IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)

THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.

BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.

On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…

MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.

But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.

IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.

IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, but MISC. is a bit leery about this week’s touring performances of The Wizard of Oz on Ice. When the witch melts, do they freeze over her remains before they resume skating? If they don’t, how do they finish the show?

UPDATE: Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant has indeed been taken over by QFC, but the only visible change so far is on the employee name tags. The signs, labels, bags, and product mix won’t change until the building’s remodeled and expanded in January. The big FOOD GIANT neon sign will then be replaced by an as-identical-as-feasible sign to read WALLINGFORD, if QFC can get the legal OK to exceed modern sign codes… Just a block away, an ex-Arco mini-mart has switched franchisors and now pumps Shell gas. Those who’ve wanted to protest Shell’s ties to the Nigerian dictatorship now have a place in Seattle to not get gas at. (The store’s independently owned, so you can still get your Hostess Sno-Balls there.)

SUDS ON THE SOUND: If the WALLINGFORD sign gets built, it’ll add to the parallels between Seattle and All My Children. We already have two businesses deliberately named after fictional businesses on the soap (Glamorama and Cortland Computer), plus institutions coincidentally sharing names with AMC characters (Chandler’s Cove restaurant, the band TAD). As longtime viewers know, when AMC dumps a character without killing them, they often get shipped to Seattle. A book by Dan Wakefield about the show’s early years had a passage noticing this and explaining how Seattle, with its nice-n’-civil rep, was the perfect place to send ex-Pine Valleyans. He didn’t add how Seattle, like Pine Valley, is sometimes referred to as a quiet little town but is filling up with morally-ambivalent entrepreneurs and weird criminals, while its old-money institutions remain in a few incestuous hands. If a soap had a family with as many political and media tie-ins as our ’80s Royer-James family, it’d be called a hokey plot device. Certainly the three new books about KING-TV reveal founder Dorothy Bullitt as a matriarch just as lively and outspoken as AMC crone Phoebe Wallingford (if less snooty).

WAVES: Broadcast demagogue Mike Siegel, fired from KVI for refusing to let trifles like the facts get in the way of his bullying, resurfaced a couple months back on Everett station KRKO, once the Top 40 station I grew up to. Back then, its slogan was “The Happiest Sound Around.” It could now be called “The Angriest Sound Around,” but instead is using the rubric “Talk Too Hot for Seattle.” I could say “they can have him,” but that would be not caring… KVI’s sister station KOMO-AM, longtime bastion of Ike-esque literate civility, now hawks its news-talk format with TV spots looking like KNDD rejects. Rave-flyer color splotches and snowboard-logo bleeding type exhort listeners to “Get Connected” and “Go Global.” It’s like seeing a golden-years relative suddenly sporting sideburns and driving a Miata; scary yet poignantly sad.

THERE GO THE BRIDES: In an economy move few years back, the Seattle Times stopped running free wedding pictures on Sundays, moving them to a once-a-month section in the lower-circulation weekday paper. That section, The Registry, will appear for the last time next month; to make the last installment, your ceremony has to be before Dec. 1. Because the section had a one- to two-month backlog, readers could amuse themselves by guessing which of the happy couples had already split up. After Dec. 2, if you want your nuptials remembered on newsprint, you’ll have to buy an ad.

SQUARE, INDEED: The demographic cleansing of Seattle continues with the Sam Israel estate’s plans to tear down the building now known as the Pioneer Square Theater (now we know why they refused to bring it up to code) for offices and the conversion of several other Pio. Square structures into “market rate” (read: only upscale boomers need apply) housing. The boomer-centric local media just adore the scheme, of course; just like they adored the Israels’ previously-announced plans to evict Fantasy (un)Ltd. for yet another blandly “unique” retail complex. It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressingly familiar.

With only 12 days ’till the election and no major politician talking about America’s real ongoing crisis (the upward distribution of wealth and the developing two-tier economy), it’s up to Misc. to give you the business, in this all-local-retail column:

BOARD MEETING: Responding to my call for suggested new uses for the ex-REI building on Capitol Hill, reader Blaine Dollard writes: “Always thought it would make a great skatepark! Take the elevator up and start your run up in the Sale Attic, total acid drop or a few banks to get down the stairs, then get mass speed down that ramp leading from the shoes towards Pike and maybe a big bowl or snake run through the Gore-Tex zone. I think it would meet zoning laws too! Now just put an empty swimming pool or two in the basement and the neighborhood could be swimming with more skaters than ever. Wouldn’t hurt [nearby board shop] Cresent’s business either!” In other clever concepts…

FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Papa Murphy’s Take & Bake Pizza chain now displays a small “Food Stamps” logo in the upper right corner of one of its TV commercials. It’s a subtle reminder that as a deli store and not a restaurant, ye who are unemployed and/or underclass can go there as an occasional break from ramen. In other sales pitches…

SCENT PACKING: I have it on good evidence that the Cologne Cult is back in town. You remember them–the evangelistically fired-up, glassy-eyed young gals n’ guys who’d enter offices and other workplaces, somehow sneak past receptionists and other gatekeepers, and hawk inexpensive designer-imposter colognes to the workers (sometimes claiming they were the real brand name products). I don’t know where they’re from, where they go when they’re not here, or how they stay in business, since none of the myriad stories I’ve heard about ’em has ever mentioned a successful sale. In other discount goods…

THE BEST INTENTIONS: Best Products is closing its last 13 Washington stores. These include the final remnants of the former locally-owned Jafco chain and catalog, which supplied moderately-priced jewelry, sporting goods, home furnishings (including foam sofa-beds), and stereo gear to two generations of Northwesterners. I can still remember the day one of my high-school teachers showed off her brand new engagement ring (from a fellow teacher) in class. Just weeks later, I happened to find that exact ring in the Jafco catalog; giving me direct evidence that education was perhaps not the most lucrative of professions. In other closings…

