3/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN THE PAPERS SAID

MISSILE CUTS AND AIRLINE RED INK

COULDN’T POSSIBLY HURT BOEING?

At Misc., we feel Tsongas’ primary success will turn out to be a great boon to the stand-up comedy industry. Imagine: a Presidential candidate who talks like Elmer Fudd! We also finally admit that the “Seattle sound” has arrived after seeing an arena organist playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” during a hockey telecast. An LA Kings game, natch.

UPDATE: I’ve now talked to more people who saw different parts of January’s Broadway riot. They describe how a few demonstrators and counter-demonstrators acted like jerks, but their consensus is that the cops went bonkers and started beating up on everybody in sight, shoving innocent bystanders into walls, threatening to arrest people who were just trying to walk home. (There’s a lot more on this in the 2/5 Seattle Gay News.) Last time, I chastised those who provoked the bashing; that does not excuse the cops who too eagerly escalated the violence.

CRUELTY, MISTAKEN FOR A VIRTUE: The State Legislature’s playing a sick game of one-downsmanship, with leaders of each party competing to see how many destitute and mentally ill people they can force out onto the streets. Most so-called “welfare reform” does nothing for people, only against them. Beware of any legislation that seeks to institutionalize the bigoted attitude that “those people” must be perpetually disciplined and humiliated. Poor people are not different from any of us, as increasing numbers of us are finding out.

GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: The Weekly‘s new look may be a sign that it’s ready to acknowledge the existence of non-yups. They’re even writing about the black community now (maybe next year they’ll even hire a black writer). But they were never alone in rejecting the Demographically Incorrect. For a decade TV morning shows, magazines, and daily papers have narrowed the definition of their primary community to the point where you only count if you were born from 1945 to 1954, went to college, and can afford the investments discussed in “Your Money” columns. Bush, Clinton, and Tsongas tailored their economic fixes to appeal to the “Your Money” audience, knowing it’d get noticed by editors who belong to the upscale 20 percent. Journalists won’t address the non-upscale population except as “those other people,” because their bosses don’t want their precious demographics sullied by non-upscale readers. Millions have been removed from the realm of political discourse because they’re outside the ad market for luxury products. In a real way, demographics could kill democracy.

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The Univ. of BC engineering students, who briefly stole the UW Rose Bowl trophy, are known for their pranks. One year, they rigged the lights on Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge to flash in Morse code: “UBC Engineers Do It Again.” UBC’s female business students hold an annual Lady Godiva Run, donning bikini bottoms and long wigs to race on horseback through the woods of the university’s Endowment Lands. The event’s always denounced by male writers on the student paper, who tell the women what’s the right and the wrong way to be liberated.

FORGIVE ME: I didn’t fill out the opinion survey for the Boeing/P-I/KIRO Crisis in the Work Force: Help Wanted project. I couldn’t answer its questions except with more questions. The first page asked, “What’s causing our problems?”; its choices were “Too much government regulation,” “Decline in American work ethic,” “Businesses taking a short-term approach instead of planning for the future,” “Rising rates of illiteracy in the U.S.,” “The federal budget deficit,” “Demands for higher wages by American labor unions,” etc. I didn’t get to write in “Weighted questions on opinion polls.”

THAT `N.W.O.’ PHRASE WON’T GO AWAY: Leftists still utter those three words in every second sentence, a year after Bush said it just once as a throwaway line. Stuck-in-the-sixties left-wingers, as much as demagogic right-wingers, yearn for the good old days of American imperialism. Neither wants to believe that we’re in relative socioeconomic decline. Instead of seeking today’s answers, they’d rather pretend we still had yesterday’s problems. Kuwait was not Vietnam. We weren’t colonizing anybody; we weren’t claiming to bring them “democracy” or even “free enterprise”. We sent an army-for-hire to restore a 70-year-old mercantilist monarchy on whom the western economy had become dependent. If there really is a new world order (that’s questionable, considering how disorderly the world is getting), its nexus isn’t in Washington, D.C. but in Tokyo and Berlin. This doesn’t mean the end of America. It could be our renewal. For moral-righteousness types, there are advantages to a country off the cutting edge of world dominance. It’s easier to make your ideals into your country’s national policy when you’re in a backwater to the currents of conquest (cf. Sweden).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 2/14): “…the Canadian government measures, aimed mostly at consumer electronics and small appliances, won’t stop the flow of about 30 million Canadians who cross the border into Washington state every year. Most are shoppers.” An impressive figure, except there aren’t 30 million Canadians.

