4/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ATTENTION HAWKEYE: GRAB YOUR STETHOSCOPE.

THE WAR RESUMES IN 0800 HOURS

Dunno ’bout you, but here at Misc. we were excited as heck at the P-I teaser headline, “Seahawks Sign Pro Bowler,” then disappointed when the article said he wasn’t a bowling pro, just a football player who’d been in the Pro Bowl. We’re still excited that a Lynnwood company’s gonna start importing Norton motorcycles, a venerable UK brand that hasn’t been sold over here in 20 years. Some analysts claim the company’s just selling the bikes as a loss leader, and the only real profits will come from merchandising the logo. The P-I says the company’s committed to selling the bikes as well as the T-shirts and caps, and has plans to start building the things here in a few years. It’d be the first US cycle plant besides Harley since the Indian company folded in the ’50s. Imagine — being able to buy a US-built two-wheeler without buying into the Young Republican “rebel” image that now surrounds Harleys (more on that later).

ONE LAST OLYMPIC MOMENT: It’s almost too bad the ’98 winter games won’t happen in Salt Lake City, whose bid was topped by the Japanese. I’d have loved to have seen Charles Kuralt & co. give their patented human-interest feature stories on the quaint customs and folklore of those cute lovable li’l Mormons.

ICE DREAM: If you saw the Good Morning America segment with the woman from the Tonya Harding Fan Club, expressing the group’s continued support for the skater at the enforced end of her amateur career, here’s its address: 4632 SE Oxbow Parkway, Gresham, OR 97080-8967. You can join at several levels (adult $10, senior/fixed income $5, children’s “Tots for Tonya” memberships $1). You’ll get a newsletter, bumper sticker, photo button, and a chance to buy autographed pix, “Team Tonya” T-shirts with the logo of an ice skate with a Portland Rose on it, “No Comment” sweatshirts, “IUPG” (Innocent Until Proven Guilty) buttons, and two cassette singles: “It’s Tonya’s Turn” (described in the club catalog as a “dreamy melodic ballad”) and “Fire On Ice” (“Peppy, upbeat lyrics and melody proclaiming Tonya’s skating abilities”). Hey — ya gotta support a figure skater whose name sounds the same as Patty Hearst‘s alias!

FOR BETTER OR VERSE: The Seattle Small Press Poetry Review has been running a reader poll. Among the questions, “Do you think poetry readings have an effect on the audiences’ writing? Good or bad?” Replies include this from Dan Raphael: “Yes, people are influenced by what they hear. Unfortunately a lot of what they hear is personal, un-crafted and indulgent. Hey, we all need places to unload but I don’t want to burden poetry with my sad songs.”

LIVE AIR: So KING-FM’s gonna be donated to the symphony, the opera and the Corporate Council for the Arts. That may remove one of the main complaints about it — that, as one of the world’s few commercial classical stations, it stuck to orchestral favorites and seldom explored the wider range of highbrow tunes. Now, it’ll be part of the nonprofit arts community’s promotional work, and presumably will be used to expose audiences to a full range of serious stuff — or at least the full range of what the symphony and opera are staging this year. The move will also aid KUOW in its plans to phase out its remaining classical hours, toward a more ratings-oriented talk format. The Bullitt sisters are still pondering what to do with the less financially-successful KING-AM. My $.02 worth: Turn it into a community station. Or if not that one, get a community-radio group together, persuade one of the multi-station groups in town to donate another underutilized 1000-1600 AM frequency, and let it rip with unbridled free speech, ungentrified music, ethnic shows, etc.

ALDUS CORP., R.I.P.: There will still be software under the Aldus name, and its code might be written in Seattle, but it’ll be conceived, guided and controlled by Adobe in California. This is more than the potential loss of a few hundred jobs. Aldus was a rule-breaker in the software biz. It was born in Pioneer Square and stayed there, rejecting developers’ offers to move it off to a sterile suburban fort like all the other software giants. Its flagship product, PageMaker, wasn’t some yuppie number-cruncher but a tool of empowerment that brought professional typography and layout into the hands of any civilian with $5 to $8 for an hour at the copy center.

