MISCmedia for 3/21/01
Tell Me A Story

"DISINTERMEDIATION" is one of those buzzwords you hear in communications circles every now and then.

Applied to the online universe, the word is usually applied to individuals talking and/or writing to other individuals, rather than media professionals gathering huge massed audiences.

There's a middle ground between these two extremes, though. It's the e-mail list, discussion board, or website (such as this one) in which somebody puts together well-chosen words for a well-defined niche audience, or for anybody willing to read on.

We'll look at a couple of local sites of this type today.

Seattle Stories is, as its name implies, an informal and friendly collection of little narratives. Most are seeded by the site's creators Erik Benson, Stephen Deken, and Alan Taylor; but they're soliciting, and starting to obtain, tales from the site's readers.

These are tales of everyday life. Taking trips, going out jogging, falling in love, raising kids, surviving earthquakes, etc. They're simple, pretense-free, and full of heart.

Pax Adicus is principally a rave-culture site; its "Philo" section is full of sermons by two guys who seem to imagine that taking ecstasy makes them a superior species to the rest of us squares, rehashing all the familiar techno-talk buzzwords. But its "Read" section features the same guys (using the bylines Mc Cutcheon and Ooh the Sloth 456) in a more honest and refreshing mode, relating incidents about their partyin' lives (drinking too much, falling in lust, driving around, visiting pals, etc.).

The stories are officially billed as fiction, but they're real (on a heart-'n'-soul level). When the site's authors go preachin' about MDMA and global trance revolutions, they unwittingly depict themselves as stereotyped trend-followers. When they set that aside and turn to the details of living, they become more fully-realized "characters."

NEXT: Don't turn social services over to the churches, turn them into business opportunities.

ELSEWHERE:

• Before "political correctness" or Tipper Gore came the liberal New Dealers' role in promoting movie censorship in the '30s....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• A TV critic faces cancer.
• Music to accompany the mattress mambo.
• Goodbyes to film critic John Hartl, the outre-music zine The Tentacle, and some cool stores.
• A last lingering look inside the OK Hotel.
• Seattle as a city that works (and works and works).
• The terrible beauty of the freeways.
• The end of our little makeover parable.
• PBS discovers marketing to kids.
• Courtney Love reinvents herself as an anti-major-label crusader.
• Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race.
• The local Mardi Gras ought to be just as dumb and naked, just less fight-prone.
• Fun, sort of, with earthquakes.
• Hardcore porn producers tone down their works for a new mainstream market.
• Comparing a couple of WTO protest videos.
• That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining.
• Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products.
• Does the "Northwest Lifestyle" personality type even exist?
• An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.
• A fantasy-fandom HQ pulls a disappearing trick.
• A photographic ode to the wonders of snow in Seattle.
• How a conspiracy theorist might view the power-crisis mania.

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