Saturday, July 06, 2002

ANOTHER UNEXPECTED SOURCE is now speaking out against record-industry greed.

posted by clark 4:46 PM

Friday, July 05, 2002

THEY MIGHT NOT WORK at their advertised uses, but those "diet belts" on TV infomercials turn out to be great vibrators.

AUTHOR KEVIN PHILLIPS has a simple theory for all the corporate scandals: When the rich get too rich, you end up with "a taste for speculation and highly developed sense of "gimme" that winds up jeopardizing both the American economy and the vitality of the American democracy."

posted by clark 3:26 PM

DIGITIZED VERSIONS of those music-video precursors briefly shown in film jukeboxes in bars, Scopitones!

posted by clark 11:10 AM

COMIC-BOOK WRITER MICAH WRIGHT has taken old WWII domestic-propaganda posters and added new texts to create some scathing anti-Bush satires. (Warning: The site is on one of those free servers with a daily hit quota, so you might have to access it early in the day.)

posted by clark 10:51 AM

Thursday, July 04, 2002

BRITISH AUTHOR WILL HUTTON has some mostly-lucid ideas in a hereby-linked essay in the Guardian newspaper on why and how American pro-corporate ideology is spent, and is the chief reason for our current economic mess and biz-ethics scandals.

The guy's wrong, however, when he puts the blame for this ideology on some particularly southern-U.S. legacy:

"The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism."

In real life, some of our worst white racists have historically been in Northeastern cities and Midwestern small towns. The old northern oil and rail barons of a century ago successfully bought and sold politicians as routinely as financiers do today. And "America First" was historically a slogan that kept us out of WWI's first four years, and was principally championed by the midwestern agitator W.J. Bryant and the Californian mining heir W.R. Hearst.

Yes, there's a certain flavor to the type of conservative bombast that eminates from the likes of Texas and Florida. But equally rancid flavors of greed and arrogance can be found all over this vast land mass. Our own Nor'Western corporatethink cuisine is a deceptively mild stew, which hides its base of biz-as-usual crony favoritism under thick yet bland sauces of bureaucratic "process" and rigged "citizen input."

So on this day when you're going to hear umpteen gazillion mushy tributes to how wonderful we are, try to remember the nation is built on a fundamental contradiction between the concepts of individual freedom and capitalist licentiousness. The corporate libertarians, who openly invoke the former to excuse the latter, only make the contradiction more visible by pretending it doesn't exist.

posted by clark 11:04 AM

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

ONCE AGAIN, someone's proposing ideas to make Bellevue a more pedestrian-friendly town. Only this time, this group is actually suggesting real pro-walker moves (more sidewalk-side storefronts, more crosswalks, landscaped walkways). Previous, highly publicized official moves to supposedly encourage walking in Bellevue have really been moves to discourage walking in Bellevue, and usually involved temporarily tighter enforcement of the DON'T WALK lights that run for three minutes in between three seconds of WALK.

posted by clark 10:39 AM

Monday, July 01, 2002

THERE WAS ANOTHER GAY PRIDE PARADE last Sunday, the 29th one in this town. This year's was perhaps bigger and more outrageous than ever.

Certainly there's a greater need for out-loud outness this year. Our appointed leaders have decreed that this nation must fight back against sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant murderers by becoming more sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant and murderous. Such a scenario would most certainly be unfriendly toward queer civil rights.

So out came the Outs, as forcefully outrageous as ever. There were the bar- and beer-company floats, the community-organization floats, the religious-tolerance marchers, the motorcycle lesbians, the drag-queen troupes, the performance artists, and the AIDS-awareness leafleters.

(Comparatively under-represented this year: Topless women; local politicians of any attire. Apparently absent: The tiny Gay AA delegation, which had always been vastly overwhelmed by the beer floats.)

Dan Savage used to say the Pride Parade ought to be at night, downtown, and more confrontative in nature.

But the Broadway, high-noon format is a more Seattle-style approach. It's funky and quirky, silly and celebratory.

And yes, it's assimilationist. It fetes the arrival of lesbians and gays as accepted and unthreatening members of the local affluent class.

Of course, it helps that the corporate-Democrat local power structure luuvvvs gay culture. More precisely, it loves a certain vision of gay culture that's all about show tunes and interior decoration and anti-Republican political organizing, and only very understatedly about oral-genital contacts with persons of the same sex. The Pride Parade gays are sex-positive, but they know when to keep the curtains drawn.

