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From the periphery of Europe to the heart of America:
The Color Gray
Book feature for The Stranger, 4-16-98
On the surface, The Factory of Facts (Pantheon) is the simple memoir of Luc Sante’s search for his roots, as a child brought to the U.S. northeast in the ’50s by parents emigrating from a depressed small factory town in still-war-scarred Belgium. But Sante wants more than to scratch any mere surface. If you’ve ever lived someplace on the periphery of the bigtime cultural action but not really in the middle of it (hint: you’re in such a place now), Sante’s got some parallels for you to ponder.
Sante (a book reviewer for the New York Review of Books and Microsoft’s Slate) sees himself as an outsider everywhere, neither fully American nor European. What’s more, he sees Belgium as an outsider among nations–something patched together during the breakup and formation of assorted Euro empires over the centuries, situated on an all-too-convenient invasion route to and from France, an amalgam of French and Dutch (and, in his own Wallonia region, German) influences. A place that gave the world (via French publishers and other middlemen) the occasional detective author (Georges Simenon), actor (Jean-Claude Van Damme), or cartoonist (Hergé), but which lives under the largely unbreached notion that the real sociocultural action is elsewhere. A country where Francophone newspapers still encourage readers to erase “colorful native idiomatic expressions”, in favor of pure, Paris-approved French. A country whose “hallmarks are ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision.”
Naturally, this made for little inspiration to an immigrant boy, an arriviesté in the nation that led the world in the export of dreams and ambitions. “Willfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably I got rid of a section of myself, a part that was once majority and shrank to accessory. I went from being the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent. This was nothing special: I drank, I smoke, I stole, I swore, I stopped going to church…. My mother was convinced that Belgian children did not do such things, her view of Belgium becoming more idealized with every year she spent away from it. My view of Belgium became correspondingly more hostile, because it represented authority and also because I was certain its taint was what made me timid and awkward and unpopular and unattractive and solitary. I began a project to reinvent myself, acknowledge no bonds or ties or background, pass myself off as entirely self-made.”
A French culture minister might say the young Luc was buying into American cultural imperialism, abandoning his own heritage for the commercialized temptations learned from James Dean movies. Sante’s explanation is more melancholy: “We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal…. Continuing to believe that I had just made myself up out of whole cloth was self-flattering but hollow.”
So the grownup Luc returns to Belgium as time and money allow. He seeks to re-connect with the extended family he left behind–not just his blood relatives, but the still-depressed industrial economy of Wallonia, its heritage of radical labor organizing (and authoritarian repression of same), its dying regional language, its once-thriving indiginous music and theater communities, its declining Catholic ideology of personal suppression (what Sante calls “the Sacred Fear”), its remaining un-globalized way of life. “What makes a country, apart from tangled history? Baked goods. Churches. Weather. The habit of discretion. Fried potatoes. Shrubbery. The color gray. The elaborate mandarin ritual that attends commercial transactions, or even just stepping into a shop. Compactness, miniaturization. Cleanliness. The cross of modesty and prudery called pudeur in French. Brickwork. Class consciousness. Women of all ages suffering in skirts and stockings in the dead of winter. Reserve, aloofness, judgment. Varnished wood. Silent children, well-bred dogs, unassertive houseplants. The fear of God, the god of fear. Wallpaper. Comic strips….”
Sante ultimately reconciles himself to his roots by re-defining himself again. He now views himself as a sort of literary industrial worker, toiling in an intangible factory constructing intangible products of value, as his forebearers had built tangible products in tangible factories. He (and we) may now be part of an “information economy,” but he (and we) still exist as the result of all which has come before us, something we forget at our own peril.
Searching for the NW In NW Lit:
We Are Here! (Aren’t We?)
Feature article by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 4/9/98
From a very early age I was instilled with the (probably unintended but unmistakable) message that real art, and by extension real life, were things that only happened in places far away from my rural Washington existence. The stories read to us in class, and later assigned for us to read, all happened in Harlem or Korea or mythical fairylands or mythical Anytowns–until we got to read Beverly Cleary. Her kids had real attitudes. Her grownups had real tics and quirks. And they lived in a real place (Portland) I’d really been to. Ever since, I’ve sought out the stories of my own place, the affirmations that, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos, “We Are Here.”
Eventually, I found some stories that tried to reveal the people and attitudes of the place. And I found other seekers.
Last December, I was involved in an exchange of emails on the topic of Northwest literature. The original question, posed by Raven Chronicles editor Matt Briggs: “Is there any ‘Northwest’ in Northwest Lit’?”
