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10/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT
Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.
WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.
WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)
WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.
BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.
JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.
RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.
NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.
THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”
CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!
BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).
The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.
Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.
I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…
X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.
THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.
EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.
But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.
Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.
So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.
Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.
DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.
Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.
ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.
The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.
FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…
BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.
Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”
Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.
DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.
SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”
‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”
PASSAGE
As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:
“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”
REPORT
As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.
Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).
There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Algolagnia”
4/93 Misc. Newsletter
GREAT! GATES GETS HITCHED
JUST AFTER I TOSS MY OLD LIST
OF COMPUTER-NERD SEX PUNS…
Misc. hopes you’ve all got your copy of the white-on-black T-shirt featuring a hypodermic needle superimposed on the Space Needle beside the slogan, ” I went to Seattle to make a score and all I got was this lousy recording contract.”
UPDATE: I recently said we should preserve Seattle as a working city and resist the huge “Seattle Commons” yuppification project. Advocates of the Cascade neighborhood, a neglected pocket of affordable housing threatened by the Commons plan, have now formed the Cascade Residents Action Group to fight the wrong kind of redevelopment (info: 624-9049 or 523-2569).
BEEHIVE VIDEO, R.I.P.: It began 15 years ago on N.E. 45th as a far-flung outlet for the Peaches record chain, housed in an ex-Ford dealership. When that chain went Chapter 11 in ’81, the local manager bought it and added a Ballard outlet. It was the last large locally-owned record store in town, and the last to stock new vinyl. The first sign of trouble came in ’87, when the Wherehouse chain opened across the street, followed by Blockbuster down near U Village. In ’90, the store stopped paying for the Peaches name and held a contest for a new name (which meant no more word-balloon signs with the “Peachy” mascot pointing to the “Gay and Bisexual Videos” shelf). In ’92, they sold the Ballard store and made the 45th outlet all-video. It bravely (foolishly?) failed to stock umpteen multiple copies of blockbuster action hits, instead keeping a large stable stock of cool obscurities. The strategy cut costs and attracted a loyal clientele, but it still wasn’t enough. On 3/22, I rented my regular Monday 2-for-1 titles and saw nothing strange, except that the sale shelf of close-out tapes was a bit fuller. The next afternoon, I went in and was abruptly told I couldn’t rent anything else: “I’m sorry, we just went out of business. We’re only taking returns.” Its loss leaves a lot of frequent-renter cards that’ll never get filled up, and leaves the central U District without a decent foreign-film store.
OUT TO DRY: The Squire Shops are in Chapter 11; many of the remaining 23 outlets are closing. Just as the ugly clothes that made ’em famous are coming back! Squire sold clothes that young mall-crawlers thought were hip. In its heyday, that meant jeans with cuffs nearly as wide as the waist. Seattle wore bellbottoms years after the rest of the country stopped. Several companies formed here to keep Seattle in clothes the national companies no longer made. That scene led to the local firms that gave the world loud sweatshirts with goofy slogans and Hypercolors; some of those firms are now on the wrong side of that fad and face money trouble themselves. (“Designer grunge” has virtually nothing to do with the local fashion biz.)
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Washington Free Press promises to be the hard-hitting investigative newspaper Seattle’s never really had, with the possible exception of the pre-JOA P-I. Several tabloids over the years promised this, but soon turned into lifestyle rags that just used `politics’ to define their subcultures (Community Catalyst is just as guilty of this, in its way, as the Weekly). Free Press isn’t like that. It doesn’t tell you what clothes you have to wear or what food you have to eat. It just reports the under-reported big stuff. In the April ish, that’s a huge piece about Boeing’s spotty environmental record and vigorous influence-peddling. The rest of the free monthly tab’s weaker (talk radio-style rants against Jack in the Box) but shows promise….Beyond the Cultural Dustbin is Hans and Thelma Lehmann’s personal history of highbrow art, music and dance in Seattle since 1938, when UK conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (scion of the drug empire that now owns Contac) came to lead the Seattle Symphony. He left a year later, calling Seattle “a cultural dustbin.” The book argues that we’ve come a long way since then, from the Northwest School painters of the ’50s and John Cage‘s residency at Cornish to today’s proliferation of dance and theatrical troupes. The book implies but doesn’t directly ask: We’ve got culture now, but is it art?
