8/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns

and one newsletter-only essay)

…AND THIS CEILING TILE WILL FLLLYYY AWAY!

Here at Misc., your most welcome piece of info since the news that Shannen Doherty will star in a TV movie about the author of Gone With the Wind, we think the just-released Flintstones TV soundtrack album is great and far superior to anything to do with the movie version, but it’d be greater if it had included Ann-Margarock.

UPDATES: Somebody called to report that there’s another salt-and-vinegar potato chip out there, made by the Kettle Chips brand and available at a few scattered outlets….

The family feud between Month magazine and Northwest Monthly, a rival formed by former Month staffers, ended with the Month publishers giving in and folding. The last Month art director has inherited the last Month office space and is using it to start yet another music/art/fashion tabloid, to be called Neo.

OUR “HOWCUM” FILE is puzzled that booze is sold on the car ferries, but prohibited on the passenger-only ferries. Lessee: It’s OK to drink if you’re gonna be driving, but not if you’re not.

THE NEW LITTER: The post-Dog House saga gets curiouser and curiouser. The legendary old roadhouse diner’s “Time to Eat” sign suddenly appeared in a longtime “restaurant graveyard” site at 5th & Denny. A window sign promises the mid-August opening of “The Puppy Club.” Yes, it’s run by the old Dog House people, and will have some of the old staff and some of the old amenities, but with no organ in the bar, some different menu items, and windows. It’ll be open all night weekends but (at least at first) will close at 11 during the week. Let’s hope it’s more of a Dog House revival than the joint now in the old Dog House building (a perfectly adequate restaurant but that’s all).

STAMPING OUT CRIME?: Misc. hasn’t said many nice things about the Seattle Police, but we do think it’s nice that new Chief NormStamper appeared in the Gay Pride parade. Odd name, tho: Down in P-Square, “stamper” is a term for guys wandering around with Joint Cover hand stamps, sometimes getting drunker and more unpleasant at each successive venue.

SERVING THE SERVANTS: An Aberdeen sculptor and ex-monster truck driver, Randi Hubbard, is making a 600-lb. concrete statue of Cobain. She wanted to give it to the City of Aberdeen, but city fathers were uneasy about putting it up in public. Those feelings were supported for other purposes by Novoselic, who wants his bandmate to be remembered according to what he’s called “the punk rock ethic” in which there are no monuments to superstars. Hubbard’s withdrawn her gift of the statue and will offer it to private buyers. Sounds like the futile attempt to make the Seattle Parks Dept. put up a Hendrix memorial, a drive that led only to a “hot rocks” monument in the African savannah exhibit of the zoo. Speaking of creativity and cultural independence…

DANCE FEVER: We now must say goodbye to XLR8R, the local rave-techno-disco-dance tabloid; its publishers are moving their whole operation to Frisco. The move highlights the chief problem with the local dance-music scene: its willingness to merely consume trends created in Calif. instead of growing its own talent and ideas. As XLR8R has reported, most every bigtime rave event in town gives its starring slots to Frisco DJs, with local spinners permanently relegated to opening slots. It’s a longstanding tradition that any creative endeavor in Seattle dies when it becomes just a market for Frisco artists. The original Northwest Rock bands (1958-66) created some all-time great sounds and filled the region’s ballrooms, but once acid rock hit big there was nothing for local bands to do but open for touring bands. To become something more than simple followers, the Northwest (not “West Coast”) dance scene will have to champion its own DJs, its own sounds, its own spectacles, and (yes) its own zines. Speaking of original artistry…

YA KILL ME: Of the current advocates of indie rock as a quasi-religion opposed to the orthodoxy of the major-label industry, few have a more adamant reputation than Kathleen Hanna, co-leader of Olympia’s Bikini Kill. Her band has gained a reputation as defiant tough women, even among mass-media people who’ve never heard its music. One person who has heard the band’s music is punk legend Joan Jett, who produced a 45 for the band. Now Hanna’s co-written three songs for Jett’s next album, Pure and Simple. What’s shocking is that one, “You Got a Problem,” was also co-credited to Desmond Child, corporate-rock producer for the likes of Kiss and singer in ’70s meathead band Desmond Child and Rouge (and a longtime Jett collaborator). Not only that but one of her Kill Rock Stars labelmates, Mary Lou Lord, has signed a publishing contract (but not a recording contract) with BMG Music (née RCA Records). You tell me: Selling out or buying in? Speaking of strong women of song…

