12/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome to Misc., the regional pop-culture section of ArtsFocus, the second most widely-read publication among the Seattle arts community.
The first is, of course, the Weekly World News. And if I may be presumptuous, I think we’re better. Sure, the WWN is handsome looking and has great mail-order ads, but buying something just so you can laugh at everyone else who buys it is an aesthetic dead end. It leads to an unattractive smugness, an attitude of scoffing at other people’s lives without ever questioning one’s own.
The logical extreme of this attitude is shown by audiences of the documentary Rate It X. “Progressive” guys watch this film of interviews with sleazy redneck guys and come away confirmed about their superiority to those working-class creeps. “Progressive” women come away knowing they don’t have to care about anyone or anything to be morally superior, since men obviously aren’t really people.
There are more pressing crises in this day than anti-thought “intellectual” films, though — like the closing of the Rainbow Tavern, just as it had finally broken the stranglehold of aging hippie R&B bands that had ruled all local clubs for too many years, and had established the most eclectic, truly progressive array of live music this town’s ever seen. The Seattle music scene will never be the same, even if a “New Rainbow” opens in the spring in some less-convenient location.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Seattle Star. One of the best free papers around, it’s a forum for the wittiest just-above-ground comics created anywhere.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Soup in a tube. From Germany, where everything from mayonnaise to milk comes in toothpaste-like tubes, comes Nutri-Soup, a thick sludge of bullion, herbs and natural and artificial flavorings. Just two inches (one tablespoon) is enough for a cup of great-smelling and adequately-tasting soup.
I hope you all saw the Art Expo in the Trade Center last month. It was a true cash-from-chaos scene, as the city’s art hustlers abandoned all remnants of cultured propriety. From now on, the question in visual art won’t be whether creative people can also sell, but whether salespeople can also create.
One answer to that question is found at D’Art, the home of Quality Artist’s Products. The permanent D’Art store may now be closed, but a holiday edition is now open in the Madison Valley neighborhood. As always, it’s filled with cute, outrageous and just plain rockin’ things, all at somewhat reasonable prices.
Alan Lande’s recent Autocratic, a “ballet for cars” in the new SCCC garage, was also tons-O-fun. Where they got a wrecked car in the same color as the rented wreckers was only the first of many great mysteries that night, as four concrete floors of dance, live and recorded music, video bonfires, signs with names of parts of the human digestive system, and other post-industrial entertainments were explored by an audience of carpools stretching a quarter-mile north of the site.
There’s a wine store in Post Alley with a great tabletop miniature of a modern winery. It uses taped narration, flashing lights, and motorized machinery to show the entire winemaking process, from vineyard to tasting room. It does not contain a tiny AA or MADD meeting.
This is being written in a tiny room overlooking the central downtown waterfront. The Port of Seattle and the usual development suspects are out to destroy the waterfront we know and love, by putting up yet another scheme of junky “gourmet” boutiques, junky “luxury” hotel rooms and junky “upscale” offices. I love the waterfront just as it is now, and don’t want it turned into another lifeless pseudo-suburb like today’s lower First Avenue or Broadway. It’s the same sort of destructive “improvement” that threatened the Market and Pioneer Square, before those great areas were “saved” by putting the trashy new businesses in the great old buildings. The waterfront deserves more than that — it deserves to stay the honest, funky, lo-rent district it is now.
In more uplifting news, Sen. Fishstick has been granted a permanent leave of absence from his taxpayer-supported position of being “hard on Communism” in Latin America as an excuse for being soft on fascism, of promoting the censorship of musicians who even suggest that religious and lifestyle alternatives exist, of making deals to let incompetent but ideologically-correct men become judges. America is even rediscovering the grand and noble tradition of disrespect for one’s president. Now comes the hard part: Getting away from complaining about the way things are done long enough to do them some other way.
Despite the posters, the local small-press book Young Men Can Sing is not “the first novel with advertisements.” Mass-market paperbacks have often had ads stuck in the middle. I remember one ’50s paperback with an ad for Time magazine, promising to inform me all about “Pasternak, Voice of the World’s Free Spirit… Einstein, Investigator Into the Unknown… Kruschev, Frank Lloyd Wright, Brigitte Bardot.” And I’d always thought she was the Voice of the World’s Free Spirit….
CATHODE CORNER: The first Christmas commercial this year came on Oct. 13 on WTBS, for an LP of holiday favorites….
Viacom Cablevision will soon add the Cable Value Network, one of many channels and individual programs established in the wake of FCC regulations regarding all-advertising “shows” and “services.” Using sophisticated marketing techniques at relatively unsophisticated audiences, these companies prey on compulsive shoppers to buy tacky wall clocks and briefcases. Cable systems running the channels get a percentage of all sales from their subscribers. No system that runs this form of unabashed audience manipulation should ever again claim to be providing a public service to plea for exorbitant rate increases. Not that it’s necessary; by this time next year the FCC will let cable systems charge whatever they can get away with.
Don’t ask where I got it, but I’ve now got a 1972-vintage tourist map of scenic El Salvador. It looks just like a Tourmap publication, with cheesy drawings of local industries and recreational opportunities. The saddest part, though, is the color photos of ugly modern lo-rise office buildings. The government is obviously proud of its attempts to make its capital city look like an imitation LA. Pity.
I’ll see you at the Incredibly Strange Matinees, noon weekends at the University Cinemas. Until then, remember to always be a good sport, be a good sport all ways. So long.