Some of the respondents said there wasn’t any–that Caucasian-dominant society here’s still too new, and too subservient to the national/ global society of airports and strip malls and stadiums. I disagreed. I felt there were indeed distinguishing characteristics in stuff from here, at least the better stuff from here.
Defining the Literary Northwest: Let’s define “here” as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, maybe Alaska, and just maybe Montana; excluding the sociopolitically different worlds of western Canada and northern California.
If that’s the literary Northwest, then Northwest literature could conceivably include anything set in this place, or written by someone who resides or once resided in this place. But that could conceivably include everything from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (partly written while he was a Boeing technical writer) to tales where people leave Seattle early on and never return (certain Jack London stories,Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).
So for convenience’s sake, let’s classify the four faces, or sub-types, of Northwest lit, and the values and weaknesses of each.
Stuff written here but without “local” content. John Saul’s chillers, Robert Ferrigno’s thrillers, and August Wilson’s African American survival plays bear little or no relationship to their creators’ domiciles. Yet some of these manage to exploit a certain Northwest spirit. Stacey Levine’s Dra- and My Horse occur in surreal fantasy realms (the former in an all-indoor city); but Dra-‘s “drab and dreary world of utter dread” and My Horse‘s “painful psycho-logic” (as described on the cover blurbs) correspond internally to a sense of low-key resignation found in some more “realistic” works from here.
Locally-set genre novels. mysteries and romances with fill-in-the-blanks ‘local color’ (insert name of popular local nightspot here).
I haven’t the space nor the expertise to discuss romances, that last bastion of un-ironic genre fiction (and the only mass-fiction genre predicated on love instead of aggression). But the better whodunit-doers, here and elsewhere, go beyond place names to invoke the spirit of a region in the ways their characters commit and/ or solve crimes. Earl Emerson and K.K. Beck’s crime-solvers have a particularly Seattle kind of world-weariness; the crimes they investigate often invoke particularly local versions of ambition and desperation.
Land Lit. In college I was introduced to a whole “Northwest school” of writers and poets. Only their message, upon initial contact, seemed to be “We Are Not Here.” The poems usually consisted of minutely-detailed nature tableaux, devoid of human life save for the omniscient gaze of their narrators. The fiction viewed this countryside as verbal Cinemascope settings for noble women and stout-hearted men felling trees and fly fishing and behaving not at all like the all-too-human Norwesters I knew. None of those people, of course, lived in any city bigger than Port Townsend.
I now understand a little more about the formula’s pre-Beat-era origins. Concurrent with the Asian-inspired “Northwest School” painters and the spiritual-empowerment aspects of the Mountaineers movement, the first couple generations of nature poets (David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, Lake City kid Gary Snyder) sought a re-connection to the cyclical continuum of life. Even the “urban” writings of Richard Hugo are full of references to birds, streams, and native plants.
But the approach had its limitations, especially in the hands of ’70s-’80s imitators. What began as a quest for Zen tranquility eventually devolved into cloying sanctimony. Its nadir came in the ’80s with the NPR essays of Andrew Ward, who gushed reverently about the plants and birds surrounding his island “cabin” while acting like a landed-gentry snob toward his human neighbors.
Poet-editor Phoebe Bosche notes, “For a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, ‘urban’ (a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban = technology. These are the writers who don’t like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest [magazine] school.”
Bosche also disagrees with my disparagement of nature writing: “To just dismiss ‘nature poetry/ writing’ is blind to the overriding presence of our surroundings here. There is the presence of nature in all the urban writing being created here. It is different than the open possibilities that infuse writing from southern California, my home. The cynicism here is also different from east-coast or L.A. cynicism. It is rooted in a denser feeling of our relationship with our surroundings, in the character of this city.”
The real thing. The rarest and dearest, the works that attempt to convey how people here behave, think, and relate. I’m not merely talking about highbrow-appeal, or even what appeals to me. (The annoyingly “lite” Tom Robbins certainly expresses the aesthetic of a certain ‘shroom-munchin’ caste of NW residents.) But I prefer works expressing the moods Robbins’s escapism is escaping from.
Timothy Egan called it “Northwest Noir.” Briggs calls it “the slippery sense of place and identity in the Pacific Northwest… a strange dislocation that sometimes expresses itself in deformed characters, like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; a reduction of realty into a heavily weighted and controlled narrative, like Raymond Carver’s short stories; or in the complete absence of family history and a sort of constant self-invention as in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, or stories about isolated and small communities as in Peter Bacho.” To that roster I’d add Gus Van Sant’s philosophical down-and-outers, the Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff’s rambunctious yet worryful teens, Rebecca Brown’s obsessively intricate life scenes, Jesse Bernstein’s defiant celebrations of despair as a life force, Willie Smith’s dark fantasies, and the sublime desolation of Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point.
