of the melting pot’s an overall good thing. Much as I enjoy the documentation and ephemera of our cultural past (movies, magazines, postcards, records), I’ve no wish to return to any “good old days” when racism was official national policy, or when book publishing was firmly controlled by a few tweed-suited men in Manhattan.
We need more tribes, more virtual communities, more ways for individuals to find their own voices and form their own affinity groups. But along with that we need ways for these communities to learn about, and from, one another.
Thanx and a hat tip to all my loyal readers, sources, and informants over the years, and to the Stranger staffers who’ve helped to keep it accurate, pretty, and properly-spelled. A special nod goes to Matt Cook and James Sturm, who helped get the column into the paper back in ’91, and to Alice (no relation) Savage, who commissioned its first incarnation at ArtsFocus.
The column existed before The Stranger did, and will continue online at Misc. World, www.miscmedia.com. There’ll continue to be non-columnar material by me elsewhere in the paper (“Cyber Stuff” and the new “Diversions” in the Calendar section, “X-Word,” reviews, one-shot essays and articles). And I’ll be working on new projects, including a long-threatened “Best of Misc.” book and a new edition of my local music-history book Loser.
‘Til then, some closing words from the last broadcast by ex-Seattleite and pioneer network newscaster Chet Huntley: “Keep the faith; there will be better and happier news, one day, if we work at it.”
The Microsoft File
Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98
The Microsoft File:
The Secret Case Against Bill Gates
by Wendy Goldman Rohm
(Times Books/Random House) $25
Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop
by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett
(Simon & Schuster) $13.95
If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.
Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).
But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.
That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).
Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.
Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.
Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”
Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.
STORE #1: I love lists, so I love how the silly Random House/ Modern Library “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” list has inspired so many folks to attempt better (more ambitious, more diverse, funnier) lit-guides. One such effort’s being compiled at the Twice Sold Tales used-book chain. Get your recommendations (up to 20) to Twice Sold’s Broadway & John store by Sunday. They’ve gotta be originally written in English and originally published since 1900; any list including Richard Bach or Bridges of Madison County will be thrown out.
STORE #2: The huge new Safeway at 15th & John opened a week before the region’s long-dominant food chain (begun by Boise’s prominent Skaggs family; now owned by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; but never owned (despite the rumors) by the Mormon Church), lost its spot as America’s #1 food vendor to the merged Albertson’s and American Stores (both with Skaggs family members in their origins). The new Safeway outlet easily matches the new Broadway QFC (now owned by Fred Meyer, which was formerly owned by KKR) in size, opulence, and ready-to-eat goodies.
Why has supermarket square footage on the hill more than doubled in the past ten years (including Central Co-op’s big new branch soon coming to 16th & Madison), when its population’s increased by much less? There’s relatively fewer kids in the area, for one thing (big folks eat more; big folks without dependents can often spend more). Big stores bring more customers past the lucrative side departments (pharmacy, video, photo, floral). And, as we mentioned when the new QFC opened, supermarkets are trying to take back business from restaurants with delis, salad bars, and convenience foods.
There’s also a semi-intentional side effect: Monstrous stores, with wide aisles and gargantuan shopping carts, bring back some of the wonder that grocery-shopping trips meant when you were a kid, mesmerized by the bounty of goodies and the old Safeway yin/yang-esque logo. Just don’t do wheelies with the carts, OK?
STORE #3, OR JUST WHAT’S A BRASS PLUM, ANYWAY?: To me, the new Nordstrom store’s opening will be the final true end of Frederick & Nelson; I’ve been able to half-pretend the grande dame of Seattle retailing was still around, I just hadn’t shopped in it for six years. It’s also (as of yesterday) the end for the old downtown Nordstrom. I’ll miss that awkward amalgam of three buildings, with the front-and-back-doored elevators, the unpretentiously-pretentious all-lower-case signage, the cramped awkward floor spaces (which suited Nordy’s then-novel “collection of boutiques” concept better than any open-plan mall space could)–a place where, no matter what year’s fashions were on the hangers, the style year was always 1974.
The Stranger’s previously criticized Nordy’s sweetheart deals with the city over the new store, its parking garage, and its reopening of Pine. But let’s remember what else this company’s wrought, for good and/or ill. The downtown Nordy’s as we’ve known it opened when lots of downtown office towers were going up. Instead of the affluent-yet-careerless women F&N targeted, Nordy’s targeted office people (particularly women) who’d begun seeing themselves not as sedate corporate drones but energetic corporate warriors. (Not exactly a feminist ideologue’s vision of empowerment, but still a change.) It told the country our far corner indeed had a fashion sense (an early Forbes article mockingly called the store “Bloomie’s in the Boonies”)–and an entrepreneurial sense. Nordy’s helped perfect the workforce-as-cult model of employee relations now associated with the likes of Microsoft. Like its dressing-for-success clientele, its staffers were encouraged (or hounded or pressured) to give their all to the company and then some.
Even as its catalogs and its out-of-state stores spread an image of the Northwest as a land of carefree outdoor leisure, its practices instilled a vigorous (or obsessive or oppressive) work ethic now common at “growth oriented companies” here and elsewhere.
