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WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU’RE LAME: Here at Misc., we’re among the many sports fans who aren’t all that sad to say goodbye to Shawn Kemp. He wasn’t the first legend-in-his-own-mind to believe the world would instantly recognize and appreciate his all-around superiority if he only got outta Seattle, where grandstanding demands for idol-worship are often answered not with supplication but with dismissive pleas to get real. Most of the ambitious emigrants I’ve known, who all left town in full certainty of their imminent superstardom, got as far as becoming studio musicians on centerfold videos or bit parts on unaired TV pilots. It takes more than just a hostile attitude toward most everybody around you to make it in one’s chosen profession’s bigtime. It even takes more than the extraordinary talent Kemp’s definitely got. Despite NBA and Nike marketing themes to the contrary, basketball’s still a team game. And, as just about everybody’s middle-school P.E. teacher used to say, there’s no “I” in the word “team.” Speaking of poor sports…
THE FINAL SPORTS BLOOPER REEL: Disgraced sportscasters, like dead celebrities, appear to come in threes. First O. J. Simpson, then Frank Gifford, now Marv Albert. I’m just waiting for the inevitable Albert-meets-Tyson jokes to pop up. The whole tawdry affair almost makes those Fox Sports Northwest promo ads (the ones with images of the lovably square Dave Niehaus intercut with images of a trashed hotel room) seem nearly plausible.
THE MAILBAG: Seattle Scroll writer Jesse Walker writes in to insist he knew all along how the anti-Internet-hoax letter he ran in a recent “net hysteria” essay (reviewed in Misc. two weeks ago) was itself a hoax, and that attentive readers could’ve inferred from his piece that he knew. Unfortunately, he won’t get to clarify this in the Scroll‘s pages. The feisty year-old biweekly’s run out of money and probably won’t come out again.
DRAWING THE LINE: Recent years have seen lotsa grownup in-jokes in cartoons. One Cartoon Network promo spot’s built exclusively around material kids aren’t supposed to know about. It features the Tex Avery dog Droopy and Scooby Doo‘s Shaggy in a convertible, talking about how the Time Warner-owned cable channel’s now seen worldwide, when Shaggy asks, “Do you know what they call Pound Puppies in France?” Explaining how there’s no such thing as “pounds” in the metric system, Shaggy then asks, “What do they call Smurfs in Spain?” His answer: “Los Smurfs.” Only that’s wrong–as anyone who went to the Smurf theme park in France knows, the late Belgian cartoonist Peyo‘s critters have a different cutesy name in each major Euro language (Stroumphs, Schlumphs, et al.). In Spain, they’re “Los Pitufos.”
OFF THE LINE: Hard to believe it just a year ago when virtually every writer, photographer, cartoonist, graphic designer, and programmer in town was either being recruited for or trying to push their way into no-benefits “contract” employment as “content creators” for the Microsoft Network and/or Microsoft-owned websites. But now, the one company that could indefinitely sustain extensive, money-losing online ventures has chosen not to do so, at least not to its first extent. Many of the paid-access MSN sites (including the “alternative culture” site Mint) are being shut down; others are being scaled back. The free-access MSNBC website is also laying off almost half its “temp” workers; while the company’s Sidewalk entertainment-listing sites scattered across the country have faced greater-than-expected staff turnover (apparently several key people were hired as “creative” writers, only to find themselves stuck typing in movie-theater showtimes). While I’ll certainly look forward to seeing some of my acquaintances on this side of the pond a little more often,
ON THE LINE: After two years of development (interrupted by putting an ever-bigger paper out every week), there’s finally a Stranger website at www.thestranger.com. Each week’s current Misc. can be temporarily found on the site. The Misc. World HQ site (www.miscmedia.com) continues as a complete archive of the column and of assorted other things I’ve written over the years.
PASSAGE (from Incredibly Strange Music organist Korla Pandit): “Music may not save your soul, but it will cause your soul to be worth saving.”
HERE AT MISC. we can’t help but anticipate and enjoy the arrival of autumnal weather. I claim to be not really a weather person, but I can’t help but feel more comfortable when the outside changes from garishly bright 70mm Technicolor back to muted 16mm Eastmancolor.
THE MAILBAG: Responding to our recent praise of the yet un-hippified genre that is marching music, Liz Dreisbach writes in to plug a group she leads, the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band. “It’s Americana at its best. Thirty players (ages 15 through 80), each wearing a radiant and different classic band jacket. We play nothing but old band tunes, mostly marches… We even have a sedentary majorette who twirls her baton sitting in her chair.” It next performs on Nov. 6, during a “Sousa Birthday Bash” at that hot new neo-vaudeville venue, Hokum Hall (7904 35th Ave. SW, West Seattle). In other old-timey spectacles…
FLIGHT OF FANCY: One event nearly ignored by the media this equinoxal season was the 50th birthday of Sea-Tac Airport. Airport management held a relatively low-key reception inside the main terminal recently: cake, mini-sausages, a kiddie choir, displays of ’40s-’50s flying memorabilia. The highlight was “stilt walker” Janet Raynor, dolled up in a ten-foot-tall version of a vintage-1967 Alaska Airlines flight-attendant’s dress. Raynor strode, pranced, and even danced in the long dress (which gave her the look of a mid-’70s Bon Marche fashion-ad illustration) while deftly fielding jokes from passers-by about which airline has the most legroom in business class. She also passed out reproductions of an old publicity photo with the dress’s original wearer standing beside the airline’s president. The guy in the photo’s just tall enough to provide the model with a degree of personal service not even Alaska Airlines is known for.
