We start this Misc. on a sad note with the passing of another of my favorite places in the whole world, the Western Coffee Shop in the Maritime Bldg. on Western and Marion. It closed so suddenly (around mid-March), it appeared posthumously in the P-I’s Final Four tourist guide. It was a legendary hole-in-the-wall with some of this town’s best sandwiches, omelets, hash browns, beefy chili, espresso shakes, and coffee; served in a cramped, cozy room with classic diner tableware and loving cowboy-camp decor.
SEAGRAM’S BUYING MCA/UNIVERSAL: If you’ve read books like Hit Men, you know both companies have shady pasts. Seagram’s Bronfman family was allegedly involved in Prohibition booze-smuggling from Canada to the U.S.; MCA, prior to its last ownership by Matsushita/ Panasonic, was one of the most Mob-connected companies in Hollywood. But that’s history; what counts in modern mergers is that boardroom buzzword “synergy”–using both companies’ assents toward joint goals. Since MCA owns the pre-1948 Paramount films as well as the Universal library, will we see stills of Mae West and W.C. Fields endorsing Crown Royal? Or maybe they’ll use computer graphics to insert V.O. bottles into Marlene Dietrich’s saloon scenes in Destry Rides Again. (This also marks the first time since the ’60s that a major North American movie studio and record label has been Canadian owned.)
FOOLS AND THEIR MONEY: The Dallas zine The Met ran a cover story earlier this month about two Texan young-adult guys who claimed to be the real Beavis and Butt-head. In the story, they argue that they’d been graphic design students studying under creator Mike Judge’s wife; that they’d told her and Judge wild tales of their high-school prankster days; that Judge turned that into the toons you hate to love; and that they now want millions from Judge and MTV plus half of B&B’s merchandising income. Halfway down the final jump page of the long story, the Met writer stated, so quickly you had to read carefully to see it, that the whole article was an April Fool’s hoax.
ON LINE: In the first half of this century, serialized novels (usually forgettable romances and mysteries) were a staple of newspaper feature pages. Now, the popular computer service America Online’s bringing that tradition back. Under the overall rubric Parallel Lives, the service now offers three ongoing text-with-illustration stories. Each offers a new 1,000-word chapter each week (each has four chapters so far). The most promising is A Boy and His Dog, not the Harlan Ellison story that became a 1975 Don Johnson film but a rather grim tale of a lonely kid in a dying industrial town harassed by someone who might be his estranged dad. The other stories involve the upscale NYC singles scene and interracial family values in Hollywood. They’re located in the Arts and Leisure section of AOL’s “@Times” area.
OFF LINE: Remember last year, at or about this time, when we worried that Ballard Computer was taking over the local retail computer market? Look at it now: Hemmed in by out-of-state superstore chains, unable to expand big or fast enough to compete against them, it closed two of six stores. The others are stocked with “returnables” like software, but the computers themselves are as thinly-stocked as the last days of F&N. They say all will be fine once their new Canadian investors get on line. ‘Til then, amazing bargains on remaining display stock can be had.
OFF THE RACKS: The Rocket Cobain exploitation issue was banned at Sub Pop’s offices and its Mega Mart store, as authorized by label co-honcho Jonathan Poneman. Meanwhile, compare the Times columnists’ cruel remarks about Cobain at the time of his death to the fawning “tribute” Pat McDonald gave him last week, and also to the much more sympathetic treatment the paper’s given to someone else facing internal emotional issues, Sonics player Kendall Gill.
GROWTH INDUSTRIES: The P-I now runs those penile enlargement ads on the stock-market pages as well as the sport section. You can insert your own snide comment about noise-makin’, foot-stompin’ jocks or Beemer-drivin’, cell-phone-yappin’ capitalist hustlers acting that way to compensate for other deficiencies.
