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Welcome to a brisk autumnal Misc., the column that can’t go to the Speakeasy Cafe without being accosted by another foreign TV crew. In one week this month, Speakeasy’s hosted camcorder teams from Britain, France, and Australia (the latter for Beyond 2000,seen on the Discovery Channel). Speaking of televisual revelations…
TALK’S CHEAP, AND I LIKE IT THAT WAY: First, that professional prissy-at-large Wm. Bennett gets on the anti-gangsta-rap bandwagon. That was a surreptitiously almost-valid stance for a moralistic high-horser to take, since gangsta rap is essentially the invention of Hollywood promoters selling white mall kids on a variation of the century-old showbiz stereotype of black men as stupid but sexy savages. But now, ex-Bush aide Bennett’s taking his demagoguery further by attacking sleaze talk shows, claiming they “make the abnormal normal.” But Bill, the abnormal is normal, everywhere except in the minds of people like you. You’ve never been to a 12-step meeting? Never listened to old ladies’ gossip? Never had a relative the elders only talk about when kids aren’t around? The things on these shows are the stuff of real life heretofore repressed from public consciousness. Yes the shows are exploitive, but much less so than Republican politicians.
GAME THEORY: The new FAO Schwarz has opened in what still looks like the ground level of a bank building, completing phase 1 of the downtown establishment’s plan to move the retail axis east to 6th Ave. It’s less a store for kids than for adult collectors (the folks who buy those Scarlett Barbie and Rhett Ken dolls on QVC). It’s got just enough kid stuff, however, to make it suitably zoo-ey this Xmas season. Whenever a big chain store comes to town, the initial journalistic reaction is to pronounce doom for local independent merchants in the chain’s genre; but in this case, the chief independently-owned “competition” is Magic Mouse in Pioneer Square, which remains a store for preppy parents (“Look, Lynnette, a teddy bear covered in genuine faux cashmere!”) and hence has its own market niche which Schwarz only partly overlaps. Still speaking of the “white whine” set…
PRESSED: The free Weekly appropriately debuted with the cover headline, “Status Quo Under Siege.” The paper that’s always identified itself as the voice of the Inner Circle finds both that circle and itself under attack. The issue’s main essay was poignantly nostalgic in its defense of the notion that “progressive” politics means leaving everything in the hands of professional “leaders.” It’s a relic of the old Minnesota and Wisconsin “progressives,” who identified liberal pieties with “nice” WASP culture–partly to rally WASP farmers and laborers against decadent NYC financiers, but also partly to keep German Catholics and other immigrants out of local power. (One of the original tools used in the Upper Midwest to keep those-who-know-better in charge was at-large city council elections, which the Weekly piece exhorted Seattle voters to keep.) To this day, the whole NPR/ PCC/ Evergreen/ English-department universe is trapped in a contradiction between advocating “multiculturalism” and preseving its own hyperbland monoculture. The Right cheerfully exploits this contradiction, while promoting its own contradiction between “We the People” talk and PAC-ass-kissing action.
As it turned out, the underfunded City Council reformers lost. So did Referendum 48, that nasty scheme endorsed by Republican legislators to officially bestow big property owners with a status akin to that of old feudal lords, as rulers of their domain. Proponents hoped for a Seattle vs. Downstate vote, but forgot the whole Puget Sound basin is filling up with folks who might themselves live in ugly suburbs built by pro-48 developers, but who don’t necessarily want those developers to have even more power than they do now.
As for the Weekly itself, can it boost its circulation numbers (in sharp decline the past two years) while continuing to identify solely with staid whitebread baby boomers? Maybe, by rededicating itself to its target audience’s infotainment needs. Right now, the Puget Sound Business Journal does a more thorough job of reporting mover-n’-shaker matters, with far less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” A paper that covers politics and highbrow culture with the clarity PSBJ uses to cover corporate junk might have a chance.
9/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)
Generation X: The Original Poem
Here at Misc. World HQ, we’ve been trying like heck to figure out the intermediate intricacies of navigatin’ that Info Hi-Way. For a Machead like me to learn an Internet UNIX line-command interface from the online help (much of which is written for programmers and system operators, not end users) is like learning to drive by reading a transmission-repair manual.
IT’S A CRIME: Ya gotta give Clinton credit even in the face of apparent defeat. By trying to push some comprehensive health-reform, no matter how kludgy, he asked Congress to inconvenience big business, something it hasn’t done on such a general scale in maybe two decades. By even bringing up the premise that perhaps what’s good for corporate interests might not be good for the country, he’s significantly altered the boundaries of public debate at the “highest” levels of our political culture. I’m a single-payer-plan fan myself, but it was clear that there wasn’t enough common sense in Congress for that to go this time. This is an example of what I’ve been saying about the need for us “progressive” types to get into practical politics. We’ve gotta expand from just protesting things, into the comparatively boring nuts-n’-bolts of getting things done. The moneybags have a powerful voice; we need to get just as loud.