THE LAST REWIND: Backtrack Records and Video, the Ravenna-based dean of local mondo-movie rental houses, is closing as of this Saturday. Owner John Black (one of this paper’s very first advertisers) has sold all his remaining inventory to Bedazzled Discson Capitol Hill, which should have Backtrack’s rental videos available again in a few weeks. Black and his original partner, attorney Fred Hopkins, started by selling used LPs, then added a modest but well-curated sci-fi/horror VHS selection in the early years of the video boom. (Today’s mammoth Scarecrow Video store began as a subleased shelf within Backtrack.) They helped sponsor a film series I curated in 1986-87, as part of their commitment to keeping the flame of cult cinema alive. They produced a public-access movie-review show (still occasionally rerun) and were involved in making a handful of amateur, shot-on-video creature features (one, Rock n’ Roll Mobster Girls, included early appearances by Jim Rose and Hole drummer Patty Schemel). Best wishes on all future endeavors. In other hipness artifacts…

THE COOL JERK: If you grew up around here, you probably recall snide remarks about the Bon Marche’s teen boutique, The Cube–remarks typically predicated on the fact that a “cube” is essentially a square, only multiplied. Now they’ve taken that to heart with this fall’s Geek Chic display. It’s complete with velour dresses, lime-green sweaters, fluorescent-orange fake-fur coats, and black PVC skirts. My favorite fashion analyst describes it as “the same doubleknit blahs you see on the Evening Magazine guy, only with a new name tacked on to make you think it’s not the same thing they’ve been selling you for four years.”

WELCOME TO A late-summer sunspotted Misc., the pop-culture column that knows there’s gotta be some not-half-bad Jack Kemp/ Shawn Kemp jokes out there. If you know any, send them to clark@speakeasy.org.

UPDATES: Adobe Systems will indeed keep the former Aldus software operation in Seattle; it’s negotiating to build offices in the Quadrant Industrial Park next to the Fremont Bridge… Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, winner of this column’s no-prize last year as Seattle’s best regulation-size supermarket, won’t become an Alfalfa’s “natural” food store. It’ll become a QFC. The wonderful Food Giant sign, its nine letters blinking on and off in not-quite synchronization and with a few neon elements always out, will shine for the last time around mid-November. The store will then be redone to QFC’s standard look, floor plan, and merchandise mix. Oh well, at least Wallingford will still have the original Dick’s.

AUTO-EROTICA?: A home video called How A Car Is Made, currently plugged on TV ads, is sold in separate adult and children’s versions. Does the adult version show more explicit rivet scenes? Or maybe nice slow shots of a car’s steel frame descending into a paint bath, emerging moments later all dripping-damp and pink?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: It took the long, slow, painful death of Reflex before this town could get the take-no-prisoners (or grants) visual-art zine it’s needed. The new bastard-son-of-Reflex bears the highly apt title Aorta. (The name was chosen long before Jason Sprinkle’s big steel heart became the most important work by a Seattle visual artist in this decade.) EditorJim Demetre seems to have the right priorities: Northwest art, he and his contributors believe, ought to be something more original than copying the latest flavor from NY/Cal, and something more personal than the upscaled decorative crafts now dominating the local gallery market. The first issue’s highlighted by a clever piece by Cydney Gillis on how local artists were persuaded to donate their time to benefit SAM’s Chinese-textiles show, while SAM still does little on its part to support non-Chihuly local art. The only problem so far: Like Reflex, Aorta will only appear every two months, so no exhibit it reviews will still be up when the review comes out. Free around town or pay-what-you-can to 105 S. Main St., #204, Seattle 98104.

SIGN-O-TIMES (on the readerboard at the Eastlake flower shop): “Pro-Environment Bumper Stickers–Joke of the Century.”

DAUGHTER OF `DESIGNER GRUNGE’: The trumped-up media outcry over the alleged Heroin Chic look has brought atention to a new outfit called Urban Decay, which has been cleaning up on helping young women look dirty. Its cosmetics, sold with slogans such as “Burn Barbie Burn,” just might be the only products sold at both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom. Its nail polishes and lipsticks have dark un-shiny colors and come in styles named Pallor, Bruise, Frostbite, Asphyxia, and Plague. Its ads read like the work of professional ad copywriters trying to sound like slam poets (“Colors from the paint box of my life. Pallor is the sheen of my flesh.”) Founder Sandy Lerner has promoted herself everywhere from the fashion mags to the NY Times as an expert on pseudo-dirty “street” looks; even though she’s quite non-street herself (she co-founded Cisco Systems, a computer-networking giant) and her company’s based on the not-so-mean streets of Silicon Valley. But then again, fashion has always been about role-playing, and in that context “gritty reality” is just another fantasy. It might be more expedient, marketing-wise, for Lerner and company to be closer to the mall kids who wish they were on the Lower East Side than to actually be anywhere near the Lower East Side.

LET US MAKE a pledge to meet in September, and until then ponder these Ways to Praise Your Child, from a refrigerator magnet available from KSTW: “Terrific Job. Hip Hip Hurray. A+ Job. You Tried Hard. What An Imagination. Outstanding Performance. You’re A Joy. You’re A Treasure. A Big Hug. A Big Kiss. I Love You. Give Them A Big Smile.”

Retro-Futurism at 600 Feet:

Dining at the Needle

Eats essay for The Stranger,7/23/96

While the future the Space Needle predicted (it helped inspire the look of The Jetsons) never happened, and the age it came from passed long ago, it remains a beloved symbol of Seattle and an icon of a bygone belief in a late-industrial, pre-computer tomorrow. It’s an almost unbelievable blend of retro kitsch and eternal beauty. Except for the ’80s-vintage 100-foot-level addition (now used only for occasional banquets), its size, scale, and shape are as near as modern American architecture gets to Pythagorean perfection.

Seattleites love the Needle so much they’ll forgive the legendary cost and mediocrity of its restaurant, almost. (You can tell a real local kid: She’ll have 100 Space Needle scale models, ball-point pens, ash trays, whiskey bottles, postcards, and posters, but has never been in the real one.)

