3/90 Misc. Newsletter

Russia’s Getting A Multi-Party System!

(Wish We Had One.)

Spring, they say, is just around the corner, but you don’t have to wait any longer for Misc., the info-mosaic that wonders why you can now get a Big Mac in Moscow, but you still can’t get one in Winslow. You call that American freedom of choice? And hey, you vegetarians and epicurean snobs out there, stop scoffing long enough to consider the years of preparation McDonald’s undertook in making food ingredients in the USSR with the quality control needed for modern agribusiness. Most USSR food is still “natural” (as in less-processed), scarce and often rotting. Their system never developed efficient production and distribution; ours perverted those virtues into for-their-own-sake obsessions.

Giving Workers the Rack: I was set to write this month about the imminent closure of Nordstrom’s U-District branch (which has been there in various forms and addresses since the days of raccoon coats), but more important news came in the state’s $30-million decision in favor of employees stuck working extra hours for free. It took the pro-business but out-of-town Wall St. Journal to print the workers’ side of the labor dispute (kudos to reporter Susan C. Faludi, who uncovered not just mandatory volunteer overtime but a corporate culture of bullying, treachery, bigotry, and forced “happiness”). The local media have been as one-sided as they could get away with, taking the angle of “Bad news for Nordstrom” (Times headline, 2/16), never “good news for Nordstrom employees.” I can believe the worst stories and still understand the pro-management employees leafleting outside the stores. Some sincerely believe in the total-hustle policy; others just might be into the “defender” role familiar to analysts of dysfunctional families. What the cracks behind the mandatory Nordic smile mean to Nordstrom’s “service” reputation remains to be seen (computer magazines regularly publish columns suggesting it as a customer-relations role model to computer companies). Even more importantly, many facets of the scandal relate back to the laid back/mellow reputation of the Northwest, whose consumers madethe Big N. what it is today. Nordstrom is one of a handful of institutions that mean the Northwest to the rest of the world (along with the Nordstrom-founded Seahawks, Boeing, The Far Side, Heart, and Ramtha). What does it say when so many of us prefer to buy from a place that hires people on the basis of their conformity to the corporate “look” (a nebulous criterion that could be used against those with too-kinky hair or too-dark skin), and apparently treats them like well-dressed little Oliver and Olivia Twists?

Snow Wonder: You can tell real Seattlites by their attitude towards a big urban snowstorm. To them, it’s a source of childlike wonder and merriment. To suburbanites and Easterners, it’s a nuisance. To Southern Californians, it’s a mix of terror and shock that the weather they love to talk about to prove their “adopted native” stance can do something this big. I loved it, even if it didn’t last longer than four days. I almost got to see a Samurai turn over, live and in person!

The Fine Print (sticker affixed to the back cover of Ernie’s Postcard Book, funny-cat photos by Tony Mendoza, published by Capra Press): “The captions on the back of each postcard are unauthorized and not the work of the author.”

Local Publication of the Month: Adbusters Quarterly, a newsprint magazine on how we are all prisoners of the North American ad culture and even what we can do about it. A sort of radicalized McLuhanism, from the apparent capital of anarchist thought in the western hemisphere, Vancouver.

Modulations: The KZOK-AM frequency, long known as KJET and more recently as KQUL (which played moldie-oldies automation tapes inherited from the old KUUU), is playing new (or at least recently-recorded) music again, mass-market metal under the slogan Z-Rock. If the quintessential KJET song was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” the quintessential Z-Rock song is Guns n’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s nice that the new format also has room for local acts, though a lot of it sounds like KZOK sounded in 1979.

Cathode Corner: I’m trying to decide whether The Simpsons is the best TV show of the past 10 years or the best ever. From Bart’s different weekly chalkboard affirmations (“I will not instigate revolution”) to the gags you need a pause button to get (the nuclear-plant entrance sign, “Unauthorized Visitors Will Be Shot”), every second is packed with sharp humor and social commentary. And to think that it all comes from an ex-Olympian, Matt Groening (whose Life in Hell list of Forbidden Words for the ’90s alone qualifies him as world-class). The show’s setting, Springfield, is, of course, the name of the most famous “hick town” in Groening’s native Oregon; the nuclear plant where Homer Simpson works looks a lot like the one north of Portland on the Columbia. Am pleased to report that Bart T-shirts are being visibly displayed as far away as Federal Way, with Bart-head-shaped bubble gum due in June.

Everything’s Not Coming Up Roses: Oregon has a lot to cheer about this winter, between The Simpsons, the TrailBlazers and the OSU men’s basketball team. But there’s no pride in the governor’s race, in which incumbent Neil Goldschmit was forced out when rumors of a marital split came true (apparently we can have a divorced man in the White House but not in Salem). The rumor about the rumor claims it was started by GOP candidate Leon Frohmeyer, state attorney general and self-proclaimed environmentalist (really, say more radical eco-activists, an architect of compromise deals with logging and mining interests).