The crime bill, however, deserved to die. In order to get a simple, rational ban on some deadly assault weapons and a few modest prevention programs through an NRA-coddled Congress, Clinton loaded a bulky omnibus bill with a lot of dumb and/or misguided ideas — more cops, more prisons, more prisoners, longer sentences, the death penalty for almost five dozen new crimes, including the killing of a federal egg inspector; in short, more of the same old “Git Tuff” bluster that just plain doesn’t work except to raise politicians’ and talk-radio callers’ adrenaline levels. And half those 100,000 new federally-subsidized cops are allocated for towns under 100,000 pop., and all of them go off the federal payroll in five years. Once again, they’re spending a lot of our money just to feel good about themselves.
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD DEPT.: Again this year, there was a Belltown Inside Out promotion, celebrating the Denny Regrade as an allegedly “diverse” and even “artistic” urban village. Over the past four years the “artistic” part of the program has steadily diminished, befitting a neighborhood where most of the artists’ studios and affordable artist housing have gone to condos. Meanwhile, the J&M Cafe, longtime crawling ground of Young Republicans and other escapees from Bellevue, is moving to Belltown; adding to a circuit of “upscale” drink and/or dance joints coexisting increasingly uneasily with the artsier music and hangout spots. I’ve come to know the yuppie bars as places to avoid walking past at night if you don’t want to be fagbashed or sexually harassed by suburban snots who’ve never been told they can’t just do any damn thing they want. I’m perfectly happy to let these folks have their own scene; I just wish they had more decorum about it, befitting their alleged status in our society — i.e., I wish they’d stop pissing in my alley. (I also wish they’d leave the Frontier Room for those of us who actually like it.)
TURN OFF, TUNE OUT, DROP DEAD DEPT.: I come not to praise Woodstock nostalgia but to bury it. Yeah, Woodstock ’94 is a big crass commercial operation–but so was the original. It directly hastened the consolidation of “underground” music into the corporate rock that by 1972 or so would smother almost all true creativity in the pop/ rock field. If there was a generation defined by the event, it was one of affluent college kids who sowed their wild oats for a couple of years, called it a political act, then went into the professions they’d been studying — the Demographically Correct, the people advertisers and ad-supported media crave to the point of ignoring all others.
By telling these kids they were Rebels by consuming sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, the corporate media dissuaded many borderline hippie-wannabes from forming any real movement for cultural or political change, a movement that just might have only broken down the class, racial, and demographic divisions that boomercentric “Classic Rock” serves to maintain.
NO PLACE LIKE DOME: The local TV stations, especially KOMO, still persist in their tirades against so-called “government waste,” usually involving state or county buildings that were constructed for more money than they absolutely had to have been. Apparently, KOMO would prefer that all public works be built as cost-efficiently as the Kingdome originally was…
GROUNDING OUT: At the start of this baseball season, Misc. remarked that the sport’s biggest current problem was its association with right-wing cultural values, in all their contradictions. The strike only confirms this diagnosis. The owners (most of whom now represent Reagan-era speculative new money, as opposed to old family fortunes) aren’t so much in conflict with the players as with each other, representing different visions of conservatism; just as the post-Reagan Republican Party struggles to keep the religious ideologues and the free-market folks in one camp.
Baseball has traditionally had richer teams that could afford to get and keep the best players (like the Yankees and Red Sox) and poorer teams that couldn’t (like yesterday’s St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators). Today, there’s less of a caste split in the standings than there used to (the Royals and Indians have done well, the Mets and Dodgers haven’t) but there’s quite a split in the financial coffers. By advocating league-wide revenue sharing, the relatively poor “small market teams” (which really include bigger towns like Detroit and Montreal) want to lead corporate baseball into a paternalistic philosophy not unlike the pre-Thatcher UK Tories, based on joint investment in the future prosperity of the whole investing class. The profitable, so-called “large market teams” (which include smaller towns like Atlanta) are out to preserve the sport’s current philosophy of Reaganite rugged individualism.
This means, perhaps ironically, that the owners in New York and Boston are advocating the so-called “radical conservatism” traditionally associated with western Republicans, while the owners in Seattle and Colorado are advocating the old-boy-network spirit associated with Boston Brahmins and old-school Wall St. bankers. Without a united business philosophy, the owners can’t present a united front to the players, who are simply holding on to their own by opposing a salary cap, a move that puts them in unofficial cahoots with the rich teams.