JESUS JONES WITHOUT THE JONES: Counter Culture is the first Christian alternative-music zine I’ve seen in Seattle since the Jesus Freak scene of the ’70s. Its cover interviewee, Tonio K., was a minor ’79 LA singer-songwriter (best-known LP: Life in the Food Chain) who’s now born-again and wants a crossover hit just like Amy Grant. The writers insist at several parts that you can still like Jesus even if you don’t like the Religious Right. It displays calls to prayer in standard cut-up punkzine design. It covers Christian grunge bands that mix “`70s funk with the anxious mind of `80s punk rock with the heart of God.” But then, punk and its descendants, even in their nihilism, held a righteous notion of good and evil, a conviction that the world should be better than it is. Bands like U2 and 10,000 Maniacs already use songs as sermons. Take out sex and drugs, add New Testament imagery, and you too could exhort the faithful at the Vineyard coffeehouse in the U District.
TO WOMB IT MAY CONCERN: First Moments is a local firm offering “videos of your child’s first moments” — ultrasound images of the fetus, to be treasured as a family heirloom; there’s blank tape at the end so you can add birth and infancy footage. Forgetting the unspoken anti-abortion implication, it makes you wonder: if you’re sick of friends’ cloying baby pix now, just wait!
OPEN MEMO TO CURSE: You’ve successfully exposed the hypocritical machinations behind KCMU-Lite and its instigators. But to restore the station as a community resource, you’ve gotta deal with the UW Board of Regents, who control the license. The current managers were turning the station into nothing but a self-serving fundraising machine, something the Regents can identify with. After fundraising, their no. 2 priority is saving face; with all the other campus scandals, they might seek the safest way out of the KCMU dilemma. Unfortunately, there are “safer” ways than restoring Classic KCMU. They could turn it into an automated classical outlet, or return it to the Communications School. You’ve gotta assert that any format change would violate the promises made in membership drives. Then, offer an olive branch. Ask your comrades, the fired DJs with the class-action suit, to back off if the Regents will let you help set up a new structure for the station, not like it’s now but not quite like before either. Tell them you don’t want to restore all of the station’s rough-hewn past. You want to build on its heritage, to more strongly serve students, alternative-music communities, and others now unserved by local radio. Even after that, you’ll have to deal with KUOW management down the hall, people who’ve asserted excessive control over KCMU and who honestly don’t get what’s wrong with institutionalized “public” radio. People who only seek the most upscale listeners. People who mistake blandness for a virtue. The announcers on NPR stations all sound like HAL 9000, for chrissakes! They oughta sound more like the booming, colorful voice who used to announce the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They oughta reflect the glorious pomposity of orchestral and opera music, the twee affectations of chamber music, the life-affirming spirit of real jazz, instead of a yup variation on BBC English. Public radio should be by and for the public, not just by the bureaucracy for the upscale.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Ex-KCMUers Debbie Letterman and Kathy Fennessy are now spinning CDs as live “queue jockeys” for callers on hold for Microsoft’s product-support lines. While it’s a novel job that pays OK, Letterman told the Puget Sound Business Journal that she’s still tied into as restrictive a format as she faced at KCMU-Lite before she quit. “The key word is mellow:” Enya si, Ministry no.
THE URBAN TOURIST: Columbia Center sounds as strange as it looks. The climate-control hum and rushing air from elevator shafts give the 5th Ave. entrance cool noises (they’d be great for a sci-fi movie). Even weirder is the Seafirst Corridor, a passageway under 5th and Columbia from Columbia Center (where the bank execs work) to Seafirst 5th Ave. Plaza (where the back-office staff works). It’s the most surreal walkway since the United terminal at O’Hare. On the walls, plastic-covered pastel lights flash in a slow sequence of colors, while New Age music and ocean sounds enhance the creamy dreamscape. At the end, two elevators take you one flight up to the harsh utilitarian corridors of the 5th Ave. Plaza, where a security guard waits to let you back into a numbing temp job.
DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: If you think Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy‘s Subaru spots are already odd, wait ’til you see the one with a dude in black jeans saying that the Impreza’s “like punk rock, only it’s a car”.
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS (via Michelle McCarthy and David Humphries): “London news has reported the NY bomb news prominently, but I think Londoners were squinting a little at the panicky New Yorkers having had their first initiation to bomb-based evacuation. Since we’ve lived here, areas as populous as Wall Street are evacuated for bomb threats close to weekly, and one actually goes off about once a month. It’s hard to imagine the US tolerating the constant shutdown and occasional destruction of its biggest cities and business districts.”