A SHORT COOL WOMAN IN A BLACK DRESS: The tribute-album craze continues with a CD of modern stars covering Ms. Romantic Doom-n’-Gloom herself, the legendary Edith Piaf. Her signature tune, “La Vie en Rose,” will be covered by Donna Summer. If you think that’s an inappropriate stand-in for the late Little Sparrow, other non-waify, non-Euro voices on the CD will include country singer K.T. Oslin, Pat Benetar, Juice Newton, Corey Hart, and our own Ann Wilson. (What, no Morrissey?) It may only prove how great Piaf was, that no contemporary female artist can attempt her material without seeming like a bad joke. Even today’s “adult acoustic alternative” women singers are too level-headed to approach Piaf’s delicate combination of power and despair. What woman today would dare present herself as torn apart by romantic anguish, and as finding strength through such turmoil? (Maybe Diamanda Galas.) Speaking of modern women’s images…

DRAWING THE LINE: In a recent Stranger, comix artist/ editor Trina Robbins said a leading deterrent to women in comix (as creators and consumers) is the offputting ambience of comic-book shops. Now, comic-shop chain Dream Factory is opening six “Dream Factory for Her” shops at malls in Connecticut, Illinois and Ohio. A USA Today item quoted exec Lori Raub claiming the stores would have a “feminine look” with rose and purple colors. The article says the stores will sell clothes, art and jewelry in addition to comics, but doesn’t say how they’ll get enough appropriate comix product for their shelves. As Robbins noted, major comic book companies produce few titles with cross-gender appeal (notable exceptions include DC’s Sandman) and fewer specifically aimed at females (and those tend to be for younger readers, like Marvel’s Barbie titles).

Any store looking for comix product to sell to femmes will have to seek independent publishers of woman-made titles (like the locally-drawn Dirty Plotte, Bitchy Bitch, Tomato and Girlhero) and of general-interest titles that emphasize storytelling instead of shoot-’em-up action (like Jim, Deadface, Love & Rockets, and Eightball). A female-friendly store would be friendly toward comix outside the action-violence genre, and would be a great tool for developing the potential of the medium–something fans of any gender can cheer about. Still speaking of modern women’s images…

THE REAL SKINNY: The ultimate charm of the Fox summer serial Models Inc. is that it’s an anachronistic show set in an anachronistic world. One subplot involves a model whose creepy musician boyfriend is trying to raise $25,000 to make a professional demo tape to send to major labels. All he’d need to raise these days would be $2,000 to press an indie CD, get it in stores, and take control of his own career. Similarly, the models themselves are already-arrived faces of pouting perfection. A realistic show about would-be supermodels might have young naive image-obsessed walking skeletons trying to break themselves into a model’s lifestyle, maybe by trying out a new fruit-flavored Syrup of Ipecac. Some would indeed have schemer boyfriends who preyed on their low self-esteem, while others would be giving up on boyfriends who talk sincere enough but just don’t understand the emotional compulsion necessary to become a would-be model, to make the world love your body by relentlessly hating it yourself. (There are women whose figures I liked more than they did; they essentially told me that I was just a tourist while they had to live there.)

RAILING ON: Mass-transit planning is firmly controlled by an insider clique of hard-bitten bureaucrats and number-crunchers who don’t understand the aesthetic and cultural influences that would persuade people to take up non-car transport. That’s why I cheer tour-bus driver Dick Falkenbury and his Initiative 39. If it makes the ballot and passes, it’d create a public agency to build a 35-mile elevated light-rail system, and to find private financing for it if possible. It’d probably look and run like Vancouver’s SkyTrain, but it’d be sold to voters as an update/ extension of the Monorail. The county’s transit planners apparently never thought of this brilliant PR stroke. Nearly everybody loves the Monorail, even if few people have a regular use for its one-mile run. Just think: We won’t be sinking $700 million into some overpriced albatross that few people will use, we’ll be fulfilling one of the Seattle World’s Fair’s dreams for Century 21!

THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE DEPT.: ABC’s asking producers of its prime-time shows to not have opening theme songs this fall. The idea is to start out right away with credits flashing beneath actors trading their opening barbs, a la Seinfeld and Murphy Brown, to discourage remote-control zapping. Don’t they know they’re destroying one of the key rituals of the viewing experience? Without theme songs, what’ll nostalgic commercials use in the year 2010?

THE SOUND OF COLIC: Unemployed San Diego aerospace engineer Rick Jurmain and his wife Mary have invented “Baby Think It Over,” an anatomically-correct, battery-powered, squishy-faced baby doll that cries loudly and shrilly at what its makers call “random, but realistic intervals, simulating a baby’s sleeping and waking patterns to its demand for two.” The $200 dolls come in four ethnic varieties plus a special “crack baby” version. The inventors want the dolls to be used in schools to warn teens that having babies isn’t always cute and cuddly. To really do that, they’d need a whole line of dolls, like Baby Stinky Pants, Baby Barf-A-Lot, and Baby Climb-Into-The-Dryer.

