HERE AT MISC. we’re disappointed but not surprised to hear the B’vue Square FAO Schwarz store held a name-the-bear-statue contest and couldn’t come up with anything better than “Latte.” Speaking of names…
DREAM OF FIELDS I: Now that the building what replaced the Coliseum is now called KeyArena, what’ll we call the old Seattle Center Arena? The Thunderbirds’ pocket schedule simply calls it “Old Arena.” I’ve heard others call it the “RockArena,” its temporary name for the past few Bumbershoots. Its original, pre-World’s Fair name, the Seattle Ice Arena, is now inappropriate since the T-Birds will play all future games at KeyArena (unless any playoff games conflict with Sonics home dates). Cobain’s last local gig was there, but it might be tacky to rename the place after him. If you’ve any other ideas, lemme know at the Misc. World HQ website, <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>. Speaking of second-string sports sites…
DREAM OF FIELDS II: The Seattle Sounders want their own $25 million, 20,000-capacity, natural-turf soccer stadium. The unofficialSounders website shows a picture of a grand old UK soccer field and waxes on about the dream of a “natural turf soccer pitch in Seattle,” then quietly notes that the team’s only looked so far at potential sites in Bellevue, Kent and SeaTac, where the team and private investors could put up a whole complex of adult and youth soccer facilities. I always say, if it’s not in Seattle it’s not “in Seattle.” Let’s scatter youth and amateur soccer fields throughout the county, but have the stadium in town. It could even replaceHigh School Memorial Stadium (now a shoddy reminder of public-school budget cuts), either at its current site or at the ex-bus barn across the street. If we could get private money to put up a cool neo-classical soccer stadium, then rent it out during high-school football season at a fee no higher than the school district’s cost to maintain and upgrade Memorial Stadium (the WWII memorial parts can be moved or rebuilt), we’d have a clear winner–no penalty kicks required.
FOURTH & LONG: The Seahawks’ attendance woes coincide with the slow decline of the NFL. American football was “The College Game” for the first half of the century. The pro game was a novelty sport, far less popular than baseball, before TV showed how to market it. The networks and NFL Films took what was structurally a game of coaching, of the execution and interruption of pre-planned plays, and turned it into a spectacle of heroes and villains, of noble warriors and ignoble bullies.
But now, the league’s owners have come to believe themselves to be the invicible warriors lionized by NFL Films. Despite sagging attendance and TV ratings here and in other areas, the owners are playing stadium blackmail with cities on such a scale that I’d need to use a Telestrator on a map of North America to explain it. They’re going all-out for subsidized luxury-box arenas now, because they’ve seen the Telestrating on the wall. With the long-term decline of network TV, so will go the first real made-for-TV sport. Why watch a bunch of guys whose faces you can’t see knocking each other down when there’s women’s college basketball on Prime Sports?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jelly is a slick 16-page brochure containing record reviews of “Mostly All-American Blues Funk Jazz Country Soul Rock n’ Roll.” Get past the lame rock-bashing essay on the cover and you’ll find some quite tasty reviews inside, covering everything from Sam Cooke and Charles Mingus to ambient-dub and “Medieval Swedish blues,” whatever that is. The back page features Elvis’s allegedly favorite peanut butter and bacon sandwich recipe. ($1 from P.O. Box 24924, Seattle 98124-0924, or online.)
(More plugs of the shameless variety: I’ve got two (count ’em!) speaking-signing events this week for my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story; Friday at Pistil Books (1013 E. Pike, and Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 1st Ave. S. and S. Main St. Both are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Be there or be L7.)
