MISC. MUST BELATEDLY mourn the passing of Vox Populi Gallery, for nearly three years the town’s best locale for exciting, fun, provocative, and just plain rockin’ painting, photography, and comic art. Writer Grant Alden, who co-founded the gallery with Carl Carlson, has been living out of town working magazine jobs the past several months. Alden decided in mid-January to cash in his interests and leave the art-selling biz entirely. Seattle still needs a space like VP.

TUBE TIES: The pending sale of KSTW to Atlanta’s Cox company means for the first time since the Bullitt sisters sold KING, we’ll have a woman-owned TV station. The Cox sisters of Atlanta were listed in Parade as among the world’s 20 richest women, up with the likes of Queen Elizabeth. The Cox heiresses’ managers built a small southern newspaper chain into a media mini-giant, from the Auto Trader magazines to film producers Rysher Entertainment. Their Atlanta monopoly daily has given my ex-UW colleague, editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovitch, a prominent and relatively censor-free forum. By selling channel 11, Gaylord Entertainment‘s giving a clear no-confidence vote in CBS’s drive to avoid permanent also-ran status. It’s a vote I hadn’t expected, since Gaylord and Westinghouse (CBS’s new owners) are partners in the Nashville Network. (Westinghouse was recently rumored to be considering buying Gaylord, with or without KSTW.)

IN A HAZE: I’m still thinking about the pathetic spectacle that was the Jimi Hendrix statue dedication late last month, in front of Audio Environments Inc.‘s Broadway offices. It’s an extremely hideous artifact, made with less artistry than seen on a Franklin Mint collector’s plate. Some folks saw irony in the statue being commissioned and totally funded by AEI, a background-music company. I didn’t see that as much as I saw it as yet another instance of white boomers fetishizing the guy as an icon for their notions of the black man as sexy savage. I’m positive Hendrix, an intelligent and innovative artist who seemed to be slumming in rock for the money, would’ve eventually spurned that image and settled into a prog-jazz career (maybe finding a jazz-rock melange that would’ve prevented the development of fusion). We must also remember he left Seattle at 18 and only performed here again as a touring act. From all accounts, he found the Seattle of his day a town with neither the racial openness nor the artistic opportunities he needed. For local boomers to keep enshrining him as the city’s pride n’ joy is something he’d probably have had a heck of a time getting comfortable with.

PRESENT TENSE: After years of wanting to, I finally got in this year to the Seattle Gift Show, a trade show for retailers and wholesalers of less-than-necessary merchandise. It was just as great as I’d imagined–a gigantic bazaar, taking up the whole Convention Center and two Seattle Center buildings to boot; full of booths hawking the widest array of stuff. There were acres of “country craft” baskets, Husky sweatshirts, “Over The Hill” bras designed to droop, small-penis-joke greeting cards, Absolutely Fabulous fridge magnets, cocoa mix from an outfit called Pure Decadence, landmarks-of-hockey-map jigsaw puzzles, Alaska souvenir pennants, men’s-restroom plastic miniatures (complete with digitized flushing sounds when you press a button), bonsai mini-fountains, angel statues, Prozac/ happy-face T-shirts, Russian dolls, Men of Africa calendars, and more. One booth offered the perfect bachelor-pad accessory, the Moon Lamp (a milky-white large plastic globe emanating spots of pastel light). An Issaquah outfit called Loveable Chocolates offered chocolate and white-chocolate novelty gifts in assorted shapes, even as a set of dentures (“We sell a lot to dentists,” the woman at the booth claimed).

But the item that might most interest some Stranger readers is Magnetic Jewelry, from the Gravity Free Factory (an NYC-founded outfit with a new Seattle office). It’s a line of stud, crystal, and spike-shaped face jewelry giving the appearance of piercing with no holes, thanks to a second magnetized piece of metal you wear on the other side of your ear, lip, or nostril. (No other applicable body parts were mentioned in the brochure or at the booth.)