Amazon.Com Finds Dominance Thru Diversity:

Hard Copy, Hard Sell

Essay for The Stranger, 2/6/97

by Clark Humphrey

It took a while, but somebody noticed there’s one thing everybody on the Internet is doing: reading. Except for the light source, visual detail, and degree of portability, the act of following words on paper is little different from following words on screen. So it only seems natural that one of the first companies to accumulate substantial sales exclusively from online merchandising is doing so with books. What might be less expected is the company accomplishing this feat–a pure startup, not a division of any existing retail operation, a startup headed by an entrepreneur with no prior retail or computer experience to speak of.

Seattle-based Amazon.com Books (two years old as of March) has become an online success story. Whether it’ll become a business success story won’t be known for some time. While the company won’t release sales numbers (the Wall Street Journal estimates it had sales of at least $5 million in 1996), it acknowledges every dime it makes, and more, is ploughed back into growing the company’s infrastructure (to handle sales growth of 34 percent a month). With profits at least a year or two off, it’s currently living off $10 million from California venture capital and private investors.

The Secret History

Is Amazon a Seattle success story? Only sorta. Founder Jeff Bezos, now 32, was an up-‘n’-comin’ Wall Street investment banker who, like lots of folks in the mid-’90s, was looking for a way to make big bucks off this newfangled Internet craze. He first settled on the concept of catalog shopping without a catalog. He then narrowed his sights further to focus on books and music. He finally chose to just sell books at first, thinking he could get more leverage with the big book publishers than with the big record labels, even though many are parts of the same conglomerates. He picked Seattle because he figured the place was awash with both book experts and computer nuts. We’re also within a one-day UPS Surface zone from Roseburg, OR, where the Ingram wholesale company runs one of America’s biggest book warehouses.

That latter fact was vital to Bezos’s business plan. While advertising itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” and boasting of 1.1 million titles in its database, Amazon actually keeps just a few hundred bestselling titles in stock. (The Elliott Bay Book Co. and the U Village Barnes & Noble each claim over 150,000 titles on the premises. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, which offers both in-person and online ordering, claims 500,000 new and used selections.)

Everything else is special-ordered, just like a regular bookstore can do for you. If a title isn’t stocked by Ingram or one of the other wholesalers with whom it’s in regular communication, Amazon will attempt to contact the publisher (or even the author) direct. Originally, this scheme meant Amazon could start in March 1995 with little more than a couple of PCs and a makeshift office in a Bellevue garage. Now, it means the company doesn’t have to worry about that bane of traditional retailers, unsold or unsaleable inventory. (Retailers can return most books to distributors for full credit; but they still cost time and money to get and hold onto.)

Why It Works

The Microsoft online zine Slate dissed Amazon in January. The article by Jonathan Chait and Stephen Glass, “Amazon.con,” claimed Amazon didn’t provide anything significantly cheaper, faster, or better gift-wrapped than one could get special-ordering from a regular bookstore. Over 200 loyal Amazon customers emailed critical letters to Slate in response, some from as far as Malaysia, Kuwait, and Germany; all exhorting the praises of Amazon’s service and selection. (Microsoft, it turns out, is in cahoots with Wal-Mart to start a rival online bookstore.)

Besides English-speakers overseas, who’s Amazon good for? Folks who are online a lot and like the convenience of staying online while they shop. Folks in search of the obscure and unusual (scientific and technical documents, car manuals, cult stuff, regional-interest books for a region they’re not currently living in). Folks who live outside big towns and don’t like the censored, mainstreamed fare at their Wal-Mart book department. Folks who like mail-order book buying but want more selection than book clubs or printed catalogs can offer.

Jennifer Cast, Amazon’s acting VP of marketing, claims the company’s secret lies in “a value proposition people can’t get in any physical bokstore. We offer the largest selection in the world, with incredible convenience. We can ship anyplace in the world, we gift wrap, we offer great discounts. Most hardbacks are discounted 10 percent, most paperbacks 20 percent, bestsellers and New York Times-reviewed books 30 percent. We’re the most heavily discounted retailer in the world.” (In many cases, though, Amazon’s shipping and handling charges more than make up for any list-price discounts.)

“Bookstores can’t order all the books we can,” Cast adds. “We have small publishers and self published titles. We have a large staff of people in the orders department making calls every single day. The time to get it is shorter; many times it’s less expensive with us.

“Moreover, if you’re in a bookstore and you don’t see a book you want, you have to know what it is and know that it exists. With us, you just use our search tools and, boom, there you are. We’ve got over 100 titles on how to play the harmonica.

People who shop in big and small stores will order from us when a value we offer is important to them.”

How It Works

The Amazon operation now employs some 160 people (up from 30 last year at this time) and is constantly recruiting for more, on its home page and on flyers posted in U District hangouts.

About half the staff’s housed in the former vocational-school building above the Art Bar downtown. There, winding corridors lead past both permanent and portable interior walls. Behind those walls, teams of fresh-faced young adults (and a few early-middle-aged supervisors) scour the major book-review publications and trade journals, write online-catalog copy, process credit-card numbers, take phone calls from customers, and program new database functions on the company’s networked workstation computers. Many of the desks are made by Amazon workers, from old wood doors and four-by-fours.

Every first-time buyer at Amazon has to fill out a detailed online form. This information (names, addresses, demographics, and buying habits) is becoming as valuable to the company as its merchandise databse. It hopes to someday sell pieces of this information to publishers. Amazon customers can also pre-order titles that have been announced but not yet printed; the company hopes to sell pre-order data to publishers too, thinking they’ll want to know how many copies to print.

The other employees, including as many as 30 temp workers and office-staff hirees in training, work in shifts at a 17,000-square-foot warehouse off Fourth Ave. South. If Argentinian fantasist Jorge Luis Borges were alive (and not blind) today, he’d love the labrynthian-library quality of the place, where thousands of unwrapped books sit on miles of industrial shelving, stacked and arranged by computer-database numbers. Because these database numbers bear no relation to the Dewey Decimal System, one shelf segment might contain a Judith Krantz bodice-ripper, a UNIX programming manual, a Simpsons picture book, and a self-published treatise predicting world economic collapse. Books last on the shelves only until a customer’s entire order has been received; usually less than a day. (Regular bookstores may turn over their stock only three or four times a year.)

From there, dressed-for-warmth young staffers put the volumes through bubble wrap and corregated-cardboard mailing sleeves, stick laser-printed address labels on the outsides of the sleeves, and collect them in bins for the UPS and US Mail trucks that pull up to the warehouse door several times daily.

For The Future

Having established its brand name, Amazon’s already seeking new worlds to conquer. It’s working deals with authors and indie publishers, to handle their online bookselling for them; so far over 550 other book-related sites handle their ordering through Amazon. The company’s also talking of starting a second base of operations in Europe next year or the year after, should European Net use finally take off to the degree it has Stateside.

“People are embracing Internet commerce,” insists Cast, rebuking media reports of a Net-hype backlash. “There are people buying on the Net and they’re buying now in droves. As more and more people get access, its time will come more and more.”

What It All Means

Amazon, and the Borders/ Barnes & Noble superstores, represent a different challenge to bookselling than the ’80s Waldenbooks/B. Dalton invasion. Those earlier mall-oriented chains specialized in high-turnover sales of a few bestsellers and perennial-sellers. Amazon and the superstore chains instead want to be everything to everybody, servicing a post-mainstream America of a thousand special interests.