FEASTING ON A GRAND SALAMI: For as long as I could remember, Seattle was a sometimes-lovable loser of a city, whose “leaders” (mainly engineers, land developers, and steakhouse owners) wanted to become “world class” but usually muffed it. The Mariners, who played unspectacularly for so many years in that homely cement pit, matched this civic image perfectly. The same time Seattle became known as an assertive seller of software and coffee and sportswear, the Ms started becoming winners. This year, they not only won their division but had been widely expected to do so. Microsoft and Starbucks have become so dominant, they’ve generated ire within their respective industries as hyper-aggressive organizations bent on total domination. The Ms are a ways from that kind of rep, but how many consecutive seasons at or near the top would it take before they became as nationally reviled as the old-time Yankees? Just wondering.
HAVING A COMPLEX: The change of season often brings a reassessment of one’s life situation. If you’re feeling a little too much peace-‘n’-quiet in your personal world, here are some handy tips for voluntarily complicating your life:
‘TIL NEXT TIME, cheer on the Ms, make sure you check out the truly-fine selection of Halloween party novelties at Chubby & Tubby (including the bleeding-hand candle with wicks on each finger, dripping blood-red wax to reveal plastic bones underneath), ponder the possibilities of a home life with the clear plastic inflatable furniture from Urban Outfitters (hint: better not have un-declawed cats or careless smokers around), and heed these words of the one-‘n’-only Liz Taylor: “There’s no deodorant like success.”
WELCOME ALL to your pre-autumnal-equinox edition of Misc., the pop-cult column that can’t decide whether the new-look Seattle Weekly represents the passing of the moderation-to-excess aesthetic that’s dominated local media for a quarter-century, or instead just signifies a corporation trying too hard to appear hip. Speaking of commercial images in flux…
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: A half-decade ago, back when the outside world associated Seattle hipster-wear with looks actually designed in NYC by the likes of Marc Jacobs, the Zebraclub store on 1st Ave. was a bright, white showcase for the loudly-logoed products of Seattle’s real youthwear industry, with such once-hyped labels as Generra and International News. Today, the big Z sports a “homier” image, with faux-rustic walls and less abrasive lighting.
If you go there and you’re nice to them, they’ll give you the current catalog for Diesel, the Italian sportswear outfit that (a la Calvin Klein‘s ’94 “kiddie porn” ads) uses the detrius of American commercial-underground media to impart an image of American dangerousness onto its Euro-designed garments. This year’s Diesel catalog’s in the manner of a tacky small-press self-defense manual, titled Fight Me. It depicts young perfect-bodied female and male models in action poses, kicking and stabbing and choking imperfect-bodied (often overweight) villains. One aren’t-we-outrageous sequence shows a little girl punching the face of an older-woman pedophile. The attack techniques throughout the book range from the impractical to the ludicrous (“Master concentration-through detachment… will yourself to levitate”). An inside-back-cover disclaimer asserts the company “deplores, in the strongest possible terms, the current prevalence, and, in some sad quarters, vogue for violence.” Yeah, right–the common parodist’s copout, getting off on something then claiming it was just a joke. Speaking of convivial boorishness…
CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS ON PARADE: I wish the current cigar-mania (stinky, choky, life-threatening, etc.) would stop, but how? It appeals to too many universal temptations (even Freud joked, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”). Besides, in an age where the lowly mass-market cigarette’s an object of scorn and humiliation, there’s nothing like a fat, smelly cigar to make a smoker feel righteously vengeful. As long as there’s social pressure to conform to social standards of blasédom, many males and some females will always choose to rebel, albeit often in crude, loud, and ineffectual ways. The ’90s spin on this, natch, is many of today’s proponents of laid-back conformity claim to be political liberals, while many of the “rebels” are Harley-ridin’, KVI-listenin’ Young Republicans. (This has its precedents, such as the decadent rich kids of pre-Victorian England; many of whom also loved a good cigar.) Speaking of social mores…
OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE IN 2012?: Besides offering yet another clear line of demarcation between the civic-builder gang (ever pursuing “world-class” status for our fair burg) and the anti-development human-scale advocates (who’d probably leave town en masse for the event’s duration), the pro-Olympic boosters are offering a unique argument. In the past, the Games have been used by cities worldwide as excuses for massive construction projects, often using vast amounts of their respective countries’ tax dollars. The Seattle Olympics boosters claim the opposite. With the town’s two new stadia, the to-be-expanded Convention Center, and other existing or already-planned facilities, we’ll already have most of the sites a Summer Games would need. All we’d have to build would be a big swimming pool, horseback and archery venues, a few dozen additional hotels and motels, and (maybe the biggest single new one) a place to house a few thousand jocks and jills for 17 days under tight security. (The 1990 Goodwill Games housed their athletes in UW dorms, but that setup might be impracticable for the Olympics for all sorts of reasons.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET (with more of your suggestions of yet-unrevived musical genres), be sure to become the first on your block to order the $229 Ken Griffey Jr. 12″ bronze statue seen in regional-ad editions of Time, and visit the new Seattle Art store on Wetern Ave.
Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.
UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.
YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.
DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.
Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.
Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”
(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)
NOT-SO-PACIFIC RIM: What if the Salmon War escalated into a trade war on all fronts between the U.S. and Canada? It could be fun, seeing which side would dare to live without the other’s products the longest. They’d have to stop going to most movies, driving most cars, eating most packaged food products, and shopping sprees to the Burlington, WA outlet mall. We’d have to give up hockey, Crown Royal whiskey, and–oh yeah–cheaper grades of paper, like the newsprint that becomes fine weekly tabloid-size newspapers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so fun after all. Maybe we should figure out a way out of this mess before it gets to that point.