THE INCREDIBLE BULK: Had some thoughts while wandering through the massive new Aurora Village Costco warehouse. There are four major national retail institutions from Seattle: Nordstrom, REI, Starbucks and Costco. The latter chain is the closest to the “Seattle scene” aesthetic. At first, punk rock and Costco might not seem to have much in common. Punk is an urban thang; most warehouse stores are located way out there. Punk is built around independent retailers filling highly specialized desires of cult audiences. A warehouse store offers only a few popular items in each department; Costco’s puny CD department doesn’t sell any alterna-rock more obscure than In Utero. But look further: We’re not a scene of debutantes spending Daddy’s money buying designer duds and snorting nose candy in discos. We’re a scene based on thrift, no-nonsense graphics, and the glorious excesses of the common capitalist American. We thrive on low-budget spectacles of glorious lowbrow pleasure. We believe in empowering small business (something Costco claims to also believe in), and in subcultural communal experiences (which Costco shopping certainly is). We like to gather at obscure sites away from the glare of malls. And we much prefer to shop among Laotian immigrant families and self-employed cab drivers than among the Bellevue Squares. And Costco’s got great beer and coffee prices. Speaking of which…

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: One item found in some warehouse stores is Tongue Splashers Bubble Gum, a Canadian-made product that promises to “paint your mouth in a splash of color.” These colors include Bleeding Red, Color Me Blue, Orange Crunch, Slime Green and Slurpin’ Purple. Even cooler is the package: a real paint can, with 240 pieces inside! …

The official Seattle Seahawks chewing gum is a lot like the team. It seems tough for the first couple of seconds, but very quickly proves just how soft and pliable it really is. Speaking of odd consumptible concepts…

HOW DRY I AM DEPT.: Powdered beer has been announced by a Czech brewery, intended at first for export to Russia. “All you need is a pot and a spoon, and you can have your own beer in about 10 days,” brewery spokesperson Jan Oliva told the AP. It contains active yeast cultures that quickly form alcohol once you put the powder in water and let it mature to taste. It costs about 25 cents a quart. “It looks like beer, it tastes like beer, and it has a head too,” Oliva said. “It is beer, and a good one at that.” Maybe it’ll become a fad item over here; heck, anything’d be better than the ice-beer and clear-beer campaigns…

Except, perhaps, for the rumored new product of the St. Ides/Black Star people, an item as yet unnamed but said to be “a malt liquor for white people.” Speaking of beverage products aimed at young markets…

PR LINE OF THE WEEK (postcard to a band’s mailing list): “This is a postcard to promote `Running With Scissors‘ and to tell you things are going to be okie dokie. … The Scissors Manifesto: 1. Attending our shows and buying our CDs are the keys to `okie dokie-ness.’ 2. People who request our songs on the radio are okie dokie. 3. Actually, sex is much better than `okie dokie-ness’ but no one will pay us for sex. 4. It would be really great if young people had a reason to feel better than just okie dokie. 5. Foul tasting, over-hyped beverages do not make you feel okie dokie…. Not affiliated with any patronizing multinational beverage company.” Speaking of which…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The OK Hotel (a great music venue, no relation to any lousy soft drink) almost finally went all 21-and-over last month, a year and a half after its owners first threatened to. The owners were looking for a way to make the ol’ music-n’-art cafe more financially stable, and decided to add a tavern in an unused storefront area of the building. This would’ve made the whole space officially a bar, and hence verboten to minors during entertainment hours; but (for once!) the Liquor Board agreed to an arrangement wherein the music room will still be open to all, but over-21s can access the new bar area. The loss of Seattle’s only full-time all-ages music space would have been an incalculable blow to the development of new bands and new audiences, and would have hindered the continued growth of the local scene. The occasional Velvet Elvis, Penny University and King Theater all-ages shows help a little, but what we really need is a way for a commercial venue to meet its expenses while letting both under- and over-21s in. Let’s hope the new OK layout proves to be one such way. Speaking of kids-n’-culture…

THE YOUNG AND THE CLUELESS: I saw a horrendous CNN interview session at the KNDD studios (don’t blame the station for any of this). Twenty-three people in their mid-20s (a CNN publicist insisted on calling this age group “kids”) took turns in a conference room, where a camera crew taped them in three-quarter profile on the left side of the screen, before a speckled-blue backdrop, while a producer asked them such probing questions as “Is there such a thing as Generation X,” “Is there a generational conflict with baby boomers?”, and “The media generally says Gen X is defined by divorce, AIDS, poor economy and a distrust of politics. What do you feel about each issue?” Not attending was ex-MTV guy Adam Curry, who’ll narrate the finished show, Boom or Bust?–airing (natch) on Woodstock ’94 weekend. Aargh!

