AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…
EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)
NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced
June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.
Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.
Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.
(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)
