WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: Here it comes! No, not television’s most exciting hour of fantastic prizes, but the next phase in the 12.5 year history of the Misc. column. You can think of this as Misc. Version 4.0 if you like. The first version was a monthly column in the old Seattle tabloid ArtsFocus, from June 1986 thru July 1989. The second was the self-published monthly newsletter beginning later that summer, and continuing until January 1995. Third came the weekly installments in The Stranger, starting in November 1991 (concurrent with the newsletter version) and eventually reaching some 200,000 Seattle-area readers before the “alternative” tabloid’s bosses stopped running the column in October 1998.
THE NEW ONLINE COLUMN MIGHT BE more leisurely paced than the previous print versions, given that for the first time the column has no pre-set space limit. I may also experiment with different types of content, shuffling topics and departments in and out to test reader response. And new audience-building features might be added to the Misc. World website as well. More about that next week.
BUT FIRST, for those who came in late, a restatement of the column’s purposes and concepts. Under the classic “three-dot” newspaper column format, and within the meta-topic of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond,” Misc. World discusses the people, places, and things that combine to make up public life here at the edge of America and the end of the century. Some of the items in the column are as short as one sentence (or sentence fragment; some take up the whole space by themselves. Some of the subjects I write about are Seattle-specific; some are national (or have their equivalents in other towns across the country). Some involve big sociocultural trends such as stock-market fluctuations and downtown redevelopment schemes; others involve matters as small and specific as new junk foods and catch phrases. But they’re all parts of the cacophanous racket that is postmodern, pre-who-knows-what urban life, and as such they all have lessons to teach us about the cross-currents and cross-pollenizations of culture.
DISCLAIMERS: Misc. World contains no rain jokes, slug jokes, or coffee jokes. All statements of fact in Misc. World are, to the best they can be verified, true. The author will gladly retract all items proven false. All statements of opinion represent the author’s sincere beliefs; not spoofs. This column does not settle wagers.
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The same week The Stranger pulled the plug on the newsprint version of Misc., the art-studio lofts at 66 Bell (where the first ArtsFocus Misc. was written a dozen years back) started getting vacated under orders from the building owner, who’s finally making good on his year-long threat to upscale the place out of artists’ price ranges.
BOARD-ING SCHOOL: At ARO.Space a month or two back there was this performance-art night hosted by an apparent New York snotface who, after each act, taunted the audience with condescending remarks like “This is something called performance art. Something nobody in this town has ever heard of.” I never learned whether this dork was being real or just playing a character. If he really was as parochial and obnoxious as he made himself out to be on stage, he could’ve learned a bit about Seattle’s love of the ol’ perf-art by following the growth and institutionalization of our main perf-art staging outfit.
For 20 years, the On the Boards organization staged dance, music, and mixed-performance events at Washington Hall in the Central District. For the past 10 of those years, OTB’s been trying to move to a bigger, newer facility. Finally, the opportunity arose when A Contemporary Theater abandoned the lower Queen Anne digs it had occupied since ’63, and moved into a fancy multi-million dollar remodel of the old Eagles Auditorium downtown.
OTB then raised its own big-donor bucks to remake the old ACT building for its own purposes. The results are quite impressive: A 350-seat, proscenium-style main auditorium with state-O-the-art sound and light gear, a 99-seat studio theater (still unfinished as of this writing), a library/video room, and all the other tech and support facilities a bigtime staging entity needs.
OTB had always had a reputation as one of the most “ground-level” of Seattle’s full-time arts organizations, as being open to new local talent (even in years when most of its major shows were touring imports) and in touch with the frontiers of live art and music (even in years when much of its fare rehashed the previous decade’s avant-garde).
The Brave New OTB, however, is a whole different animal. The new building, like most other new public buildings around here, bears the name of somebody who paid for the privilege (it’s “the Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance”). The group’s newsletter announcing the opening of the new building is full of plugs for various corporate sponsors and contributors, (including AT&T, US Bank, Boeing, and Microsoft), offers a “new and expanded Business Club” which “gives local companies of all sizes an opportunity to benefit from a great incentive package–while also supporting On the Boarts.” Only time (specifically forthcoming schedules) will tell how well local and smaller-scale creators will fit in the new OTB’s scheme-O-things.
SO THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE SECRET SAUCE: McDonald’s stores now sport Big Mac 30th anniversary posters, featuring pseudo-psychedelic graphics reminiscent of Starbucks’ 25th anniversary posters from two years ago. Hippies then and now, of course, have loved to invoke McDonald’s as a quintessential symbol of everything they hate about corporate America, suburban lifestyles, and meat consumption.
The mistrust was mutual. The company’s dress code back then, natch, frowned on excessive male hirsuteness. More importantly, the chain’s whole operation was (and is) built around the un-hippie values of uniformity, conformity, neatness, and efficiency. The Fifties (a Learning Channel cable documentary series based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name) featured a telling memo from McD’s top management, calling individualism a dangerous trait and asserting all managers, employees, and franchise owners will be broken into the organization’s proper spirit of total conformity. McD’s arch rival Burger King briefly used the ad slogan “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules;” Outback Steak Houses currently feature the slogan “No Rules, Just Right.” These are so false they’re not even preposterous: A restaurant chain, especially a fast-food franchise, is nothing but a set of rules. Without the standardized products, prices, and premises stipulated in a franchise agreement, there’s no reason for the national advertising or other brand-building techniques that make a chain franchise more valuable to a franchisee than simply starting his or her own indie restaurant concept. (Of course, even that’s no guarantee of success, as seen by the bankruptcy of the once-booming Boston Market circuit and the resulting sudden closure of all its Northwest outlets.)
OTHER VOICES (from KJR-FM DJ Norm Gregory): “The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a proposed new rule which would limit beer and alcohol sales at events when 25 percent of the fans are under age 21. This could end beer sales in the stands at the football and baseball games. Part of the thrill of going to the games for my kids was passing drinks down the row. I didn’t mind them handling alcohol–it was when they started the one-sip-per-drink rule.”
SURVEY SAYS: I’m asking your help for next week’s column. Seems the aforementioned changes in my publishing situation have triggered what self-help books used to call a “midlife crisis.” I don’t have a spouse to mercilessly cheat on or thinning hair to cover-up. I wouldn’t buy a monstrous SUV even if I had the money, and I’ve no desire to do the Green Acres thang (I grew up in the countryside and won’t go back). But that still leaves lots of new directions into which a gent could place one’s life. Please send any suggestions on how I should devote the next year or three (for cash income or otherwise) via email to clark@speakeasy.org. The best will appear in this virtual space next week.
‘TIL THEN, ponder these words attributed to one Louise Beal: “Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.”
