11/18/91 Stranger Misc.

(the first Stranger Misc. column)

The Misc. Statement of Purpose

Hi. My name’s Clark and I’m going to be your columnist today. Since 1986 I’ve been writing Misc., the monthly newsletter on popular culture in Seattle and beyond. I write a lot of little segments about a lot of different topics. I have a very individualistic sensibility, but I don’t try to be contrary for its own sake. I have certain underlying beliefs. Among these are the following:

1. The Pacific Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. It’s a real place with real people and real problems. It did not suddenly come into existence when you moved here, nor even when the first white people moved here. I’m from here, so I have no illusions about the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle” that was invented in the mid-’70s.

2. Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one. We need people who are willing to make it a better city — people willing to work in the arts and community service. We don’t need any more people who just want to go to the mountains for the weekend or buy a million-dollar waterfront “cabin.”

3. I’m a leftist but I’m not a hippie. I want a better world, a more compassionate and just world. The only way to get to that is to build movements, to reach out to people, not to sit around and mourn the end of the ’60s or to treat everybody except yourself as a hopeless square.

4. Television and male sexuality are not automatically evil.

5. Popular culture is a far more accurate portrayal of a society than highbrow culture. You won’t find the real character of England, for instance, on Masterpiece Theatre. You’ll find it in cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, and the horrid things they make out of the variety meats.

6. On the other hand, popular culture isn’t an exact replica of popular beliefs. The millions of women who buy sleazy crime books don’t necessarily want anything in the books to happen to them.

7. Our country’s totally screwed up in its attitudes about work, sex, democracy, and ethics. But so’s most every other country, in its own way.

8. Lame parody is the death of real humor. J. Webb’s Dragnet was a helluva lot funnier than D. Aykroyd’s.

9a. Hardcore fascist kitsch is not cute. I’m not a consumer of TV evangelists, wrestling, big-budget violence movies, or the Weekly World News, not even to laugh at them. I hate those things.

9b. When I say I hate something, it doesn’t mean I really like it. It means I really hate it.

10. George Bush is like those small-town lawyers on Scooby Doo after their ghost masks are taken off. The difference is those characters were businessmen pretending to be monsters. With George, the reverse is true.

11. I believe in the power of the written word, though I have a healthy respect for its limitations. I don’t believe in “serious literature,” nor in the lifestyle and belief system “serious” writers are expected to conform to. Writers are some of the most aesthetically reactionary folks around, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics. If only modern novels had one percent of the vitality found in the best modern music, dance, and visual art.

12. The only real way to make an artistic or political idea accessible to the general public is to present it in the most lively, compelling way possible; not to make it bland and soft.

13. The three-dot newspaper column is a dying American art form, one which Misc. tries to keep alive.

Here are some of the things you’ll see in Misc.: Junk food. Giant public art works crashing to the street. Local publications. Capsule comments on film, TV, politics, and other lesser arts. Quotable quotes. Celebrations of great new ad slogans and new products. Words and word usage that deliberately contradict academic standards. No sex gossip or spoofs.

Selections from Misc. begin in this space in the next issue.