As PageMaker and its sister products gathered more and more professional features, they became almost as expensive as some of the computers they ran on; but Aldus remembered its DIY roots and acquired the popular-priced program Personal Press. When the history of the street-level media revolution is written, the Aldus name will be up there proudly, in 32-point bold condensed.

CATHODE CORNER: NW colleges have never been sources of Florida migrations, but in recent years we’ve seen what we’ve missed with MTV’s Spring Break Weekend, showcasing that annual rite of thousands of East Coast rich kids getting drunk and stupid together. The “highlight” of each year’s coverage was a coed beauty contest that skipped talent or poise segments and went straight to the skin. But this year, a new (female) producer imposed a new dress code: no more undersized trunks and thong bikinis, just baggy surfer shorts and modest two-pieces. Between this and Beavis and Butt-head, the channel is definitely moving its exploitation recipe toward less sex and more violence (just the formula the Reagan-Bush guys would have approved of).

UNDER THE COVERS: As a fervent lover of bookstores, both big-n’-diverse and small-n’-specific (I don’t mess with Mr. In Between), I anxiously await the opening of Borders Books and Music on 4th Ave. downtown, right near Waldenbooks on 5th and Brentano’s in Westlake Center. Just don’t expect any big neighborhood rivalries among them. All three chains are owned by K mart.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Controlled Divisiveness: The Rise and Fault of the Compact Disc is Alex Kostelnik’s self-published tract commemorating the 11th anniversary of the CD’s introduction, packaged in a CD jewel box. Kostelnik uses the CD as a symbol for everything that’s wrong with the music biz — corporate consolidation, bland overproduced product, repressive tactics like anti-home taping campaigns. (He includes a sticker, amending the anti-taping logo to read “Sony Corporation Is Killing Music — And It’s Legal.” Available for $3 at the New Store…. Splice is a new local movie-review zine run by Tacoma’s Michelle McDaniel and Rich Bowen, operating under a simple slogan: “Movies Suck.” Bowen invokes a line popularly attributed to sci-fi guy Theodore Sturgeonthat “90 percent of everything is crap,” then goes on to differentiate between non-crap (Psycho, Casablanca, 2001), good crap (Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster), and bad crap (Calendar Girl). It offers subscriptions, but since the first issue just came out a few weeks ago and has a crossed-out October cover date, you might not want to trust ’em with cash in advance… The first months of newWeekly editor Knute Berger‘s regime have shown a significant turnaround for a paper that seemed doomed to follow its cherished upscale-boomer generation into the grave (or the suburbs, whichever comes first). It’s doing things it’s never done before — publishing significant stories by nonwhite writers, running more serious cover stories, cutting back on the psychobabble and the advertiser-oriented lifestyle fluff. Last week’s piece on City Attorney Mark Sidrin astutely noted that his various harassment campaigns against nightlife, minorities, and the poor, in lieu of a real anti-crime program, might be less effective at making the city safer than at appeasing the prejudices of the “Emerald City” boomers, whose worldview the old Weekly would have never questioned. Speaking of which…