A piece on Microsoft’s Slate last year suggested companies like MS and Starbucks had to have copied N.Y. or L.A. styles of institutional aggression; such drive couldn’t possibly be indigenous to our countrified region. Nordy’s proved it could be and is.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Book feature for The Stranger, 8/20/98
THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT
by Aimee Bender
(Doubleday) $21.95
The 16 stories in Bender’s first fiction collection are dark yet never morbid, funny yet never goofy. They’re constantly going just off the side of your expectations, yet their own twisted worlds function perfectly. They have just the right details in just the right places.
Bender deconstructs the Everywoman motif common among so many contemporary female authors. Bender’s women do, by more or less their own free will, things other women may find selfish, inconsiderate, or just plain icky. These heroines and antiheroines aren’t virtuous victims or scheming sirens but more-or-less ordinary folks who get caught up in (or find themselves creating) extraordinary events. Even when these women do not-too-nice things, Bender lets us fully understand why they would.
Example: The long-suffering wife in “What You Left in the Ditch,” who remains steadfastly loyal to her soldier husband until he comes home without lips. Bender doesn’t excuse the woman’s superficiality or abandonment of her beloved in his hour of need, but she lets us see how the character had been dependent upon an idealized fantasy of her faraway man, a fantasy ultimately severed from the scarred, real husband.
Another example: The mild-mannered librarian in “Quiet Please,” who learns her estranged (and possibly abusive) father has died, and who spends the rest of the day soliticing sexual favors from every adult male on the library premises–not to fulfill any of their (or her) lusts, but to engage in the act of life as atonement for the belief she’d psycically caused dad’s death by having wished him dead for years. A male reader might first imagine the thrill of encountering such a woman. A female reader might first feel mildly appalled at her actions. But by the end of Bender’s tightly-written, well-paced little tale, all readers will likely feel a tinge of pity, perhaps mixed with a sort of admiration for a character who does what she must to righten herself.
THE 1998 MISC. MIDSUMMER READING LIST: For the second year, we’ve a pile of old and new bound verbiage (in no particular order) to recommend as mental companions while you sit in airports, on ferry docks, in the breakfast nooks of RVs, in rain-pelted tents, and wherever else you’re spending your summer leisure hours.
The Ruins, Trace Farrell. In the ’80s I was involved in “Invisible Seattle,” a group of writers who (among other exercises) fantasized about an alternate-universe Seatown with Old World traditions and grit. This is what local author Farrell’s accomplished in her hilarous parable of working-class discipline vs. New Money hedonism; set in an Old World seaport town but based on a real Seattle supper club and on Seattle’s current caste-and-culture wars.
The Incomparable Atuk, Mordecai Richler. From the Great Canadian Novelist, a 1963 fable still relevant amid today’s Paul Simonized nobel-savage stereotypes. Atuk’s a supposedly innocent native boy from the Northwest Territories who’s brought to Toronto as part of a mining company’s publicity stunt, and who quickly falls right in with the city folk’s hustling and corruption.
Machine Beauty, David Gelernter. One of these skinny essay-books everybody’s putting out today; only this one’s in hardcover. The premise is admirable (advocating simplicity and elegance in the design of industrial products and computer software), but it’d have been better if it were longer, with more examples and illustrations.
Consilience, Edward O. Wilson. Giant essay-book by biologist Wilson, who proposes all human behavior (and indeed all knowledge) can be ultimately traced to biology and physics. He puts up a solid defense, but I still disagree. To me, the world isn’t a tree with a single trunk but a forest of interdependent influences. Life is complexity; deal with it.
The Taste of a Man, Slavenka Drakulic. For “erotic horror” fans, a novel of psychosexual madness by the Croatian author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Not much laughing here; just a heroine who takes the female sex-metaphors of absorption and consumption to their logical extreme.
Self Help, Lonnie Moore. Short stories by the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, reworking women’s-magazine clichés into a far less “motivational” but more realistic worldview.
Coyote v. Acme, Ian Frazier. Light yet biting li’l funny stories like the old-old New Yorker used to run. The cast includes a cartoon lawyer, a Satanist college president, Bob Hope, Stalin, Mary Tyler Moore, and “the bank with your money on its mind.”
Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, and Terry Hong. Asia’s economies are on the ropes but Asia’s pop cultures are going strong, as shown in this breezy coffee-table intro to everything from pachinko and sumo to Jackie Chan and Akira Kurosawa.
Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey. For all haters of expensive bad movies, essays and interviews depicting Hollywood as irrepairably corrupt and inane (and offering the porn biz as an example of a slightly more honest alternative).
Behind Closed Doors, Alina Reyes. An ’80s teen-romance series, 2 Sides of Love, told its stories from the girl’s point of view on one side of the book and the boy’s on the other. Reyes (author of The Butcher and Other Erotica) applies this gimmick to more explicit sex-fantasies, putting her two protagonists through separate assorted sexcapades in assorted dreamlike settings with assorted opposite- and same-sex partners before they finally come together at the middle.
