Thursday, June 27, 2002

THE SUMMER PRINT MISC is officially late (I'd wanted it out today), but it is coming.

As part of it, I'm writing an exhortive little essay entitled "No, Seattle Doesn't Suck."

For it, I'd like your participation. Tell me what you like about Seattle. (Only things that are actually in Seattle! Out-of-town scenery doesn't count!)

Send it in to our handy email box, preferably before the end of the month. Thanx in advance.

THE NY TIMES quotes an Italian business analyst on the Enron-Arthur Andersen-WorldCom mess: "What is lacking in the U.S. is a culture of shame. No C.E.O. in the U.S. is considered a thief if he does something wrong. It is a kind of moral cancer."

WHAT ADAM SMITH REALLY WROTE, as opposed to what the pro-corporate "libertarians" claim he wrote.

THE FREMONT SOLSTICE PARADE is tons-O-fun; equally zany (although only slightly more dressed) is the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

posted by clark 5:56 PM

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

LET'S ALL PLAY
SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPE
MYSTERY DATE!

This proposed role-playing game will involve two separately-shuffled decks of cards.

The female player draws a card at random from the Pink Deck to determine which of the following grossly overgeneralized female character types (taken from popular images in "mainstream" and "alternative" media) she must adopt.

Then the male player does the same from the Blue Deck, containing various one-dimensional male character types. The two players then proceed to have a bitter verbal argument, in their characters.

The loser: The player who breaks character first.

The winner: There are no winners.

The point of the game: NOT to have fun, but to be as adamant and as miserable as you can be.

THE FEMALE ROLES:

• The Destructive Temptress
  Description: Says she'll love you; will really kill or at least totally humiliate you.
  Visualization: Blonde, sultry, with a come-hither expression, cleavage, and a knife held behind her back.

• The Mean Teen
  Description: Stuck-up high school brat
  Visualization: Perfect body, perfect hair, perfect clothes, the facial expression of someone who's just confronted horse feces on the sidewalk.

• The 'Anti-Sexist' Sexist
  Description: Believes stereotyping people by gender is the worst crime in the world, that it's done by no women and all men, and if you disagree you're part of the universal male conspiracy.
  Visualization: Butch in leather with a permanent scowl.

• The Drama Queen
  Description: The emotionally abusive, all-purpose victim of everything. Transforms in an instant from bawling to anxious to wrathful.
  Visualization: Overemotive Shakespearean actress; or the couch-swooner from that Edward Gorey book cover. Might be finishing a drink carried in one hand while pouring another drink with her other hand.

• The Body-Image-Obsessive
  Description: Completely lacking a mind or will of her own. Enslaved by TV and magazine ads that don't want her to buy stuff, just to make her feel miserable.
  Visualization: mirror in her hand, standing on a scale, rail-thin but seeing herself in the mirror as voluminously obese

• The Virgin 'Slut'
  Description: Victim of the Mean Teen's putdowns for merely looking insufficiently ladylike. Because she has the skankiest reputation in school, no boy will have her--and none ever has.
  Visualization: Not seductive, merely "cheap" and semi-pathetic looking. Ill-fitting denim jacket, last year's jeans style, the wrong brand of cigarettes, too much makeup.

• The Ditsy Princess
  Description: Her mischievous giggle and batting eyes can make men give her fortunes, which she'll waste in an instant on one really fabulous consumer purchase.
  Visualization: Carefully contrived fake absentmindedness.

• The Porn Bimboid
  Description: The woman every man's supposed to go absolutely crazy about and if you don't what's wrong with you?
  Visualization: An almost kabuki-like absurdist characterization made from her own thoroughly-surgeried body; plus overbleached and overteased hair, big vacant eyes, surgically-thickened pouting lips, impossibly high heels, and a vinyl or gold-lame jumpsuit.

