MISC. SAYS GOODBYE this week to one of its favorite conglomerates, American Home Products, maybe the biggest company you never heard of. It’s being broken up, with divisions sold off, so management can focus on its drug operations (Anacin, Advil, Dristan, and many lucrative prescription patents). Unlike the late Beatrice, AHP kept its corporate profile low while promoting its brands (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pam, Brach’s candy, Ecko kitchenware, Easy-Off, Aerowax, Black Flag) with near-monomaniacal aggression. It was be said if you didn’t have a headache before an Anacin ad, you had one after. When Procter & Gamble’s ’50s soap operas offered up Presbyterian homilies of hope and family alongside the tears and turmoil, AHP’s soaps (Love of Life, The Secret Storm) relished unabashed melodrama, the harsher the better. While AHP was never a household name, its contributions won’t be forgotten by anyone who ever dined on Beefaroni while listening to a Black Flag LP.
BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! (NY Times blurb, 5/6): “If television is the Elvis of communications media and the Internet is Nirvana, radio is Bach.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: From our pals in the Seattle Displacement Coalition comes Seattle’s Urban Counter-Point, a four-page tabloid chastising the city’s inaction against homelessness and its action against homeless people. It does a better job than anybody at explaining how and why Seattle’s political machine, giving lip service to “progressive” homilies while actually serving at the beck and call of big money, is “a system of establishment control that is more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright graft.” Issue #1 doesn’t propose many solutions to homelessness, but does get in some well-placed digs at public officials’ war against the poor, and promotes a public forum where more proactive policies will be debated (Mon. June 10, 6 p.m., downtown library). The paper’s free (donations accepted) from the Church Council of Greater Seattle, 4759 15th Ave. NE, Seattle 98105.
FOAMING: KIRO-TV’s feature series earlier this month about the “fake microbrew” phenomenon successfully revealed the philosophy that sets real “craft” brewers apart from not only mainstream beer, but from mainstream business in general. “Contract brewing” is the product of a notion, increasingly popular in American business, that all that matters is a product’s concept and its marketing; actually making the stuff is a technicality to be dealt with as expediently as possible. That philosophy is why ad agency Weiden & Kennedy and its stable of spookejocks earn more money from Nike than all the Third World sweatshoppers who actually make the shoes. Craft brewers, on the other hand, put great pride and/or elaborate PR into the brewing process, into being able to control and refine every step.
This lesson hasn’t been lost on Minott Wessinger, the Henry Weinhard heir who sold that company, got into the malt-liquor trade, then tried to re-enter mainstream beer in ’93 with Weiden & Kennedy’s Black Star ad campaign. Wessinger’s about to re-launch the Black Star brand, without W&K and with a new corporate identity. He’s now doing business as the Great Northern Brewing Co., and proudly advertising every aspect of his new brewhouse in Whitefish, Mont. Black Star will now be promoted as something as carefully produced as microbrews, but with a more mainstream taste.
THE SKINS GAME: Another International No-Diet Days has come and gone. This year, the week of body-acceptance forums and events followed a curious NY Times piece on high schoolers across America these days (girls and boys) refusing to undress in the shower. Apparently, if you believe the article, kids everywhere are hung up on not looking like supermodels and/or superjocks. (It doesn’t seem to get any better in the gay world–papers like the Village Voice are now full of ads with bare male chests, all completely pumped and completely hairless.) As one who is neither jock nor model, I say there’s billions of great body types out there. Standards of perfection are for machine tools, not people.
(Party games, entertainment, performance art, memories–the giant Misc. 10th Anniversary Party’s got ’em all. Sunday, June 2, 6 pm-whenever, at the Metropolis Gallery, University St. between 1st and 2nd downtown. Be there. Details at the Misc. World HQwebsite, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.)