DOWN WIT’ DA FLAVOUR: Your ob’d’nt correspondent recently spent half a week on Vancouver, the town that gave the world the smart sounds of DOA, 54/40, Skinny Puppy and k.d. lang. Now, though, thrash-fratfunk music is seriously considered by many to be the thing to put BC music back “on the map.” I stood through parts of a day-long free downtown outdoor rockfest, sponsored by a skateboard store; the skate demonstrations were astounding; but the bands mostly suffered from tiresome macho posturing. Some of them were accomplished players if you’re into that sort of thing, but I always want more.
There are still Vancouverites who try for creative sounds (including Cub and the Smugglers), but they’re hampered by a struggling club scene that’s stifled by real estate costs and liquor laws more restrictive than Washington’s (except for their 19-year legal age).
It was the week before the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, and the BC protest community was planning civil disruptions to call attention to Canada’s treatment of native peoples and the environment, England’s treatment of Ulster, et al. Official corporate sponsorships for the Games were in full force, including a billboard promising “The Best Coverage of the Games” — sponsored byShield condoms. That was next to a non-Games billboard that proclaimed, “You don’t have to abstain, just use protection” — showing a suggestive-looking hot dog and a package of Maalox. B.C. isn’t among the test markets for OK Soda but they do have the new plastic Coke bottle that looks like an old glass Coke bottle, sort of.
Anyhow, the fun and weirdness we know and love as Canada (from ketchup-flavored potato chips to the big nude virtual family that is Wreck Beach to the relatively-working community experiment of Co-Op Radio) might not be with us forever. Quebec separatists are now the official opposition party in the House of Commons; if their next referendum for provincial secession passes, the whole nation might collapse. Some folks have talked about creating a new Nation of Cascadia combining B.C., Washington and Oregon (whose motto, coined in the pre-Civil War days, is “The Union”). I’d love it if we could get their health care, gun control, strong public broadcasting, and appreciation for urban communities; just so long as we don’t have to have their high booze and gas taxes, media censorship, greasy-palm political corruption, and lack of a Bill of Rights.
PUMPED: Unocal 76 isn’t just gonna turn some service station service bays into convenience stores, but into complete fast-food-to-go kitchens. Reminds one of that mythical roadside sign, “Eat Here and Get Gas.”
DUMB AD OF THE MONTH: I’ve two questions about the current commercial, “Like a robot, I kept using the same tampon.” (1) Most humans who use those things don’t keep using the same one (unless they use those health-food-store washable sponge thingies). (2) I’ve never seen a robot that uses such products, have you? (You can imagine to yourself about The Jetsons’ Rosie or the Heavy Metal cover droids.)
STRIPPED: The worst comic strip in the daily papers in recent memory was Mallard Fillmore, billed in a P-I publicity blurb as “a conservative Doonesbury.” But Doonesbury sets its liberalism in solid character gags. Old-time conservative strips (Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Steve Canyon) anchored their politics in a holistic set of traditional cultural values, including the values of solid storytelling and fine draftsmanship. Mallard simply had an unattractively-designed, boorish duck character spout snide personal insults about the Clintons. If Models Inc. doesn’t know it’s not hip, Mallard doesn’t know it’s not funny…. It was dropped the same weekend that my trashing of it went to press.
PRESSED: The Times has lost a reported 14,000 readers since its redesign late last year, a change that turned a dull but idiosyncratic paper into a dull but bland one. Perhaps Fairview Fanny management is finally awakening to the notion that if you make your paper as boring as possible you should expect readers to be bored by it. But at least in the new design you always know where everything is: World news in the A Section, local news in the B Section, birth announcements in… you get the picture.
BOOZE NOOZE: Some legislators think it’d be a good idea to scrap the state liquor stores and let big chain stores sell the stuff. I support any move to dilute the power of the WSLCB, a truly outmoded institution whose picayune policies helped thwart any real nightlife industry here. However, I’m gonna miss the old liquor stores with their harsh lighting, no-frills shelving, surly clerks, and institutionalistic signage. Every aspect of the experience expressed a Northwest Protestant guilt trip over the evils of John Barleycorn; just like the old state rules for cocktail lounges, which had to be dark windowless dens of shame.
FLYING: A high-ranking exec with Northwest Airlines (America’s first all-non-smoking airline) was nabbed at the Boise airport earlier this month for holding pot. Shouldn’t he rather be working for that new commuter airline in Olympia?
