MISCmedia for 3/30/01
Remember Rain?

AT FIRST, I'd not planned to mention rain in my new Seattle picture book. It's a cliche, I thought; the topic of too many cutesy-wootsy "jokes" in newspaper living-section columns and dorky greeting cards.

Then something happened. The rain went away, and stayed away most of this past winter.

Dunno 'bout any of you, but I came to miss it. Without the rain and the overcast, winter in Seattle is merely a slightly warmer version of winter in Liverpool.

It was as if all the changes wrought upon the city in recent years had altered not just its economy, its ethnography, and its cost of living but its very climate. All became bright, sometimes glaringly so.

Our usual, predictable seasonal-affective-disorder season got supplanted by nine-hour days of Technicolor brilliance interrupting fifteen-hour nights of crisp (but above freezing), starry skies. Instead of the grim, fatalist aesthetic of Cobain, Lynda Barry, and Ray Carver, we had a cheery, thought-free, go-for-it look and feeling better suited to techno music, glass art, and demographically-correct magazines. (Too bad the economy couldn't keep up with the sunny disposition, particularly those once high-flyin' tech companies.)

It was a disconcerting experience for someone accustomed, both psychologically and physiologically, to spending week after week under the low silver canopy of overcast (which inspired the surreal image of a giant indoor city in Stacey Levine's novel Dra-).

The main salient feature of western PacNW rain isn't really the precipitation. It certainly isn't the volume of downpour, which even in an average year is less than NYC and several other big cities. It's the dim, diffused light that makes going from indoors to out seem like those early Masterpiece Theatre shows where the interiors were in brightly-lit video and the exteriors were in drab 16mm film. (On a heavily overcast day, my new digital still camera insists on flash outdoors at high noon). It's the lo-visibility "grey-out" conditions on the water. It's the water-torture drip drip drip. It's the mildewy scent that gets in your clothes and never goes away.

This past week, the drizzle came back, at least for a few days. Not enough to relieve the alarmingly low levels in our hydroelectric lakes, but enough to remind us what it's like.

NEXT: Millions are reading and writing more than they ever did before. That's supposed to be bad?

ELSEWHERE:

• What, you expect to always get tons-O cool shit on the Net for free?...
• Could the movies be an innately right-wing medium? (found by Arts & Letters Daily)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• In defense of DIY publishing.
• A special offer on slightly-hurt Losers.
• Parts one and two of Boeing becoming just another global corporation.
• Could you be turning into a hippie without even knowing it?
• Is it time to privatize welfare customer-service?
• Tell me a story.
• 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.

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