“There is a common, nervous energy (like overcompensating for the overcast winter) to a lot of the writing that I think strikes me as particularly PNW,” Briggs adds. “This spirit I’m talking about is like your weird uncle,” Briggs adds. “Your characters are generally losers. They’re not heroic; they’re just odd.”
Even the humor in NW lit, and there’s a lot of it, is off-center (Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, Gregory Hischack’s beautiful zine Farm Pulp), self-deprecating (Spud Goodman’s TV skits, Scott McCaughey’s song lyrics), or concerned with the dichotomy between crudity and beauty (cartoonist Jim Woodring, Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook).
Which brings us to the here and now. At live readings, the nature poets have largely been succeeded by slam poets. The younger would-be literary writers I meet want to be Anais Nin or Charles Bukowski. The economics of publishing virtually dictate that a work with “alternative” appeal reach out to a national or global subculture, while a work with local or regional appeal must hew to a mainstream zeitgeist. And the local mainstream zeitgeist has been thoroughly gentrified beyond David Brewster’s wettest dreams. With all the material riches to be grabbed here now, detective writers can imagine higher-stakes crimes and romance heroines can enjoy more luxurious adventures.
But what place is there for the quirky, the depressive, the unparodic noir, in a social landscape dominated by hypercapitalistic monomania? Marty Kruse, small-press buyer at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, says he’s “really disappointed with the output from the Pacific Northwest (of late)…. There was a great deal more enthusiasm when we all had less to lose.”
But if the best NW lit’s about people who’ve left behind, or been left behind by, family and society, then there’ll be plenty of material to come about people who’ve been left behind by the boom. As Briggs points out, “This has been an industrial town and a seat for the labor movement and there are all of these people who were here before the 1980s (and even those who were there before them, all the way back to the original Salish tribes) milling around, working strange jobs, and who aren’t exactly jumping on the Boeing/ Microsoft bandwagon, largely because they can’t.”
WHEN `REAL’ ISN’T: I’d long ago defined porn as fantasies for purposes of masturbation, and early-’90s cyberporn as fantasies about masturbation. Sex robots, “dildonics,” virtual reality glasses, dream machines, holograms–whatever you call the schticks in cyberporn fiction, they’re still mere get-off gadgets, means to avoid the sacred confusion that is interpersonal contact.
So it’s not surprising to hear all the hype surrounding a California (natch) company called Real Doll, promising a partial fulfillment of one common cyberporn schtick. For $5,000 or so they’ll custom-build a full-size plastic version of your dream woman (they say they’re thinking of adding a male-doll line later). They promise the look and feel of real flesh, hair, and bone-muscle structure, in a variety of heights, bust sizes, and skin and hair colors. The pictures I’ve seen of the products look like the more grotesquely hyperreal creations of some NYC hotshot shock artist in the Jeff Koons tradition. The more “realistic” these things get, the less they rely on the imagination and the more aware you are that you’re staring not at a fellow biological creature but at a hunk of lifeless petrochemicals. Cyber-freaks might be turned on by that, but I’d just find it icky.
MORE IMAGINATIVE PLAY equipment might be found at Seattle Surgical Repair, 10726 Aurora N. The location (right next to the cemetery) might not be the most tasteful site for a dealer in used medical equipment, but the tiny building’s crammed full of goodies. Examination tables! Speculums! Knee-reflex hammers! Stethoscopes! Gurneys! (Old car and motorcycle parts, too.) Just play safe when you’re playing doctor, and don’t perform any actual procedures that should be left to qualified personnel.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Li’l Hassan’s Bleeding Head is Marcus Surrealius’s eight-page take on the sort of gentle new-agey satire pioneered by the likes of, say, the Church of the SubGenius. Issue #3 includes a cover tribute of sorts to Nico and Yoko Ono, a scrambled analysis of Huckleberry Finn, and an “Ebonic Hail Mary” that reads just like the fake-Black-dialect Bible passages I was once forced to listen to in my old liberal-Methodist youth group. Even better are the little slogans here and there (“Neachy is pietzsche”). Free at the usual dropoff spots, or online at www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/4475…. Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan’s quarterly True Northwest is my kinda regional-history zine. Why, right on page 2 there’s a reprinted old ad for the late, lamented Pay ‘n Save stores! Further inside are a big retrospective of Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, an interview with Seattle Pilots/ Portland TrailBlazers announcer Bill Schonely, and references to the Elephant Car Wash, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, TV’s Here Come the Brides, Spokane’s Bing Crosby memorabilia collection, Jimi Hendrix’s days playing guitar with Tommy Chong in Vancouver (the closest to Seattle Hendrix lived in his whole adult life), and much much more. $3.50 from P.O. Box 22, Olympia 98507; or online at www.olywa.net/truenw/.
