Rock On: An Office Power Ballad
by Dan Kennedy
(Algonquin Books) $14.95.
If you’re thinking that it’s at least 35 years too late for a book
about the death of rock by corporate hands, you’re right. It should
come as a surprise to no one that the office jobs behind the
commodification of popular music stand in stark contradiction to the
ethos that very music is ostensibly pushing. Yet dramatizing this
surprise is exactly the tack that Dan Kennedy takes in Rock On: An
Office Power Ballad. Kennedy accepts a job in the promotions
department of Atlantic Records and expects he is entering the
black-and-white pictures in the album sleeves of his youth. He thinks
he will be walking among the Stones and Zeppelin. What he gets is the
Donnas and the Darkness. And even then it is the former doing
public-service announcements, the latter at a board meeting.
All of which is to say I feel like I should not like this book as
much as I do; it is unnecessary, not to mention easy to the point of
cruelty, to mock a corporate giant’s signed talent. It is Kennedy’s
voice that pulls it off. He has convincing innocence and expectation,
the genuine elation of someone who has struggled through shit jobs for
an entire early adulthood and believes he has finally found something
real. Whether Kennedy’s innocence is a pose ceases to matter. What we
get is a year-and-a-half behind-the-scenes assignment: a humor writer
going undercover to show us that this really is as bad as we think it
probably is, a bunch of oblivious and overpaid suits surrounded by the
recurring question of how has this come to be.
The question quickly becomes irrelevant. One of the two triumphant
points of the book is that corporate rock is dying from the terminal
wound inflicted by downloadable music, and that it clearly had it
coming. Live by the rock, etc. The dinosaur that stomped all over your
youth is dying a slow and painful death and Kennedy is there to laugh
at it. The other triumphant moment this book captures comes from an
extracurricular Iggy Pop show, where the wiry old punk focuses his bile
at the VIP seats: “Betcha wish you weren’t fat! Jump down here you fat
fucks! I dare you to jump!” CHRISTOPHER SABATINI
Seattle Architecture:
A Walking Guide to Downtown
by Maureen Elenga
(University of Washington Press) $20.
The “Battle of Seattle” that everyone remembers happened on November
30, 1999; the “Battle of Seattle” that we have forgotten happened on
January 26, 1856. The 1999 battle erupted near the Washington State
Convention & Trade Center; the 1856 one erupted where the King
County Courthouse currently stands. The 1999 battle was between the
global justice movement and the governments that maintain the global
capitalist order; the 1856 battle was between Native Americans and the
U.S. government.
The 1999 battle of Seattle is mentioned (and not examined) in
Maureen Elenga’s new book, Seattle Architecture: A Walking Guide to
Downtown. Published by the Seattle Architecture Foundation, the
book offers historical backgrounds, maps, and 200-word descriptions of
prominent buildings in Belltown, Pioneer Square, the International
District, and the city’s civic and financial centers. Elenga’s writing
heats up a little when describing the dead decorative features of older
buildings. She loves elaborate cornices, modillions, bracketry,
cartouches, and the like. As for downtown’s modern and postmodern
buildings, they are located and mentioned in a language that is as
plain as possible. Here and there, we learn a thing or two about the
style/use of a place. Now and then, we are dished a technical tidbit.
In the end, we come close to learning nothing about what architecture
is: a real class struggle, an open battle for ideological dominance.
The book treats current and historical conflicts as mere information
and not as the essence, the very substance of every building we see and
enter. A walk through our city is a walk through the battle for
Seattle. CHARLES MUDEDE
Lust
by Ellen Forney
(Fantagraphics) $19.95.
How many Seattle-area orgasms have been indirectly attributable to
Ellen Forney? Every week, Forney translates one of The
Stranger‘s kink classified ads into a drawing. Where the written
ads can be gross, ridiculous, or bordering on desperate, the drawings
are funny, playful, and sinuous. This world would be a whole lot hotter
(and lighter) if it were full of Forney’s characters.
Now for the first time they’re gathered together in Forney’s first
hardback book, Lust. Even when you can’t quite figure out what
the hell these people plan to do to each other—one drawing of a
flower with an erect pistil nestling against a demure leaf reads:
“Latina pre-op transgender ver-top well-hung & bi male ver-bottom
couple seeks bi male &/or petite female &/or M/F or M/M couple
for erotic play & friendship”—you still get the gist. It’s
all about pleasure. JEN GRAVES
