6/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT:

‘CHEERS’ AND JAKE O’SHAUGHNESSEY’S ARE STILL DEAD!

We’re still childless here at Misc. World HQ, despite Mom’s best efforts to fix us up with a nice Christian girl, so we could only watch from aside the conversations in downtown cafés on Take Our Daughters to Work Day: “Just think, little Allie, someday you’ll get to be a frustrated wage slave just like mommy!”

UPDATES: Last time, we commented on the fad for every business to have a “mission statement.” The cool new Xerox art/literary zine Hel’s Kitchen has one of its own: “Mission Statement: Missions were built in California to obliterate the native customs and spread colonization…. We hate them”…. Owners of the Cyclops Café are threatening to sue the N.W. Ayer ad agency over the AT&T commercial inviting Americans to call their grungy pals back in Seattle. Cyclops claims that Ayer offered $100 to shoot still photos inside the joint for an hour, claiming they’d just be used in a stock-photo collection; instead, they spent three hours and not only included the café’s storefront but made it the ad’s key image.

THE TRAGEDY CONTINUES: Greg Ragan, who wrote and performed with the seminal Seattle punk band The Feelings, died 5/1. Friends say he’d gotten a good job and was getting his life together at the time, after getting over his years-long heroin habit. Alas, it had already weakened his system for good.

LESSER BUMMER #1: The King County Library’s closing its Seattle film desk. Several years ago, the city library donated its film collection to the county, under the condition that they remain accessible to city residents. But now, to borrow a 16mm film (or one of the county library’s wide assortment of videos), you have to phone in an order and pick it up days later at an out-of-town library branch (closest: off of 175th & Aurora). If you think this petty budget-cutting move is wrong, write the King County Library System (300 8th Ave. N., Seattle 98109) and the King County Council (King County Courthouse, Seattle 98104).

LESSER BUMMER #2: The Corner of Bargains, the big old rustic barn full of furniture across from Sears on 1st, is closing. That great stoic claptrap of a building, packed to the walls with garish overstuffed sofas and gargantuan brass lamps, is the vision of American commerce at its finest. At least Sir Plus is still in the neighborhood.

HERE WE ARE NOW: Grunge tourism is back, maybe bigger than last summer. I talked to an advance woman for a BBC crew, about to descend on the city for a youth-travel documentary series. She called the paper to ask: Where are the grunge hangouts? What’s the grunge radio station? How did grunge get started? Are any of the current grunge stars under 30 years of age (except for Nirvana, most of the first-tier noisemakers are near or beyond that mark)?

LOSING IT: If we still don’t have a Grungeland theme park, how ’bout somebody putting out a Grunge Aerobics video? I can imagine it now: a formation of tall guys flailing their long hair about during the opening warmups, using Sheaf Stout bottles instead of hand weights, before hitting the floor for the tummy exercises that give you the ever-popular emaciated junkie physique without having to do the drugs. At the end, the moshers could give nutritional advice (“don’t stage dive 15 minutes after eating”) or even sell their own food products (Mosh Mush, the perfect post-hangover breakfast). The dancers could compare their weight-loss results at the end to determine who’s “the biggest Loser.” Just if you produce such a tape, I want credit….In an item cut from the February issue, I pondered even more future developments in watered-down corporate “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 new designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

TRAFFIC TO THE JAM: If you’re going to Lollapalooza at the Gorge at George, don’t try to “gorge” your conscience at the environmental booths up front; 20,000 people in 10,000 cars, 140 mi. each way, ain’t exactly living lightly.

A REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENT: The Weekly‘s fanning the flames of “tax revolt” every chance it gets (as many as three redundant articles per issue), gleefully predicting political genocide if Lowry and Clinton don’t cave in to big business and the rich. As publisher David Brewster’s followed his target audience away from its last vestigial connections to The Sixties, he’s followed a classic behavioral shift among publishers, once described by New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson: a young Turk vows to be the Voice of the People, but winds up on the golf course with the Chamber of Commerce and slowly sees things their way. In the Reagan-Bush era, Brewster and his readers could ostensibly oppose (while benefiting from) Reaganomics. Now that the yups are asked to pay their fair share, Brewster’s ready to follow (or lead?) them rightward.

STREET STORIES: While the Weekly set upon its campaign to decimate government services, the daily papers launched a campaign for more government aid to their business friends, by trumping up an “instant crisis” about the downtown retail “atmosphere.” The papers, wholly recycling the Downtown Seattle Assn. line, apparently want downtown to be as sterile and monocultural as the malls, hinting that cops should remove the homeless (to where??) so the sidewalks can look nicer. The anticlimax came with a full-pageTimes story full of crime-scare tactics, while reluctantly admitting in a sidebar item that most downtown crime categories are down this year (after peaking in ’85). Downtown retail’s real problems are (1) a continuing national downturn in consumer spending, partly due to the long-term consolidation of personal wealth towards the wealthiest; (2) the decline of the dept. store biz, of which Frederick’s and I. Magnin were the weakest local players; and (3) layoffs at banks and other offices, bringing fewer commuters downtown. Locking up the panhandlers and chasing out the skate teens won’t solve any of that. I’ve lived down here nearly 2 years; sure, I’d like to see fewer suffering people on the sidewalks, but the real way to do that is to try and alleviate their suffering, not to corral ’em into some other neighborhood. We need a war on poverty, not another war against the poor. And skateboarders don’t hurt anyone, they just speed up wear-&-tear on Westlake Park facilities. I say let ’em skate. Rebuild the park platforms and pottery to withstand skate wheels, and turn the kids into a tourist attraction.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES DEPT.: We can’t figure out why anyone would buy a correspondence course to escape a dead-end career, based on the recommendation of Sally Struthers.

PC PARADE: Tacoma’s News Tribune ran a front-page photo of Sea-Tac Mall guards chasing two teen boys out of the mall for wearing blue bandannas, which immediately branded them in the eyes of mall staff as gang members. In the photo, the guards are black and the supposed gangbangers are clearly white (tho’ their faces are partly obscured by the camera angle, a standard practice in news photos of underage suspects).

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The current quarterly Bulletin of the Seattle-based National Campaign for Freedom of Expression features a whiff of 1992 nostalgia: mug shots of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan altered with X-Ray Spex for proper ridicule by us sophisticates. The articles are thankfully more lucid. NY scholar William Strickland calls for a permanent, populist, holistic left coalition. Another article notes that city officials in Auburn and Spokane have been trying to censor nudity in public art works, using laws intended to fight sexual harassment. In both towns, the challenged works are by female artists…. Tacoma’s finally got a more-or-less stable music scene and some newsprint zines to go with it. Pandemonium and its arch-rival Smutch are chock full of relatively un-stupid band interviews, reviews, scene reports from Club Tacoma and the Red Roof Pub, opinions on everything from hate crimes to youth politics, and dance and art profiles; all in a refreshingly attitude-free attitude…. Back here, Hype published its last free-tabloid issue in April, but vows to return as a slick-cover mag around July.

YOU SEND ME: Times art critic Dolores Tarzan Ament (no apparent relation to Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament) was all mistaken in her piece trashing City Voice, the public art project/opinion survey now in the mail to 10,000 city homes. Ament mustn’t know about the postmodern traditions of mail art (decorous postcards, stamps, and other mailable matter) and appropriation (turning commercial communication forms inside out). City Voice, funded by Seattle City Light and devised by three local artists (Alan Pruzan, Helen Slade, and Galleria Potatohead vet/Weekly cover boy Bill Moore), takes the fun graphics and interactive tear-and-paste aspects of Highlights for Children and Publisher’s Clearing House mailings, to ask citizens to write in about their lives and ideas. What could be a more appropriate public art project than one that not only asks the public’s response, but invites the public to participate in the creative process?

AD OF THE WEEK (bus billboard for Washington Egg Producers): “Fake is OK, for a sorority girl.” The sales reference is to egg substitutes vs. the real stuff, but what’s the joke reference: fake eyelashes? Bustlines? Orgasms? Personalities?

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Nordstrom’s annual meeting featured a slick video presentation of the “shopping system of the future,” interactive video. Scenes shown on the TV news depict a smug yuppie housewife watching TV, ordering windows around on the screen thanks to never-gonna-happen voice-activation commands. More fantastic, the “personal shopper” talking to the housewife in an inset window was none other than ex-Let’s Make a Deal hostess Carol Merrill!

IN STORE: By now, many of you have seen the new Broadway Safeway, a veritable mini-Larry’s Market with big diagonal aisles and interior neon signs. The remodel emphasizes a deli, a pharmacy, a flower stand and other higher-profit items around the walls, but less shelf space for lower-profit packaged foods in the middle of the floor. Once the staid, sea-green monarch of western supermarketing, the chain’s been decimated by leveraged-buyout debt. It’s closed stores (and left some metro areas altogether) and looked for ways to squeeze more profit out of its remaining stores. The fancy signs, over a 10-year lifespan of a remodel, don’t really add much to the price of a pound of cheese; that comes from getting you to buy that cheese on a ready-made pizza.

IN THE OFF-ING: Contrary to the Regrade Dispatch, no-booze strip joints can be relatively harmless neighborhood additions. What goes on inside may disgust some of you; but, unlike bars, they release their clientele onto the streets not only sober but utterly depressed.

SEATTLE COMMUNITY CATALYST, 1990-93: Are local lefties are so disorganized, they can’t even support a little tabloid with a joint monthly calendar? A more practical analysis (and leftists like nothin’ better than analysis!) would say it’s hard to create a united left just by publishing a newspaper; especially here, where it’s hard to get people to care for causes beyond their own neighborhoods, their own hiking trails, their own ideology trips, etc. Maybe the Catalyst‘s ambitions were too small. It was a paper for people who already believed in the things it covered. It wanted people in one leftist clique to pay more attention to the other cliques. Maybe the next attempt at a political paper should try to evangelize people who aren’t in any cliques yet, to promote new ideas at a wider audience.

CATHODE CORNER: KTZZ’s televising KIRO-AM’s morning news from 5 to 7 a.m., turning Seattle’s slickest radio show into its clumsiest TV show. It’s shot on two robot-controlled cameras mounted above the announcers — great views of bald spots. During remotes and taped segments, we see still graphics or the announcers fumbling with papers. During KIRO’s live commercials, KTZZ plays stock music while showing Bill Yeend continuing to talk. Because KTZZ doesn’t have the rights to CBS Radio material, it runs long stretches of public-service ads at least twice an hour. It’s a great antidote to the slick, empty TV morning shows (including KIRO-TV’s own First in the Morning News). It also points out just how little news KIRO-AM news has.

LIVE AIR: The one station that plays the bands outsiders think all Seattle bands sound like is KZOK-AM. The ex-KJET mostly rebroadcasts the Z-Rock network from Dallas, but ex-KCMU “Brain Pain” king Jeff Gilbert goes live afternoons with the hard stuff — especially on Friday’s local-music hours, cranking up new Sweet Water and Grin right after old AC/DC. And remember, it’s the station with the Million Dollar Guarantee: “Pay us a million dollars, and we’ll play any damn song you want.”

CIVIX LESSON: While the City of Seattle keeps trying to prevent all-ages rock concerts, the City of Redmond puts on its own. Nightlife, a program of the Redmond parks dept., regularly sells out its alternate-Saturday-night shows at the Redmond and Bellevue YMCAs with almost no publicity. The bands are mostly Eastside teen groups, plus a few big and semi-big names (the Posies, D.C.’sFugazi). There’s no reason it can’t be done on this side of the lake, except that the Blue Meanies in high places wouldn’t have it.

`TIL NEXT WE MEET, ponder this from the recently-deceased western author Wallace Stegner: “The west does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long. The west is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it. The west as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The west is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

PASSAGE

From “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by the suicide-at-30 Robert E. Howard: “Let me live deep while I live: let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, and the mad exultation of battle…I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Our annual Misc. anniversary party’s happening Sunday, June 6 at the Two Bells Tavern, 2321 4th Ave., 8:30 p.m. Readings, multimedia, previews of our book on the history of the Seattle underground scene, audience participation games, and much, much more. Attend, or don’t lie to your grandchildren and say you went.

REPORT

Your loyal reporter is once again without a day job. All ideas, suggestions, and offers (paid positions only) will be considered.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Simsum”

4/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

GREAT! GATES GETS HITCHED

JUST AFTER I TOSS MY OLD LIST

OF COMPUTER-NERD SEX PUNS…

Misc. hopes you’ve all got your copy of the white-on-black T-shirt featuring a hypodermic needle superimposed on the Space Needle beside the slogan, ” I went to Seattle to make a score and all I got was this lousy recording contract.”

UPDATE: I recently said we should preserve Seattle as a working city and resist the huge “Seattle Commons” yuppification project. Advocates of the Cascade neighborhood, a neglected pocket of affordable housing threatened by the Commons plan, have now formed the Cascade Residents Action Group to fight the wrong kind of redevelopment (info: 624-9049 or 523-2569).

BEEHIVE VIDEO, R.I.P.: It began 15 years ago on N.E. 45th as a far-flung outlet for the Peaches record chain, housed in an ex-Ford dealership. When that chain went Chapter 11 in ’81, the local manager bought it and added a Ballard outlet. It was the last large locally-owned record store in town, and the last to stock new vinyl. The first sign of trouble came in ’87, when the Wherehouse chain opened across the street, followed by Blockbuster down near U Village. In ’90, the store stopped paying for the Peaches name and held a contest for a new name (which meant no more word-balloon signs with the “Peachy” mascot pointing to the “Gay and Bisexual Videos” shelf). In ’92, they sold the Ballard store and made the 45th outlet all-video. It bravely (foolishly?) failed to stock umpteen multiple copies of blockbuster action hits, instead keeping a large stable stock of cool obscurities. The strategy cut costs and attracted a loyal clientele, but it still wasn’t enough. On 3/22, I rented my regular Monday 2-for-1 titles and saw nothing strange, except that the sale shelf of close-out tapes was a bit fuller. The next afternoon, I went in and was abruptly told I couldn’t rent anything else: “I’m sorry, we just went out of business. We’re only taking returns.” Its loss leaves a lot of frequent-renter cards that’ll never get filled up, and leaves the central U District without a decent foreign-film store.

