Saturday, April 05, 2003

AS YOU CAN TELL near the upper left corner of this page, our photo exhibit City Light, City Dark is now online, via the PhotoJo site. You're all cordially invited to buy as many prints of as many images in the collection as you can fit above your couch, over your bed, and at any other revered place in your home or in the home of a loved one.

posted by clark 1:50 PM

Friday, April 04, 2003

THAT EVER-CLEVER MEDIA MANIPULATOR has done it again, by making and then not releasing a pro-peace music video in such a way that it would gain even more exposure. Too bad she still can't act.

posted by clark 10:16 AM

ARUNDHATI ROY offers up a long, impassioned rant about what he insists is a war being fought for "a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony."

posted by clark 10:04 AM

Thursday, April 03, 2003

TO TRY AND FIGURE OUT things to say about this current mess, I've gone back to a couple of the past century's most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I'm about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. The pop-critic's best known "serious" book popularized the catch phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village." But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers' conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in '64; he was working on it as early as '59), the "cool medium" of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience's attention and involvement) was overtaking such "hot media" as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society's whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called "The Spectacle." It's both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a "hotter" medium since McLuhan's time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is "hotter" still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies' favorite medium, is ultra "hot" by McLuhan's definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I've previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the "Two-Minutes Hate" scene in George Orwell's 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell's world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: "Because 2003 is 19 years too late.")

Certainly we've got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the "inner party," a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen's thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war "coverage," deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward "patriotic" fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today's Republican INGSOC doesn't yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media's own push toward fractured demographics mean there's no undifferentiated mass of "proles" to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can't get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.

posted by clark 2:40 PM

FROM WHERE MIGHT YOU SUPPOSE the officially titled "Dullest Blog in the World" originates? Might one guess, say, Britain?

posted by clark 10:35 AM

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

SIGN OF ARRIVAL AND/OR ASSIMILATION: CBC just ran a commercial for Zero brand liquid detergent, promising a goth-gal it would keep her clothes their blackest.

posted by clark 3:06 PM

REMEMBER: THERE ARE NO 'GOOD GUYS' IN THIS WAR. The fundamentalists in Washington DC want to turn the clock back to the 19th century; the fundamentalists in the Middle East want to turn the clock back to the 18th century. Neither side is particularly fond of real democracy; each would guiltlessly order its own troops to (even tactically) worthless deaths for the sake of "honor" or the purity of the cause.

This also isn't a matter of "winning" or "losing." Saddam will eventually disappear from the world stage; though a regime as internally repressive as his could easily survive after him, even with US backing. At this point, it's become a matter of minimizing or stopping the meaningless carnage, and of halting the neocons' dreams of empire abroad and their war against freedom at home.

posted by clark 1:25 PM

DAVID CORN wonders whether the war, and the W regime, might soon stumble upon the "Hubris of the Neocons."

CLEVER ENTREPRENEURS have designed a pro-peace, pro-love, and pro-active T-shirt bearing the slogan "French Kiss for Peace."

posted by clark 12:59 PM

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

CANADIAN COMMENTATOR ANDY LAMEY sez we shouldn't consttantly rail against Bush's language blunders. For one thing, we can still "criticize the U.S. President based on his bad policies. It ain't like there's a shortage of those." For another, "Language bullying -- or prescriptivism, as it's more politely called -- is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain wrong and cranky."

posted by clark 11:30 AM

WE SEEK GOOD NEWS wherever we can find it, so here's a link to some valiant folk trying to preserve the traditional Clallam language.

AN APOLOGY to those who tried to see my photo show the past week and a half. The Nico Gallery apparently had a water-heater explosion. We'll try to remount the show elsewhere later this year, and will soon post all the images online.

posted by clark 11:25 AM

Monday, March 31, 2003

THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it's currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.

The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store's founder George Latsois. (He'd died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)

Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He'd started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he'd consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.

He built it from there according to that mid-'90s local business mantra, "Get Big Fast." It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local '90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store's operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got 'em!).

Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city's intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that's become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don't have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we'd rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.

Compare Raban's depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle's (fill-in-the-blank) isn't an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.

I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don't settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don't have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.

posted by clark 1:30 AM

Sunday, March 30, 2003

DAVID BRODER breaks from the Washington Post's recent deluge of Dubya-worship to dare to question a new Federal budget that sacrifices almost everything from education to children's health, all for the sake of the gazillionaires' sacred tax cuts....

WHILE SUSAN FALUDI ponders whether we're seeing the death of certain American mythologies, such as those of morality and justice.

posted by clark 12:34 AM

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