3/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Hi again, pop-culture fans, and welcome to Misc., the only column that ate at the Silver King, drank at the Trade Winds, and lived to tell the tale.

The building that until recently housed the Lesbian Resource Center and Seattle Women’s Gym is about to become a bridal shop. This trivium is offered merely for the sake of irony, and is not in any way to be considered an encouragement of the new homophobia. (Ever notice how many of the mass media only talk about AIDS when straights get it, or how the new soft-focus-scare condom ads never mention the existence of gays?)

In business news, B. Freshman’s in Wallingford, the noble experiment in drawing the hypertasteful Nouveau Riche to mark prices on groceries with great pencils inside a cramped basement, somehow failed. (More closures in our handy sidebar.)

In new business activity, Razz-Ma-Tazz on Denny offers all the essential elements of a topless bar without toplessness or a bar. For a small fee, you can enter a room with flashing lights and blaring Bon Jovi where legally-dressed young women will smile, touch your shoulder and request additional fees for a soft drink, a conversation or a 2-minute “table dance.”… Could that ’80s nostalgia landmark, the Showbox Theater, really be slated for conversion into a movie multiplex?

(latter-day note: Razz-Ma-Tazz went topless and is now all-nude, at least on stage; its table dances are still less explicit than those described in police reports about suburban strip clubs. And the Showbox became a comedy club with an ugly interior remodel.)

CATHODE CORNER: Continuing our theme of antisexploitation, KSTW is following the lead of the USA Network in running cheap sex comedies with the sex scenes all cut out. What’s left makes less sense than the Spanish channel makes if you don’t know Spanish….

Hope you didn’t watch Amerika. Remember: The networks don’t care if you love or hate a show, as long as you keep watching. The only effective protest is to turn it off….

The most fascinating show on the Discovery Channel’s week of Soviet TV was Serious and In Jest. Segments on the value of satire in increasing industrial productivity were intercut with film of degrading police interrogations of vodka scalpers and a melodramatic sketch in which a boy suffers a total breakdown after learning his parents met while dealing in the black market….

The CBC this month is presenting not only the curling championships but also the return of Seeing Things, the offbeat mystery show about a clairvoyant crime reporter. It can descend into corn, but at its best blows the slick US crime shows out of the water.

Now that Bob Barker has successfully used the Miss USA pageant to campaign against furs, maybe he’ll now talk about the way humans are treated in the countries where he MCs Miss USA’s parent show, Miss Universe. I don’t remember him commenting when Imelda Marcos raided the Philippines’ public-housing budget to build an auditorium in Manila, which opened by hosting that year’s Miss Universe show. (By the way, the introduction of computerized scoring to Miss USA may encourage those who criticize pageants for the wrong reasons. A pageant queen is not the idealized lover but the idealized daughter. The spectacle does not objectify the start of the breeding cycle but its final result.)

I keep telling people computers can be our friends. Now it turns out that a White House mainframe, which preserved even “erased” files, may become the best witness to the Iran-Contra scheme and a whole network of other potentially illegal acts organized under the doublespeak moniker “Project Democracy.” As the nation takes what John Chancellor has called a “trip down memory lane,” the Reagan Discs may prove more useful in uncovering abuses of power than the Nixon Tapes.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Amazing Adventures of Mighty Mole, a comic book distributed to elementary schools by Metro. Our tunnel-digging hero exclaims that the downtown bus tunnel is “a totally rad concept,” excavating equipment is “totally awesome,” and that “digging a tunnel is really exciting work.” And I always thought it was boring. (For our slower readers, that was a pun.) (For our early readers, more local publications will be featured at the Underground Press Convention, Feb. 28 here at Lincoln Arts.)

The Globe Radio Theater production of Gogol’s Dead Souls, produced in Seattle by Jean Sherrard and John Siscoe, will soon be available on cassettes for repeated nuance-hunting. KPLU has aired the mini-series right after Bob and Ray Sunday evenings, for a whole hour of consciousness-bending, low-key humor. With great intellectual entertainment like this on public radio, who’ll miss Garrison Keillor (who ran out of ideas three years ago anyway)?

DUMB AD OF THE MONTH (in the P-I): “If it’s true that automatic transmissions are capable of unintended acceleration, then all cars with automatic are suspect. Audi is the only manufacturer to date who has addressed the problem to protect their owners.” A local dealer thus attempted to depict as the leader in responsibility a manufacturer who refused to do anything about the problem until it could not hide from the evidence any more….

Several more respectable cars are on display in a great new book, I’ll Buy That: 50 Big Deals and Small Wonders. It’s published by Consumer Reports as a 50th-anniversary celebration, and covers 50 major contributions to American life, including not just consumer products (the Mustang, the Beetle, the minivan, detergents, frozen foods), but such other innovations as the Salk vaccine, the birth control pill, the credit card and the suburban housing tract.

EARLY WARNING: With spring coming soon, the New City Theater Directors’ Festival is also coming soon, and then the Seattle International Film Festival. Only a few weeks of winter remain in which to stare at your Video Aquarium tape from the How-To-Do-Anything Store. ‘Til then, let’s return to Soviet TV for this closing thought, from its equivalent to CBS’s Morning Program: “If we entertained you, made you smile, and did not make you late for work, then our job here has been a successful one.”

DOWNTOWN BUSINESS WHICH HAVE CLOSED

SINCE THE START OF CURRENT CONSTRUCTION JOBS

Seattle Design

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Florsheim

Weisfield’s

Town Theater

Music Box Theater

Golden Crown

Bernie’s

TJ’s Men’s Wear

The Frankfurter

J.K. Gill

Pipelane Ltd.

ABC Corral Western Wear

Walden Books

Leed’s Shoes

Lindy Shoes

Copper Kitchen

J. Spencer Books