CHRISTIAN GORE AT 911: Three years ago, Gore was the uppity editor of a Detroit ‘zine about perverse film and video. Now, he’s the uppity editor of a slicked-up, mass-market Film Threat, based in Beverly Hills (at that ZIP Code) and financed by Hustler‘s Larry Flynt. Gore puts big stars on the cover (for sales) and trashes those stars inside (for credibility). He covers “B” Hollywood horror and sci-fi, and still promotes a few undergrounds. Gore promised two different nights of video treats, but the Friday and Saturday shows shared half the same material: drive-in movie trailers, Sid & Marty Krofft theme songs, banned Ren & Stimpy episodes (Gore’s cronies with the original R&S team), psychedelic computer animation. At both shows, Gore passed around cans of cheap beer and asked the audience to sit back, yell if they thought something was boring, and act like they were in his living room. I took advantage of this after he showed a student film about an “artist” who has naked women with blue paint on their bodies press up against butcher paper: “Everybody knows that’s based on a real artist, right?” Gore, incredulous: “It is?” Me: “Of course. Yves Klein! He was in the first Mondo Cane movie.” “I didn’t know that.” A guy who doesn’t know the daddy of schlockumentaries shouldn’t call himself a weird-film authority.
IT’S SQUARE TO BE HIP: I don’t just want you to question the assumptions of mainstream culture. I want you to question the assumptions of your culture, like the assumption that it’s sacred to be “hip” and profane to be “square.” The hip-vs.-square concept is the alternative culture’s unexamined legacy from the beats’ misinterpretation of jazz lingo. In the NY jazz scene, “hepcats” (derived, sez Zola Mumford, from the Senegalese word hipicat, “one who is very aware of their surroundings”) were those who played and/or listened to advanced black music (instead of the watered down Paul Whiteman versions) and who’d mastered the complex codes of social gamesmanship in Manhattan. It was a concept for a specific time/place that no longer exists. Square people these days are a lot hipper than a lot of self-proclaimed hipsters. Squares enjoy drag queens on Geraldo and buy male pinup posters. Squares buy Soundgarden CDs and watch The Simpsons. Squares grow and haul the food we eat. Squares make our cars. Squares support education and world-relief drives. As Wes “Scoop” Nisker writes in Crazy Wisdom, “the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering.” There is no superior race (not even yours). There is no superior gender or gender-role (not even yours). There is no superior culture (not even yours). The real enemies are people who think they’re hip but aren’t: The Religious Right (not a mass movement but a tightly organized minority that gets out its vote in low-turnout elections); the civic fathers/mothers who want to outlaw youth culture. (More on this below.)
IN BLOOM: When I told people I wanted to write a book about the local music scene, most said “you’d better get it out right away. Nobody will care about Seattle next month.” I don’t know if the “Seattle sound” is really the flash in the pan that so many local wags think (hoping they can go back to their familiar nihilism?). People here are so used to obscurity, when the spotlight shines they squint and wait for it to stop. But like I’ve written before, this could just be the flash that lights a lasting fire. Jonathan & Bruce shrewdly took a subgenre that’s been developing for 10 years, put a slogan on it, made it the Next Big Thing and made us its capital. But the sound they built isn’t one of those short-half-life sounds like power pop. It’s an identifiable sound, imitable yet sufficiently diverse to allow infinite variations. The dozens of “generic grunge” bands now playing opening sets at the Off Ramp could form the tourist bedrock of a permanent scene, like the “generic country” bands in small Nashville bars, bringing in the bucks and attention to support more advanced work. If we play our cards right, Seattle could become the Nashville of rock.
