11/89 Misc. Newsletter
Empty Space Renovators Find Asbestos in Showbox Walls;
You Thought the Punks Looked Deadly!
Welcome to yet another ennui-packed edition of Misc., the column that wonders whether Monty Python’s Graham Chapman would have wanted to die on the same day as, and have his obituary upstaged by that of, the race horse Secretariat, and decides that he might well have. This is the special newsletter edition, containing (not much, but some) additional material, cut from the version in ArtsFocus. While that tabloid was on indefinite hiatus this summer, I put out a special newsletter version and solicited for subscriptions. Two people replied. This is for them, and anyone else who might end up applying for the mailing list.
NO JANE, NO PAIN: I do not mourn the impending departure of Jane Pauley, who has held her position on Today for 13 years despite a distinct incompetence. She was particularly bad in her early years, but still maintained a level of journalistic ineptitude to the end (we’ve already mentioned her interview with the Seattle Rep’s Dan Sullivan, in which she never “got” the idea that non-NYC theater is real theater).
STAGE OF DECLINE: The demise of the Pioneer Square Theater has been dissected elsewhere. I’ll simply note that at one time, a local theater company was able to support itself mostly on its own receipts, and might have continued to do so had its original team stayed in town. Another case of LA ruining everything.
SPECIAL INTEREST: The John Lennon purists (a bunch of gracelessly-aging ex-potheads) may scorn the memorial Visa cards authorized by Yoko, but I love ’em. There’s nothing quite like going over your limit as the receipt-stamper pulls across the face that sang “Imagine no possessions.”
THE WORLD SERIOUS: So the A’s, thanks to Mike Moore and their other ex-Mariners, finally won. “But where in all this,” you haven’t asked, “is ex-A’s owner Charles O. Finley, the man who wanted to give us orange baseballs?” He’s still dabbling in sports. While Oakland was in mourning over the quake, Finley was safe up here, giving a public demonstration of his new glow-in-the-dark footballs. Their fluorescent green stripes are supposed to make them more visible at night in dimly-lit high school stadia; which would ruin one of the joys of the high-school game. O well, at least they’ll still have under-the-bleachers fights and the sound of both schools’ bands simultaneously playing “On Wisconsin” as their own fight song.
COME BACK, SAM! ALL IS FORGIVEN!: Am still trying to learn whether the Samuel E. Schulman credited as publisher of the new magazine Wigwag is the illustrious ex-Sonics owner and B-movie mogul of the same name. The mag is subtitled “A Picture of American Life;” it looks a bit like Spy and reads a lot like the last half-hour of All Things Considered. Lotsa smug Ivy League “populism” and pretentious cuteness. It does have one nice item on loneliness from the only single black woman in Tucson.
THE PLANE TRUTH: At this writing, the Boeing strike is going strong. It’s a novelty among recent U.S. strikes: it’s against an industrial manufacturer that’s been doing well enough that the usual pleas that the battered workers “sacrifice a little more” to keep management comfy just don’t work. If successful, this may be the turning point in American labor. People at Boeing and other firms may be getting tired of being pushed around, of getting sick from hazardous chemicals only to have management claim it’s just psychosomatic or “hysterical,” of being treated as a mere “cost” to be “contained,” of having any disagreement with any of this denounced as disloyalty to the corporate “family.”
MEANWHILE, Martin Selig’s fall from the heights of local office development should not surprise. In an ongoing attempt to cut corners from the costs of his big projects, he’s been late on payments to smaller suppliers for years. He got caught when he tried to slow down his payments to outfits big enough to fight back: first City Light, then some big creditors. In the end though, an ex-strip-mall-builder in an overbuilt market was no match for the big guys from LA and Toronto, now poised for total dominance.
TOY BOY: The first Xmas product with promise is the Heartthrob game by Milton Bradley, the years-late answer to Mattel’s Mystery Date game (circa 1962). It’s for girls ages 8-12, who draw and trade cards pertaining to their ideal boy’s traits, trying to assemble the most attractive guy possible.
