Now about those fake dicks: They’re real! But not really –
they’re photographic images cut out of paper. You see them
when Saddam Hussein, who’s died and become Satan’s lover in
hell, starts waving them around from under the bed-clothes,
threatening poor Beelzebub with all kinds of untold
pleasures of Eros. Let your freak flag fly, we say.

But not even those fake dicks penetrate to the core appeal
of the “South Park” movie, a collaboration between Trey Parker
and Matt Stone, creators of the hugely popular Comedy
Central show. (If a distinction must be made, the fart jokes
are even funnier.)

“South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” is a
surprisingly cohesive piece of filmmaking — really. It’s
never a good idea to hold out much hope that a
half-hour
animated program will translate well to the big screen: The
herky-jerky, minimalist animation of “Beavis and Butt-head”
(entertaining enough in 30-minute wedges spliced with video
footage) proved too slack to sustain a feature-length movie.
Beavis and Butt-head are characters designed to be watched
from a slumped-down position in a chair at home, the kind of
thing you use to numb yourself out after a day of punching
cash-register (or computer) keys — or the kind of thing you
watch if, God forbid, you find yourself wasted in the middle
of the afternoon.

But “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” — even more so than the show
from which it was developed — demands attentiveness. Maybe
it’s more correct to say that it commands it. If you’re
feeling distracted and fuzzy, a song like “Uncle Fucka” (one
of several big musical numbers in “Bigger, Longer & Uncut”) is
just the thing to snap you back into the world of the
living, whether you find the hedonistic abandon of the
lyrics (“You’re an uncle fucka, yes it’s true, no one fucks
uncles quite like you”) offensive or not. The protests of
educators and learned dweebs to the contrary, “South Park” –
both the show and the movie — isn’t slacker entertainment,
the kind of anti-stimulation you seek when you want to close
yourself off from the world. It requires a certain level of
engagement to key into “South Park’s” miniature universe of
anarchy. At its most basic level, it’s about the freedom and
exhilaration of saying whatever you want. People who’ve
programmed themselves to forget how lush and naughty it felt
to say, “Fuck!” for the first time obviously wouldn’t get it.

In “Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” the outrageousness of the
things that come out of the “South Park” characters’ mouths is
amusing for the first half-hour or so. But Parker and Stone
must have known they couldn’t rely on it for the duration,
and they marshaled enough ideas to build the movie out from
there, spinning out a spiral of devious, dizzying little
thrills.

Written by Parker, Stone and Pam Brady, the story,
for all its outlandishness, is worked out better than the
narratives of many allegedly “serious” live-action features.
Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny all sneak into the R-rated
Canadian import film “Asses of Fire,” starring their heroes,
toilet-humor potentates Terrence and Philip. (Refused entry
because they’re too young, they ask a homeless person
to buy their tickets for them — a reflection of Parker and Stone’s adamance about
keeping the movie’s R-rating, thus forcing parents
everywhere to take their kids to see it. It’s a loud-and-clear
raspberry to the Uncle Fuckas on the MPAA ratings board.)
When they return to their third-grade class with an arsenal
of delightful new obscenities, their classmates rush off to
see the movie for themselves. Parents, shocked at their
progeny’s new vocabulary, call a meeting and decide that
it’s not society nor television that’s to blame, but Canada.
At the initiation of Kyle’s mom (who, as anyone who’s ever
watched the show knows, is a big fat bitch), and with the
help of Conan O’Brien, Terrence and Philip are taken hostage
by the United States. Canada retaliates in a most heinous
fashion — I refuse to give away the nature of the initial
attack — and a full-scale war is launched, with Satan and
Saddam Hussein mixing it up as well.

From there, “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” serves up nonstop
action (as well as nonstop bad taste), along with some
animated blood and gore. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t
get all just a bit wearying in the last third: You may start
to feel so overstimulated that you long for a break. But
Parker and Stone have a knack for subtleties, too, and it’s
what saves their work from being completely exhausting.
They’re sharp ironists, but you have to be wide-awake, open
to the images that flash past the corner of your eye, like
the sign on the wall of a classroom that says, “Get high on
pottery.” The dorkiness of well-meaning adults knows no
bounds.