CROSS-CUTTING: The editors of True Northwest previously wrote Seattle on Film, a fun little book chronicling locally-shot movies from the years before the sight of a car on screen with Washington plates automatically meant “filmed in Vancouver.” Is it fair for our neighbors to the north to have The X-Files and Millennium while we’re stuck with a certain cheeky cable show amply discussed in recent Strangers? Since this is the start of baseball season, a trade metaphor springs to mind. We should try to acquire at least one B.C.-filmed show in exchange for the aforementioned cable production. Since that wouldn’t quite be an equal exchange, we’ll have to throw more in the pot. Maybe some tanker trucks of cheap U.S. gasoline, a couple of 10-year-old rock bands, and a cartoonist to be named later. If we can’t get a spooky sci-fi series, maybe we could at least deal for other Canuck assets like decent health insurance or adequate arts funding.
PASSAGE (pianist-author Charles Rosen in the March Harper’s): “A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.”
IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
REASON FOR THE SEASON: The oldtime Euro-pagans (and the Catholics who re-defined many of the old Euro-pagan holiday dates) had a reason for a holiday of romance this week. It’s the end of the 13 darkest weeks of the year. While not the time of fertility and blossomings, the waning of S.A.D. season is a reminder that more fruitful times are indeed ahead.
SIGN OF THE WEEK (marquee at the Oak Tree): “Fallen, Half Baked, As Good As It Gets.” Considering the quasi-pickled state of many Aurora nightlife patrons, this might be the most saleable set of letters they’ve ever put up there…. In other film-hype news, commercials for the quickly-disappeared Phantoms referred to its originator, hack writer Dean Koontz, as “The Master of Suspense.” At least when Brian De Palma stole that slogan from Hitchcock, he inserted a qualifier: “The Modern Master of Suspense.”
APPLYING YOURSELF: I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the folded cover of this year’s Bumbershoot performing arts application pamphlet looks amazingly like the Scientologists’ famous “Personality Test” flyer. So far, though, no reports of B-shoot’s selection committees hooking up any entrants to E-meters.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME: So new mayor Paul Schell’s official priority #1 is the city’s housing crisis, a topic loudly ignored by the prior regime. My first thoughts: Certain pundits used to say it took a Democratic president to get us into war and a Republican to get us out. Maybe it takes a member of the developers’ clique, rather than a politician merely working on the clique’s behalf, to deal with speculative overdevelopment’s effects on the social fabric.
But after reading preliminary accounts of Schell’s plan, a more realistic assessment seeped in. Rice was a politician who sucked up to developers. Schell’s a developer reasserting his roots as a politician. And pro-business-Democrat politicians love construction schemes better than anything in the world. Schell’s answer to runaway development: More development, via “targeted incentives” to builders, relaxed density and parking codes in selected neighborhoods, etc.
Schell’s plan also echos the Rice-era Seattle Commons and urban-village schemes (which weren’t really promoted as answers to exploding home prices and rampant evictions) in a less publicized goal: To get more people living in town, by increasing one of the lowest homes-per-square-mile ratio of any big U.S. city. It won’t slow down suburban sprawl that much, but the political extablishment undoubtedly hopes it’ll slow the decline in Seattle’s portion of the county’s and the state’s population–and hence stem the city’s loss of influence within the county council and the state legislature.
DISHING IT OUT: I hear from more and more people these days who’re getting, or wish they could get, a satellite dish. There’s even one guy who works on a public access program who told me he wants to replace his cable TV connection with a dish, even though he’d no longer receive his own show at home. The cable companies, meanwhile, are still feeling the PR fallout from prior censorship drives and are shying away from promoting the access channel as an asset you can only get with cable.
The cable people promise to combat the dishes with digital transmission and dozens more channels–one of these years. If that doesn’t stem cable’s loss of market share in time, how will access producers make their works available to ex-cable households? Maybe via web sites with “streaming video” files, particularly if promised higher-speed modems and more powerful home computers make that more feasible. But that won’t be free to producers, unless somebody donates server space at an Internet service provider. I could imagine that happening for shows allied to established political or religious groups. But what of the more personal statements? Who’ll support the streaming of Goddess Kring or Tea Talk with Leroy Chin? An arts group or producers’ co-op could do it, but even those outfits would probably have somebody deciding who could or couldn’t use their services. The freewheeling, no-gatekeepers thang that is today’s access channel might be something we’d better enjoy while still in its prime.