Soap Opera, Alecia Swasy. Intrigued by Richard Powers’ corporate-greed novel Gain (based on Procter & Gamble, and named for one of its detergents)? This real, unauthorized P&G history (named for the broadcast genre P&G helped invent) is even stranger.
Underworld, Don DeLillo. Mega-novel spanning four decades and about many things, principally the U.S. power shift from the northeast (symbolized by NYC’s old baseball dominance) toward the inland west (symbolized by chain-owned landfills). But with the Yankees back in dynasty mode, and financiers now overwhelmingly more influential than industry (particularly resource-based western industry), DeLillo’s march-of-history premise seems like reverse nostalgia.
The Frequency of Souls, Mary Kay Zuravleff. The best short comic novel ever written about refrigerator designers with psychic powers.
AND A READER SELECTION of sorts:
Subject: Northwest Lit Sent: 7/26/98 5:29 PM Received: 7/26/98 5:36 PM From: LSchnei781@aol.com To: clark@speakeasy.org
Clark:
Your review of the above subject completely ignored the best of the lot–Ivan Doig. Here in Fort Wayne IN where more books are read per capita than in any other city in America (there just isn’t much else to do), Mr Doig’s books enjoy a wide readership, and he is considered by many of us to be in the first rank of contemporary American writers. Lynn Schneider (LSchnei781@aol.com)
The Ruin of Many a Poor Boy
Original online book feature, 7/6/98
The Ruins
by Trace Farrell
NYU Press
In the ’80s I was involved with a writers’ collective called Invisible Seattle (inspired partly by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and partly by the French Oulipo writers’ group). Through group writing experiments, an early computer bulletin board system, and public performance events, we imagined alternate universes where the Queen City of the Northwest had different properties, populations, and institutions. Sometimes, we posited a Seattle with a Latin Quarter; sometimes, a Seattle with open-air butcher stands and lovemaking in the streets; sometimes, a Seattle with mysterious spies investigating a case of people disappearing into thin air at the whim of a creature known only as “The Author.”
Trace Farrell might never have known of the Invisible Seattle group, but her novella The Ruins lies completely within the spirit of the group’s doings. Her concept: Take a real, oh-so-darn eccentric private Seattle supper club (name unchanged) and imagine if it wasn’t the creation of its founders’ fantasies as much as an organic part of its community. To make this clearer: Farrell took the real Ruins (with its ambience of fake Euro-decadence) and made up a fictional city to put it in.
This city, called merely “Q__” and situated in an unnamed European country, substitutes old-world outrageousness and earthiness for Seattle’s cold “niceness,” but surrealistically represents a lot about our real city’s increasing bifurcation of the new rich vs. the old poor, hip vs. square, bombast vs. thrift.
“Our hero, Tom” is the old Seattle–hardworking, unassuming, disciplined, sincere, repressed as hell. He’s a down-on-his-luck shoe-shine-stand operator who shows up at the Ruins in search of more gainful employment, and (being the first even half-sane person to ever enter the building) gets immediately hired as its maitre d’.
The other characters represent various aspects of the new Seattle. The owner’s a gregarious, loud, gladhanding big-idea man who can’t be bothered with such boring trivialities as health inspectors and rent payments. The employees are knockabouts, actors, and airheads who know everything about maintaining a festive Bacchanalian spirit but nothing about running a restaurant. The regular customers (most notably a voluptuous dowager lounge singer) are New Money hedonists and hustlers whose lives of worry-free abundance couldn’t be further from Tom’s pitiful existence and what New Agers would call his “poverty consciousness.” Tom is repeatedly hounded, harrassed, and made the butt of cruel jokes by all the others–who, through it all, insist they love him and need his continued presence to keep the Ruins from total operational collapse.
On one level, Tom is a classic archetypal patsy–an Elmer trapped in a world of scwewy wabbits, a hapless Hardy in a roomful of Laurels. On another level, Tom’s a stand-in (or stunt double) for The Forgotten Man, the hard-working schmoe exploited as “Joe Sixpack” by politicians, labeled a “fascist redneck” by self-styled radicals and hipsters, and treated as a blight in need of removal by urban redevelopers. His misadventures in The Ruins are sometimes hilarious, but don’t laugh too hard. His fate could soon become yours.
(PS: For those who’ve asked me to state more clearly if I liked a book, I liked this one. Farrell’s a deft humorist. Her fantastical concoctions, and her descriptions of them, are outrageous without ever crossing the line into safe parody. She’s sympathetic toward her antihero even while she puts him through humiliation after humiliation. And she writes up a more amazing meal than any nonfiction food writer you’ve ever read.)
It’s a 4th-O-July Misc., the column old enough to remember back when many Americans were all worried sick that Japan and those other Pacific Rim powerhouses were gonna economically bury the U.S. under a tide of “principle-centered leadership,” “total quality management,” “work-team networking,” and hi-mileage compact cars. Could still happen one o’ these decades, I suppose.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dick’s frozen concentrated chocolate shakes are now at QFC. Frozen, they’re like that Darigold Frosted Malt. When thawed, diluted with a couple tablespoons of milk, and whipped up in an open-air blender, they’re just like what you get at Seattle’s favorite drive-ins. Even when whipped in a lidded blender (or even just stirred vigorously), they’re mighty tasty.