KARMA CORN: If the new age people are right when they claim that your fate in life is primarily determined by how positive or negative your attitude is, then perhaps the state’s latest welfare reform craze is doomed from the get-go. The current public-assistance system is a network of embarrassment, frustrating procedures and cumbersome eligibility requirements, a surefire way to get people to feel dejected and hopeless about their futures. So of course, some of our legislators want to make the requirements even more picayune, the bureaucracy even harsher, to deliberately turn the system into a kind of psychic punishment for the sin of being poor. By the theory of karma, that’s no way to turn depressed, hounded paupers into confident, assertive citizens.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists among you might claim that that’s just what politicians want — to keep poor people feeling helpless, so they won’t think about rising up to challenge the status quo. The same conspiracy arguers might claim that the current cry for a “War on Crime” throws money into an ever-bigger prison system expressly to turn amateur criminals into professional criminals, thus keeping the crime rate up, thus maintaining the perceived need for a police state that would gnaw away against personal rights. I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been around long enough to see social systems (legal, bureaucratic, corporate, et al.) get sidetracked by traditional procedures and end up working against their ostensible original goals. It should be clear by now that we need an assistance system that encourages self-respect and initiative, and a justice system that teaches and encourages non-violent behavior. That is, it might be clear if we weren’t living under government-by-talk-radio. The real goal of our welfare system is to let politicians and affluent voters feel like they’re getting tough on those bad ol’ good-for-nothings. In this sense, we’re already spending our tax money to make people feel good about themselves, but we’re doing it in the wrong way for the wrong beneficiaries.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Food and beverage producers have vastly multiplied their assortments of brands in recent years, trying to exploit the subcultural fragmentation of American society (more about that next week maybe). In one clever example, a small brewery deep in the Iowa grain belt proudly offers Pink Triangle Beer, sold exclusively in gay bars and marketed as the gay-friendly brew gays should choose to show their support for their scene. I don’t know if the active yeast cultures used to make it have that special “gay gene” some speculative researchers think might exist; nor do I know if it has what professional beverage critics sometimes call a “fruity quality”…. Tim Zagat, regional stringer for the foodservice trade mag Restaurants & Institutions, claims the Next Big Thing in Northwest restaurants will be Tofu Chateaubriand! I can’t even imagine what that would be. Whatever it is it sounds disgusting, so of course I want to try it. If anybody’s really serving this, please let me know.

DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: The city should support punk culture, instead of continuing to harass it. Seattle’s government and mainstream media still believe in the sentiments uttered by KIRO’s Lou Guzzo back in 1986, supporting the infamous Teen Dance Ordinance. In one of the most reactionary utterances ever made on local airwaves, Guzzo essentially called punks worthless losers; if teenagers were bored, he said they ought to take up hiking or skiing — in other words, consumer leisure pursuits that wouldn’t lead to questioning the established sociopolitical order.

Punks believe in living in big cities. They believe in creativity. They believe in making their own world, in making up their own minds. Punks believe in downtown shopping, public transportation, and public gathering places. Punks seem like nihilists to many outsiders, but really believe in actively working for a better world. In the developing information age, they’re pioneers in info-entrepreneurism. They make their own records, they book their own gigs, they paint their own posters, they publish their own zines — a collection of skills that seem like marginal pursuits to most people over 40, but which will be vital to the key industries of the 21st century. Punks aren’t hopeless dropout ne’er-do-wells. They’ve created one of the Seattle area’s four or five top export industries. They’ve helped make us a world-class arts center, with a reputation as a focal point for aspiring enthusiastic creative types from all over. Speaking of which…

OVER-THE-COUNTERCULTURE: You sometimes hear about old radical groups that got infiltrated by FBI informers. In some accounts, the plants prodded the groups into illegal acts or spurring internal dissentions. But I wonder if they ever got subliminal messages into those old light shows, implanting time-release instructions to the freaks: “By 1971 you will get hooked on pot, move to the country, and care only about yourselves.”

When I was in college in the early ’80s, some of the most personally complacent and artistically reactionary people were the ones who also wouldn’t stop bragging about how open-minded they were in The Sixties. When I was on KCMU I closed my DJ shift with the tagline, “Rock on — never mellow out.” I didn’t want my listeners to turn into self-obsessed fogeys intolerant of anything that didn’t conform to their increasingly narrow worldview.

Now, hardly a week goes by that I don’t meet somebody 10 years younger than me emulating everything that frustrated me about the people 10 years older than me. Here in the Geraldo era I meet young adults who still find something “rebellious” about Hunter Thompson, that professional self-aggrandizer who presaged today’s reporter-as-celebrity hype. I’ve read Terence McKenna essays that criticize “linear Western Civilization” as if it still existed. And it’s not just 40-year-olds anymore who mistake “What a long strange trip it’s been” for a profound statement.

I’m even getting young people treating me with the same stereotypes old people used on me — like the stereotype that anybody who doesn’t adhere to a “leftist lifestyle” must be a political conservative. I’ve heard food co-op purists condemn all supermarket shoppers or all TV viewers as fascist rednecks; the argument reminds me of the Fundamentalists of my hometown who avowed that the Mormons would go to Hell because of their incorrect doctrine.