Due to early holiday-season deadlines, this Misc. installment’s the first to get to comment on that very peculiar New Year’s, during which those Seattle residents not blotto-drunk might as well have been, since all attempts to see the Space Needle fireworks resulted only in a fog-blurred haze of colors like something from a Mark Tobey painting.
ERROR MESSAGES: Hardly a day goes by without somebody saying something nasty about Microsoft. The Dept. of Justice disses the way MS tries to strong-arm PC makers. Nader warns about MS trying to monopolize “electronic commerce” tools, wanting a piece of every buck that’ll ever change hands online. Sun and Netscape claim MS wants to quash their “cross-platform” software lines, which threaten the notion of an MS-dictated computer universe. Mother Jones charges an MS-funded antipiracy group promising not to prosecute offices for using unpaid-for software if they promise to not only buy their warez but to buy all-MS software. And MS’s temps and perma-temps complain about their second-class treatment within the firm (including, thanks to new state legislation, no more overtime pay).
In most of these cases, the company claims it’s being unfairly targeted due to its “success” at creating products that just happen to be “popular among consumers.” That’s not quite the way it is, of course. Just about anybody who’s not working for the company (or for one of its media joint-venture partners) will acknowledge MS writes better contracts than code. Instead of innovation and competition, it operates by buying friends and crusing enemies. While its staff ideologues publicly pontificate about a cyber-future of decentralized societies and limitless opportunity, it behaves like an old-fashioned oil or railroad monopoly. In the past, MS’s enemies wanted the feds to split the company in two, spinning the DOS/Windows side into a separate company. That move by itself wouldn’t solve anything now, since the DOJ’s main argument is against MS turning Internet application software into a piece of Windows, making it tough for others to sell separate browser programs. It’s not just using its operating-system dominance to sell application software, but to give away software other companies want to sell. In other industries, it’d be called anti-competive “dumping.”
Our fair region is the born-‘n’-bred home of perhaps the most widely hated American company outside the oil or media businesses. Gates and Allen come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively new corner of western civilization. What does it mean to the longstanding image of this place as, for better or worse, “The City of the Nice” (as proclaimed by Tom Robbins in ’81)?
That, of course, always was an exaggeration. We weren’t “nice” so much as polite and businesslike, eager to please when it’s in our interest. (Author Roger Sale wrote in ’75 that Seattle was “bourgeois from the start.”) Despite the popularity of drunks, scoundrels, labor radicals, and whoremongers as local historical icons, most of the real settlement of the city was led by would-be timber, transportation, and real estate barons. The ones who made it didn’t just have what the new agers call “prosperity consciousness;” they maneuvered themselves into the right places, befriended the right people, made the right deals. Behind today’s Boeing boom lies a heritage of sales execs who forged long-term friendships with airlines, sealing deals Lockheed and Douglas couldn’t match. Rainier and Oly stayed prominent as long as they did because regional Teamster boss Dave Beck used his influence to make sure local beer outlets preferred local beers. The burgeoning Seattle biotech industry’s due to Sen. Warren Magnuson’s pipeline of federal bucks into the UW med school. MS started by signing deals with early hobbyist-computer maker Altair, and became a giant by signing deals with IBM. Much of the Seattle/ Oly “indie rock” philosophy has to do not just with alternative kinds of music but with forging alternatives to the music industry’s contractural practices.
Seattle’s a town of dealmakers as much as it’s a town of engineers. MS took this craft to a hyper-aggressive level. The extent to which this aggression succeeds and/or backfires will affect the company, the region, and the world.
