2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.

THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.

CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.

EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.

GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!

SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”

DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)

MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.

CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.

YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it: Deluxe.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.

THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”

THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”

DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.

NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.

PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”

DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).

A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.

She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.

Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”

PASSAGE

Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”

REPORT

My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”