3/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHEN POSTERS ARE OUTLAWED,

ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE STAPLE GUNS!

Here at Misc. world HQ, we celebrated yet another lonely-guy Valentine’s Day by scarfin’ down those Brach’s Sour Hearts candies.

UPDATE: Patrick Purdy says I shouldn’t have been so harsh a few months back about the hand-carved Zuni fetishes offered as promotional trinkets by Time-Life Books: “They’re (the tribe) developing a cottage industry for themselves so that they may upgrade their standard of living without having to leave their home. The fetish carvings have proved so successful that they’ve opened a few fancy galleries…That they must have signed a fairly lucrative contract with Time/Life is not a matter for despair, but for congratulations.”

ONE OF THE FEW negative aspects of this gig is that people come up at parties and demand that I be angry for them on cue. They seemingly expect me to always have some shoulder chip, some fresh beef ground daily. But as Johnny-one-note expectations go, it’s easier than if people asked me to be funny for them on cue, ‘cuz I can always fall back on being angry about being expected to be angry.

MY $.02: As some of you know, Misc. is at least partly an homage to the great prewar columnists. The only similar columnists in modern dailies are Army Archard in Daily Variety, Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times, and of course our hero Larry King in USA Today. Just for fun, let’s start out with some Kingisms: “When it comes to great ear-poppin’ tunes, you just can’t do better than Built to Spill… To this pair-O-eyeballs, nobody wrote page-turners like that past master Donald Barthelme… Has anybody ever made that Mock Apple Pie from the recipe on the Ritz cracker box?… As that local sage Dick Balch used to say, if you can’t trust your car dealer, who can you trust?… New name to watch: Combustible Edison. Hip enough for the kids, and parents like ’em too! They’re gonna be big; trust me.”

THIN ICE: The “media-beat” analysts on C-SPAN and in NY opinion journals are predictably aghast over Tonyamania. The commentators seem to think all newspapers used to be like some idealized memory of the pre-1974 NY Times, that only in today’s dark times would papers put scandal and sleaze on their front pages. Not so. Newspapers always were as exploitive as they are now, only they used to be a lot better at it. The old Hearst papers or the old NY Daily News would’ve done a much hotter job on it than today’s wimpy rags.

THINNER ICE: As the nation awaited the Nancy/Tonya faceoff, it faced the usual abundance of commercials and sponsor-ID announcements. Again, as in previous Games, some advertisers were able to boast that they were “proud sponsors of the U.S. Olympic Team,” while other companies, that had opened their wallets to nothing Olympic-related beyond their own commercials, tried to fudge their commitment to Our Kids by plugging themselves as “a proud sponsor of CBS’s coverage of our Olympic heroes.”

CIVIC VALUES: So the Dog House restaurant is now Closed 24 Hours a Day. Woolworth’s is an empty palace of bargains. And the city government talks only about attracting more rich people’s retail. Between the Commons, the poster ban, and the big downtown development proposals, Seattle threatens to become a city by the upscale, of the upscale, for the upscale and to hell with everyone else. Hey Norm: How ’bout getting some stores the rest of us can afford to shop at? Support the plan to put a Marshall’s discount clothier in the Magnin spot. Next, we need a Freddy’s where Woolworth was, and an all-nite restaurant on 7th where you can get a good $6 pork-chops-and-mashed-potatoes dinner. Planet Hollywood? Who needs it! (Also note: KCTS’s Dog House closing-party special was technically well-done but suffered from that upscale-media disease, smug boomer condescension; much of the narration could be rewritten into “Look, Muffy: Ordinary people! Let’s gawk!”).

MISC. RULES FOR LIFE: another exciting ennui-filled column, how ’bout some Misc. rules for life: Don’t trust anybody who nevvuhwatches teh-levision. Don’t trust anybody who calls a car “an investment.” Don’t trust anybody who only talks about how “hot” a movie or a band is, not about how good it is. Don’t buy diet pills from an infomercial with the fine print “No Orders Accepted From Iowa.” Don’t buy anything advertised by white guys in Dockers dancing to James Brown‘s “I Feel Good.” And don’t move into a former slaughterhouse or brothel that’s been “restored to its original elegance.”

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.: A few weeks ago, KING reported that the state’s highest youth suicide rate was on the Eastside. I could believe it, after having gone for a job interview in the heart of darkest Redmond. Once-lovely farmland, ploughed under and paved over with winding roads to nowhere, abutted by finished and unfinished cheap poured-concrete lo-rise office park buildings, some with gaudy entrances tacked onto their otherwise hyperbland facades, all recessed from the road by moats of parking and/or dirt where grass will eventually be. No “public space,” no pedestrians, just people working in isolated cubicles writing software that presumes that we’ll all someday be working in isolated cubicles. A sterile landscape of silent dread that only author J.G. Ballard or filmmaker Atom Egoyan could properly fictionalize.

HOUSE MUSIC: Tuff times have hit C/Z Records, the scrappy li’l label with perhaps the strongest current stable of Northwest bands. Honcho Daniel House rushed five CDs into the Xmas season, but his distributor RED (half-owned by Sony) only sold 200 units in December (after subtracting returns from stores). He’s putting three employees on two-month layoffs (“We need that time to get back on our feet”). House’s right-hand-dude Tim Cook is one of the casualties; he says he might look for permanent work elsewhere, having had managerial differences with House lately, but doesn’t have anything specific to announce yet.

House still plans a slate of 10 albums this year (down from 14 in ’93), including most of his top acts (7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Treepeople, Alcohol Funnycar, Dirt Fishermen, Engine Kid), the just-out In the West by new signees Silkworm, and a women-in-rock collection. He’s also negotiating for a retrospective of Seattle’s top new-wave-era band, the legendary Blackouts.

An indie-label purist might use this case to claim that labels don’t necessarily get top service from pseudo-indie distributors with major-label backing like RED (or Caroline, with whom Sub Pop parted ways, citing similar frustrations). (House has been negotiating for some sort of major-label alliance with Sony; nothing’s been signed yet.) The real problem’s more complicated than just big guysvs. little guys. Distribution remains the weak link of the music biz (and of the print biz, but that’s another tale). There are only so many slots in store bins (even at the 1,500 or so new-music specialty stores). Getting a new act into those stores, and promoting it to customers once it’s there, remains a pseudo-science. Articles in Musician and Wired look forward to proposed in-store downloading stations, where you could special-order any recording and get it transmitted onto a CD while you wait.

The major labels, natch, don’t want any part of a technology that might threaten their market share. Music-by-info-highway would be great for oldies and classics, and would destroy the fetish-object aspect of record collecting (thankfully), but wouldn’t solve the promotion issue. I can get umpteen thousand books from The Reader’s Catalog, but somebody still has to tell me why I need any particular one.

(latter-day note: By the end of 1994, most of C/Z’s remaining bands either broke up or went to other labels. House moved the company into his basement.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/10): “In the best of Peter Medak’s films, irreverence is something of a sacred cow.”

HARDWARE WARS: This home-store fight is getting out of hand. You’ve got Ernst promising to undercut Eagle, HomeBase vowing to undersell Price Costco. Now Home Depot has taken the battle to the next level. It’s established its own bridal registry. Now you can make sure cousin Mindy doesn’t get 24 identical Skilsaws.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: When the Washington Free Press first came out, I said it was a feisty little rag that had the potential to be better. With the latest issue, it’s approaching that potential: a great piece on Boeing workers getting sick from icky production chemicals, with the company dismissing the complaints as some sort of mass hysteria, plus a well-argued essay warning against “job blackmail” — companies’ threatening to take their jobs elsewhere unless governments scrap those pesky environmental laws. Speaking of which…

DEMO DERBY: A couple of readers have asked me to stop constructively-criticizing the failings of “progressive” types, player and just stick to slamming Republicans. I still do that when appropriate; but our president, governor, mayor, most of our state Congressional delegation and most of our city council are Democrats who at least profess to some degree of progressive ideals. It’s important to note when they stray from or compromise these ideals in the name of “creating a climate for business” or whatever; and when the popularly-accepted definition of “progressive” thought might not be the best way to solve our problems. That’s why I sometimes question some of the unquestioned premises behind urban-bohemian ideology, premises that some other publications have taken as Gospel truth. Speaking of which…

SPY, 1986-1994: Gee, maybe the Reagan Era really is over. The magazine’s entire humor was predicated on opposing the Reaganites while accepting the Reaganites’ terms of debate. Spy completely bought into the notion that the Right held a monopoly on political/social popularity, that the only people not enthralled to the GOP were a few big-city artist types. Spy reveled in its self-righteous posturing, in its concept of lower Manhattan as the lone outpost of wit and civility amidst a nation of heathen predators.

If Reagan and Bush invoked a romanticized social past where authority was seldom questioned and resources existed to be exploited, Spy invoked a romanticized cultural past where New York was the only place that mattered. Both notions are now more widely seen as the ancient relics they are. Readers turned away from a magazine that kept rehashing the same tired gag formats attacking movie stars and local NY celebrities as if they were worth the attention. The last Spy editor, Nat. Lampoon vet Tony Hendra, announced a new-look magazine that would take a fresher, funnier look at postmodern America, but the money ran out before he could implement the new format.

