4/91 Misc. Newsletter

ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN

“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”

ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE

We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.

CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.

STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.

A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”

THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…

STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.

TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!

SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.

MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.

OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.

LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”

NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.

VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).

SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.

PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”

‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”

PASSAGE

The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”

REPORT

The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.

I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.

Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Approbation”