YOUR EVER-HOPEFUL MISC. would really, really like to believe Newt is really gone for good, even though it knows he’s probably just repositioning himself for the 2000 presidential run. (More material tangentally related to this toward the column’s end.)

THE MAILBAG: Thanks to all who responded to our request for new pro-sex public-service slogans, designed to encourage teens and young adults to get off the streets and on each other. While no snappy slogans were suggested, one reader did propose a TV commercial with two gal-pals chatting at the water cooler: “How do you manage to feel so fresh and positive in the morning?” “Simple: I don’t leave the house without some sex.” Or, alternately, a print ad could feature the big face of a sensitive-looking young man staring out from the magazine page to say at one time, a man was expected to take care of a woman, to provide for her material needs. Nowadays, such traditional roles are increasingly passé. But still one important way you can help a woman achieve her goals in life. Share some sex with her, today. Not only will she feel better–but so will you.” At the bottom of the page would go a common-sense disclaimer, similar to that used by liquor advertisers, to the effect that those who enjoy sex best enjoy it responsibly.

PHILM PHUN: The Big Chill is actually going to be re-released in theaters, giving late-’90s audiences a chance to relive the alleged good old days of early-’80s nostalgia for the late ’60s. I say, forget the original movie (even though it was, and is, a depressingly-accurate depiction of the original Seattle Weekly target audience). Instead, why not remake it? The new Big Chill-Out could depict a circle of aging late-’80s punks who whiningly long for the good old days of simplistic heroes and villains, bond in the tribal solidarity of smug self-righteousness, and enjoy the timeless tuneage of Killing Joke (while sneering at those Hanson-listening kids these days).

GOIN’ SOUTH?: The Portland tabloid Willamette Week ran an essay package two or three weeks back, on the topic “Seattle Envy.” For those whose only notion about either Portland or Seattle is they’re not New York, the essays provide a valuable intro to the real differences between the two towns, only 185 miles away and nearly identical in size (though Seattle’s greater metro area has almost a million more folks than Portland’s). All six writers (four current Seattleites, two Portlanders) agree Portland’s older, smugger, and more civic-minded, while Seattle’s brasher, louder, and more globally aware. That leaves them to disagree on which they prefer….

• Intro-story writer Kris Hargis claims, “for all its charms, Portland has always seemed a bit burdened by what you could call a Napoleon complex. `So we’re little, so what?’ we say. `We can still kick your town’s butt on social services, city planning and parks’–all the things Seattle forgot about in its quest to become a Goliath of global commerce.”
• Seattle author Robert Clark: “Portland’s calculated attractiveness and livability exist at the cost of some of the spontaneity and un-selfconsciousness that has distinguished Seattle and lent it a certain funky charm…. I simply don’t find it as warmhearted a place as Seattle. But Seattle is changing–and not, I fear, for the better…. Our previous and current mayoral administrations have a rube-like fear that Seattle is not a `world-class’ city and are unable to resist the blandishments of developers who promise to put our backwater town into the same league as, say, Houston or Branson, Mo.”
• Seattle Weekly music writer Jackie McCarthy believes “Portland is like a Spinanes record: smart, sincere, comforting, underappreciated. Seattle, on the other hand, is a lot like Mudhoney’s music: Cool, sarcastic, insular, overrated.”
• Seattle website drudge Chip Giller relates how “Portland is, to many, a more intense place, a more real place, than Seattle. In Portland, mean is meaner, clean is cleaner, hip is hipper.” He quotes one ex-Portlander, “The rain is more depressing. The sun is brighter. If you were a songwriter, your songs would sound better in Portland.” But another tells him Portland “is Disneyland. Everybody’s white and happy.”
• Portland State grad student Lizzy Caston: “Seattle has manic-depressive fluctuations between being a nouveau riche rock star and a used-up junkie lying in the gutter underneath the Alaska Way Viaduct. Portland is the creative writer on Prozac–often brilliant, sometimes smug and antisocial, but convinced of its own intellectual superiority.”
• And Seattle freelancer Kristy Ojala takes a cautionary view to the subject: “The differences between the two cities are hinged on small details, not life-altering differences. It’s like a pointless high-school rivalry (`Our team can kick your team’s ass!’), where thickheaded generalizations serve as absolutes. We’re both stuck with software companies and rain and the coffee/lumberjack stereotype.”

