1/90 Misc. Newsletter

Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,

Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash

Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.

Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.

No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.

The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.

Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).

Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.

The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.

Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).

Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.

Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.

Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.

`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

PASSAGE

John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”

OFFER

All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.

Also from Fait Divers: The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Multivalent”

What the `90s Have Given Us

Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution

• USA Today, music video, performance art, personal computers, Nordstrom Rack, rap, punk, world beat, self-help movements, Pee-Wee Herman

We’ll Look Back and Laff At

• The Brat Pack, Reagan, Gary Hart, Lionel Richie, power breakfasts, whale music, Jimmy Swaggart, L.A. metal, The Last Temptation of Christ, Black Monday, tanning beds, cosmetic surgery, Tom Clancy, herbal energy pills, U2, the Suzuki Samurai, George Peppard, big-budget B movies

Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated

• Watt/Burford/Meese/North/etc., Joan Rivers, Joan Collins, Wrestlemania, cocaine, wine coolers, “blue-eyed soul,” Robert Palmer, Donald Trump, Tipper Gore, Mergermania, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” all-oldies radio, Albert Goldman,15-second commercials, Bill Cosby, homelessness, Exxon

We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without

• Futons, styling mousse, anti-smoking policies, NutraSweet, VCRs, CNN, vitamin stores, oat bran, Roseanne Barr, C. Everett Koop, Spike Lee, 976 lines,trade paperbacks

Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews

• Bell System break-up

Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope

• New communications technologies available to individuals, from the computer programs that make this document possible to the fax machines that helped give the world the real news from Beijing
• The end of economies of scale favoring big business over independent business, as merged corporations make consumers and employees pay for the misadventures of the speculation parasites
• The whole Eastern Europe thing
• A progressive, aware populace that doesn’t know how big it is compared to any era except ’67-’70
• A slowly-growing realization that the sins of the Nixon-Reagan era shouldn’t be mistaken for virtues

Top Local Stories

• Few noticed in ’80 when tiny Seattle Software sold a computer operating system to a slightly bigger company, Microsoft. MS-DOS made King County the world leader in making computers work for people. It was this leadership that led an obscure Japanese toy company to put its U.S. HQ here, leading to the Nintendo video games now sharpening the hand-eye coordination of so many pre-adolescents.
• In ’82, I was among those who scorned the new official nickname “Emerald City.” It was totally inappropriate to the Seattle I knew and loved. In the eight years since, large portions of the city and its suburbs have been rebuilt to fit the name. The bus tunnel, the Bagley Wright Theater, Westlake Center, 10- and 11-cornered office towers, “luxury townhomes,” candy-colored Archie Bunker houses in the north end and the fake chateaus on the eastside, the planned gussying-up of Seattle Center — all these reflect the dangerous idea that this is some fantasy paradise where all will be mindless nirvana. This is a real place, with real people and real problems. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can start working on real solutions.