LAST YEAR AT THIS TIME, we openly wondered in this space why nongays couldn't have a sex-positive summer exhibition. SIlly us--we'd forgotten about the Fremont Solstice Parade, held (last year as this) just one week prior to the gay event.

Just as the gay parade isn't exclusively gay, the Fremont parade is by no means exclusively straight. But it's got a het aesthetic to it. Where the gay parade is about loudly and in many cases campily proclaiming one's queerness (and one's legal/social right to make such proclamations), the Fremont parade is about comfortably living in one's oddness and intermixing with everyone else's oddnesses.

The nude bicyclists, an unofficial part of the parade for over half a decade now, are only the most obvious incarnation of this aesthetic. Many, if not most, of the parade's scheduled acts and icons involved zestful, vigorous depictions of masculine and feminine archetypes, both old (Pan, Pandora) and recent (loggers, businesswomen); sometimes in conflict with one another but all residing, however uneasily, in tghe same universe.

Heterosexuality, of course, is more likely to generate children. Such persons were in clear attendance at the gay parade, but were everywhere at the Fremont parade. They received candy, made chalk drawings, shook the hands of costume characters, were the chief audience of several floats and performers, and were the partial subject of the parade's most intriguing float.

Based on the related topics of pregnancy and its avoidance, the float featured a traditional fertility goddess at the front, egg-and-sperm representations on the back, real-life moms-to-be, and real-life moms with their progeny (not visible in the shot). All around the float walked costume characters dressed up as assorted contraceptive devices. Possible implied meanings: Trying to get pregnant and trying not to get pregnant are merely different aspects of the whole shtick of being what gays used to call "a breeder;" sexual attraction, and the cycle of life of which it is a key part, are both to be joyously celebrated.

Self-help mogul Stephen Covey once wrote something about a "maturity continuum," in which dependent children become independent adults, who eventually recognize their interdependence with each other. I'll add that true heterosexuality is also about that, at least ideally--not about greedy conquests or individual preenings, but about connecting to another person (and indirectly, spiritually, to the whole of the species).

It's also about getting over the fear, reaching beyond your own head, negotiating the stickier parts (literally and figuratively) of such interconnections. That's certainly a skill the world needs to get better at, on all levels.

I've written previously that we live in "a MISC world," filled with untold numbers of cultures, subcultures, sub-subcultures, ethinicities, religions, and sex/love proclivities. Real heterosexuality is a key, perhaps the key, toward making such a world work--learning not only to tolerate but to share enduring love with someone fundamentally different from yourself.

What some socio-philosophers call "pansexuality," I call ultimate heterosexuality--one big motley melange of women and men, and also of gays, lesbians, bis, trannies, SM-ers, swingers, monogamists, celibates, exhibitionists, voyeurs/voyeuses, femmes, butches, fairies, studs, princesses, and folks who don't know what the heck they are; all finding consensual mind-bending togetherness with whomever, all ssupporting one another in stumbling through this miasma known as human existence.

posted by clark 3:27 PM

AS A TRIBUTE TO CANADA DAY, an unexpected tribute to the True North from the once-promising novelist Douglas Coupland. (His comments about the "Canadian character" toward the end are, unremarkably, a lot like what I've been saying about the Seattle character.)

posted by clark 10:53 AM

Sunday, June 30, 2002

TODAY, MISCmedia IS DEDICATED to Rosemary Clooney--singer, actress, aunt of Batman, mother of Twin Peaks' Agent Rosenfield, and ex-wife of Cyrano de Bergerac.

posted by clark 8:50 PM

A REAL ANGEL OUT THERE should consider investing in my dream travel book project, in which I'd go to all the places I've always wished to go--including America's wildest museums.

MEANWHILE CLOSER TO HOME, execs at the company that built Fremont's gargantuan waterfront office park defended it Friday, after an architect wrote in the P-I that the place was just too big for the neighborhood and too gentrifying to boot. The execs argued that Fremont's a cleaner, upscalier, and more wholesome place with the offices:

"To appreciate Lake Union Center now, it is helpful to reflect back to 1986, the starting point for redevelopment efforts in Fremont: The Red Door Ale House was the Fremont Tavern, not a place for families...."

I dunno 'bout you, but to me the word "tavern" (or the phrase "ale house") would imply "not a place for families."

IN OTHER BOOZE NOOZE: Buried in an article about the fact that there's at lest one winery in every state nowadays is the fact that Wash. state "has added a winery every 20 days since 1997," and surpassed N.Y. state as the nation's #2 wine producer and probably its biggest per capita. But can we scarf down enough brie and Breton crackers to go with it?

posted by clark 8:26 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.