And although the “primitive” animation of South Park is
supposedly a joke, it’s really a secret weapon. The
simplicity of Parker and Stone’s technique is what makes it
so effective. On the big screen, the texture of the
construction paper that’s used to make the characters and
backgrounds jumps right out at you, even more so than on the
TV screen. Anyone familiar with the show knows that each of
the regular characters has his or her own distinguishing
characteristics (Kenny’s snorkel hood, for example). But
here, Parker and Stone also give us a beautifully drawn
lobster-red Satan. His pectorals are stylized curlicues, and
he wears a raggedy fur loincloth and a skull codpiece, as
well as an almost perpetually stricken expression (he isn’t
such a bad Satan after all).

And Parker and Stone are madly inventive when it comes to
details: During the big opening number (in which Stan sings
a paean to his small mountain town, even as he’s getting
pushed off the sidewalk and similarly abused by his fellow
inhabitants), at one point you see a battalion of tiny black
kittens marching up a snowbank. It’s the kind of image to
which the only proper response is “What the …?” It means
nothing in the grand scheme, but it’s a small delight, a
fillip that couldn’t have just plopped down accidentally.

Of course, none of this adequately conveys the important
message of “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” but for that
kind of enlightenment, you’ll have to experience the movie
firsthand. Suffice to say that Parker and Stone have a
dream: They envision a nation populated by miniature sailors
on perpetual shore leave. The reality of that dream is a
long way off, but “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”
brings us one step closer.

SALON | March 12, 1999

- – - – - – - – - -

For sale: One wizard and 2 million pieces of gold
Anyone who has spent time playing the multiplayer role playing game Ultima Online can attest to just
how time-consuming building out your account can be — assembling the
castles, characters, clothing and other digital detritus needed to be a
powerful player can take years. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of eBay
and virtual capitalism, you no longer have to spend excruciating hours
developing your own account: You can simply purchase another player’s
discarded account instead.

The “games” area of Ebay is now peppered with href="http://search.ebay.com/cgi-bin/texis/ebay/results.html?query=ultima+online&maxRecordsReturned=300&maxRecordsPerPage=50&SortProperty=MetaEndSort">auctions hawking used Ultima Online accounts — ranging from a modestly
valued account, offering a mere five characters, that is currently valued at
$20, to a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=75868384">grandiose account that’s been bid up past $1,500 and
boasts eight characters, a castle, a smelting house, various weapons, 2
million pieces of gold and “the notorious horse dung.”

Louie Ciaramello, for example, opened the auction for his 2-year-old
Ultima Online account at $300 — the price, he says, of a DVD player he has
his eye on. Why would someone fork out that much cash for his account?
“Starting a new account is very time-consuming, it takes a while to build up
from nothing,” he writes via e-mail, though he too seems a bit surprised by
the phenomenon: “I can’t believe people are actually willing to pay $1,500 for a game. I guess it just shows how gaming can be an addiction just like drugs.”

David Swofford, a spokesman for Ultima creator Origin Systems, says the
phenomenon seems to have started just a few weeks ago and has caught on like
wildfire. “We’re pretty amazed, and certainly we think it’s a
reflection of the passion that people have for this game and the excitement
it generates,” he says. “It’s also a reflection of how Ultima Online
parallels the real world — people put value on virtual things and actions,
just like the real world. It’s a capitalist society, you’re free to see how
much you can get for things.”

Many Ultima players appear to be selling off their accounts because they
are weary of the game or simply don’t have time to play anymore. And the
emerging market for their accounts does seem to be a great opportunity for a
multitude of players: Although Origin Systems has sold 200,000 copies of the
game, only 125,000 accounts are active — which means that 75,000 players
have simply let their accounts expire rather than pay the $9.95 monthly fee.
If the auctions continue as a trend — and the bidders turn out to have
genuine offers — it will certainly be incentive for disgruntled players (of
which, judging from the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/08/19feature.html">lawsuits and href="http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/8545.html">protests
of recent years, there are many) who are considering getting out of the game
for good.
— Janelle
Brown

SALON | March 11, 1999

- – - – - – - – - -

Intel eludes the antitrust maelstrom
Throughout its conflict with the Federal Trade Commission,
Intel has made one thing clear: This antitrust case would
be different from Microsoft’s. Now Intel has taken the ultimate
step to differentiate itself from that other legal quagmire: At the last
moment before its trial was set to open, it has reached a tentative
settlement with the government.

