11/90 Misc. Newsletter
TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’
Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.
To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.
FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)
UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)
THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”
PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.
WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”
STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.
TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).
DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.
LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…
FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”
BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.
CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.
WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.
THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…
KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.
BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.
WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.
‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.
PASSAGE
Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”
REPORT
Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).
WORD-O-MONTH
“Lachrymose”
LITE LIT
(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)
Page Passage
2 He was a smiling, handsome man…
8 She smiled at him.
11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…
13 …he said, and smiled at me…
14 He smiled at me.
21 …he said, and smiled…
22 She smiled at me…
27 …looked around at him and smiled.
31 He was smiling and looking at me…
34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.
37 She smiled up at me…
37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.
38 …my mother said, still smiling.
38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.
40 …and she was smiling.
40 She smiled at him.
44 She smiled and shook her head.
48 She smiled.
52 …she was smiling.
52 …and one of them smiled.
53 …my mother said, and smiled.
53 …and smiled at me.
56 …she said, and smiled at me.
63 She looked around at me and smiled.
70 …he was smiling.
72 …then she smiled at me…
72 She was smiling…
73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…
75 She smiled…
77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.
77 She smiled at me.
82 …he looked up at her and smiled…
82 She looked at me and smiled.
84 He was standing there smiling…
88 …the woman was smiling…
90 She smiled at me.
91 …smiling and fanning herself.
92 My mother smiled.
92 Warren…smiled at my mother.
93 She smiled at him.
100 My mother smiled at me.
101 She smiled at me again.
101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.
104 She smiled at me again…
110 He was standing…and smiling…
111 …my father’s clean smiling face…
120 She smiled at me…
122 She smiled at me…
123 She smiled…
131 …looked at me and smiled…
133 She looked up at me and smiled…
134 She smiled.
136 She smiled at him.
136 He was smiling.
136 And then she smiled at him again.
137 She smiled at him…
139 My father smiled at me.
143 …smiled at her.
143 …and smiled.
143 …and smiled again.
144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.
154 …and he was smiling.
170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.