On the one hand, the fact that big money’s pouring into bookstore development is proof Americans really are buying books these days. Yet literary purists bemoan this and any other threats to their near-mythologized vision of the cozy neighborhood bookseller who knows all about everything in stock, something no big organization can supposedly match. Amazon tries to make up for that with a detailed database of its titles, but even it doesn’t have all a would-be buyer would like to know, especially about those thousands of more obscure titles. Its Web pages regularly solicit reviews and summaries from customers, publishers, and even authors. Customer-submitted reviews are entered into a contest; weekly winners get free store credit.

As big-biz booster Virginia Postrel writes in Forbes, “Take the values independent booksellers celebrate: diverse literary voices, personal service, support for unknown authors. Jeff Bezos is delivering those values–and just about any book printed in English–via the Web…. Amazon threatens old-fashioned bookstores–and we can expect to hear them squak–but it furthers their professed values.”

For all its championing of “progressive” values, the book community is full of nostalgia for a past that never was, a mythical time when bungalow-dwelling gentlemen of leisure (and their educated but careerless wives) gently devoured hardcover tomes edited by tweed-clad Ivy Leaguers working out of quaint Manhattan brownstones, retailed by tiny storefronts that somehow always had what you wanted. Such a setup could only have been possible in a class-stratified society, one in which only a favored few were invited to read anything more complex than Sunday-school guides or pulp-fiction magazines. We now live in a different world, and we’re largely the better for it.

The computer magazine Web Week quoted Bezos last fall, “Are we going to put physical bookstores out of business? No. TV didn’t put movie theaters out of business. But physical bookstores will have to keep adding value to what they’ve got.” Actually, TV and suburbanization combined in the ’50s to kill half the country’s theaters, the RKO studio, and short-subject production. Already, indie publishers are trimming their backlists and adjusting their new-release priorities so their products will better reach out to customers from the vast lonely shelves of the superstores. Indie bookstores are either folding or struggling or turning to specialty niches.

But the movie biz eventually adapted to changing conditions. The book biz has faced many changes over the decades (the rise and fall of the cheap paperback, the rise of the costlier trade paperback, the consolidation of big publishers, etc.). The dawn of online retailing means a “virtual superstore” like Amazon.com can become gigantic by delivering the diversity indie stores promise. The little booksellers can’t be everything to everybody, but they can still be a few things to a few bodies. And the little book creators are having to learn to compete, not against a few others of their ilk in the confines of indie-store shelves, but against a million other titles equally available online. If Amazon.com hadn’t fed this state of affairs, someone else would have. At least this particular revolution is being led by an outfit eager to do business with indie publishers.

MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)

DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.

WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”

HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.

So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).

As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.

ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”

‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”

(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)

NFL Films’ 16mm Heroics:

The Movies of Champions

Original online essay, 1/28/97

As a U.S. Male who came of age in the ’70s, it seemed pro football was always with us, and so was its official biographer, NFL Films. In schools, at church teen retreats, on the lonely late-afternoon weekend TV slots now occupied by infomercials, NFL Films’ half-hour reels of grainy 16mm film were ubiquitous, with their pompous narration and brassy music scores.

So it’s surprising to learn that American football, a major college and high-school sport since the 1890s, was a decidedly secondary attraction as a pro sport, far less popular than baseball, until the ’60s. The pro game’s explosion had three main causes: TV coverage, the NFL-AFL merger, and the evangelizing artistry of NFL Films.

The early to mid ’60s was a golden age for sports documentaries, thanks largely to the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras with advanced lenses and film stocks. The surfing film The Endless Summer was a hit in theaters; Warren Miller’s skiing films drew roadshow crowds across the northern U.S. and in Canada. Ed Sabol, a Philadelphia businessman with no pro filmmaking experience, sent in a blind bid to shoot the official filmed record of the 1962-63 NFL championship game. The next year, Sabol sent crews to every NFL game, editing the footage into a catalog of highlight reels. By 1965 Sabol convinced the league’s team owners to buy his company and keep him in charge of it. Ed’s son Steve Sabol, who in college was both a football player and an art major, soon became the studio’s creative czar. He still is.

From the start, Steve Sabol established a house style that would sell the game and the league, albeit by using the filmmaker’s art to bend the game’s story. Football is essentially a game of coaching and planning, with squads trying to either complete or stop fully choreographed five-second plays. But Steve Sabol’s guys presented instead a game of individual heroics.

“We emphasize the struggle of a game rather than the strategy,” Sabol explained in a recent phone interview. “We portray the game as a passion. When I was a [college] player, the game was only shown from the top, from cameras in the grandstands. I wanted to show the muscles bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. There are two spheres in sport; there’s one sphere where things are measured by seconds and inches and yards, then there’s the sphere where things are measured by heart and guts.

“When we started, our goal was to create an image for the game; to show sport at its most passionate and visceral level. But at the time we were just a bunch of young guys who loved to make movies and loved pro football and wanted to communicate that love to an audience.”

The first film released under the NFL Films name, They Call It Pro Football (commissioner Pete Rozelle called it the best sports movie he’d ever seen), started with a booming intro (written by Steve) that set the stage for three decades of histronics: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown… A call. The ball is snapped and the play continues. A drama of man on man and a race against the clock. It’s precision, persistance, power. The unleashed speed of the kickoff. The whistling feet of a great runner. The reckless fury of a goal-line stand. The crowning glory of a winning touchdown. The swelling roar of the crowd… This is pro football, the sport of our time.” (These and countless later, equally momentous lines were delivered with booming stoicism by ex-Philly newscaster John Facenda, who died in 1984 from the cigarettes that had given his voice its trademark gritty rasp.)

Facenda’s voice and the stirring martial music (first assembled from stock-music selections, since the ’70s taken from a library of original orchestral tracks) accompanied footage that used every known sports-film trick and many tricks NFL Films invented. A typical segment of a film might cut from overhead shots to field shots to cutaways of anxious fans to wired-for-sound coaches’ exhortations to reverse-angle replays to super slo-mo shots made with a mammoth 600-mm telephoto lens to tackle shots pumped up with highly exaggerated sound effects.

Even the studio’s “humor” reels were rough-hewn and overblown, with Mel Blanc giving the only unfunny performances of his career by means of trying-too-hard-to-be-wacky gag voices.

As the NFL grew in prestige and popularity (if not in intellectual respect), NFL Films became an institution within an institution. Between seasons it churned out a few films on other sports, commercial and industrial films, and even a few music videos (for Slayer and Bruce Springsteen). It was supposed to make a propaganda film saluting the US military’s work in the 1991 Gulf War, but the deal fell through. And it’s been called upon to replicate its style in movies about the sport (Semi-Tough, Brian’s Song, Black Sunday,Paper Lion, Everybody’s All-American) and in last year’s Nike commercials about pee-wee football.