That’s a perfect attitude for moralistic posturing, but a lousy way to build a progressive political movement. To see why, let’s examine some unexamined presumptions going back to the Beat Generation.

The button-down conformity of the ’50s was not the way society had always been. Some WWII-generation intellectuals saw ’50s culture being created, and rebelled against it. Their central premise, as watered down and reinterpreted over the years, was that all of America could be neatly divided into two groups: Hipsters (enlightened intellectuals and artists, plus those whom the intellectuals and artists chose to romanticize) and Squares (everybody else). Tom Lehrer lampooned these pretensions in his song “The Folk Song Army” (“We’re the Folk Song Army, and every one of us cares. We hate repression, injustice and war — unlike the rest of you squares!”).

The hippies took this premise to its logical extreme, and in doing so tore the American left apart from the working class it once claimed to champion. By stereotyping all non-hippies as fascists and rednecks, they wrote off the potential support base for any real populist uprising. They sometimes claimed to be the voice of The People, but their definition of The People got narrower every year. Spiro Agnew got away with calling leftists “effete snobs” because leftists allowed themselves to be perceived as a self-serving elite.

By the early ’70s, black activists started charging that the counterculture didn’t even care about minorities anymore, only about white middle-class women and white middle-class gays. More recently, minority leaders have questioned the environmental movement’s priorities, asserting that toxic waste sites in ethnic neighborhoods are at least as important as hiking trails.

Today, BMW drivers call themselves “rebels” and beer commercials promise to make you “Different From The Rest.” There is no “mass culture” to rebel against anymore. Society’s been fragmented into demographic and subcultural mini-states, influenced by specialty advertising concepts and demographic target marketing. The “counterculture” is now just another market niche; organic foods in this store, ethnic foods in the next. If you tout yourself as somehow “apart” from Big Bad America on the basis of what you eat or what you wear or what age group you are, you’re still letting the segmented-consumer metaphor define you.

To be truly “political” would be to forge alliances with people beyond your own subculture, to reach out across our fragmented society, to build coalitions and exert influence to help make a better world. We don’t need to tear the fabric of society apart; big business already did it. We need to figure how to sew it back together.

QUESTIONABLE PR TACTIC OF THE MONTH: Marshall at YNOT Magazines wants people to “help” City Councilmember Jane Noland’s drive against street posters: “Go take a flier off your local pole, any one you find visually stimulating is fine. Then fax it to her so she knows the effort you have exerted to her cause. Then do it again. Do it til the cows come home. Do it ’til they leave on spring break and come home again but whatever you do just keep faxing her updates of your efforts. Maybe even make a flier about this and tack ’em up all over. Boy wouldn’t that be swell!” I can’t endorse this; I thought we were trying to prove we can be responsible people who don’t deserve to be treated as non-citizens in the name of that official state religion of Seattle, Mandatory Mellowness.

‘TIL THE NEXT TIME your fingers pick up our ink, and call for your copy of the complete Hanna-Barbera sound effects library, on four CDs from somewhere in Canada (800-387-3030).

PASSAGE

Stanford “industrial psychologist” Dr. James Keenan, in a 1967 speech to Muzak executives quoted in Joseph Lanza’s book Elevator Music: “Muzak helps human communities because it is a non-verbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village…. Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it massifies symbolism in which not few, but all, can participate.”

REPORT

Printout copies of the rough draft to my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are still available for a limited time for $10 plus $2 postage. Be among the first to learn what really happened to make Seatown the capital of rock revivalism.

As you can tell, this is the first issue of the new, expanded, larger-than-it-once-was Misc. newsletter thang. It’s a vehicle for some non-Stranger material, for some of my unpublished short fiction and humor pieces, and for some future experiments in form and design. The price also increases with this issue, to $12. Current subscribers will receive two issues for every three they’re still owed at the old price, rounded up in their favor.

Ads are again being accepted for this letter of fun: $25 for a business card-sized spot on the back, $20 for the same-sized spot inside. Show your support for Seattle’s original home of fast-food-for-thought.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Querulous”