SPICE GIRLS: One of the things I miss most about Moe was its dining room’s large selection of obscure indie hot sauces. There’s more of these out there than ever, thanks to increased demand for exotic foods, bigger supermarkets with more space for different items, and that ol’ pop-cult blessing/ curse, the collector. The trade mag Fancy Food quotes Jennifer Trainer Thompson, author of The Hot Sauce Collector’s Guide, as saying there’s “such a demand today for collectible hot sauces and gifts that makers are releasing the same sauce over and over again and just putting different labels on it.”
One example of creative labeling is the same mag’s ad for Pepper Girl sauces from Calif.-based Peppertown USA. Each product has a label inspired by ’40s-’50s pin-up illustration: Fifi’s Nasty Little Secret (pineapple-jalapeno, with a French maid on the label); Kitten’s Big Banana (banana-mango-habanero, with a bathing beauty); Wrong Number (chipotle-mango-habaerno, with a lingirie model holding a dial telephone); Bad Girls In Heat (papaya-pumpkin-habaerno, with two hitchhikers in slinky dresses); and Sultan’s Main Squeeze (passion fruit-Thai pepper, with a belly dancer). Those female diners who might disapprove of those brands might instead prefer an ad elsewhere in the magazine, for the Atlanta-made Scorned Woman Fiery Barbecue Sauce (slogan: “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even!”).
BRING ON THE WARM JETS: In past years, I used to annually print my arguments in defense of Seafair. I skipped it last year, but with the Blue Angels’ noisy spectacle returning to the lineup this weekend I figure it’s time. With Bumbershoot admission getting pricier every year, the Seafair parade and hydro races comprise two of the city’s three most populist gatherings; the first is the Bite of Seattle. This annual triumverate of events reject both the “quiet good taste” of Seattle’s yuppified official culture and the too-cool-to-have-fun taboo that constricts much of our “alternative” community. Sure these are “family” events, as advertised; but they’re for real families: bratty kids, horny teens, dysfunctional parents, grumpy oldsters. They promise pleasant times out-of-doors with food, drink, and unpretentious entertainment (plus a lot of noise). They deliver humanity in all its gross-out, homely, cantankerous, troublesome, pathetic, amazing, loveable variety (plus a lot of noise).
Nature poets (like the poets who used to hold anti-Seafair reading events every year) love to move to communities connected to The Land and The Water, but have a hard time cohabiting with the castes of people who live off of said resources. Seafair honors the people who work in and on the water (sailors, fishers, shipbuilders, stevedores) and those who feel affinity with them (regular working stiffs)–not the people with million-buck “cabins” on the islands. Similarly, the Bite (particularly the Times-sponsored portion) purports to honor the town’s yupscale restaurant segment, but really celebrates the all-American deadly sin of gluttony as thoroughly as Mardi Gras revels in lust and modern Christmas honors greed. Unlike Folklife’s moderate hammered-dulcimer lovers, the Bite’s a true celebration of the common person. The streets of downtown, increasingly unhospitable to the non-affluent, became on Aug. 1 a temporary invasion site for the forgotten Seattleites. This weekend, the brahmins of Lake Washington are bracing for the onslaught of gauche sex-joke T-shirts, decidedly non-REI rubber rafts, and people at least officially not drinking alcohol in a public park. Plus a lot of noise. Even noisier with the Blue Angels back. I can’t wait.
(Next week: The Misc. midsummer reading list.)
BILL OF `RIGHTS’: It’s official. The catch phrase of mid-1997 is “right on.” But not the assertive, exclaimatory ’70s “Right On Brother!” like you might have heard from Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night. No, this contemporary version’s a quick, perfunctory expression, dropping and then suddenly rising in tone to make the two syllables sound like three. It’s less of a commanding statement, almost like a question: “Right o-on?” I’ve heard it all over town in the last month: on buses, in clubs, at street fairs, in theaters, in convenience stores. People who claim to be in the know tell me it started either with the snowboard crowd or the young-adult backpacking crowd, then spread to the general bar-and-coffeehouse populace, until it finally reached local ubiquity this season. Speaking of the neo-jock crowd…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK #1: That chocolate-goo candy in a modified toothpaste tube I reported on a year or so ago has been reincarnated with a supposedly practical purpose. Clif Chocolate Peanut Shot (“The Natural Energy Burst”) is apparently popular among bicycle marathoners and “X-treme” sports enthusiasts. It’s billed on its tube as “an easy to digest, high-energy food” for folks on the run (literally; the tube’s front shows a sprinter crouching at the starting blocks). It’s made with rice syrup, peanut flour, cocoa powder, ginseng, and salt. As for the taste, imagine a combo of Nestlé’s Quik powder, creamy peanut butter, and a touch of Vegemite (that Aussie yeast-extract sandwich spread). Speaking of odd edibles…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK #2: Burger King’s Land before Time “Dino Tenders” are chicken patties formed in vaguely dinosaur-esque shapes. There’s something odd (yet not as disconcerting as one might expect) about meat pieces flaked apart to the point that they don’t look anymore like pieces from an animal, then re-shaped to look like another (albeit guilt-free-because-extinct) animal. Speaking of species whose time has gone…
BOXING DAY: It’s been nearly four years since the last CD “long boxes” were in stores; surprisingly, I still haven’t seen a significant collector/ speculator market for them (maybe there is one and I’ve just missed it). Anyhow, let’s next see if we can dump the CD jewel box. It’s always a bother trying to take the insert out of those plastic tabs; and those hinge thingies never, ever last. For years, many European record labels have used cardboard CD sleeves with plastic disc holders and paper booklets glued on inside. American labels have traditionally balked at this format, not so much because of cost as because of production flexibility. It’s quick ‘n’ easy to run off those paper front sheets and cardboard back sheets, in any quantity desired, to be stuck into pre-made jewel boxes; while the Euro system (sometimes known by the trademark “Digipak”) adds a few extra steps of assembly work at the time of duplication.