CLASS WARS: Amid the controversy regarding Ballard High’s students and staff being shunted from their reconstruction-impaired regular digs to the quite dilapidated Wallingford carcass of the closed-in-’81 Lincoln High, Showtime’s been running Class of 1999, a truly bad B-thriller filmed at Lincoln in 1989. Exec-produced by onetime SIFF co-boss Dan Ireland, this RoboCop ripoff starts with that #1 cliche of bad sci-fi, the present-day trend exaggerated into the future. Teen-gang violence gets so bad by ’99, the opening narration states, that high schools have become total-security compounds with armed robots disguised as teachers. Only some of the robots go schizo and start killing teens, causing the all-white gangstas to retaliate in a predictable orgy of blood and steel limbs. Anybody who saw it (or worked on the crew) could tell Lincoln was perfect as a fictional bombed-out shell of a school, hence a lousy site for a real school.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A kind reader, visiting a local dollar store, found and sent in a package of Smack Ramen, an Asian-style meal in a packet (as made in Costa Mesa, CA). While the name obviously derives from a Japanglish attempt to invoke lip-smackin’ goodness, there is (as is oft the case with Japanglish) an unfortunate double meaning. Is this also the cheapo-meal of choice for those who’ve spent all their money on a certain poppy-derived non-nutritive substance (also Asian-derived)?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The second “more-or-less quarterly” issue of Platform, Morgain Cole and Bret Fetzer’s ambitious local theater zine, is now at Seattle theaters and other free drop-off spots. It’s got timely ideas about the organization and financing of local drama troupes, plus a 1983 Richard Nelson essay about the precarious state of “Nonprofit Theater in America.” He said the theater movement was “nearing disaster,” ‘cuz it was “without an adequate sense of tradition or a sense of social responsibility.” The fact that most of Nelson’s arguments could be made today (and are being made today, as in a recent NEA staff report) proves (1) the theater movement’s done a good job of not dying, and (2) how little further than that it’s gotten. (No subscriptions, but info can be had from 313 10th Ave. E, #1, Seattle 98102.)
WORKIN’ IT: The Discover U catalog offered a course two weeks ago on the “Secrets for Making Love Work.” For those of you who couldn’t attend that day or didn’t have the $29 class fee, we hereby offer a few of our own secrets:
I WANNA KNOW: Last month, we asked who you thought had more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t one of our most popular surveys, but all four respondents agreed: Sabrina. Our next survey: What will ’90s nostalgia look like? Which sights, looks, sounds, and consumer goods will future movies and collectors deem as evoking those silly days of now as A Simpler Time? Submit your suggestions at our new email address, clark@speakeasy.org.
PASSAGE (from Topper author Thorne Smith): “Like life itself, my stories have no point and get absolutly nowhere. And, like life, they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter shaking an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonatrated in a shop window.”
INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.
Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.
MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.
Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”
The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”
Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.
Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”
Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)
The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)
The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”
Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.
Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.
There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.
YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.
The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.
IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.
Close to the Machine
Book review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/30/97
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: A San Francisco essayist who’s not an insuffrable egomaniac. Instead of incessantly promoting herself as a Hipper Than Thou brand name, Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine (City Lights Books) calmly and personably details some of the routines and subroutines of her daily existence as a freelance “software engineer and consultant.” On one level, this short memoir gives a narrative focus to the process of programming–something I haven’t really seen since a 10-year-old Microsoft Press interview book, Programmers At Work.) On another level, Ullman evokes real sympathy while describing her life as the soul-numbing reality behind the other techno-essayists’ futuristic fantasies. She sits at her keyboard all day and most of the night, except when she’s driving two hours each way on an assignment in some deep-suburban office park. She lives in a cool loft space, but spends most of her time there working alone. Aside from her family back east, her only non-work-related relationship consists of occasional convenience sex with a younger man who dreams of making it big in offshore money laundering and online porn. On the plus side, she does get to drive a fancy car and eat at fancy restaurants and solicit AIDS-benefit money from her wealthy acquaintances. But, as centuries of literature have already shown, upscaleness can’t buy happiness.
AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:
It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.
It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.
It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)
On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.
While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.
The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.
I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.
On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.
Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.
The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.
Online Extras:
To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.
The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.
As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.
Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.
And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU’RE LAME: Here at Misc., we’re among the many sports fans who aren’t all that sad to say goodbye to Shawn Kemp. He wasn’t the first legend-in-his-own-mind to believe the world would instantly recognize and appreciate his all-around superiority if he only got outta Seattle, where grandstanding demands for idol-worship are often answered not with supplication but with dismissive pleas to get real. Most of the ambitious emigrants I’ve known, who all left town in full certainty of their imminent superstardom, got as far as becoming studio musicians on centerfold videos or bit parts on unaired TV pilots. It takes more than just a hostile attitude toward most everybody around you to make it in one’s chosen profession’s bigtime. It even takes more than the extraordinary talent Kemp’s definitely got. Despite NBA and Nike marketing themes to the contrary, basketball’s still a team game. And, as just about everybody’s middle-school P.E. teacher used to say, there’s no “I” in the word “team.” Speaking of poor sports…
THE FINAL SPORTS BLOOPER REEL: Disgraced sportscasters, like dead celebrities, appear to come in threes. First O. J. Simpson, then Frank Gifford, now Marv Albert. I’m just waiting for the inevitable Albert-meets-Tyson jokes to pop up. The whole tawdry affair almost makes those Fox Sports Northwest promo ads (the ones with images of the lovably square Dave Niehaus intercut with images of a trashed hotel room) seem nearly plausible.