GAS PAINS: The great oil slump continues, as Chevron sells or demolishes some of its most prominent locations (Ballard and Market, Evergreen Point) while the independent Gull sells all its Seattle stations. Gull, along with Mobil, thus joins these other long-gone brands from town (how many do you remember?): American, Carter, Douglas, Enco, Flying A, General, Gilmore, Gulf, Hancock, Hudson, Payless, Phillips 66, Red Crown, Richfield, Rocket, Signal, Standard, Time, USA, Valvoline, Vickers, and Wilshire. Seattle never had any outlets, however, for Clark Oil (no relation), the Midwestern brand that sold premium gas only.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Belgian waffle snacks at Gaufres (“gauf”), a storefront at 106 James with the shortest menu of any restaurant in town. For a buck, you get a small cup of coffee and a hot, glazed waffle on a sheet of wax paper. No butter, syrup, or whipped cream; this is finger food. Eat too many, though, and you’ll have a “gauf figure.”…Seattle’s Starting Right Co. now has the first gourmet frozen dinners for babies – strained, pre-cooked mounds of rice/squash/cod, zucchini/potatoes/beef, and pasta/carrots/turkey.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Miscellania Unlimited (again, no relation) is launching a new line of Northwest-produced comic books. The starting lineup ranges from the funny-philosophical Morty the Dog (who was “killed off” during his previous series from Starhead Comics; how he returns is the chief mystery) to the all-too-typical Rhaj (a female warrior in ancient Egypt with big eyes, a big knife, and a bigger bare bosom)…. I wish somebody here had a paper as lively as the Portland Free Press. It’s a monthly left-anarchist broadsheet concerned with toxic dumping, deforestation, and particularly with the Citizens Crime Commission, a panel of Oregon’s wealthiest and most powerful people who lobby for more prisons and fewer civil rights using the “drug emergency” for a justification….Every two months Factsheet Five, a national directory of small-press and self-published matter, includes several listings of Seattle-area “zines” available only by mail. As space permits, I’ll occasionally reprint one of these listings. This time it’s The Whetstone, described by FF (haven’t seen it myself) as “a new ‘magazine for independent people’ on news ignored by the major media…the alleged A-bomb test at Port Chicago in 1944, the AIDS-syphilis connection and alternative high-energy sources.” Available for $15/4 issues from FIFE Publications, Box 45792, Seattle 98145-0792.
THE KING AND THEM: Yul Brynner, according to one of those son-of-star-tells-all books, had steamy affairs with many of your favorite Hollywood leading ladies, and also with the actress who later became Nancy Reagan. It’s a gruesome thought, I know, but not as shocking as a pic published last year in the French Photo magazine, a full-frontal nude of a pre-stardom Brynner — with hair on his scalp!
COLOR ME BLUE: COCA recently held a performance by NY artist Mike Bildo. Three local women walked onstage and spent the next 10 minutes brushing bright blue paint on their nude selves. Occasionally, Bildo instructed the models to tastefully flay themselves on one of two large paper “canvases.” A group calling itself the Gorilla Girls picketed outside, calling the work an “appropriation” of women. The Gorillas’ literature drew heavily on quotes from Alice Walker, a writer who has dismissed any criticism of her work with the all-damning phrase “white male attitude.” The Bildo piece did NOT advocate male power over women. It questioned the valuesof originality and individualism, a topic frequently covered in feminist art writing. The models, the six clothed musicians, and Bildo were all re-enacting roles devised in 1960 by conceptual-art pioneer Yves Klien, who in turn was commenting on both French ooh-la-la exhibitionism and on the role of the nude figure in art. (Bildo’s enactment was closer to Klein’s concept than was the re-edited version of Klien’s event in the exploitation film Mondo Cane ). Body painting is an old tradition in other cultures, and has oft been used in Western alternative art. Weeks before Bildo, Karen Finley appeared on the same stage, her nude self covered in chocolate syrup, giving a charged lecture on bodies and body images. The chocolate motif had been used in ’74, with similar metaphors, in Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie. The UK female punk band The Slits once posed for an album cover in mud and loincloths (as re-created this fall by the Seattle male punk band Mudhoney). Had the Gorilla Girls overcome their own stereotypical notions about gender and power, they’d have been treated to a spectacle full of images worthy of smart criticism. (Something like this section may appear in the KCMU Wire).
IN CONCLUSION, copies of the special “What I Did This Summer” report are available by sending a SASE to Box 203, 1630 Boylston, Seattle 98122, as is information on my novel The Perfect Couple (currently available only as Macintosh computer software). Until our next report, vote for Rice (claiming you’re “too hip to vote” is just the same as voting for Jewett), see the Art of Music Video Festival at 911 (no, I won’t bow to the current fashion and call it “the 911 space,” though I might start calling my home “the Clark space”), and remember this quotation from Goethe: “Everything that needs to be found out has been found out.The hard part is finding it again.”