While the league itself is in trouble on several fronts (greedy owners, unpopular team moves), NFL Films is as big as ever. Today’s NFL Films is a 200-employee outfit in its own office complex behind a New Jersey shopping mall, with its own film labs, editing suites, soundstages, and vaults (Sabol claims the only human event more thoroughly documented on film than NFL football is World War II). It sends at least two camera people and four support staff to every game. Everything but the in-studio narration segments is still shot on film, though some editing is now done on video with telecine color correction (I prefer the more mythic look of the older films, with more grain and washed-out colors). The footage they shoot is edited into weekly shows for ESPN and HBO (coaches’ and players’ cusswords are still bleeped on the HBO shows), annual highlight reels for each team, plus several home videos a year, occasional TNT specials, and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special. The 98-piece London Symphonic Orchestra records two sessions’ worth of background music for NFL Films every year.

The NFL Films look has influenced major filmmakers; Steve Sabol loves to tell how Sam Peckinpah publicly noted “the way we used the camera at different speeds, the editing and the intensity of the violence as an influence on how he did the end of The Wild Bunch.” But the thing’s really a universe of its own. By giving heroic treatment to players whose faces can’t even be seen on TV, it’s forged an audience intimacy the real game can’t provide. As Sabol calls it, “What we are is storytellers and mythmakers.”

(Some selected NFL Films video releases: Feel the Power, Idol Makers, NFL Throwbacks, NFL Talkin’ Follies, and The NFL’s Greatest Moments.)

AD VERBS 1: Pontiac’s got this new ad with a computer-animated version of the Munch Scream man. A red sports car appears on his bridge. He gets in and immediately morphs into a shades-clad “dood,” happily puttering down the road. By treating chronic depression and/ or realistic world-weariness as just a minor “attitude adjustment” problem, it ridicules the worldview of the young-adult generation it’s trying to sell to. How typical. Speaking of ill-advised selling points…

AD VERBS 2: I know I’m not the only one disturbed by the new Blockbuster Video slogan, “One World, One Word.” It harkens back to a line used in the ’80s by its now sister company MTV, “One World, One Music, One Channel.” Both phrases envision a singular corporate deity commanding the entire Earth’s population with a single brand of formula entertainment. It’s not just monopolistic, it’s monotheistic. And it’s not what either music or video ought to be. Rather, millennial pop culture is (or is becoming) a pantheon of sources, ideas, aesthetics, genres, sounds, and looks; something as vast and chaotic as the world itself. Speaking of dangerous delusions of hegemony…

ANGUISH LANGUISH: The whole Ebonics mania is about teaching the ability to communicate. The furor over it shows just how much miscommunication we have to deal with. From hate radio to the op-ed pages, Beemer conservatives and Volvo liberals alike are decrying something Ebonics isn’t, something that existed only in oversimplified newspaper descriptions. What the Oakland, CA schools want to do isn’t to “promote” the language spoken by Af-Ams in inner cities and the rural south. They want to treat that language in class as a legitimate idiom, with its own rules and norms–and then to use these notions of rules and norms to teach business English as a second language. Think of it as sorta like your Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady shtick, with modern school-bureaucrat propriety substituted for Prof. Henry Higgins’ old-time classism.

The more rabid critics of Ebonics are using it as an excuse to deride Black English as “gibberish,” and those who speak it as “illiterate thugs.” This kind of arrogance is part of the whole point of Oakland’s Ebonics scheme. It’s a scheme to teach kids to speak and write business English without telling ’em they’re idiots for not already knowing it. It’s a scheme combining Calif. new-age “empowerment” hype with legitimate linguistic studies. Indeed, as occasional Stranger contributer Zola Mumford can tell you, Black English is a fascinating mix of words and pronounciation patterns from Africa, the US south, and elsewhere. Everybody from beatniks and mall rappers to jazz and art lovers have benefitted from its traditions and continual innovations. (I wrote a couple years ago that “teen slang in advertising” could be defined as how old white people think young white people think young black people talk.) The catch is that most potential employers speak a different idiom, one which must be learned by potential employees. What might really frustrate both rightists and centrists is where Ebonics departs from the Higgins metaphor. It treats business, or “white,” English as a trade idiom (like the old-Northwest “Chinook Jargon” taught by white pioneers to conduct business with different native peoples who spoke different tongues). The idiom of CEOs (and of talk-show hosts and columnists) is treated as just another English variant, not as the language’s one and only proper form. Speaking of learning…

CRUNCHY NUMBERS: Tucked away in the residential enclave of Maple Leaf (89th & Roosevelt) is an educational-toy store with a wonderful name, Math’n’Stuff (looove that juxtaposition of specifics and generalities!). If you didn’t grow up in the kind of Harper’s-subscribin’, Pendleton-skirt-wearin’ family you see in all the Nordstrom Xmas ads, you can now fantasize about that sort of patrician cocooning with this store’s vast array of geometric puzzle games, algebra flash cards, mind-bender storty-problem books, and K’Nex building sticks. (They’ve even got genuine Rubik’s Cubes!) Much of the store’s merchandise is meant to teach kids to see math as relevant, by relating “real” world observations to the world of numbers. I imagine a different, equally-valuable use–to teach teen and adult computer nerds that the world of senses and physicality is just as exciting as the world of logical constructs.

MISC., YOUR SEASONAL-AFFECTIVE COLUMN, couldn’t help but be cheered up by the January Playgirl cover blurb: “Odd Men Are In!” What could be duller than square jaws, pumped pecs, and steely gazes? Conversely, what could be more fun than somebody with a deft wit, a neato wardrobe of mismatched shirts and ties, and a wicked pinball wrist? (At least that’s what I’ve always tried to tell women.)

TCI IN TROUBLE: The cable behemoth’s laying off 7 percent of its workforce, ordering exec-pay cuts, considering selling subsidiaries, and scaling back upgrade plans (though its long-promised Seattle upgrade’s officially still in the works). Boss John Malone has to placate stockholders, in particular the heirs of one recently-deceased exec, to keep the company from being sold out from under him. The long-term problem: Customers are fed up with Malone’s limited line-ups, rate hikes, and dumping of popular channels for channels Malone owns a piece of. Malone’s siphoned ratepayers’ bills into acquisitions, joint ventures, and power-grab schemes, while staying put too long with aging electronics and wires. Customers are going to mini-satellite dishes today. By ’88, they may turn to phone-company-run or Net-based video systems. I wouldn’t miss Malone, but the wrong kind of takeover could bleed even more money away from service and into junk-bond debt.

`STREET’ IMPROVEMENTS: Sesame St. was looking a little tattered in its 28th year. Once PBS’s ratings powerhouse and a merchandising gold mine, its disjointed mix of humans, Muppets, cartoons, animal films, and committee-written lesson plans has declined in viewership and grownup attention. As more of commercial TV took on Sesame’s frenetic flash, PBS found kids taking refuge in the decidedly steadier Barney and Magic School Bus. The show’s production company, Children’s Television Workshop, has taken cash from toy royalties to buy ads on the commercial networks, hoping to alert viewers that Sesame’s still on the map.

So it was a happy surprise for CTW when Rosie O’Donnell used a plush figure of Elmo, a relatively recent Sesame Muppet character, as a mascot on her talk show. O’Donnell’s endorsement brought parental attention to what had become Sesame’s most popular character. A vibrating “Tickle Me” Elmo doll is the hit toy of an Xmas season otherwise dominated by recycled older properties (Mario, Bugs, Dalmatians). A wide-mouthed, not-unbearably cute, everykid character created from a generic Muppet design, Elmo signifies kids embracing the defiantly innocent side of kidness, rejecting violent fantasy and smartass “attitude.” Now I know where the K Records listeners of tomorrow are coming from.