(latter-day note: Spy returned later in 1994, with mostly the same format as before.)

AD VERBS: Dewar’s Scotch has a magazine ad with an Alice Cooper/Peter Criss lookalike, complete with boa constrictor as scarf. The headline: “Your tastes in music have changed. Your taste in drinks should too.” Yeah, I know just what they’re saying: When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate acts like that. Now I do.

THE INFORMER: KCTS has been running “public service” spots from the King County Police, asking folks to keep their eyes on their neighbors and report any activity that might be potentially drug-related — visitors at odd hours, darkened windows, et al. Somebody on a computer bulletin board called the spot “Gestapo TV” and wants anyone who doesn’t like it to tell the station they won’t give it money. I won’t go that far, but I will use the case to note that in the nascent Information Age, not all information’s gonna be shared freely or used benevolently.

CATHODE CORNER: In a welcome surprise, MTV’s 120 Minutes played the new Sage video, albeit deep into the show’s 1-2 a.m. hour. Too bad the show’s latest clue-deficient host, Lewis Largent, had to introduce the clip with that now-chichéd line, “They’re from Seattle, but don’t get any preconceptions; they’re not grunge.” Aargh! The next person who thinks all local bands are alike, please tell me just what Flop, Mix-A-Lot, Amy Denio, Alice in Chains and Sister Psychic have in common.

The media turned “grunge” into a stereotype so exact that no band really matched it; then they used that to dismiss our diverse music as if the stereotype were true. Largent’s seemingly well-intended statement really perpetuated the false myth. He oughta say, “Yes there are lots of bands in the NW, lots of different bands, and here’s another.”…In a more positive homage, an episode of NBC’s off-again Homicide included murder-suspect characters named Layne Staley and Crist Novoselic.

SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (on Safeway Mrs. Wright’s Sesame Cheddar Snack Crackers): “Baked For Your Enjoyment!” Ever see a snack baked for your seething frustration? If you find one, let me know.

THE FINE PRINT (fortune cookie-like slip of paper inside a Sears CD player): “Warning: Protection Rubber must be removed before using.” Unless you’re playing one of those sounds-of-lovemaking CDs. Speaking of which…

LOSS-OF-ERECTIONS DEPT.: Leno joked that after the MLK Day Quake, LA had become “a community united behind one shared goal: to move to Seattle.” A week later, an AP article noted that many LA porn-video companies were in heavily quake-hit buildings. Some outfits might move rather than rebuild among the So.Cal. radical right. One unidentified exec said, “Our people will find another place where the climate is more liberal, and the ground more stable. Someplace up north maybe, like Seattle.”

We’re not all that quake-safe ourselves (if you believe the mass-media scare stories). And any hetero (or sex-positive-gay) hardcore producers would face our PC censorship advocates, who can be as obstinate and closed-minded as any Fundamentalists. But we’ve got a strong community of trained video technicians (with the Art Institute supplying more every year), and hundreds of underemployed actor-dancer-model types who don’t have to worry about tan lines. It’ll be even more fun if the producers apply for the tax breaks politicians usually love to offer to relocating companies.

(latter-day note: I’m now told there are already at least two hardcore adult-video producers regularly shooting in Seattle. I don’t have any names to refer you to. They haven’t provided much of an economic boost to the local production community, since they use small crews and maintain their own in-house post-production units.)

MOUTHS-O-BABES (overheard gleeful shriek of an 8-year-old girl on a bus, passing the Bon’s Chihuly window promoting ArtFair ’94): “See mom, I told you! Big cereal bowls!”

SHRINKING VISION: Seattle’s “public art” establishment has long been known for its private privileges. Jurors pick friends and/or lovers for top grants, organizations tailor project specs to favor their favorite artists, programs are publicized just before (or even after) their deadlines. Now comes word that the visual-art programs in this year’s Bumbershoot festival will be awarded by invitation only; tho’ if you’ve got an idea for something, you can send in an informal suggestion and maybe they’ll look at it. We’re going in the wrong direction, folks. We need arts people whose top loyalty is to art, not to specific artists. We need truly open processes, where a total unknown can come out of left field and bowl people over with a spectacular idea. We need to encourage art that blows minds, not art that kisses butts. (If it’s any consolation, one of the exhibits will be culled from the city’s “Portable Works Collection,” one program that does sometimes buy from non-insiders.)

MY SOAP BOX: When an ad agency designed the Tide box in the ’50s, it never knew that its concentric patterns would look just like the computer-animated psychedelic visuals of the ’90s. The orange box has become an icon of rave graphics. It’s on countless techno-party flyers. Portland’s Sweaty Nipples used it on a CD label; a Seattle band was going to use it before the Nipples used it first. I’m told that the brain can perceive the circles as moving in and out at the same time, making the image a “mandala” that can send the mind into another world. I’m also told that the orange circles look great under blacklight, and that Liquid Tide makes a great medium for making black-light paintings that can’t be seen in normal light (the “bleach substitute” ingredient contains a fluorescent dye). What’s next: acid-trip costumes based on the playing-card guy on the ol’ White King box?

‘TIL WE NEXT CROSS INK STAINS, recall these words of Wm. Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

PASSAGE

Gregory Hischak in the new issue of the lovely local zine Farm Pulp: “The planet is an unstable being. Little earthquakes rumble up and down our coast. The earth has a lot of bottled up stress…pent up aggression. The earth really needs to get out more. Spend more time in the woods. Feed the ducks. The planet needs to stop operating on that second shift mentality.”

SPECIAL OFFER

Uncorrected, autographed proof copies of my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are now available for a $10 donation plus $2 postage from the address below. Be among the first to get a piece of local cultural history! Tell your friends.

Either next month or the month after, this newsletter thang’s gonna get twice as big: a whopping 4 pp. of ennui and unwarranted assumptions clogging your first-class mail the last Friday of each month, including weird fiction and non-Stranger material. Larger print not guaranteed. New sub rates will be announced then; current subs will be adjusted accordingly.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Cathexis”

2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.

THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.

CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.

EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.

GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!

SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”

DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)

MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.

CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.

YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it: Deluxe.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.

THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”

THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”

DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.

NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.

PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”

DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).

A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.

She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.

Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”

PASSAGE

Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”

REPORT

My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

12/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.

WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA

This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).

REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.

Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.

COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.

ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.

RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.

POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?

THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.

DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”

TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.

PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.

BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”

SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.

PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.

THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.

ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.

XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.

FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”

PASSAGE

Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”

REPORT

My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?

Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phenocryst”

11/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-cult report that knows something’s gone wrong again when the songs on 120 Minutes are indistinguishable from the songs on VH-1, that loved Edward Muybridge‘s ol’ stop-motion photography experiments long before thatU2 video ripped him off.

STOP THE MADNESS!: Seems hardly a week goes by without another important cool thing about Seattle dying off. Next is the giant downtown Woolworth emporium, home of Seattle’s best selections of cheesy crossword magazines, kitschy souvenir mugs, by-the-pound chocolates, home aquariums, 10-pack tube sox, photo booths, board games, and fedoras (it’s where I’ve gotten all my hats). Where will we get any of these in the future? At some small-selection pharmacy or remote mall store? Hah! The store’s not performed poorly; the company just wants to cannibalize the variety stores for their real estate, then shunt the proceeds into more Foot Locker mall outlets. Do we need more places to buy Air Jordans and fewer places to buy $9 canvas deck shoes?

BP SELLS ALL WASHINGTON ASSETS: Guess we’ll have to go back to pumping gas into the pickup instead of replenishing the petrol supply of the lorry. Pity.

GENTRIFICATION MARCHES ON: The Eastlake dock that housed the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store for decades will now be a franchise of T.G.I. Friday’s, the NY-based king of meatmarket bars.

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: It’s been a bad year for our pals in Tacoma. Their plan for a beautiful walkway from downtown to the waterfront died when Seattle talk-radio jerks branded it a waste of state funds. Then they lost the landmark ASARCO smelter smokestack, the Anti-Space Needle. Now the B&I Circus Store (one of the last independent discount stores in a region that used to be awash with Valu-Marts, Gov-Marts and Yard Birds) is bankrupt and will likely be sold to some chain, sending Ivan the gorilla to some out-of-state zoo. At least Tacoma’s greatest gift to rock in the past 25 years, Girl Trouble, isn’t breaking up as far as we know.

IN-A-NAME DEPT.: Haven’t said it before, but we’ve always been perturbed by the idea of Ortho brand contraceptives. Would you really put something in your body that had the same name as a bug poison? And do the burly truck jockeys ridin’ on Hyster brand heavy equipment know that that’s the old Greek word for a uterus?

MOREL CONCERNS: Mushroom hunters in Eastern Oregon forests have been shooting one another this year over the precious fungi. So much for the notion that the stuff makes you pacified and at one with the universe.