OUT TO DRY: The Squire Shops are in Chapter 11; many of the remaining 23 outlets are closing. Just as the ugly clothes that made ’em famous are coming back! Squire sold clothes that young mall-crawlers thought were hip. In its heyday, that meant jeans with cuffs nearly as wide as the waist. Seattle wore bellbottoms years after the rest of the country stopped. Several companies formed here to keep Seattle in clothes the national companies no longer made. That scene led to the local firms that gave the world loud sweatshirts with goofy slogans and Hypercolors; some of those firms are now on the wrong side of that fad and face money trouble themselves. (“Designer grunge” has virtually nothing to do with the local fashion biz.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Washington Free Press promises to be the hard-hitting investigative newspaper Seattle’s never really had, with the possible exception of the pre-JOA P-I. Several tabloids over the years promised this, but soon turned into lifestyle rags that just used `politics’ to define their subcultures (Community Catalyst is just as guilty of this, in its way, as the Weekly). Free Press isn’t like that. It doesn’t tell you what clothes you have to wear or what food you have to eat. It just reports the under-reported big stuff. In the April ish, that’s a huge piece about Boeing’s spotty environmental record and vigorous influence-peddling. The rest of the free monthly tab’s weaker (talk radio-style rants against Jack in the Box) but shows promise….Beyond the Cultural Dustbin is Hans and Thelma Lehmann’s personal history of highbrow art, music and dance in Seattle since 1938, when UK conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (scion of the drug empire that now owns Contac) came to lead the Seattle Symphony. He left a year later, calling Seattle “a cultural dustbin.” The book argues that we’ve come a long way since then, from the Northwest School painters of the ’50s and John Cage‘s residency at Cornish to today’s proliferation of dance and theatrical troupes. The book implies but doesn’t directly ask: We’ve got culture now, but is it art?

JESUS JONES WITHOUT THE JONES: Counter Culture is the first Christian alternative-music zine I’ve seen in Seattle since the Jesus Freak scene of the ’70s. Its cover interviewee, Tonio K., was a minor ’79 LA singer-songwriter (best-known LP: Life in the Food Chain) who’s now born-again and wants a crossover hit just like Amy Grant. The writers insist at several parts that you can still like Jesus even if you don’t like the Religious Right. It displays calls to prayer in standard cut-up punkzine design. It covers Christian grunge bands that mix “`70s funk with the anxious mind of `80s punk rock with the heart of God.” But then, punk and its descendants, even in their nihilism, held a righteous notion of good and evil, a conviction that the world should be better than it is. Bands like U2 and 10,000 Maniacs already use songs as sermons. Take out sex and drugs, add New Testament imagery, and you too could exhort the faithful at the Vineyard coffeehouse in the U District.

TO WOMB IT MAY CONCERN: First Moments is a local firm offering “videos of your child’s first moments” — ultrasound images of the fetus, to be treasured as a family heirloom; there’s blank tape at the end so you can add birth and infancy footage. Forgetting the unspoken anti-abortion implication, it makes you wonder: if you’re sick of friends’ cloying baby pix now, just wait!

OPEN MEMO TO CURSE: You’ve successfully exposed the hypocritical machinations behind KCMU-Lite and its instigators. But to restore the station as a community resource, you’ve gotta deal with the UW Board of Regents, who control the license. The current managers were turning the station into nothing but a self-serving fundraising machine, something the Regents can identify with. After fundraising, their no. 2 priority is saving face; with all the other campus scandals, they might seek the safest way out of the KCMU dilemma. Unfortunately, there are “safer” ways than restoring Classic KCMU. They could turn it into an automated classical outlet, or return it to the Communications School. You’ve gotta assert that any format change would violate the promises made in membership drives. Then, offer an olive branch. Ask your comrades, the fired DJs with the class-action suit, to back off if the Regents will let you help set up a new structure for the station, not like it’s now but not quite like before either. Tell them you don’t want to restore all of the station’s rough-hewn past. You want to build on its heritage, to more strongly serve students, alternative-music communities, and others now unserved by local radio. Even after that, you’ll have to deal with KUOW management down the hall, people who’ve asserted excessive control over KCMU and who honestly don’t get what’s wrong with institutionalized “public” radio. People who only seek the most upscale listeners. People who mistake blandness for a virtue. The announcers on NPR stations all sound like HAL 9000, for chrissakes! They oughta sound more like the booming, colorful voice who used to announce the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They oughta reflect the glorious pomposity of orchestral and opera music, the twee affectations of chamber music, the life-affirming spirit of real jazz, instead of a yup variation on BBC English. Public radio should be by and for the public, not just by the bureaucracy for the upscale.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Ex-KCMUers Debbie Letterman and Kathy Fennessy are now spinning CDs as live “queue jockeys” for callers on hold for Microsoft’s product-support lines. While it’s a novel job that pays OK, Letterman told the Puget Sound Business Journal that she’s still tied into as restrictive a format as she faced at KCMU-Lite before she quit. “The key word is mellow:” Enya si, Ministry no.

THE URBAN TOURIST: Columbia Center sounds as strange as it looks. The climate-control hum and rushing air from elevator shafts give the 5th Ave. entrance cool noises (they’d be great for a sci-fi movie). Even weirder is the Seafirst Corridor, a passageway under 5th and Columbia from Columbia Center (where the bank execs work) to Seafirst 5th Ave. Plaza (where the back-office staff works). It’s the most surreal walkway since the United terminal at O’Hare. On the walls, plastic-covered pastel lights flash in a slow sequence of colors, while New Age music and ocean sounds enhance the creamy dreamscape. At the end, two elevators take you one flight up to the harsh utilitarian corridors of the 5th Ave. Plaza, where a security guard waits to let you back into a numbing temp job.

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: If you think Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy‘s Subaru spots are already odd, wait ’til you see the one with a dude in black jeans saying that the Impreza’s “like punk rock, only it’s a car”.

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS (via Michelle McCarthy and David Humphries): “London news has reported the NY bomb news prominently, but I think Londoners were squinting a little at the panicky New Yorkers having had their first initiation to bomb-based evacuation. Since we’ve lived here, areas as populous as Wall Street are evacuated for bomb threats close to weekly, and one actually goes off about once a month. It’s hard to imagine the US tolerating the constant shutdown and occasional destruction of its biggest cities and business districts.”

CHRISTIAN GORE AT 911: Three years ago, Gore was the uppity editor of a Detroit ‘zine about perverse film and video. Now, he’s the uppity editor of a slicked-up, mass-market Film Threat, based in Beverly Hills (at that ZIP Code) and financed by Hustler‘s Larry Flynt. Gore puts big stars on the cover (for sales) and trashes those stars inside (for credibility). He covers “B” Hollywood horror and sci-fi, and still promotes a few undergrounds. Gore promised two different nights of video treats, but the Friday and Saturday shows shared half the same material: drive-in movie trailers, Sid & Marty Krofft theme songs, banned Ren & Stimpy episodes (Gore’s cronies with the original R&S team), psychedelic computer animation. At both shows, Gore passed around cans of cheap beer and asked the audience to sit back, yell if they thought something was boring, and act like they were in his living room. I took advantage of this after he showed a student film about an “artist” who has naked women with blue paint on their bodies press up against butcher paper: “Everybody knows that’s based on a real artist, right?” Gore, incredulous: “It is?” Me: “Of course. Yves Klein! He was in the first Mondo Cane movie.” “I didn’t know that.” A guy who doesn’t know the daddy of schlockumentaries shouldn’t call himself a weird-film authority.

IT’S SQUARE TO BE HIP: I don’t just want you to question the assumptions of mainstream culture. I want you to question the assumptions of your culture, like the assumption that it’s sacred to be “hip” and profane to be “square.” The hip-vs.-square concept is the alternative culture’s unexamined legacy from the beats’ misinterpretation of jazz lingo. In the NY jazz scene, “hepcats” (derived, sez Zola Mumford, from the Senegalese word hipicat, “one who is very aware of their surroundings”) were those who played and/or listened to advanced black music (instead of the watered down Paul Whiteman versions) and who’d mastered the complex codes of social gamesmanship in Manhattan. It was a concept for a specific time/place that no longer exists. Square people these days are a lot hipper than a lot of self-proclaimed hipsters. Squares enjoy drag queens on Geraldo and buy male pinup posters. Squares buy Soundgarden CDs and watch The Simpsons. Squares grow and haul the food we eat. Squares make our cars. Squares support education and world-relief drives. As Wes “Scoop” Nisker writes in Crazy Wisdom, “the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering.” There is no superior race (not even yours). There is no superior gender or gender-role (not even yours). There is no superior culture (not even yours). The real enemies are people who think they’re hip but aren’t: The Religious Right (not a mass movement but a tightly organized minority that gets out its vote in low-turnout elections); the civic fathers/mothers who want to outlaw youth culture. (More on this below.)

IN BLOOM: When I told people I wanted to write a book about the local music scene, most said “you’d better get it out right away. Nobody will care about Seattle next month.” I don’t know if the “Seattle sound” is really the flash in the pan that so many local wags think (hoping they can go back to their familiar nihilism?). People here are so used to obscurity, when the spotlight shines they squint and wait for it to stop. But like I’ve written before, this could just be the flash that lights a lasting fire. Jonathan & Bruce shrewdly took a subgenre that’s been developing for 10 years, put a slogan on it, made it the Next Big Thing and made us its capital. But the sound they built isn’t one of those short-half-life sounds like power pop. It’s an identifiable sound, imitable yet sufficiently diverse to allow infinite variations. The dozens of “generic grunge” bands now playing opening sets at the Off Ramp could form the tourist bedrock of a permanent scene, like the “generic country” bands in small Nashville bars, bringing in the bucks and attention to support more advanced work. If we play our cards right, Seattle could become the Nashville of rock.

BUT NOT IF the forces of repression have their way, as led by our city’s “progressive” political machine. Most mayors like to kiss up to their town’s fastest growing industry, but not ours. From feminist/prohibitionists to the tepid No Nukes concert film, some of the most adamant political liberals were cultural conservatives. Norm Rice wrote the Teen Dance Ordinance as a City Councilmember; as mayor, he’s apparently behind the actions to shut down all-ages concerts and raves and the effort to seize part ownership of RKCNDY. Rice comes from the disciplinarian side of the black middle class, where adults want young people to strive hard at all times and avoid idle temptations like pop music. Rice doesn’t get that the rock scene is a hard-working, industrious bunch of people empowering themselves. He calls himself a “supporter of the arts” while clamping down against Seattle’s first indigenous artform since the ’50s Northwest School painters. He promotes Seattle as a “KidsPlace” while trying to shut young people up.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to check out the Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at the ex-Penney’s site on 2nd & Pike (where the real homeless are studiously kept outside), and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

PASSAGE

Christine Kelly in Sassy:

“While watching the inaugural balls, I realized that Hillary Clinton is the Courtney Love of politics. If the people want Kurt (Bill), they gotta take Courtney (Hillary) too. People will accuse Courtney (Hillary) of trying to break up the band with her constant meddling and poisoning influence, even though Courtney (Hillary) has her own band (office). Hillary (Courtney) said provocative things to the press about baking cookies (taking heroin). Courtney (Hillary) was on MTV with her husband. Both chicks have a cute, sassy daughter. There is one major difference: Courtney has too much taste to mix jewel tones like amethyst and royal blue while watching her husband accept an MTV award (get inaugurated).”

REPORT

Like I said somewhere here, I’m starting to write the major history of the Seattle music scene from ’76 to today. I’ll need to talk to everybody who was a major part of it (players, promoters, ‘zine editors, designers, producers, club people). Write for details. If any of you know the addresses of ex-locals who’ve left town, also write.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pecuniary”

3/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:

HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK

Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.

BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.

WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).

THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.

WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.

JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.

NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)

WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”

WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.

MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.

FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.

ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.

ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.

AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.

DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?

BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.

‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

PASSAGE

In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”

REPORT

I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)

I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000 Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Captious”

2/93 Misc. Newsletter

(Incorporating four Stranger columns)

HILLARY’S JUST GOT IN;

ALREADY HALF

THE CAREER WOMEN

IN AMERICA

HAVE FOOTBALL-HELMET HAIR!

n the remote chance that you care, here at Misc. we spent the morn of 1/20 sitting warm in our electric-heated apartment, watched the swearing-in on crystal-clear cable, and felt sorry for all the folks here in Liberalville waited so long to see a Democrat inaugurated, only to have the power knocked out. No, we won’t make tapes of all the festivities for you. Besides, you don’t want to see Barry Manilow‘s opening act on the pre-inaugural special (a potential harbinger of disappointments to come?).

THE BUZZ OF THE NATION: Note that Pepsi was a sponsor of that same TV special. Traditionally, Coke was the Democratic pop (owned by Atlanta Dixiecrats) and Pepsi was the Republican pop (owned by Wall St. investors). During WWII, FDR pushed sweetheart deals to give Coke extra sugar rations and to let it build plants wherever our troops landed. In the ’50s, Nixon deliberately staged his “kitchen debate” with Kruschev in front of a Pepsi display at a New York trade fair. In the ’80s, Pepsi’s rise in the “cola wars” (under a management full of ex-military officials) mirrored the GOP’s power surge; as the Dems compromised and struggled, Coke lost its way with New Coke and ill-advised Hollywood investments. Now, it’s Pepsi that’s going weird at one end (with dumb ideas like Crystal Pepsi) and digging in at the other (buying fast-food chains to insure a captive market for its drinks). Clinton himself claims to be a Coke loyalist.

ENGULFED II: Predictably, the old order wouldn’t go away without one last blow by the GOP sleaze masters — the unilateral restarting of a war in hopes that the new guy would have to continue it, and thus continue the military spending levels and foreign-policy arrangements tied into it. History will, I predict, conclude that practical Republicanism, like practical Communism, was a system for preserving the rights of the privileged no matter what the cost to the nation as a whole, no matter how much it contradicted its own official ideology. If we’re lucky, maybe we’re over both of them.

SEARS CATALOG, 1886-1993: I suppose there’s little purpose for the Big Book in today’s malled and Wal-Marted America. Still, when any longrunning periodical dies, it’s a loss to the national scene. The Sears book, like the Wards book created (and died) before it, was a pioneer in what us art snobs now call interactive literature. You read the words and looked at the pictures. You imagined how the furniture would look in your home, you took your own measurements. Some of you tried to figure out the mysterious demarcation between Girls, Misses and Juniors. You could use it for bad toilet paper, worse cigarette paper, and cheap anatomy lessons via the underwear section. Now the masses have to shop in person, while the elite can stay home with their L.L. Bean and Victoria’s Secret books.

CATHODE CORNER: After honing his act for several years on assorted local cable channels, Spud Goodman has blossomed into a bright little show on regular TV (if that’s what you can call KTZZ), punctuated by outstanding live local-band segments and snappy graphics. Goodman’s own act consists of rambling interview/discussions that get interrupted by the large studio cast before they can get anywhere. While he treats himself as a god (“healing” viewers from the sin of having seen Bodyguard), everyone else treats him with patronizing indifference. The studio regulars don’t let him finish a sentence. The cameras, aping either experimental filmmaker Stan Brakage or AT&T ads, turn away toward people’s hands or goofy props. The tape editor cuts in fake poetry or meaningless location footage. Either they all disdain him, or they’re protecting him from the risk of boring the home viewer….Phoenix residents can now see The Maury Povich Show dubbed into Spanish, by accessing the same “Second Audio Program” signal used with some HBO movies. What a great way to teach our li’l kids to be bilingual! Forget those cute storybooks about spunky waifs back in the Old Country. Give us the wives who’ve become best friends with their husbands’ mistresses; that’ll hold anybody’s attention.