DOWN, ON THE FARM: Big agribusiness outfits in Calif. are suing for the right to not contribute to government-mandated marketing campaigns (the California Raisins, “Got Milk?”, California Summer Fruits). In an AP report, one plaintiff complained the slurping and chewing sounds in a Summer Fruits commercial were too sexually suggestive. Another said the mandate reeked of socialism. (Actually, it reeks of mercantilism, the belief that government’s highest duty is to enrich business.) I say government oughta quit the raisin biz. If these huge factory farmers wanna be foolish enough to kill some of the most clever and effective ads around today, let ’em.

WHITHER THE KINGDOME?: It’s not the echoing fan noise that made it such a good home for our teams. It’s the way its homeliness, its blatant architectural mediocrity, complemented the lovable-loser status of the Seahawks and pre-Griffey Mariners. Its concrete cheapness symbolized an ex-frontier town wanting to become a Big League City but unwilling or unable to do it right. Paul Allen sez he won’t buy the Hawks if they’re stuck in an aging, luxury-boxless Dome. The new M’s owners said the same. Besides the economic considerations, I think both parties were uncomfortable with an overcast-grey box whose un-gussy-uppable look of thrift contradicted today’s mania for yupscale pretension. Dunno ’bout you, but I’ll miss the humble giant hamburger bun if Allen gets the county to tear it down.

WE’LL MEET AGAIN on Boxing Day (my fave Canadian holiday!) with the annual Misc. In/Out list. ‘Til then, keep in mind my favorite aphorism from Rudolph, a line which has become my life’s motto: “Even among misfits you’re misfits!”

This installment of Misc. is being written on a gorgeous, sturdy office table obtained dirt cheap at the old REI store’s after-closing fixture sale. While many of us working in the Pike/Pine corridor are thankful to no longer compete for parking with Suburbans from the suburbs, there’s still a certain feeling of loss over what was a solid, utilitarian place selling solid, utilitarian goods. REI began as an outgrowth of the ’30s Mountaineer movement, a quasi-bohemian subculture that believed communing with Nature could bring empowerment and even spiritual growth. These folks wanted a consumer-run resource for practical tools. That’s a ways from the mass-merchandising behemoth that is today’s REI, with its huge new Retail Theater Experience on Denny Way.

Another survivor of the pre-WWII co-op craze, Group Health, admits to being in merger negotiations with Kaiser Permanente, a huge HMO with operations in 18 states. Some news accounts questioned whether such a scheme could preserve Group Health’s “cooperative spirit.” I say without the actual practice of cooperative governance, such a “spirit” is little more than an image; and at organizations the size of today’s REI or Group Health, real hands-on co-op management might not even be possible. Speaking of forgotten populist dreams…

STEAMED OR FRIED?: TV commentators on Primary Night claimed to be mildly astounded by the size of Norm Rice’s loss in his run for governor. They attributed the defeat to his failure to get out the vote among his supposed core constituency of “urban liberals.” Nobody mentioned how Rice wrote off that vote before his second mayoral term started. From his status as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nordstrom to his (or rather, the city’s) continued attempt to remake Seattle into a city where only upscale baby boomers are welcome, Rice had nothing to offer progressives and little to offer voters elsewhere in the state. He made no viable promises that he wouldn’t sell out the rural environment to Weyerhaeuser and agribusiness the way he’s tried to sell out the urban environment to the condo developers and Paul Allen. (Then there’s the way his development program as Seattle mayor played against the rest of the state, by vying for housing stock and nonindustrial jobs that might otherwise go to other jurisdictions.)

I knew several Rice campaign staffers; while they’re articulate, outgoing folks, they couldn’t tell me what Rice’s candidacy had to offer non-affluent and non-boomer voters. He might have had a chance running as a Dan Evans-style, mainstream, pro-business Republican, if that party were still run by sane people. Indeed, Demo primary victor Gary Locke is now running against GOP nominee Ellen Craswell as just that voice-O-moderation the GOP once claimed to be. Speaking of business and hype…

EXPOSED: You’ve seen corporate ads swipe graphic, type, and copy elements from home-published zines. You may have seen record-company promos made by professional design studios to look like the work of no-budget zinesters. But Hollywood Highballis an apparent first: a paid-circulation ($4.95) publication purporting to be a real street-level zine, sold at the same record and comix stores, but made by a national ad agency (Gyro Worldwide of Philadelphia, described in the NY Times as an outfit that “Prides Itself on Understanding Generation X”).

Subtitled “Indie-Rock’s Nudie Magazine,” its 48 pages combine retro “cocktail culture” lifestyle features, celebrity swipes (reserving any real negativity to dead celebs), parody cheesecake photos (black asterisks cover all bare nipples), and ads for Gyro’s regular clients–MTV, Reactor clothes, Goldschlager liquor, and especially Red Kamel cigarettes. The NYT quotes Gyro founder Steven Grasse about Highball, “It helps our agency’s image. If we say we understand urban hipsters, we have to continue to prove it.” Having ad execs running a magazine sure removes the danger of pesky content getting in the way of the ads (that’s one place you’ll never see an anti-smoking article). Even the concept’s advertiser-friendly–consumer hedonism disguised as a spoof of yesterday’s consumer hedonism, with the erotic aspect of the ’50s source material toned down to inoffensiveness.

This week at Misc. World HQ, we seek your suggestions for the ex-REI building.

LET US RETURN to Misc., the pop-culture column that’s indifferent about the threatened Federal ban on goofy cigarette brand merchandising like Marlboro Gear, Camel Cash, and the near-ubiquitous Your Basic Hat. Wearing or carrying that stuff’s a walking admission of subservience to a chemical god, disguised (as so many human weaknesses are) as bravado. Speaking of personal appearance…

BEAUTY VS. COMMERCE: The Portland paper Willamette Week reports many employers in that town are altering their dress codes to regulate employees with nose and lip rings. An exec with the espresso chain Coffee People was quoted as saying his company allows up to “three earrings per ear and a nose stud,” but forbids nose rings. Starbucks baristas in the Rose City may wear up to two earrings per ear but no face rings, no tattoos, and no “unnatural” hair colors. Dunno ’bout you, but I like to be served by someone who shows she knows there’s more important things than serving me. Speaking of trendy looks…

UPDATE: Got a bottle of Orbitz pop thanks to the guys at Throw Software, who’d smuggled three bottles from NYC. It’s made by a Vancouver company (Clearly Canadian) whose US HQ’s in Kent, but it’s only sold so far in the Northeast. It’s more beautiful than I imagined–a clear, uncarbonated, slightly-more-syrupy-than-usual concoction with caviar-sized red, yellow, or orange gummy globules in perfect suspension, neither floating nor sinking. It uses Clearly Canadian’s regular bottle shape, which is already sufficiently Lava Lamp-esque for the visual effect. As for the taste, reader Jeannine Arlette (who also got hers in NY) sez it’s “less icky tasting than the dessert black-rice-pudding, but just a little… The little neon `flavor bitz’ lodge in the gag part of your throat as you swallow, and, they have no flavor except possibly under some very loose definition where texture is considered a flavor.” Speaking of beverages…

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of an ad offering video-rental “happy hours,” complete with cocktail-nation cartoon imagery): “Rain City Video does not condone the use of alcoholic beverages with some movies.” What? Without a few good highballs or mint-liqueur martinis in your system, what’s the point of watching something like Leaving Las Vegas, Barfly, Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? Certainly the Thin Man films nearly demand six martinis. Speaking of film and morals…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in his paper The Final Call, recently blasted the producers of Independence Day.He claims they knowingly stole and corrupted a 1965 prophecy by his predecessor, Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, that a fleet of space ships will one day descend from their “Mother Plane,” secretly built by Africans in 1929 and currently hidden in high orbit, to destroy white America. (This is the source of the “mother ship” imagery George Clinton sanitizes for mainstream consumption.) Farrakhan claims all the world’s political and media leaders know about the Mother Plane but have never admitted it, except to slander it in a movie. (Farrakhan’s also displeased that the UFO-blasting hero in Independence Day is so openly Jewish.)