@ LAST!: By the time you read this, US West was supposed to have finally started advertising (and maybe even installing) its “MegaBit” high-speed Internet-access service, using the ADSL technology written about here nearly three years ago. It’s been delayed by state regulators, who complained the phone company hasn’t done enough to welcome independent Internet Service Providers into its ADSL connectivity. So maybe MegaBit will start taking installation orders next week, maybe not. Scrappy li’l Summit Cable, meanwhile, sez it’ll start offering cable-modem service in its neighborhoods (chiefly downtown, Belltown, the Central District, and Beacon Hill) perhaps as early as September; big TCI still promises to do the same sometime within the next year or so. While the hi-bandwidth revolution (enabling decent-quality live video, audio, and telephony thru the Net to home users) has been and will continue to be slow-emerging, at least it’s now underway. Maybe by this time next year, the whole media landscape will have begun to change, further away from the big boys and towards more decentralized structures. Speaking of revolutions…
REVOLUTION ONE-OF-THESE-DAYS-MAYBE!: I’ve talked to four people in recent weeks, who’ve mentioned either their desire or fears of a new American revolution. I have a hard time imagining a violent overthrow of the US of A, especially in these times of relative prosperity for So what would such a revolution be? (I mean a real sociopolitical revolution, not some advertised “fitness revolution” or “style revolution.”)
(To be more precise, Robertson’s relationship with the “reconstructionist” faction of the religious right’s a bit more complicted than I have space (in the print version of the column) to explain. He’s supported many ideological points similar to theirs, but at least for now he’s still a registered Republican. And Robertson’s former right-hand man Ralph Reed’s publicly come out against the reconstructionist agenda; Reed believes the religious-right platform (an authoritarian culture, under the twin thumbs of Fundamentalists and corporations) can be realized without dismantling the nation’s political foundations.
(Think you know how to accomplish any of this? Share your fervor at clark@speakeasy.org.)
Subject: Revolution
Sent: 7/4/98 1:59 AM
Received: 7/4/98 8:07 AM
From: Jason Foster, loosenut@scn.org
To: ‘clark@speakeasy.org’, clark@speakeasy.org
It’s about time. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say that there should be a revolution every 50 years? Aren’t we long overdue?
The statement that the revolution will not be led by the Religious Right made me think of something I read in Hakim Bey’s Millennium. He suggests that the religious right will have to band together with the anarchists and everybody else that thinks our current system is bullshit. They should be able to see the effect that greed has had on our government as much as anyone else.
I don’t think the revolution will be something to accomplish. I think it will just happen as result of social conditions. The destruction of the environment, dumbed-down mainstream media, super-greedy corporations, fucked-up politicians, grassroots politics, and real access to real information raising awareness (like through the internet) will be all be catalysts. Hopefully it will be bloodless.
And as for the revolution being televised: Do you think they will know what it is they are televising?
Misc. is a great column. Thanks for keeping me entertained and informed. (And thanks for reinforcing a lot of my belief system 😉 In an age severely lacking in heroes, you are one of mine.
Peace,
Jason Foster
————-
Subject: Re: revolution bullets
Sent: 7/9/98 8:29 PM
Received: 7/10/98 7:52 AM
From: JJAXX@aol.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org
It has seemed that at one time or another most everyone either anticipates some coming revolution or hopes for one. At the most personal level this is just wanting to get revenge on ones “boss” or parent.
The singular item that stopped my casual disrgard for another jeremiad was the phrase “unjust system.” Now that is something to think about! What exactly IS an unjust system? And, gosh!, relative to what other system did you have in mind?
At this point in history, about every culture I know of favors the powerful and wealthy (redundant?). There is good reason for this. And to various extents the less so are battered by the inequity. This does not mean there is a pending revolution. Most people are well aware of their own vices and shortcomings, regardless of their anger. And the consequences of poor impulse control are seldom long term positive for anyone. What comes after any revolution, any overthrowing impulse? These concepts are weighty to most people who have good memories or education. History is not kind to successful revolutions.
The establishment of a constitutional united states that has endured 200+ years is startlingly freaky when one compiles all of the governmental, corporate, and traditional upheavals the planet has supported in the last couple millenia. As it is, far too many people in this country have a huge economic and health incentive to suppress any so called revolution. The portion of the population that sees itself as the recipient of unjust treatment, I suspect, if gathered together, would never be able to agree on their own manifesto.
The result of this is scattered, small clubs of “revolutionaries” whose main goal is to “overthrow” their unworthy oppressors. Unfortunately, the number of “oppressors” in the US in something like 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than any of these groups. Focusing only on the superelite misses the size of the benficiaries numbers. In a country as armed to the teeth as the US, if the superelite were really threatening peoples well being their tenure would be so risky that their identities would be eyes only secrets. And that is a situation that the system itself could not support.