I’m looking at a still of Elvis’s scene in the Space Needle restaurant from It Happened at the World’s Fair. The revolving, donut-shaped dining room evokes what was considered wondrous in ’62: Space Patrol uniforms on the servers, fine suits and dresses on the clientele, rich paneling on the walls, rich food on the tables.

In its 35th year, the uniforms and the decor have become more commonplace (the walls are now as grey as the view on an overcast winter day; the ceiling has that speckled-relief effect made infamous by suburban condos). The food, which always was commonplace, has remained so.

The Needle’s a product of what passes for “old money” in this young city. It’s always been a private endeavor, adjacent to but not part of the city-owned Seattle Center. It was built by mega-contractor Howard S. Wright, with backing from developer Ned Skinner and hotel tycoon Eddie Carlson. The late architect-activist Victor Steinbrueck claimed to have played a role in the design, but Wright’s discounted the extent of Steinbrueck’s participation. Both Steinbrueck and Wright claimed to have been inspired by Stuttgart’s TV tower (more explicitly cloned in Toronto’s CN Tower). For many years the restaurant was managed by Carlson’s Western International (now Westin) Hotels; the Needle itself was owned by a five-partner consortium headed by Wright and entitled (our neopagan readers will love this!) the Pentagram Corp. The operation’s now united as the Space Needle Corp.

Tom Robbins called it a phallic symbol, claiming the old Grandma’s Cookies neon sign at north Lake Union as its feminine counterpart. He was only half right. It’s tall and cylindrical, but also curvy and gracious; you rise up to penetrate it, arriving in a cornerless world of padded surfaces and comforting joys.

Upon checking in at the bottom, the efficient staff confirms your reservation and warns you how many elevator loads are ahead of you. Despite a large group from a software company waiting in line ahead of me, it was soon my turn to take the smooth 42-second ride up 600 feet to the “top house.” Quicker than you can adjust your inner ears, you’re in the stark grey topside waiting area. The excessively (but not insuffrably) perky wait staff soon seated me at a non-window table, near two middle-aged couples from Philadelphia freely expressing their giddiness at the whole top-of-the-world sensation. The whole room had the air of low-key (and, at some tables, higher-key) celebrations: Contracts signed, wedding dates set, relatives reunited, jobs and homes temporarily abandoned.

Aside from the diners’ happy talk, the only aural accompaniment to my meal came from the steady, reassuring hum of the turntable motors ever-so-slowly sending me around to view the panorama of city, sound, sky, and (since it was sunny) mountains. I couldn’t see my house (a bigger building was in the way), but everything else was laid out like a miniature movie set for Godzilla to stomp on; the Harbor Island container docks looked like a stack of grey Lego bricks.

The giant turntable has grown jittery over the years. It rumbles and vibrates beneath your feet, and staggers for a second every few minutes. The thing goes all the way around in an hour; with the efficient service and pre-prepared dishes, you can expect to be finished by the time you again spot the buildings that were in front of you when you sat down.

While the restaurant’s menu has evolved, the emphasis remains on fancy-but-not-too-fancy meals for tourists, business travelers, and locals hosting out-of-town relatives. It makes no claims to be on the cutting edge of cuisine. Aside from a fried vegetarian penne ($24.95), the dinner menu is neatly divided into “Entrees” (bigger, costlier versions of what your parents would order in a steak house on their anniversary) and “Signature Entrees” (that seafood stuff the tourists hear you’ve got to get when you’re in Seattle). Everything is soft-textured and mildly seasoned, so everyone from grandma to your finicky preteen niece can enjoy it.

My entree choice, the Chicken Parmesan ($24.95), was a huge slab of chicken, breaded and baked to you-need-no-teeth tenderness, with melted chese and a pizza-esque sauce. Not the worst of its type I’ve ever had, but nothing you couldn’t get better and/ or cheaper on Terra Firma. It came with two scoops of reconstituted mashed potatoes, carrot slices and string beans. The butter-pat foil containers and the sugar pouches carried the telltale logo of Food Services of America–the empire of that Thomas Stewart guy from Vashon, patron of right-wing politicians and subsidizer of John Carlson’s think tank.

If I were to recommend a dish to you, it’d be the prime rib ($27.95 to $31.95). The demise of Jake O’Shaugnessey’s has left a vacancy in the Lower Queen Anne vicinity for this melt-in-your-mouth delicacy. It’s cured, so it’s safely cooked even when it’s all red and fleshy on the inside. Those celebrating on a budget can settle for the smoked-salmon appetizer ($9.95).

Any good kitschy “special occasion” restaurant needs a special drink or dessert. The Needle disappointed in both areas. They were out of the take-home ceramic Needle-shaped glass that’s supposed to come with the Mai Tai-esque Space Needle Blast-Off Punch ($18). They did have the World Famous Lunar Orbiter dessert ($5.50); but once the dry-ice fog from the lower compartment of its special cup has steams away, you’ve just got a lot of ice cream covered with mini M&M’s.

You can get the drinks without the entrees, at the cocktail lounge on the non-revolving Observation Deck just above the restaurant. The view’s just as spectacular as it is from the restaurant, though you have to walk around it yourself (the outer walkway’s all fenced in nowadays, to be jump-proof). And the atmosphere’s far more festive, with cheery tourists and screaming kids running to and fro. The gift-shop merchandise is astounding. You can play with the penny-flattening machine or the coin-op telescope (not powerful enough to peer into hotel rooms). Tucked away in a corner there’s a computer kiosk normally displaying an Internet tourist-guide site, but you can follow links to the Sub Pop Mega Mart site and leave it there. And on summer Friday evenings, the amplified melodies from the Pain in the Grass concerts waft upward beautifully. I like the band Zeke normally, but it never sounded as hot as it did from 600 feet away.

AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…

EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced

June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.

Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.

(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)

UPDATE: I recently sought your proposed new uses for the Kingdome. The best came from one J. Drinkwater: “1) Fill it with water and house the sea lions from the Ballard Locks. 2) Rename it the Seattle Commons.”