Many of you first became acquainted with the advanced mysteries of the Nation of Islam at the Million Man March, when Farrakhan preached about conspiracies revealed by magic numbers. A nonbeliever might find it strange, but it’s no stranger than tenets followed by Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, and New-Agers.

Besides, the premise of an apocalypse from the skies is as old as War of the Worlds. Several sects have predicted violent or benign spaceship-based takeovers over the years; the Church of the Sub-Genius parodied it in its tracts claiming that “Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet.” And compared to real-life crimes against blacks (like the recent report in the mainstream press that CIA-connected crooks jump-started the crack industry, and the resulting gang violence, in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras), and Farrakhan’s charges seem relatively mild and almost plausible.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder these thoughts of Courtney Love on smells, from a 1993 issue of Mademoiselle: “All boys love Chanel No. 5 because it reminds them of their moms when they got dressed up.”

DUD RANCH: Montana’s got the (alleged) Unabomber, but in Seattle it’s the summer of the Unbomber! Indeed, we’ve got Unbombers all over town! Even though a certain politically ambitious prosecutor’s trying to throw the book at one alleged Unbomber, subsequent Unbombs continue to pop up everywhere! Since an Unbomb isn’t a bomb, it can be anything–unclaimed luggage, grocery bags, stalled cars, a garage-sale lamp, stray free samples of Honey Bunches of Oats, that Arch Deluxe box in the gutter–any unattended physical object of any appreciable size. Remember, don’t be a litterbug–you could get charged with planting an Unbomb, with un-threatening hundreds of innocent lives!

UPDATES: While the Off Ramp’s rebirth has taken a little longer than expected (don’t these things always?), its Denny/ Eastlake neighbor in noise, RKCNDY, may also arise from the ashes. Lori LaFavor, who booked many of the 1994-95 Sailors’ Union Hall shows, says she hopes to book a few all-ages shows in the space while the new owners get their remodeling plans and liquor-license application going… The couple who ran the Toaster Museum in Seattle’s AFLN and Wonderful World of Art galleries have moved to Portland and are raising funds to open a larger display of historic bread-burners there. To learn how to help write The Toaster Museum Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 11886, Portland, OR 97211, or email <ericn@SpiritOne.com>.

THE MAILBAG: Blaine Dollard writes, “What’s up with these buses?” It’s simple, really: In honor of King County taking over Metro Transit, a new luscious purple-based exterior color scheme was devised for the buses. But to save money, existing buses won’t be repainted until either (1) an advertiser pays to get a bus painted and that deal expires; or (2) a particular coach has its turn in the five-year cycle in which all the buses get repainted anyway. So from now until the new millennium, when you peer down the road to see if your bus is coming, you’ll have to squint to perceive either the luscious new colors or the old burger-chain browns (or for those weird ad buses, but that’s another item).

NO `SAX’ PUNS HERE: ‘Twas nice to unexpectedly spot the Billy Tipton Memorial Sax Quartet a few weeks back on Black Entertainment Television’s Jazz Discovery show, a mail-us-your-video-and-maybe-we’ll-play-it affair similar to MTV’s old Basement Tapes. It marked the first time I saw five white women on BET and it didn’t turn out to be an infomercial.

INTO THE DRINK: In the good ol’ days of the ’80s (trust me, they’re already being marketed by the nostalgia industry as “A Simpler Time”), the General Brewing Co. in Vancouver USA used to put fun little rebus picture puzzles inside the bottle caps of its Lucky Lager and generic “Beer Beer.” Pabst, which bought and closed General, still uses the puzzle-caps on its cheaper brands and malt liquors; unless you’re an Old English 800 fancier, you’re more likely to see such a cap strewn on the sidewalk than on a bottle you’ve personally bought. The gang at Portland’s Widmer Bros. Brewery must have remembered these; for their new bottled-beer line includes a line drawing inside the cap of two clinking glasses, the slogan “A Prost” (German for “toast”), and one of 20 different salutations (“To Palindromes,” “To Paleontologists,” “To Button Fly Jeans,” “To Firewalkers,” “To Dogs Named Steve,” “To the Platypus,” “To the Polar Bear Club”). Frankly, I’d rather have a rebus. At least with them, if you couldn’t solve it you knew you’d had enough. Speaking of beverages…

CALL TO ACTION 1: I previously asked if any of the column’s out-of-town readers could supply me with some of those Olestra fake-fat snacks. Nobody did, but now I’ve got another favor to ask. The Clearly Canadian drink company’s supposed to be launchingOrbitz, a soft drink with neon-colored “flavored gel spheres” floating in the bottle like edible little Lava Lamp bits, in selected test markets. Damn, I want some.

CALL TO ACTION 2:I now seek your opinions on whether the Sex Pistols’ slogan “Kill the Hippies” ever was, or is still, valid. Email your responses to clark@speakeasy.org. The more interesting replies will appear on this site sometime in September. Thank you.

The Official Drinking Game of the 1996 Olympics!

by Clark Humphrey with guidance from

Susan Rathke, Eric Fredericksen, Regan Holden, Nicolle Farup, and Skillit.

7/25/96

1. You can’t go to the bathroom until you see a close-up of a non-US athlete.

2. Drink every time an advertiser is mentioned as “an official sponsor of the Olympics.”

3. Finish off your drink every time an advertiser tries to cheat by calling itself merely “an official broadcast sponsor of the Olympics telecast.”

4. Anyone who laughs during the mini Leno show is immediately disqualified.

5. Drink with every “walking along the beach” reflective shot.

6. Puke continuously with every montage of heroic little girls.

7. Finish your drink every time they say, in an “up close and personal” interview, “How did the death of your mother/father affect your training/performance today?”

8. Drink twice every time they accuse a non-US winner of using drugs and/or cheating.

9. Drink whenever the color guy working gymnastics with John Tesh criticizes a gymnast’s dismount.

10. Drink whenever anyone refers to Ahmad Rashad as “NBC’s ambassador to the Olympics.”

11. Drink whenever someone mentions the buses not running on time.

12. Drink any time the clop showing Bela Carolyi carrying whatsherbutt with the sprained ankle is shown.

13. Throw your drink at the TV whenever they say, “Here in Hot-Lanta!”

MISC. CAN ONLY admire the Times for daring to run a front-page banner headline on 6/24 with the quotation “I’m Really Boring.”

THE GRIND: McDonald’s now offers official Babe Happy Meal toys with purchase of a hamburger, cheeseburger, or Chicken McNuggets. No, you can’t substitute a Sausage McMuffin (I tried).

