Saturday, October 26, 2002

MARK YR. CALENDARS: Yr. humble web editor's gonna be a panelist at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.

It all goes down on Thursday, Nov. 7, 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There's no admission fee, so I fully expect everyone within the sound of my typing to get there.

posted by clark 6:20 PM

Friday, October 25, 2002

THE WASHINGTON STATE LOTTERY'S been running TV spots fantasizing about a big winner buying the Space Needle and moving it from Seattle to the remote Eastern Washington town of Moses Lake. Some viewers might see the ads' computer-animated imagery of wide-load trucks transporting the Needle across Snoqualmie Pass and imagine it represents just another outmoded tribute to individual greed.

But the ads' clever creators are also tapping into another fantasy—that of transferring wealth and prestige away from Seattle (where the economy's been horrid lately) to rural Washington (where the economy's been even worse, and has been for a much longer period of time). It's a blatant exploitation of what lotteries, and gambling in general, have always exploited—the dream of the futureless underclass citizen finally Making It.

True, the Needle's fictional purchaser in the commercials isn't depicted as a country cracker or a world-beaten working stiff, but the implication's all there: Buy a lottery ticket and, just maybe, you can transcend your dead-town life. P>

posted by clark 5:25 PM

ONE GUY BELIEVES Shrub's war-madness could be put in check if he had less lethal means to express it; thus the website "Buy Bush a Playstation2!"

posted by clark 4:59 PM

SOME MORE PAUL KRUGMAN, this time concerning the big-money boys' drive to create a permanent political advantage for themselves.

posted by clark 1:14 PM

Thursday, October 24, 2002

AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT, my mental energies have of late been focused upon one primary and apparently uncomfortable topic: What I can do for money (NOT things I could do that would be totally volunteer but really cool).

I'm aware I'm not the only US citizen in my current predicament, and I'm very aware I at least don't have any kids depending on me. But that doesn't mean I should just give up on my creative-career dreams and just send out 1,000 resumes a week for busboy jobs.

No, tuff times call for tuff thinking. I'm gonna get outside the envelope and start pushing the box (or is it the other way around?). I'm gonna find great new opportunities where others just find weed-strewn country ditches with a beater Camaro or two capsized and rusting away.

Areas I've looked into or thought about:

• Ghost-writing CEOs' memoirs;

• starting a restaurant (even more flaky a proposition than publishing, but one which banks seem to be more willing to lend to);

• starting a bookstore and/or boutique and/or coffeehouse;

• starting an investors' newsletter (maybe not the right year);

• designing collectible cell-phone calling cards;

• starting an indie-cred sex magazine full of escort ads (it's been done in Portland, but they've got more indie strip clubs to distribute such a mag in);

• creating a wacky cartoon character for snowboarders' T-shirts that could cross-over into a Nickelodeon series (but someone else would have to draw it);

• devising "alt-culture" versions of every known book-biz cash cow (self-help, investment guides, decorating guides, calendars, romance novels–anything except murder mysteries or celebrity-hype);

• learning to bet on horses;

• devising thousand-page grade-school-level novels for that emerging long-attention-span generation (sounds easy, except kid readers are infinitely more BS-intolerant than grownup readers);

• becoming an insurance attorney a la Wallace Stevens;

• making sex videos (character-based softcore, not loveless hardcore);

• abandoning the attempt at a commercial periodical and instead simply writing shit that really turns me on and putting it out in little paperbacks for global distro;

• starting a franchised chain of indie-rock clubs between Ellensburg and Pierre, making it more fiscally feasible for unsigned bands to tour the NW corner of the US (another such chain could be started between Ashland and Eureka);

• creating spoken-word comedy routines sold only on mail-order CDs (because, the ads, would say, they'd be "too clean and nice to ever be heard on the radio");

• starting grassroots propaganda campaigns on behalf of industrial-fiber plants other than hemp (I can see it now: "Flaxseedfest!");

• a line of "designer" wines in labels bearing the faces of famous people who died from alcoholism;