• The PC Prude
  Description: Diligently works to create a society where everything's uniformly blah and anything that could even possibly be fun would be outlawed.
  Visualization: Stern emotionless behind big round glasses, blah hair, blah clothes,

• The Dresser for Success
  Description: Your new boss, who uses conniving and treachery to get to the top (whereas your old male boss simply used bluster and bullying).
  Visualization: Nordstrom-suited adult version of the Mean Teen. Shoulder pads capable of playing football in.

• The Emasculating Bride
  Description: doesn't want to kill you, just enslave you.
  Visualization: Perect demure smile, bridal gown, holding handcuffs or a lasso, perhaps dreaming a "thought balloon" of screeching children and a minivan.

• The Girl Gone Wild
  Description: In high school she was the Mean Teen. In adulthood she will be the Dresser for Success. But now in college, she's sowing more oats than Quaker--and will voraciously defend her right to do so.
  Visualization: Standing up in the back seat of a convertible, either flashing or simply thrusting her bosom forward. Expression of out-of-control glee.

THE MALE ROLES:

• The Maxim Magazine Frat Boy
  Description: Ape-ish, vulgar, boorish, yet boistrously unaware.
  Visualization: Abercrombie & Hilfiger designer slop, backward baseball cap, puking while holding a bottle of Goldschlager.

• The Clueless White 'Gangsta' Teen
  Description: Can't read, speak, or think. Can barely stand. Yet fantasizes about being a drug-running, woman-beating street tough.
  Visualization: Baggy butt-cleavage jeans, blank permanent-stoner expression, skateboard, lanky and hunched over.

• The Post-Dot-Com Hustler
  Description: Believes in Breaking All The Rules, especially rules that prevent him from doing anything he wants to anything (or anyone) he wants.
  Visualization: Loud "GQ" attire, Ray-Bans, smug smirk, cocky strut, posing in front of a huge-ass vehicle with anti-environmental and/or just plain rude bumper stickers.

• The Militia Creep
  Description: Wishes for the chance to create, from violence and chaos, a new world of total purity. Doesn't yet realize such a world would immediately declare him not pure enough.
  Visualization: Crew cut, huge-ass gun, stern stare, KKK robe showing beneath his fatigues.

• The Middle Class Dittohead
  Description: Watches TV and doesn't read "alternative" newspapers; and hence is personally responsible for everything wrong in the whole world.
  Visualization: The vacuous '50s daddy figure from the cartoon This Modern World.

• The Patriarchist
  Description: Exists only to oppress women; dreams of a world where men are men and women stay barefoot & pregnant.
  Visualization: Malicious-looking brute with slick hair and a slick thin moustache, in a disco suit with gold chains and a thick mound of fake chest hair.

• The Dunderheaded 'Guy'
  Description: From man-bashing TV commercials, the clueless househusband who can't even open a can of beans without a woman to help.
  Visualization: Clumsy oaf in the middle of a pratfall.

• The Self-Emasculated Wimp
  Description: Believes the only way a male can have a soul is to renounce his body. Eats a special macrobiotic diet devised by Chinese monks to completely suppress the sex drive. Women frequently tell him of their platonic respect for him, in between relationships with Patriarchists.
  Visualization: Ponytail down to here; paisley pajama-esque clothes, open-toed Earth Shoes.

• The Paternalistic Snot
  Description: The school principal, college professor, company president, court judge, government official, parole officer, doctor, cop, father, banker, or other authority figure whose only joy in life is keeping you down.
  Visualization: A sadistic yet somehow blasé expression, a more or less wrinkly face, and a more or less formal business suit.

• The Domesticated Husband
  Description: The perfectly trained mate. Ready and eager to perform any chore (from cunnilingus to grouting) without notice. Will be cheated on within a year and divorced within two.
  Visualization: Sweater, tastefully poofy curly blond hair, the expression of a puppy dog eager to please. Perhaps cooking, gardening, or mending socks.