NITE LIT: Insomniacs such as myself have found a great companion and aid toward tiredness in USA Cable’s Up All Night, which takes old drive-in sex movies and cuts out the sex, making them even duller. Book lovers deserve their turn, so I propose a new book club. Boring Books Inc. would issue special editions of the classics, condensed to skim over the exciting parts and leave in all the tedium. (They’ll also help you write book reports when you’ve only seen the movie versions.) Just imagine the possibilities! The BBIMoby Dick: Just the documentary accounts of the whaling business. The BBI Lady Chatterly’s Lover: Just the passages about the decline of England’s agrarian society. The BBI Razor’s Edge: Just the gossip about Somerset Maugham’s rich friends. The BBI Fear of Flying: Just the parts about being a lonely affluent American in Germany, waiting for her weekly dose of The New Yorker. The BBI Thomas Hardy: Everything he ever wrote.

THE FINE PRINT (from the back of the Bradford Exchange Simpsons collector’s plate): “A decorative accessory. Not to be used for food consumption. Pigments used for color may be toxic.”

`POST’ MORTEM: There used to be a U-District jewelry store owner who tried for years to ban street posters. He said they were desecrating the neighborhood, that the Ave ought to look more clean-cut, more like Bellevue. Now, the Washington Music Industry Coalition and the Northwest Area Music Alliance have announced a campaign to get clubs and bands to stop postering light poles. This would further force music promotion into paid media (like here). Admittedly, it’s wasteful to make hundreds of nondescript big-type posters aimed at passing cars, that may only attract a few dozen people to a particular gig. Still, there’s something to be said First Amendment-wise for the right to poster. And, as shown in Instant Litter, Art Chantry‘s book of local gig posters from 1977-85 (still at remainder racks), the illustrated poster aimed at pedestrians is a vital art form. Some are more creative than the advertised bands.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Wall St. Journal correction, 12/28): “A spokeswoman for News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting said the show In Living Color is part of a “long tradition of sketch comedy,” not sex comedies, as reported. The spokeswoman was misquoted in an item in Thursday’s Advertising column.” Runner-up (P-I headline, 12/29): “Sadomasochism gaining influence in dominant culture.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints finally came out a bit late for Xmas giving, but is still a quality alternative to your standard art calendars. Written and collage-illustrated (anonymously) by Talking Ravencollaborator James Koehnline, it’s a glorious celebration of the world’s free spirits and insightful thinkers, represented through 15 months’ worth of alternative “saint’s days”. February alone gives you found art and short texts about Bob Marley, Sir Thomas More, Russian anarchist Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Susan B. Anthony, Copernicus, and Tex Avery. Available at Left Bank and A.K.A. books….Ex-Wire publisher, ex-KCMU DJ and ex-Stranger music reviewer Brian Less is back in business with Urban Spelunker, another free monthly tabloid about the local scene. As is the case with many aging music scenesters moving on to new interests, Less’s new mag is just a little about bands, plus a little about experimental-highbrow music, poetry, politics, and other stuff (but why did that David Fewster piece use an old quote from me, calling for more serious Northwest fiction, as the premise for a page of coffee jokes?)…Memo to IEM: If you’re gonna run Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream tributes, don’t call yourselves a local art mag. And what do those letters stand for anyway?

PHILM PHACTS: Robert Altman’s making a film cobbled together from pieces of Raymond Carver stories — only relocated, says,USA Today, “from Carver’s Pacific Northwest to suburban southern California.” Carver was arguably the best portrayer of pre-Yup Northwest society, a world of repressed Presbyterians who sit around brooding mournfully and talking very plainly. Can you really see Carver’s world enacted by light-haired Porsche drivers among the palm trees?

WHY THE COMMONS IS A DUMB IDEA: South Lake Union is Seattle’s version of the “cheap merchandise district” depicted in Ben Katchor’s great comic, Julius Knipel, Real Estate Photographer (seen sometimes in The Stranger and collected in the book Cheap Novelties). Every thriving city needs a low-rise, low-rent district adjacent to downtown, for all the commercial activities that need to be near the center but can’t afford tower rents. We need the suppliers, distributors, and photo studios that are there now. The problem is that to civic planners, there are no old low-rise buildings — just redevelopments that haven’t happened yet. The visionaries don’t see the needs of the real city, just the fantasy of an “Emerald City.” They can’t see the beauty of the Washington Natural Gas and Pacific Lincoln-Mercury neon. They demand their “piece of the country in the heart of the city.” They can’t see the beauty that’s already there. They can’t see that urban landscapes can have their own beauty. They can’t see the city for the trees.

SHAMAN ON YOU: Commercial exploitation of indigenous spirituality descends to a new low as Time-Life Books offers “a free hand-carved Zuni animal fetish” with The First Americans, a coffee-table book series picturing historical artifacts and the like. The ad copy proclaims, “Hand-carved by artists of the Zuni nation, these stone fetishes are believed to house the spirits of the animals they represent….The Zuni people believe that fetishes contain a spirit force that can be of great value to the owner. They can have many uses — in Native American rituals, on the hunt, for healing, for long life, for personal protection — and are considered very powerful.” Having conquered their land and destroyed their livelihoods, Anglos now turn native people’s most intimate beliefs into corporate kitsch in the name of “tribute.”

PRESSED: My Mirror job gives me access to the periphery of the daily journalism biz. These folks seem to attend so many meetings, you wonder how they get a paper out every day. One topic at these meetings: how to appeal to younger readers. It seldom dawns on them that maybe young people aren’t reading papers ‘cuz papers are so downright hostile to people born after about ’54. In the 1/12P-I, John Marshall applied his tiresome aging-boomer-sneering-at-those-kids-today routine to examine grunge (if he’s only heard about it now, he doesn’t deserve to be an arts writer); his highest compliment is that some of it sounds just like ’60s music (gag!). The same day’s Times ran a wire story about PBS going after “the youth vote” with shows about those fresh young teenybopper idols Elton John, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon!

BODY OF EVIDENCE DEPT.: Lollipop’s is a new Eugene no-booze strip joint open only to ages 18-20. “Lots of the kids come in to play pool,” the owner told Newsweek; “they don’t even watch the girls.” Apparently the boys of Deadheadville take the name of Seattle’s Déja Vú strip chain literally: Nothing you haven’t seen before.

MONOCULTURE: The Weekly still claims to be an “alternative” paper, only its apparent idea of “alternative” is to be more conservative than the dailies. Last December it and its sister paper Eastside Week ran a long essay on “The Downside of Diversity Training.” In it, EW staffer Ted Kenney whined about the inconvenience of affluent white guys at corporate training sessions, forced to think about the concerns of non-whites and non-guys. Its research was heavy on anti-affirmative-action position papers from think tanks “associated with a free market stance.” The author’s insensitivity only proves a need for diversity training. All this from a company that to my knowledge has never had a prominent nonwhite employee (please prove me wrong on this). To the Weekly, diversity means putting white male Reagan Democrats next to white female Reagan Democrats.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! MOSHPIT!: Here’s more about Seattle Backstage, the TV show about local music discussed here in January. It’s 13 half-hours, taped at the Backstage (natch), to premiere in Feb. or March on KCPQ. UW-discovered centerfold model Angela Melini hosts feature segments; KNDD’s Norman Batley is the main host. Michael Harris, who’s co-producing the show with the Backstage’s Ed Beeson, says he’s close to a national syndication deal. Bands already taped include locals (Tiny Hat Orchestra, Mudhoney, Posies, Sadhappy) and secondary national acts (Toad the Wet Sprocket, L7, Sarah McLachlan). This show is not to be confused with the separate team, led by Doug Bray (a UCLA Film School grad) and Steve Helvey, making a feature-length documentary. Tentative title: Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest (from an early EP by Bray’s old pals the Young Fresh Fellows, who took the title from a 1962 phone co. promotional record). They’ve held special filming concerts with the Posies, Fastbacks, Chemistry Set, Love Battery, 7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Coffin Break, Hammerbox, Mono Men, Supersuckers, and Gas Huffer. Future sessions are scheduled with Tad, the Young Fresh Fellows, Girl Trouble, Seaweed, Beat Happening, Mudhoney, and Dead Moon. Bray has unnamed investors, three Super 16 film cameras with synchronized time codes, digital sound recording. What he doesn’t have yet is a distributor.

(latter-day note: Seattle Backstage never made it to the air. Pray’s film, now called Hype, was finished but still looking for a distributor as of July 1995.)

CLUB ETIQUETTE: Remember, anytime you go to see a band at a bar that’s supposed to be cool, there will be uncouth ruffians to watch out for. These people will prey on anyone they perceive as weak — harassing women, fag-bashing men, “accidentally” shoving against people in order to spill their drinks. Fortunately, these goons are easy to spot. They travel in male pairs or trios (very rarely in coed couples). They’re always the most clean-cut looking guys in the bar, with the biggest jawbones, the costliest “ordinary” haircuts, the widest game-show-host smiles. You’re safe with the people who look like freaks; it’s the suburban slummers you must never speak to. This may change, should “designer grunge” make it to the malls. But by then we’ll all be wearing something else (most of us already do). Speaking of which…

DESIGNER GRUNGE UPDATE: That “Seattle fashion” craze invented in New York has reached Europe, according to articles in the London Sunday Times and Italian Glamour. The Sunday Times piece called Seattle “almost Canadian in its boringness.” Wish I could translate what the Italians said about Kurt, Courtney, et al.; the pictures all show the NY designer ripoff product, with no local images seen. Italian Vogue, however, has had photographers really here.

IF I HAD TO DO THE SAME AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal reports that the Next Big Thing in London clubs is upscale cover bands with names like the Rolling Clones, the Scottish Sex Pistols, and an ABBA tribute named Bjorn Again. Does this mean we can finally stop aping every new UK music fad? Can we stop buying those costly air-shipped copies of Melody Maker and I-D telling us what styles we must slavishly follow in order to be properly “alternative”?

‘TIL MARCH, remember this faux pearl of insight from one of the Amy Fisher TV movies: “I love him ’cause he loves me so much. We have great sex. And he fixes my car.”

PASSAGE

AutoWeek publisher Leon Mandel, quoted on the sales surge in big pickup trucks: “Something in the American spirit likes great size and a lack of subtlety.”

REPORT

Two bad colds in one month have interrupted my regular research rounds (and made much of the rest of my life into a minor hell). God, hope I last long enough to see this health care reform jive come to pass.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Hypaethal”

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”

From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.

In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).

The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)

Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.

SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.

SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….

The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.

THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”

AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….

Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.

ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.

IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.

WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….

I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).

PASSAGE

Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”

REPORT

Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,

not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.

12/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns

and one newsletter-only essay)

THERE’S HUSKY COFFEE NOW!

JUST DON’T SERVE IT ICED.

IT DOESN’T HOLD UP UNDER COLD CONDITIONS

At Misc., we have only one response to the reported infestation of coyotes in Discovery Park: Where’s Acme when you need it?

CLARIFICATION: For those of you not up on your pop-cultural literacy, the “Woody” referred to last month wasn’t Mr. Allen but Mr. Woodpecker.

ELECTION AFTERMATH: The electorate issued a big dose of reality. A positive reality, as in waking up dazed yet refreshed, to find Patrick Duffy telling you that the past 12 years were just a bad dream. For too long, our government and its business backers lived in a fantasy, in which the declaration of one’s innate “morality” excused all immoral actions, in which the stagnating defense of old socioeconomic privilege could be sold as a “growth policy.” The denizens of this delusory Pleasure Island, long since having turned into asses, expected that with enough money (ours) and lies (theirs), they could maintain the fantasy forever. But the lies ran out quicker than the money. The sleaze machine will finally be out of the Executive Branch. No more gag rules, no more Council on Competitiveness, no more friendly dictators, no more executive orders to appease Pat Robertson. No more race-baiting or gender-baiting as official policy. Now for the boring part: establishing a long-term, active constituency for getting done what needs doing. The two drug cartels (illicit and prescription) are still bleeding the nation dry. The pro-unemployment and anti-environment lobbyists maintain their unelective offices; they and their pundit pals still brand anyone who dares oppose them as “special interests.” Think it’s OK to go back to hip apathy? Get real.

IF I’M RIGHT about this being a new era, we’re gonna need a new aesthetic to go with it. It’s not just that the Clintons and Gores don’t like harsh lyrics and other shock art, but that they don’t like the divisive concept behind them. The visions of Karen Finley and Henry Rollins are clumsily reversed clones of the GOP’s politics of hate. The Young Republicans long ago co-opted the image of the self-made rebel sneering at the petty concerns of the little people; there’s no point in alternative artists acting like that anymore. There’s still a helluva lot to be angry about, but it needs to be answered by a more inclusive kind of anger, something that goes beyond the mere vilification of enemies. Now that 62% of the voters have rejected the organized Right, it may be time for the art world to reconsider its hostility against the so-called “sap masses” and to start communicating with people about the real problems. Leftist art used to be about promoting solidarity with the working classes; it can be about that again. The post-Bush era also means there’s less value in enduring bad art just so you can smugly know that you’ve consumed something the Right would hate. What counts now is whether you like it.

BEFORE WE FORGET the campaign, let’s remember the curiosity that was Ross Perot. It wasn’t just money that got him as far as he got. It wasn’t just a bullheaded unwillingness to play by the rules (including the rule of listening to others’ ideas). It was that he played these as assets. He exploited the ’80s romance of entrepreneurism as Reagan and Bush tried but couldn’t. His contrived maverick act caught many hearts within the subcultures that the NY Times doesn’t know about: Computer bulletin board users. Talk radio listeners. Franchisees and multi-level marketers. “Couples’ erotica” video renters. Self-help readers. Family nudists. The 30 percent of the population that no longer watches prime time TV. People in 12-step groups. Upscale health food eaters. Bodybuilders. People who use powder cocaine while denouncing people who use crack. People who go to comedy clubs. People who used to read National Lampoon in high school. Members of spouse-swapping clubs. Science fiction fans. Everybody who thinks they deserve to break the rules. A savvier candidate might have turned these groups into a force to be reckoned with indeed. God help us if it happens.

APPEARANCES #1: Someone signed only Elvira says she usually likes Misc., but that my consenting attitude toward shirt-doffing G ‘n R fans “really struck out”: “Is the above aimed at women specifically? If so then you are no more `enlightened’ than the band is regarding women! Why would anybody, actually, show a lot of flesh at concerts? Or anywhere else for that matter?” I can think of a million reasons, starting with: why not? I can’t tell women what to do. And I have no monolithic attitude toward all women. Fifty-two percent of the human race can’t be all alike. If some wanna make fools of themselves at dumb corporate-rock shows, I won’t go look but I won’t condemn ’em either. And yes, I’d support male nudity in mutually supportive situations, like the Berkeley, CA student who showed up in class either bare or bottomless all semester, to the condemnation of management but the support or indifference of his fellow students.