But now there’s really no more excuse.
Several recent releases (from the major-label Minus Five disc to the very indie compilation Big Choice) have proven that even without the plastic disc holder, the ol’ miniature LP-style cardboard sleeve’s snazzier and more convenient. These plasticless sleeves are simple die-cut and glued jobs, as efficient to make as the sleeves for those freebie America Online CD-ROMs attached to computer magazines. Sure they bend, fold, and mutilate under the right level of mishandling, but that only means the package’s no longer in “mint” condition; the disc itself’s still fine. Asking record labels to make more plasticless CD sleeves might not save that much petrochemical product in the long run, but it’d certainly make CD buying a lot cooler and CD handling a lot easier. Speaking of enhancing one’s media experiences…
BOOK ‘EM: I know summer’s already way underway (at least according to the calendar), but it’s never too late to start getting literized. In that spirit, the first Misc. (mid)summer reading list will appear here in two weeks. Send your nominated titles now (remember, only specific individual selections, not “anything by so-and-so”) to clark@speakeasy.org. Hey, if Oprah can do it…
MICOSOFT TO BUY CBS?: That’s what a New York Post story said a couple weeks ago. I didn’t believe it, even before the denials from all sides. For one thing, Gates likes to buy companies on their way up, not underperformers in need of restoration. For another, MS’s current alliance with NBC made for at least a few half-decent jokes around the Internet, contrasting nerd stereotypes with the network’s young, hip image (Gates becoming the seventh Friend, et al.). But there’s nobody on CBS one could even imagine as having ever used a computer–except Dave’s World star Harry Anderson, a card-carrying Macintosh endorser.
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “At Bally’s health clubs, you can get the body you’ve always wanted to have.” And you thought that sort of offer could only be advertised in the rural counties of Nevada…
WHITE UNLIKE ME: I’m on my third reading of Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto. Goad (co-creator of the nearly-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me!) has his points, but you have to sift through an awful lot of theasaurus-bending cuss words and almost poetry-slam-style “attitude” to find it. Around all this filler, Goad interweaves his and his family’s story of financial/ social struggle with observations of his current surroundings in industrial north Portland and with what BBC documentary producers might label “a personal history” of the white (rural and urban) working class in Europe and America, from the bad old days of indentured servitude and debtors’ prisons to the bad new days of welfare-mother bashing, wage stagnation, and job exports. In Goad’s worldview, the great mall-hopping middle class either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to his main concept, the eternal war of “white trash vs. white cash.” Among the aspects of his thesis:
* Poor whites and poor blacks have more in common (and socialize together more readily) than poor whites and rich whites.
* Unattractive traits ascribed to rednecks and trailer trash (laziness, savagery, stupidity, promiscuity, poor hygiene) have always been used by the rich everywhere to disparge the poor everywhere.
* America’s “dirty little secret” isn’t race but class.
* Most rich people are white but most white people aren’t rich–and shouldn’t be collectively blamed for slavery, discrimination, and other rich people’s crimes.
* So-called “angry white male” subcults (militias, talk radio listeners, etc.) aren’t necessarily as racist, sexist, homophobic, or paranoid as the upscale media crack ’em up to be. Their real beefs, Goad claims, are against big business and big government, as they should be.
* The media (including most “alternative” weeklies) are tools of the “white cash” class and don’t give a damn about the downscale, except to sneer at ’em.
* The same’s true of white-upscale leftists, whom Goad claims care more about overseas rainforests than about toxic dumps in our own inner cities. Goad says this is an historic trait, citing Brit society ladies who spoke out against slavery in the American south while treating their own servants and employees like dirt.
* The white hipster agenda has always had less to do with assailing bourgeois privileges than with defending these privileges against the downscale squares.
Many of the class-struggle arguments have been made before, by folks like Michael Moore and Baffler editor Tom Frank. Goad’s main addition to the genre, besides his damn-aren’t-I-politically-incorrect sass, is his insistance that there’s no singular white racial caste, united in privilege and oppressiveness. With this, Goad seemingly contradicts the worldview of Race Traitor zine editors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who claims there is such a universal Caucasian identity and “progressive” whites should personally renounce it.
But their stances aren’t really that different. Both believe in self-empowerment by dropping out from the mainstream-America assimilation thang. Ignatiev and Garvey (instructors at bigtime East Coast universities) do this by pretending to be black. Goad does it by playing up his links to the white unprivileged. Goad’s is probably the healthier approach. Instead of appropriating the romanticized victimhood of some defined “Other,” Goad argues for the right to be his own Porter Wagoner-listenin’, dead-end-job-workin’, hard-livin’, high-lovin’, prematurely-dyin’ kind. One approach seeks true humanity outside oneself; the other finds it within. (More on this latter sub-topic in two weeks.)
ASIDE FROM THE CURRENT whereabouts of conceptual artist and convicted non-terrorist Jason Sprinkle (he’s out of jail and apparently doing OK), the most-asked question these days to Misc. World HQ (www.miscmedia.com) is “What’s gonna happen to the Cinerama?” Cineplex Odeon currently continues to operate Belltown’s early-’60s-vintage film box on a month-to-month basis. Independent parties are said to be attempting to buy the place, desiring to turn it into a not-yet-officially-announced entertainment concept, probably involving film screenings of some sort. If their quest succeeds, you’re sure to hear about it.