AD OF THE MONTH (from the Weekly): “I wish to apologize to all the people I called fat when I was selling a weight loss product. I am very sorry I offended each of you. I failed to see the essence of your being and your uniqueness. Maggie.” Runner-up (same source): “Achtung Baby! U2 can earn 3K/mo. starting in my international brokerage firm…”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Death of Rock n’ Roll, by Times freelancer Jeff Pike, is more than just a big book with all your favorite dead-rock-star vignettes. It also covers rock songs about death (especially the teen-suicide and car-crash songs of the early ’60s) and essays about “the three deaths” of rock itself (the clampdowns in the late ’50s, the wilting of flower power in the late ’60s, and punk’s supposed shattering of R&R populism in the late ’70s. I’d argue with the last point: instead of driving the final nail in rock’s coffin, punk and “alternative” music revived and codified the image of bad boys with guitars, for better or worse. Speaking of which…

AUDIO FILES: Didn’t care much for George Clark’s Stranger parody, The Whimper (too held-back and off-target), but his tape of Six Delightful Grunge Jingles is great. It’s the evil twin of Grunge Lite: Instead of making familiar tunes of bitterness more “commercial,” he makes bitter commercials. In the form of a fictional demo tape for a radio-ad production company, he introduces a band called Behavior Management that grinds out a perfect generic jam of drum thuds and guitar distortion, capped by a screeching rendition of “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” The other five jingles further explore the dichotomy between aggressive-poser music and ad happy-talk, as well as the desperation of marketers trying to latch onto any fad. Speaking of which…

DUDS (P-I headline on regional fashions): “It’s not just grungy anymore.” It never was. How many times to we have to say it: What the media call “grunge fashion” was invented by Marc Jacobs in New York, based mostly on Greenwich Village rich-kid primping. Don’t blame anybody here for it…Or maybe blame Charles Schulz. He’s got a new sweatshirt of Pigpen with the simple slogan “Original Grunge.” Speaking of which…

MORE DUDS: Nirvana agreed to have a logo sticker inserted in the new Sassy, but the band undoubtedly didn’t plan for it to be stapled in the middle of a fashion spread called “Oops, Your Bra Is Showing.” The sticker appears right in front of a monochrome shot of an outstretched butt in sheer undies. Speaking of which…

RETRO GRADES: Kudos to the Pearl Jam guys for refusing to be interviewed for that tacky, utterly point-missing Time cover story last week. First, the mag makes the most pathetic definition of “alternative rock” this side of Rolling Stone. Then, it patronizes present-day rockers as mere ’60s throwbacks without even mentioning those ’60s bands who really did influence today’s kids (MC5, Stooges, Velvets). Then, it chooses as the definitive angry young punk combo an outfit that never claimed to belong to any dissonant postpunk genre, but whose neo-blues-rock sound probably appeals to yup journalists more than the N-boys, the Overkill kids, the Pumpkins, the The, or other still-popular yet somewhat more street-level bands. But at least Time gives its clumsy sort of recognition to modern rock — unlike a 10-page rant in the new Utne Reader, that pseudo-liberal magazine that thinks the most oppressed people in the world are affluent white boomers. In it, some ex-hippie whines that there hasn’t been any good rock since (you guessed it!) the ’60s. He insists there won’t be any good rock again until those persnickety kids start obeying their elders by (you guessed it!) conforming to the blues-rock tradition. He doesn’t see that today’s post-mass-media world doesn’t need white R&B; we can get our black music from black people today. What the rest of us can make is music, art, etc. that speaks to our own life situations, no matter how rootless and disillusioning they may be, and hope the message doesn’t get too diluted in the hype. Speaking of which…

IN MOTION: In the new Wired, Paul Saffo posits that all it takes to start a cultural revolution in America is about 100 people plus overzealous press hype. That was about the number of hardcore Beats prior to the publication of On the Road (as Saffo quotes George Leonard), and about the number of real Cyberpunks in the mid-’80s. Saffo could’ve added, but didn’t, that there were maybe 100 Dadaists in 1920, or 2-300 Soundgarden and Green River fans in 1986, or about that many Riot Grrrls in early 1991. Seen in this light, a mass event like Woodstock could be viewed not as the dawn of an era as it was usually hyped, but as its close. It could also mean that we really do have to be as afraid of little hate groups as the media want us to be. Or, taken to an extreme, it could mean that any movement big enough to have its own professional magazine is already too unwieldy big to be effective. By the time the mainstream media hears about a scene, it may already be over. Speaking of which…

THE NON-SHOCK OF THE NON-NEW: Most “political” writing and art from as late as last October seems utterly dated now. One can almost look at the late ’80s-early ’90s as what all nostalgized eras are called, a simpler time. Everything seemed obvious then: “Activist” art didn’t have to bother with changing the world, only with announcing your own righteousness. All you had to do to call yourself politically active was sit and complain about Bush and other easily dehumanized targets. Because Republican rule was considered permanent, you didn’t have to bother with devising any practical agendas of your own. You could just keep making pseudo-“confrontational” art that only slammed people you safely knew wouldn’t be in your audience. Then we got a president who wants to make a better country, even if a ’50s-style Congressional coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats doesn’t want to help too much. There are detailed debates going on about not just whether but how to climb out of America’s assorted messes. You have to actually think about things these days, not just follow some “hip” line. Speaking of which…

PRESSED: Remember when the Weekly “discovered” the Italia restaurant as headquarters of “the new art scene” in town? Guess who’s on the ground floor of the paper’s new building? Speaking of which…

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: NYC politicians are supposedly giving up on their 25-year dream of razing most of Times Square for bland monolithic office towers. Actually, they still want to build the office towers, but now they’re grudgingly willing to have street-level retail in them, maybe some fast-food chains with appropriate-for-the-area loud signs. They probably wouldn’t think to have the wig shops, music stores, and other places that give the human touch to that huge district. And no more porn, of course. Speaking of which…

PRO-CREATIVITY: It’s common knowledge that the best aspects of most XXX videos are the titles based on regular movies (Fleshdance, Edward Penishands). So don’t be surprised that a Nevada company’s made Sleeping With Seattle.

CATHODE CORNER: Imitation Ren & Stimpy cartoon shows are popping up all over. They’ve got the flashy colors and gross-out gags but not the comedic or artistic excellence instilled by fired R&S creator John Kricfalusi. Nickelodeon’s new Rocko is produced by the same in-house team that’s preparing the new version of R&S, to premiere later this year. If the sorry Rocko‘s any evidence, the new R&S won’t be much. And the Ted Turner people running Hanna-Barbera have 2 Stupid Dogs, whose rehashed retro-’50s design is unsupported by flat gag plots….Meanwhile, if the makers of New Pink Panther show had to give the cat a voice, it shouldn’t have been the nasal Canadian whine of Matt Frewer. To me, the only guy living who could voice this character right would be Tony Bennett.

AUTO MANIA: Damn, I want one of those 2.5-foot-wide “commuter cars” proposed by Subaru to meet Calif.’s forthcoming tough emissions requirements. The prototype shown in the Times is bright red and about the size of an Indy car, seating one passenger behind the driver. Utterly, utterly cool.

ICY DILEMMA: I’ve been receiving reports from college towns across the country, via people on my newsletter mailing list. They’re talking about what they see as a new social coldness on campuses. Students are shutting themselves off from public displays of affection or courtship. Men and women aren’t even looking one another in the eye.

Under the new propriety it’s OK to have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you publicly treat the relationship nonchalantly, as settled down into blasé platonics; otherwise, you’re supposed to be aloof and untroubled by those pesky anti-intellectual hormones. That’s not being cool, that’s being frozen.

There are plenty of potential causes: a decade-long media campaign to instill a fear of sex (you won’t get AIDS by eye contact), ongoing ill-will between macho men and judgmental women, rising heterophobia within the boho/alternative community (reminding me of a line attributed to Robert Anton Wilson or to the book Principia Discordia about “what was once compulsory is now forbidden”).

It is possible to be a man (or a woman who loves them) and a human being. Don’t buy into one-dimensional stereotypes, mainstream or alternative flavors. You don’t lose your soul via emotional intimacy, you strengthen it. This neo-puritanism doesn’t deter abusive relationships (creeps don’t bother with intellectual dogma except when it suits them). It only reinforces the fears of smart but shy young sensitives, the very people who need relationships, who could bring more humanness into the social realm.

It’s OK to be whatever sex and sex preference you are, even if it’s an outré one. It’s not what’s in your pants that makes you good or evil, it’s what’s in your heart.

MISC. UNPLUGGED: Power outages aren’t supposed to happen to urbanites with underground wiring. They’re supposed to happen to middle-class couples out in some forlorn suburb they mistakenly think is “The Country,” where overhead wires dangle dangerously beneath wind-vulnerable tree limbs. Little did I realize (‘tho I should’ve, from friends’ experiences in the ’88 downtown outage) that all these new Regrade condo projects had been fed into the same aging WWII-era circuitry.