APPEARANCES #2: The same week that Pentagon brass got all cowardly about admitting gays and lesbians, a woman wrote in the NY Times about the lack of full male skin in mainstream studio sex movies. Both probably have something to do with some men’s fear of other men’s sex (an emotion oft exploited in wartime propaganda, the ol’ keep-the-huns-off-your-wife line). As I’ve said before, writers who depict “Men” as a single collectivized psyche are wrong. Forty-eight percent of the human race can’t be all alike either. We’re isolated souls; many of us hate each other. I grew up from locker-room intimidation games long ago, and wish others could do the same. And while I’m not attracted to other guys’ parts, I don’t mind their images. I’ve seen enough male nudity in plays and foreign films to know how it can add that ever-needed human vulnerability.

APPEARANCES #3: The fashion press has certified the “Grunge Look” as the official Next Big Thing. Except that some of these designers (including Perry Ellis staffer Marc Jacobs) turn it into commercial crap, with sand-washed silk “flannel” shirts and models’ hair elaborately styled to look unkempt. Others (including Betsey Johnson) define “Seattle style” as Dee-Lite-meets-Frederick’s-of-Hollywood, with sheer tops and rainbow bell bottoms over Doc Martens. I’ve nothing philosophically against $500 see-thru dresses or butterfly pasties (see above), but authentic Seattle wear oughta be something you can wear in November without catching pneumonia. More seriously, the Seattle arts community (in music, fashion and other media) is at its best when it gets folks together, unpretentiously, to achieve honest expressions (even honest banal expressions). If the big designers reinterpret it in pretentious ways, maybe it’s just too much for corporate fashion to understand.

APPEARANCES #4: Betty Page, the reclusive ’50s S&M model whose pinup photos are reprinted in countless books, mags and trading card, who’s inspired everyone from Madonna to the Cramps’ Poison Ivy with her kinky innocence, was finally found in Calif. by Robin Leach. She describes herself now as “old and fat” and living off Social Security; some of the publishers who’ve made money off her image are volunteering to help her out, which is nice. I never was turned on by her myself; I mean, her pictures in regular clothes look like my mom did at the time.

AIRING IT OUT: At the save-KCMU rally 11/8, several people booed when a speaker mentioned the letters “NPR.” They knew that despite NPR’s several liberal political voices, in operating practice it’s become a very Reaganite institution. For one thing, it does a lousy job at serving ethnic or cultural minorities. If you’re not an upscale baby boomer, you’re not welcome. KUOW’s newsletter boasts about how it appeals almost exclusively to the well-off, the perfect consumer audience for “enhanced underwriting announcements.” Also, many under-40 listeners loathe NPR’s cloying aesthetic, its patronizing attitude toward non-yup subcultures, and its “down home” features celebrating the purity of life in all-white towns. (See the current Whole Earth Review for more details.) Also, I’m as guilty as the rest of the local alternative press in keeping quiet about KCMU’s gradual state of siege until now. I wanted to support the station too much to speak ill of it, even as great volunteer DJs got axed one by one for disobeying petty rules or playing too much of the “harsh and abrasive” music that was making Seattle famous. Just call me a listener who loved too much.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Even if there weren’t a new fad of cereal-box collecting, the Cocoa Puffs Factory box would be a collector’s item. A flap on the back unfolds into a 3-D image of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a working chute system. Put a handful of the cereal in the bin at the top, release a trap, and watch the puffs roll down the device and into your bowl. Get one to use, and one to save for your grandkids… Hershey’s Desert Bar (“special formulation for desert and tropical conditions”) is a melt-resistant chunk of chocolate mixed with egg whites for extra body, as enjoyed by the troops of ’91. It’s a substantial biting experience, less gooey and sugary than the regular bar. It’s also got the powdery-white exterior familiar to anyone who’s worked in a candy kitchen and sampled a brick of “industrial chocolate.”

NATIVE LORE: The 11/23 Times sez the number of self-designated Native Americans in Wash. grew from 58,000 to 78,000 in the last census period, a figure far higher than that of officially recognized tribal members. I knew there were phony New Age shamen running around, but I didn’t know there were so many.

AD VERBS: Howcum all these half-hour commercials are for products that you could explain in a minute, while the stuff that could use the time (like cars) still only gets regular spots?

THE FINE PRINT (on a bag of Fritos): “You may have won $10,000. No purchase necessary. Details inside.”

BEHIND THE PINE CURTAIN: Oregon’s Prop. 9, which would have officially dehumanized homosexuals, lost — but by a dangerously small margin. Its sponsor, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, plans to keep resubmitting the measure, to gain administrative control of the state Republican Party (onetime home to progressives like the late Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Wayne Morse), and to start a Washington branch.

The OCA and the Idaho Nazis are not aberrations to the recent mystique of the “laid back” Northwest. Their presence reflects the logical extreme of the myth of “getting away from it all” to a refuge populated only by “people like us.” This was one of the last parts of the continent that whites conquered. After that, we had race riots against Chinese laborers; after that, we sent our citizens of Japanese ancestry off to wartime internment camps. The “Northwest Lifestyle” ideology that coalesced in the mid-’70s promotes turning one’s back on “urban problems” (such as nonwhite people) and putting down roots in “God’s country” where everybody’s identically “nice” and wholesome. We don’t need any more of that. We need to attract people into the region who are willing to live among other people.

CATHODE CORNER: Sony’s about to bring the cyberpunk vision one step closer by introducing a Visortron “headset video screen.” The goggle-like device contains two tiny 0.7″ LCD screens, one just in front of each eye. Not only could this mean perfected of 3-D movies, it’ll let bus riders and hospital patients remove themselves even further from their immediate surroundings. Also, it’s one of the components that “virtual reality” developers have clamored for. They want to be able to rig up users with sensor gloves, feed computer animation into their eyes, and send them on journeys into computer-created “worlds” (depicted in the Neuromancer books and the forthcoming film Toys). Advocates claim it could be used for everything from simulated drug trips to sex with robots (a pitifully sterile fantasy, if you ask me). But you know it’ll end up being primarily used for military training.

STAGES: ‘Twas something really peculiar about seeing the New City production of Fever (Wallace Shawn‘s monologue piece about the limits of rich-liberal guilt trips) performed at a substitute venue: First Christian Church, usually occupied by people who don’t just go to upscale plays about poverty and suffering but actually try to do something about them. Shawn posited a world consisting only of the oppressed and the privileged (the latter including himself and, by implication, his audience). He conveniently concludes (or seems to, since he’s conveniently equivocal) that there’s little his class can do but feel sympathetic and give a little money to street people. Sorry Wally, not good enough. Next time, try to see the rest of the world, not as an artist looking for source material but as a citizen looking for a task to be done. You could start at the church and its ongoing ministry to street people.

OUR ANNUAL ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT: 24, including three colorized showings; plus three showings of Marlo Thomas’s remake It Happened at Christmas. Fortunately, the lucky few who get Summit Cable can see Rope (J. Stewart’s most morally ambiguous role) this month.

‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN in another year (with Seattle’s most accurate In/Out list), remember this holiday entertaining advice courtesy of Fay Weldon in Praxis (1978): “Never feed your family gourmet meals, because they will come to expect them.”

NEW CABINET SUGGESTIONS

• Energy: Who’s got more than Robin Williams?
• National Security Agency: Leo Buscaglia makes everybody feel more secure.
• Housing and Urban Development: Nobody’s created more housing for less money than the punk squatters.
• Human Services: Warren Beatty‘s serviced a lot of humans.
• Nat. Endowment for the Arts: Who knows more about art and endowment than the Men on Film guys?
• Defense: It’d take an army of millions to hold back Chuck D.
• Central Intelligence: Marilyn Von Savant‘s the most intelligent person I know.
• Treasury: The computer phreakers of the Legion of Doom know deeply how “virtual” (imaginary) our money system is.
• Commerce: Nobody in America knows anything about this anymore. Sell the dept. to Matsushita.
• Internal Revenue: We need someone with proven fundraising skills. Jerry Lewis could also work on increasing U.S.-European relations.
• Interior: The Mariners are great at keeping open spaces quiet and underpopulated.
• Agriculture: Orville Reddenbacher looks like he still gets up early to listen to the Farm Report.
• Veterans Affairs: The classic rock DJs know how to appeal to guys who’re still obsessed with our last wartime era.
• Labor: Jane Pauley‘s been through it a few times.
• Education: Spike Lee‘s always ready to teach a thing or two.
• Attorney General: A. Hill would be the obvious applause-getting choice, lest we forget her solid conservative stance. Otherwise, how ’bout someone who knows today’s legal frontiers, like whoever’s defending Negativland from U2’s anti-sampling suit.
• State: Let’s get someone who can bring people together and keep ’em smiling, like Mark De Carlo.
• Transportation: Who shows more love for public transit than George Carlin, the new Conductor on Shining Time Station?

PASSAGE

Ken Siman of Grove Press, on his Drew Friedman cartoon ad appearing in rags like the Village Voice:

“You don’t have to be snooty or dull or pretentious to read books.”

REPORT

After seven grueling months, I finally have a new day job as assistant editor of Mirror, a new local monthly for high school students, distributed only in the schools. If you’re a Clark completist (God knows I’m not), go to a local middle or high school starting Jan. 5. And while you’re there, consider joining a volunteer tutor or mentor program.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Noumenon”

10/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and four newsletter-only items)

Here Comes Moshpit Tourism!

OK OK OK, Misc. is now ready to admit that the “Seattle Sound” is dead. The evidence: not Singles, but the 9/13 travel page of the Sunday newspaper insert USA Weekend (stuffed into the Bellevue Journal-American and dozens of other papers around the country), right after the Haband ad for mail order men’s slacks. The headline: “Get Set for the Seattle Sound: Next weekend’s rockin’ movie Singles puts the limelight on this musical metropolis.” As Jim Kelton writes, “Just as Memphis has the blues, Chicago and New Orleans have Jazz, and Nashville owns country, Seattle now has its own hard-driving sound, dubbed ‘grunge rock,’ giving travelers another reason to visit the city…Visitors will find entertaining and fiercely outspoken music in nearly every corner of this sprawling city. But first-timers should note that the best spots to hear its sounds aren’t always upscale. You can take in the sights during the day, then fill the nights with the fresh Seattle sound.” The page gave prospective grunge-tourists listings of five clubs, two costly hotels (including the Meany Tower, inaccurately described as being close to many important grunge venues), the youth hostel, and two eateries: 13 Coins and the Dog House (“the ‘in’ place for musicians and music fans”).

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The article encourages tourists to come here to see live gigs by the very bands that got into making records in the mid-’80s because they couldn’t get live gigs. The music that was rejected by so many clubs for so many years might now become a boon to the state’s hospitality industry. Maybe we should just replace Seattle Center with a Grungeland theme park. Flannel-shirted costume characters could sneeringly blow Export A smoke into the eager eyes of affluent American families, on their way to enjoy hourly indoor and outdoor performances in between stops at a Jimmy the Geek house of thrills, senior citizen moshing lessons, an all-vegan food circus, bumper cars that look like beat-up Datsuns, wandering Iggy impersonators, beer-can crushing competitions, a detox clinic fantasy ride, (for the gents) a contest to become L7‘s chaste bondage slaves, and (for the ladies) an all-scrawny, all-longhair male strip show.

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE?: The city wanted to collect 3% admissions tax on the “suggested donation at the door” for the Two Bells Tavern’s Chicken Soup Brigade musical benefit. On Sept. 23, city official Dale Tiffany sided with the tavern and withdrew the tax bill, noting in a letter that “you made a quite persuasive case”…. Meanwhile, COCA ran afoul of the police dept.’s crusade to shut down all-ages musical events. Its non-alcoholic rave party was shut down in August over a few creative interpretations of technical ordinances and the infamous “Teen Dance Ordinance,” a law ramrodded through the city council a few years back intended to ban all-ages events under the guise of regulating them.

ON DISPLAY: I saw COCA’s Native American political art exhibit, which uses images of pre-Columbian daily life as symbols of defiance, in the context of what if our entire way of life were similarly suppressed. After thinking some more about it, I couldn’t think of many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture that that weren’t already symbols of our past conquests. What music do we have that isn’t Black- or immigrant-rooted? What fashions have we got that aren’t based on street or folk dress? Through ethnic art (often designed for white consumption) and its equivalents in literature and music, armchair lefties like me get to anoint ourselves with the vicarious righteousness of pretending to be what some white ideologists call “The Other.” It’s a change from most American cultural experiences, which are typically fantasies of conquering something or someone. The only American genres to discuss what being conquered might feel like are science fiction and Red-baiting propaganda, usually as a pretext for heroic action. But imagine: What if our entire way of life was suppressed as North America’s indigenous cultures were? What practices would be kept underground? What pieces of everyday life that you take for granted would turn into symbols of rebellion? What things that you care about would be turned into jokes and stereotypes by the conquerors?

CAN’T I GET LIBERATED TOO?: The (Ero) Writes/Rights panel at Bumbershoot was mostly the usual inconclusive porn-vs.-erotica debate. But one woman made a good point about “censorship of the spirit and the intellect,” something too many of us do to ourselves. The alternative literary scene would attract more people if it weren’t always so grim and staid, if it expressed the whole range of human thoughts and feelings in our big wide world. In many ways, small press literature is the most aesthetically conservative art form this side of barbershop quartet singing (and a hell of a lot less fun). You’re not gonna get young people involved in advanced prose if it offers nothing more than Montana travelogues and ’60s nostalgia. I long for a literature of compassion, of participation. A good place to start is erotica, by its nature a genre that mustn’t be self-centered. Like Jae Carrlson and Kirby Olson in Reflex, I believe the answer to bad porn is better porn, that gleefully celebrates human connection in all its varieties.

OTHER B-SHOOT NOTES: Loved Book-It, the troupe that dramatizes short stories verbatim. Much more literate than most of the “literary” events….

Missed They Might Be Giants, who filled up the Opera House an hour and a half before they went on. In the line, two suburban kids joked about how this show should’ve been in the Coliseum instead of Queen Latifah (this year’s token non-’60s black act), because “nobody’s going to shoot anybody at this show.” I wished to hell I’d had a Walkman so I could’ve made them listen to TMBG’s song “Your Racist Friend.” The Latifah show was, by all accounts, a sedate affair full of perky White Negro wannabes….

The $25 Quick Access Pass was an elitist scam, going against B-Shoot’s one-big-crowd tradition, and should not be repeated….

Michelle Shocked had a great line at the Interview Stage comparing most rock music to “a blackface minstrel show” without the makeup — affluent whites acting out a simplistic persona of blacks as sexy savages….

