MISCmedia for 11/18/99
The Less-Than-Fine Arts

ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.

Among my favorite: The "Ways to Annoy Your Roommate" list.

A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn't seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.

That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.

Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today's most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.

That one notion, natch, led to more.

There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:

• 'Annoy Your Roommate' lists and their ilk themselves.

• Chat rooms. My ol' pal Rob Wittig insists, "I'm convinced we're living in the Golden Age of Correspondence -- comparable to Shakespeare's era." A few people have tried to create email novels as late-modern updates to the 19th-century epistolary novel. Wittig's now working on a chat-room novel, a larger-scale version of the email novel with more characters "on stage" at once and with the added premise that the characters are "typing" their lines in real time.

• Telemarketing scripts and junk-phone-call recordings. In some future, more enlightened age, citizens will wonder why companies ever thought such intimately annoying messages could persuade.

• Movie and TV spinoff novels. Cousins of, and oft confused with, tie-in novels (the ones that reiterate the on-screen stories, which themselves are sometimes based on a prior novel). Examples: The Star Wars paperbacks that starred Han Solo and Chewbacca (and none of the other movie characters); or the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family mystery novels (a young Dean Koontz supposedly wrote some of these under pseudonymns).

• Internet-company promo trinkets. Anyone who goes to the High Tech Career Expo or a computer convention gets tons of 'em: Caps, T-shirts, Frisbees, yo-yos, hacky-sack balls, pen-and-pencil sets, coffee mugs, and other semi-ephemeral goods bearing the logos of companies whose only physical presence might be rented office space, whose "products" exist only on server files, and whose prospects for survival (or even profitability) are anyone's guess.

  Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its "restructuring for the future" downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt "celebrating" another company's acquisition of its remaining assets.

(Suggest your own current-day ephemera by email or on our scrumptious MISCtalk discussion boards.)

TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can remember when high-school girls were kicked out of school for wearing jeans--i.e., not showing enough skin....
• "Genetic engineers have proposed a tree which grows its own lights." (Found by EatonWeb)....
• Harry Stephen Keeler didn't really write mysteries but "coincidence porn" (found by Arts & Letters Daily)....
• Seattle's now #3 on somebody's annual "Good Places to Live" survey, weighted toward supposed middle- and upper-middle-class priorities (cost of single-family homes, personal security, supply of professional jobs, etc.). #1: Salt Lake (apparently, nightlife and ethnic diversity aren't on the survey's criteria)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• I still don't like San Francisco; but is Seattle now no better?
• Wacky emails received here lately, plus other fun short stuff.
• Can you tell me how to get to Coronation Street?
• Guys who fight aren't necessarily copying Fight Club.
• The history of trying to get away from it all.
• Does postmodern fiction trash old hierarchies or just build new ones; can't we just get past PoMo yet; and can we imagine a more proactive future?
• Ron Harris's journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
• A hipper-than-thou magazine complains when corporations don't love it; while the zine Ben Is Dead dies.
• Election '99 pitted both prog-leftys and rabble-rightys against the corporate center.
• Not-so-guilty musical pleasures.
• Could Blair Witch be considered a Dogme 95 film?
• The joys of oral surgery.
• The origins of manga/anime storytelling.
• Cyber-libertarians vs. cyber-libertines.
• That great contemporary-art benefactor, Procter & Gamble; and a possible way to restore alterna-art's role in urban society.

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