Next, let’s figure out a future for the ex-Cineplex Newmark Cinemas. I know there’s something of a surplus of performance spaces in town right now, but a five-theater fringe/ music/ dance/ whatever cavalcade would be the perfect contempo complement to the new symphony hall going up nearby.
UP IN SMOKE: Was listening to CNN’s live press-conference coverage about the potential ban on U.S. cigarette billboards while reading the 6/19 Stranger with the Kamel ad right up next to a Queer Issue article entitled “Nobody’s Billboard.” Sure, I’ll miss the cigarette billboards and the lovely defacements placed thereupon by enterprising protestors (as reported in these pages a couple weeks back). But I’m also a little worried. (I could say “a tad worried,” but I’ve been in the Seattle music scene to long to think of “a tad” as something small.) Without dumb ads in store windows and along strip-mall highways promoting smoking as a blasé, corporate-engendered, mainstream-American habit, how are we gonna convince the kids how uncool it is? (The cig brands in current favor among Broadway’s smoking vegans include some of the least heavily advertised, such as that indie brand falsely believed by many buyers to be made by Native Americans.) Indeed, with all the curtailments on cig ads in places where kids might be able to see ’em, we might be in for even more intense smoking-is-cool marketing pushes inside 21-‘n’-over joints.
TALKED OUT: The least talked-about ramification of the Second Seattle TV Network Switch is the sudden fallout of that early-’90s broadcast staple, the daytime “reality” talk show. Former KIRO and KSTW daytime attractions Maury Povich, Ricki Lake, Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones, and Crook & Chase have been shunted into the wee hours or onto UHF indie KTZZ. It’s not the genre’s end, but it could signal the beginning of the end. If the format does disappear, I wouldn’t worry about the fate of all those potential guests who’d no longer get to share their traumas and family secrets with the world. I would, however, feel sorry for all the op-ed columnists, sociology profs, and Republican politicians who’ve dissed the chat shows as proof of the inexorable decline of American mores. (These critics never seemed to find anything disturbing about the existence of incest, abuse, fraud, poor parenting, etc.; just about the public revelations of same.) Speaking of alleged attacks on allegedly traditional values…
MY-CUP-RUNNETH-OVER DEPT.: The religious-kitsch camp collecting fad has been bubbling under the radar of media attention for a few years. It’s now gone above ground with the opening of Coffee Messiah (neon window-sign slogan: “Caffeine Saves”), the latest espresso concept on Capitol Hill’s E. Olive Way. The joint looks terrific, with more cool prayer candles and crucifixes and Mary statues and religious paintings than you’d ever find in any Italian-American grandma’s house. So what if some might call it sacreligious. I see it more as sincerely celebrating the human expressions of faith and devotion, neither insistant nor perjorative about the ideological content of any particular belief. It’s like a small-business version of the Unity Church: all the reassuring ritual and artistry of worship, without any potentially troublesome theology.
If you really wanna see some urban hipsters belittling a popular object of solemn worship for the sake of cheap laffs and shock value, go enter the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves’ raffle for the chance to “Shatter a Genuine Chihuly!” (The glass-bustin’ event’s gonna be Thursday, Aug. 7 at the Lava Lounge, where $1 entry tix are now being sold; proceeds benefit the Northwest Fine Art Search and Rescue Team.)
I KNOW IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, but here’s my fantasy: We move the now-surplused Kingdome to the Interbay landfill, then turn it into a community of tomorrow. In the stands: moderately priced housing, artists’ studios, offices, and light-industrial work spaces. In the corridors: tasty brewpubs and burger stands, charter schools, and convenient shops. On the playing field: a combo park, playfield, bazaar, and art/ performance space. At least let’s dismantle and rebuild the Dome’s prefab pavilion annex for a year-round street fair, complete with food and merchandise booths, exhibits, and an all-ages music club. The gracefully-curved pavilion looks too neat (like an inner hallway in some giant space station) to just trash.
UPDATE: The bike-messenger zine Iron Lung, mentioned here in May, has a new address: c/o Stephanie Ehlinger, 1719 E. Spring St. #104, Seattle 98122.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: PMS Crunch, from a Scarsdale, NY outfit called “Time of the Month Inc.,” claims in food-trade magazine ads to be “the perfect combination of salty and sweet–the taste and the gift that’s always in season.” The can promises “Chocolate, Nuts, and More Chocolate.” Its primary slogan: “The Best Snack… Period!” (Wholesale orders can be obtained at 1-800-PMS-44ME.)
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: I got some decidedly mixed messages from those huge newspaper ads for the Fox News Channel. I couldn’t tell whether the ads’ incessant insistance on fair, unbiased reporting on the channel is meant to trash CNN (which Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch has previously, and falsely, accused of liberal bias) or to appease viewers apprehensive about the conservative bias of other Murdoch properties (most infamously, the New York Post and London Sun).
In any event, I’m intrigued by the notion of a news source with more nuts-‘n’-bolts info and less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” Of course, that’s not what Fox News gives you. That’d require more people and money than a startup cable channel’s gonna have (even one with Murdoch’s dough). Instead, you get hour upon hour of talking-head interviews and pontification, officially “unbiased” ‘cuz the opinionating’s done by the guests, not the hosts. This is augmented during daytime hours by functional but unremarkable top-of-the-hour news briefs.
FRAG-MENTATION: The other day I was talking with a musician who said her all-time favorite childhood memories included Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson’s Canadian-produced ’80s puppet series. The more she triggered my own memories, the more the show seemed a metaphor for the precarious existence of the would-be “alternative” artist or intellectual in our day and age. If you stay where you are, you can be safe and happy, working and playing and having funny misadventures with your own kind, but at the cost of ireversibly depleting the one resource that sustains you (the rock/ the safety of your subculture). Leave in one direction, and you end up in a smotheringly bourgeois purgatory (the handyman’s shop/ middle-class satiety). Leave in another direction, and you risk more directly hostile forces (the Fraggle-eating monster boy/ censorious conservatives). In the show’s final episode, the Fraggles found a solution to their dilemma by tunnelling to a new home. Perhaps we all need to (at least metaphorically) find our way toward a new premise for our lives and work.