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THIS GUY: I can’t wait for the Jimi Hendrix museum to open, even if it doesn’t display the uncensored Are You Experienced? cover art or Suzie Plastercaster‘s famous life-cast of his masculinity. Well-heeled local backers are looking at at least two potential sites, including the ex-Seattle Art Museum annex in Seattle Center. The guy deserves a proper public memorial. (KZOK tried a few years ago to get a memorial in a city park, but the Parks Dept. wouldn’t go along; the station settled for a pile of “hot rocks” at the African savannah exhibit of the zoo.) Besides, these days it’d be good to remind people of a guy who joined the Army just to get out of Seattle, his only hope of making it in music.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger writes, “Perhaps you might be able to enlighten us as to what exactly is the deal with this baseball cap display on the rear dashboard thing?” Would you please be more specific? What are these items, and what do you wish to learn about them?

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Husky Dawgs, in bright wrappers bearing official UW football logos, are really repackaged Canadian Jumbo Hot Dogs (the expiration date sticker says both “Meilleur Avant” and “Best Before”). As all good Seattle barflies know about Jumbos, they’re hearty if underseasoned tube steaks that can be steamed, boiled, or grilled, and are virtually impervious to decay even after rotating under a heat lamp all day….

As my budget and diet allow, I’m planning to try all of the faux Frangos being offered around town: Nordstrom Best Mints, Ala Bons, Boehm’s Encore, Seattle Chocolate Co.’s Milt Chocolate, etc. The Times sez that Nordstrom uses a higher grade of chocolate, no salt and no tropical oils. The Seattle Chocolate Co. makes the Nordstrom candy (mint flavor only), and also makes its own brand with a slightly different recipe (in three flavors). Ala Bons, the first faux Frango, are smaller and flatter, not as fully whipped. Boehms, in gold foil boxes, only have six ounces for $6.95 (Frangos and most of the imitators have eight ounces)…

MANGO TANG UPDATE: Mark Campos claims to have tried the stuff, obtained from relatives through an Oregon food warehouse outlet. “The mad chemists at the Tang labs were nowhere hear a mango flavor consensus…no matter how much I stirred, a majority of the stuff marched to the bottom of the glass and stayed there. Also, it’s the most unappealingly colored stuff. Like Mountain Dew, it should not be put into clear glasses for consumption.”

1-900-FAILURE: Megaquest, the Queen Anne-based parent company of some 50 phone talk services (many, but not all, sex-related) in a half-dozen countries, is close to bankruptcy, after earning a net income of $14 million in 1990. According to a great story in the Sept. 4 Puget Sound Business Journal, original partners Arthur Joel Eisenberg and Betsy Superfon (apparently her real name) are battling in court over control of the companies, whose revenues have tumbled as government agencies and phone companies crack down against the rights of those unimaginative Americans who can’t even abuse themselves without coaching.

AD OF THE MONTH (newspaper ad for Nationwide Warehouse and Storage Furniture): “The Chastity 4-Piece Bedroom Set, $198.” Runner-up: the Wm. Diericx Co.’s radio ad for office supplies, selling paper shredders endorsed by Fawn Hall.

“DIS” INFORMATION: Still still more proof that hip-hop culture can’t be successfully whitened comes from the Suzuki 4 x 4’s fall ad campaign, “Fear of a Flat Planet” (a notably lame exploitation of Public Enemy‘s Fear of a Black Planet).

A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE: The Florida state tourism dept. rushed out some newspaper ads insisting that their state was still open for business. The state had to produce the ads at their own Tallahassee office, because it couldn’t complete a phone call to its Miami ad agency.

CATHODE CORNER: Alert home satellite dish owners know about the supplemental feeds of network football games, with the field pictures and sound but no announcers or commercials. I saw part of a Seahawks game this way; you can tell all the important aspects of the game, and don’t have to hear any dumb anecdotes.

DUDS: One piece of good news in the Generra bankruptcy came in a Times story noting that the company, like many in the sportswear biz, is starting to get clothes made in the U.S., after years of only using overseas sweatshops where workers make as little as $1.03 a day. Seems that it takes too long to ship stuff from over there. By the time a fad item gets here, the fad can be over.

“DON’T WALK” THIS WAY: Bellevue officials are promising to make their town “more pedestrian friendly” — by beefing up citations against people walking against the Don’t Walk lights. If they really wanted to help walkers, they’d change the lights on some intersections that allow walking for only three seconds every three minutes, so you have to jaywalk to get anywhere on time.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Tiny, King of the Roadside Vendors is an affectionate tribute by Sharon Graves Hall to her late brother, Richard “Tiny” Graves, the girthy and jovial operator of Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere (one of Washington’s few authentic “roadside attractions”, with ad signs attracting tourists along U.S. highways throughout the west). For just $12.95, the book’s more fun than a case of Aplets and Cotlets….

Meet Me at the Center is Seattle Center’s authorized history, written by ex-Times guy Don Duncan. It’s chock full of World’s Fair camp images (which I can’t ever get enough of). It’s also essential reading for all of you who don’t know what Seattle was like in the era prior to Starbucks and PCC, when a small remote city was trying desperately to join the “jet set” its machines had made possible….

Journeys of the Muse is a 12-page quarterly newsletter by Pamela Reno of Naches, Yakima County. Topics include “The power of thought to influence the sun: A turning point for humanity?”

FUN WITH WORDS: Husbands and Wives stands a chance of becoming the biggest audience-participation movie since Rocky Horror. Here’s how it works: go with all your feminist friends, and hiss whenever Woody says something that turns out to have been eerily lifelike… Another great new cussing site is the downtown library, specifically at the terminals of the new computer card catalog. On any given afternoon you may find retired schoolmarms, Mormon ancestor-researchers and valedictorian wannabes struggling to cope with the confusing software and the mistake-ridden data, talking back to the VDT’s with words not found in the bowdlerized dictionaries.

INDECISION ’92: A requiem is in order for failed gubernatorial primary candidate “You Must Be” Joe King. He’s actually been a pretty good state House speaker, fighting to keep the Wm. Spafford murals up in the Capitol and to support a lot of good legislation. But for his first statewide campaign, he let image consultants package him as something just this side of a Reagan Democrat; an unlikely recipe for success this year….

Campaign commercials used to feature a big red “NO!” crashing down on the face of the sponsoring candidate’s opponent. This time, at least one candidate used “NOT!” instead.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, pick up some great bargains at Blowout Video on 1st (the video equivalent of a remainder book outlet) and the Evergreen State Store in the Center House (your one-stop tourist trinket shop), watch the Japanese soap The 101st Proposal Sat. mornings on KTZZ, and heed the words of Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the cartoon character): “Fear and I were born twins.”

PASSAGE

John Kricfalusi, the cartoonist-director-actor who made Ren & Stimpy into the cult sensation of the year (and just got fired for his trouble by Viacom bureaucrats), quoted in Film Threat before his dismissal: “Everybody’s ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody’s nose. Look in — who’s the big actress today? Look inside her nose and then think about porkin’ her.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Funambulist”

STOP THIS WEATHER CHITCHAT ALREADY.

WE’VE GOT ABOUT THE DULLEST WEATHER IN THE WORLD.

9/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?

TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,

A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …

Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?

CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.

APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.

ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”

PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.

MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.

IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)

STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.

MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.

ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.

A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.

TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)

MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.

DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?

RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.

`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).

He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.

SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.

Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.

The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.

Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.

PASSAGE

Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Crenellated”

Stranger Moment One-Liners

Script for a proposed series of Stranger trade ads

with the local TV show Bombshelter Videos,

written 6/25/92 (some were videotaped; none aired)

Memo to Dan Quayle: We’re not laughing at traditional family values. We’re laughing at you.Lesbians are known to be tough, uncompromising, totally righteous. And the Army says those aren’t qualifications for a good soldier?

It’s time we realized: Seattle IS a major American city. It’s big and clumsy, but thinks it’s still little and cute. In cartoon terms, we’re the Baby Huey of cities.

If John McCaw’s so proud to be one of the new Mariner owners, why won’t he show his picture in the paper? Has he got really bad pimples or what?

Folks tell me they won’t vote for Clinton ‘cuz of his slick personality. Look: If you vote for a guy ‘cuz he’s got a winning charisma, you end up with Ronald Reagan.

How come every vegetarian I know smokes the highest-tar cigarettes you can get? Do they think they’re getting extra protein?

If you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the right wing wants you to do.

Somebody told me a racist joke, then tried to say it was just a parody of a racist joke. I asked him if he’d like a parody of a punch in the face.

They say Americans can’t accept the value of tragedy. Maybe that’s why when the Ridgemont theater turned porno, they changed the comedy-tragedy masks on the sign so they both smiled.

I’ve said it before, but I don’t waste my time laughing at the supermarket tabloids. The regular newspapers are a lot funnier.

If we published fewer poems about trees, we’d have more trees.

If God didn’t want guys to watch TV, he wouldn’t have shaped the corners of the picture tube like a woman’s shoulders.

The government doesn’t want us to have abortion rights or affordable health care. What do they want, lots of babies who all die off quickly?

Junk Food: The American Way

Essay for Wire, 6/7/92

For five years, I’ve been writing a newsletter called Misc. It usually contains a segment commenting about the “Junk Food of the Month.”

I believe junk food is an important part of Americana; an important part of any culture. Archaeologists on their digs like to show off rare treasures and ceremonial objects, but they get the most productive research out of examining the remaining objects of a culture’s everyday life. What it wore, what it used as tools, and how it ate.

Our understanding of England would be just a bunch of cluttered stereotypes if we knew only about its fine cuisine (come to think of it, is there any fine cuisine in England)? You can tell much more about how England really lives by taking a quick glance at lukewarm thick ale, cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips that used to be sold wrapped in newspaper, and the near-unspeakable things they make out of the variety meats.

That’s why I write about junk food, because it’s the true symbol of one’s country. It embodies the American obsessions with advertising flair, instant gratification, and obsessive-compulsive “fun.” There’s more real America in a box of Teddy Grahams than in a thousand white-college-boy blues bands.

The history of junk food is the history of America, from the first Uneeda Biscuit ads in turn-of-the-century magazines to the building of the first companies capable of supplying fresh food products through a network of plants connected to every spot on the continent.

Junk food is also a microcosm of modern advances in technology. Several years ago, there was this great British documentary shown on the PBS series Nova, about the making of a new snack product. It began with surveys showing that consumers wanted more wholesome, natural snacks — but then these guys with college degrees in food tech reduced those desires to a set of flavors and textures, to be re-created with the newest manufacturing advances. The end result was a tubular cracker with a cheese-flavored filling, “co-extruded” through an experimental continuous-run machine. Even that wasn’t half as cool as the scene with the stuffy Brit executives trying to figure out how “natural” they could legally call their product while still getting to use their complete arsenal of additives and processes.

Junk food is not always pretty, but neither is this country, as we have seen in recent weeks. But it can be a source of understanding. For one recent example: Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Hostess Turtles Pies (advertised as “Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Farley’s Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and a thorough layer of green frosting. I have publicly nauseated people by eating one in their presence. Kids, of course, get off on doing things considered gross by people my age. As for the fantasy of foods arriving fresh from the sewer, it’s a natural for a target audience of guys living in the years between toilet training and puberty, some of whom have a healthy obsession with exploring the sides of human/animal nature that us grownups keep trying to ignore.

The “vanilla” flavor in the pies probably came from a 42-year-old south Seattle plant that made over three million pounds of vanillin a year. According to the Times, the chemical flavoring was extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide. One pound of vanillin was taken from 140 pounds of pulp, used for important drugs as well as flavoring; the remaining pulp was sent on to paper mills. Now, the plant’s closing, replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (I want to hear no grumblings from the natural-food crowd about how unappetizing this all sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical (“nature-identical” in British lingo) to traditional vanilla; it just comes from a tree instead of a bean. Besides, some of these same purists will drench their pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)

Disappearance is an accepted fact of life when one is a junk food aficionado. So many of the junk foods I’ve written about in the past five years are no longer available. You can’t, to the best of my knowledge, get Space Food Sticks, or Pudding Roll-Ups. I know you can’t get Billy Beer, and that it’s even become hard to find the generic “Beer Beer” with the puzzles inside the bottle cap letting you test whether you’ve had too many that you can’t see or think straight. And you can’t even get Vernell’s Gummy Transformers anymore, those chewy candies in the shapes of powerful robots.

But wherever there is disappearance, there is scarcity, and the chance to profit from people’s memories. Somebody is trying to start a craze for collecting cereal boxes, reportedly primarily to raise prices for his own collection, and is starting a magazine called Flakes to promote the new hobby. Look for it. Also look for a three-volume video collection of cereal commercials.

You can tell where a nation’s heart is any given year by the ways in which it consumes its sugar and/or alcohol. Envir-O-Mints are not going to save the world all by themselves, but the yummy locally-made little chocolate pieces with pictures of endangered species embossed onto them do show off the consumer’s concerns for a better future. Sure, you could say that these animals would stand a better chance of survival if more of the Third World wasn’t cleared off to grow cocoa, coffee and sugar for western consumption, but a few cases of mints aren’t going to change that imbalance in either direction.

Or take a recent Kraft newspaper insert, headlined “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington in a green suit, pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the famous vegetable. Not only is the ad a wonderfully garish display of almost glow-in-the-dark colors, but it ties a gooey processed dairy product in with the public image of a president who, at the time the ad was designed, didn’t have much of a public image to exploit.

Junk foods are also an underrated force in local and national politics. Note the attempts to ban McDonald’s in a few towns across the country that think they’re “progressive” but are really just paternalistic. And note how the soft drink bottling industry always comes to Olympia when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), and now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products.

And if you still don’t think snack foods are an integral part of the modern human condition, think of this: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” The notion that Castro would divert precious meat supplies for a snack product shows how vital snack products are to people’s souls. To buy something to eat which has been prepared by someone else is in its own little way a mark of luxury. It proclaims that one has risen, at least slightly, above the standards of one’s ancestors who toiled all day, every day, to gather and prepare a meal.

5/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

SAM KINISON & BENNY HILL

ARE NOW PLAYING AN ETERNAL POKER GAME

IN HEAVEN’S CHEAPEST BACHELOR PAD

At Misc., we’re prouder than heck that Rolling Stone declared Seattle the “New Liverpool”. This must mean we’re a decaying western seaport, far from its country’s power centers, inhabited by roughhousing gay sailors with an incomprehensible accent. Or, to quote UK statesman Benjamin Disraeli, “I am deeply sorry for the unkind things I said about Liverpool. I had not seen Leeds at the time.” Meanwhile, I was in Fremont’s spectacular Glamorama when KCMU played Weird Al Yankovic‘s Smells Like Nirvana. A customer spoke up: “These don’t sound like the original lyrics.”