Power Politics: Downtown Blackout II lasted four hours, while its ’88 predecessor lasted four days. Could City Light have worked harder knowing that the thousands of Lotto players in three counties were losing their chances at becoming $6 million men and women (Lotto’s dedicated computer-phone lines are routed through downtown)? Ehh, probably not….

Tourist Trappings: Some multinational has started a mini-cruise ship, the Spirit of Puget Sound. Its ads promise “three hours of live entertainment and fabulous food” along with the usual seaside scenery. Don’t they know what the phrase “a three-hour tour” has come to mean?

Junk Food of the Month: Frozen dinners for kids. Banquet and others have devised microwave versions of all the classic kiddie meals (hot dogs, chicken, chili, etc.) with stereotyped kiddie graphics on the boxes. They’re presumably intended for the growing numbers of offspring with all-working parents, who must fend for themselves after school. Wish I had those things back when I was in that situation.

End of the ’80s Item #4: Perrier water can be bad for you!

Street of Silence: It’s sad to witness the death-by-installments of Broadway, the Aurora Village of urban business districts. Speculators would rather see buildings go empty than lower unrealistic rents. Hence, over a dozen major storefronts are now empty, from the venerable Broadway Theater to the Benneton sweater stand that replaced the cool Different Drummer bookstore. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn’t cruise there much anymore, now that he’s got a house in Kent. Only Keeg’s remains of thesix furniture stores that had made Broadway Seattle’s furniture row back when E. Pike was its auto row. (But the long-pending Dairy Queen finally opened, that venerable chain’s first in-town Seattle store since the mid-’70s.)

(latter-day note: Broadway again thrives, with indie businesses replacing downsizing chains (including an ethnic restaurant where Dairy Queen was). Aurora Village got demolished. Keeg’s closed, leaving no more furniture stores on Capitol Hill except used office furniture outlets.)

Street of Noise: The Pike Place Market authorities are all a-flutter over what they claim are semi-secret plans by the NYC speculators who may or may not own the buildings to turn the Market into a high-priced, chain-stored parody of itself. What they’re not saying is that this would only accelerate a process the Market leaders already instigated, starting with sweatshirt stores and tourist-oriented parking projects. The promotion of the Market as a sight rather than a marketplace has already affected the remaining farmers, who see Saturday after Saturday of crowded walkways full of sightseers but bereft of actual food purchasers.

Ink Inc.: Just as we declared Spy magazine “outski” for 1990, imitations began to sprout. If the real Spy’s quaint we’re-from-New-York-and-you’re-not attitude doesn’t quite get your soul afire, you can enjoy self-conscious prose, retro art and graph-chart stories inWigwag (for the Garrison Keillor audience), Forbes Publishing’s Egg (for the most emptyheaded lifestyle wannabes), and Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly, designed by Mark Michaelson (who worked on the infamous summer ’79 UW Daily with Lynda Barry, John Keister, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Mike Lukovich, and an underachieving writer who does some little newsletter about pop culture). And is it a mere coincidence that the mass media have become overtaken with chronicling the daily life of Spy’s most frequent satirical target, Donald Trump?

Hearts and Thorns: If Christmas is when everybody’s expected to be in a nuclear family, then Valentine’s Day is when every adult is expected to be in a couple. This is a reasonable if superficial conclusion from the newspapers and the self-help books. There are, at last, support groups for people who need to learn about getting out of bad relationships, but still none about getting into good ones. To admit one’s wish to share one’s life with another goes against the unisex rugged individualism of early-’90s America. To call a place a “singles’ bar” these days is to be insulting; to still be out looking is to be shut out of a lot of social activities and, despite insurance-institute reports that hetero AIDS may never take off in this country, even to be denounced as a menace to society. At least you can get candy really cheap during the following week.

My Nightmare: I dreamed of an old man with white hair whining, “Ever wonder why you can’t get your hooded robes white again after a night of cross burning? Nothing seems to get all the smoke and ash out, not even the old-fashioned real bleach with the sediment at the bottom of the jug.”… I also have dreams in which Denny Hill was never torn down, and had by now become Seattle’s most fashionable residential neighborhood.

‘Til next time, write your Senators to stop the ban against Silly String (we have only one party to spray for our country!), see Roger & Me, don’t buy from the itinerant street gang of perfume salespeople, beware of any self-proclaimed “environmental President” who came from the top of the oil industry, and heed these words of Tim O’Brien: “A real war story is never moral. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it.”

REPORT

Factsheet Five, the Publisher’s Weekly of Xerox and desktopped literature, likes MISC. “Witty and interesting, even for those of us who live clear across the continent,” sez editor Mike Gundelroy. If you like it half as much, you might consider subscribing to MISC. (with one of Fait Divers’* funny mini-posters as a free gift).

(*Say “Fay Dee Vare”)

BEACON

Philosopher Elaine Pagels, interviewed in Bill Moyers’ A World of Ideas: “Guilt involves a sense of importance in the drama. To say that one is not guilty is also to acknowledge that one is in fact quite powerless.”

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Ataraxia”