Conclusion: for all intents and purposes, people in the west, and surprisingly, even third world countries, are living in a time that, viewed over a millennium, is a golden age. To posit a successful revolution one must have some vision of a future that betters all 5 billion plus the ecosystem. The only people with that kind of vision are already creating that future. They tend not to be tearing down the current institutions (which have the current reins of power, and tons of money), they are building new institutions, creating new pathways of power and vast arrays of wealth. Individuals that are incapable of participating in this generation…first must look to themselves. If I elect to not pick up a book on HTML and front a web page, it isn’t BIll Gates to blame. If I cannot read to learn HTML it isn’t my teachers to blame.
Revolution is already happening. Show me someone on top in the US who was there 10 years ago. The better future is more like a river than a rock. It requires more in the sense of ability to navigate it than to stand on it.
JJ
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 11:02:42 -0700
From: hbarron
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: clark@thestranger.com
Subject: vive le revolucion!
im writing in response to a misc of a week or two ago in which the ? was something like ‘how to save the world’
id like to mention an org im active with that i think if succesful will greatly increase the joy and peace in the world.
its the party of non-aggresion and non-intervention -the Libertarian Party!
libertarians know that all human interaction can go one of two ways -either peaceful and mutually beneficial(commerce, charity) or coerced and destructive(drug prohib., slavery). therefore the more we can increase voluntary, peaceful, tolerant living and decrease violent social interaction(of which our government is the worst example) the better off we all will be!!!
please drop me a line if you want or if i can answer any ? re/ Libertarianism for the Stranger!!!
Tipton Bio Never Drags
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98
Suits Me:
The Double Life of Billy Tipton
Diane Wood Middlebrook
(Houghton Mifflin) $25
You know the basic story. Billy Tipton, a nostalgic pop-jazz pianist and fixture of Spokane society for over three decades, died in 1989 and was revealed by doctors to have been a woman all along. Now here’s the long version.
Who was Billy Tipton really? At several points, Middlebrook (a onetime Spokanian herself) accepts the argument that Billy (born Dorothy Tipton in 1914) was a closeted lesbian who only dressed as a man to make it in the jazz business and/or because nobody in her world would accept A Strong Woman. Yet the details of Tipton’s life, which Middlebrook clearly spent much time and effort collecting, suggest otherwise. Instead of heading to NY or LA or Vegas, where lesbians and jazzy women would get as much acceptance as they would anywhere in those less enlightened decades, Tipton stayed in the Midwest and later the inland Northwest, where the potential career rewards were smaller but where the competition was also smaller. (Tipton only recorded two LPs, both of retro trad-jazz standards released in the ’50s on supermarket budget labels; his work, as described by Middlebrook, seems to have settled quickly into covers and, later, Lawrence Welkish nostalgia.)
I used “his” above for a reason. Despite Middlebrook’s psychoanalyses, her tale is clearly one of someone who saw himself as a man born with the wrong equipment, who wanted to be known exclusively as a man. There were plenty of strong women in Tipton’s dust-bowl Oklahoma upbringing; but their strength was in holding households and careers together, not in the letting-loose demimonde of jazz. By the ’40s, when female instrumentalists had started to emerge in jazz and pop (and young men not in the armed forces were often derided as unpatriotic), Tipton never took the opportunity to end his offstage “act.” Even when dying of untreated ulcers, Tipton refused the medical attention that might have revealed his secret.
No, the Tipton story isn’t a tale of tragedy but of triumph. Tipton wasn’t a jazz great and probably knew he’d never be one, but he died a success at becoming something, and someone, he wanted against all odds to become–and without benefit of surgeries, shots, or hormone pills.
Fun things in the book: The elegant design, the cover, the shadow-clef frontspiece logo, the descriptions of ’50s Spokane, some of Tipton’s creakily “naughty” onstage jokes about women and gays, the descriptions of Tipton’s cross-dressing details (strap-ons, chest-binding, elevator shoes, claims that sanitary pads were great for sopping up car-oil leaks).
•
The Crisis of Criticism
Edited by Maurice Berger
(New Press paperback) $17.95
Yes, there are readers who actually take arts reviews seriously. At least other reviewers do. When New Yorker writer Arlene Croce complained about the concept of “victim art” she accused a Bill T. Jones AIDS dance work of abetting (without Croce actually seeing the show), several members of the NYC-centric art-crit and lit-crit spheres fell into a tizzy.
This brief book compiles Croce’s un-review with eight other critics’ responses and ruminations on the value of criticism in today’s everybody’s-a-critic era. Granted, a lot of these pro critics and authors (especially bell hooks) are just sticking long words onto a desire for a world in which people such as themselves get more respect. But others argue, with varying degrees of success, for a new or reasserted role for their profession.