THE INSANITY CONTINUES: I don’t care how the Camlin Hotel’s new owners redevelop the rest of the hotel’s block (now just parking and a motor-hotel annex). And if they must upscalize the hotel rooms, the rest of us will just have to find another site for our wedding receptions and/or just-divorced parties. But the plan to replace the venerable Cloud Room with luxury penthouse suites simply must be stopped. I don’t know how, but it must.
At a time when prefab retro-cocktail hangouts and stinky “cigar bars” are sprouting all over, we mustn’t lose one of the last real, un-“restored” martini emporia. I’m sure the Camlin-block development will still be plenty profitable with an intact Cloud Room. I suggest you go there at every opportunity in the coming weeks, and let it be known (both in the lounge and at the front desk) you love the joint and seek the chance to keep going there in the future.
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.
SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”
MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.
But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.
I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)
MISC., YOUR LOCAL non-hiking column, is downright disappointed Washington won’t impose a sports logo tax to help pay for one of Paul Allen’s construction megaprojects. It would’ve been so neat to see people “vote with their pocketbook” and not pay the extra 50 cents or so for the right symbol on their shirts, jackets, duffel bags, etc. Judges would have had to somberly decide whether a cap with Mariner-like colors and the initial “S” really was a Mariners cap. Niketown would have sold T-shirts promoting Michael Jordan only as a cartoon movie star.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Little-noticed amid the end of Cyclops was the simultaneous demise of another Belltown eatery, the somewhat more working-class My Suzie’s (successor to the legendary Trade Winds). Its ambience could go from rough-‘n’-tumble to retro-lounge to soul-revival on successive nights. Its closure, allegedly at the pushing of the ex-Sailors Union of the Pacific building’s new owners, makes non-hoity-toity downtown gathering places an even more endangered species. How long will the remaining five or six spots of this type hold on?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Darn, I hope us Americans can soon get to taste Wacky Vegi brand vegetables. The latest thing in England, these are bags of frozen corn, baby carrots, peas, cauliflower, specially coated with chocolate, pizza, baked-bean, and cheese & onion flavors! Their manufacturer was convinced to launch them by an anti-cancer awareness group, willing to try desperate measures to get more Brit kids to eat their veggies. (Hey, anything would be more appealing than traditional English overboiled food, right?) Speaking of grocery wonders…
IN THE BAG: By the time this comes out, QFC should’ve opened its big new store on Capitol Hill and finished branding its own identity on Wallingford’s once-feisty Food Giant. The new Capitol Hill store was originally to have been a Larry’s Market, but QFC outbid Larry’s at the last minute. (If the retail development had gone as originally planned, we would’ve had Larry just a block away from Moe!) Meanwhile, a strip-mall QFC’s under construction in the formerly rural Snohomish County environs of my childhood, bringing 24-hour, full shopping convenience to a place where a kid used to have to go two miles just to reach a gas station that sold candy bars on the side.
These openings represent small steps in a chain that’s gone in 40 years from a single store on Roosevelt in ’58 (still open) to 15 stores in the mid-’70s (including five taken over when A&P retreated from its last Pacific stores) to 142 stores in Washington and California today. It’s rapidly expanded in the past decade, even as many larger chains retreated from neighborhoods and whole regions. (The once-mighty A&P name now stands over only 675 stores, down from 5,000 in the early ’60s.)
While the new store isn’t QFC’s biggest (that’s the Kmart-sized U Village behemoth), it’s still a useful 45,000-square-foot object lesson in the economics of the foodbiz. The first real supermarkets, in the ’30s, were as small as the First Hill Shop-Rite. New supermarkets kept getting built bigger and bigger ever since, in stages. QFC was relatively late at building ’em huge; in the early ’80s, it proudly advertised how convenient and easy-to-navigate its 15,000-square-foot stores were compared to the big ‘uns Safeway and Albertsons were then building in the suburbs.
Grocery retailing’s a notoriously small-profit-margin business. The profits come from volume, from higher-margin side businesses (wine, deli, in-store bakery), and from gaining the resources to muscle in on wholesaling and processing. QFC started as a Thriftway franchise, part of the Associated Grocers consortium. AG’s one reason indie supermarkets can survive in Washington; it gives individual-store owners and small chains a share in the wholesaler’s piece of the grocery dollar.
What QFC pioneered, and others like Larry’s and the Queen Anne Thriftway have since further exploited, is a “quality” store image. The idea’s that if your store’s known for “better” items and service, you can retreat a little from cutthroat price competition (i.e., charge more). From the Husky-color signs to the old Q-head cartoon mascot (designed by ex-KING weatherman Bob Cram) to the “QFC-Thru” plastic meat trays, every visible aspect of the store’s designed to say “Hey this ain’t no everyday corn-flake emporium.”
Of course, now with everybody in the biz trying to similarly fancy themselves, QFC still has to keep prices in line with the other guys, at least on the advertised staple goods. But it remains a leader in the game of wholesome-yet-upscale brand identity, a shtick most of the now-famous chain retailers from Seattle have adopted; indeed, an image the city itself has tried to impose upon us all.
If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.
I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.
One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”
But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”
Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.
There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.
Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.
Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.
