Friday, November 30, 2001

UPDATE #1: My ol' pal Susan Rathke's second and final Jeopardy! episode appeared tonight. Though she was felled by a particularly tuff "Final Jeopardy" question, she still left with $23,000 and a cool overseas vacation trip (not to mention an NY Times subscription and a copy of the home game). Way to go!

UPDATE #2: A Calif. entrepreneur is trying to relaunch Luxuria Music, the Internet radio station that played an amazing blend of lounge, exotica, swing, and related music prior to its April demise at the hands of radio mega-chain Clear Channel Commuications. You can read more about the scheme at his site, Luxuriamusic.net.

PARTYING LIKE IT'S 1999: The Seattle WTO protests of two years ago were already a nostalgia topic six months later. They were remembered in a series of events today. The one I went to (at Westlake Center) and the one attended by one of our MISC informants (at Seattle Central C.C.) were dull, pallid affairs. Each had no more than a couple hundred anarcho-hippies and aging punk rockers singing songs, chanting chants, and otherwise giving rote by-the-numbers "radical" stances.

Before today, we'd wondered aloud how the anti-globalization movement would respond after the terror attacks of Sept. (which were centered at a symbol of globalization that even had "World Trade" in its very name). The answer, at least as far as today's events went: Quite lacklusterly. The two outdoor commemorations attracted few beyond the hardcore far-left kids (and even among them, the Mumia and Revolutionary Communist cliques didn't have much of a presence).

A good case against global corporate power-grabbing can still be made. It is possible to despise what the skyjackers did and still seek a more fair, more just world, a world in which the needs of the people and the earth would be given more importance than the Almighty Stock Price. But such a stance would now require more subtlety, more tact, and more intelligence than the more one-dimensional parts of the anti-WTO shtick could've accommodated.

posted by clark 11:38 PM

Wednesday, November 28, 2001

SO SORRY: My pal's Jeopardy! appearance doesn't air locally until Thursday. I forgot about Monday Night Football screwing up the show's schedule here during the fall.

ELSEWHERE:

"Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture."

If you don't click on this link, then the terrorists will have won.

posted by clark 7:38 PM

Tuesday, November 27, 2001

NEPOTISM DEPT.: One of my beloved former Stranger colleagues, Susan Rathke, is a contestant on the Jeopardy! episode airing tonight. And I'm told she does rather well in the game. Watch and root her on vicariously (it was taped weeks ago, so your good thoughts won't help her win, but it's still the right thing to do.)

posted by clark 11:19 PM

WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1!: A British-based condom manufacturer has issued a survey which claims Americans have a lot more sex on the average, with more partners, and starting at an earlier age, than folk in Britain, Germany, Japan, and 24 other major industrial countries.

What this might mean:

• Despite 20 years of the Religious Right's anti-sex tirades (or maybe at least partly because of them), U-S-of-A-ers are just as buggery-obsessed as ever.

• The Muslim fundamentalists, and other overseas moralists, are right to fear the global reach of American corporate-pop culture. As countless staid Catholic and Mormon parents in this country already know, there's nothing to get kids to challenge tired authority systems quite like the promise of nookie. Especially when it's seen in the context of a whole American-export cultural shtick of sugar drinks, rock n' roll, blue jeans, the open road, big cars, etc.

• This era of U.S. supremacy in the quantity (if not necessaarily quality) of coitus coincides with U.S. supremacy (for better or for worse) in military and economic power. This puts the lie to the Right's claims that the non-repression of lust would turn us into a weak and vulnerable nation.

• Indeed, it might justify the rival claim, made by followers of Tantric yoga and of the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich, that a healthy sex life is a sign of, and contributor to, general personal vitality and social energy.

• Of course, more sex isn't always better sex. Included in the survey's average of 124 matings per year per American must be plenty of awkward adolescent experiments, unsatisfying marital acts, abusive relationships, lonely hooker dalliances, premature ejaculations, preorgasmic women, unwanted conceptions, and unimaginative fantasies. The continued prosperity of sex-ed guidebooks and videos shows that the most isn't always the best.

• Porn doesn't necessarily lead to promiscuity--or to monogamous vitality either. The least-sexually-active country in the survey is Japan, a place teeming with strip joints and raunchy adult comic books.

• These averages, if true, are still just averages. Please don't feel anxious or depressed if you're currently not getting any. And don't stay in a lousy relationship just out of the fear of involuntary chastity.

(This article's permanent link.)

posted by clark 4:48 PM

Monday, November 26, 2001

FINALLY SAW Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace Sunday night, during its free-TV debut. It was just as mediocre as its worst critics had claimed.

It was indeed full of not-so-thinly disguised ethnic slur characterizations. It indeed had long, long sequences intended to promote spinoff video games. It indeed depicted a Top Gun attitude toward warfare as a hunting adventure in which the good guys can kill without any nagging guilt complexes (most of the enemy foot soldiers were robots!). And it indeed substituted the original films' pseudo-Nazi villains (creatures Just Like Us, only evil) with pseudo-Asian and pseudo-Arab heavies.

The one intriguing aspect of George Lucas's story came at the very start and was fairly quickly faded into the backgorund. The future Galactic Emporer has acquired his first army of conquest by secretly taking over a stateless, intergalactic organization called "The Trade Federation." In a film released five months before the Seattle WTO debacle (and written at least a couple years before that), Lucas already knew to exploit the growing public fears of transnational capitalism and its potential powermongering excesses.

posted by clark 1:53 PM

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