• The Ethnic Threat
  Description: White women see him as a potential stealer of purses. White men see him as a potential stealer of jobs.
  Visualization: Thin; dressed in an overly-anxious-to-fit-in looking formal suit. Face is silhouetted (the particular ethnicity of this man, whatever it is, isn't the point).

• The Perfect Man, Who's Gay
  Description: Perfect BECAUSE he's gay and therefore safely unavailable; the object/recipient of female fantasies involving every possible virtue.
  Visualization: Perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, boyish looking (but not queen-y).

posted by clark 12:15 AM

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

TO AVE AND AVE NOT: As we've seen many times, the City of Seattle's favorite answer to everything is a construction project. Especially a construction project that's really a subsidized incentive for upscale gentrification. That's what's starting this week along University Way. Bureaucrats are even admitting the whole street-beautification scheme's intended to bring in, as a UW prof describes it, "a higher-end residential and commercial base." In other words, the removal of anything afforable and/or nonbland.

posted by clark 7:24 PM

Monday, June 24, 2002

COUGHING IT UP: The latest research sez tobacco could be even worse for you than the previous accepted wisdom believed. That's tobacco in and of itself. Yes, even without additives.

posted by clark 4:40 PM

Sunday, June 23, 2002

STILL GOING STEADY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the movie Singles, writer-director Cameron Crowe's light-'n'-fluffy love letter to Seattle and the striving, sincere young adults therein.

At the time of its release, it was the victim of a Warner Bros. marketing campaign that emphasized the suddenly-hot local bands in its audio background (the soundtrack CD came out months before the film did), rather than the characters or plot(s). When it turned out to be a frothy tale of six dating-scene survivors, only one of whom was a musician, certain audience expectations were shattered. Nevertheless, it had a respectable theatrical run and remains a decent-selling video title.

It's also the rumored unofficial inspiration for the Warner-produced sitcom Friends. (Check-list the similarities: A sextet of dreamy looking young Caucasians, representing a variety of serious and artistic careers, all of whom hang out at the same coffeehouse, most of whom live in the same apartment building that inexplicably has a couch in its front courtyard, and who head into and out of assorted romantic entanglements, sometimes with one another.)

According to the "grunge" stereotype popular in the national media of the film's time, young Seattlites (especially those involved in the rock scene) were alleged to be listless, rootless, directionless slackers. Crowe saw something quite different: Aware, ambitious moral-decision-makers who want to take charge of their lives, to make a difference in the world and to experience ultra-ecstatic true love, but who are (to varying degrees) thwarted by an urban society that wants to stick them into confining, unfulfilling roles.

Campbell Scott (the film's real male lead) plays a state transportation planner who's staked his whole up-n'-coming career on a proposed elevated-rail project he calls the Supertrain, bound to resolve rush-hour jams, slow down suburban sprawl, and create a more Euro-like urban community. (Any similarity to currently hyped elevated-transit proposals is purely coincidental.)

Scott's main affection object, played by Kyra Sedgwick, has some not-completely-identified job trying to stop water pollution.

And Matt Dillon's messy-haired musician character is shown by film's end to be the most courageous of the lot. He systematically, indefatigably works on getting his girlfriend bac, just as he works on getting his musical career off the ground. His no-compromise stance toward realizing his dreams makes him a heroic ideal to which the other characters can only try to emulate.

That said, Singles remains a fairly dumb film. The gag scenes and plot complications are way too predictable. The drab lines and situations given to the characters mirror the drab life-destinies they're trying to escape. But it gives its characters far more dignity than so many later mating-n'-dating comedies.

And, of course, local viewers l love the many geographic inaccuracies (Sheila Kelley's character bicycles from south Lake Union across the Fremont Bridge and into the Pike Place Market in successive shots), the now-gone sites (RKCNDY), and the now-gone cameo players (Wayne Cody, Layne Staley).

posted by clark 8:57 PM

ARCHIVES:

• Past weblog entries.
• 2002, 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.