IT’S A POST-MAY-DAY MISC., the column that had almost gotten used to the idea of the Mariners re-becoming the hapless team of old. Then they got better again. In the next few weeks: Who knows?
SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE #15: Gus Van Sant’s directed a music video for Hanson.
RIDIN’: After the item last month about the Mercedes/Swatch Smart car (a mini-minicar to be sold only in Europe), a local outfit called Electric Vehicles Northwest wrote in to plug its new Twike machine, designed in Switzerland and to be assembled here from imported components. The sleek, three-wheeled two-seater has an 8.7-foot-long aluminum/glass bubble body, an AC motor capable of 25-40 miles between charges (at up to 52 m.p.h.), and even supplemental bike-pedal propulsion. What’s not mini is the price–$16,500.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ole is a line of fruit flavored, sweetened milk beverages; sort of an Asian style (made in Calif.) version of Strawberry Quik, but better-tasting (and in a wider variety of flavors). Just don’t mix Ole and Oly. (Though an Ole might help soothe your stomach after one too many Olys.) Available at Rite Aid and at ALFI, the convenience store across from GameWorks (for the time being).
STRAIT OUTTA COMPTON: Local TV news in Seattle, while increasingly obsesssed with “team coverage” of mayhem and disaster stories, is still slightly better here than it’s become in some other cities. One reason was KING’s Compton Report, a one-host, one-topic-per-show weekly half hour that combined intelligent reporting with slick videography and editing (while avoiding the PB-esque pomposity that’s helped make “documentary” a four-letter word among TV execs). Jim Compton himself was totally squaresville, but that was his charm. Now, though, the program’s on its way out. Compton accepted an early-retirement offer from the station. He’s not commenting on the split, but does say he’ll try to get another gig in town (acqaintances say he’s looked into starting a magazine). KING promises to replace his Sunday-evening show with another news-magazine format (look for something devised as a lead-in to Dateline NBC).
IT’S NOT JUST HERE: USA Today reported late last month on the gentrification of Chicago, with mayor Richard Daley fils presiding over the closing down of a popular sidewalk flea market and most downtown newsstands, all in the name of an upscale/bland vision of “beautification.” Daley’s next scheme: Establishing a sidewalk-restaurant row along the once-toxic Chicago River (for those few weeks a year it’s neither too cold nor too hot to spend an appreciable amount of time outside). Of course, Chi-town’s been at the upscaling game for over a decade now, replacing artists’ lofts (particularly along the aforementioned river) with condos and goofy theme restaurants, then putting up street banners proclaiming the former artists’ streets as “The Artistic Neighborhood.” Speaking of which…
EN `GARDE’: A kindly reader spotted the following graffito on a recent trip to Montreal: “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.” Actually, it’s not as cynical a notion as it might first sound. Remember, the term “avant-garde” originally meant the the vanguard of an advancing army (i.e., the shock troops). The notion, which goes counter to the more currently fashionable image of the permanently underground art world, was that the cutting-edge artists led where the rest of us followed. So it’d only be natural to extend that metaphor into formerly industrial urban neighborhoods as well as urbane aesthetic styles.
PASSAGE (German director Ulli Lommel, interviewed in Ian Grey’s Hollywood-expose book Sex, Stupidity, and Greed): “Americans are caught up in this American Dream, yet at the same time, in order to service that dream, they have to constantly deny what people are really like, what they really want…. You really like to do something but you don’t tell anybody because you hate yourself so much for doing it so you have to persecute everybody for doing what you are doing.”
