NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