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Ball Park Fun Franks are microwaveable mini-wieners with their own mini-buns! Tiny li’l critters, they rank in size somewhere between Little Smokies and the fictional “Weenie Tots” on a memorable Married…With Children episode. Speaking of weenies…
WHO’S THE REAL PRICK?: If you didn’t already have a good reason to vote against Sen. Fishstick, a.k.a. Slade Gorton, a.k.a. Skeletor, here’s one. Taking a cue from Jesse Helms’s perennial NEA-bashing, Fishstick’s just introduced a bill in the Senate that would let local cable companies censor public access shows. The poster child in his attack: our ol’ pal Philip Craft and his Political Playhouse show, in which groups of left-wing merrymakers chat up about hemp, safe sex, health care, military intervention and other fun topics–occasionally uncostumed. I don’t know what attracts Fishstick toward his obsession with the privates of Craft and co-hostBoffo the Clown, but this is a clear act of political silencing, under the guise of cultural intolerance. Craft’s weekly series only sometimes shows bare penii, but always speaks out against the kind of pro-corporate, anti-environmentalist policies that Fishstick supports. Oppose his divisive vision now, while you still can.
FLOWER POWERLESS: Rob Middleton, singer for the band Flake, made the mistake of picking a few flowers early one morning at Martin Selig’s Metropolitan Plaza towers (the Can of Spam Building and Zippo Lighter Building across from Re-bar, and site of KNDD’s studios). Four cop cars showed up to nab the vandal, who was arrested for theft, trespassing and assorted other charges. Our coveter of thy neighbor’s flora spent a few hours in jail until $850 in bail was paid.
RAISING STAKES: Just in time for Spy magazine’s return to the stands comes some local news about its favorite subject. Up by my ol’ hometown of Marysville, the Tulalip Tribes are talking up an offer to jointly develop a reservation casino with gaming mogul and NY/NJ regional celebrity Donald Trump, who’s apparently rethought his previous quasi-racist remarks against reservation casinos. I hadn’t gotten along well in that town when I lived there, and wasn’t sad when it was transformed from a country town into a suburb. But I dunno about the place becoming a squeaky-clean version of sin city. And I sure dunno if I want Spy following every move of my old neighbors; tho’ Taso Lagos, the frequent Spy letter-writer from Seattle who’s now trying to sell a movie project called American Messiah (starring Keister as a movie director who says “fuck” a lot in the video trailer), might.
`X’ WORDS: Thanks to artist-critic Charles Krafft, I’ve now gotten to see the original Generation X–the book Billy Idol’s old band took its name from. It was written in 1964 by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson; the cover blurb on the US paperback promised to expose “what’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth.” It’s mostly about mods, rockers, teddies, all yourQuadrophenia types. There’s also two pages about playwright Joe Orton.
The title resulted from an ad the authors placed in a London paper, asking young people to send life stories. Responses included a poem titled Generation X, “written in the peace and tranquility of the trees and gardens of a psychiatric hospital” by “a female, age 20, suffering from depression and neurosis.” Lines include “Who am I? Who cares about me? I am me. I must suffer because I am me…Money, time, these are substitutes for real happiness. Where can I find happiness? I do not know. Perhaps I shall never know…” That original coiner of today’s most overused media catch phrase, who’d now be 50, wasn’t named.
‘TIL WE NEXT CROSS INKSTAINS, be sure to toast 20 post-Watergate years by making your own 18 and a half minute gap, write NBC to demand more episodes of Michael Moore’s mind-blowin’ TV Nation, and enter our new Misc. contest. Name the TV show (past or present, any genre) that’s least likely to be turned into a movie–then write a 50-word-or-less synopsis of a movie based on that show. Remember, there’ve already been movies based on soaps and game shows, so anything’s open. The best entry, in the sole opinion of this author, receives a new trade-paperback book of our choosing. There’ll also be a prize for the best scenario based on the title Nightly Business Report–The Movie.
PASSAGE
1955 magazine ad for Formfit girdles:
“It’s true! This local gal made good
In glamorous, clamorous Hollywood!
To wine and dine me nights, at nine,
The wolves would line for miles on Vine.
My footprints at Grauman’s Chinese?
They took my imprints to my knees!
They soon acclaimed me Miss 3-D:
Delightful, Dazzling, De-Lovely!
And what made me a thing enthralling?
My Formfit outfit. Really, dah’ling!
REPORT
My book on the real history of Seattle punk and related four-letter words should be out next March. Rewrites, pic-gathering, fact-checking, lyric-clearing and page-laying-out are about to commence bigtime. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see me out much this fall.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Mistigri”
HOW MANY OF YOU STILL WANT THE SONICS
TO GO TO THE KINGDOME NEXT SEASON?