SPACES IN THE HEART: Back when Seattle bands were just starting to attract out-of-town notice, the center of the town’s live-music action was a pair of clubs near Eastlake and Howell, connected by a walkway under a freeway overpass. The Off Ramp and RKCNDY weren’t posh by any means, but their drinks were strong and their PAs were loud. Newer and fancier clubs since stole their thunder. RKCNDY is closed and for sale; financing for a planned remodel apparently fell through. The Off Ramp has struggled as well. A new owner and new booker vow to keep things going; but the liquor-license transfer apparently hit a snag, and the home of Gnosh Before the Mosh is, as of this writing, also shut. Meanwhile, the all-ages music scene continues to take it on the chin. Fire marshalls suddenly halved the Pioneer Square Theater’s legal capacity the night of a show, making future shows there fiscally iffy. The Velvet Elvis almost stopped hosting concerts after a few rowdy punkboys disrupted a show in late April. Instead, the VE will continue to let indie promoters run all-ages music in the space, but has asked them to de-emphasise hardcore-punk lineups. In a final note, Park Ave. Records, lower Queen Anne’s Taj Mahal of collector vinyl, has called it quits. Its purported replacement: a branch of the Disc-Go-Round chain.

LOVE, ITALIAN STYLE: Director Bernardo Bertolucci shot his share of requisitely-picturesque Seattle scenes for his film Little Buddah. Now he’s introducing that other popular image of Seattle into his work. In the trailer for Bertolucci’s new film Stealing Beauty(no relation to Britain’s 1988 sexy-novice-priest movie Stealing Heaven), a pastoral scene in a decaying Italian farm shed is gloriously interrupted by Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler), as a teen brought to the farm against her will by her family, loudly singing and dancing to a tape of Hole’s “Rock Star.” The scene transforms a personal jeer at one particular clique (the Oly rocker-than-thous) into a universal defiance against cliquishness in general.

THE DRAWING ROOM: The Meyerson & Nowinski art gallery has instantly become the ritzy-upscale “contemporary art” emporium for Seattle. The splashy opening show gathers drawings and prints from artists of different nations and decades, collectively referred to by the gallery as “Picasso and Friends.” (It’s really no worse than TNT sticking Tom & Jerry cartoons onto a show called Bugs Bunny and Friends.)

Many of you remember Bob Blackburn Jr. as the sometime statistician and broadcast assistant to his dad, the SuperSonics’ original radio announcer. Bob Jr. also played in assorted Seattle bands (including the Colorplates) before moving to L.A. in ’89. He now works for the Westwood One satellite-radio empire, conducting celebrity interviews and organizing promotions. Last month his job led to the fulfillment of a longtime dream, the chance to meet ’50s bondage model Betty Page. As you may know, the sweet-faced, dark-haired Page posed mostly for obscure and under-the-counter publications for about 10 years, then retired to a very private existence. Only now, long after her pictures became the icons of a new mainstream-fetish cult, has she partly resurfaced, giving a few select interviews and authorizing a biography. Blackburn chatted with her for an hour and got her to autograph a picture for his friends in the Seattle sleazepunk outfit Sick & Wrong. He says Page “still looks really good” at 73, but won’t be photographed. The audio interview was mostly done, he says, “for the record.” Westwood One has no plans to air it on any of its satellite feeds, most of which aren’t carried in Seattle anyway. I think Blackburn should invite her to come work with his ex-employers. The Sonics (especially Kemp) could use someone to teach some discipline!

(Be sure to keep Sunday, June 2 open for the magnificent, marvelous, mad mad mad Misc. Tenth Anniversary Party at the Metropolis Gallery, on University St. east of 1st Ave. Details forthcoming.)

UPDATE: Some months back I named the Wallingford Food Giant Seattle’s best full-size supermarket. Since then, the north end’s been abuzz w/rumors that the place was being sold to Alfalfa’s, the out-of-state yuppie health-food chain. Not so, insists FG management.

THE MAILBAG: I can say the most outrageous things and get no response (perhaps because, as I’ve learned, some folks just assume I’m kidding); while the slightest throwaway gag can cause the most irate responses. Like my little joke about Vancouver’s new Ford Theatre. I’ll readily accept the letter writers’ assertions that Canadians probably know more about American history than Americans know about Canadian history–or than Americans know about American history. I know enough about Canada to endorse DOA singer Joey Shithead’s campaign for the BC legislature (can’t ya see it, “The Honourable M.L.A. Shithead”?). On a related note…

CANADIAN CATHODE CORNER: Canada, especially Vancouver, is gaining awareness as the prime filming site for exploitation TV dramas. I wouldn’t be surprised if next fall Fox aired more Canadian-made prime-time hours than Canadian network CTV. I also wouldn’t be surprised if sci-fi conventions started circulating “fan fiction” stories in which the universes of all the Vancouver-filmed shows (X-Files, Strange Luck, Sliders, Profit, et al.) collided at a dimensional gateway somewhere near the Cambie St. Bridge.

REFLEX, RIP: The regional visual-art tabloid was great while it lasted, and (particularly under first editor Randy Gragg) provided frequent glimpses into the peculiar jargon of art-crit (‘tho sometimes I wished they’d run a glossary of terms). It illuminated issues surrounding the corporate/ institutional art world and the role of creative individuals therein. And it gave many artists precious review clippings. But it was never all it could be, or all its community needed. Its bimonthly schedule meant it could never recommend a show while it was still up. Its nonprofit-bureaucratic structure meant it was eternally begging for gifts from the same funding sources as the artists the paper advocated.

AD VERBS: Still recovering from its old pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads, Subaru is turning toward marketing at specific market segments. As part of this, it’ll soon run specially-designed ads in lesbian magazines, touting its autos as the perfect acoutrement to a practical, sensible Womanlove lifestyle. Meanwhile, Elvira (aka Cassandra Peterson) has quit as a Coors spokeswitch–not due to Coors’ support of right-wing causes but ’cause indie brewery Beverage International offered to market her own line of Elvira Brews. Look for the first bottles in test markets by July.