CASH FROM CHAOS DEPT.: Remember when Misc. reprinted a slogan from the Usenet newsgroup alt.society.generation-x, “I Am Not A Target Market”? The June YM had that very phrase–as the tease line for a slick fold-out Nike ad section. Only Nike (and its ad agency, Weiden & Kennedy) would try so desperately to be hip as to try to co-opt youthful rebellion against co-option. Speaking of clever bizpeople…

WHAT’S ON SECOND?: Spurred by the success of Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, a bunch of other eatin’-&-drinkin’ joints wanted to make of Second Ave. in Belltown blossom with a whole string of sidewalk dining spots. It’s been slow in coming, thanks to bureaucrats in the city and at the state Liquor Board holding up the permitting process. The Lava Lounge and the Crocodile got their al fresco OKs, but Goodchow and Tula’s haven’t yet and the Speakeasy’s request was refused. Maybe somebody’s worried about hoped-for hordes of volunteers not being able to navigate narrowed sidewalks to get to the Norm Rice for Governor campaign office, also on Second.

MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING DEPT.: The Nation had a comparatively flimsy essay a couple months back bashing “profits from poverty”: companies discovering new opportunities from the downsizing of America (dollar stores, check-cashing stands, gambling, “secured” credit cards, telephone-reconnect services, etc.). The article claimed something was wrong in this. I say it’s not something companies persue out of spite, exploitation, or evil thoughts. It’s value-neutral, like most of capitalism. If you wanna argue that value-neutrality is exactly what’s wrong with capitalism, I’m willing to listen. Besides, what’s capitalism good for if it can’t properly service its own victims? Speaking of outfits servicing diverse clienteles (or are supposed to)…

DOWN THE PIKE: The heavy hand of demographic cleansing continues on assorted fronts around Seattle. Seems like just yesterday (really a couple years back) the Pike Place Market fended off a hostile-takeover bid from NYC investors who wanted to turn it into a prettified, market-research-driven mall-oid exclusively for yups and tourists. Now, market activists (including theInternational Examiner newspaper and sometimes-heretic market council member Michael Yeager) charge market management with attempting this process on its own. Their claimed evidence: (1) six recent evictions or lease non-renewals of Asian-American shopkeepers who’d sold non-yup wares; and (2) a statement to the press by market executive director Shelly Yapp, in which she envisioned the market as a place primarily for upscale shoppers in competition with Larry’s Markets and Westlake Center. Twenty-five years ago this summer, the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority (the city agency employing Yapp) was chartered to preserve the market as a real place for real people, including low-income, elderly, and non-whitebread people. If Yapp and her staff really are ignoring or abrogating this aspect of the market’s mission, then it’s time for a few changes. Pike Place, like the city as a whole, should be for everybody, not just the upscale elite already served by retail institutions that don’t get taxpayer support.

SIGN OF THE WEEK: The following message, each line in descending type size a la an eye chart, is the only thing visible at a boarded-up storefront in Westlake Center: “We waited a long time to get this location and we wanted to keep it a secret and build suspense but the manager of Westlake Center said that according to the lease we were obligated to put something up in the window to let everybody know something exciting is happening in the mall which really surprises us but they probably buried important information like that in the fine print just like we’re doing. Announcing the grand opening of our new store. (Coming soon!)” In the short time it took me to copy the sign’s words into a notebook, three shoppers asked if I knew what the store would be. (I don’t.)

HANK-ERING: Misc. received an anonymous letter from somebody complaining about a recent ish of No Depression, the “alternative country” zine co-run by Rocket vet Peter Blackstock. The letter-writer felt outraged at the cover image of the late Hank Williams Sr. posing alongside two white Negro-dialect impersonators. I highly doubt Blackstock intended to endorse the show’s crude ethnic humor. Rather, I’m sure he intended to explore Williams’ work and its historical context–like the Robt. Christgau Village Voice piece last month claiming Williams took his vocal shtick from NY performer Emmett Miller, who sang in blackface from the ’20s thru the ’40s.

CLUB IMPLOSION, CONT’D.: The Weathered Wall, for four years Seattle’s poshest (in a friendly way) live-and-recorded-music club (and the only local club to use a blown-up photocopy of an old Misc. column as a wall poster), shut its doors in mid-June. It’s been used since then as a location for a made-for-TV movie. Various interests are looking into getting it sold and/ or re-opened, but there’s nothing to announce now. Meanwhile, the Pioneer Square Theater has hosted its last all-ages gig. Promoters tried to raise prices after fire marshals halved the building’s legal capacity; but that put the concerts out of range of much of the underage crowd. Reportedly the marshals offered a list of improvements that had to be made before full capacity could be re-granted; but the space’s landlord balked at the expense. (If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d wonder why the marshals didn’t go after the building back when it housed non-punk music and plays.)

And the Lake Union Pub, home to some of Seattle’s punkiest shows (and to some of the Liquor Board’s heaviest enforcement details), just had another 10-day closure, amid rumors the joint would be sold and turned into a sports bar. If it happens, the closure would mean three of the four alt-music clubs on the Commons Committee’s ’94 map of blocks it wanted to condo-ize would be dead (leaving only Re-bar). On the upside, the Pub’s quasi-neighbor, the Store Room Tavern, has been booking bands again; while the Seattle Parks Department (!) has co-promoted Wednesday night touring-punk bands at the Miller Community Center on east Capitol Hill.

THE BIG TURN-OFF: The Sonics’ recent successes reminded me how one of the joys of televised sports has always been the excuse to loiter among a department store’s TV displays, sharing the moments of triumph/ despair with instant friends without having to buy (or drink) anything. But that’s another of those disappearing urban pleasures. The Bon Marche’s new management, having disposed of the Budget Floor, the Cascade Room restaurant, and the downtown pharmacy, is now closing the electronics departments. Besides leaving Radio Shack (and pawn shops) as the only source for home electronics in the central downtown, the loss (effective August) leaves but a few public TV walls in the greater urban core (Sears, Fred Meyer, Video Only). At least we might see no more dorky Bon cell-phone ads (we love ya Keister, but keep your night job).

The changes show how the Bon, once powerful enough to rise above retail’s sea changes (documented in an ’80s P-I headline, “Bon Marches to Different Drum”), now bumps along in the tides like the rest of the industry. Further proof: the parent company’s apparent threat (still officially denied) to consolidate the chain with another of its holdings, Macy’s California, and planned cuts in commission pay which might lead to a clerks’ strike this month. Still, for now, the Bon remains the store “Where All Seattle Shops,” from dowagers hanging out in the women’s rooms to brides seeking just the right bread machine. It’s also the city’s crossroads point, having struck a deal in the ’20s to make its 3rd Ave. side one of the town’s biggest bus stops. While the downtown store’s merchandise mix is now based on strategies devised for mall branches, it’s still the first place to go for lots of stuff, sold in a respectful, relatively unpretentious manner. Would hate to see it deteriorate into just another store.

UPDATE: The Portland paper Willamette Week sez that town’s “Church of Kurt Cobain” was just a fraudulant publicity stunt. As opposed to the real publicity stunt we thought it was.