MISC.’S TOP 22Sunday Mexican movie musicals on Univision
Suzzallo Library, UW (even with the awkward-looking new wing)
The Beano, UK comic weekly
Bedazzled Discs, 1st & Cherry
Hal Hartley movies
NRBQ
The New York Review of Books
M. Coy Books, 2nd & Pine
Salton electric coffee-cup warmers
Real Personal, CNBC cable sex talk show
Bike Toy Clock Gift, Fastbacks (Lucky Records reissue)
Daniel Clowes “Punky” wristwatches at the Sub Pop Mega Mart
Lux Espresso on 1st
The stock music in NFL Films shows on ESPN
Hi-8 camcorders
Seattle Bagel Bakery
First Hill Shop-Rite
Off-brand bottled iced tea
Carnivore, Pure Joy (PopLlama reissue)
Granta
Opium for the Masses, Jim Hogshire (Loompanics Unlimited)
Bulk foods
MISC.’S BOTTOM 19Telemarketers hawking car-insurance plans, who don’t take “But I don’t own a car” for an answer
Today’s Saturday Night Live (except for Ellen Cleghorn)
Voice-mail purgatory
Pay-per-view movies and home shopping taking over more cable channels
MTV’s rock merchandise home-shopping shows
The Paramount-Viacom merger
CDs with no names on the label side, just cute graphics that lead to misplacement
Mickey Unrapped, the Mickey Mouse rap CD
Tampon and diaper ads showing how well the things absorb the same mysterious blue liquid (they must be made for those inbred, blue-blooded folks)
KVI-AM (dubbed “KKKVI” by Jean Godden), the 24-hour-a-day version of Orwell’s “Two-Minutes Hate”
Reality Bites
Speed
PBS/KCTS’s endless promo hype for Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries
Goatees
Backward baseball caps Rock-hard breads from boutique bakeries, especially if loaded with tomato or basil
Morphing
Ice beer
Slade Gorton
8/91 Misc. Newsletter
Spend A Night in the “Night Gallery”
Welcome back to a midsummer night’s Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that’s highly disappointed now that we don’t get to hear mega-metal concerts at the never-to-be Ackerley Arena. We’re also bemused by the recent flap that Chief Sealth (the Milli Vanilli of the 1850s) never spoke about buffalo and railroads (which he never saw) and may not have said all attributed to him in the famous 1887-published translation of an 1854 speech. Hate to disillusion you, but folks often get famous for things they never actually said (Jesus never spoke in King James English, Bogart never said “Play It Again Sam”). Sealth has become a figure around which a body of ideas has coalesced — the best way for anyone to become immortal.
AN AROMATIC PROPOSAL, BUT SHORT ON BODY: Ste. Michelle and its sister winery Columbia Crest want the Feds to OK “Pacific Coast” as an official appellation for wines blended from Washington, Oregon, and/or California grapes. (Presently, wines with grapes from more than one state have to be called “American”.) A winery spokesperson admitted that the requested name is part of a plan to promote Washington wines to foreign markets far more familiar with Calif. product.
THORNS: KIRO showed a Seattle secretary who was “blessed” with the delivery of over 650 red roses and dozens of red balloons to her office cubicle on 6/26, from a boyfriend who wanted to become a husband. In a switch from most extravagant-surprise wedding proposals you hear about on the TV news, she said no.
ELSEWHERE IN CUPIDLAND: Successful Singles, the high-priced dating service with questionnaire-membership forms at every steak and pancake restaurant in town, was sued by a Denver man who sez they kept setting him up w/totally the wrong kind of woman. He put on his membership form that he didn’t want a woman who was obsessed with money, yet his arranged dates would ask immediately how much he made.
OFF KEY: The Big 6 multinational record companies want Congress to ban all independent importation of music, claiming some line about stopping “bootlegs” when they really just want to stamp out all imports and the independent stores that sell them. Even worse, the majors might be so eager to get an anti-import bill that they might make a deal with the pro-censorship forces in return.
SPROCKETS: Joel Siegel, the worst national critic since Dixie Whatley, called The Naked Gun 2 1/2 “Every bit as funny as The Naked Gun 1 and 2.” He didn’t even realize that there was no Naked Gun 2.
“LOVE PARTY” BUSTED: Police were quick to halt the BYOB disco affair at the Georgetown steam plant in late June, but decidedly less speedy responding to the rioting and looting by disgruntled patrons at the 2nd Ave. hat store where the tickets were sold. The store may not recover from the losses and damages.
WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: Went to Vancouver briefly. Heard a Quebecoise newswoman talking about Slovenia. Saw the CD jukebox at the Cruel Elephant rock club with the sign LOONIES ONLY (the $1 coin with a loon on it). Missed the Grocery Hall of Fame in the warehouse district of Richmond. Heard horror stories about Hong Kong investors deliberately hyper-inflating real estate prices for money-transfer purposes. Read about third-generation Chinese-Canadians facing hate attacks even tho’ they’ve no connection to the financiers.
WHAT ELSE I DID THIS SUMMER: Visited San Francisco, “The City” to which all others are compared (by its own boosters), almost as packed as Tokyo but less civil, where they stare you down if you mistakenly call the Muni Metro a “subway.” I now understand why Bay Areans never look at Seattle for anything we’re really like but for their own fantasies; since our houses have lawns, by their standards we’re a small-town paradise. Any illusions about the self-proclaimed intellectual apex of the hemisphere vanished when I overheard the staff at City Lights Books discussing which was the best theater to see Terminator 2 at! On the plus side, environmental group Urban Habitat has an “Eco-Rap” contest, to help rid the image of ecologists as only white college grads. And H. Caen, whose local columns are clipped and framed in the hundreds of stores and restaurants he plugs, had a great essay on how he misses the SF of Tony Bennett’s song, but realizes that era’s “urbane sophistication” hid a lot of sins, principally corruption and racism. He singlehandedly broke my image of San Franciscans as a people eager to bitch about everyone else in America but unwilling to take even valid criticism of their own town. All in all, a nicer tourist trap than most, with bookstores almost as good as ours, a bagel deli on every block, a decent handful of non-oldies clubs, and two Spanish TV stations. But I’m still gonna call it Friscoany damn time I want to.
(Everybody I met there, by the way, said they’d heard Seattle was “really a cool place,” but couldn’t say why. Came back to find that somebody made a passage from the July Misc. into a street poster, without credit.)
FRAMED: Big cost overruns plague the new Seattle Art Museum, as they so often do with such more officially respectable uses of taxpayer money as Stealth bombers. The contractor calls the Robt. Venturi design “unconstructible.” And I thought it was another concrete box with superficial decorative reliefs. But the P-I sez it’ll be a definitive architectural statement of the late 20th century, the first major US building by a guy whose writings have inspired many architects but himself hasn’t won many bids (well, actually it’s mostly by his design staff).
IN THE (COURT) HOUSE: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s got a nasty feud with his ex-label, Nastymix. Following two albums that were the first locally-produced-and-recorded million sellers ever (or at least since the Fleetwoods in 1960), Mix-A-Lot (a.k.a. Anthony Ray, who presumably took his stage name to avoid confusion with second-string big band leader Ray Anthony) accused Nastymix of cheating him and exploiting what had essentially been a “handshake” contract. Nastymix countersued to block Mix-A-Lot’s jump to a major label.
KNOCK ON WOOD: The Chicago Tribune said on 6/27 that lumber companies have suddenly, jointly raised wholesale prices 20 to 30 percent nationally, blaming the increase on the spotted-owl decision. Their aim, the paper implies, is to raise new-home prices enough that John Q. Middleclass will beg Congress to give the timber biz all the environmental excuses it wants, maybe even to scuttle the Endangered Species Act.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: General Mills Pop Qwiz is a new microwave popcorn for kids, in more colors than Trix (red, blue, orange, yellow, green, purple). There’s games and trivia quizzes in every box, to enjoy while hiding from parents yelling about who stunk up the house with imitation-butter-flavor smell.
SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (on a Diamond Parking receipt): “Park where you are invited and welcome.”
DEAD AIR: Another piece of our broadcast heritage dies as KJR moves to sports-talk and phases out its music (which had become an oldies-laden ghost of its old energetic Top 40 image). Space prohibits us from going into the legacy of KJR’s DJs, its onetime support for local music, its impact on anyone who grew up here followed by the shamefully bigoted anti-youth ads of its oldies phase, which were thankfully dropped.
BRAND NEW KEY DEPT.: A New York company has come up with the latest necessity for the single woman: Lady’s Choice, a“talking keychain” that “tells” men in bars whether you want them or not. By pressing one of five areas, you make the keychain give out digitized sounds saying “Get Lost,” “You’re A Loser,” “Nice Buns!,” or “What A Hunk!” or a random selection of the four. It’s made in China, where prearranged marriages are still the norm….
The 7/17 Newsweek ran a tabloidy “shocker” proclaiming that many teenage females actually like sex and will assertively seek out boys who will provide it. While I haven’t known any suck women (for good or ill), it doesn’t surprise me that a new generation of women, comfortable with the disciplines of safe sex and weaned on ideologies of gratification (advertising, rock music), would find anti-sex “morality” (of the prudish right or the puritan left) worthless and self-defeating. (This is all a gross overgeneralization of a complicated topic, but so was the original article.)
