MISC., your own four-man luge derailment-accident of online journalism, couldn’t help but be bemused by the awkward coincidence of Salt Lake City’s Olympics scandal (wherein local officials were forced to admit bribing Intl. Olympic Committee members as part of their successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games) just weeks after some Seattle movers-‘n’-shakers announced their overt displeasure with the City Council’s refusal to pursue a bid for the 2012 Summer Games. It also shows that they may profess to be sexual neo-Puritans over there in the Beehive State, but they know how to be corrupt when and where it proves materially valuable.
MADE FOR WALKING?: We still don’t have many nominations for our proposed, mythical, Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame. So we’ll keep the topic open one or two more weeks at our Misc. Talk discussion boards and by email to clark@speakeasy.org.
WHILE ROME BURNS DEPT.: I’m on two major e-mail lists these days, besides my own: One for the regional punk-rock community, and one for readers of the hi-brow novelist David Foster Wallace. Both lists descended to Nazi talk in recent weeks. On the punk list, a discussion about unfortunate fistfights and bullies at the Breakroom’s New Year’s show has descended into list members quibbling about Nazi skinheads (the general consensus: Not all skins are Nazis, and not all Nazis shave their skulls). On the Wallace list, somehow a discussion about an essay Wallace wrote about Dostoyevsky devolved into a shouting match about whether German philosopher Martin Heidegger was really a Nazi or just pretended enough to be one so they wouldn’t track him down & kill him like they did to so many other intelligentsia members in 1939-45 Europe. (Meanwhile, the Republican Sleaze Machine is attempting nothing less than the destruction of the U.S. electoral system, and nobody on either list (or I) has given it even a cursory mention.)
OF COURSE, the relative lack of public discourse over the coup attempt may be just what the coup plotters want. The Sleaze Machine may very well want you to be so completely disgusted by its coup attempt that you’ll stop paying attention. That way they can continue to ply their methodical annihilation of democratic governance with even less public scrutiny.
DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: I may have been overgenerous last month in wistfully nostalgizing about KSTW’s former ownership by Gaylord Entertainment (owner of the Grand Ole Opry radio show and theme park, and co-owner of cable’s Nashville Network). The Columbia Journalism Review just named Gaylord’s flagship property, the Daily Oklahoman, “the worst newspaper in America.” According to the CJR story, old man Gaylord allows his other media enterprises to be professionally run, but continues to lord over his Oklahoma City monopoly daily like a back-country version of those oldtime reactionary press lords like Hearst.
IT’S ONLY WORDS (via Joe Mabel): “Have you noticed the recent rise of `actionable’ used to mean `able to be acted upon’ rather than `giving cause for a lawsuit’? Last night at the Washington Software Alliance awards ceremony, the keynote speaker actually said `content on your web site must be actionable.’ I guess we all knew what he meant, but my oldspeak ear couldn’t help hearing this as `make sure you slander someone.'”
ACCESS BAGGAGE: No, P-I “Arts Beat” writer Douglas McLennan, you’re wrong to suggest the city exploit TCI’s default of its city cable contract (the company admitted it wouldn’t upgrade service to all city neighborhoods by a contract-imposed deadline of next week) by getting the cable company to fund an “improved” public-access channel–a city arts channel, in which a professional programming staff would ensure “quality control” by picking who got to be on it. That wouldn’t be real public access at all. The whole point of public access is nobody chooses. Anybody can get on it and many do–evangelists, female and male strippers, pot-legalization advocates, UFO conspiracy theorists, Y2K scare-mongers, rappers, racists, zither players, video artists, cabaret performers, karaoke singers, high-school football players, political activists, etc. etc. etc. The city already has a designated TCI channel it currently barely uses to document council meetings and public hearings. It could put quality-controlled arts shows on that channel whenever it wanted to. If the city can get production funds for such shows as part of its settlement from TCI, that’d be great. But leave public access to remain true public access.
FOX TAKETH AWAY, FOX GIVETH: The X-Files is no longer produced in Vancouver, but another prime-time network show is now being filmed 150 mi. from us–in the opposite direction. The PJs, that instant-hit Fox 3-D cartoon, is animated by our Portland pals at Will Vinton Productions from scripts and soundtracks generated in Hollywood. Instead of the modeling clay Vinton’s crew’s famous for (“Claymation” is their registered trademark, ya know), The PJs utilizes foam-rubber dolls with wire skeletons and detachable-replacable facial parts. The result looks sharper on the small screen, and (vital for a weekly series) is a heckuva lot more efficient than clay-sculpting every figure for every frame. This means The PJs is the only animated series besides South Park to use no overseas subcontractors. It also means you can judge for yourself whether these aging Oregon hippies can accurately visualize the show’s setting (a generic east-coast inner city neighborhood), or if in the necessarily-exaggerated world of animation that even matters.
GOING GOING…: J.K. Gill’s last mall-based paperback and stationery stores are closing sometime this month. This was a Portland-based chain that had bought the retail arm of Lowman & Hanford (which claimed to have been “Seattle’s Oldest Retail Business,” and whose old Pioneer Square building later housed the startup incarnations of both Aldus (now Adobe) and Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks)). Countless former junior-high girls have fond memories of going out to Gill’s to steal Shaun Cassidy notebooks and unicorn figurines. Speaking of youth-culture memories…
REVERTING TO TYPE: The Delaware-based House Industries, a purveyor of retro-hip computer typefaces, is now selling “Flyer Fonts,” a $99 computer disk containing “18 hardcore and punk fonts, based on type from punk and hardcore flyers of the ’80s.” For only several times the combined production budgets of the original posters, you can get exact digital re-enactments of hand-lettering, cut-out, stencil, and umpteen-generation-photocopy faces with such titles as Distortion, Vandalism, Straight, Filler, Malfunction, and All Ages. You also get 25 clip-art images (skulls, skateboards, a circle-A), a T-shirt, and a CD with ancient noise-rants by the likes of Suicidal Tendancies, Youth Brigade, and the Circle Jerks. You could call it high tech trying to ape the street credibility of low tech. Or you could call it a service for aging punks now stuck in commercial graphic-design careers who want to relive their former artistic styles without the bother of re-learning the use of X-Acto knives and rubber cement. (For the whole House catalog, call 800-888-4390.) Still speaking of youth-culture memories…
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Among the old buildings demolished in recent weeks for yet more homely office/retail/condo collossi was the old church just east of downtown known from 1977 to 1985 as The Monastery, an all-ages, primarily-gay disco. Its operators had Universal Life Church mail-order ordinations and called its DJ events “church services.” As a place where underage males publicly came out, it would’ve attracted negative scrutiny even without the rumored use of common disco and/or teen drugs. Rumors at the time (unconfirmed then and unconfirmable now) claim a dad with major city-government connections blamed the Monastery for his son’s emergence as an openly gay user of some substance or another; the dad then persuaded his politico pals that all-ages nightlife was A Menace To Be Stopped. The result: The infamous Teen Dance Ordinance, widely blamed for helping make (live or recorded) music shows for under-21s nearly impossible to profitably mount in this town. Only today, with a somewhat less reactionary faction on the council authorizing a Music and Youth Task Force, is anything being done to correct this past over-reaction. By now, though, it might be too late. The cost of real estate’s getting so damned high in town, even if larger booze-free clubs were legalized (small ones like the Velvet Elvis have been exempt from the ordinance), there might be no place available in which one might feasibly be operated.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, ponder these words from Leonard Maltin, made while discussing the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments: “Sometimes people laugh at silent films because they find them corny or feel superior to them. I can understand that. I felt the same way about Armageddon.”
