7/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

The Reds Will Never Get Our Military Secrets —

They Can’t Outbid the Private Sector

Ahh, what better reading for the Age of the Greenhouse Effect than Misc., the column that always keeps its cool?

STUFF: Now that we’re through booing the Lucking Fakers for another year, we can examine Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s purchase of the Portland TrailBlazers. Will fancy computer analysis come to basketball? Will it result in increased throughput?

THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE continues, with Union St.’s beautiful Post Office Grocery and the legendary Market Theater the latest victims (of development and Reaganomic monopolization, respectively). The next front is the Music Hall Theater. Allied Arts is striving to keep the Clise Agency from razing the ornate movie palace for yet another cheap “luxury” hotel. Other interests are trying schemes to keep the Paramount standing. But don’t look to Royer Roi for any help; the onetime “people’s mayor” now acts as a stooge for those who would destroy Seattle in order to save it. (Speaking of hotels, the finally-done Convention Center won’t rent space to local people unless they’ll bring at least 1,000 out-of-towners to area hotels.)

MODULATIONS: The local airwaves are now safe for cool music. KJET is apparently sticking around for a while, and has added more hours of live programming. And the FCC declined to let the Jack Straw Foundation knock KNHC off the air. Straw, whose old KRAB devolved from beatnik eclecticism to hippie senility before it made a quick buck selling its frequency, will now start a small station in Everett, where people talk almost as slowly as the old KRAB announcers did.

CATHODE CORNER: The CBS special on the plight of local Vietnam vets was a great piece of filmmaking, marred at the end by an obscene promo for the network’s newest Joy-of-Violence cop show…. The long-announced Boris & Natasha movie is now in production, with #1 hoser Dave Thomas recently cast opposite Sally Kellerman. Variety ads, made to lure investors while only Kellerman was signed, show a male model in a Boris suit with a hat over his face…. MTV’s Museum of Unnatural History was an amazing lesson in the contradictions of commercial surrealism, even more bizarre by being in the recursive maze that is Bellevue Square. The exhibits scattered along the mall (and decorated in Late Pee-wee) included two banks of 24 video screens each. One had Pontiac ads, the other a montage of MTV promo spots including a shot of singer Mojo Nixon (but, alas, not his great song “Burn Down the Malls”).

UPDATES: The end of the ’80s (discussed in a prior column) was celebrated in a mock funeral by NYC performance artists The Blue Man Group, cremating a deconstructivist print, a model of a postmodern office building, and a yuppie doll…. The ’70s revival continues, as dinosaur rock and neo-disco race up the charts while several late-’70s celebs stage publicized comebacks (Devo, Patti Smith, Jimmy Carter)…. The Monthly, a local ad trade paper, asked 10 ad-biz experts about the new Rainier Beer ads. The only guy who liked them works for the brewery.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (USA Today, 6/21): “Wives of economic summit leaders wave as they leave on a boat tour Monday… Absent: Denis Thatcher.” Runner-up (P-I “Correction,” 6/10): “The relish tray (at Le Petit Prince) comes with an original dip made on the premises, not a sort of Green Goddess dip as suggested by the reviewer.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Hardball, best of the many local sports rags, takes the familiar “literary fan” approach to baseball, covering the three local pro teams and assorted other aspects of the game…. Pacific Northwest’s cover on films made and/or set in the Northwest is astounding. Richard Jameson included many memorable NW movies but did neglect my favorite, Ring of Fire (1961). Long unavailable, it featured Mason County deputy David Janssen abducted by three teen hoodlums led by Frank Gorshin. They wander the woods and inadvertently start a raging forest fire, but not before Janssen and seductive hoodette Joyce Taylor share a quiet embrace, followed by shots of a tall tree and rolling hills.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Linda’s Lollies are “hand made lollipops” in many sophisticated flavors, including Samduca (a licorice taste with three real coffee beans inside). At Paper Moon in the Market…. Godfather’s now has a “Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza,” complete with pickles.

ON A ROLL: By the time this comes out the Suzuki Samurai jokes may have come and gone (dealers with high turnover, the teal-blue car it takes a real man to drive, etc.). The best and most real comment is that Univ. Village uses a Samurai with “Security” boldly painted on the side. Just don’t ask me to go after shoplifters across speed bumps in it.

LEFTOVERS: As usual, there’s just too much going on in Our Wacky World to fit the column, so we can’t talk much about Reagan vs. the Native Americans (only a movie cowboy with a mistaken sense of reality could call massacres and the reservation system “humoring”); George Bush (sez he’s less elitist ‘cuz he only went to Yale, not Harvard); the plan to put casinos in Detroit (buying their cars is a gamble enough); the censoring by US West and the state of phone sex and porn books, respectively (threatening all expressions of politically incorrect lifestyles); and the Mariners’ latest woes (why couldn’t they at least be lovable losers?).

‘TIL OUR AUGUST EDITION (our first ever), see Baghdad Cafe and the Burke Museum’s Far Side of Science, don’t see The Morton Downey Jr. Show (not even to “love to hate it”), see the Ivar’s fireworks (accept no substitutes), and register to vote. See ya.