SPURTS: It may be better that the M’s produce their own telecasts, as they’re threatening to, instead of leaving it to Prime Sports Northwest, whose offer is hitting delays. I recently saw a PSN repeat of a UW-WSU basketball game that ended abruptly with a minute to go and the outcome in doubt. An announcer hurriedly apologized for technical difficulties and read the final score…TheOregonian will no longer mention sports team names that allegedly demean native Americans. The editor calls such names “stereotypes that demean the dignity of many people in our society.” They’ll still print the name of the Oregon State Beavers.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: P.O.V. is the monthly newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Film and Video Association. The Feb. issue contained a fascinating piece on the economics and politics of high-definition TV. While HDTV might eventually make film obsolete, P.O.V. sez the short-term result of the changeover will be to increase TV/video work shot on film. The new technology will eventually be the standard, but it hasn’t been perfected yet. Therefore, the only way to be sure your production will transfer well to hi-def is to shoot on film and transfer later to whatever HDTV system we eventually get.

GUY STUFF: After I saw SAM’s opening night, I was just as impressed by the photo show at Benham Studio across the street, including male nudes by female artists. I’ve since seen two films by R.E.M. videomaker James Herbert that used male bodies as the chief images in hetero-erotic scenes. Finally, there was the life-size male nude sculpture smiling from inside the window at the Donald Young Gallery (a cheesy mannequin to which a Calif. artist stuck on hyper-realistic fiberglass genitals). I concluded that I was attracted to female images that represent people I’d like to be with, and to male images that represent people I’d like to be. In most art and literature by both women and men, the female body is the land where sex lives, while the male body is portrayed as the instrument of work. Our strongest non-gay male images are of muscular action: athletes, rock stars, socialist working-man art, SAM’s Hammering Man. It’s only since ’70s porn that we’ve had straight male sex objects, viewed with admiration by other straight men. While the porn business treats men as soulless stimulus machines (a view it shares exactly with the anti-porn crusaders), it led to men looking at other men as sexual creatures. Contemporary artists are going further in demystification, showing that a phallus is an awkward work of biology, not the iron rod or missile invoked by sexists of both genders. These artists are affirming that men are people too.

WIRE, 1982-1992: For three years, back while the now-acclaimed Seattle music scene was really a promotion and art-direction scene, Denis Twomey and his editors ran a local music magazine that was about music more than about style or attitude. It’s tough to discuss aural art in print; even the prosperous UK music papers emphasize celebrity (sometimes in the guise of “alternative” celebrity). But it never recovered from devastating debts, including an ad default from Sub Pop.

AD VERBS: AT&T promoted its new TTD public phone/computer terminals for the deaf with a totally soundless commercial. The most attention-getting device yet; why didn’t anyone think of it before?… KIRO sold sponsorships for its “bumpers” updating what would be on each night’s Olympic coverage. To my knowledge, no other station’s sold advertising during its own advertising. Maybe we’ll get back to the old days when every nonfiction show would have sponsor logos decorating the scenery…. Plymouth has commercials with talking cars, under the slogan “The Intelligent Choice.” Need we remind you what make of car Christine was?

FREDERICK & NELSON, 1890-1992: Department stores were the retail flagships of mid-century America. They set the aesthetic/cultural tone for their towns, both in the styles they promoted and in the newspapers their ads supported. Seattle had the middlebrow Bon Marché, the lowbrow Penney’s and Sears, and the also-rans Rhodes, Best’s, and MacDougall-Southwick. But Frederick’s was the queen, the setter of style. Its distinction wasn’t just Frangos or a doorman. In our rough-hewn port city it was a bastion for the traditionally feminine arts of fashion, decorating, interior design, food, and society. It was headquarters for a clientele of women with upbringing and money but not jobs. It was considered such a female institution that it set up a special Men’s Grill where gentlemen could take a respite from shopping among all the ladies. Its decline was predicated on a series of tightfisted owners (starting when longtime owner Marshall Field’s wouldn’t let it build a Northgate store). But its dominance really passed in the ’60s when Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes, selling flashy career outfits to women who had more to do during the day than sit in Frederick’s tearoom. Frederick’s reacted by turning inward, taking pride in its refusal to change with the times. (It only admitted blue jeans in an obscure corner under a plain “Today Casuals” sign.) The store was made weak, prime for a series of raiders to bleed it dry. But now, maybe too late, people are looking back fondly at a store that had real standards of quality and service, without the designer-trash styles and motivational sales-zombies found across the street. No matter what happens to the store buildings, the impending loss of Frederick’s is a major turning point in our history.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see the gorgeous Until the End of the World, and ponder role-playing-game creator Steve Jackson‘s policy on not depicting fantasy swordsmen/women in G-strings: “Battle is not the place for recreational nudity.”

PASSAGE

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist imagining the sayings of a Delphi oracle in The Sibyl (1956): “We gather knowledge which we call truth from those in whom we least believe, and unconsciously let ourselves be led by what we most heartily detest.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This may be your last free issue of Misc. With the Stranger now running weekly excerpts from the report, I’m severely cutting back on the number of drop-off points for the main newsletter. It’ll still be around at about 20 spots, but the rest of you really ought to subscribe.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Obstreperous”