Cathode Corner: The Almost Live syndication plan is apparently dead, according to Variety. Worldvision (the backer of Twin Peaks, who had enough foreign sales to pay half the costs of keeping that show alive but didn’t have the credit to borrow the rest) failed to sell AL to enough stations. Instead, a rerun package will air on Comedy Central, a cable channel seen here only half the day, only on Viacom systems. Worldvision’s now trying to sell new AL shows to ABC… I get Summit Cable, which has a few channels TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings offer shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Astaire-Rogers tribute dancers (just like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred!), many torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out to a recorded music track in front of a silent 40-piece orchestra. Afterwards, they were promptly shooed offstage by the bald, tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao, Hammer, Ciao”…

Events I Heard About Too Late: “Nude Trek: The World’s First Nudist Star Trek Convention” was held in January at the Sultan naturist camp. Events included video screenings, games, skits, role playing, a hot tub and sauna. Perhaps fortunately, James “Scotty” Doohan was not scheduled to appear.

A Three-Hour Hobby: One David Goehner of PO Box 66, Dryden, WA 98821 is offering “the first collectible figures ever” from Gilligan’s Island. You can get a 9″ vinyl figure of Gilligan or the Skipper on an “island stand” for $15 or both for $26, or 4″ figures of the two characters for a total of $8. No coconut-shell telephones or pieces of the true S.S. Minnow.

Surreal Estate: For Rent magazine has a front-page ad inviting people to come live at Walden Pond, “A home that the heart never leaves…Sense the peace of living by the pond…In this fast-paced world of hustle and bustle, it’s nice to know that there is someplace where you can enjoy the peace and comfort of easy living.” It turns out to be a south Everett condo on a man-made lake. The “luxurious 1, 2, & 3 bedroom homes” offer designer fireplaces, covered parking, free aerobics classes, an exercise room, tanning salon, pool, sauna, video lounge, and gym. “And it’s only minutes from work, school, Boeing, Everett Mall, and all major conveniences.” By the way, if you still believe you must move to a country town, look for the three most prominent main-street storefronts. If they’re all real estate offices, drive back. The place is already lost to future suburban sprawl.

Those Phunny Phoreigners (Reuters, 2/19): “French master chef Paul Bocuse is suing McDonald’s for $5 million to $7 million over an advertisement in the fast food firm’s Dutch outlets showing his assistant dreaming of Big Mac hamburgers while working in his kitchen. The advertising agency says it did not realize Bocuse and his assistant were among the chefs in the photo, although Bocuse’s name was on their aprons”….Meanwhile, EuroDisney attracts scoffers from the French culture gods. Right-wing pampleteer Jean Cau calls it “a cultural Chernobyl.” Ex-Socialist government spokesperson Max Gallo: “Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are to culture what fast food is to gastronomy.”

Something Fishy: No concept is too lame to be imitated, not even Ted Turner’s “environmental superhero” Captain Planet. Gorton’s Fish Sticks has inagurated its own cartoon commercial hero, Captain Gorton, who thwarts small-time polluters and keeps the seas safe for seafood. Maybe he could teach a lesson to founding-family heir Slade Gorton, well-known enemy of environmental legislation.

Local Boy Makes Waves: Ex-KIRO news director John Lippman was severely dissed in the LA Times after he “tabloidized” the news at his new home, KCBS-TV. The station’s run a sex-slaves “exposé” and a promo spot using the song “Riders on the Storm” with explicit footage of a drowning boy.

Local Publication of the Month: Northwest Photo Network is a bimonthly tabloid for pro photographers. It’s got an ad warning photographers not to sell their copyrights to clip-art services, a photographer writing about how hard it can be to find the right model for a shoot (while would-be models still get defrauded into costly, worthless “trainings”). And an anonymous article cries that the Seattle Commons proposal, which would clear dozens of blocks northeast of downtown for a huge park, would eradicate over a dozen photo studios and suppliers. Objects of beauty (or at least of commercial appeal) are made in buildings the Commons activists call eyesores… Memo to Art Rag and Community Catylist: Weekly World News spoofs are so lame.

Junk Foods of the Month: Smoked salmon cream cheese spread is fast becoming the toast/bagel topping of choice among newcomers desperate to fit in with the “traditional Northwest lifestyle.” Don’t tell them the stuff was just recently invented. It’s at Still Life in Fremont, Cafe Counter Intelligence in the Market, and elsewhere… People presume me to be a cynic or a kidder but I’m not. When I shop for a soft drink I look for Minute Maid Orange Soda because I enjoy the bizarre combination of syllables of that mystery ingredient, “glycerol ester of wood rosin.” I enjoy the slippery thickness it gives to the beverage, making a glass of flavored water feel like something juicier.

Magazine Ad of the Month: “Does he sleep with you? Does he get jealous? Does he wake you up in the morning? Does he nibble at your ear?… Amoré. Isn’t he worth it? (The product is a cat food.)

Sam Walton, 1918-1992: The king of discount wasn’t known here. Even in the states Wal-Mart’s in, it’s not big in the metro areas where media people live. Thus the press was shocked in the ’80s to see it become the #1 retailer. Its stores were so big, in towns so small, that they destroyed thousands of Main Street merchants across the southern-tier states. Walton aided the ’80s consolidation of wealth from the many to the few, and naturally became a favorite Reagan-Bush insider. But just as shoppers are re-learning the value of selection and service, so are they getting upset at our Wal-Mart government (with its Neiman-Marcus military). Postmodern America is the discount society: a land of slipshod engineering, lousy quality, few real choices, and service that’s not “efficient” as much as nonexistent. The tax-cutters are wrong to think that discount taxes will ever bring prosperity. We’ve already got the lowest overall tax rates in the industrial world; it shows in our inadequate civilian services (education, health, arts, infrastructure). Countries that still respect the value of public investment are whipping us in the world marketplace (or are at least doing less poorly).

Icono-Graphics: CNN’s Showbiz Today lists the weekly Neilsen ratings against a graphic of TV antennas rising from urban rowhouses. A cable channel offering nostalgia for the pre-cable days…

Found Object: An Enumclaw used-book store turned up Daughters of Genius, an 1890s-era biography of famous women of its day (the Brontes, George Sand, Flo. Nightengale, Harriet Beecher Stowe). The intro said it was natural that, as long as the human race was predicated on war and conquest, masculine values would prevail; but that with a more civilized society dawning, women were making themselves known “in most of the professions and all of the arts.” The book erred in timing: war and its values remained, yet the emergence of prominent women progressed incrementally anyway.

Fashion Update: Hypercolor sweatshirts, declared “Outski” here in January, fell even faster than I thought; so much so that Generrais laying off a quarter of its staff. Sorry guys: I never meant to have that much influence.

How Long Was It?: I remember being 12, sneaking into the living room after bedtime (I was already an insomniac!), turning on the Zenith at the lowest volume to catch Johnny Carson from New York: always fresh and energetic, having a blast with his well-groomed guests. By the time I got the occasional OK to stay up late, Carson moved to LA and became a soft, predictable doppleganger of his former self. Friends ask why I don’t move to California; that’s one reason. I don’t want what happened to him (or to numerous once-great musicians who lost it in LA) to happen to me.

‘Til June, check out the Wizard of A-Z gift shop on Market St. in gorgeous Ballard, and recall these words from Gregory Hischak’s odd local zine Farm Pulp: “So let us love and eat and mulch, there isn’t any other obvious reason to be here.”

PASSAGE

From Hal Hartley’s exquisite TV movie Surviving Desire: “The trouble with us Americans is we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.”

SPECIAL EVENT

I’ll be on the Laura Lee talk radio show on KVI (570 AM), Sat., 5/9/92, at the raucous hour of 1 a.m. Skip the end of Sat. Nite Live, get home early from pub-crawling, or set your radio alarm to awaken you for a special treat. I will be taking your calls.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Panegyrics”

•

POST-EASTER SPECIAL

A few weeks ago, we asked your responses to the premise, “What if Jesus were alive today, in his teens, preparing to return to public life at the dawn of the new millennium?” Excerpts follow.

JILLIANN SIMS AND LEIGH DUNHAM: “Jesus would be one of the fine, upstanding citizens we lovingly call `Ave Rats.’ He would hand impressionable, young students fliers proclaiming, `Love thy neighbor (but not too much, and safely please)’.”

BRENDA MARTIN: “The Catholic churches would hunt him down and have him killed for security reasons.”

BRUCE LONG: “The whereabouts of the adolescent Jesus: Someplace blessed with a bumper crop of second chances.”

MUSTAFA PATWA: “Jesus is indeed alive and well. He is currently preparing for public life in the early 21st century by playing Doogie Howser, America’s favorite teenage doctor, on the show of the same name.”

BOB ARMSTRONG: “He’d be an illegal immigrant in east LA who got turned onto computers by a white nerd at his high school, and will soon make a raid on the interlocking banking computer network, shifting funds around to more appropriate accounts. He’s Catholic, but hasn’t been seen around the church in some time.”

SID MILLER: “Jesus is probably a sophomore at a high school east of Lake Washington. Real trendy haircut with shaved sides and a pigtail/rattail down the back. Wants his own TV show or his own band. Doesn’t have the gumption to practice his guitar — too busy with skateboard. Hopes grungy skateboard buddies will piss-off Mary, who is preoccupied with telling all who will listen that Joseph has `run off’. She recently blurted out, `He’s not really your father.’ Jesus has been talking with his buddies about how `cool’ it would be to set a wino on fire. Bought gun for $25 from acquaintance and brings it to parties. Wants a car so he can go cruising. Mother of his child will turn 16 three weeks before baby is due.”

ORAN WALKER: “Jesus would be the son of a working-class family; the father a professional craftsman, possibly union. The mother would be a secretary in a Catholic church. He had his pick of schools and ended up at a small college not far from New York City, where he spends his holidays and weekends, to the chagrin of his mother. She knows he doesn’t attend church and hangs out on the Lower East Side with God knows what socially marginal types, most likely Hispanics and Queers. She doesn’t know that he has been fucking around with his friends, both boys and girls, since he passed the age of accountability five or six years ago. `Safer sex’ has been more than a catch phrase with Jesus, since he realized early that sexual contact is such a complicating factor in the lives of both participants…He is making above-average grades, especially in ecology policy courses. He has written two essays on the need for global awareness and human charity among the earth’s peoples and probably will expand his ideas into his master’s thesis, but it’s early yet. He has been assured that he’ll live to a grand old age — unless he gets those messianic ideas again.”

3/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN THE PAPERS SAID

MISSILE CUTS AND AIRLINE RED INK

COULDN’T POSSIBLY HURT BOEING?

At Misc., we feel Tsongas’ primary success will turn out to be a great boon to the stand-up comedy industry. Imagine: a Presidential candidate who talks like Elmer Fudd! We also finally admit that the “Seattle sound” has arrived after seeing an arena organist playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” during a hockey telecast. An LA Kings game, natch.

UPDATE: I’ve now talked to more people who saw different parts of January’s Broadway riot. They describe how a few demonstrators and counter-demonstrators acted like jerks, but their consensus is that the cops went bonkers and started beating up on everybody in sight, shoving innocent bystanders into walls, threatening to arrest people who were just trying to walk home. (There’s a lot more on this in the 2/5 Seattle Gay News.) Last time, I chastised those who provoked the bashing; that does not excuse the cops who too eagerly escalated the violence.

CRUELTY, MISTAKEN FOR A VIRTUE: The State Legislature’s playing a sick game of one-downsmanship, with leaders of each party competing to see how many destitute and mentally ill people they can force out onto the streets. Most so-called “welfare reform” does nothing for people, only against them. Beware of any legislation that seeks to institutionalize the bigoted attitude that “those people” must be perpetually disciplined and humiliated. Poor people are not different from any of us, as increasing numbers of us are finding out.

GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: The Weekly‘s new look may be a sign that it’s ready to acknowledge the existence of non-yups. They’re even writing about the black community now (maybe next year they’ll even hire a black writer). But they were never alone in rejecting the Demographically Incorrect. For a decade TV morning shows, magazines, and daily papers have narrowed the definition of their primary community to the point where you only count if you were born from 1945 to 1954, went to college, and can afford the investments discussed in “Your Money” columns. Bush, Clinton, and Tsongas tailored their economic fixes to appeal to the “Your Money” audience, knowing it’d get noticed by editors who belong to the upscale 20 percent. Journalists won’t address the non-upscale population except as “those other people,” because their bosses don’t want their precious demographics sullied by non-upscale readers. Millions have been removed from the realm of political discourse because they’re outside the ad market for luxury products. In a real way, demographics could kill democracy.

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The Univ. of BC engineering students, who briefly stole the UW Rose Bowl trophy, are known for their pranks. One year, they rigged the lights on Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge to flash in Morse code: “UBC Engineers Do It Again.” UBC’s female business students hold an annual Lady Godiva Run, donning bikini bottoms and long wigs to race on horseback through the woods of the university’s Endowment Lands. The event’s always denounced by male writers on the student paper, who tell the women what’s the right and the wrong way to be liberated.

FORGIVE ME: I didn’t fill out the opinion survey for the Boeing/P-I/KIRO Crisis in the Work Force: Help Wanted project. I couldn’t answer its questions except with more questions. The first page asked, “What’s causing our problems?”; its choices were “Too much government regulation,” “Decline in American work ethic,” “Businesses taking a short-term approach instead of planning for the future,” “Rising rates of illiteracy in the U.S.,” “The federal budget deficit,” “Demands for higher wages by American labor unions,” etc. I didn’t get to write in “Weighted questions on opinion polls.”

THAT `N.W.O.’ PHRASE WON’T GO AWAY: Leftists still utter those three words in every second sentence, a year after Bush said it just once as a throwaway line. Stuck-in-the-sixties left-wingers, as much as demagogic right-wingers, yearn for the good old days of American imperialism. Neither wants to believe that we’re in relative socioeconomic decline. Instead of seeking today’s answers, they’d rather pretend we still had yesterday’s problems. Kuwait was not Vietnam. We weren’t colonizing anybody; we weren’t claiming to bring them “democracy” or even “free enterprise”. We sent an army-for-hire to restore a 70-year-old mercantilist monarchy on whom the western economy had become dependent. If there really is a new world order (that’s questionable, considering how disorderly the world is getting), its nexus isn’t in Washington, D.C. but in Tokyo and Berlin. This doesn’t mean the end of America. It could be our renewal. For moral-righteousness types, there are advantages to a country off the cutting edge of world dominance. It’s easier to make your ideals into your country’s national policy when you’re in a backwater to the currents of conquest (cf. Sweden).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 2/14): “…the Canadian government measures, aimed mostly at consumer electronics and small appliances, won’t stop the flow of about 30 million Canadians who cross the border into Washington state every year. Most are shoppers.” An impressive figure, except there aren’t 30 million Canadians.

