Thursday, January 30, 2003

THE DAYS are getting ever-so-slightly longer, but it still feels like early winter around here, socio-psychologically. Everywhere you look around these parts, there's bad news.

Chubby & Tubby finally closes this week.

Fallout Records, the feisty indie music and zine store that supported the print MISC since its relaunch three years ago, is shutting down next month.

The Paradox Theater, which mounted underage rock gigs for the past three and a half years (at the old University Theater, where yr. web editor once promoted some silly little B-movie matinees), is shutting down this weekend; though its operators promise to promote all-ages shows at other sites.

The gorgeous streamlined ferry boat Kalakala is in danger of being sold out-of-state without a quick massive arrival of restoration funds.

Dozens more of Seattle's most talented creative people are splitting town, including two of the print MISC's most valued past contributors.

Boeing, now essentially a branch-plant operation of McDonnell-Douglas, continues to churn out massive layoffs while starting up a job-blackmail scheme in which its three or four production cities will surely be asked to pay subsidies for the right to have the company's next passenger-plane assembly operation.

Even mind-numbing shit jobs are being lost in vast numbers across the local economy. Nearly 2,000 telemarketers have been canned in Washington, as various companies consolidate their "call centers" into low-wage states (or countries). And word has it that computer programming, seen only eight years ago as THE profession of the century, risks becoming a dead-end career, as big corporations ship whole information-tech departments off to India and Singapore.

The politicians around here are playing a game of one-downsmanship, each striving to combine the most brutal cuts against programs to aid the poor with the most pious public apologies for same.

Personally, I've gone from underemployed to unemployed. I only get sleep one night out of every three (no I don't know why). I've felt like giving up the daily grind of submitting resumes to everybody in town, for jobs I don't even want. But I don't know what to give it up for.

And, of course, the national political/economic situation is as sorry as it's been since at least the early Watergate era.

Maybe the Erotic Art Festival tomorrow at Town Hall can bring at least a little bit of life/hope back to the memescape.

posted by clark 1:16 PM

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

SURE NUFF, the print MISC is delayed still, this time not of our making. Some outlets should get it by Friday.

OUTLINE SKATING: Regular readers of this space know we love bullet lists, outlines, and the other trappings of precision humor. Some persons, however, still apparently believe "real writing" hasta be obtuse & obfuscatin'. Even daily-paper writers, who must state their premises clearly, occasionally fall under this delusion.

That's the best reasoning I could figure for a recent Chicago Tribune gripe-piece ragging about PowerPoint presentations. Writer Julia Keller claims they're ruining the art of argumentative discussion, by turning every topic into a rigid sequence of oversimplified "talking points" and preventing impromptu exchanges among speakers and audiences.

In real life, those sins are only committed when the presenters are either:

• unsure of themselves in public,

• unsure of themselves with a particular audience (say, bosses or customers), or

• intellectually lazy.

The article includes several facetious examples of famous speeches reduced to easily-digestible PowerPoint lists. (Here's another, visualized in presentation-slide format.) Go ahead and have a quick laugh, but then take another look. These gag translations actually reveal the soundness of the original authors' arguments and the clarity of their thinking. Far from destroying the magic of the original speeches, these latter-day outlines could be useful tools for teaching modern-day folks how to think, write, and speak with similar clarity.

Keller also seems to claim outline-based presentations are incapable of expressing complex ideas. Bunk. Any good Hegelian knows any expressive or instructive statement flows from a sequence of hypotheses, antitheses, and syntheses. Details follow from sound structures, as much as any soundly-constructed building starts with a solid foundation and a sturdy frame.

Here's a particularly beautifully written example: A 1930 manual published by RCA, intended to teach movie-theater projectionists how to properly exhibit those newfangled talking pictures.

The 211-page document travels a vast path from the laboratory basics of sound and electricity, to the procedures of operating the crude ealry theater sound equipment, to advanced lessons in maintenance and troubleshooting. But it remains thoroughly readable and comprehensible, because its clear copywriting arises from a clear structure. All "technical writing" worthy of the name exhibits these traits—and so do the most effective philosophical, argumentative, persuasive, and political writings.