LET ‘EM GO: EastsideWeek’s new “Independent Republic of the Eastside” promotion sounds a bit like certain secessionist movements in Montana and Idaho, or at least like these pro-sprawl “new county” movements across the Cascade foothills. On the good side, the promotion (devised largely by editor Skip Berger) calls into question the “community spirit” of folks who’ve moved to the burbs precisely to avoid civic commitment, to drive from office park to mall to cul-de-sac without feeling any expressed need for “public space.” And it gives Berger a chance to question some assumptions about suburban growth by offering alternatives: “Will we become Paris, Rome, Venice, or Orange County?” (Place your own joke answer here.)

DOME SWEET DOME: What to do with the Kingdome, with no baseball in three years and possibly no football? (The NFL’s hinted at demanding a new arena in return for keeping or replacing the Seahawks.) The obvious is to keep it for auto shows and tractor pulls, and as an exhibit annex for the Convention Center. The county’s been planning this anyway.

I say, let’s go build two new stadia, with as much private money as possible. Make the football field convertible for NHL hockey; make both convertible for trade shows.

Then take the existing Kingdome, gut its current interior, and rebuild it into the living and recreation space of the future. A World’s Fair domed-city fantasy made real, or a pansexual “intentional community” utopia. Level upon level of PoMo condos around the concourses, looking onto an indoor plaza and celebration zone. The mind reels with the possibilities! (Got any fantasy Dome uses of your own? Send ’em here.)

UPDATES: P!pe editor Soyon Im is a her, not a he… The kindly folks at the DMX cable-music service called to say yes, residential customers can get the full 90-channel service, not just the mainstreamed 30 channels offered on local cable TV systems–if you’re willing to buy your own 27″ satellite dish and tuner. For the “German Schlager” and Flemish Pop channels, tho’, it just might be worth it.

LIVE AIR: Pirate radio broadcasts have resumed in Seattle on the 89.1 FM frequency recently vacated by the Monkeywrench Radio collective. The new outfit, FUCC, includes some of the old Monkeywrench volunteer DJs. It promises long segments of “non-corporate” news and interviews along with the freeform music, 6 p.m.-2 a.m. nightly. The Pearl Jam members, rumored to have helped jump-start Monkeywrench, are officially not involved in the new operation.

PLAYLAND: Just as the Washington Bullets basketball team plans a change to a less violent name, two inventors from DC’s Maryland suburbs won a patent for “bleeding” toy figures embedded with tiny fluid-filled capsules that rupture during play. An NY Times report said the blood capsules would be attached to the toy in patches, which could be replaced for repeated “play.”

THE SWINDLE CONTINUES: A Mountain Dew ad has premiered on MTV with images of “Xtreme” sports accompanied by John Lydon singing a sneering-macho rendition of “Route 66.”

WATCH THIS SPACE: On the Boards announced it wants to raise money to buy and move into the current A Contemporary Theater building on lower Queen Anne, once ACT moves into the Eagles Auditorium downtown (around August). OTB sez its current home, Washington Hall, is too small and under-equipped for some of OTB’s favorite touring dance and performance-art acts. The stoic, historic old space would still be great for whatever theater or performance outfit picks it up next. Apparently at least one theater troupe’s vying for Wash. Hall, but nothing’s anywhere near final. (It’s also a perfect space for all-ages music events.)

PANGS OF GUILT: I understand the local media’s obsession with Martin Pang but I don’t share it. Should they try him for arson? Yes. Murder? No; manslaughter at most. Yes, four firefighters died needlessly in the fire Pang allegedly masterminded. But nobody’s even claiming he wanted or specifically sought their deaths.

C:\>HAWKS?: When Paul Allen bought the Portland TrailBlazers, I wrote about whether he’d bring sophisticated computer analysis to basketball and whether it’d result in increased throughput. As it turned out, Allen (and his privately-financed arena) made the Blazers a much enviable franchise financially, if not in the standings. Now, the MS/ Asymetrix/ Starwave/ TicketMaster/ Seattle Commons/ Hendrix Museum magnate’s talking about buying and saving the Seahawks (though owner Ken “No Ball” Behring, the almost-official Most Hated Man in America 1996, officially isn’t talking about selling). But the lack of any real sale prospects thus far doesn’t mean we can’t start pondering the possibilities. First, we can presume Pearl Jam won’t perform before any Hawks games like they’ve done for the Sonics. Jared Roberts wrote to the Internet newsgroup “alt.sports.football.pro.sea-seahawks” with further predictions: “There would be a trick play called the `Ctrl-alt-del.’ Tackling an opponent would be called `crashing’ an opponent.”

HATE TRIANGLE: Courtney Love’s put her band Hole on temporary hiatus and cleaned up her personal act (possibly to appease the movie producers she now wants to work for). To help fill any outrageousness gap, two local performing artists have trotted out characters named “Courtney Hate,” both gleefully exploiting Love’s recent-past rep for big make-up and crude stage antics. One is lounge-before-lounge-was-hip singer Julie Cascioppo; she’s done the role at her regular Pink Door gig and on her cable-access show (a show I’ve been on). The other’s a drag performer, who’s appeared at events including the recent Drag Queen Spelling Bee. He claims Cascioppo stole the idea from him; she denies it. I believe the idea’s so obvious, neither should claim it was a conception of major originality. Love herself is apparently amused; the gay paper Perv quotes her, “You know you’ve made it when you’re impersonated by a drag queen.”

Numbness and Ennui at Sea-Tac:

With the Mainliners at Airport Nation

Article for The Stranger, 3/22/96

Don’t go to Sea-Tac on I-5. All you get to see is that weird flashing time-and-temperature sign bearing the airport’s name about half a mile from the place, making you think you’re closer to your destination than you really are.

Instead, take 4th Ave. S., E. Marginal Way, and Pacific Highway S. It’s a route fully lined with the homey, rugged beauty that is Industrial America; warehouses, the original Costco, used-car lots, gun shops, a McDonald’s with a kiddie playland inside, strip joints (including the county’s only current male strippers), a church, a cemetary, a Larry’s Market, and a bowling alley.