MISC. WISHES A FOND ADIEU to Courtney Love, who (if you believe the British papers) is apparently leaving Seatown for good in order to further her new career as a Hollywood professional celebrity. Unlike some local print outlets, this column has prepared for the loss by building up an ample supply of non-Love-related items, and hence will not run short of supplies for at least the near future.
IN OTHER BABY-DOLL NEWS: Kelly, billed by Mattel as “Barbie’s Baby Sister,” is already showing signs of rebellion against her careerist, acquisition-obsessed sibling. Evidence: the new “Potty Training Kelly” model, shown in Saturday-morning TV ads “tinkling” into her own toddler-size toilet. Besides demystifying the mechanics of female elimination for young male cartoon viewers, the doll allows females just beyond toilet-training age to act out on an inanimate victim any traumas their own moms had imposed on them, potentially preventing deep psychological issues that might surface later in life.
CATHODE CORNER #1 (via Sherman Lovell): “Am I the only one who’s annoyed by the new KCTS VJs? All three of them are attractive, congenial sorts, but they don’t really seem to have any purpose other than to say `Wasn’t that great?’ and `Coming up is…’ If we have to have VJs on the PBS station, can’t we get Daisy Fuentes?” (Actually, they serve a third purpose: to give advertisers–oops, “underwriters”–more noticeable between-show spots to buy.)
CATHODE CORNER #2 (via Michelle Ellefson): “The KONG commercials on KING are driving me nuts… I’m just hoping (in vain, I know) this isn’t some dumb King Kong gorilla thing. The last thing this city needs is an inflatable gorilla on the Space Needle, and that’s what I see coming.” (It’s a UHF TV station out of Everett, to launch later this year after being in the works for nearly a decade. While nominally independently owned, it has some sort of joint marketing or programming arrangement with KING, just within the letter of FCC regs against one company owning two TV stations in the same metro area.)
THE BITS AND THE BYTES WERE THERE: The UW Computer Fair attracted all the usual exhibitors again this year. There were CAD/CAM graphics-software vendors, MS Windows training seminars, mouse-pad imprinters, and scads of Internet service providers. What I missed were the unusual exhibitors. After peaking earlier in the decade, the number of truly innovative or offbeat vendors at the fair has shrunk, perhaps due to the veering of PC-related business back toward corporate markets after a prior flowering of hobbyist/ home action. The most notable exception was one Tom Bourne of Bothell selling $79.95 handcrafted wood computer mice, items looking less like electronics and more like something fallen off an old Chris-Craft yacht. Bourne’s silly product name, “Li’l Woody,” doesn’t do this elegant product justice. (See for yourself at www.isomedia.com/homes/lilwoody.)
THE NAME GAME: There’s a (quite impressive) record store in Belltown called Wall of Sound. As of this week, there’s also a music-news website in Bellevue (part of Paul Allen’s Starwave organization) called www.wallofsound.com, which might get into selling records later on. Wall of Sound (the store) is now talking about possible legal action against Wall of Sound (the website). As far as I know, neither outfit ever discussed use of the name with record producer Phil Spector, credited with coining the phrase circa ’61.
TRIDENT IMPORTS, R.I.P.: Beyond the competition from out-of-state chains like Cost Plus and Pier 1, Trident was stuck with the de-romanticization of imported household goods. At one time, when most furniture, clothes and even shoes were still made in America, the first Cocktail Generation regularly sought for moderately-priced exotica to furnish its otherwise lookalike tract homes. Back then, the word “import” signified something more than mere pennies-a-day production wages. It meant affordable beauty, an unthreatening glimpse of an older and more rooted culture, even if in the form of a Tiki-god lamp fixture or a bamboo throw rug. There’s been lotsa talk about big, big development projects on Trident’s waterfront site, but you just know whatever goes in there won’t be half as much fun.
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that groaned and laffed with the rest of you during the media’s recent sheep-cloning headlines, but didn’t see any magazine use the most obvious such headline: “The Science of the Lambs.”
CATHODE CORNER UPDATE: Cox Communications will now be buying KIRO-TV instead of KSTW. Viacom made a last-minute deal to grab KSTW instead, and will shift its UPN network affiliation to channel 11; thus freeing channel 7 to again run CBS shows. Sources at both stations claim to be at best bemused, at worst befuddled, by the actions of the various out-of-state parties in this mega-transaction (including KSTW’s current owner Gaylord Entertainment and KIRO’s current owner A.H. Belo Corp., which started this by dumping KIRO so it could buy KING). All the parent companies’ PR people vow nothing but total confidence in the stations’ local managements; but the way station staffs were pushed, pulled, and kept in the dark during the wheelin’ ‘n’ dealin’, don’t be surprised if a few heads start rollin’.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Don’t know what to make of Klang (“A Nosebleed-High Journal of Literature and the Arts”), August Avo and Doug Anderson’s curious four-page litzine. The current issue (billed as “Vol. 3.14,” though I’ve never seen one before) purports to reprint an excerpt from a best-selling Russian novel; but the piece, “A Day in the Blood Line,” reads more like a smartypants American’s clever take on Russian lit, both of the classic and Soviet-era-underground varieties. (Of course, I could be wrong about this.) Free where you can find it or by email request to bf723@scn.com… 59cents (“The #1 Rock and Roll Magazine”) is an utterly charming photocopy-zine side project of the band Blue Collar. The current ish, officially #16 (though I’ve never seen a prior ish of this one, either), includes microbrew taste tests (juxtaposed with a screed warning “drinking till you puke or pass out is not rebellious”), an anti-Christian rant, and a brief rave for the Girl Scouts for removing the word “cheerful” from their pledge. Free where you can find it or from P.O. Box 19806, Seattle 98109…
ANNALS OF MERCHANDISING: Lilia’s Boutique, the fancy women’s-clothing store in Basil Vyzis’ condo tower next to the Vogue, started to hold a going-out-of-business sale. Soon after the SALE signs appeared in the windows, representatives of the real-estate company handling the building’s retail leases taped a “Notice to Comply or Vacate” paper to the store’s front door overnight. The notice told Lilia’s essentially to stop going out of business or be forced out of business. Apparently, there were terms in Lilia’s lease forbidding “distress sales” or any public acknowledgement that business conditions in the building were less than perfect. Anyhow, the dispute got quietly resolved, and Lilia’s got to continue going the way of 80 percent of new U.S. businesses.