When properly used, tools such as PowerPoint can help an author or presenter create clear structures. Some of the people these tools are helping are people who weren't previously familiar with these principles, or with the general basics of writing and public speaking. PowerPoint is helping these rank amateurs become at least semi-adept amateurs. Some of their resulting works will feature less-than-Shakespearean elequence. But they can, with a modicum of creative discipline, effectively say what the speaker-presenter wants to say.

So don't be another tech-bashing fogey, like so many culture-critics and newspaper essayists unfortunately are. If you don't need software assistance to help organize your thoughts, you don't have to knock those who do.

Besides, the PC-based "slide" lecture is another great addition to our collection of late-20th-early-21st-century literary forms. (Some others: FAQ lists, video-game hint sheets, e-mail investment scam solicitations, filmmaking storyboards, self-help quizzes, affirmation tapes, and shopping-channel spiels.) All of these vocabularies and more are just waiting for some clever writers to relaunch as more or less serious storytelling techniques.

posted by clark 1:48 PM

Sunday, January 26, 2003

UPDATE: The oh-so-long-awaited new-look print MISC will finally, knock on Formica, be out starting this Tuesday at select sales outlets around town. Subscribers should get it by the end of the week.

SOME MAGAZINES are so desperate to fill their pages with sex-related texts, they end up hyping alleged "trends," sometimes contradictory, sometimes in the same issue.

Case in point: New York mag, which in a recent issue declares NYC young-marrieds to be a stress-defeated "Generation Sexless," yet also proclaims a new upsurge in casual sex thanks to online dating services giving women more anonymity and power within such situations.

OK OK, less married sex and more unmarried sex aren't contradictory. Except another story in the mag claims more NY-ers now want to marry and are having less casual sex.

Meanwhile, USA Today claims to have discovered a vast trend of listless middle-aged husbands, incapable of satisfying wives who came of age in the sex-lib '70s and who still want it as often as possible.

Confused? Hey, it's an innately confusing topic to begin with. Live w/it.

Or maybe it's not so confusing, if you try to wrap it all into a meta-trend.

Say, a grossly overgeneralized meta-trend of Women Who Want It All, or at least as much of It as can fit around other weekly tasks; facing dudes who can't be the Sole Breadwinner anymore (and are often not winning any bread right now), who don't know what role to play opposite assertive women, and some of whom (particularly in art-and-media cities) might feel intimidated by some of the "cute" and "funny" wholesale male bashing in contemporary pop-cult.

This ties in, tangentally, with this site's "Peepees for Peace" campaign, advocating the deployment of passionate male energy in the quest toward a better world for all. This call for a metaphoric rebalancing in the public sphere can easily equate with a need for more literal rebalancing in the private sphere.

I'm not advocating male superiority but male equality. As John Cusak's platonic ladyfriend says in Say Anything, "There are millions of guys. Be a man."

This country needs men.

Not the prepubescent schoolyard bullies of the political right.

Not the self-emasculated gender-guilt trippers of the political left.

Not the bumbling dads and incompetent husbands of the sitcoms.

Not the Pavlovian dorks of Maxim and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.

We need men who are equally eager to learn how to rebuild a dying economy and to learn how to lick clit. Who can create both new opportunities and new fantasy-role games.

We need more of the positive masculine qualities of bravery, responsibility, zeal, intelligence, and perserverence; at home and in the outside world. (The fact that juxtaposing the words "positive" and "masculine" is so rare in alt-culture, even a seeming oxymoron, is but another symptom of our problem.)

We need men who are confident enough to work and live alongside strong women, neither as master nor as slave. Men who can give women the kind of attentive, soul-meshing love neither vibrators nor blue pills can give by themselves.

Such men are made, not born. How to make them? I wish I knew.

posted by clark 11:36 AM

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