Then you suddenly enter a world of big bland motor hotels, rental-car lots, and squatty black-glass office buildings. You have arrived at a destination only peripherally connected to Seattle or Puget Sound. Just as an embassy is legally the “soil” of its sponsoring nation, every major airport is a node of Airport Nation.

Some people work in Airport Nation. Some people merely visit Airport Nation–the tourists, family travelers and others who make an increasing part of the flying populace. And some unfortunates live in it–the business travelers, the itinerant scholars, those who go from airport to plane to airport to plane, staying at airport hotels, gathering in airport convention halls, and seldom getting to visit the cities or towns the airports purportedly service. USA Today was created to be the “hometown” paper for Airport Nation; its biggest sales come from discounted bulk copies sold to airlines and hotels.

Much has been written about how jet travel has helped make the world smaller. Not too much has been written about how it’s imposed its own order on the world. Some of the professors who live in Airport Nation, at least part of the year, will yammer endlessly about how TV or fast food is to blame for the blanding-down of society, but air travel, and the numbing aesthetic surrounding it, may play a far greater yet unsung role in the homogenization of America.

And much of that aesthetic, I’m sorry to say, is our own Nor’wester creation. Boeing, its engineers, its designers, and the consultants it shares with the airlines have all spent the past four decades selling their service as something safe, convenient, and pleasant. They’ve done everything to try and get folks to forget they’re stuck in a small chair inside a big aluminum tube for hours on end. From the interior color schemes to the sound of the air-recirculation units, every aspect of the in-flight experience exists to lull people into a passive, semi-hypnotic state. They can’t really control the screaming baby in front of you or the jabbering sorority girls in back of you, but they try.

The airport aesthetic is an extension of the in-flight aesthetic. The air is as quiet and lifeless as can be engineered. Aside from PA announcements, you hear little but real Muzak, mellow adult-contemporary music, or whooshy silence (with one exception, which we’ll get to). It not only muffles the energy of all those people going all those places, it extends the airline trance state as long as possible. Those who go straight from the terminal into courtesy vans sending them directly to the airport hotels may never fully leave the trance state.

The airport aesthetic also helps ease the shock of ending a day in a different sector of Earth than the one you awoke in. Airport terminals look essentially alike. Airport restaurants, hotels, and convention facilities look even more alike. It can take the souvenir stands to tell you where you’re at. At Sea-Tac, the souvenirs range from the ridiculous at the regular gift stands (chocolate slugs, “Sleepless in Seattle” coffee mugs (still), totem pole pencil sharpeners, Space Needle ring-toss snow domes) to the ridiculously “sublime” at the highbrow shops (relentlessly “casual” earth-tone clothes, the ubiquitous glass art).

The outer public spaces at Sea-Tac are all so big and tall and wide and out of human scale. Black everywhere. Not the black of punk or of Johnny Cash, but the black of Nixon’s suits, the black intended to make pudgy businessmen feel powerful in their selflessness.

The oversized corridors are decorated mostly with the big, offensively “inoffensive” work that gives public art such a bad name. (The closest thing to an exception: the comic-strip mural promoting recycling, with our pal Mark Zingarelli trying valiantly to breathe life into a tired detective-parody script burdened with lame latté jokes.)

And don’t bother looking for stimulating creativity in the rotating art-exhibit area either; it’s all Pilchuck Glass. Fortunately, the glass is right next to the non-denominational “Meditation Lounge,” where you can pray for the strength to walk back past it without going mad.

Once past the demarcation of the outer and inner public areas by the metal detectors, the carefully established lull is broken by banks of TV monitors situated right at the gates where people can’t escape, all blaring the CNN Airport Network. Five-minute segments of news briefs and canned features. Ads for domestic cars, tires, and razors. In another sign of the changing airline market there’s quite a lack of businessman-oriented advertising anywhere on the airport premises, compared to the past. The most notable exception comes hourly on the monitors, when CNN Airport is interrupted by an airport-sponsored fake news report about the future of Sea-Tac, in which a half dozen well-dressed white people offer sound bites in unanimous support of the controversial proposed third runway.

The restaurants and most of the retail spaces are run by one company, Host International. This arrangement not only adds to the sameness of everything, it adds to the prices; every meal and trinket includes an unspecified surcharge to defray Host International’s lease fees.

In keeping with the post-deregulation “democratization” of air travel and the “lean n’ mean” spirit of modern business, much of the available food is of the fast variety, served in harshly fluorescent-lit cafeteria settings, including abbreviated Taco Bell and Pizza Hut menus.

But Host International has maintained one refuge for those preferring a more leisurely style of dining. The Carvery is a classic ’50s-style executive steakhouse, completely preserved in its unmodernized state, from the scarlet-velvet walls to the fake British heraldry to the fake fireplace. Cocktails are available, despite the prominent wine list on every table; bourbon-on-the-rocks is recommended. The Carvery’s only concession to modernity is the presence of a few “Healthy Choice” options on the scarlet menu. The Carvery is a surviving remnant of an earlier age in jet travel: an age of stable airlines charging regulated fares, of male sales execs and three-martini politicians in comfy seats sharing naughty remarks about pert stewardesses while watching in-flight movies from real 16mm projectors, of the original Cocktail Culture. Today, The Carvery’s big windows overlook the taxiways of Horizon Air, a low-fare, short-haul, no-meals, express commuter line.

The other big throwback to the days of flying past is the Museum of Flight Store, an extension of and promo for the partly-Boeing-backed museum at Boeing Field. The store offers fun and educational memorabilia of air travel, from nostalgic Pan Am 747 model kits to exquisite reproduction wood propellers to freeze-dried Astronaut Food ice cream. There are even refrigerator magnets with old United Airlines logos promoting its early transcontinental routes as “Coast to Coast Mainliners.”

