MISCmedia for 2/9/01
Cut Loose

I HAVEN'T WORKED directly for Amazon.com, but I happened to be at Linda's Tavern the evening of the big Amazon layoff. Despite personal hoarseness due to a cold and/or flu bug (I'm much better now; thanks for asking), I succeeded at joining in with a rousing call from one of the back tables (obviously occupied by disgruntled laid-off workers) for everyone in the room to yell "Fuck Amazon!"

I could easily commiserate with the Amazon refugees. That very day, you see, I'd received email notice that the dot-com for which I'd been working for the past year would no longer need most of what I'd been doing for them.

Since March 2000, I'd been supplying daily online crossword puzzles to the L.A.-based Iwin.com. (Yes, I, Mr. California-Basher Supreme, willingly took cash from an L.A. media company.) Later in the year, I also started writing questions for Iwin's trivia pages.

Iwin was bought out late last year by the N.Y.-based Uproar.com, another gaming site (and home to the official Family Feud and To Tell the Truth online games). The usual reorganization-based inconveniences followed (new invoicing procedures; additional delays in getting paid).

Then came word that the crosswords weren't generating enough website traffic and would be jettisoned once their current backlog was exhausted.

As a freelancer, I didn't have to work 60 hours a week in some dot-com office, chained to a cubicle save for "motivational" groupthink meetings. (Heck, I never even saw the office.) I was never expected to give my heart and soul to the company, or to have a company-logo tattoo on my ankle. I just did my work the best I could, and was (for once in my life) paid decently for it.

But as a freelancer, I also knew the gig could end at any time. Writers (at least those not employed at unionized newspapers) tend to have only slightly more job security than musicians.

And so, to borrow a motivational-book phrase, my cheese has been moved. I'm out in the maze now, searching for the next gig to keep me going while I keep trying to turn this self-publishing thang into a full-time operation.

Any suggestions?

NEXT: A single mom vs. the welfare bureaucracy.

ELSEWHERE:

• Our pal Michael Wolff talks about the recent efforts "to consolidate the media business just as it is in the process of fracturing into a hundred million pieces...."
• Science fact (perhaps) follows science fiction, with the reported invention of a real-life equivalent to Barbarella's "Orgasmatron" machine (found by Fark)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• A fashion makeover gone very wrong.
• Parts one and two of a mild pique of jealousy for Mexico's public-transport system.
• Amazon.com tries the wrong way to become a respectable company.
• What might be the basis of '90s nostalgia.
• Boo for consumer-sex and non-sex; yay for real sex.
• What's wrong with Playboy isn't what its most vocal critics claim is wrong with it.
• What we know so far about the new administration.
• A glimpse of our forthcoming coffee-table photo book.
• Still more new cable channels.
• Just when you thought the '70s revival was dead, here comes a new energy crisis.
• Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
• How to improve Ken Burns's Jazz.
• I know what IT is, and if you're nice I just might tell you.
• Yes, Virginia, there's race discrimination in "nice" Seattle.
• A Hollywood insider acknowledges the death of the mass audience.
• Lynda Barry's Cruddy is anything but.
• My dream of a permanent alternative daily paper.
• People you're not better than.
• Parts one, and two of a remembrance at some people, buildings, and institutions that are gone or going at this time.
• Parts one, two, and three of a look at the possible next-big-thing in pop-cult genre repositionings, Christian smut.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia