Friday, January 10, 2003

WIRED PONDERS whether PCs are from Mars and Macs are from Venus.

SURE ENOUGH, as soon as I'm no longer writing Obits a major passing occurs in the Northwest scene. Miller Brewing is closing the 106-year-old former Olympia Brewery, the region's last mass-market beer factory and Thurston County's biggest industrial employer.

It comes four years after Seattle's Rainier Brewery came to a similar end. Both shutdowns (along with those of Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Carling/Heidelberg in Tacoma, and the Lucky Lager plant in Vancouver WA) were directly caused by the industry's massive consolidation. Miller's contract-brewing arrangement with Pabst meant the Oly plant made the brand names formerly produced at all five big Northwest breweries (though Pabst has been phasing out what was left of the Olympia and Rainier brands this past year).

The Oly site was once the west's second biggest brewery after Coors, but is now the smallest of Miller's seven facilities. Management apparently decided to surplus it rather than add a recently required wastewater-treatment facility. So, just maybe, It really was The Water.

(The 125-year tradition of sudsy manufacturing in the PacNW, of course, at dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs, whose business plans aren't as brutally reliant on mass production and mass marketing.)

posted by clark 1:19 PM

Thursday, January 09, 2003

THE LESS-THAN-GOOD NEWS: My last regular textual contribution to The Stranger, the Obits column, has been suspended as of three weeks ago. It might come back later, should the paper's ad volume go back up.

THE MUCH BETTER NEWS: The new-look print MISC is finally ready, and should be back from the printer any day now.

It's a regular-magazine sized,, 48-page volume just packed with exciting stuff to read and/or look at.

It's the "Hipster Parents & Swingin' Kids" issue. "Theme" stories include:

• Punk dad Julian Fox defends the honor of his punk daughter from slanderous school administrators.

• Debra Bouchegnies remembers the lighter side of a bedridden pregnancy.

• Charlotte Quinn becomes a feminist single mom, attaining true independence by having a dependent.

• Stacey Levine finds creepy Oedipal undercurrents on a TV cooking show.

• Doug Nufer thinks baseball is behaving like a bad parent.

• New stepdad Eric Nygren watches nice "progressive" parents trying to re-segregate the schools.

• Clark Humphrey (yr. humble editor) differentiates between real families and the fantasy that is "The Family," and also offers lesson plans on how to tell your kids the sad truth about Bush.

• Illustrator Sean Hurley finds the inifinities of the universe in a little child.

• Susan Purves thinks punk legend John Doe should stick to grownup music.

But that's not all! The issue also contains these other great features:

• Yr. editor asks his fellow men to rise up for peace.

• Tom Deluxe shares sure-fire moneymaking ideas.

• Julie McGalliard discusses her worst job ever.

• Filmmaker John Michael McCarthy claims American culture hasn't produced anything of value since Elvis died.

• Doug Nufer and his parrot decide what TV shows we're going to watch.

• Spinoza Ray Prozak dissects the corpse of nihilistic heavy metal.

• Matt Briggs thinks fiction writers don't have to be gay to be "queer," but it helps.

• Doug Anderson wonders what winning the lottery would be like.

• Cartoonist David Lasky and writer Tatiana Gill recall a wild night of naked beer drinking and frozen-pizza eating.

And that's still not all! There's also news briefs, Ms. MISC, a David Lasky comic, a photo essay about autumn in the city, a funny In/Out list, a junk food review, recommendations of books, videos, and CDs, and even a few scattered typographical errors (can you find them all?).

The splendiforous MISC #118 will be available at select retail outlets starting in mid-January for a mere $3.95 US; or you can order it by sending a check or money order to MISC, 1400 Hubbell Place, #1314, Seattle WA 98101.

posted by clark 12:53 PM

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

IN CONTRAST to an item a few items below this one, here's a piece of more serious media criticism (actually a review of a book of media criticism). The big point here: Presidential campaign reporters got stuck on a few one-note characterizations (such as Gore as an exaggerator), then shoehorned everything they saw to fit these stereotypes.

posted by clark 12:33 PM

Monday, January 06, 2003

THERE ARE JUST too damn many B-horror and exploitation films that aren't yet out on DVD. The kind folks at DVD Talk have listed a few dozen of them (Freaks, Jaws 3-D), along with some past listings that finally made the digital leap (Squirm).

posted by clark 11:00 PM

STILL MORE NEWS on our Peepees for Peace campaign: There's now a "Masturbate for Peace" website, replete with bumper-sticker designs and silly little jokes n' puns (and links to Viagra-selling sites). But it also has a more serious tone in its intro:

"We've entered a time of wars and rumors of wars. Threats of terrorism and mass destruction have filled the world with fear and brought us perilously close to worldwide conflict.

There's no greater antidote for war than love. Feelings of hatred and distrust form the necessary basis of armed confrontation. Replace those negative feelings with love and you're halfway towards resolution of any conflict.

However, any real love must start from within. You can't love others without loving yourself first. And, of course, masturbation is the greatest expression of self-love. So it's natural that we, the citizens of the world, are joining together to masturbate for peace.

As we begin with this act of self-love, we encourage others to do the same, to take pleasure in life and to share masturbation's positive energy with a world in need."

Of course, I'll say being joyful to yourself isn't enough. We must go beyond our own selves, sowing Tears for Fears's proverbial seeds of love.

posted by clark 4:23 PM

HEREBY LINKED: AN EXAMPLE of lefty "media criticism."

You'll notice there's no actual mention of anything any newspaper published, just a list of topics critique author Alan Miller Kunerth believes are important but hasn't seen in the papers. Kunerth doesn't bother to report these stories himself; he merely complains that nobody else has.

(Kunerth's title, "The Decline of Newspaper Journalism," implies there'd been some past Golden Age when the regular news sections of big-city dailies gave the kind of analytical, conclusion-drawing, progressive-minded work Kunerth doesn't see there today. I'm not so sure most big US papers ever did a whole lot of that.)

While Kunerth's piece was posted at commondreams.org, it's of the same shtick as that perfected by Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting: Tease your readers with the hint that you know about some Really Big Shit the bigtime papers won't tell you about, then rant on and on about why the bigtime papers won't tell it, but never get around to yourself actually telling your readers just what this Really Big Shit is.

When I said a few weeks ago that this country really didn't have a "liberal media" and could use one, this was part of what I meant. We need a more empowered, more proactive, less defeatist shtick than this. We need writers (on websites, in ground-level zines, and elsewhere) who are willing to tell what they believe the Really Big Shit to be; to go beyond the whine and actually make the kind of media they want to exist.

posted by clark 12:53 PM

PASSAGE (George Orwell, quoted by Sam Smith at prorev.com:)

"Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us."

posted by clark 12:36 PM

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