BUT NOT IF the forces of repression have their way, as led by our city’s “progressive” political machine. Most mayors like to kiss up to their town’s fastest growing industry, but not ours. From feminist/prohibitionists to the tepid No Nukes concert film, some of the most adamant political liberals were cultural conservatives. Norm Rice wrote the Teen Dance Ordinance as a City Councilmember; as mayor, he’s apparently behind the actions to shut down all-ages concerts and raves and the effort to seize part ownership of RKCNDY. Rice comes from the disciplinarian side of the black middle class, where adults want young people to strive hard at all times and avoid idle temptations like pop music. Rice doesn’t get that the rock scene is a hard-working, industrious bunch of people empowering themselves. He calls himself a “supporter of the arts” while clamping down against Seattle’s first indigenous artform since the ’50s Northwest School painters. He promotes Seattle as a “KidsPlace” while trying to shut young people up.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to check out the Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at the ex-Penney’s site on 2nd & Pike (where the real homeless are studiously kept outside), and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”
Christine Kelly in Sassy:
“While watching the inaugural balls, I realized that Hillary Clinton is the Courtney Love of politics. If the people want Kurt (Bill), they gotta take Courtney (Hillary) too. People will accuse Courtney (Hillary) of trying to break up the band with her constant meddling and poisoning influence, even though Courtney (Hillary) has her own band (office). Hillary (Courtney) said provocative things to the press about baking cookies (taking heroin). Courtney (Hillary) was on MTV with her husband. Both chicks have a cute, sassy daughter. There is one major difference: Courtney has too much taste to mix jewel tones like amethyst and royal blue while watching her husband accept an MTV award (get inaugurated).”
Like I said somewhere here, I’m starting to write the major history of the Seattle music scene from ’76 to today. I’ll need to talk to everybody who was a major part of it (players, promoters, ‘zine editors, designers, producers, club people). Write for details. If any of you know the addresses of ex-locals who’ve left town, also write.
“Pecuniary”
My Alma Mama
Essay for the Stranger, 9/14/92
Congratulations to all of you who have placed yourselves in debt for the rest of your and your children’s lives in order to go to the University of Washington, the self-styled “University of a Thousand Years,” the largest single campus west of Texas (the Calif. system is decentralized among many smaller sites). I’ve been there. I know its secrets. You can get a lot out of this place, if you know how. It’s my job here to tell you how. But first, some fun facts.
The UW is not, as is sometimes claimed by outsiders, a football team with a college attached to it. It’s really a research hospital with a college attached to it. A half dozen med school profs make more money than the governor. The medical center grew to world-class status thanks to our late, influential Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson, who channeled a lot of big federal research grants its way. Call it pork barrel if you will; but if the AIDS vaccine they’re working on (now in preliminary human tests) proves effective, a lot of people will be thankful the place exists.
The UW’s already made one medical miracle, the artificial kidney machine. Back when the first experimental unit was built, they set up a committee to decide who got to use it. It was called the “God Squad,” because (1) it always included at least one minister, and (2) it chose patients from among people who would die without the treatment. You can learn more about this in the “Seattle Hits” exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry, and in Adam Woog’s book about local inventions, Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats.
While the lower campus (hospital, stadium) achieved national recognition, the arts and sciences departments on the upper campus struggled, due to their dependence on regular state funding. If good comp-lit and anthropology profs get better offers from Stanford, the UW won’t try too hard to keep them. Newer upper-campus buildings have been built in that brutal, “efficient” architecture that ends up costing in the long run because of all the cheap materials used. We don’t even get good graduation speakers.
The Times ran some recent “exposes” about the UW president’s lavish lifestyle. The stories first made it appear as an extravegance at taxpayer expense, but then it turned out that president Wm. Gerberding’s mansion and furnishings are largely paid for by a private fund, endowed by a timber baron who wanted a stately site for bigwig functions. So, while you can’t complain to the state about the palatial home most of you’ll never visit, you can complain to the fund that it ought to consider spending some dough on vital repairs to some of the functioning campus buildings. (At least the state found money this year to hire a window washer for the campus, a position that was left unfilled for over a decade.)
Our state government likes to congratulate itself on “supporting quality education” without having to actually do so, especially if it involves spending money. (Evergreen was created to be a profit center for the state college system, attracting rich kids at full out-of-state tuition.)
There’s always been an element in the Legislature that’s fearful of people with ideas. Various UW-related people were harassed by commie-bashers from the ’20s through the ’50s. One of these was Henry Suzzallo, whose support for progressive ideas got him hounded out of his post as university president in the ’30s; he eventually got a library named for him. The independent Seattle Repertory Playhouse, producers of “distinctive plays” for many years, got ousted from its UW-owned building on University Way amidst McCarthy-era red baiting against its provocative productions. Glenn Hughes, the late UW drama prof who backed the drive to put the Playhouse out of business, now has his name on the place. That was the context behind the harassment of Frances Farmer, a very cool UW actress who flirted with left-wing causes and caught a lot of flack in the local press for it, before she went off to L.A. and severe emotional burnout. While she was here, she reportedly dated another acting student, future news anchorman Chet Huntley.
