MISCmedia for 6/12/00
The Good Old Days of 1999

FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).

YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering "The Sixties" mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.

It's too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.

Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.

It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-'90s theme restaurant--complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.

Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.

Folks who've become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.

The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.

In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.

They'll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.

They'll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.

Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.

TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.

ELSEWHERE:

• To us old-timers, "I Spy" signifies neither a DJ club nor a kids' game, but a TV adventure show in which local kid Robert Culp was star-billed ahead of Bill Cosby....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Will WTO-protest nostalgia become as tiresome as Woodstock nostalgia?
• Some activities that just aren't as much fun in one's forties.
• How rap music morphed from celebrating black intelligence to white stupidity.
• Some more possible Microsoft penalties.
• Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.
• A few things you might think are true but which are not.
• Life dies again.
• Why Seattle (hearts) film.
• The city Paul Allen's building.
• The typeface that's taking over the world.
• Napster-mania.
• The ultracool Razor scooter.
• Why sweatshoppers love to sell images of rule-breakin' "rebels."
• It's still square to be hip.
• Could open-source software be the next big anti-Gates hope?

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
• The origin and future of MISCmedia