• devising career-planning guides exhorting parents to prepare their kids for the careers that had been "hot" a year before said planning guides were written;

• devising a TV survival show in which people have to do what any people who really have to survive together do (i.e., cooperate);

• devise a TV decorating show (with spinoff home videos, books, and magazines) on how to add more clutter to your life;

• curate an anthology of highbrow literary stories about U.S. sports other than baseball;

• start a commercial UHF TV station devoted to local entertainment programming (plus a few infomercials and really obscure reruns such as "Championship Bridge");

• discover a yet- (or not-currently-) exploited B-movie genre (explicit surgical dramas, musicals for heterosexuals);

• publishing lists of money-making ideas.

OK, some of these concepts are far less plausible than others. If I could only discern which ones they are. But at least I'm not trying to sell Internet stocks.

posted by clark 11:30 AM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

ONE OF THE MOST-OFTEN-WRITTEN RULES of online discussions that you know a discussion board/newsgroup/chat room's become useless once the guys in it start calling one another Nazis.

This is essentially what a P-I freelancer did in a scathing review of Dennis Miller's current touring comedy act.

It's too bad the reviewer stooped so low. The once-creative Miller's current routine, all full of pro-war blather and the kind of aggressively bigoted "attitude" found in the worst "morning zoo" radio talk hosts, could have easily been effectively denounced without such a tactic. After all, if you're complaining about Miller's cheap shots and name-calling, it's not wise to resort to cheap shots and name-calling yourself.

posted by clark 9:11 PM

NORTHWEST BOOKFEST, or as I call it, "The World-O-Words LiteRama," set up shop last weekend at one of Sand Point's ex-naval air hangars (not, as I'd previously said here, the same hangar used for the Friends of the Library book sales).

News accounts said attendance was back up from last year's event at the bland-modern Stadium Exhibition Center, and quoted several attendees as preferring the "funky old" atmosphere of the huge drafty structure originally built to house symbols of military power. Some of these quoted attendees said Bookfest belongs somewhere other than a standard sales-show hall, since books, after all, weren't just another business.

Books, of course, have been treated for some time as just another business, by the intellectual-property oligopolists who run that business. And also by ambitious entrepreneurs selling specific info to niche markets; such as Heather & Co., the publisher of Eat Without Fear: Help for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

The relative remoteness of the Sand Point site, which doesn't have direct bus service from downtown Seattle, did as much as the building's "funkiness" to help the event's goers believe themselves to be so darned special in that PBS-precious middlebrow way. Even the weather played its part, providing perfect tweed-sweater temperatures and waterfront grayout sightlines.

Book-biz realities, as I've monotonously said every year around Bookfest time, are a little different. There's no separate subculture of book readers, just as there's no separate subculture of CD listeners. There are now as many mega bookstores in Seattle as there are mega record stores.

There are subcultures (or niches) within the larger book biz. "Serious" literature is but one of those niches. What I like about Bookfest is the way it crowds so many of these niches into one room--the cookbook people, the travelogue people, the coffee-table-book people, the children's-chapter-book people, the antiquarian-book people, the nature-poetry people, the self-help people, the mystery people, the sci-fi people, and at least some aspects of the serious-lit people.

(Still underrepresented at Bookfest: Comics, zines, romances, erotica, translated lit, and PoMo/experimental lit.)

And oh yeah--there's another, locally quite popular, genre of "writing," the tattoo. This new U-District parlor's awning sign could easily represent not only what customers oughta seek in a tattoo parlor, but what some government/business leaders leaders seek for our local civic society.

posted by clark 8:42 PM

Sunday, October 20, 2002

LAST SUNDAY IN THIS SPACE, I discussed the value of continuing to read local newspapers, not just the NY Times.

But I also see value in trudging one's way thru the Cadillac of American newspapers (i.e., it's bigger than the others and weighted down with more luxury features, though it's still built on the same Chevy drive train).