Some of the better pieces don’t address Croce’s beef at all, but instead explore other criticism-related matters. Particularly notable is Richard Martin’s “Addressing the Dress,” arguing for more serious and less hype-laden fashion journalism. With so much art, entertainment, etc. being churned out by the intellectual-property industries and their highbrow counterparts, the best of these essayists assert the importance of trying to make sense of it all, to sift the aesthetic diamonds from the aesthetic zirconia.
It’s the 12th-anniv.Misc., the column that wonders if Vancouver essayist Brian Fawcett was right when he said malls and subdivisions are typically named after the real places they replaced, whether a corollary might be made about car commercials promoting further traffic-jamming steel tonnage with images of the wide open road, or (even better) SUV ads using nature footage to sell landscape-ruining gas-guzzlers.
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS: Loyal readers have been sending junk food samples from far and near. Scott McGrath, though, takes the no-prize for the biggest cache of snax from the furthest-away place. The centerpiece of his shipment: a hamburger (made with chicken) he found at a Beijing convenience store, in a sealed envelope complete with bun, lettuce, and “salted sauce.” The English half of the envelope’s back warns of a two-to-three-day shelf life for the product, depending on the time of year. The bun got squished in transit, but it’s otherwise a normal looking way-past-pull-date meat food. The rest of his box contained Japanese, Filipino, and Taiwanese products he found in Guam: Banana catsup, dried squid and cuttle fish, soybean and herbal-jelly soft drinks, and Marine World Biscuits (shrimp-flavored animal crackers in fish shapes labeled, in English, “Tuna,” “Dolphin,” and even “Sea Lawyer!”). Many of these are more conveniently available at Uwajimaya and other local Asian-food emporia, but it’s the thought behind the gift that counts.
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: I’ve traditionally used this, the anniversary week of Misc. (begun in the old ArtsFocus tabloid in June 1986), to take a look back at the column, the changes in Seattle, or my journeys. This time, I want to look ahead. This li’l corner-O-newsprint ain’t my sole ambition in life. There’s plenty of other things I’ve always wanted:
IT’S A POST-MAY-DAY MISC., the column that had almost gotten used to the idea of the Mariners re-becoming the hapless team of old. Then they got better again. In the next few weeks: Who knows?
SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE #15: Gus Van Sant’s directed a music video for Hanson.
RIDIN’: After the item last month about the Mercedes/Swatch Smart car (a mini-minicar to be sold only in Europe), a local outfit called Electric Vehicles Northwest wrote in to plug its new Twike machine, designed in Switzerland and to be assembled here from imported components. The sleek, three-wheeled two-seater has an 8.7-foot-long aluminum/glass bubble body, an AC motor capable of 25-40 miles between charges (at up to 52 m.p.h.), and even supplemental bike-pedal propulsion. What’s not mini is the price–$16,500.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ole is a line of fruit flavored, sweetened milk beverages; sort of an Asian style (made in Calif.) version of Strawberry Quik, but better-tasting (and in a wider variety of flavors). Just don’t mix Ole and Oly. (Though an Ole might help soothe your stomach after one too many Olys.) Available at Rite Aid and at ALFI, the convenience store across from GameWorks (for the time being).
STRAIT OUTTA COMPTON: Local TV news in Seattle, while increasingly obsesssed with “team coverage” of mayhem and disaster stories, is still slightly better here than it’s become in some other cities. One reason was KING’s Compton Report, a one-host, one-topic-per-show weekly half hour that combined intelligent reporting with slick videography and editing (while avoiding the PB-esque pomposity that’s helped make “documentary” a four-letter word among TV execs). Jim Compton himself was totally squaresville, but that was his charm. Now, though, the program’s on its way out. Compton accepted an early-retirement offer from the station. He’s not commenting on the split, but does say he’ll try to get another gig in town (acqaintances say he’s looked into starting a magazine). KING promises to replace his Sunday-evening show with another news-magazine format (look for something devised as a lead-in to Dateline NBC).
IT’S NOT JUST HERE: USA Today reported late last month on the gentrification of Chicago, with mayor Richard Daley fils presiding over the closing down of a popular sidewalk flea market and most downtown newsstands, all in the name of an upscale/bland vision of “beautification.” Daley’s next scheme: Establishing a sidewalk-restaurant row along the once-toxic Chicago River (for those few weeks a year it’s neither too cold nor too hot to spend an appreciable amount of time outside). Of course, Chi-town’s been at the upscaling game for over a decade now, replacing artists’ lofts (particularly along the aforementioned river) with condos and goofy theme restaurants, then putting up street banners proclaiming the former artists’ streets as “The Artistic Neighborhood.” Speaking of which…
EN `GARDE’: A kindly reader spotted the following graffito on a recent trip to Montreal: “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.” Actually, it’s not as cynical a notion as it might first sound. Remember, the term “avant-garde” originally meant the the vanguard of an advancing army (i.e., the shock troops). The notion, which goes counter to the more currently fashionable image of the permanently underground art world, was that the cutting-edge artists led where the rest of us followed. So it’d only be natural to extend that metaphor into formerly industrial urban neighborhoods as well as urbane aesthetic styles.