So, around 2 a.m. Monday morning, I glanced at the digital alarm to find it off. Everything was off, even at the seniors’ housing out the window. Only the emergency lights were on in my hallway (by 9 a.m. their batteries died, and the windowless halls became pitch black). The Sunday/Monday wee hours are radio’s traditional dead spot, so there was no news of the outage ’til KIRO-AM signed on for the morning commute. Even then, local radio stations seemed to care little for the story, even the stations that were in the blackout zone. You could go for two or three consecutive news breaks without hearing a thing about it. In the Information Age, this is a pathetic excuse for “When You Want to Know First.”

‘Twas weird to see the Space Needle enshrouded in the morning fog without even its top aircraft beacon. ‘Twas weirder to glance into the Western Ave. band studio, one of those mazes of cheaply-built sheetrock walls; too bad one of the bands based there,Candlebox, couldn’t live up to its name.

Found myself depending on the kindness of strangers, including one household where I spent one night on a couch with two hyperactive kittens shoving each other all night for the right to claw me. More frustrating were my attempts to recruit sympathy from acquaintances outside the affected area; so many “hip” folks these days are so proudly ignorant of any local news, that I had to explain what an outage was and why I had one.

As my computer/video/stereo withdrawal set in, I caught a glimpse of the pristine life of info-chastity my acquaintances were living. Its simplicity was seductive, but dull! I decided quickly that I like modern life. Heat, hot water, electric shavers, coffeemakers, toasters, dishwashers, answering machines, VCRs, and modems are good things (‘tho there was something nice about not hearing the next apartment’s bass speaker).

People in the neighborhood were serviced with a Red Cross meal van, serving up free coffee, fruit, soup, and Spam sandwiches. I spent as much time out of the house as I could, hanging out at art spaces. The evening after getting re-plugged, I was doing the Pio. Square gallery crawl and happened to run into ol’ pal Bill Rieflin, who’s drummed in a couple of famous bands but was best known here for his work with one of Seattle’s best-ever combos, the Blackouts.

Lessons? Only that big developments, even in established urban areas, entail a public price for infrastructure. City Light bet it could get away without upgrading its wiring system, and lost. The Seattle Commons plan, which would stick a population the size of Pullman into what’s now a square mile of light industry, will take a lot of public investment. The advocacy group Allied Arts wants a public vote before the city spends or rezones toward the Commons condos. They’re right. I like living downtown, and wouldn’t mind more company, but we all need a voice in whether to adopt this massive scheme.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try to figure why the state puts signs in over-21 places saying you’ve gotta be 18 to buy cigs, and hope all your troubles disappear as completely as the Canadian Conservatives.

PASSAGE

Sign outside Dr. Zipper on Fremont Ave.: “When I, Dr. Zipper, made the Zippocratic Oath, I pledged to fix zippers on PARKAS and PACKS, Heal SLEEPING BAGS and TENTS. Apply the mending touch to snaps and buckles. Restore CAMPING GEAR and SOFT LUGGAGE to useful life. Invisibly Patch Gore-Texreg. and other STORMGEAR. Restitch CLIMBING GEAR for maximum safety. Teach the MENDING ABC’s: All-One-Zipper Meshed-In-Line, All-One-Zipper Save-You-Money, New-Life-To-Outdoor-Gear Lesson. Don’t Replace! REPAIR-REPAIR-REPAIR OK!” (Cf. Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles.)

REPORT

Still seeking a publisher for my local-music history book. Thanx to all who’ve participated in it so far.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pithacoid”

10/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAIN IS.

Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.

WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”

BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.

Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.

How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.

We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.

Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.

If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.

KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.

MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.

WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.

FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.

ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.

BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.

GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?

COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.

CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.

FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.

BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”

DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.

`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.

MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.

STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).

ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.

GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.

SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.

PASSAGE

Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”

REPORT

Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.

Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Audile”

9/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

NO WEATHER JOKES! NO SLUG JOKES! NO COFFEE JOKES!

Here at Misc., the only column that wonders why ads for toilet paper consistently use images of infants (the only humans who don’t use the stuff), we feel obligated to repeat a disclaimer issued earlier this summer: A concert held in the middle of Eastern Washington with no public transportation cannot by any logical definition be called a “Seattle” show. I wouldn’t even call it an Ellensburg show.

`OTHER’ WISE: Two readers have suggested that the source of “The Other,” that now-ubiquitous term used by Reflex writers to rant about how bigoted everybody outside the Art World is, was Simone de Beauvior’s classic essay The Second Sex. She apparently used it to describe how people divide the world of their own minds and bodies (“The Self”) from everything else in the universe (“The Other”). Most of the folks using the term today intend to denounce other people’s bigotries, but inadvertently reveal their own (damning entire groups of people, defined by such totally superficial criteria as their race and gender, as incapable of sympathy toward Otherness). We need alternatives to bigotry, not just alternate forms of bigotry.

NOSTALGIA REVISITED: Pop-culture recycling is completely out of hand. With every permutation of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s re-played to death, they’re now reviving gimmicks from the ’80s that didn’t make it the first time. Seventeen brashly proclaims that thefashion trend for fall will be — ready? — “The New Romantics: Fall’s fresh style takes its cue from the romantic dandy, mixing floaty white shirts with an old English beat.” Where’s Adam Ant when we need him?

Speaking of dumb fads, did I tell ya I got a designer grunge fashion spread from a March ish of the Glasgow Sunday Post? Imagine — telling the Scots how to wear plaid.

And even worse, some UW-licensed sweatshirt company’s got a “Grunge Puppy” design: a UW Husky looking like it’s high on something, in torn jeans, Docs and an open flannel shirt over a T-shirt reading “Eat, Sleep, Party.” Looks as horrid as it reads.

MUST TO AVOID: Under no circumstances should you pay money for The Seattle Style Guide, a self-published handbook for new residents. The author lives in Bellevue (the first sign of knowing nothing about Seattle), he refers to certain obnoxious yuppie bars as hangouts for the “artistic crowd,” he calls Kenny G Seattle’s proudest contribution to music, and he suggests you learn to appreciate grunge by playing a little Pearl Jam in between your Eagles records.

CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE DEPT.: KCPQ’s got this ad chiding all the recent turmoil, firings and resignations in local TV news departments, and offering its own nightly information alternatives – A Current Affair and Inside Edition!

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Teen Fag is a little zine of stories and art not exclusively for teens or fags. Its main selling point is a review of the final Seattle show by G.G. Allin, NY’s self-proclaimed “violent and obscene rock performer,” who died weeks later. There’s also an extensive piece on Naughty Bits cartoonist Roberta Gregory. Available at Sound Affects Records on E. John (home of the sign, “Hey boys and girls: Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work”)….

Also available there is Sixth Form, a stapled Xeroxreg. zine with a thickly laminated cover, devoted to the (or should I say “thee”) gothic side of things. Issue #2 documents the heretofore undocumented Seattle/Salt Lake City band connection, apparently based on the ethereal/dreamscape bands Faith and Disease, Mary Throwing Stones and Ursula Tree. The zine celebrates a tight little clique of black-shawled explorers down there in Zion. Local coverage includes Diamond Fist Werny, Self Help Seminar, and a brief piece on Common Language‘s forthcoming British CD. (Hey, Common-ers: You’re one of the greatest bands around, but import-only releases by American alternative bands sucked 13 years ago. They still suck today. Same goes for the Walkabouts: Please get your stuff out at the affordable price, even if it’s on a label the size of eMpTy.)

DEAD AIR: It’s been a while since we talked of the KCMU Konflict. The CURSE/UW lawsuit is somewhere in the digestive tract of litigation. It’s been almost a year since station management imposed authoritarian controls and bland programming. Their official reason was to keep increasing station ratings and revenues. Even by those dubious measures, they’re an utter failure. So why would they apparently rather see the station die than admit they made a mistake?

It’s becoming clear that money isn’t what they’re after. The mess now seems to really be after the one thing all good UW administrators crave above all other desires: administrative turf. In the “nonprofit” equivalent of a corporate takeover, the honchos at KUOW down the hall wanted to assert control over KCMU, to turn it from a volunteer community station to a paid-staff institution that would suck up to wealthy listeners and corporate donors in the established NPR manner. They sincerely don’t understand that KCMU thrived as a very different station, with a different audience and a different operating philosophy. If they really want to make KCMU strong again, they should gentlemanly step aside and let it be run by the people who know how to run it right, the ex-volunteers who built it.

CLICHESTOPPERS NOTEBOOK: The only thing more lame nowadays than calling your band “grunge” is to call it “not grunge.” I’ve been reading the latter label applied in the last month to everything from the cowgirl-kitsch Ranch Romance to local rappers to a compilation record of frat-party bands (see below). As early as 1990, stupid national rockzines labeled 90 percent of Seattle bands as “not your typical Seattle band.” Don’t tell me what you’re not, tell me what you are.

