1/91 Misc. Newsletter

`IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT,

NOV.-DEC. 1990: 22

Welcome to the first 1991 edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t help but wonder what was the last comedy Norman Cousins saw before he died, and whether its makers are responsible for making him insufficiently lighthearted. It couldn’t possibly have been Haywire.

SNOW STORIES: For the first time since I was 8 or so, Xmas looked like the cards and ads always said it was supposed to look like. Astounding! (Of course, in those New England Colonial days, people simply understood they’d be home from Nov. thru March)…A guy on KPLU mistakenly called convergence zone a harmonic convergence…A whole mature elm on the east slope of Capitol Hill fell over and took a Honda with it…People who commute out to the suburbs took 5 hours to get back into town the night of 12/18. I went to a bus stop on Roosevelt Way at 4 p.m. and got right on a bus — a 2:20 bus — only to be unceremoniously booted off by a defeatist driver on Eastlake and Roanoke an hour later…The roof caved in at Northgate, the original shopping mall; what a symbol for reality crashing in on the nice-day artifice of modern commercial America…70 abandoned school buses were officially missing as of 12/21. Did the drivers tell the dispatcher that the dog ate them?…

THAT SINKING FEELING: Could Tugboat Annie have saved I-90? Don’t know, but I do know that even the 20-year flood spared my mom’s antique shop in downtown Snohomish (though she’ll probably retire before the next threat)…The end of the Stena Line to Victoria follows the end of the beloved Princess Margeurite (named for a Dutch princess born in exile in Canada during the war), now seized by the BC government on behalf of Stena creditors.

ARMED FOR ACTION: Will ’91’s big fashion thing be a sleeveless dress that lets you fully show off your contraceptive implants?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Before Columbus Review is a newsprint journal produced on the UW campus, involved in not just indigenous American cultures but a variety of ethnic issues…The Everett Herald wins praise (and a church-organized protest campaign) by listing gay and lesbian “marriage” ceremonies in a new Celebrations section. Makes me almost proud it was my hometown paper.

CATHODE CORNER: On the 10th anniversary of J. Lennon’s death, the Bon unveiled a commercial with cherubic tots singing his “Merry Xmas (War Is Over).” Wake me when they make a spot out of “Imagine no possessions…”…A Penn State psychologist claims some kids are genetically predisposed to become “chronic TV watchers.” I wonder if anybody’s born to become a maker or reader of silly pseudoscientific surveys?…Night Flight, once the hippest show on cable, is now syndicated (on KING 2:30-4:30 am Fri nites/Sat morns). Segments include the “poignant serial” Twin Geeks (really scenes from the infamous siamese-twin exploitation film Chained for Life).

AD VERBS: The original British Boy Scouts are selling sponsorships on merit badges and accompanying manuals. The “Hobbies” badge bears the logo of Dungeons & Dragons games; sports badges carry the trademarks of equipment and shoe companies.

Revenge or Set-Up for Conquest?: As 1/15 approaches, Newsweek says ABC hired a private spy satellite and found no evidence of a massive Iraqi buildup in or near Kuwait; you know, the buildup that was supposed to have one Iraqi soldier for every Kuwaiti.

CLIPPED WINGS: We’re extremely disappointed that Pan American Airways probably won’t exist any more, ‘cuz we won’t get to ride a Pan Am passenger space shuttle in the year 2001. (That was perhaps the first paid “product placement” in a movie, unless you count De Beers Consolidated Mines paying Ian Fleming to use the title Diamonds Are Forever for a novel that became a movie). Meanwhile, Black & Decker is suing 20th Century-Fox for cutting its product-placement scene from Die Hard 2. I’d be glad to have not been in that loser (but then, I wasn’t). Besides, the company doesn’t need any more association with murder and mayhem. In late-’70s Europe, “to Black & Decker” became a verb for applying a power drill to someone’s knees. (Don’t try this at home.)

SPROCKETS: The foreign control of Hollywood studios won’t affect the (largely horrible) state of movies, because films are already increasingly controlled by Asian and European investors. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was financed by a Hong Kong firm that normally backs regular ninja movies; Disney’s relying on a limited investment partnership based in Japan. These syndicates want films for a worldwide audience — stateless fantasy and male-violence films…The historic Ridgemont Theater is slated to be replaced by (what else?) luxury condos. To think of all the couples who fell in love during the year and a half that A Man and a Woman played there, not to mention all the divorced guys who relieved their loneliness during the year it was a porno house, when the comedy-tragedy masks on its marquee were changed so they were both smiling (mandatory, unrelieved “happiness” is an identifiable mark of sleaze). Cineplex Odious is closing the Market Theater this month, but at least one party wants to reopen it and return to alternative programming.

SIGN ON AURORA: “Olympic Ballot Theatre Presents Nutcracker.” If nobody showed up due to the snow, would the performance have been a secret ballot?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Official Seahawks caramel popcorn, only $2.95 a pound at Frederick’s.