BEST PART OF THE FIREWORKS: KING-FM’s biplane banners buzzing all around Lake Union; all classical stations should promote themselves in such populist ways. Worst part (besides the Coca-Cola war exploitation ad): The two-hour traffic jam, tying up every road that remotely led to a freeway on-ramp. If Seattle really had the vibrant nightlife scene so many of us have longed for, we’d have traffic this bad every Fri. and Sat. night.
BUYING THE FARM: A strawberry farm where I spent many an extremely boring summer afternoon will be closed, flooded, and brokered to developers wanting to trade wetland-preservation rights so they can build elsewhere. The Chicago Board of Trade, meanwhile, will soon start trading in pollution-rights futures….
THE BYTE BIZ: IBM and Apple, longtime sworn nemeses, are getting together to create the next generation of computer software (and the next generation of computers to run it). The deal is as disillusioning to Apple consignetti as the Hitler-Stalin pact was to US socialists. Apple was originally perceived as the triumph of sci-fi loving, T-shirt wearing techno hippies against the blue-suit mentality of IBM. In reality, Apple was fueled by Porsche-driving venture capitalists and got more corporate oriented every year, making great machines that it only wanted the rich to own; until it grudgingly cut prices last year (and laid off thousands to keep profits up). The one thing Apple still has going for it is superior engineering, particularly in software; now, the system that will replace the Mac in the mid-’90s will be available to IBM and others. The move also creates a software giant to rival (perhaps supplant) Microsoft (some computer insiders would jealously love to see it).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch is a funky bimonthly report on the slow strangulation of the latest “artists’ neighborhood” to be overrun by predatory developers, including the impending death-by-upscaling of the Cornelius Apts., immortalized in Holly Tuttle’s “Life at the Edge Apartments” strip in the early-’80s National Lampoon. (I wrote this weeks before they published an issue plugging me.)
THE UNTOLD STORY: A downtown dept. store was evacuated shortly before noon on 7/2, due to a small interior fire. I know this only because I was there; I found no story about it (correct me, please) in the papers that depend on its ads. I was so looking forward to a headline about how it was such a perfect summer’s day for a bon fire.
BALLARD HIGH TO BE REPLACED: No matter what building it’s in, the heritage will continue of pubescent frosh giggling at the team name (hint: it’s the same as Oregon State‘s).
‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN IN SEPTEMBER, tell KCTS to stop being such total toadies to big business, join the drive to save the historic Everett Theater, and recall these words from Richard Amidon’s Selling Yourself Raw, a new book on the poetic side of salesmanship: “I want to make love to your gullibility.”
Newfoundland columnist Ray Guy, quoted in the Toronto Globe and Mail about his fellow Canadians: “Of all the foolish, silly, pitiful crowd who ever dabbled in the ‘country’ game, that lot is it…. I don’t think I ever met a Canadian I didn’t like, and that’s about as bad a thing as I can think of to say about anyone.”
SPECIAL EVENT
I’ll be appearing at COCA’s Night Gallery reading series, 8 p.m. Wed., Aug. 28 at 1305 1st Ave. Also on the bill: Gillian “Johnny Renton” Gaar with parts of her new book on female rockers. Info: 682-4568.
We don’t issue paper-wasting renewal notices. Your mailing label tells when you need to renew in order to keep getting more wonderful issues.
Anyone with ideas on turning this into a professional, self-supporting operation (or who can invest in such an operation) should write in.
“Lambent”
GUNS N’ ROSES: FIRST WHITE BAND TO
MAKE HEADLINES FOR NOT STARTING A RIOT
4/91 Misc. Newsletter
ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN
“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”
ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE
We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.
CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.
STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.
A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”
THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…
STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.
TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!
SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.
MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.
OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but 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. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.
LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”
NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.
VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).
SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.
PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”
‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”
The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”
The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.
I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.
Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).
“Approbation”
4/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Despite All Attempts to Preserve the War,
Peace Still Threatens to Break Out
At Misc., the column that says what it means and means what it says, we’re getting awfully bored by America’s glut of lame parody. It’s in movies (Dan Aykroyd’s Dragnet), TV (Moonlighting, public-access cable), music (Buster Poindexter), and now billboards. The car-dealer sign telling us to “Surrender to the Germans” treats WWII as a mere cliché taken from old movies (as did Aykroyd’s 1941). If we’re offended by the sign we’re dismissed as old fogeys, not the cool young dudes of the dealer’s target audience.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts newsletter. With the oversupply of parodic works mentioned above has come a complementary supply of lawsuits. Craig C. Beles’s piece on “Parody as Fair Use; or When Can Minnie and Mickey Be Placed in a Compromising Situation?” drolly covers the cases of Disney v. Air Pirates Comics, Pillsbury v. Screw Magazine, and Dr Pepper v. Sambo’s. For your copy send a small donation to WVLA, 600 1st Ave., #203, Seattle 98104.