NOTES: Just when you thought music meant something again, the forces of mindless entertainment prepare to counterattack. I’ve seen what promoters and managers are offering as the Next Big Thing, and it ain’t pretty: white funk bands. Jocks and fratboys from Portland, Boise and elsewhere, in backward caps and butt-cleavage jeans, waving attempted guesses of gang hand signals. These guys reinterpret Funkadelic and Run-DMC the way George Thorogood reinterpreted the blues, into one-dimensional macho posturing. The sounds associated by mainstream America (rightly or wrongly) with drug dealers are being revamped into the property of drug buyers. Actually, some of it’s stupid-cute, as long as you don’t take these guys as seriously as they take themselves. Few onstage sights are sillier than accountants’ sons hunching their backs and shouting “Yo!” And as for the authenticity issue, ya gotta figure that your average ex-high school football player has probably had more black friends than your average ex-conservatory jazz player.

CAN’T YOU SMELL THAT SMELL?: One of the few pleasures of my current unemployment (you thought this column was a full-time job or something?) is living without fear of the dreaded cologne cult cornering me at my desk. At most every office I’ve worked in, even spaces separated from the public by two layers of reception desks, I’d invariably get confronted this time of year by blank-eyed young adult males demanding that I buy their cheesy impostor colognes or cheesier framed prints of floral arrangements. I don’t know who they are or where they come from. I haven’t been able to stop any of them long enough to ask.

CULTURE CLUB: With something of a budget finally passed and health-care reform a while away, the right-wing Gridlock Machine has been backtracking for targets. Among the “scandals” recently recycled on talk radio and in pundit magazines is that all-purpose nemesis, the National Endowment for the Arts. They’re giving the same ol’ blah-blah about Our Tax Dollars and flaky artist types who mock all that is pure and proper. The real scandal about American arts funding isn’t that taxpayers are supporting too much “controversial” art but too little.

A couple of people who say “fuck” on stage notwithstanding, most NEA money subsidizes formula entertainment for the rich. It’s just as bad on the local level. Washington’s reputation as an artistic center is overrated and based more on consumption than production. We rank well in the bottom half of states in terms of public arts support. And a lot of that money goes either to bland sculptures by out-of-state artists, to “major performing institutions,” or to “support services” (buildings and bureaucrats); while the citizens who make images/films/texts, particularly of the non-touristy or non-upscale kind, scrape by as always.

The rich should pay for their own lifestyles, either directly or thru corporate support. I don’t wanna see any bassoonists lose their jobs in today’s economy, but if the symphony and the Rep are gonna get public money, it should be for public stuff: free or discounted shows, in-school appearances, etc. Since we’re always gonna have inadequate arts funding, what we can spend should emphasize investment in new works, works that might or might not find a big audience, works that might or might not even be good (experiments must be allowed to fail).

NEWS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE NEWS: About 10 Seafair parade drunks headed to Broadway near midnight 7/30, presumably to fag-bash (baseball bats in hand), but were rounded up by a herd of police and State Patrol cars sent up the hill from the parade site.

COP OUT?: Twist Weekly claims to be the real reason Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons resigned. The gay tabloid ran some articles about Paul Grady, an openly gay police sergeant who resigned in May. He said it due to harassment by fellow officers; but only Twistreported Grady’s claim that Fitzsimons specifically allowed and even encouraged the harassment. More damaging, Twist claims Fitzsimons’s homophobic attitude was a front — that the chief privately made moves on Grady and other male officers, and that he once tried to pick up a teenage restaurant busboy. Local mainstream media (except for KVI talk host Mike Siegel) pooh-poohed or hush-hushed the allegations, and treated Fitzsimons’s sudden resignation as the ordinary retirement of a great public servant. (Seattle Weekly did mention it, including Fitzsimons’s denials of all charges). If true, it’s another tragedy of the Closet — of someone trapped between his true self and a career that made him deny it, only to hurt himself and others. In any case, Fitzsimons still leaves a questionable legacy: the harassment of gay officers, overzealous tactics against young and/or black people, the still-in-the-works Weed and Seed paramilitary-occupation plan.

POST(ER) IMPRESSIONISM: Somebody (not me) put up street posters along Broadway and U Way, to harass my ex-employerFantagraphics Books. Around an old teenage photo of co-owner Kim Thompson (misspelled as “Thomson”) and rows of dollar signs, the poster invites people to work there and “earn up to $500 a week. Summer may be hot, but the heat is on!” Apparently, the office was inundated by calls from Ave rats seeking big bucks at the comix publisher. The hoax was probably instigated by one of those firees. The same person may have been responsible for a press release claiming Fantagraphics star Peter Bagge (Hate) was leaving to start his own comix company; the phone number on the press release belongs to a Bellevue dry cleaner.

PHILM PHUN: If you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing some stupid movie star favorably describing their stupid movie as “like a roller coaster ride,” sometimes using old Disneyland lingo as “an E Ticket ride.” For that matter, a lot of films these days are being turnedinto theme park rides, usually cheesy and expensive ones. I say, if we’re going to have theme park attractions based on movies, let’s have ’em based on good movies: The Murnau Sunrise streetcar, the Magnificent Ambersons sleigh ride, the Lover Model A (on a fake colonial-Saigon street), the Women on the Verge taxi, the (adult-scale) Battleship Potemkin baby carriage, the Detour hitchhiking experience, the Lift elevator ride, the Women in Love male wrestling show…the list is endless. And concession stands: Under the Volcano bar drinks, Merchant-Ivory cucumber sandwiches, Repo Man plates of shrimp, Prospero’s Books wedding feasts. Let’s have licensed merchandise from good movies, too: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! bath toys, When the Wind Blows fallout detectors…

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: I know this department used to appear a lot more often in the past than it does now, but that’s because fewer great new junk foods are being developed these days. One reason: the consumer-products conglomerates, like the media conglomerates, are fading. The recession’s led consumers toward store-brand products, while the breakup of the mass media leave fewer resources to build new brands. (Procter & Gamble, once TV’s biggest advertiser, whose daytime dramas inspired the term “soap opera,” is laying off an eighth of its workforce due to permanent downsizing.) But General Mills is giving it one more go by launching Fingos, billed as “the cereal you eat with your fingers.” They’re actually like little cinnamon-graham or oat crackers, and quite habit-forming indeed. They’re also a great on-the-run alternative to gooey breakfast bars.

DYING WORDS: Two separate parties have sent me copies of These EXIT Times, an 8-pp. zine distributed at the Oregon Country Fair by a small group called VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; the acronym refers to “vehemence”). Business interests sometimes accuse environmentalists of being anti-people; these folks really are. They want the human race to agree to die off without reproducing, so “the earth can recover.” They don’t want you to kill yourself, just to leave no progeny. I don’t see how they can expect ideology to overcome standard-equipment biological instinct. Besides, why preserve the land for future generations if there won’t be any? (Remember Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt, who said it was OK to exhaust the Earth because the Rapture was coming soon?)

ON THAT INSPIRATIONAL NOTE, be sure to visit the years-in-the-making Toaster Museum inside the Wonderful World of Art studio-gallery, refurbish your home for cheap with durable, utilitarian items from office furniture surplus stores (dumping the working tools of all those laid-off bank employees), and heed these words of Bret Maverick: “My pappy always said to never cry over spilt milk. It could’ve been whiskey.”

PASSAGE

Robert Anton Wilson from Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (published in 1992, already badly dated): “In an accelerating, fast-evolving universe, whoever does not change moves backward relatively. Did you ever notice that takes only 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative, without changing a single idea?”

REPORT

Still looking for people to talk to for my history of the Seattle music scene. I especially need to talk to people who’ve been involved with local music since the mid-’80s, not just from the early punk days. So write me, OK?

Also, I’m thinking of an alternative tourist guide to Seattle, showing the joints everybody who comes here wants to see but regular tourist guides don’t mention (the Off Ramp, Jimi’s grave, et al.). Depending on space, it may also have a few cheap eating/drinking/shopping/staying places. What do you think should be in it? (Don’t nominate only your own business.)

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lenticular”

THE REAL MESSAGE OF `EDUCATIONAL’ CARTOONS:

YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH SHODDY WORK

IF IT MEETS BUREAUCRATIC REQUIREMENTS

8/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger columns)

AREN’T YOU GLAD BUDWEISER’S GOT BRANCH PLANTS?

Here at Misc., where we can’t help but repeat what you all must have thought about Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts (i.e., surely he could have picked better), we think the next Brit blue-eyed soul singer, Mercer Island blues babe, or frat-boy funk band that pretends to be black should have to earn it. Get thrown out of Denny’s, get hassled by cops just for standing outside, get rejected for jobs and mortgages for no good reason, see your band blackballed from almost every venue and rental hall in town while blue-eyed party boys imitate your music at showcase clubs every week. Only then you could boast about how much soul you’ve got.

UPDATE: Remember when we talked about the old Seattle band that had a logo instead of a written name and a yelp instead of a spoken name? They’ve re-formed! Look for ’em in the club listings any week now, printed as “Aiieee!” or something similar.