LATE GIFT SUGGESTION: Turning the Tables, a board game created by two Seattle folks, all about waiting tables. The first player to collect $250 in tips wins. Along the way, you have to face, via instructions on the cards, unruly customers, constantly changing “menus,” broken wine glasses, and other fun facets of modern restaurant work. Another impressive local board game: Earth Alert, “the active environmental game”…Parker Bros.’ Careers for Girls game received major flack from Small Business Administration chief Susan Engeleiter. The six “careers” players can choose are Supermom, schoolteacher, rock star, fashion designer, college graduate and animal doctor. Careers in ecology, space, sports, the arts, politics, big business, farming and the movies were in previous versions of the game but dropped for the new edition. The company responded by noting that the game was developed and packaged by an all-woman team.

RE-TALES: Portland now has Nike Town, a 20,000 square foot “shoe experience”. Each line of shoes has its own “environment,” complete with background music and stereo sound effects for a particular sport or activity. The hottest new retail concept for Seattle, meanwhile, is a franchised laundry-tavern combo called Duds `n’ Suds. Cute, but nothing like Miami’s laundry/topless bar (could you wash all your clothes there?)…Pay n’ Pak is the first hardware chain to take the American Express card. I’m reminded of an old radio spot for Amex’s dying competitor Carte Blanche: “After all, why would you pay for a meal in a fine restaurant with the same card you use to have your swimming pool cleaned?”…The Dutch Oven restaurant on 3rd is gutted, now to become a Bartell’s. In its most glamorous moment, in the 1978 TV movie The Secret Life of John Chapman, Ralph Waite (Pa Walton), as a college professor slumming among the working class, walked in front of the Capitol in Washington DC, then turned a corner and ended up inexplicably on 3rd Ave., entered the Dutch Oven, got a job watching dishes, and went home with waitress Susan Anspach.

BLACK & WHITE ISSUES: Seattle photographer Mel Curtis won a $140,000 copyright case against an ad agency that used one of his pictures in a “comp” for a proposed General Dynamics corporate image ad, then substituted a new, almost-identical picture when the ad was published.

UNSUNG HERO: Martha Wash, one of the boisterous 2 Tons of Fun/Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame, turns out to have been the real singer behind songs credited to Black Box and Seduction, two svelte disco girl-groups assembled by manager-producers on the basis of looks. Ex-Seattle singer Marni Nixon (singing voice of the female leads in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The King and I, West Side Story, and other musicals) was quoted in the P-I as saying, “Voice dubbing will always be with us.” But was it really her saying that, or…?

PUNK LIVES! (SORT OF): The KOMO reactionaries discovered the evils of hardcore again, thanks to a Federal Way thrash-nostalgia band whose only provocative aspect is its name, Date Rape. Everything else about it is really tired — slam dancing, flannel shirts tied around the waist. This stuff’s older now than hippie stuff was when punk started. At least it lets KOMO condemn music by white kids, for a change. Geov Parrish, meanwhile, writes that straight-edge rock (discussed last ish) is four or five years old and “already pretty much played out.” Furthermore, Hare Krishna recruiting out of that scene started a couple of years ago but “the word is spreading and they’re getting fewer converts that way.”

RESPONSE: A postcard signed with a scrawled one-word name beginning with “A” takes issue with my claim that “sci-fi” was an OK term since 20th Century-Fox used it in a corporate ad: “Since when have the ad writers been the arbiters of taste or literacy?” I was almost ready to side with A. when across my desk at The Comics Journal came a catalog for cassettes of “filk,” listing singers whom the catalog’s readers were expected to already know. Nowhere did the brochure describe or define filk. I finally learned that it’s pop tunes with new lyrics poking ever-so-gentle fun at sci-fi movies, TV shows and books, performed by the lyricists at fan conventions. People this obsessed with excessively-serious trash art deserve any nickname I can give.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH (when, if we’re at all lucky, we’ll not be out killing people), read The Ascent of Mind by UW neurobiologist William P. Calvin, join our kudos to Charles Johnson for his National Book Award, don’t read American Psycho (more proof that literature is not necessarily the most enlightened of the arts), and stay warm.

REPORT

The 28 people who attended the first Lite Lit reading 12/16 appeared to have fully enjoyed the experience (except one guy who wrote in later, suggesting I should learn to speak more like the Red Sky poets. Sorry, but monotone rants hurt my throat). I’m sure the audience at the following Wednesday’s reading would have been equally entertained, had anybody shown up. Watch for a re-schedule in February.

VISION OF HELL #2

Being trapped in the chair of a hair stylist whose radio station plays all stupid songs (Bread, America) — and who sings along.

VISION OF HELL #3

Being trapped in the only restaurant open in a small town Xmas Eve, with big-screen TVs blasting continuous NFL Films retrospectives of Super Bowls X thru XX.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pish”

INS AND OUTS FOR 1991

Our fifth annual In/Out list follows the same rules as the previous ones: We’re predicting what will become big in the next year, not declaring what’s already big now. In the past, we correctly picked Winona Ryder, Roseanne Barr, plaid, women singers, The Simpsons, pantsuits, Arsenio Hall, minor-league hockey, crystals, fax machines, Anne Rice, nose rings, and minivans.