PASSAGE (German director Ulli Lommel, interviewed in Ian Grey’s Hollywood-expose book Sex, Stupidity, and Greed): “Americans are caught up in this American Dream, yet at the same time, in order to service that dream, they have to constantly deny what people are really like, what they really want…. You really like to do something but you don’t tell anybody because you hate yourself so much for doing it so you have to persecute everybody for doing what you are doing.”
Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Stories to End the Century
Book review for The Stranger, 5/7/98
The mostly-British anthology Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: Stories to End the Century (Serpent’s Tail trade paperback; edited by Sarah LeFanu) purports to chronicle the return to the “traditional values” of social repression following the end of the purported ’60s-’70s Bacchinale. Actually, it’s more like a reassertion of one particular traditional value of U.K. fiction: the pre-’60s kitchen sink drama, Angry Young Man version. That was a genre particularly suited for the England of grey skies and grim industrial towns and lingering postwar depression, a place where things new and invigorating just didn’t occur. The protagonists of most of these stories don’t find satori or mind-expansion from their earthy pursuits. At best, they achieve a little solace or escape from their everyday tedium.The sex is mostly of the “alternative” variety, and mostly in conformance with current “alternative” propriety. Professional dominatrixes; gay men searching for mates while on ecstasy; future lesbians engaged in girlhood role-playing; a married woman whose husband supplies her with another man as her birthday present; a honeymooning intellectual couple sitting at cafés while discussing the philosophical implications of fucking.
Similarly, the drugs are mostly used to escape the darkness of one’s life (Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born to Bleed”) or to build an artificial sense of self-confident fuckability (the aforementioned ecstasy users in Philip Hensher’s “The Chartist”). The main exception:Â Laurie Colwin’s “The Achieve, or the Mastery of the Thing,” in which a student bride in the nascent hippie years turns her professor bridegroom onto the then-novel joys of spending one’s entire life too stoned to feel pain.
Not much rock ‘n’ roll is in here, and that’s OK since there’s so little good writing about that world that isn’t really about the sex and drugs. Certainly the main rock story here, Cherry Wilder’s “Friends in Berlin,” has little novel to offer about bandmates getting on one another’s nerves while on tour. Again, nostalgia for the days of potential rebellion provide the highlight–Christopher Hope’s “Gone,” about a ’50s white boy learning to love rock music in apartheid South Africa.
The notion of intense pleasures as dulling narcotics reaches its ultimate point in Michael Carson’s “Postcards of the Hanging,” imagining a near-future in which humans are implanted with 24-hour radio receivers in their bodies, letting the outside world fade away while listening constantly to the top pop hits (with commercials). Like much modern-day sci-fi, it’s based on the schtick of taking a present-day trend (Walkmen and boom boxes) and simply imagining it will become more-O-the-same in the future. In this day of “chaos theory” and “quantum thinking,” many science and pop-science writers no longer believe trends necessarily “progress” in one direction forever. Too bad so many science fiction writers haven’t discovered this notion yet. But then again, maybe chaos-influenced fiction would constitute stories to begin the next century, not stories to end this one.
Writers at Microsoft:
WPA or Pharoah?
Book feature for The Stranger, 5/7/98
Artists, the old saying goes, subsidize art with their lives. Unable to make a living from their life’s passion, they spend their daylight hours pretending to be other, less noble creatures, from strippers to lawyers. These days, untold hundreds of writers, painters, musicians, et al. have infiltrated the 8,000-plus Redmond workforce of Microsoft.
“I had an office mate once,” says painter Pam Mandel. “We joked how Micosoft was like the WPA [Works Progress Administration, FDR’s make-work program for artists during the Depression]. This place has put more artists and writers to work than any place we knew. It’s the biggest employer of creative people I’ve ever seen.”
THE WORK
Two years ago, it seemed half the writers in Seattle were working on proposed “shows” for the Microsoft Network. Now, most of MSN’s entertainment or culture-oriented sites are, or will soon be, gone. (One survivor, the political-analysis netzine Slate, has moved to a paid-access format.) Instead, MS is pushing into websites that can generate direct profits by selling stuff like cars, plane tickets, and financial services.
But that shift still leaves lotsa work for word-wranglers. Besides the remaining MS websites, the company has reference CD-ROMs, software manuals and help files, training guides, Microsoft Press books, PR materials, and in-house documents to be written, edited, and constantly revised. And it has work requiring good communication skills, in such areas as graphics, “interface design,” marketing, and telephone help lines.
Tech writers are part of most MS software-development projects nearly from the start. “The products are so complicated,” poet and essayist Emily Warn says, “they need people who can communicate about them. More and more ,the manuals have gotten simpler and they’ve tried to make the products more intuitive. Yet if you’re only a programmer, you don’t have the ability to think like a user using the product.”
Warn notes the differences between this and traditional literary day jobs on college campuses. “I’ve a lot of writers in academia asking me how they can get jobs at Microsoft. Academia seems so petty and removed for me–all the office politics and ideological sects.”