Back when that slogan was coined, shortly after United was spun off from Boeing, flying was a novelty and an adventure. United still used Mainliner as the name of its inflight magazine into the mid-’60s, when three-martini flying was nearing its peak and “mainlining” gained a new meaning here on Earth. Today, more and more of us are mainlining on the drug-like state of tripping through Airport Nation. And while jet travel, like some other drugs, has lost some of the exclusive cachet it once held, it still holds an ability to entrance and seduce its users, some of whom never quite escape its grip.

The route to Sea-Tac described at the top of this story is that taken by Metro routes 174 and 184. The express route 194 uses I-5, as do the $7.50 Grey Line Airporter (626-6088), leaving throughout the day from downtown Seattle hotels, and the Shuttle Express (622-1424), which will pick you up from most anywhere in town. And while airfares are now deregulated, taxi fares from downtown to Sea-Tac are standardized at $30 a carload.

MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.

SPACES IN THE HEART: While watching this year’s fifth annual Belltown Inside Out, a “community” festival originally sponsored by condo developers and now increasingly run by local Scientologists, an acquaintance told me the newly-widened 2nd Ave. sidewalks were an omen that the whole neighborhood was doomed to become “another Rodeo Drive.” Dunno ’bout that; the Nordstroms, who have de facto control of retail zoning in Seattle, are getting all the new costly stores situated next to them. Indeed, the movie megaplexes planned for the Pike/ Pine corridor (30 total screens) are helping end Belltown’s mini movie row. The King has closed for probably the last time. And now it’s been announced the ugly-outside-gorgeous-inside Cinerama will close when or before the mega-cinemas open. The Cinerama was the first Seattle movie house I went to (for the minor musical Song of Norway). Only the UA’s two screens remain, as discount houses… Similarly, a belated goodbye goes to Village Lanes, closed for redevelopment into an Office Depot just as bowling becomes the hip sport of the ’90s (many of your fave Seattle musical performers are also keglers). Speaking of things hip-n’-now…

BUZZ BIN TO BARGAIN BIN?: We’ve written recently about the continued flow of big money into the book biz, disproving the common notion that nobody reads anymore. Now there’s MTV Books, out to disprove the notion that no young’ns read anymore. It’s an imprint of MTV’s fellow Viacom unit Simon & Schuster, launching with such tie-in titles as The Real Real World and Aeon Flux: The Dossier.

Underlying all this is Viacom’s mistaken notion that there’s a generation out there that loves its MTV and will eat up anything bearing its name (in the trade mag Advertising Age, MTV claims to be sponsors’ gateway to “32.1 million impressionable young minds”). What there really is, as known to everyone except Viacom, is a generation that reluctantly turns to MTV for a few specialty shows and the flips to it when there’s nothing else on, but doesn’t think of it as anything more than a corporate-media compromise.

You could really see it if you were on America Online during the recent MTV Online promotion. The channel solicited comments from AOL users, some of which were retransmitted on a censor-delayed basis across the bottom of the MTV screen during select video segments. There was quite a bit of MTV bashing, in various degrees of maturity and intelligibility, in the messages posted on AOL that didn’t make the censor’s cut. What made the MTV cablewaves was generally limited to the likes of “Eddie Vedder Roolz.” Speaking of online revelations…

THEATRICS: Hope you’re not tired of Courtneymania ‘cuz it’s spreading to the theatrical world. Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), a one-woman play by Elyse Singer based on Love’s uncopyrighted Internet newsgroup messages, just ended a three-week run at NYC’s HERE performance space. Carolyn Baeumler gave what by all accounts was a dead-on impersonation of Love, writhing about the stage while reciting online posts about everything from rock-star sexism to life with and after Cobain to a recollection of the first record she ever owned (Marlo Thomas’s ode to non-gender-specific child rearing, Free to Be You and Me). She’s accompanied by a lone guitarist, offstage voices playing her online correspondents, and slides and videos of her career and life trials. A positive review comes in the online zine Addicted to Noise from Carol Mariconda, Love’s personal volunteer liaison with the newsgroupalt.fan.courtney-love. Mariconda writes, “Courtney’s intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having experienced more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively short existence, is captured by Baeumler in a powerful portrayal.”

PLUGS OF THE SHAMELESS VARIETY: My huge book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, is now at the printer and should be in stores by the start of October. A release party’s tentatively set for Sun., Oct. 15; details to follow… Still looking for your favorite local grocery store, in the convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic categories. Details on theMisc. website.

UPDATES: The C-Space group is dead, but another group has risen to take its place providing education and advice to the leather community: SKIN (Seattle Kink Information Network). It meets at, and can be reached in care of, the Crossroads Learning Center… I’ve now tried RealAudio (the software for receiving sound files on the Internet in real time) and it’s great. Love the lo-fi sound (akin to an international call placed thru a no-name long distance company), complete with disconcerting jump cuts at random places in some files. The software’s developers promise improved quality in future releases (though any improvement is limited as long as the data comes to you on regular phone lines), but for now it’s a miracle.

THE REAL THREAT: I’m told cops are still trying to find “public safety” excuses to stop the all-ages shows at the Sailors Union hall. The SUP shows are probably the safest place to be in Belltown. The real safety problem lies on the three blocks just south of SUP. Late Fri. and Sat. nights, this is an iffy zone for single women, non-jock men, and anybody else rich bullies like to beat up on. Meanwhile, Capitol Hill continues to face gay-bashings, including a recent attack against two women outside Wildrose. Seattle is getting to be a less-safe place, and you can’t blame it on the homeless, non-whites or other “Others.” Increasingly, the threat to safe streets comes from middle- or upper-middle-class white kids, part of the “upscale” class local politicians and most local media bow down to. For the benefit of those of the suburban jock contingent who might be reading this while “slumming” in Belltown or on Broadway, a quick piece-O-advice: Despite what you might have been led to believe in recent years, intolerance, bigotry, rudeness and violence are not virtues. Bashing, harrassment and racist jokes don’t prove how daring or “politically incorrect” you are; they only prove how stupid you are. Assholes aren’t noble “rebels,” they’re just assholes. It’s not “cool” to be a creep.