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: During the Stranger‘s recent off week, some folks with access to DTP and too much time on their hands created a 12-pp. spoof, the Whimper. It’s OK and sorta funny, ‘cept for the “Miscue” column. I’ve been spoofed two or three times now, and nobody’s gotten it right. Keep trying.

1991 NOSTALGIA: I’d forgotten, as many of you likely forgot, that no Democrat gets nominated for President without the support of pundits and interest groups that demand a business-as-usual foreign policy. By starting Gulf War Lite, the Pentagon’s acting just like the Irish and Mideast vigilante armies that answer opponents’ isolated acts of mindless terror with their own. The week before the missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ, the new Wired had a short article claiming tomorrow’s warfare would be “infrastructure war”: precision raids against electronic and information targets. Maybe Wired really is the magazine o’ the future it claims to be.

LACTOSE INTOLERANCE: Tower Records Pulse! sez Danken’s licensed “Strawberries and Pearl Jam” ice cream won’t come back from its limited production engagement, partly ‘cuz some band members are anti-dairy vegans. One potential successor: “Nirvanilla.”

THE SAME OLD SAW: KIRO’s running a half-hour infomercial paid by the timber industry. Washington Private Forest Report, hosted by ex-KIRO anchorman Jim Harriott, is a self-congratulatory paean for timber management’s current environmental practices, with edited remarks by corporate, governmental, tribal and environmental “leaders” who all back the industry line about “a balanced solution” between ecological and commercial needs (i.e., letting the big companies cut all they can get away with). The show only discusses practices on company-owned lands, without directly mentioning the dispute over clearcutting old growth on Forest Service lands, though its “trust us” message is clearly meant to apply to public as well as private lands. Shows like this reduce issue politics to the level of campaign politics: the side with money gets to say anything in the media at any time; the side without money only gets a few words in real newscasts, edited by station employees and “balanced” with words from the moneyed side.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Zealot claims to be Seattle’s first-ever motorcycle zine (there’ve been bicycle and scooter zines), by and for the local rider community (more intelligent, and more co-ed, than old biker stereotypes suggest). A glance at the staff box reveals the street integrity here: 14 people listing the bikes they personally ride, plus one business manager who admits to having a Toyota Corolla. Within the free tabloid are bike photos, hot bike comix, repair tips, race reviews, and Dana Payne’s essay on the differences between riders and non-riders: “They look at us and see lemmings, chattering happily down the road to destruction. We look back at them and see the eyes of rabbits, of guinea pigs. Soft. Dewy. Fearful.” And not a single precious Young Republican Harley in the whole paper….When Adam Woog wrote his book about local inventors, I said it was the kind of book I should have written. His and Harriet Baskas’s new Atomic Marbles & Branding Irons is a book I have tried to write (the backing never came through). It’s a guide to “museums, collections and roadside attractions in Washington and Oregon.” You get all about the General Petroleum Museum on Capitol Hill, Dick and Jane’s Art Spot in Ellensburg, the Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle, the Advertising Museum in Portland, and the “world’s largest hairball” at Oregon’s Mount Angel Abbey (but not Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere). Recommended.

MAD RAGS: You can now get the most realistic G-word-wear from one of the authentic sources used by the original musical creators. Yes, the Salvation Army store on 4th Ave. S. has opened an “Alternative Gear” boutique, complete with 15-percent discount flyers for “ripped flannel.” (G-word insiders prefer Value Village or Goodwill.) Meanwhile, USA Today (which boasts to advertisers that, “compared with the general population,” its readers are “23 percent more likely to dance/go dancing”) ran a pic of a truly stupid designer-G-word teen couple taken from the JC Penney Back To School ’93 collection. Maybe if the chain likes the Seattle urban look so much now, it’ll think about having a store in town again.

LOVE’S LABOURS: We now know that several weeks back, Kurt was arrested and went to jail for three hours on a domestic-violence rap, before being released without charges. Cops say they went to his place on a neighbor’s noise complaint. There,Courtney supposedly said they’d argued about his gun-buying binge and their busted $300 juicer; they supposedly shoved each other, he supposedly dragged her to the floor and choked her. (So much for juiceheads being laid-back.) She insisted to the P-I that it was all a big misunderstanding, that they’d argued but not physically fought, that he’s still a great guy and an ardent feminist. She echoed these remarks at the Hole gig at the Off Ramp: “This is a song about domestic violence, not! I don’t mean to joke about it, I know it’s a serious issue and shit…” The show itself was one of those gigs where the band valiantly keeps efficiently chopping away throughout the frontperson’s half-drunken stumblings (she gave up on guitar playing in the middle of a couple of songs). In short, a definitive sloppy old-fashioned punk show. Perfect.

THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer title on the public-access show H.A.R.D. TV (Hardbody Alternative Rock Digest)): “All bands on this show sound 500% better live. This audio is the worst (and we know it).”

WHERE AMERICA SHOPPED: It’s one thing for Sears to kill its catalog, but to remove the candy counter at its 1st Ave. flagship (its oldest surviving U.S. store) is unforgivable. That little stand between the first-floor escalators was the heart and soul of the place. They might as well stop selling DieHards.

PHILM PHACTS: Free Willy is a new mid-budget “family film” about a boy who helps a lonely killer whale escape a nasty, fictional “Great Northwest Water Park.” Execs from Sea World, the Anheuser-Busch-owned theme park chain with 18 performing killer whales (all named Shamu), have reportedly been to the San Juans, hobnobbing with area whale experts to help assemble their anti-Willy PR campaign. They’re telling you that captive orcas have great lives and are treated fine, that no Willys need ever be freed….I got to see a few scenes from Sleepless in Seattle some months back, and the finished film is every bit as stupid as those scenes cracked it up to be. Yo, Hollywood: We’re not all rich boomer airheads here.

NOTES: The Chamber of Commerce’s idea of Seattle music, Kenny G, will play the Coliseum in Sept. with Peabo Bryson. He’s the male half of most of those sappy love-song duets at the end of dumb blockbuster films (new catch phrase: “The movie ain’t over `til Peabo sings”). He oughta have a giant screen behind him showing closing credits through his entire set.

GRAFFITO OF THE MONTH (outside B. Dalton Books on 1st): “Read less. Live more.”

THE NOAM-MOBILE: Congrats to all of you for making Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media one of the biggest documentary hits in a long time, even though I don’t agree with much of it. Chomsky treats the mass media as one monolithic, unstoppable force exercising mind control over all America (except for himself and his East Coast intellectual pals). He can’t, or won’t, notice how tentative that hold really is. People who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming. Compare the faux-ironic, “air quotes” speech patterns of MTV viewers with the blind-faith naiveté of tube-loathing neohippies. A typical TV viewer takes nothing by faith, treats everything with (excess?) skepticism. A typical nonviewer is ready to believe almost anything, as long as it’s told in the proper “alternative” lingo by recognizably “alternative” faces. The Robertson right, the Perot moderate-right, and the Chomsky left all hate the commercial mass media. Everybody’s a “rebel” these days, and the press is one of the few universally recognized symbols of what everybody’s rebelling against. Newspaper circulation is flat, and ad revenues have plummeted. (Ratings and ad revenues for TV news are also down.) Most people are already aware that their local newspaper is beholden to its town’s business and political bigshots. It doesn’t take listening to three hours of Chomsky to figure out that national and Eastern-regional media might be similarly beholden to the NY/DC bigwigs. The New York Times is, after all, the Cadillac of American newspapers: it’s bigger, and it’s got more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.

Just as leftist economists talk as if the world’s economy was still based on heavy industry, so do media critics like Chomsky still “analyze” an American media comprised only of three networks, two wire services, two weekly news mags, five opinion mags, and two or three big Eastern papers. Can Noam adapt to a media, and a nation, that are becoming more decentralized and diffuse (but perhaps no more “progressive”)? Stay tuned.

RE-PRESSED: At least Chomsky does sometimes get around to telling you his worldview, instead of just dissing other media worldviews. That’s the problem with most leftist “media analysis,” especially the syndicated “Media Beat” columnists in the Saturday Seattle Times. Those two guys give only a shadow of the “reality” they claim exists. They keep telling us that the papers aren’t telling the whole truth about some issue, but they expend little or no space telling us what their idea of the “true story” is. I wanna throttle those guys and dare ’em: “Yeah yeah, I know these other people aren’t telling me the whole story; so why won’t you tell it to me already?”

NOT MY GENERATION: The Weekly still treats rich baby boomers as the only people (besides political-corporate bigshots) it wants to talk about. Its preview of summer music festivals treated tame boomer nostalgia music as a refreshing novelty, not the reactionary albatross that’s helped keep original music off bigger stages for two decades. The same issue had Walt Crowley with one of those puff pieces about how great it was to be young 25 years ago (ostensibly a review of a book about old underground papers, like the one he used to edit). Like most such articles, it depicted a Sixties America populated only by middle-class college boys. Unlike most, he didn’t treat it as a gone-forever “age of miracles.” Instead, he wished young’uns would follow the path set by elders like himself, without saying how. It’d be unwise to do everything like it was done then. Hippies made a lot of mistakes: they appropriated Black Power slogans while doing little to integrate their own world; they abrogated 50 years of leftist heritage by stereotyping all working-class people as redneck fascists. We’ve gotta learn from that time, including its mistakes, to do better. Don’t live in the Sixties, be radical now.