SPURTS: It may be better that the M’s produce their own telecasts, as they’re threatening to, instead of leaving it to Prime Sports Northwest, whose offer is hitting delays. I recently saw a PSN repeat of a UW-WSU basketball game that ended abruptly with a minute to go and the outcome in doubt. An announcer hurriedly apologized for technical difficulties and read the final score…TheOregonian will no longer mention sports team names that allegedly demean native Americans. The editor calls such names “stereotypes that demean the dignity of many people in our society.” They’ll still print the name of the Oregon State Beavers.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: P.O.V. is the monthly newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Film and Video Association. The Feb. issue contained a fascinating piece on the economics and politics of high-definition TV. While HDTV might eventually make film obsolete, P.O.V. sez the short-term result of the changeover will be to increase TV/video work shot on film. The new technology will eventually be the standard, but it hasn’t been perfected yet. Therefore, the only way to be sure your production will transfer well to hi-def is to shoot on film and transfer later to whatever HDTV system we eventually get.

GUY STUFF: After I saw SAM’s opening night, I was just as impressed by the photo show at Benham Studio across the street, including male nudes by female artists. I’ve since seen two films by R.E.M. videomaker James Herbert that used male bodies as the chief images in hetero-erotic scenes. Finally, there was the life-size male nude sculpture smiling from inside the window at the Donald Young Gallery (a cheesy mannequin to which a Calif. artist stuck on hyper-realistic fiberglass genitals). I concluded that I was attracted to female images that represent people I’d like to be with, and to male images that represent people I’d like to be. In most art and literature by both women and men, the female body is the land where sex lives, while the male body is portrayed as the instrument of work. Our strongest non-gay male images are of muscular action: athletes, rock stars, socialist working-man art, SAM’s Hammering Man. It’s only since ’70s porn that we’ve had straight male sex objects, viewed with admiration by other straight men. While the porn business treats men as soulless stimulus machines (a view it shares exactly with the anti-porn crusaders), it led to men looking at other men as sexual creatures. Contemporary artists are going further in demystification, showing that a phallus is an awkward work of biology, not the iron rod or missile invoked by sexists of both genders. These artists are affirming that men are people too.

WIRE, 1982-1992: For three years, back while the now-acclaimed Seattle music scene was really a promotion and art-direction scene, Denis Twomey and his editors ran a local music magazine that was about music more than about style or attitude. It’s tough to discuss aural art in print; even the prosperous UK music papers emphasize celebrity (sometimes in the guise of “alternative” celebrity). But it never recovered from devastating debts, including an ad default from Sub Pop.

AD VERBS: AT&T promoted its new TTD public phone/computer terminals for the deaf with a totally soundless commercial. The most attention-getting device yet; why didn’t anyone think of it before?… KIRO sold sponsorships for its “bumpers” updating what would be on each night’s Olympic coverage. To my knowledge, no other station’s sold advertising during its own advertising. Maybe we’ll get back to the old days when every nonfiction show would have sponsor logos decorating the scenery…. Plymouth has commercials with talking cars, under the slogan “The Intelligent Choice.” Need we remind you what make of car Christine was?

FREDERICK & NELSON, 1890-1992: Department stores were the retail flagships of mid-century America. They set the aesthetic/cultural tone for their towns, both in the styles they promoted and in the newspapers their ads supported. Seattle had the middlebrow Bon Marché, the lowbrow Penney’s and Sears, and the also-rans Rhodes, Best’s, and MacDougall-Southwick. But Frederick’s was the queen, the setter of style. Its distinction wasn’t just Frangos or a doorman. In our rough-hewn port city it was a bastion for the traditionally feminine arts of fashion, decorating, interior design, food, and society. It was headquarters for a clientele of women with upbringing and money but not jobs. It was considered such a female institution that it set up a special Men’s Grill where gentlemen could take a respite from shopping among all the ladies. Its decline was predicated on a series of tightfisted owners (starting when longtime owner Marshall Field’s wouldn’t let it build a Northgate store). But its dominance really passed in the ’60s when Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes, selling flashy career outfits to women who had more to do during the day than sit in Frederick’s tearoom. Frederick’s reacted by turning inward, taking pride in its refusal to change with the times. (It only admitted blue jeans in an obscure corner under a plain “Today Casuals” sign.) The store was made weak, prime for a series of raiders to bleed it dry. But now, maybe too late, people are looking back fondly at a store that had real standards of quality and service, without the designer-trash styles and motivational sales-zombies found across the street. No matter what happens to the store buildings, the impending loss of Frederick’s is a major turning point in our history.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see the gorgeous Until the End of the World, and ponder role-playing-game creator Steve Jackson‘s policy on not depicting fantasy swordsmen/women in G-strings: “Battle is not the place for recreational nudity.”

PASSAGE

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist imagining the sayings of a Delphi oracle in The Sibyl (1956): “We gather knowledge which we call truth from those in whom we least believe, and unconsciously let ourselves be led by what we most heartily detest.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This may be your last free issue of Misc. With the Stranger now running weekly excerpts from the report, I’m severely cutting back on the number of drop-off points for the main newsletter. It’ll still be around at about 20 spots, but the rest of you really ought to subscribe.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Obstreperous”

2/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Love Songs for Vacuum Cleaners

Welcome to another morosity-packed edition of Misc., the pop culture report that believes all Presidential candidates, just to be fair, should have to eat (Times, 1/9) “marinated raw salmon, consommé with mushrooms, filet of Japanese beef, cooked vegetables, salad, passion fruit and ice cream with strawberry flavor.” If Brown wants to forego the beef, he can substitute stale bean curd.

UPDATE: Puget Sound Bank indeed cut funding for local arts on public TV, but both the bank and the station insist that the decision came long before they saw the Seattle Men’s Chorus show. So don’t call ’em homophobic. If you must complain, complain that as a proud urbanite you deplore last year’s commercials where PSB showed itself as the bank of wholesome white suburbia while associating its out-of-state competitors with evil inner cities (even using Manhattan images to bash Albany, NY’s Key Bank).

GOOD BUY, BASEBALL!: Nintendo of America singlehandedly brought an entire industry back from the dead. It may be the shrewdest entertainment marketer in the world today. I can think of no higher qualification for a Mariners owner. Besides, it couldn’t hurt the team to adopt some of the philosophies in those zen-of-baseball books or in the Asian-American Theatre’s play Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder. As I write this coming home from a sold-out SAM retrospective of Yoko Ono films, I think of how this town is socially closer to Japan than it is to certain other US regions. Not only are Boeing and the timber companies among the nation’s top exporters, we’ve got the Nissan and Subaru docks. Hardly the “xenophobia” attributed to us by nature writer Andrew Ward… The 1/27 “Morning” (née Tacoma) News Tribune had a headline, “M’s deal shows where the action is: in Seattle’s suburbs.” The paper, whose current circulation push is into those suburbs, noted that none of the would-be buyers works in Seattle. It didn’t note that the government and business leaders who brokered the deal are all downtown.

IN THE STREETS: I witnessed the anti-hate-crime march on Broadway 1/25, but didn’t catch the start of when it turned violent. People who saw part of it put the source of the roughness at provocations toward cops by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, run by Bob Avakian, who claims to be a purer Maoist than China’s current leaders. For 12 years, I’ve seen the RCYB as the smallest, loudest part of any protest march, ready to move in on any movement and pretend to be leading it. Members of another of his groups started that whole flag burning fuss. They know how to make precise, irrelevant acts that provoke the most fiery backlashes. This is not the same skill as building a real movement to empower real people.

STAGES OF LIFE: A major hit of the London theater season is A Tribute to the Blues Brothers, starring Aykroyd/Belushi impersonators ripping off their ripoffs of R&B greats. Ads quote a Times of London review: “The most slickly staged concert since the last Madonna tour, and much more fun.” Maybe somebody could do a tribute to it, so you’d get a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff (or politely, a tribute to a tribute to a tribute).

IMPRESSIONISM: Behind all the hoopla surrounding the end of the Reds, there was a little item about how the freedom movement survived at its nadir, thanks to one of my favorite things in the world, self-publishing. Newsweek sez that during the ’81 crackdown on Solidarity, the Polish underground fashioned a printing system using inks made from detergent and silkscreens made from elastic from men’s underwear. Imagine: the Soviet Union undone by union suits.

DEFENSIVENESS: The Weekly immediately followed its sensational date rape cover (proving just how hard it is not to get tabloidy about the subject) with an equally tabloidy self-defense story, with circulation staffers studiously removing the “This Image Offends Women” stickers from the vending-box windows. Let’s hope they find another reason soon to have two non-restaurant covers in a row…. And what’s this new pseudo-Rocket logo, anyway? The old Weekly logo was no award-winner, but it was a mark of design evolution going back to the paper’s founding in ’76 — when it ignored people too young to be “from the sixties,” instead of scoffing at us like it did in recent years. Now, the paper can only maintain its circulation/ad base by reaching out at last to us Generation X-ers. Natch, it does this in a patronizing way, with an uninspiring pomo logo that looks like what out-of-it oldsters think “those kids” will eat up. (I may have a totally diff. opinion a month from now.)

BUSH CAMPAIGN HEAD WILL PETUS (in USA Today, 1/12) insisted the campaign was not hopeless by saying, “George Bush has been declared dead more times than Elvis Presley.” The thing is, Elvis was declared dead just once, accurately. It’s the folks who declare him undead who are insistent and wrong. Which is the better metaphor for Bush’s chances?

PHILM PHUN: The Seattle film-production community is growing to the point of extensive postproduction facilities. This means we get such spectacles as Rebecca de Mornay, dubbing her lines from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, telling techies how proud she is of how her breasts look in one scene. Forsaking us for cheap Vancouver filming are the producers of This Boy’s Life, based on Tobias Wolff‘s Skagit County coming-O-age saga that’s the closest anybody’s come in nearly years to the Great Northwest Novel. R. DeNiro and E. Barkin star.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Commas Are Our Friends is English teacher Joe Devine’s “painless, fearless, and fun-filled approach to the rules of grammar.” At last: somebody who doesn’t use the language to belittle his inferiors, but who communicates the importance of communicating, the elegance of well-designed writing that leads to (and from) well-designed thinking…The Cereal Killings is Stranger cartoonist James Sturm’s new comic book that uses a standard murder mystery to ponder what if breakfast talking animals were real (and not like Roger Rabbit but like any sensitive artist forced into the compromise world of advertising). The premise brings a whole new dimension to the American iconography of spokes-critters. You could even stick in an analogy between black customers not allowed into the Cotton Club and the Trix Rabbit never getting the cereal with his own face on the box. (Well, maybe not.)

THOUGHT WHILE LISTENING TO KNDD replay the greatest nonhits of my youth: The punk/newave era can be said to have begun in ’76 with the first Ramones LP. Its end is somewhere between Angry Housewives, Duran Duran, and the LA hardcore bands that made punk orthodox and stale. But the real deathknell came with the emergence of rap, which fulfilled what the bebop guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t need white people to “popularize it” (i.e. muscle in). The whole century-old premise of what it meant to be a hip white boy was dislodged. (KNDD, by the way, is using its mention in last month’s In/Out List in its sales brochures. They didn’t mention my earlier, less nice, piece about ’em.)

EVENTS WE OUGHTA HAVE: Chicago’s Berlin Club advertised an “8th Annual Anti-New Year’s Party…No midnight announcements. No party favors. No cheap champagne. No `Auld Lange Syne.’ No more Father Time to kick around. We’re going to be covering all watches with tape at the door to prevent cheating.”

COLOR ME BEMUSED: There’s a distinct color-scheme generation gap. Yuppies (and yuppie ad agencies trying to appeal to teens) are into bright, gaudy, neony colors. Teens themselves are dressing in black and watching b/w music videos…Why is it that the kids who are supposed to be the New Chastity generation strut about in skintight spandex and black bras, while the newly middle-aged who still boast of their wild swinging pasts wear ugly grey sweaters and shapeless faded jeans?

CATHODE CORNER: Who at NBC saw to place a Teen Spirit deodorant ad in Sat. Nite Live‘s last network commercial slot (separated by two local slots) before Nirvana’s network debut of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (whose title wasn’t mentioned in the intro and isn’t in the lyrics)?…Some of the 71 Awards for Cable Excellence categories: “Directing live sports events coverage special or series. International educational or instructional/magazine/talk show special or series. Business or consumer programming special or series. Extended news or public affairs coverage. Entertainment host. Program interviewer. Stand-up comedy series. Game show special or series.”

REWIND: I’d like to advise you to avoid Blockbuster Video stores. You may already know that they’re trying to drive indy video stores out of business (exec Scott Beck in Video Business: “We’ve done our best to eradicate as many as we can, but they just stick with it”), that they’ve banned NC-17 movies while amply stocking repulsive slasher and shoot-em-up flicks. Now, film zine Ecco sez BBV’s imposed chainwide buying (preventing local stores from choosing anything), and has cut back sharply (some sources say entirely) on independent, foreign or classic films. If you don’t want the video revolution to die, don’t go there, or else we could end up with nothing to see but action hits.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Gosanko Chocolate Art makes chocolate baby coho salmon, $5 at fancier non-chain candy shops near you. Since the same molding process can be used to make both candy and plastic toys (indeed, a Quaker Oats division sells “industrial chocolate” to candymakers), sweetness can be made in virtually any 3-D shape. We’ve already mentioned the Ken Griffey Jr. bar, the Space Needle on a stick, and the skyline-of-Seattle collection. We can hardly wait for the Stars of Grunge Rockcollection.

NO DIRTY WORDS: Thanks to my antique-dealer mom, I now have a copy of Songs of Regina, a 1931 songbook for door-to-doorvacuum cleaner salesmen. The lyrics, written to the tune of popular songs of the day, were presumably to be sung at motivational sessions. “Glory, glory what a cleaner/Yes, the name of it’s Regina/And the money it will bring ya/As we go marching on.” The company survived the depression, perhaps due in part to these pep-rally songs. But it couldn’t survive the ’90s recession. The brand recently disappeared in a merger.

THE WORKS: A sense of realistic despair fell over the country rather swiftly, after years of strained overconfidence and hip nihilism. America’s hi-tech/service sector future was replaced by visions of a nation of glorified temp workers with no pensions, no insurance, no futures, no ability to buy the luxury goods and services that our economy was restructured around. What little investment was made in this country was made in the expectation of an affluent professional class that the rest of us would serve. That class is now shrinking, and nobody’s making anything for any other class. We’re reaping the fruits of the cynical ’70s-80s, from non-voting liberals to conservatives who’ll sell themselves (and the country) to anybody. From speculators who buy companies to loot their them, to CEOs who annihilate their workforces (decimating the consumer wealth needed to support their own companies’ products).

MAILBAG: Michael Protevi sez, “Misc. is wonderful. I can’t wait to show my friends/family back East. I really appreciate `The Real NW.’ It’s refreshing to hear news of the old Seattle, the pre-deluge. It always bothered me that they would tear down so many great buildings (Music Hall, etc.) and then pat themselves for being the most environmentally conscious (`recycling,’ etc.). What a crock! Obvious where the real power lies (and lies).”