THE MAILBAG: Seattle Scroll writer Jesse Walker writes in to insist he knew all along how the anti-Internet-hoax letter he ran in a recent “net hysteria” essay (reviewed in Misc. two weeks ago) was itself a hoax, and that attentive readers could’ve inferred from his piece that he knew. Unfortunately, he won’t get to clarify this in the Scroll‘s pages. The feisty year-old biweekly’s run out of money and probably won’t come out again.
DRAWING THE LINE: Recent years have seen lotsa grownup in-jokes in cartoons. One Cartoon Network promo spot’s built exclusively around material kids aren’t supposed to know about. It features the Tex Avery dog Droopy and Scooby Doo‘s Shaggy in a convertible, talking about how the Time Warner-owned cable channel’s now seen worldwide, when Shaggy asks, “Do you know what they call Pound Puppies in France?” Explaining how there’s no such thing as “pounds” in the metric system, Shaggy then asks, “What do they call Smurfs in Spain?” His answer: “Los Smurfs.” Only that’s wrong–as anyone who went to the Smurf theme park in France knows, the late Belgian cartoonist Peyo‘s critters have a different cutesy name in each major Euro language (Stroumphs, Schlumphs, et al.). In Spain, they’re “Los Pitufos.”
OFF THE LINE: Hard to believe it just a year ago when virtually every writer, photographer, cartoonist, graphic designer, and programmer in town was either being recruited for or trying to push their way into no-benefits “contract” employment as “content creators” for the Microsoft Network and/or Microsoft-owned websites. But now, the one company that could indefinitely sustain extensive, money-losing online ventures has chosen not to do so, at least not to its first extent. Many of the paid-access MSN sites (including the “alternative culture” site Mint) are being shut down; others are being scaled back. The free-access MSNBC website is also laying off almost half its “temp” workers; while the company’s Sidewalk entertainment-listing sites scattered across the country have faced greater-than-expected staff turnover (apparently several key people were hired as “creative” writers, only to find themselves stuck typing in movie-theater showtimes). While I’ll certainly look forward to seeing some of my acquaintances on this side of the pond a little more often,
ON THE LINE: After two years of development (interrupted by putting an ever-bigger paper out every week), there’s finally a Stranger website at www.thestranger.com. Each week’s current Misc. can be temporarily found on the site. The Misc. World HQ site (www.miscmedia.com) continues as a complete archive of the column and of assorted other things I’ve written over the years.
PASSAGE (from Incredibly Strange Music organist Korla Pandit): “Music may not save your soul, but it will cause your soul to be worth saving.”
WHAT A RELIEF!: By the time you read this, the Mariners may have clinched the AL West championship and secured a role in the baseball playoffs. They were damn close to the clinch when this was written, but with the state of the Ms’ bullpen all year long nothing was sure. For just such jittery situations, Queen Anne-based Beadle Enterprises now offers Ninth Inning Worry Beads. These translucent plastic beads on a metal string come in Mariner blue and tourquoise, with a tiny wooden baseball and bat attached. The company claims they’re just the thing to “soothe nasty symptoms associated with penant fever. Twirl them. Rub them. Jiggle them. Hold them in your hands and pray. They’re almost guaranteed to work.” (Sales info: 217-9002.)
A SCHMICH IN TIME: Earlier this summer, a humorous text document was disseminated on the Internet far and wide, labeled as a commencement address to MIT graduates by author Kurt Vonnegut. Then, Net news sites (and mainstream news media) reported it was a hoax: Vonnegut never spoke at MIT, and the witty words-O-advice to today’s youth were from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich. Earlier this month, the Seattle Scroll ran a story about Internet rumormongering, claiming (via an email message from one Jem Casey, purportedly reprinting a Chronicle of Higher Education article) the hoax story was itself a hoax–that Vonnegut really did give the speech at MIT, and nobody named Mary Schmich had ever worked for the Tribune. From there, Scroll writer Jesse Walker uses the case to chastize the media for their collective “Internet hysteria.”
Walker’s arguments are well-taken and I agree with most of them. Too bad the anti-hoax message he opens his piece with is, you guessed it, a hoax. All Walker had to do was look up the Tribune‘s Schmich page (www.chicago.tribune.com/columns/schmich/archives/97/803.htm) to learn she’s real, she really wrote the words-O-advice (which included a plea to be sure and use sunscreen), and Vonnegut was nowhere near MIT this past June.
(After this was originally posted, Walker wrote in to say he knew the anti-hoax statement was a hoax, and that careful readers of his piece could have discerned that he knew.)
