Here at Misc. we love the idea of the recent McDonald’s All-American Gymnastics Tourney. You probably always think of Quarter Pounders with Super Size fries when you see lithe toned athletes bulging out of their tights. It’s the weirdest corporate sponsorship since Yuban coffee sponsored the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, a story that takes place while its heroine’s asleep.

CONSUMER TIP OF THE WEEK: Dave’s cigarettes are really made by those Jesse Helms lovers at Philip Morris USA. The pseudo-small-business ad campaign is just a crock, like all the “family” winemakers in the late ’70s that were really owned by Gallo. As if a one-tractor, 20-acre tobacco farm run by one guy “who works for nobody but himself” could afford all those fancy ads, billboards and point-of-sale displays.

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Alternative X is an online journal curated by a literary essayist using the (allegedly real) name Mark Amerika. Its main attraction is “In Memoriam to Postmodernism,” a book-length package of essays on “avant pop” fiction (defined here as everybody from Kathy Acker to Mark Leyner) and other topics. Included in the package are:

* “Strategies of Disappearance, or Why I Love Dean Martin” by Stranger interviewee Steve Shaviro (praising the eternally-indifferent “Zen Master of the Rat Pack”);

* “A Mysterious Manifesto” by Don Webb, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a mainstream science-fiction fan (because commercial SF/ fantasy denies any real sense of mystery and wonder in favor of “grey” formula predictability); and

* “An Essay-Simulacrum on Avant-Pop” by Curt White, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a “radical” (because they haven’t “advanced any description of a social organization beyond capitalism more invigorating than the oft-used and dusty phrase `true participatory democracy'”).

Also on the site is “Toward the New Degenerate Narrative,” a “literary manifesto” by Bruce Benderson that starts with a cute rant against bureaucratically-edited school textbooks and goes on to expose the classist assumptions behind the “progressive” fantasy of a utopian small-town society where everybody’s “nice” and soft-spoken–the same fantasy behind the “Northwest Lifestyle” rhetoric. Benderson notes that much of the post-hippie left’s politics “have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain lifestyle: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about The Other.” He also disses the slogan “Hate Is Not A Family Value,” asserting that “hate and resentment keep the family’s incestuous urges tensely leashed.”

THE FINE PRINT (on a tub of Dannon Light ‘N Crunchy Low Fat Yogurt with Aspartame Sweetener and Crunchies): “Contains one-third fewer calories than the leading brand of sugar-sweetened yogurt with crunchies.”

HEY SAILOR!: As some of you know, I live in the general vicinity of the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall in Belltown. So when chartreuse-haired guys n’ gals started lining up in front of the place on the evening of 3/3, some neighbors and neighborhood people shuddered out loud that they were gonna be kept awake by another of the all-night raves that had been held there over the past year. I reassured them this was different: Live bands (no incessant disco beats), in an all-ages show that’d be over before midnight.

Inside, the scene was a flashback to a time when today’s underage punks were in diapers. By the time the amazing Team Dresch played a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover, the time warp was complete. With one big difference (bigger than the gig’s total on-stage ratio of eight females to three males)–unlike the old rental-hall punk shows, where drinking, drugging, fighting and hall-trashing were constant presences or threats, this crowd grew up under the burden of the Teen Dance Ordinance, knew an all-ages show was something precious, and behaved accordingly. Part of the credit goes to promoter Lori LaFavor (a partner in the old local music tabloid Hype). She booked some of the biggest names in indie music, who also happened to share a belief that music should be more than a mere excuse for partying but a means toward communication and community.