INDUSTRY FOR SHOES: As you know, I love Seattle’s urban industrial areas. I love their empty streets, their old-style big low buildings, their ambience of honest hard work. I haven’t talked about one of my favorite such areas, south Ballard/Salmon Bay. The area from the Ship Canal to Leary Way is a low-key wonderland, from Mike’s Chili Tavern to the legendary recording studio (now known as John and Stu’s) where most of the early Sub Pop product was made. In between are boat shops, warehouses, lumber yards, paint factories, car-parts stores, and a couple of stray artists’ studios. But like anything real in this town, it’s targeted for “improvement.” Fred Meyer wants to build a big store near Leary & 8th NW. I like Freddy’s and would love one in Ballard, but not at the expense of an entire neighborhood. A group called SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land) wants commercial uses and their jobs preserved there; it’s asking the city to do more research on how Freddy’s would change the area. SOIL can be reached at 789-1010. Elsewhere in developmentland…

SACRIFICE: The Seattle daily papers were somewhat agog that the Legislature didn’t make the whole state subsidize a new Seattle baseball stadium. But it’s in non-King counties’ best interests not to support the Mariners. The team draws out-of-town residents’ entertainment dollars to Seattle, dollars that would otherwise be spent at home. So instead, the state will probably let the county raise an already regressive sales tax, pending a public vote, to help build a new arena whose retro architecture would bring back memories of a time when ballparks were human-scale facilities built with all-private funds. (To read arguments from new-stadium proponents, check out the unofficial Stay-dium WWW page (http://www.weber.u.washington.edu/~ayers/staydium/stayduim.html).

ONCE AGAIN, be sure to attend our next big Misc. anniversary party, Thurs., 6/8, 7:30 p.m., at the Metropolis Gallery on University between 1st and 2nd (across from the big black wind-up toy). For those planning to see SIFF’s second showing of The Year of My Japanese Cousin that night, come by afterwards.

Welcome again to Misc., the column with only one word for Eartha Kitt’s recent Jazz Alley stint: Purr-fection!

FAT, NOT SASSY: As a civic booster, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by Fat Tuesday, the Mardi Gras for people who are just too boomer wimpy or too laid back to do a real Mardi Gras. Mind you, it’s a screwy notion for a stuck-up Protestant city to attempt a Mardi Gras in the first place (even the northern towns that pull off successful Winter Carnivals tend to be in Catholic-dominated places like Quebec and southern Germany), but the way the idea’s been executed usually hurts. I was at the 1978 Fat Tuesday, the last big nighttime-outdoor one, and it almost became for real (i.e., people getting shitfaced and fucking in public, or dressing up like all get out). Since then, it’s been tamed into a promo tool for the boomer-blues-bar circuit, and it’s been an experience not unlike a boomer blues bar on a bad night: predictable, unoriginal, yet annoying. Every place needs a real letting-go time, a healthy respectful vacation from inhibitions; many of us could use a real Lent too, but self-denial isn’t part of the consumer society’s agenda.

VANITY PLATE OF THE WEEK (on a Suzuki Samurai parked on Queen Anne): “F8L CR8.”

PIERCE-INGS: I heartily recommend voting for the big transit proposal next week. Do we need more freeway lanes? No way. Could we use a reliable regional transit system that makes it possible to live as well as commute sans private wheels? You bet. Public transit is a populist, civilizing force, bringing diverse people together as well as saving resources. I saw it when I took the transit proponents’ demonstration train. Hundreds of eager citizens young and old, sitting in adequately comfy seats and chatting happily while we rumbled speedily past the south King/north Pierce County neverland toward the wonders of Tacoma.

Decade-old bumper stickers used to say “Admit It Tacoma, You’re Beautiful.” Recent T-shirts for local band Seaweed admonished us to “Visualize Tacoma.” There’s no need to be so apologetic. Tacoma really is one of the most honestly attractive cities in the region (and perhaps the nation). Except for one area, it’s a human-scale city with a homey lived-in look to it. Its compact downtown was bypassed by the freeway and hence maintains much of its solid brick prewar buildings. The chain stores may be gone from downtown but there are two great “restored” theaters and an Antique Row, plus your usual array of “unique shops and restaurants” at Freighthouse Square. There’s even an elegant coffeehouse in the storefront that served as Tracey Ullman’s pizza joint in I Love You To Death. The town’s got lotsa wonderful architecture: stoic old warehouses, a music store with a rooftop piano neon sign, the ivory-white world HQ of Roman Meal bread (billed on the building as “Nature’s Nut Brown Food”), and of course the world-famous Java Jive. The one part of Tacoma that sucks, the soulless hole in its urban donut, is the Tacoma Mall area–as whatshername might say, a mall is a mall is a mall–yet even it has its particular charms, specifically one of the area’s last surviving Chuck E Cheese robotic pizza parlors.

And you can go there carless too, without waiting for permanent commuter-train service to start, six days a week on the express buses ($2 each way) run by Pierce Transit (where “Your Ride Is Our Pride”). Better still, you can transfer in T-Town to another express and end up in Indietown USA, Olympia. Too bad these express buses don’t run after 8 p.m.; it’d be great to see a show at T-Town’s Victory Club or Oly’s Capitol Theater (or for those town’s folks to see shows here), and afterward Leave the Driving to Them. But you will be able to use the bus this summer to see outdoor AAA baseball (the most “professional” ball we might get this season) at glorious ol’ Cheney Stadium.

NEXT WEEK: The first-ever Misc. Frequently Asked Questions list. Get yours in now.

11/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:

LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’

IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY

Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?

AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.

UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.

GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.

This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.

Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.

However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.

GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…

HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)

Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).

THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”

BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.

BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.

The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.

FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.

TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.

PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)

MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”

THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.

KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.

GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.

The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.

ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)

I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).

The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.

It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”

PASSAGE

Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”

REPORT

You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).

Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).

With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Oogonium”