9/91 Misc. Newsletter

Bug-Proof Pantyhose

Welcome back to an autumnally-seasoned edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that’s fond of noting that in the Robt. Venturi design with its vertical relief stripes, the name SEATTLE ART MUSEUM appears to be spelled with dollar signs.

THE RED SQUARES: On Mon., 8/19, I wrote in my ongoing computer file, “There are moments in the life of the world that make it tough to be a humor writer, even a world-weary, cynical humor writer.” Then the attempt at bringing back eight men’s sorry vision of the “good old days” disappeared faster than the stock at a Russian butcher, and I could retain my generally hopeful worldview about democratic progress in all countries except mine. I also reaffirmed how much I can hate public radio sometimes: call me a traditionalist, but world-crisis bulletins shouldn’t be combined with easy-listening background music (I refuse to call that Windham Hill-style music they use “jazz”).

A MOVING EXPERIENCE: Within weeks of the Weekly “discovering” my neighborhood, my landlord raised the rent significantly. Don’t let this happen to you! Took the increase as an opportunity to move (for only the second time in seven years; more desperate finances made me run from the upscalers eight times from ’81 to ’84). I will miss parts of the Broadway neighborhood, but will not miss the BMW car alarms malfunctioning at all hours or the ceiling that became a giant loudspeaker for the upstairs apt.’s stereo.

FILM TITLE OF THE MONTH: Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking.

FRAMED IN PUPPETLAND: The hoopla over Pee-wee, and all the child psychologists talking about how to tell your kids the sad news, is pathetic. The poor idol of millions hasn’t even been convicted yet. You’ve got to remember this was in south Fla., home of the 2-Live-Crew-busters, where there may have been official pressure to track down a white celebrity to harass in order to maintain a pretense of impartiality. Actually, it turns out that the arresting officer was part of a three-man squad assigned solely to make arrests for the most victimless sex act of all. (It’s such a Pee-wee sort of activity, too; self-possessive, compulsive, fantasy-possessed). For the record, he was watching straight porno films; a semiotics book a couple years back noted that the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters are based on common gay-camp personas.

WILD IN THE STREETS: KING and KIRO dumped Sat. AM cartoons for news (and local commercials). Now, when there’s violence on Sat. morning TV, the victims won’t be alive in the next scene. Both newscasts are heavily supplemented with filler satellite footage from other stations around the country. The stations chose just the right week to start their Sat. morn news, the morning after the traditional biggest Fri. night of brawl of the year. The Seafair riots are wimpy compared to riots in other cities for more substantial celebrations such as winning a Super Bowl, but our minor street brawls and our hydro-drunks keep the old rowdy Seattle spirit alive despite the annual proclamation that Seafair has, at last, become a “true family event.” The expectedly strident pre-parade anti-war rally was met by a Christian country-rock band sponsored by KMPS, singing “I love A-Mair-i-Kuh / I love the U-S-A” (with a military snare-drum riff) and shouting afterwards, “You know the line, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.” The TV stations, also expectedly, allowed no significant time for the protesters to tell why they were there and plenty of time for officials to insist how everybody besides a few foul-mouths is in total unquestioning obedience to our national authorities.

CATHODE CORNER: Employees of Telemation, once Seattle’s biggest video production facility, spray-painted the outside of the building the Fri. night after the company was shut down by its out-of-state buyer, the Home Shopping Network. By early Mon. morning, all offending statements (including the blacking-out of the parent company’s name) were whitewashed over….

On 8/15, KING discovered a Northwest angle to the latest Royal scandal: Di’s petite 2-piece bathing suit (that made the cover of every UK tabloid) was designed by Oregon’s Jantzen. (In The Mouse on the Moon, the film sequel to The Mouse That Roared, a BBC announcer proclaimed a British connection to the Grand Fenwick space program in the form of the astronauts’ wristwatch.)

MODULATIONS: KNDD (“The End”), the new “cutting edge” format on the old KRAB-KGMI frequency, is like Old Wave Night at the Romper Room. Instead of the greatest hits of Phil Collins, they play the greatest hits of U2. Their last format was for folks whose musical tastes stop at 1970; this is for folks whose tastes stopped in ’87. (At least they play Thrill Kill Kult in light rotation.)

TRUE CRIME: A Montana fugitive was spotted on 8/1 by his old warden when they inadvertently met at an Ms game. In any previous year he’d never have had to worry about anybody finding him there.

HOBSON’S CHOICE ’92: Rebecca Boren and Joel Connelly are reportedly feuding over who’ll get to cover the ’92 US Senate race for the P-I. On KCTS panel shows, Connelly has shown to be fond of possible Republican candidate Rod Chandler and unfond of possible Democratic candidate Mike Lowry.

AD VERBS: NutriSystem’s running flashy ads pointing with pride to an endorsement by Healthline magazine. Weight Watchers announced it was promised the same endorsement, but refused to pay the magazine for favorable coverage.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH: The NY Times piece (8/6) on minor Florida theme parks: ones you might not know (Flea World, the Elvis Presley Museum, Gatorland, and “Xanadu, Home of the Future”), are in the works (the Transcendental Meditation park “Maharishi Veda Land” planned by magician/TM devotee Doug Henning), the USSR/US friendship park Peristroika Palace), and ones that never made it. The latter included Bible World, Western Fun World, Hurricane World (“a glorified wind tunnel that could transport tourists into the eye of a storm”), Little England (“a grandiose re-creation of an ancient British village,” sounding like an old G. Vidal story about Disney buying all of England), and Winter Wonderlando (“skiing in central Florida. Great name. Lousy concept”).