COLD AS ICE: Penthouse may soon run stills from home sex videos of Tonya Harding, supplied by ex-hubby Jeff Gillooly. Haven’t seen ’em, but can probably assure you that the pix will reveal that Harding (1) is a woman, and (2) used to have relations with someone to whom she was married. BFD.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside Megan Mary Olander Flowers on 1st Ave. S.): “Clues That You’re In the Wrong Age Group: You walk into the party and everyone hides their beer. Your bell bottoms and platform shoes are originals. No one knows who Marlo Thomas is. Rad is not a unit of radiation. They talk Star Trek and you drop the name William Shatner. All your friends are taking Retin A and Alpha Hydrox (isn’t that a cookie?). You were around when martinis and Tony Bennett were cool the first time.”

OTHER VOICES (Fintan O’Toole in a recent issue of The Irish Times): “We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, `I know this is not politically correct, but…’ in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness…. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from the fascists to the merely smug.”

CLIPPED: Northwest Rock, one of the only two regularly-scheduled outlets on Seattle TV for regional acts (especially indie and unsigned acts), has been canceled by KTZZ. It can be argued that the station’s sales staff didn’t know how to market the show, and that it was hurt by its 1 a.m. Saturday time slot (when people who liked these bands would be out seeing them). Producer Frank Harlan, a.k.a. Bill Bored, isn’t giving up; he’s got plans for occasional specials, and may try to relaunch the show under some other financial setup, on KTZZ or some other outlet. It might help if you write KTZZ, 945 Dexter Ave. N., 98109, tell ’em you want to keep seeing “Northwest music history in the making” and would watch it in a better time slot.

‘TIL WE BAKE SLIGHTLY LESS in Sept., check out the Thursday night “Rock n’ Bowl” at Imperial Lanes on Rainier (the real-life equivalent to the “Soul Bowl” depicted on a recent Stranger cover), be sure to catch TV Nation, Fox’s great reruns of Thunderbirds Sat. morns and Lifetime’s great reruns of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Sat. nights, and recall the sage advice of the immortal James Thurber: “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.”

PASSAGE

Bucky Fuller’s classic definition of a human being: “A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped…the whole complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectrascope, etc., the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.”

REPORT

Still looking for pix (photos, posters, record art) for my book on the real local music history.

If you’ve any comments on what ought to be in the new bigger newsletter (i.e., if you think the fiction’s cool or sucks), lemme know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Sedulous”

THE MEDIA SEATTLE

There are many Seattles more or less co-existing in the same real estate, but practically the only one you hear about in the local mainstream media is what we might call the Media Seattle. The Media Seattle is the only Seattle you see on Evening Magazine, in the Weekly, in Pacific Northwest magazine, in commercials, and in Nordy’s ads. It’s the only Seattle you see when Good Morn. America or Tom Snyder’s cable show come here: Pike Place Fish, houseboats, Starbucks, microbrews (but never any drunks), Bill Gates, the Museum of Flight, and maybe Boeing. You see Westlake but not Eastlake, Green Lake but not the Duwamish. The Media Seattle myth tries to condescendingly explain away “the grunge explosion” without acknowledging that the Punk Seattle is diametrically opposed to the obsessive smarminess and blandness of the Media Seattle.The Media Seattle often brags about its “commitment to diversity” or “multiculturalism,” but it’s a sham. The Media Seattle only gives a damn about you if you’re an affluent member of the baby-boom generation (or a pre-teen child of one), and only if you’re either a non-Catholic white or an assimilationist minority trying to be a white boomer. A few Japanese-Americans are allowed in the Media Seattle, but no Koreans or Vietnamese and certainly no Samoans.

Representatives of the traditional news media sometimes try to scare you that the Info Hi-Way will make information accessible only to the affluent, but that’s what those traditional news media themselves have been doing for the past 20 years. When was the last time you saw minority or working-class people depicted as non-buffoons in the local dailies, as non-criminals on local TV news, or at all in the Weekly? When was the last time you saw our “Seattle” mainstream media treat city residents with respect, instead of aiming only at some mythical average family out in the higher-priced subdivisions? There’s this one very narrow class of people that the media want to reach. If you don’t belong to it, you won’t be shown in the media (and that includes “alternative” media that try to be “progressive” but still all-upscale) unless you get arrested for something bad.

When I see images of the Media Seattle, I think what a dull, utterly bourgeois place that would be if it existed. The Commons and the Urban Villages are attempts to make that smarmy fantasy a reality. Thank God we still have some other Seattles in our midst, at least for now.