HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.
CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.
UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.
SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”
UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”
A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.
PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