NOT THE SAME OLD SONG:Some weeks back, Misc. asked your input on formerly-popular musical genres that haven’t yet been turned into hip revivals. Some of you continued to write in past the initial deadline. Here’s some more of your nominations, with some more of my comments:
A Star and His Bucks
Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
8/21/97
Pour Your Heart Into It
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
Hyperion, $24.95
There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.
Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.
A comparison is due at this point:Â Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.
Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.
On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).
Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.
Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.
Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”
BRIEFS
Thrift Score
Al Hoff
HarperCollins
Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.
Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.
Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest
Lorna Price, ed.
University of Washington Press
The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?
These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.
EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.
The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.
If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.
This first Misc. Midsummer Reading List is a totally random collection of titles, recommended for fun value and in some cases for insights into the writerly craft. I started it after two different people asked for recommended reading matter. Within the next few weeks, a regular book-briefs section will appear in The Stranger, featuring various staffers’ recommendations of tomes new and old. But here’s some of mine (and yours). (Book links provided in association with Amazon.com.)
Online Extras
MICOSOFT TO BUY CBS?: That’s what a New York Post story said a couple weeks ago. I didn’t believe it, even before the denials from all sides. For one thing, Gates likes to buy companies on their way up, not underperformers in need of restoration. For another, MS’s current alliance with NBC made for at least a few half-decent jokes around the Internet, contrasting nerd stereotypes with the network’s young, hip image (Gates becoming the seventh Friend, et al.). But there’s nobody on CBS one could even imagine as having ever used a computer–except Dave’s World star Harry Anderson, a card-carrying Macintosh endorser.
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “At Bally’s health clubs, you can get the body you’ve always wanted to have.” And you thought that sort of offer could only be advertised in the rural counties of Nevada…
WHITE UNLIKE ME: I’m on my third reading of Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto. Goad (co-creator of the nearly-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me!) has his points, but you have to sift through an awful lot of theasaurus-bending cuss words and almost poetry-slam-style “attitude” to find it. Around all this filler, Goad interweaves his and his family’s story of financial/ social struggle with observations of his current surroundings in industrial north Portland and with what BBC documentary producers might label “a personal history” of the white (rural and urban) working class in Europe and America, from the bad old days of indentured servitude and debtors’ prisons to the bad new days of welfare-mother bashing, wage stagnation, and job exports. In Goad’s worldview, the great mall-hopping middle class either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to his main concept, the eternal war of “white trash vs. white cash.” Among the aspects of his thesis:
* Poor whites and poor blacks have more in common (and socialize together more readily) than poor whites and rich whites.
* Unattractive traits ascribed to rednecks and trailer trash (laziness, savagery, stupidity, promiscuity, poor hygiene) have always been used by the rich everywhere to disparge the poor everywhere.
* America’s “dirty little secret” isn’t race but class.
* Most rich people are white but most white people aren’t rich–and shouldn’t be collectively blamed for slavery, discrimination, and other rich people’s crimes.
* So-called “angry white male” subcults (militias, talk radio listeners, etc.) aren’t necessarily as racist, sexist, homophobic, or paranoid as the upscale media crack ’em up to be. Their real beefs, Goad claims, are against big business and big government, as they should be.
* The media (including most “alternative” weeklies) are tools of the “white cash” class and don’t give a damn about the downscale, except to sneer at ’em.
* The same’s true of white-upscale leftists, whom Goad claims care more about overseas rainforests than about toxic dumps in our own inner cities. Goad says this is an historic trait, citing Brit society ladies who spoke out against slavery in the American south while treating their own servants and employees like dirt.
* The white hipster agenda has always had less to do with assailing bourgeois privileges than with defending these privileges against the downscale squares.
Many of the class-struggle arguments have been made before, by folks like Michael Moore and Baffler editor Tom Frank. Goad’s main addition to the genre, besides his damn-aren’t-I-politically-incorrect sass, is his insistance that there’s no singular white racial caste, united in privilege and oppressiveness. With this, Goad seemingly contradicts the worldview of Race Traitor zine editors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who claims there is such a universal Caucasian identity and “progressive” whites should personally renounce it.
But their stances aren’t really that different. Both believe in self-empowerment by dropping out from the mainstream-America assimilation thang. Ignatiev and Garvey (instructors at bigtime East Coast universities) do this by pretending to be black. Goad does it by playing up his links to the white unprivileged. Goad’s is probably the healthier approach. Instead of appropriating the romanticized victimhood of some defined “Other,” Goad argues for the right to be his own Porter Wagoner-listenin’, dead-end-job-workin’, hard-livin’, high-lovin’, prematurely-dyin’ kind. One approach seeks true humanity outside oneself; the other finds it within. (More on this latter sub-topic in two weeks.)