FINDING MR. WRIGHT: A major exhibit of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is coming to the Bellevue Art Museum. Talk about going where you’re needed most. Sure, Bellevue could use the inspiration of someone who believed in spaces to enhance human life. But these days, so could Seattle. To call the Disney Co. plan fir Seattle Center “Mickey Mouse” isn’t enough. Our chief public gathering place is not a theme park and should not be controlled by theme-park people. It should not be a sterile, slick monument, but a living world for living people. It should embody the joy and hope of the World’s Fair that created it — just as the waterfront, also targeted for what a citizen-advocate calls “tacky yuppification,” should stay a working dockside, not a Friscoid tourist trap.
CLARIFICATION: You may have been misinformed about the recent flap at UW Women Studies. Activists there aren’t trying to get rid of a guy student because he’s a guy, but because they believe he’s a right-wing troublemaker, out to disrupt the class via heckling. If true, then he’s simply following the Jerry Rubin school of politics, wherein anyone who felt righteous enough was free to act like a jerk, since he was above the behavioral rules of square people. It’s the same method by which egotistical liberals become admired by (or become) egotistical conservatives.
BOOZE NOOZE: The Big Restaurant Protection Committee, a.k.a. the Washington State Liquor Control Board, is lowering the food-to-drink sales ratio that an eatery needs to keep a drink license. Think it’ll lead to saner liquor laws overall? Ha! This unelected body never works for increased competition or live entertainment except grudgingly, years too late.
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The lights on Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge suddenly started flashing on and off on the night of 3/11. A resident detected that the lights were going off in Morse code, which he translated as “UBC Engineers Do It Again.”
SEZ WHO?: Will someone please tell me where these “reports of a Nicaraguan incursion” that led to the latest Reagan pro-war charade came from? How do we know the CIA didn’t just make it up? None of the interminable analyses on the affair mention this, or if they did I fell asleep before I found it.
SHAME: Masters & Johnson almost seem to want the hetero AIDS epidemic that still hasn’t happened but which they promise any time now. (Masters holds experimental-vaccine patents, and might profit if lower-risk groups thought they were more vulnerable.) If so, they join the soaps and other media trying to exploit it while ignoring anything really controversial like the existence of gay people. It’s worse in Europe, where magazines use AIDS as an excuse to put forlorn, nude straight women on their covers. All this does is heighten fear about the disease without raising sympathy or help for those who do have it.
CATHODE CORNER: Ed Beckley, the self-titled “Millionaire Maker,” is in bankruptcy. Victims of Beckley, who promised viewers they could get rich buying real estate for no money down, are working with other creditors to keep his show on the air. It’s the only way he can pay off everyone demanding refunds from his expensive courses…. Merv Griffin wants to buy Resorts International in Atlantic City. I know I’d pay $20 for a spectacular floor show starring Charo, Prof. Irwin Corey and Helen Gurley Brown.
UPDATES: The Wonder Years is just as awful as I’d feared. The ’68 junior-high clothes are accurate, though…. The plan to re-color Metro buses seems to have been just a stunt, with a phony-looking “groundswell of support” for keeping the blecchy browns.
THE BYTE BIZ: Apple Computer’s suing Redmond’s Microsoft, claiming MS Windows (a key program in the next generation of IBM software) rips off the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” Can Apple, which has always avoided fighting MS, expect to beat what the Wall St. Journal calls “the real controlling firm in computing”?… The hype over an Aldus program being inadvertently “infected” with a hidden world-peace message bears the marks of an orchestrated rabble-rousing by those who’d use “data integrity” to deny public access to major data bases.
HAPPINESS IS A BIGGER SPACE: Peanuts has suddenly switched from four small panels a day to three larger ones. It’s the first major structural change ever to Charles Schulz’s comic. Four square panels every day, six days a week, was a perfect metaphor for the chilling purgatory of characters stuck at the same presexual age for 38 years. (To see Schulz on adolescence, look for his rare ’60s paperback “Teen-Ager” Is Not A Disease. All the kitsch of Peanuts, none of the charm.)
CLOSE: ‘Til May, see the Seattle Filmhouse’s French New Wave series at MOHAI, catch the Weekly piece on local cartoonists, take lotsa pix of the Pine St. hole while you can, and remember the words of Sydney Smith: “I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.”
