1/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Welcome again, shopping survivors, to Misc., your pop-culture column and voice of the Post-Sixties Generation.

THE TOP STORY THIS MONTH: Seattle is becoming world corporate headquarters for Muzak. The most famous name in office music recently merged with locally-based Yesco, a purveyor of music tapes for bars and other businesses for which the briefly famous DJ Steve Rabow once worked as national program director. From now on, when you hear a 100-violin rendition of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” at your local doctor’s office, you can take pride in knowing that the dulcet tones are being carried across North America from right here in your hometown.

The fact that the new Stage Left Cafe is advertised as being right next door to Angry Housewives first and in the Smith Tower second must say something about the relative public awareness of the two longstanding Seattle landmarks.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Blue Suede News. Pick up a free copy at a better record store and read all about cool music that would never have been recorded if CDs and “adult contemporary” radio had been around in its day.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Old-time gum. Beeman’s, Clove and Black Jack are back in a few select stores (some of which are already sold out). If you ever wanted to chew Beeman’s, the official gum of The Right Stuff, now’s your chance.

BEST NEW ALL-AGES LIVE MUSIC VENUE: The Century Square mezzanine. A recent Saturday night found me in the ground floor plaza there, with some professional-sounding (slick but bland) rock emanating from above. At the top of the escalator I found five guy musicians in identical shirts and a young woman singing in exactly the same type of contrived hysterics heard each week on Fame.The answer came in the slick brochures stacked next to the band: They were from the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, a new private school that appears to be for parents who want their teens to be just like the Fame kids. The band really cooked considering its limitations as a class project, and the acoustics of that huge glass-walled space made it sound even better.

CATHODE CORNER: Cable viewers should check out an awesome Japanese cartoon series (dubbed in Montreal), Astroboy, 9:30 a.m. Saturdays on BCTV. It’s the adventures of a robot boy with superpowers and jet-rocket feet, and his robot sister (without superpowers, which means traditional-sex-role-time in the rescue scenes, the show’s only flaw). It has way-cool music, pleasing characters and very imaginative scripts, many based on the Futuropolis humans’ unfounded prejudices against robots. The best part is the four-minute filler scene at the end of each show, when Astro summarizes the episode’s plot with one obscure error in a name or storyline. You’re supposed to play with your friends after the show and see who spots the mistake — but they never tell you the right answer. A must-see….

With the Michelob Yuppies off the scene, the current Worst Commercial on TV is the one for a maxi-pad using computer graphics to show how it fits in your undies better than any other brand….

Coming to a video store near you: Video Shorts 6, the winners of last month’s national video-art contest run by Seattle’s Parker Lindner. The best video on the tape (and the only winner from Washington) is Crash Your Car, a sprightly music clip using edited gore from old driver-ed films with a peppy synthesizer tune. The real psychotronic thing about it is that the finished video is actually being shown in driver-ed classes!

UPDATE on last month’s item on cable deregulation: Group W’s selling its last local systems to TCI, which burst into town with an instant image problem. They announced that in return for an extravagant rate hike, they’d give viewers many new channels — which turned out to be garbage networks like The Weather Channel and Cable Value Network, which TCI happens to own stock in. To make room, some popular local channels would be dropped out and others moved down to the far end of the black box. Thanx to Reagan’s foxes in the FCC chicken coop, the city could do nothing to stop it – except delay approval of the license change until after the new federal tax law, which would cost TCI millions. So it looks like KVOS and KTPS are safe — for a while.

My best wishes to New City Theater, which has had hard times of late. They’ve taken many notable risks this season, trying to expand into a “full service theater company” showing contemporary and challenging works without a camp/nostalgia cash cow production to support them. Hope they’re back in good shape soon.

More kudos to The Weekly for its recent follow-the-money expose of the downtown building boom. Turns out all those glass boxes haven’t been built because anybody needed the office space, but because the old tax law and deregulation of banks and pension funds made real estate speculation a lucrative proposition whether or not the buildings themselves made any money. Therefore, expecting the free market to regulate tower growth without public intervention is useless. This cancerous growth has been going on in most US cities. In Manhattan they call it “gentrification;” in San Francisco they call it “Manhattanization;” in Seattle they call it “becoming more like San Francisco.” In Houston they call the new, unleaseable glass boxes “see-thru buildings.”

Until next month, let me leave you with a line from an obscure Portuguese film about a beautiful woman dying of consumption: “I love you like God loves sinners.”