‘TIL OUR RITE-O-SPRING March ish, vow to ask the next would-be tuff guy on the street in an LA Kings jacket if he’s ever in his life been to a hockey game, see the Museum of History & Industry’s five wooden-ship maidens on a stairwell wall (all sealed up in plastic packing wrap like seabound Laura Palmers), visit the new Signature Bound bookstore on 2nd, and recall the wisdom of child-development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce (from the Canadian journal Edges): “Intellect alone has never changed anyone. All change comes from the heart.”

THE GOOD OLE DAYS

Time, 9/15/61: “The ban the bomb campaigners…are dedicated to the dubious proposition that any political fate is preferable to the horror of atomic war.”

REPORT

Thanks to the person who listened to my KING radio appearance on 1/15.

The format of Misc. will remain stable for the near-term. Should I find a way to reduce the number of other things I do in order to support this, a bigger newsletter may ensue (maybe with ads, graphics and/or a cover price).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Fueilletonist”

JUST CUZ WE MAKE CARS TOO BIG FOR JAPANESE CITIES,

WITH THE STEERING WHEELS ON THE WRONG SIDE…

1/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and

the 1992 In/Out list, also published in the Seattle Times)

1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21

Welcome to a new ever-lovin’ fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture report that doesn’t follow trends and doesn’t really lead them either, but just stays out of their way.

Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero’s Books on 11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don’t think I’m going to see The Rapture…. There appear to be two Addams Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I saw. Maybe it’s like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw the critics’ edition, tell me what it was like…. This year’s best-of list by Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and never bothers to check what’s playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of 14) that didn’t show here, down significantly from previous years.

Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11 p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station’s next owner, the Providence Journal, was one of the papers that didn’t run the Doonesbury strips about Quayle’s possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them… Almost Live might go national next fall. Worldvision’s offering a syndicated weeknight version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.

Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like “Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed” and “Complex, condensed, SAM tough to build.” It had “thank you Seattle” vanity ads from Acme Iron Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the Carpet Resource Center. It’s more proof of how much easier it is to get politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing contractors, instead of uncouth artists.

Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): “What’s that up there?” “It’s a gas station.” “No, that’s a flower. Don’t you know, flowers are bee pee stations.” The real BP has a kids’ book promotion with G. Burghoff saying it’s important for children to read, so “you can become anything you want to be.” No — it’s important so America can regain a capable workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies like BP.

No “Willie” Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels. First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys who insist they’re not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN’s electronic masking made her look like Madonna’s “Blank” character in Dick Tracy. The defendant’s name is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy’s nephew but seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten Kennedys.

Ad Slogan of the Month: “It’s not your mother’s tampon.” I should hope not…

Good Buy, Baseball!: So let’s get together and buy the Mariners. Granted, it’s not as important as saving Frederick’s, but it’s still a good cause. At $100 million, it’ll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I’m reminded again of Jim Bouton’s words at the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle’s first attempt to keep a team: “Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can’t be all bad.”

Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested, presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)… The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It’s appropriate that Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).

Xmas ’91: Frederick’s save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that’s a sign of confidence to the store’s bankers remains to be seen… Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment of Hasbro’s product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle dock.

Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in hardcover.

None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, “David Ansen of Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of your seat.'” Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: “The twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone’s Movie Can’t Be Trusted.” But the last word, as always, goes to Oliver (“Fuck me, rock god!”) Stone: “I think a president was illegally killed.”

The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the Northwest is not Paradise. There’s this whole mystique that gets more exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters “turned conservative” in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women’s-choice initiative was due more to opponents’ well-funded lies than any deep anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson to the Senate, how we’re no more or less conservative than ever. It’s just getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the early ’70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: “Northwest Style: Laid Back with Dockers.”) The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our “tolerance” was more like apathy. We’re not mellow, we’re cold and sullen. The real spirit of the Northwest isn’t in aPoulsbo bed-n’-breakfast, it’s in the acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The syndrome’s worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by folks who think our State Reps are called “assemblymen.”)

Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and shrillily demand the right to destroy the few “real” spaces left.They built the S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan’s deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L’s) Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture. Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds, was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the nation’s social terrain.

Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the “rabbit ears” TV antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P. Middlemark died in ’89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, “nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all).” Sounds like my kinda guy.

‘Til our fab Feb. ish, make a ’92 resolution to petition KCTS to show The ’90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn’t count), and join us again.

PASSAGE

Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 12/1: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of thing.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I don’t have a business checking account at this time. Please make all subscriptions payable to “Clark Humphrey.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Synecdoche”

THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92

I don’t claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That’s the logic of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what’s peaking, declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I previously predicted the rise of Estonia, ’70s music, and nose rings, as well as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.

12/91 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating the first four Stranger Misc. columns)

Elegance? What Elegance?

Welcome back to the sixth year-ending edition of Misc., the newsletter that hopes the end of the cold war will mean the end of gratuitous mushroom-cloud shots in experimental films. And despite recent tragic events, we still root against all LA sports teams.

Silence = Debt: You may have heard how KIRO’s top brass censored a report on 7 UW football players with police records (basic jock crimes like speeding and assault). You may not have heard another TV censorship tale. The KCTS Arts and Performance Group had its entire funding cut by its sole patron, Puget Sound Bank, after a Seattle Men’s Chorus show with transvestite segments. (The bank and the station denied any cause-and-effect accusations.) The unit must now hustle for funding for individual events (insuring more conformity to corporate tastes). It may be about time to give up on allegedly “public TV,” set up financially by the Nixon administration expressly to be beholden to big business. KCTS has shunted documentaries like Tongues Untied to the wee hours, while devoting prime time to animal shows, Kissinger interviews, and Lawrence Welk reruns. The ’90s, the one regular forum for true independent points of view, is now only seen on KCTS at 3 a.m. Thursday mornings. Nationally, shows that don’t suck up to corporate America don’t get (or stay) on. Mobil asserts a lot of creative control over Masterpiece Theater and Mystery serials; nothing goes on that doesn’t support the British class system as a model society. It’s time to find a real alternative distribution system for professional, independent video.

The Fine Print (card wrapped with a Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers figurine in a Frosted Flakes box): “Parents: The toy in this package meets or exceeds currently applicable government and voluntary toy industry standards. As with any toy, we suggest you provide guidance to your children regarding proper use.”

Notes: The local media made a big to-do about Nirvana having to buy out an LA band’s claim to the name. In fact, this sort of thing happened a lot in the punk days. The beloved late English Beat was known as just the Beat everywhere but in North America, where a lame Calif. band had already released an LP as the Beat. A fledgling Seattle band had to stop calling itself The News after Huey Lewis’s lawyers showed up. In 1979, there were unrelated bands in NY, SF and Detroit all called the Mutants… For two minutes of video airtime, M. Jackson ceased to be a bland, commercial imitation of weirdness and became a real provocateur. Of course, that footage had to be dropped.

What’s In Store: The downtown Bon has been running this big “Return to Elegance” ad campaign. Seattle’s newcomers might be fooled into thinking this was some grand dame of merchandising that had lost its focus before recovering its past glory. But we know better. We know this is the same place that used to have flannel fabrics and a great homely budget floor and acres of Qiana and stretch pants and a quintessentially 1977 boutique called “Annie’s Hall.”

News Item of the Month (P-I correction, 10/24): “The jicama is a brown, crisp-fleshed tuberous vegetable; the kiwano is a fruit with orange, spiky skin and green, seedy pulp. Due to a typesetting error, a story in the Oct. 16 editions confused the two.”

Ad Verbs: There was this wonderful USA Today story on 10/31 about national ad campaigns that didn’t make it. Along with the usual everyday rejections (a 3 Stooges fax-machine ad rejected by the Japanese product manager who never heard of the Stooges), there was an ad that would’ve warned against taking an inferior 4 x 4 into remote rugged terrain where it might leave you stranded: “Drive a Landcruiser or drink your own urine.” Then there was a magazine ad with a simple before-and-after equation, with a tube of Clearasil photographed on the Before side and a wrapped Trojan on the After side. Wrote the Clearasil managers: “This promise cannot be substantiated.”

Xmas ’91: One place you might not think to look for gift ideas is the American Bar Association Journal. There you can find a sweatshirt bowdlerizing Shakespeare to read, “The first thing we do, let’s kiss all the lawyers.” Another outfit, Legal Artworks of Chester, Conn., offers framed reproductions of “distinguished works of art with legal subject matter: trial scenes, lawyers, jurors, etc. by Daumier, Thomas Hart Benton, others.”

Still Earning Their 10 Percent: The Curtis Publishing Co. (the Indianapolis right-wing couple who run the nostalgia/revival version of the Saturday Evening Post) now has a subsidiary, the Curtis Management Co., merchandising agents for about 100 sports and entertainment celebrities, most of whom are dead (Twain, Abbott & Costello, Buckwheat, Bogart, Garland, Belushi, Hank Williams Sr., Satchel Paige, Babe Ruth). The company’s PR documents identify its living clients (the third Benji and some ex-football players) with an asterisk denoting “Available for personal appearance bookings”).

When Will the Madness Cease?: Thenext victim of upscaling is the legendary Valhalla Tavern in Ballard, now the Old Pequliar Ale House.

Getting Mighty Crowded: I’ve had little positive to say about Joe Bob Briggs, the redneck-pretending to be a yuppie-pretending to be a redneck who writes lovingly about bad movies. But in a recent issue of his We Are the Weird newsletter, he noted that “in Seattle, which used to be one of the friendliest places in America, people will very openly tell you how much you are not welcome there, especially if you intend to build a house, open a new shopping center, or for that matter just move there to live with your idiot cousin.” His advice to Seattle and other “anti-growth” places: You don’t have to sell a house. Don’t say you’re against growth and then beg United Airlines to move its HQ to your town. If you don’t want more traffic, don’t demand that builders include so many parking spaces. And “watch it with the `I was here first’ syndrome. Seattle, after all, is a man’s name. He was an Indian.”

Junk Food of the Month: Fun Food Inc. of Portland offers a line of kiddie microwave breakfasts, including mini-servings of “wacky” waffles, French toast and pancakes (all with turkey sausage) and an egg-muffin sandwich. The foods are moist enough to eat without syrup; the names include My Dream Breakfast and SuperSports Breakfast.

Local Publication of the Month: Where’s Dan Quayle?, the The Waldo-parody drawn by Puyallup’s Bron Smith, is the first non-Trudeau political-cartooning book on the bestseller list in recent memory. Like the Waldo books and Quayle himself (and unlike traditional political cartoons), it’s obsessively “light.” I’ve said that mandatory “happiness” is a hallmark of sleaze; the book’s creators display this more effectively than any blatant editorial cartoon ever can.

Art in Form, 1981-91: It lived and died as a store selling fancy (often costly) books on progressive art and art theory. Its greater value for 10 years was as a gathering place for smart people. The merchandise is being cleared in a “deconstructing” sale. The space will live as a world-music shop serving the same clientele, but it won’t be the same.

Painful Realization for the New Millennium: By the time I’m 60, tourist towns will hold upscale rap festivals with mostly-white casts and all-white audiences sipping wine and basking in what they’ll call the first art form of the 21st century. The music will sound like Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs backed by bad jazz. Already, a jazz combo has covered Grandmaster Flash’s The Message.

Sign of the Month (on a city Landscape Dept. truck): “A city without trees isn’t fit for a dog.”

The Drug Bug: The new Pay n’ Save on 2nd & Union has Seattle’s first inside drugstore espresso bar. And I still remember Seattle’s last drugstore soda fountain…

Happy Returns?: The Init. 120 turnout helped Seattle gain its first predominantly-female city council. The networks chose not to cover this election; CBS preferred to run a cheap made-in-Vancouver movie about three women (why do women in TV movies and modern novels run around in packs of three?) who defy possessive boyfriends by posing for Playboy…. As the next “on-year” election approaches, the Repo men insist that the recession’s over, based on obsolete “leading indicators” and other financial data that don’t relate to real un-/underemployment or shrinking real wages. A pro-business government that’s good at nothing but doling out favors, borrowing money, and destroying people/things is a perfect match for an economy that’s good at nothing but advertising, distribution, and “earning” paper profits.

Another Local Publication of the Month: Adam Woog’s Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats: 100 Years of Invention in the Pacific Northwest is the kind of book I’ve always wanted to write, but could never get away from the need for a day job long enough.

The Mailbag: About a dozen of you responded to my plea for suggestions on turning this into a more self-sufficient enterprise (thank you). Zola Mumford said I should market Misc. to young adults about “to make Kerouacian journeys westward…for Seattle’s `Golden Country.’ You could sell Misc. to them before they come here, and they can be just as hip as you and me.” Thanks, but I don’t run a Hipster Chamber of Commerce. I’m here to expose harsh realities, not for smug boosterism. Besides, the Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. I mean, the Elks lodges started here. How hip can we be?

Writes & Wrongs: In my day job at the Comics Journal, I was phoned by a Univ. of Chicago intellectual writing an article on “the declining role of words in American society.” He pumped me for any info that would support his presupposition that we (or our younger peers) have become non-reading, non-writing, non-talking image addicts. I replied that we’re really more inundated with words than ever: in little publications like this, piles of documents in schools and offices, computers and fax machines, hundreds of specialty magazines, thousands of paperback novels. Talk radio, phone sex, rap, and virtually all TV (except commercials and music videos) depend on the spoken word. My caller refused to consider my arguments. He sounded like one of those non-thinking highbrows who blissfully assume that “those kids” have all gone to hell since his generation was in young-adulthood (whether his generation is that of 1945 or of 1968 doesn’t matter; the syndrome’s the same). So-called “serious” writers can be the most reactionary people in the cultural world, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics.

Philm Phun: The Addams Family, despite pans by fuddy-duddy critics, is the best macabre comedy since Young Frankenstein (or at least since Santa Sangre). It could’ve been an all-time classic if it hadn’t been ruined by product placements and the obligatory out-of-place hit songs (by Hammer). It’s intensely appropriate that Grandmama was played by Judith Malina, a founder of NYC’s Living Theatre, which believes in unleashing desire and imagination to defeat conformity and free the human spirit. Just the message of the most life-affirming Hollywood movie of the year.

We’ll return in the next year with our annual In/Out list. ‘Til then, be sure to visit Castle Cash and Carry on U. Way and Mr. Haney’s Curio Emporium on Ballard Ave., and recall the words of archy and mehitabel creator Don Marquis: “When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?”

PASSAGE

Harvard Russia-watcher Russell Seitz, in the 11/4 NY Times, on the USSR’s increasingly desperate deals to sell any technology that might attract hard currency: “Nobody ever contemplated that the Soviet military-industrial complex would end up in Chapter 11. It’s the yard sale at the end of history.”

REPORT

For an undetermined amount of time, excerpts from recent Misc. issues will be reprinted in The Stranger, giving thousands more potential readers a glance at the wonders to be found here.

If anyone can help me distribute future newsletters, please leave a message at 524-1967.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Indivuous”

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE STUPID LOOKING

THAN FOOTBALL UNIFORMS WITH BARE MIDRIFFS?