Runner-up: The 8/1 Wall St. Journal report that “Kanebo Ltd. in Osaka plans to test US markets this year for pantyhose embedded with microcapsules that moisturize while the wearer walks. It sells scented pantyhose in Japan, where it just introduced insect-repellent hose.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH: The Ballard law office storefront “Mullavey, Prout, Grenley, Foe and Lawless.”

AGIT PROPS: The Downtown Seattle Assn. call for censorship against one of the In/Public sets of artist’s aphorisms, echoing a woefully ignorant and arrogant P-I editorial calling the project “not art but arrogance,” is itself an arrogant act.Bold verbal statements are indeed an artform. They have been so at least since the 10 Commandments were etched in stone. The postmod incarnation of this art takes the boldness of current T-shirt/bumpersticker philosophy and turns it around so it challenges, instead of reinforces, the consumer culture (perhaps the real reason the retailers hate it). It demands the right to not be “cheerful” or “colorful,” as a merchant spokesperson described his idea of good art. In an allegedly image-drenched era, it affirms the power of the written word. It has it limits, though, as evidenced by theGuerrilla Girls posters at the Greg Kucera Gallery. The GGs really to nothing to help female and minority visual artists; they just point out that nobody else in the mainstream art elite does. It could also be argued that declaring all female artists to be one class or even one genre, regardless of what any of them does, only keeps the artists’ own voices stifled.

A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THE GUERRILLA GIRLS WOULDN’T LIKE: A new bio claims Time-Life heiress Claire Booth Luce, archetypal career woman and wielder of unprecedented power in politics and publishing, obtained a great deal of her influence by sleeping with politicians, editors other than her husband, generals, theatrical producers, etc. A first reaction might be that she’s betrayed, from beyond the grave as it were, the millions of women who came after her fighting for a similar degree of influence on the basis of merit alone. But if she hadn’t done what she did, would there have been as much opportunity for those who followed her? (Probably.) Will today’s women live without her for a role model? (Undoubtedly; the Republicanism she espoused is the nemesis of current feminists.)

STOP THE PRESSES: At least three Misc. readers have been sending me clips from that awful Dave Barry, the “humor” columnist whose one-note theme is “Yeah, so I’m an affluent, dull white guy, so what?” Once, humorists had fun getting involved with the exciting parts of their cultures (jazz, early movies, wild fashion) and sneering at the dull and complacent. Nowadays, dorks like Barry and R. Baker take pride in their geezerdom and sneer at anything or anybody with real character. They pander to the whitebread suburban mentality of most newspaper editors, who keep making papers duller and more irrelevant while blaming the resulting circulation losses on public apathy.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Misc. subscriber James Koehnline is planning a World’s Columbian Jubilee Calendar of Saints, to celebrate the 500th anniv. of Columbus by proclaiming an end to “the Work and War Machine.” Koehnline is looking for names of cool people for saint’s days on the calendar (“no living persons, no Popes, no heads of state”). For info send $1 to Koehnline, Box 85777, Seattle 98145-1777.

CHAINED: QFC wouldn’t display the Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, claiming the image of a woman with child wasn’t “family oriented” enough (!), unfit to belong in the same store with the beer and cigarettes they sell every day (or on the same periodical racks with tabloids, serial-killer paperbacks, and rich-bitch novels).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH (from the Wall St. Journal, 8/13): “Calgene Inc. wants federal regulators to declare its genetically engineered tomato officially ‘food’…. The tomato, named the Flavr Savr, includes a gene that blocks the production of an enzyme that causes them to soften and rot.”…

Calif. now has a snack food sales tax, and is trying to figure what’s junk and what’s untaxed “real” food. On which side would you put fructose-laden “energy bars”?

THE NAKED TRUTH: The long articles in the Times and the Weekly about table dancing clubs sold sex more sneakily than the more honest commerce of the clubs themselves. The sleaziness of the clubs’ operators, as described in the articles, seems little worse than that of some mainstream entertainment promoters I’ve known and/or read about. Nude dancing can be seen as a metaphor for our entire consumer culture (all tease, no fulfillment); the sadness that pervades those places, beneath a screaming air of mandatory “happiness,” betrays a deprivation of true connectedness in such a culture.

‘TIL OCTOBER presumably finds us much cooler, celebrate the 10th anniv. of KCMU (it’s actually longer; Robin Dolan and I were playing new music there in 11/80), and heed the wisdom of Gracie Allen in The Big Broadcast (1932): “If I died I’d like to come back as an oyster, so I’d only have to be good from September to April.”

PASSAGE

Restroom sign at a Frisco coffeehouse: “In a society that replaces adventure with mandatory fun, the only convenient adventure left is drinking good coffee.”

REPORT

Please note the new address below for subs, orders for my novel The Perfect Couple on Mac disks ($10), and other correspondence. I’m still soliciting suggestions or investors toward turning this into a self-supporting enterprise.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Terpsichorea”

WHY ARE MOST JAZZ FESTIVALS HELD IN ALL-WHITE TOWNS?