The details aren’t yet public, but the simple fact of Intel’s
willingness to compromise serves as a striking contrast to the trench
warfare that has marked Microsoft’s confrontation with the Justice
Department. After all these months of testimony and cross-examination, it’s
hard to remember that for a brief period last May, Microsoft, too, held out
the prospect of an early settlement with the government — and the Justice
Department’s suit was actually briefly delayed while lawyers bargained.
But the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement, and the rest is bitter history.

Now Intel can return its attention to its business, which has had its
own share of recent difficulties — the rollout of the new Pentium III was
marred by a privacy controversy over its serial numbers, and in January
Intel’s competitor, AMD, href="http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,32972,00.html">outsold it in
the desktop-computer chip market for the first time. Of course, those woes
also suggest that Intel’s chip monopoly might not be so fearsome and in
need of antitrust policing, after all.

href="mailto:scottr@salonmagazine.com"> — Scott Rosenberg

SALON | March 9, 1999

- – - – - – - – - -

Where are the Pathfinders of yesteryear?
In the course of its lifetime, Pathfinder, the Time Warner megasite, has undergone countless relaunches and management shake-ups — and with each one came a face lift or redesign. Can anyone remember what the site looked like back in October 1994, when it launched — or a year later, when Time Chairman Don Logan famously referred to it as a “black hole”?
Web history disappears unless someone takes the trouble to save it. In Pathfinder’s case, you can now relive Pathfinder’s golden oldies on a site called the Pathfinder Museum — established anonymously by a former employee to chronicle the ghosts of Pathfinders past.
“The Pathfinder Museum’s Permanent Collection,” its page reads, “is the world’s foremost collection of objects and artifacts relating to Pathfinder’s World Wide Web Site. It was established in 1998 with an anonymous donation of a 100MB Zip Drive containing rare Pathfinder screens (circa 1994-95).” The site is organized tongue-in-cheek along the lines of a real museum, and meticulously labeled throughout with curatorial annotations (“The Home Page below was used by Time-Warner to send information through the Internet”).
For now, it seems, the Pathfinder Museum is very much a work in progress. Though it teases visitors with features like the Content Partners Collection (“contains approximately 40,000 documents compiled by Pathfinder staff members in preparation for historically significant meetings with Pathfinder’s many content partners”), most of its pages remain empty vessels.
But someday, perhaps, scholars will write dissertations based on the museum’s artifacts. And if you believe in this undertaking, you can even donate your own Pathfinder pages and paraphernalia.
— Scott Rosenberg

“We realized Multimedia Gulch would make more sense because we’d be in the thick of it,” says Ellington. “We’d at least be black players, able to go to lunch at the South Park Cafe and meet people and cut deals. We’re a tech-driven media company, therefore I need to be around people doing cutting-edge technology. Why do I have to stay over [in Oakland] because I’m black — to prove my blackness? Even when that might limit my growth, my strategic partnerships, my ability to leverage deals?”

NetNoir’s dilemma reflects the thorny complexity of race in cyberspace. The online world has barely even begun to acknowledge the deep well of feelings and history that underlie the black American experience; the vague utopian heritage of the Net has led much of the online industry to act as though race simply disappears as an issue once we shed the physical world for the virtual. Oakland or San Francisco? That’s not supposed to matter in the new world of the Net. But of course it does.

Blacks still make up a disproportionately small percentage of the American online population. (It’s almost impossible to find a reliable exact number, since most demographic surveys of online users don’t ask about race, though Net statistician Donna Hoffman says her Project 2000 is preparing a detailed study for release next month.) Ellington estimates that, out of America Online’s 8 million-plus subscribers, at least 500,000 are black, and he expects that number to continue to grow.

“I’m not panicked,” the NetNoir CEO says. “If in 2007, the numbers are the same, I’ll panic. But in 1997, I still point out to folks that 99 percent of white people are still not online. So I’m not going to worry. One of the driving points of technology today is making things more widely available. Between kiosks, work environments and schools, there’s going to be a lot of points of entry for people to get online.”

In a 1995 study, “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America,” the National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported that only 11.8 percent of urban black households have computers, compared with 30.3 percent of white households. (The numbers are even lower for rural black households. And not every household with a computer is online.) But any inquiry into such numbers inevitably produces circular, chicken-and-egg-style explanations: There’s not a big black presence online because fewer blacks have computers, so there hasn’t been much incentive to create content that caters to the black community, so there’s not much reason for blacks to get online.