MIA ZAPATA, 1965-1993: In the past three years I’ve said goodbye in print to six members of the local music/arts scenes, some I’d known personally and some only through their work. They all died needlessly and too soon. This may be the most senseless death of them all. Zapata, a poet, painter and singer-lyricist for the Gits, was found strangled in an alley near 25th and S. Washington, an hour and a half after she left a small get-together at the Comet, honoring the one-year anniversary of her friend Stefanie Sargent’s fatal overdose. Zapata died a week before she was to have recorded vocals for the Gits’ second CD. I knew her only as a presence on a stage, a dynamic presence delivering some powerful and fun tunes, a voice rooted in the early notion of punk rock as a statement of positive defiance, not just a lowbrow lifestyle.

Some 300 friends of Zapata and the band attended a wake at the Weathered Wall, which included the surviving Gits and friends playing her songs one last time (the band won’t continue without her) on a stage filled with candles and yellow roses. Some people ask me how Seattle bands can be so strident and negative, contradicting the official image of Seattle as heaven on earth. I tell those people to look around themselves: There’s a madness here, subtlely different from the madness in the nation at large. Due partly to our western boomtown heritage and surviving Greed Decade attitudes, far too many people here believe they have the right to do anything they want, to whomever they want. Seattle’s “nice” image is at best a cover-up, at worst an emotional repression. Beneath the enforced attitude of passivity sometimes called “the Northwest lifestyle,” you’ll find a barely-contained force of sheer terror. There’s no running away from it; you’ll still find that terror in the white-flight suburbs and the hippie-flight countryside. Don’t move out, stay and reclaim the public space. Do that and we can help fulfill the pledge shouted by the people at her wake, “Viva Zapata!” (A reward fund is being formed to help find her killer, in cooperation with King County Crime Stoppers. Any info that might lead to Zapata’s killer can be given anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 343-2020.)

‘TIL WE MAKE A PLEDGE to meet in September, be sure to see the digitized Snow White, be courteous to foreign Seattle Sound tourists, and ponder this thought from Night of the Living Dead master George A. Romero: “People are operating on many levels of insanity only clear to themselves.”

PASSAGE Chris Stigliano in the Sharon, PA zine Black to Comm: America’s Only Rockism Magazine:

“Don’t you miss the days you could turn on your fave UHF station and watch any of the Nick at Nite programs without the computer animation and with those great car salesman ads? Me too….You can pay upwards of $30 a month to see ’em presented in a yuppie/disco manner that ultimately insults them (and you), but ain’t television supposed to be free and not controlled by spoiled brat cokeheads with little understanding of what we (as noncorruptable, wild rock & roll reactionaries) are?”

REPORT

Almost finished with the first draft of my book chronicling the Seattle music scene since 1976. All you who’ve been holding back on offering your stories and reminiscences: Drop me a line already. All you who have offered, but haven’t heard back from me yet: Be patient a week or two longer.

I’m thinking of offering official Misc. T-shirts, stickers and the like. Any favorite slogans you’d like?

WORD-O-MONTH

“Orphic”

7/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Demographic Cleansing

Misc. thanks all who went to our big variety spectacular last month at the Two Bells. If you didn’t, future speaking engagements may be in store, possibly broadcast. I’ll forgive you; you were probably preoccupied anxiously waiting for the new-look Seattle Times (more on that later).

END-O-ERA DEPT.: A tired old sitcom about a bunch of maintenance drunks leaves TV after 11 years and gets the biggest hype campaign this side of the end of Communism. Dave leaves the same network after 12 years and doesn’t even get an ad in TV Guide. One word says it all: Weasels.

MEMO TO LOWRY’S HANDLERS: You’ve gotta reach out to the people of the state. Explain that the Right’s no-new-taxes/slash-all-spending/just-don’t-ask-us-how line is a crock. Remind folks that the interests that scream the loudest about slashing spending are the ones that lobby the hardest for breaks or subsidies for themselves. Point out that this “We The People” petition is really backed by big-bucks lobbies that like the health-care and transportation messes the way they are, that’ll do anything to stop real reform. Remind folks that we need roads and schools and colleges (not to mention prison guards for all the throw-away-the-key sentencing laws), and we’ve gotta get health care and public transit into shape or the state’s fiscal health will just get worse. To build a better future, ya gotta invest. Even rugged-individualist Eastern Wash. was settled by government aid (railroad land grants, dams, irrigation, farm price supports, Hanford).

TURNING A PAGE: The new Barnes & Noble book superstore in an old bowling alley (one of Bellevue’s few truly beautiful buildings) proves that the intellectual-elitist myth is wrong: people do read books these days, in increasing numbers. If they didn’t, corporate empires like B&N owner K mart wouldn’t build monster outlets like this. It’s what all these folks are reading that we can still argue about.

TURNING ANOTHER PAGE: Book sales boomed in recent years, but newspaper circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth. The Times is particularly frustrated, with suburban papers whopping it on its outer turf. In response, the paper’s built a Bothell printing plant and launched a massive redesign. Launched after two years of committee meetings, focus groups and “pagination” consultants, the new-look Times is a mix of elements from the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, SF Examiner, Oregonian, Tacoma News Tribune and many other papers. Most redesigned papers adopt huge type sizes that let ’em fill the same space with fewer reporters; the Times redesign is relatively modest about this, losing only 5 to 10 percent of its verbage per column inch (more is lost to goofy new features like the Page 2 blurbs). It’s like the remodel at the paper’s biggest remaining advertiser, the Bon. The paper, like the store, was an old workhorse not noted for flashy looks, suddenly given a “return to elegance” that it’d never had. The new Times is just more “tastefully” dull than the old.

BUMMER OF THE MONTH: The Nowogroski Insurance Agency closed its old office across from Safeco Tower in the U-District, and moved out somewhere by Northgate. It wouldn’t concern us, except the storefront office (an ex-A&P store) still bore the name of one of the operations that had been merged into it: the James M. Cain Insurance Agency. I always wanted to take out a life policy there, just so I could ask if they had a double indemnity clause.

THEY LOVE US IN EUROPE: Posh Italians think we’re “the ultimate frontier of the American look, costume and sound.” It says so in “Il Futuro Arriva de Seattle” (the future comes from Seattle), a 15-page spread in the Euro-style mag Max. There’s no NYC “designer grunge” wear (indeed, almost no women) in the Seattle spread, shot by photog Loca Trovato in January. You do get bike cops, fish tossers, the Smith Tower, the singles apartment house, Bruce Lee’s grave, Waiting for the Interurban, Bulldog News, the Waterfront Streetcar, and a mention of Bernardo Bertolucci filming Little Buddha here. The mag describes grunge (“Uno Stile, Una Musica”) as “expanding like an oil spill on the world scene,” local clubs as teeming with record producers ready to sign a band on the spot, and Seattle as a “laboratory for tomorrow…where the human dimension lives together with the future of technology, avant-garde urban planning and respect for nature.” They’ve got shots of the Sub Pop guys, Nirvana, Mother Love Bone, current club bands Dumt and Spoonbender, the Off Ramp, the Crocodile, the Vogue men’s room (looking unusually clean), the Colourbox and the Paramount, plus the fraudulent NY Times “Grunge Glossary” (Max doesn’t know it’s fake), a wacky sidebar on Madonna’s attempt to sign a grunge band (Candlebox, not Hole) for her label, and Chris Cornell complaining about the overcommercialization of the scene. And this allegedly common benediction: “It’s not rare, frequenting the Seattle clubs, to speak with anyone and hear the response: `Grunge will be you’ or `Grunge will belong to you.'” (Thanx to Tom Orr of Twist Weekly for translating help.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: XLR8R is the free monthly tab for local rave, techno and dance music lovers. Issue #2 includes an update on the rave-harassment issue, from the point of view of a promoter who’s managed to meet every bureaucratic hurdle and hold successful shows at the West Seattle rehearsal building Nirvana uses. He even reported getting a personal inspection and OK from asst. mayor Donna James (who’s married to the brother of the ex-wife of the brother of the previous mayor — all four of whom are present or former local TV personalities).

MORE SPACE EXPLORATION: The Showbox lives! — sorta. The legendary 1st Ave. ballroom that was Seattle’s grandest punk palace, then became a branch of the Improv comedy chain, has DJ/rave dance nights on Mondays. The Odd Fellows Temple also lives again with 18-and-over shows Fri. nights. The new promoters claim to have worked out all police and fire regs; we’ll see if the city tries to censor it again. And somebody named Troy is inviting bands to submit demos for a new all-ages series; call 285-0385 Mon. and Tue. afternoons for info.

