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Sept/Oct 1999 issue (#41)
Seattle pop culture maven Clark Humphrey and New York novelist Samuel R. Delany may not belong together in a review, but such a seemingly incongruous pairing represents a phenomenon both writers see as a prime advantage of civilization. In the city, people from different backgrounds can meet and get along, have arguments, become lovers, share adventures, and go back to their own lives with a better sense of their culture and of themselves. Meanwhile, in New York as in Seattle, developers and civility-crazed politicians have ruined neighborhoods and reduced diversity to a small world after all, where only the rich can play. Much as I'd like to believe that the real life of a city will survive all venal ploys and good intentions, the trend each of these authors documents in his own way is well financed, shrewdly packaged, and generally accepted by an apathetic public. Despite the power of the opposition and the lassitude of the people they might recruit as allies, Delany and Humphrey mount exuberant and persuasive arguments for a vital kind of citizenship.
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NYU), Delany explores Manhattan's notorious district of porno theaters and other cheap thrills. Times Square has recently been subjected to a massive redevelopment project, purging the neighborhood of its former denizens. Tourists can feel at home--or at least, unthreatened--as they tour a theme park version of the city. While police roust the undesirables, the Disney Corporation heads the redevelopment. In a wonderfully wide-ranging pair of long essays, Delany busts the skyscraper finance racket, views the sterilizing effects of gentrification, and extols the benefits of urban living. One interesting irony is that the former Times Square, with its pimps, whores, thieves, and hustlers had a way of policing itself, so that a middle-aged, middle class black college professor (Delany) could feel reasonably safe and comfortable.
Most of the book belongs to "Times Square Blue," his memoir as an observer and a vigorous participant in the theater cruising scene. Delany accosts men nobody else will go near, strikes up conversations that often lead to relationships. Even more remarkable than his courage and his forthright ability to tell what he has done is the sympathetic picture he presents of the old Times Square. It's a place which, despite a seedy reputation, made up a community that was infinitely more congenial and civilized than the clean-cut vision of Disney hell which replaces it.
Midway through Delany's book, I wondered whether a university press was the best publisher for this book to reach its widest audience. This terrifically entertaining and frequently hilarious glimpse at a world everybody wonders about but nobody really knows could have been a runaway hit. Eventually, though, the book develops into something more ambitious and eclectic than a publisher bent on cranking out bestsellers might be able to handle.
The essential but rarely asked questions of publication stalk any exceptional book, while run-of-the mill books are taken for granted. When Clark Humphrey announced he was making a book out of his old (1986-1999) Misc. columns "on popular culture in Seattle and beyond," I wondered why anybody would publish it. Much as I have admired his column, these impassioned amalgamations of essays, rants, jokes, and lists seemed more topical than timeless.
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The trend each of these authors documents in his own way is well financed, shrewdly packaged, and generally accepted by an apathetic public |
He solved this problem two ways. For one, he published The Big Book of Misc. himself (Misc. Media, PMB #217, 2608 2nd Ave., Seattle, Wa. 98121). Using lightning print books-on-demand technology, he produces fairly handsome perfect-bound books to fill orders. And, he organized material from the old columns into sections (e.g. Northwest Politics, Seattle People, Designs for Living) surrounded by marginalia, so each topic contains news and commentary spanning over a decade while notes retain the breezy cross-referential character of the column: you can learn something and have fun at the same time.
After popping up in ArtsFocus, thriving as a zine, and running in The Stranger, Misc. now appears on-line (http://www.miscmedia.com). The mid-century concept of a newspaper column with a little of everything may seem dangerously out of step in this supposed age of specialization, but as Humphrey has written, "It's not considered cool to be ignorant of your culture." He has long advocated the need to be aware of politics, art, sports, television and a thousand other things, and he has often taken delight in spotting relationships between different areas. He has also cantankerously vented pet peeves (such as aging hippies) well after many of us have seen these dead horses flayed, hauled off, and made into glue.
This leads to a criticism of something which isn't entirely Humphrey's fault--and more applies to the cumulative effect of following his columns over the years than to the experience of reading pieces of them reassembled in book form. Much of this stuff tends to sound the same. Greedy developers in 1986 don't behave much differently from greedy developers in 1999. Sports teams, situation comedies, junk food, political ploys tend to derive from earlier versions of themselves and then to be recycled, as if with a vengeance.
And yet, things change. By mostly focusing on one place and keeping his reliably personalized crap detector in working order, Humphrey has followed the changes by sifting through more stuff than most of us care to know. Just as it's not necessary to be familiar with Times Square to appreciate Delany's account of urban succession, you don't have to know Humphrey or Seattle to appreciate this tour through thirteen years in the life of a city.