A similar dilemma has long faced the leaders of the U.S. newspaper industry, whose newsroom rosters have often failed to reflect the changing urban population. In one view of the problem, publishers will find black readers or users only if they can better integrate their staffs and the content of their publications.

“I know the names of a lot of minority journalists, and I don’t see any of their names in the magazines like yours, Slate or Feed. Why is that?” asks former PC magazine editor Joel Dreyfuss. “There are thousands of black writers out there, dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners. So the question goes back to, what kind of intellectual culture is being created on the Net: Is it just going to be a bunch of white guys talking to each other?”

Now the editor of Our World News, an online weekly newspaper devoted to black perspectives on the news, Dreyfuss is hardly surprised by the relative “whiteness” of the Web — after all, most Web ventures are a combination of the historically white computer industry and the predominantly white print publishing industry. But he is concerned that it will continue to be so, even as Web culture begins to penetrate the mass market.

He asks: “Where is the creativity going to come from? The nature of creativity in this country is that it comes from gays, from blacks, from Hispanics and Asians, as well as whites. But when you’re operating in an all-white world, you’re kind of missing the opportunity.”

Print publications have long been under pressure to increase minority employment and have only made limited progress. Despite efforts over the past 20 years by unions and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, minorities — including blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans — comprise only 11.35 percent of U.S. newsroom employees today, according to a recent Editor and Publisher report. That’s less than half the percentage of these minority groups in the general population.

But even that record looks good compared with the Web publishing industry, where many companies remain totally white. Startup companies are usually more concerned with trying to break even than with long-term social causes. And companies often argue that they don’t have a large group of minority applicants to choose from in filling new jobs.

“We would like to increase the minority representation on our staff,” says Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya, who acknowledges that Salon’s staff includes few minorities and no African-Americans or Latinos. “As a start-up, your first need is to survive, so you tend to hire people you’ve worked with closely. In our case, for a number of familiar reasons, that pool didn’t include many blacks or Latinos. But in our next round of hires, we’ll definitely be looking for qualified people of color.” Kamiya added that Salon has used many black, Latino and Asian-American freelancers.

While the past few years have seen a proliferation of black-oriented Web sites — like Virtual Melanin, Cafe Los Negroes, Gravity and Melanet — most of these sites are based in New York, where there is a much larger minority population.

“Clearly, we’re the only black company in all of Multimedia Gulch,” NetNoir’s Ellington concedes. “So realistically, I don’t know how much of a pool there is to draw from.”

That’s the complaint of Wired Human Resources director Marilyn Hommes, who says the company has had difficulty recruiting black applicants. “We’re doing OK in just about every other area — Asians, Hispanics, gays, women. And a lot of those groups are represented in upper management. But with African-Americans, that’s where we’re low,” she says.

Ellington says that although he receives plenty of risumis from qualified black applicants, only two companies have come to him looking to recruit black employees. “I try to be objective and ask, how much can you expect start-ups to do all this aggressive outreach?” Although he recognizes that an industry with its legs so firmly rooted in libertarianism isn’t likely to embrace anything resembling affirmative action, Ellington points out that “we’ve certainly found lots of black folks that do this. They do exist.”

At some online companies, hiring policies are based on the principle that race not only shouldn’t, but truly doesn’t, matter. “The staff here is very ethnically diverse, but that’s happenstance,” says CNET editor Christopher Barr. He can’t say how many of the company’s more than 500 employees are black or members of other minority groups, he says, because “they were hired for their skill set only. When a risumi comes in, you don’t know anything other than what’s on there.”

Still, if companies are hiring for “skill set only,” that leaves journalists like Joel Dreyfuss wondering about the overall scarcity of black faces and black voices.

“I had an editor’s column in Information Week that was very well read, but I never got a call from any of these online magazines saying, ‘Hey, you wanna write something for us?’” Dreyfuss says. “It’s not happened. I talk to my friends about it, some of them minorities who are running the Web sites for major papers, and no one’s beating down their door. I can understand an editor at the New Republic or the New York Review of Books doing their thing, because they are mostly old, liberal white folks who have a kind of patronizing attitude about blacks anyway. But what concerns me is that the 30-somethings, the younger Web people, are not any different in their attitudes, or perceptions. The point is not affirmative action — I don’t want anybody to feel like they have to do affirmative action. The question is, can you have a more interesting site if you bring in a perspective that’s not a rehash of what’s seen on all the Sunday morning talk shows?”