THE ADVANTAGES
“I know I have a BFA,” says Mandel. “I couldn’t make anywhere near this kind of money teaching or working in a gallery.” Currently working as a technical writer, Mandel previously wrote picture captions for MS’s Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia. “It was the first time I’d ever been paid for my art-history education.”
Warn says she feels “almost apologetic because I like working at Microsoft. There are a lot of creative, smart, chaotic people. It’s a very interesting place to work. In my group alone [maintaining the Internet Explorer website], here are at least five working poets, three working fiction writers, and several highly qualified journalists. My boss is an ex-Maoist fiction writer.”
Eileen Duncan recently wrote in the online literary zine Salmon Bay Review, “I don’t always admit in public that I’m a writer. I’ve had several people ask, `Why would you do anything that doesn’t earn you money when you already have a job?’ At Microsoft, however, people react with kindness and interest to my admission. They even approve of it.”
Second-generation Seattle writer Sean Bentley works in a “user assistance group,” surrounded by “folks who at least read, if not write. This is a happy break from selling wastebaskets to restauranteurs who hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about most of the time if it didn’t have to do with Rubbermaid. Bartending was similarly soul-sucking, and I was lucky to escape being knifed, which is something I rarely have to worry about at MS.”
THE DRAWBACKS
Ken Smith co-edits Salmon Bay Review when he’s not at Microsoft. He finds the transition between left- and right-brain work “sometimes tough. When you sit down to write code, it’s absolutely literal. Sometimes the logic doesn’t make sense and it works anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to make the mental shift.
Smith says the sometimes-long hours and the Seattle-Redmond commutes don’t affect him, at least not directly. “I do have the time to do the things I want to, but sometimes my brain is a little more fatigued when I come home than it used to be.”
THE IMPLICATIONS
Microsoft is an aggressive corporate player with an ambitious agenda, to leverage its operating-system dominance into new aspects of the computer business (and many businesses only half-related to computers).
Some writers at Microsoft declined to be quoted about the company’s role in the world, a topic its PR division doesn’t like other employees discussing with the press. Poet and former Microsoft contract employee Arthur Tulee was willing to discuss it in historical-metaphor form:
“I was one of many slave scribes (excuse me, temporary contingent staff) for the Pharoah Bill…. I wrote, drew, and spellchecked on many of the various publications and manuals on how to build the Sphinx, obelisks, Cleopatra’s barge, etc. I studied straw production, quarries, Nile barge traffic, slave lifespans (excuse me, temporary contingent staffing contract periods), and purchasing quality fake beards at less than cost for Pharoah Bill and his thousands of permanent blue-badge lieutenants, some of whom were too young to grow beards.
“All my blue-badge lieutenants were educated, all-wise and compassionate. Some of them started out also as scribes, so no wonder. They worked us beyond human endurance, and promised us one view off the pyramid summit at the end of our project. There is no greater thrill than looking down upon thousands of slaves (excuse me, temporaries) sweating, groaning and straining for one purpose, one cause, one vantage point. We accomplished many stacks of hieroglyphs, some on short schedules, and only a few had slipped on the production calendar. On our backs stand giants.”
Virtual Unrealities:
The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
Book feature for The Stranger, 4/23/98
I could go on for the length of a trilogy about what’s wrong with most recent science fiction writing. Instead, I’ll recommend Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage trade paperback) as a near-perfect example of how it should be done. Alfred Bester was a veteran of the ’30s NYC lowbrow-writing circuit, where he ground out tales for pulp magazines, radio, and comic books. Gradually he got opportunities to ply his solid storytelling skills to more ambitious topics. While earning a living writing nonfiction magazine articles in the ’50s, he produced the novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, plus occasional short stories, most of them collected here.
Each of these 17 stories has a different fantastical premise, ranging from “hard science” speculation to flights of impossibility and varying degrees in between. But it’s Bester’s writing that makes these premises work.
The book’s centerpiece tale is “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Bester’s futurization of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men premise. In it, a man is doomed to travel the galaxies accompanied only by a psychotic, and possibly homicidal, android. The man and the machine, we slowly learn, have developed a complex mental symbiosis, which Bester subtly reveals by switching his first-person narration between the two, sometimes in mid-sentence.
In that and the other stories, Bester always uses the premise not for its own whaddya-think-of-that? sake but to hook the reader into caring about his (mostly male, mostly melancholy) characters. In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” a young man learns the secret to time travel and attempts to change history, only to find himself literally disappearing from consensus reality as his own time-track becomes derailed. In “The Pi Man,” a mathematical super-genius rides his mental compulsions into unimaginable wealth, only to live in forced isolation from the imperfect minds of everyone else.
Bester’s stories have a lot teach to today’s would-be fantasists, who’ve been learning too many of the wrong lessons from the golden age of adventure fiction. What was great about the old pulp and early-paperback stories, the comic strips and movie serials, wasn’t the formulaic boy-adventure plots or the one-dimensional characters, but the skill masters like Bester learned from the sheer volume of work they produced, the way they beckoned readers into their worlds, and the vividness with which they used unearthly plot elements to express all-too-universal yearnings and conflicts.