THE FINE PRINT (from Cyborgasm, producer Lise Talae’s CD of surround-sound sex scenes): “Cyborgasm is a 3D audio fantasy anthology. The activities presented here have been created using sonic rendering and digital simulation. Cyborgasm should not be taken as an endorsement of these activities.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside the Off Ramp): “We don’t care if you smoke, snort, sniff, or shoot. Just don’t do it in here.” Runner-up (in the window of the Salvation Army service center on E. Pike, adjacent to a liquor-license notice): “The Salvation Army is moving. The liquor license is being sought by the future owners of the building. The Salvation Army has nothing to do with this.”

(latter-day note: The building in question became Moe, perhaps Seattle’s finest alt-rock club and one of my fave hangouts. The one relic from the space’s Salvation Army days is a long inside sign with the slogan “Self Denial Will Prove Your Love to God.” The current occupants stuck a big MOE sticker over “God.”)

`OTHER’ WISE: Where did this now-ubiquitous term “The Other” come from anyway, and why do all these white het male art critics use it to complain about white het males? I know there was an NY underground rag long ago called The East Village Other, but they presumably got the term from somebody else. The critics invoking it (including most everyone at Reflex) imply that there are only two classes in American society: the class of all the people they don’t like (called either The Patriarchy or The New World Order) and the class of all the people they like (The Other); the critics analyze all artworks accordingly. Shoehorning art into oversimplistic ideology is just silly, and sheds no insight onto either art or politics. In the ’70s, academic leftists claimed that Everything Is Political. I’m starting to believe Everything Is Aesthetic. Besides, anybody who thinks there are only two cultures in the U.S. isn’t looking very hard.

CATHODE CORNER: Local actor Patrick-Alden Moore wants to produce a weekly TV sitcom in Seattle. It’d be an all-local production: not just location shooting but local writers, actors, and crews. He’s writing a pilot script, which he hopes to film with money from some of those Hollywood bigshots with Puget Sound island homes. He envisions a lighthearted soap-parody like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Soap, though not too weird or too sexy (“I want this to be something everyone can enjoy,” he says, adding that he thinks The Simpsons is too racy for kids). His written premise involves psychiatry jokes and ethnic jokes (an Hispanic bartender learning Yiddish). Don’t look for any local references: the title, City, is the only name the show’s town will have. Casting isn’t final yet, but he says he’d like to get the unlikely teaming of Ichabod Caine (country DJ and born-again Christian) and Peggy Platt (empress of local standup comedy and outspoken pro-choicer).

WHAT’S (NOT) IN A NAME?: So Prince wants to no longer be referred to by name, just by his abstract pseudo-zodiac logo. It’s been done. There was a Seattle band in ’81 that had no written name, just a symbol of two interlocking diamonds with wings on each side and a graph line inside. Unlike the Prince symbol, this outfit did have a spoken name: a guttural shriek. And there’s still the famous local illustrator/tattoo designer, known by the logo of a triangle-slash.

DEMOGRAPHIC CLEANSING: Sometimes it seems that yuppies don’t want to coexist with anybody, that they want to take over a place, shove everybody else out, then appropriate the evictees’ cultural heritage. The downtown “cleanup” campaign can be seen as a plan to remove the young and/or poor from public areas. The Belltown “anti-crime” campaign is a system for harassing black kids who stand around quietly, while ignoring far rowdier white kids nearby. But now comes the second draft of the Seattle Commons Plan. The rich suburbanites behind the plan now insist they want to keep the same number of low-income housing units in the South Lake Union/Cascade area (not necessarily in the same buildings), though most of the planned net increase in housing stock would be luxury or “market-rate” (upper-middle-class). They’re even talking about keeping the Lincoln-Mercury building (without the great neon). But nowhere in the 126-page report is there a mention of the neighborhood’s funky lo-rise character, its half-dozen or more rehearsal studios, its photo studios, or its other current values to the city. Low-rent, high-ceiling districts are as precious an urban resource as jogging trails, and have just as much right to exist.

I ORDER YOU TO RELAX!: You probably missed out on Lighten Up America Day on 6/22, devised by Portland corporate-motivation speaker C.W. Metcalf (no relation to “Convoy” singer C.W. McCall). He thinks Americans are too darn depressed these days (I can’t imagine why). Metcalf wants us to think brighter thoughts, to let more light into our hearts. Speaking of which…

CHURCH WINDOWS: Some members of St. Mark’s Cathedral want glass artist Dale Chihuly to design the Episcopal landmark’s still-unfinished interior. I’d always thought of the Episcopalians/Anglicans as a religion of grandeur and spectacle. Chihuly, who sells prosaic decorative bowls to Microsoft millionaires, would be all wrong for that (‘tho I like his idea to freeze neon lights inside theTacoma Dome hockey surface). His passionless work would be more appropriate to my alma mater denomination, the Methodists. Speaking of which…

THE GOOD NEWS: Those who miss the activist calendar in Community Catalyst should check out The Source, the monthly “Ecumenical Newspaper” of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Even for non-churchgoers, it’s a great resource for events along the social-concern wing of mainline Protestantism. Last month’s topics include the Dalai Lama’s visit, Hiroshima memorials, the survival of faith in a hi-tech age, the Ste. Michelle wine boycott, helping the homeless, Cuban friendship advocates, and a big section about gay rights vs. right-wing disinformation campaigns. Speaking of which…

DEAD AIR: The talk radio goon squad, predictably, is at the forefront of pro-gridlock politics. The demagogues and their TV-pundit pals fancy themselves as Scarlet Pimpernels, valiantly rescuing helpless aristocrats from the pinko insurrection. They’re really more like old Soviet state ideologists, using twisted logic to find “moral” or “economic” justifications for preserving the status quo of power and privilege. They’ve got Clinton in retreat, forcing compromises on any issue that can be oversimplified into a faux crusade. The White House ought to capture the moral high ground. Hillary‘s trying, with her remarks about a “politics of meaning” to fight the “sleeping sickness of the soul” caused by a dehumanizing society. (It’s paraphrased from ex-UW campus radical Michael Lerner, who now runs the Jewish social-philosophy mag Tikkun.) The pundits and talk-radio guys (I hate to call ’em “hosts,” a term that implies gentility) scoffed: How dare a politician be sincere about social leadership, instead of using it as an excuse for hate-mongering? How dare anyone talk about spirituality who doesn’t belong to the former state religion of Robertsonism? Mrs. C.’s going where Mr. C.’s backed off, toward disarming the Right by exposing its corporate hypocrisies. Speaking of which…

BOXING BOUT: Buying CDs in jewel boxes, from stores that don’t supply those wasteful cardboard longboxes? Think you’re saving the Earth? Think again, after you pass the Precision Sound warehouse on Republican St. east of Westlake. On a rainless day you’ll see a crew of dudes & dudettes out on the loading dock, tearing off longboxes and tossing them into a Dumpster. Sure they’re all recycled, but it’s still a waste to make ’em in the first place. Any record co. that puts environmental hype in its inserts ought to offer jewel box-only CDs. Besides, longboxes were the last bastion of big cover art; you should have the option of getting ’em. They will be collectibles. Speaking of which…

CANNED HEAT: Some folks claim to have found syringes in diet-pop cans. It’s really either a hoax or a tampering, but I can’t help fantasizing about a company doing it as a stunt to become the Choice of a New Generation, Seattle-style. (Imagine the alternative-rock-star endorsement possibilities!) Note that officials insist any contaminant chemicals would never survive in a Pepsi can (should our kids drink stuff that strong?) Also note that KIRO handed the commentary spot about the soda scandal to its longtime resident shrink, Dr. Pepper Schwartz (no relation).

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: In an item cut from a column back in February, I pondered future developments in watered-down “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the Betsey Johnson fashion show at Benham Studio (one “designer grunge” maker who’s actually been here!), get your official Jurassic Park dino-dolls with built-in, take-apart flesh wounds (just don’t bother with the movie, an overblown mix of WestWorld and Godzilla on Monster Island), and ponder this headline from British Vogue: “If Georgia O’Keefe were alive today, she’d be modeling in Gap ads.”

PASSAGE

Louis M. Haber in a Washington Post Op-Ed essay, defending Barney the Dinosaur:

“Is this incredible hostility toward Barney just a reflection of societal prejudice against idealistic and cheerful people who are often discounted as simpletons? Against males who are not afraid to reveal a delicate and sensitive persona and to display gentle mannerisms?…Are you so hard-boiled as to be unable to accept anyone who accepts everyone? So cynical as to think of those who are undauntingly optimistic as obsequious?”

REPORT

My book on the history of alternative culture in Seattle still doesn’t have a publisher (they’re throwing away the investment opportunity of a lifetime), but it’s attracting attention from here to Montreal (I’ve been interviewed for the CBC French channel about what Seattle kids really wear).

A broadcast Misc. is still in the works; more info when it happens. I’m also working on other marketing ideas (T-shirts, stickers, posters, a 900 line). If you’ve got an idea you think might work, drop me a line.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Penuriousness”

FIRST, LOCAL BANDS GET BIG. NOW, THE M’S ARE CONTENDERS.

I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!