But Ellington is much more optimistic. Preferring to focus on the “tech” half of “information technology,” he believes technology can go a long way toward leveling the playing field: “Where liberal arts are still going to be heavily laden with biases, because they demand interpretation, here you can design the killer app and people don’t care what you are — VCs are ready to invest. If you’re smart, you go to the head of the class.”

Maybe so — but try telling that to Ronald Dennison. A black programmer, Dennison was hired last year to do HTML work for the Web site of the high-tech investment magazine the Red Herring. Accustomed to doing more advanced programming, he found his efforts to advance were resisted. “Eventually, I had to be disobedient,” he says. “If I tried to do more than just the HTML, they’d say, ‘You can’t do that.’”

Now the systems administrator, Dennison doesn’t feel he’s been discriminated against, emphasizing that he knows his boss hires people “based on what they can do.” But he does remember feeling that, because he stood out as one of very few minorities in the office, “any mistake I made would be magnified.” And because he knows he will never be part of the inner circle of friends that forms the core of the company, as with many Silicon Valley start-ups, he feels his opportunities are limited. “I’ll never be in a position where they’ll have me over to their house. They won’t want me in that group. And even if I was there, I’d feel awkward,” he admits.

Hoping to take what he’s learned at the Red Herring and someday apply it to his own company, Dennison says the most important lesson he’s learned is one that he’s reluctant to accept — that white faces have an easier time of it in the Web business: “If I’m going to get any help — if I’m going to get anything for free — I know I’ll have to have a white front end.”

Despite such stories and experiences, the notion that race “doesn’t matter” in the online world and the industries that shape it remains widespread. In one MCI commercial, a rainbow of people stare at their computer screens to a world-beat soundtrack, while a voice commands the viewer to “imagine … a world where race doesn’t matter.” To some critical observers, such rhetoric just masks a convenient, though sometimes well-intentioned, effort to sidestep unresolved racial issues instead of dealing with them in earnest.

“I think people would like to think we live in a world where race doesn’t matter,” says Soledad O’Brien, host of MSNBC’s The Site. When she mentioned on her message board that she is half black, half Latina, some posters chastised her: “A couple of people wrote in and said they were offended I would mention my race, saying, ‘You’re a good journalist, that’s all that matters.’” she says. “It’s not all that matters. Race is an issue. It will always matter. It’s your perspective, your history, your bias, for bad and for good. People have tried to argue that from the ’60s — ‘I don’t see color, everybody’s beautiful’ — but I just don’t buy that. I had long discussions about it, and they were all with white people. Latinas sent letters saying, ‘It’s so good to see a Latina on a show that would usually be only for white men.’ Only white people were the ones who [objected]. I thought that was really interesting.”

Having worked, often as the only minority female, in both print and broadcast newsrooms, O’Brien prefers acknowledging a journalist’s perspective over the traditional media’s cloak of “objectivity” and the Web’s new promise of race-free anonymity.

“You can tell, right now, that most black organizations on the Web are very Afrocentric,” O’Brien says. “And I think that’s probably a good thing right now, because the Web is at such a beginning stage that you want to be able to help people find something they can relate to.”

But Dreyfuss, of Our World News, worries that such narrowcasting of Web sites contributes to a resegregation of sorts.

“The question is, what do these Afrocentric sites bring to the Web? Are they just celebratory racial sites, or do they bring good writing, good stories, good entertainment — good Webness to this? What I don’t want them to do is let everybody else off the hook — ‘Well, the blacks have their sites, therefore we can just do our thing.’”

Whatever strategy Web companies adopt to try to reach black users and present black perspectives, they face plenty of difficulties.

The Red Herring’s Dennison says: “I’ve been trying to get all my black friends online, get them into e-mail, but they don’t have much interest. I taught a computer class at the local high school, and in a class of 36, only two students would come to me after class to ask questions, and they were both Asian. None of the blacks or Hispanics really gave a shit. But I see where the Web is going to become much more integral to people’s lives — it will affect money, voting, everything. I worry about people who are going to be left out.

“It reminds me of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ‘Total Recall,’ where those with a key to the inside have all the oxygen, and those on the outside are either rebels or physically different somehow. In this scenario, it’s blacks who won’t have the key.”