SONICS POSTMORTEM: No matter what happens to the team in future years, we’ll always have Games Four and Five to savor. For four glorious days, the whole city (save a few droller-than-thou alternative conformists) believed. Imagine–a team of great players could beat a team of spokesmodels! Like the Seattle music scene (to which the Sonics have consistently made closer overtures than any other local sports team), the Sonic victories celebrated talent, diligence, and cooperation instead of celebrity, arrogance, and corporate hype. How appropriate that it happen two weeks before the opening of Planet Hollywood, that chain restaurant expressly devoted to corporate celebrity hype, and which staged a PR stunt with professional hypemeister Cindy Crawford telling us if we were smart we’d root against our own team. Can you say, “Not quite the way to make new friends for your business”? Speaking of athletes striving for respect…

THE DEAD POOL: At its Olympics debut in ’84, synchronized swimming was often derided as a summer-games answer to ice dancing, less a sport than an excuse to show half-dressed women. Since then, the sport’s tried to shake that image and earn respect. In the biggest effort yet, the French national team crafted a routine inspired by the Nazi Holocaust. The choreographed playlet premiered at the European Cup finals in May and was planned for the Atlanta Olympics. To Schindler’s List soundtrack music, swimmers goose-stepped into the pool, then switched identities to impersonate women victims being taken to the ovens. But in early June, the country’s sports ministry ordered the team to drop all Holocaust allusions from the routine. Time quoted a dismayed team official, “The program was created to denounce not only the Holocaust in particular, but all forms of racism and intolerance that we see rising.” I say the routine’s well within postmodern performance art, and should be allowed; especially with the ex-Olympic city of Sarajevo only starting to rebuild from a half-decade of attempted genocide. Speaking of dances with a message…

BYE BYE BRAZIL: We’ve past reported on the ever-reaching tentacles of global corporate entertainment, even while American fans increasingly search for untainted pockets of “world beat” and other ethnic arts to bring home. Now, I must sadly report Mickey Mouse’s planned debut at next February’s Rio Carnaval parade. Samba school Academicos da Rocinha will get to use giant models of the Disney characters to celebrate 25 years of the Disney World theme park–as long as the parade’s 2,000-or-so women dancers all keep their tops on. “That was my first condition and thank goodness they agreed,” a Disney marketing official told Variety. In the same article, troupe president Izamilton Goes dismissed suggestions the cover-up would detract from the spectacle: “Inside all of us there remains something of a child and we all loved Disney.”

It’s not that Carnaval would be “cheapened” by Disneyfication. It’s been kitsch for decades. But it’s been its own indigenous brand of kitsch. It incorporates sex not as seamy exploitation but as joyous celebration. The dancers are often poor women who sew their own sequined costumes and arrange their own choreography, who bare their bodies proudly to an audience of men, children, and other women. They enjoy being admired as carnal beings after a year stuck in the wife-mother-laborer roles the Disney people are more comfortable with. Anyhow, the other 18 or so samba schools aren’t bound by Disney’s dictates. And the TV network that largely subsidizes the parades wanted to ban nudity a few years ago, hoping to increase foreign TV-video sales, but the samba schools said no. Speaking of broadcast empires…

BEHIND THE SCREEN: MSNBC, the forthcoming Microsoft-NBC cable news channel we won’t get to see for some months after its July launch, is now going to build new studios in New Jersey (with state-government aid), scuttling earlier plans to share space with NBC’s existing CNBC. Darn. CNBC could use some news people in its building, or at least somebody who could tell the channel’s talk-show hosts the O.J. Simpson trial is over.

WELCOME AGAIN one and all to Misc., the pop-culture column still anxious to try those Olestra potato chips with the chemically-engineered fake fat. If any out-of-town readers live in the chips’ test markets, could you send some over here? Thanx.

UPDATE: Looks like the brick-and-concrete light-industrial building that housed RKCNDY, that recently-closed rock n’ roll purgatory, may soon house the Matt Talbot Day Center, a Catholic Community Services drop-in ministry attending to drug-addicted or otherwise troubled teens. The lease hasn’t been finalized and could still fall through (like the deal last winter to buy the club and keep it operating). I’ll let you generate your own forces-of-redemption-take-over-din-of-iniquity remarks; you might even consider it the Big Guy’s smirking revenge for Moe taking up business in an ex-Salvation Army rehab center.

AD VERBS: Not too long ago, advertisers loved to claim their products would help you attract a sex partner. Now, masturbation metaphors are the rage. First, there was the shampoo that promised women a veritable scalp orgasm. In a more recent spot, a phone-sex worker emotes gushingly about the Pay Day candy bar’s sensuous qualities. And a still-small but growing trend of advertising for women sneaks in references to that self-satisfaction aid, hardcore porn, like the Revlon lipstick promoted as “SuperseXXXy.” If you believe the conspiracy-theory thinking in zines like Adbusters Quarterly (I don’t), you might theorize how the marketeers want to exploit people’s natural drives by redirecting those drives away from the nature-intended craving for intimacy with another human soul and toward sexual identification with the Product itself. Certainly the ad where a woman fantasizes (apparently during intercourse) about how she’d rather be driving a Mercedes could be so interpreted.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical-labor outfit that earlier this century tried to forge “One Big Union of All the Workers,” still exists. The Real Deal: Labor’s Side of Things is its regional monthly zine, edited by Mark Manning. It offers a little labor history (in the May ish, an essay on the Spokane IWW’s fight to overturn 1909 laws banning public speech in the Lilac City). But most of it’s of the present day, documenting workers’ struggles and conditions here and in other parts of the world. At a time when much self-styled “radical” literature either ignores or sneers at working-class Americans, Manning refreshingly extols not just sympathy for but solidarity and common cause with wage slaves everywhere. One flaw: The back-page article chiding downtown business interests for opposing hygiene centers for the homeless starts picking on one particular businessman without explaining why. (Pay-what-you-can to PO Box 20752, Seattle 98102.)

PRICELESS-ADVICE DEPT.: One side effect of writing for an increasingly popular alterna-paper is mainstream journalists treating you, perhaps foolishly, as an expert on Those Darn Kids. An AP writer called from Portland late last month, preparing a story on theChurch of Kurt Cobain opening down there and wanting my sound-bite-length comments. I said Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role of Rock Star, and would undoubtedly reject veneration as some demigod prophet of Gen X. As I interpret his work, he longed for a world without gods or at least without leaders and followers, a world where folks create their own cultures and work out their own ideas. From first glance, these lessons seem to be lost on the church’s founder, Jim Dillon, who told the P-I his 12-member congregation “pays homage to this alienated tribe and to the man who they have called `saint.'” But then again, if Jesus’ words can be interpreted in as many different ways as they are, it’s only natural to expect Cobain’s sometimes expressionistic word imagery to become similarly reread or misread.

‘TIL NEXT WE SHARE INKSTAINS, ponder these words of Indian movie star Madhuri Dixit, quoted by interviewer “Bitchybee” in the magazine Cineblitz: “Work is worship. Play is a waste of time. Night clubs, parties socializing saps your energy and gets you nothing, but unwanted notices from snoopy gossip journalists. Avoid the night spots and dark circles. It’s even helpful in avoiding pimples.”

Misc. was naturally bemused by the Newsweek hype piece about a Seattle only faintly resembling any real-world town, a town whose supposed biggest celebrity is New Republic/CNN Crossfire vet Michael Kinsley, esconced in Redmond to start Microsoft’s pay-per-read website Slate (presumably not named for Fred Flintstone’s boss). But we’re even more perplexed at what Kinsley told the Times a few weeks back, that Slate readers shouldn’t expect “a left wing magazine.” As if anyone familiar with his Reagan-Democrat views ever would.