YOU MAY ALREADY BE A FOOL!: Like many of you, I just got a bold postcard announcing I’ve become a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winner–“pending selection and notification.” The postcard alerted me to watch the mail for the “prize announcement” soon to follow. What followed, of course, was yet another entry form with its accompanying sheet of magazine-subscription stamps. While I love much of the PCH program (the stamps, the Prize Patrol commercials, the cute interactive aspect of cutting and licking and pasting the entry forms), the just barely non-fraudulant pronouncements in its pitches has always struck me as unnecessarily taking us customers as gullible saps. A Time tote bag oughta be incentive enuf, right?
Then I realized who gets PCH mailings: People who’ve subscribed to magazines the company bought mailing lists from. In other words, readers. According to hi-brow commentators like Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, the very act of reading somehow mystically imparts taste and discernment onto the reader, regardless of content. Yet PCH became a national institution by treating folks who regularly pay for the writen word as potential suckers for weaselly-constructed promises of certain wealth. In this case, I’d believe money rather than ideology, and here the money loudly cautions against blind faith in The Word without specifying which words. (More on this topic next week.)
BIG GAME HUNTING: The GameWorks video-game palace, opening this weekend, is the first in the chain to open for business, but not the first one built. There’s a full-scale working prototype on a Universal Studios soundstage, where they’ve worked out everything from electrical requirements and crowd flow to lighting and acoustics. Paying customers, though, are still the ultimate test of any business. The next GameWorks (in Vegas, where it’ll fit right in) is too far along to be radically changed by the company’s Seattle experience, but the chain’s owners (Sega, Spielberg, and Seagram’s/ MCA) will do some tweaking to the concept based on which attractions prove more popular here.
Basically, GameWorks is to your neighborhood amusement arcade what Borders is to your neighborhood tome-boutique. It’s bigger, flashier, and noisier than anything outside Nevada. You really feel inside the frenetic cathode-gaming universe. But see for yourself. There’s no cost to just look around this new building made to look like an old building had been ungraciously “restored.” An “old-timey” look is enforced throughout the place with the Rosie-the-Riveter type posters, some more obviously fake than others. In one corner there’s a mural of a ’50s-dressed couple gaping at a ’70s-era game console, above the script-lettering slogan “Remember Pong?”. There’s a corner for ’80s video games on the mezzanine, next to the Internet-terminal corner (laptop computers attached to comfy lounge chairs) and the of-course-they’d-have-one Starbucks booth. Most of the main-floor game units are have sit-in consoles and big-screen monitors; several race games are arranged in rows of eight for simultaneous competition. You’ll also find video batting-practice, air hockey, and a few Space Jam pinball games. (Sega’s signature game series, Sonic the Hedgehog, was nowhere to be seen on the preview days I was there, but I’ve since learned they’ve got one Sonic unit in now.)
The place is all ages except for the Elysian Brewpub upstairs. (A note on the pub’s menu describes the Greek myth of Elysium as a place of peace and harmony; this joint’s somewhat less tranquil.) Indeed, it’s significant as the only big place in the whole downtown redevelopment juggernaut intended for people of a post-Boomer demographic, the people who do support in-city merchants, gathering places, and public transportation. Speaking of hi-tech wonderlands…
AIRING IT OUT: After all these years, I finally got to the famous Boeing surplus store a few weeks ago. It’s well worth the trip to the daytime nightmare that is Darkest Kent’s vast miles of faceless, windowless warehousery and wide, sidewalkless arterials. Best to get there just before its 10 a.m. opening, to mingle with the mechanics and home-improvement crowd waiting for first chance at the bargains. The day I was there, alas, no airplane seats or beverage carts or 10-foot-tall landing-wheel tires could be had. But many other things were there, all dirt cheap: Sheets of aluminum. Office furniture, including drafting tables. Computers (and their parts and accessories) of varying vintages and operating systems. Drill bits. Welders’ heat-shield masks, a la Flashdance. Safety goggles. Cash registers. Huge rolls of upholstery fabrics, in those reassuring dark blue colors psychologically tested to make passengers less restless. Platforms and podiums. A bicycle with no handlebars or pedals. A huge old photo-typesetter, the kind of machine that made words like these in the pre-desktop-publishing era. Fifteen- and twenty-minute VHS tapes from the company’s in-house production studio, now erased but bearing labels announcing such former contents as Confined Space Awareness, Commitment to Integrity: The Boeing Values, and even Accident Investigation: It’s About Prevention. Speaking of accidents…
GEE, THAT’S ME!: While returning from Kent on I-5, I passed the former Sunny Jim food plant, its still-standing signs harkening back to good comfort-food memories. While Sunny Jim products hadn’t been around for several years, I could remember the labels, tastes, and even smells of its peanut butter, apple butter, jams, jellies, pancake syrup, and cut-price soda pop. I had no way to know the building (which had been artists’ studios in recent years but was now only half-occupied by city maintenance trucks) would go up in a massive fire, started accidentally by a roofer, an hour later.