Now if you ask me, the differences are at the same time more blatant and more subtle than Willamette Week’s crew suggests. The subtle ones come from Portland’s stronger sense of “society,” the kind of community-spirit that means both public-transit systems and beauty pageants get taken a lot more seriously there than here, where traditionally more folks headed to out-of-town recreations on the weekends. The blatant ones come from one prime source, Boeing. Without Boeing, Portland was free to build its economic base on timber, shipping, and insurance. With Boeing, Seattle came to see itself as a player on the world stage. Also with Boeing, Seattle gained a civic hierarchy built around the dual elites of gladhanding deal-makers and obsessive-compulsive engineers, hierarchies which would eventually find their ultimate meeting point at Microsoft. (Though Nike proves Portlanders can easily match Seattleites in the ruthless pursuit of profits and market share at any cost.)

A LOVELY MAT FINISH: The Monday after Newt resigned and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota, I tried to watch the competing pro wrestling shows on cable. No longer the pseudo-sport for dummies, wrestling’s now a pair of complex soap-opera plot threads that no first-time viewer can even hope to sort out. These threads play out all year long on the basic-cable shows (one of which, WWF Monday Night Raw Is War, will hold a cablecast from the Tacoma Dome on Dec. 14); leading to climaxes not during Neilsen ratings sweeps weeks but on separate pay-per-view events. On some shows (the World Wrestling Federation has four hours a week on USA; the Time Warner-owned World Championship Wrestling has seven weekly hours split between Time Warner’s TNT and TBS channels), the shouting and the theatrics drag on far longer than the action.

The theatrics, the action, and the characterizations are all far more “X-treme” than during rasslin’s last heyday when Ventura pretended to hate Hulk Hogan. The matches themselves now bear only a miniscule resemblance to real (high school, college, and Olympic) wrestling, and have more in common with that banned-in-every-state gorefest known as “ultimate fighting” (tactics include kickboxing, bare-knuckles boxing, and explicit crotch-grabbing).

The combatants’ grandiose personas and rhetorical bombast certainly have a lot in common with Newt’s now-disgraced system of governance by blowhardedness–except wrestlers, unlike Republicans (and particularly Republican talk-radio hosts) are always ready to directly confront their foes, instead of staying safely within one-sided environments. In this regard, Ventura (as the first candidate from Ross Perot’s Reform Party to make it to a high office) may actually prove more effective than Perot himself would have.

And then there’s the strange case of WWF proprietor Vincent McMahon Jr. A few years ago he presented himself to the world as the underdog of faux-sports titans, a third-generation family businessman (with a son he was grooming to eventually take over from him) struggling to compete against the conglomerate-backed WCW. These days, he’s taken on the TV persona of a corrupt corporate overlord, taking personal sides in the matches he telecasts to favor the baddest of the bad guys. (He even designates his favorites as “corporate champions”!) At one time, rasslin’ villains bore the colors of Russians and Iranians. Now, they’ve captured changes in the popular imagination and re-emerged as the toadies of Big Business. McMahon, who’s perfectly willing to be hated by his audiences as long as they keep watching, has caught onto a shift in the public zeitgeist, before WCW’s sister company Time magazine discovered corporate welfare. He could’ve taught ol’ Newt about this, if either had cared. (Does Ventura know about this shift? Most likely.)

TO CLOSE, take the Kalakala tour, and enjoy the next 10 weeks’ worth of long nights and short days (like you’ve got an alternative).

(Still seeking your pro-sex ad slogans (not one-to-one pickup lines). Send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org.)