F'rinstance, Paul Krugman's Sunday magazine section think-piece on America's immensely growing economic inequality, and how it's polluted politics, health care, foreign policy, social discourse, etc. etc.

It's good to see something this honest in a paper that's long (actually, just about always) been the voice of the economic elite. (I vaguely remember a writer (I don't remember who it was) complaining a year ago that the NY Times Sunday magazine section's editors rejected a piece he'd written about the homeless, asking him to make it more upscale.)

The backward distribution-O-wealth toward an increasingly out-of-touch Overclass isn't exactly an untold story. But it is undertold. Or rather, when it is told it's in a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees manner.

Anyone who regularly peruses the "alternative" press knows about the symptoms of an Overclass economy:

A Republican Party whose "ideology" is just a ramshackle structure of excuses for big-money butt kissing and power-grabbing.

A "New" Democratic Party concerned solely with preserving its own institutional existence, by striving to become just as big-money-friendly as the Republicans.

A "conservatism" prescribing authoritarian brutality to the downscale, libertine excess to the upscale.

A "liberalism" with plenty to say about recycling but little to say about luxury lifestyles that produce all those wastes; that abstractly worships M.L. King as a courageous leader (a sort-of civil-rights CEO) but ignores most of the issues he fought for; whose favorite "minorities" are upscale white women and upscale white gays.

A 'radicalism" centered parimarily around issues friendly to the "rebel" kids from affluent families (the fates of plants, animals, and "exotic" humans who conveniently don't live on the same continent).

A corporate society built not around making stuff, or even around profitably selling stuff, but around supporting the insatiable material demands of top executives by propping up the Almighty Stock Price.

An urban environment defiled by smoggy SUVs.

A suburban environment defiled by minimansions, ever larger and ever further apart.

A dumbed-down "mainstream" media in which only the big-money boys' side of any issue gets mentioned, in between lengthy pieces about entertainment celebrities.

A dumbed-down "alternative" media in which politics is reduced to demographic target marketing ("Oh how much more englightened we are than those mainstream dorks"), in between lengthy stories about "alternative" entertainment celebrities.

A "digital age" that was aggressively hyped as a tool for expression, empowerment, and equility; but which, in its pre-stock-crash form, generated even more obscene levels of stock-price and luxury-lifestyle nonsense, contributing to real-estate hyperinflation and massive demographic cleansing in many cities.

The Overclass economy might have carried the seeds of its own fall from grace. Between certain CEO scandals and a depression that's made millions aware of their own precarious fiscal states, it's at least a little harder this year to make excuses for giving the ultra-rich every damned thing they want.

But a fall from grace ain't the same thing as a fall.

The U.S. economy might not currently even know how to reform itself toward greater equity, despite experts' warnings that middle-class consumer confidence might be the only way out of this slump.

Most politicians are deathly afraid of doing anything that might threaten big-money campaign donations.

Most media outlets don't even want to think of showing or printing anything that would tarnish the upscale image they sell to advertisers. (When I interviewed for a job at the short-lived local mag Metropolitan Weekly, the publisher's first statement was the minimum average income he wanted his readers to have.)

No, the way out of our socio-political-economic mess won't come from the systems and institutions that helped us get into the mess.

It can only come by developing viable, inclusive, true alternatives to those systems and institutions; forcing those systems and institutions to adapt or die.

posted by clark 8:44 PM

THE STROKES are appearing Monday at the Paramount. But, as far as I've been able to determine, no Seattle media have mentioned the local angle to the fantabulous neo-pop-rockers' success. The producer of their CD is none other than longtime Seattle-scene stalwart Gordon Raphael, who'd been in Sky Cries Mary and at least 30 other bands. Raphael had been trying to keep a tiny NYC recording studio open when a series of schmooze-connections brought him to the band. The rest is infamy; he's now ensconced in London, knob-twiddlin' for assorted Next Big Thing acts. From the looks of this picture, he's become quite the neo-fop.

posted by clark 10:26 AM

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