TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.
IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.
ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”
HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).
`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.
ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”
