4/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Despite All Attempts to Preserve the War,
Peace Still Threatens to Break Out
At Misc., the column that says what it means and means what it says, we’re getting awfully bored by America’s glut of lame parody. It’s in movies (Dan Aykroyd’s Dragnet), TV (Moonlighting, public-access cable), music (Buster Poindexter), and now billboards. The car-dealer sign telling us to “Surrender to the Germans” treats WWII as a mere cliché taken from old movies (as did Aykroyd’s 1941). If we’re offended by the sign we’re dismissed as old fogeys, not the cool young dudes of the dealer’s target audience.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts newsletter. With the oversupply of parodic works mentioned above has come a complementary supply of lawsuits. Craig C. Beles’s piece on “Parody as Fair Use; or When Can Minnie and Mickey Be Placed in a Compromising Situation?” drolly covers the cases of Disney v. Air Pirates Comics, Pillsbury v. Screw Magazine, and Dr Pepper v. Sambo’s. For your copy send a small donation to WVLA, 600 1st Ave., #203, Seattle 98104.
FINDING MR. WRIGHT: A major exhibit of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is coming to the Bellevue Art Museum. Talk about going where you’re needed most. Sure, Bellevue could use the inspiration of someone who believed in spaces to enhance human life. But these days, so could Seattle. To call the Disney Co. plan fir Seattle Center “Mickey Mouse” isn’t enough. Our chief public gathering place is not a theme park and should not be controlled by theme-park people. It should not be a sterile, slick monument, but a living world for living people. It should embody the joy and hope of the World’s Fair that created it — just as the waterfront, also targeted for what a citizen-advocate calls “tacky yuppification,” should stay a working dockside, not a Friscoid tourist trap.
CLARIFICATION: You may have been misinformed about the recent flap at UW Women Studies. Activists there aren’t trying to get rid of a guy student because he’s a guy, but because they believe he’s a right-wing troublemaker, out to disrupt the class via heckling. If true, then he’s simply following the Jerry Rubin school of politics, wherein anyone who felt righteous enough was free to act like a jerk, since he was above the behavioral rules of square people. It’s the same method by which egotistical liberals become admired by (or become) egotistical conservatives.
BOOZE NOOZE: The Big Restaurant Protection Committee, a.k.a. the Washington State Liquor Control Board, is lowering the food-to-drink sales ratio that an eatery needs to keep a drink license. Think it’ll lead to saner liquor laws overall? Ha! This unelected body never works for increased competition or live entertainment except grudgingly, years too late.
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The lights on Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge suddenly started flashing on and off on the night of 3/11. A resident detected that the lights were going off in Morse code, which he translated as “UBC Engineers Do It Again.”
SEZ WHO?: Will someone please tell me where these “reports of a Nicaraguan incursion” that led to the latest Reagan pro-war charade came from? How do we know the CIA didn’t just make it up? None of the interminable analyses on the affair mention this, or if they did I fell asleep before I found it.
SHAME: Masters & Johnson almost seem to want the hetero AIDS epidemic that still hasn’t happened but which they promise any time now. (Masters holds experimental-vaccine patents, and might profit if lower-risk groups thought they were more vulnerable.) If so, they join the soaps and other media trying to exploit it while ignoring anything really controversial like the existence of gay people. It’s worse in Europe, where magazines use AIDS as an excuse to put forlorn, nude straight women on their covers. All this does is heighten fear about the disease without raising sympathy or help for those who do have it.
CATHODE CORNER: Ed Beckley, the self-titled “Millionaire Maker,” is in bankruptcy. Victims of Beckley, who promised viewers they could get rich buying real estate for no money down, are working with other creditors to keep his show on the air. It’s the only way he can pay off everyone demanding refunds from his expensive courses…. Merv Griffin wants to buy Resorts International in Atlantic City. I know I’d pay $20 for a spectacular floor show starring Charo, Prof. Irwin Corey and Helen Gurley Brown.
UPDATES: The Wonder Years is just as awful as I’d feared. The ’68 junior-high clothes are accurate, though…. The plan to re-color Metro buses seems to have been just a stunt, with a phony-looking “groundswell of support” for keeping the blecchy browns.
THE BYTE BIZ: Apple Computer’s suing Redmond’s Microsoft, claiming MS Windows (a key program in the next generation of IBM software) rips off the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” Can Apple, which has always avoided fighting MS, expect to beat what the Wall St. Journal calls “the real controlling firm in computing”?… The hype over an Aldus program being inadvertently “infected” with a hidden world-peace message bears the marks of an orchestrated rabble-rousing by those who’d use “data integrity” to deny public access to major data bases.
HAPPINESS IS A BIGGER SPACE: Peanuts has suddenly switched from four small panels a day to three larger ones. It’s the first major structural change ever to Charles Schulz’s comic. Four square panels every day, six days a week, was a perfect metaphor for the chilling purgatory of characters stuck at the same presexual age for 38 years. (To see Schulz on adolescence, look for his rare ’60s paperback “Teen-Ager” Is Not A Disease. All the kitsch of Peanuts, none of the charm.)
CLOSE: ‘Til May, see the Seattle Filmhouse’s French New Wave series at MOHAI, catch the Weekly piece on local cartoonists, take lotsa pix of the Pine St. hole while you can, and remember the words of Sydney Smith: “I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.”