A FASHIONABLE FORM OF CANCER: Tobacco companies are paying “hip” bars to sell their cigarettes. R.J. Reynolds paid Kid Mohair to exclusively sell Camels. Moonlight Tobacco (RJR’s “hipster” alias company) struck a deal (exact terms not publicized) to have its brands be the only cancer sticks sold at Moe, whose upstairs room has been renamed the Moonlight Lounge. (Both parties claim the room’s naming is a coincidence, not part of the deal.) At the opening party for the Moonlight Lounge, two Moonlight Tobacco PR drones walked around giving out long cigarette holders, wearing military-style jackets with the name patch NICK (as in -otine). Since nightclubs can be perennially on the edge of solvency, even a modest “promotional allowance” plus free ash trays is too good for many owners to resist. Speaking of club ups n’ downs…

OFF RAMP UPDATE: Here’s what we know about the glorious Eastlake dive where so much local music history was made and so much cheap Oregon gin was swilled. The old owners ran out of cash and agreed to turn the place over to new owners. But there was a snag in the liquor-license transfer process, so the place shut down at the end of April. The wannabe new management’s still trying to execute the financing and paperwork to reopen the home of “Gnosh Before the Mosh” soon.

But a revived Off Ramp will face the same problems other clubs now face. The explosion in touring indie bands these past two years has drawn audiences away from regularly-gigging local acts, whose once-steady appeal had brought a small degree of stability to the club circuit. Clubs have added an array of DJ nights, geared to draw specific sets of regular patrons, but that market’s spread increasingly thin by competition. We’re also coming on five years since the Seattle music eruption hit big; the original Mudhoney and Fallouts audiences are aging beyond the prime club-hopping years. Maybe a new Off Ramp management can figure a new recipe for sucess, one that can help the scene as a whole. Speaking of the “maturation” of indie-rock…

STOCK IT TO ME: Stock-music production companies are now coming out with “alternative rock” production music for use in commercials, TV shows, low-budget films, industrial films, video games, porn, etc. The Minnesota-based HyperClips company offers “Alterna,” a package of 40 “alternative rock and dance tracks. Give your project an edge with these grungy and atmospheric pieces. With all the moodiness and aggression that the Alternative styles have to offer, with everything from mellow acoustic grooves to hardcore distorted jams.” The Fresh Music Library, meanwhile, claims its “Alternative Rock” CD features “production values heard on today’s college and alternative rock radio stations… These themes evoke U2, Nirvana, R.E.M., the Smithereens and others. Exactly the disc for youthful energy.” Speaking of commercialism…

AD VERBS: You may have seen the cutesy ad for Seattle’s Westin Hotels, with a jealous-sounding female narrator accompanying butt shots of a stud: “Broke his neck to get the job, then broke the corporate sales record. Even broke the corporate no-jeans rule. Who’s he sleeping with?” The closing: “Choose your travel partner wisely.” Never before (to my knowledge) has a major hostelry chain so brazenly teased at the aura of naughtiness that’s always surrounded the industry.

(You’ve four days to rearrange your schedule, obtain the swankiest outfit, and leave room in your diet for the splendiforous Misc.Tenth Anniversary Party, 7 pm-whenever Sunday, June 2 at the Metropolis Gallery, downtown on University St. between 1st and 2nd. Odd video, fine food and beverage, games, entertainment, and fine memories will be had by all. More on the Misc. World HQ site, <http://www.miscmedia.com>. Be there. Aloha.)

MISC. SAYS GOODBYE this week to one of its favorite conglomerates, American Home Products, maybe the biggest company you never heard of. It’s being broken up, with divisions sold off, so management can focus on its drug operations (Anacin, Advil, Dristan, and many lucrative prescription patents). Unlike the late Beatrice, AHP kept its corporate profile low while promoting its brands (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pam, Brach’s candy, Ecko kitchenware, Easy-Off, Aerowax, Black Flag) with near-monomaniacal aggression. It was be said if you didn’t have a headache before an Anacin ad, you had one after. When Procter & Gamble’s ’50s soap operas offered up Presbyterian homilies of hope and family alongside the tears and turmoil, AHP’s soaps (Love of Life, The Secret Storm) relished unabashed melodrama, the harsher the better. While AHP was never a household name, its contributions won’t be forgotten by anyone who ever dined on Beefaroni while listening to a Black Flag LP.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! (NY Times blurb, 5/6): “If television is the Elvis of communications media and the Internet is Nirvana, radio is Bach.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: From our pals in the Seattle Displacement Coalition comes Seattle’s Urban Counter-Point, a four-page tabloid chastising the city’s inaction against homelessness and its action against homeless people. It does a better job than anybody at explaining how and why Seattle’s political machine, giving lip service to “progressive” homilies while actually serving at the beck and call of big money, is “a system of establishment control that is more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright graft.” Issue #1 doesn’t propose many solutions to homelessness, but does get in some well-placed digs at public officials’ war against the poor, and promotes a public forum where more proactive policies will be debated (Mon. June 10, 6 p.m., downtown library). The paper’s free (donations accepted) from the Church Council of Greater Seattle, 4759 15th Ave. NE, Seattle 98105.

FOAMING: KIRO-TV’s feature series earlier this month about the “fake microbrew” phenomenon successfully revealed the philosophy that sets real “craft” brewers apart from not only mainstream beer, but from mainstream business in general. “Contract brewing” is the product of a notion, increasingly popular in American business, that all that matters is a product’s concept and its marketing; actually making the stuff is a technicality to be dealt with as expediently as possible. That philosophy is why ad agency Weiden & Kennedy and its stable of spookejocks earn more money from Nike than all the Third World sweatshoppers who actually make the shoes. Craft brewers, on the other hand, put great pride and/or elaborate PR into the brewing process, into being able to control and refine every step.

This lesson hasn’t been lost on Minott Wessinger, the Henry Weinhard heir who sold that company, got into the malt-liquor trade, then tried to re-enter mainstream beer in ’93 with Weiden & Kennedy’s Black Star ad campaign. Wessinger’s about to re-launch the Black Star brand, without W&K and with a new corporate identity. He’s now doing business as the Great Northern Brewing Co., and proudly advertising every aspect of his new brewhouse in Whitefish, Mont. Black Star will now be promoted as something as carefully produced as microbrews, but with a more mainstream taste.

THE SKINS GAME: Another International No-Diet Days has come and gone. This year, the week of body-acceptance forums and events followed a curious NY Times piece on high schoolers across America these days (girls and boys) refusing to undress in the shower. Apparently, if you believe the article, kids everywhere are hung up on not looking like supermodels and/or superjocks. (It doesn’t seem to get any better in the gay world–papers like the Village Voice are now full of ads with bare male chests, all completely pumped and completely hairless.) As one who is neither jock nor model, I say there’s billions of great body types out there. Standards of perfection are for machine tools, not people.

(Party games, entertainment, performance art, memories–the giant Misc. 10th Anniversary Party’s got ’em all. Sunday, June 2, 6 pm-whenever, at the Metropolis Gallery, University St. between 1st and 2nd downtown. Be there. Details at the Misc. World HQwebsite, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.)