This is a big institution, a good place to get lost in. It’s full of a lot of diverse people, doing a lot of diverse stuff. My advice: take the classes you think you’ll need to get a job to pay off your student loans. But also study anything and everything else. Do not, under any circumstances, become obsessed about a career to the exclusion of everything else (you’ll probably not find a job in your first-choice career anyway). Get a healthy dose of input from all facets of knowledge. Take regular classes, extension classes, Experimental College classes. Wander the 4.3-million volume library system every chance you get, especially the old and foreign magazines in Suzallo. Go to plays and shows. Get involved in a political group or two. Learn from experience about what you want out of sex (safely). Your high school personality and reputation are now erased; go out and learn who you really are.
The UW gathers a lot of people from across our great state. A lot of them are reasonably intelligent people whose decimated local schools didn’t prepare them right. They show up in class, blissfully unaware that some instructor who came from a decent educational background back East will humiliate ’em in class for not already knowing all the things they came here to learn. The following is a brief list of topics upon which you should bone:
Stuff you won’t have to know to make it in college, but ought to anyway (you may never again have access to a 4-million-volume library system):
1/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and
the 1992 In/Out list, also published in the Seattle Times)
1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21
Welcome to a new ever-lovin’ fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture report that doesn’t follow trends and doesn’t really lead them either, but just stays out of their way.
Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero’s Books on 11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don’t think I’m going to see The Rapture…. There appear to be two Addams Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I saw. Maybe it’s like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw the critics’ edition, tell me what it was like…. This year’s best-of list by Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and never bothers to check what’s playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of 14) that didn’t show here, down significantly from previous years.
Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11 p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station’s next owner, the Providence Journal, was one of the papers that didn’t run the Doonesbury strips about Quayle’s possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them… Almost Live might go national next fall. Worldvision’s offering a syndicated weeknight version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.
Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like “Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed” and “Complex, condensed, SAM tough to build.” It had “thank you Seattle” vanity ads from Acme Iron Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the Carpet Resource Center. It’s more proof of how much easier it is to get politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing contractors, instead of uncouth artists.
Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): “What’s that up there?” “It’s a gas station.” “No, that’s a flower. Don’t you know, flowers are bee pee stations.” The real BP has a kids’ book promotion with G. Burghoff saying it’s important for children to read, so “you can become anything you want to be.” No — it’s important so America can regain a capable workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies like BP.
No “Willie” Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels. First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys who insist they’re not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN’s electronic masking made her look like Madonna’s “Blank” character in Dick Tracy. The defendant’s name is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy’s nephew but seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten Kennedys.
Ad Slogan of the Month: “It’s not your mother’s tampon.” I should hope not…
Good Buy, Baseball!: So let’s get together and buy the Mariners. Granted, it’s not as important as saving Frederick’s, but it’s still a good cause. At $100 million, it’ll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I’m reminded again of Jim Bouton’s words at the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle’s first attempt to keep a team: “Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can’t be all bad.”
Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested, presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)… The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It’s appropriate that Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).
Xmas ’91: Frederick’s save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that’s a sign of confidence to the store’s bankers remains to be seen…Â Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment of Hasbro’s product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle dock.
Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in hardcover.
None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, “David Ansen of Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of your seat.'” Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: “The twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone’s Movie Can’t Be Trusted.” But the last word, as always, goes to Oliver (“Fuck me, rock god!”) Stone: “I think a president was illegally killed.”
The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the Northwest is not Paradise. There’s this whole mystique that gets more exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters “turned conservative” in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women’s-choice initiative was due more to opponents’ well-funded lies than any deep anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson to the Senate, how we’re no more or less conservative than ever. It’s just getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the early ’70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: “Northwest Style: Laid Back with Dockers.”) The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our “tolerance” was more like apathy. We’re not mellow, we’re cold and sullen. The real spirit of the Northwest isn’t in aPoulsbo bed-n’-breakfast, it’s in the acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The syndrome’s worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by folks who think our State Reps are called “assemblymen.”)
Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and shrillily demand the right to destroy the few “real” spaces left.They built the S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan’s deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L’s) Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture. Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds, was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the nation’s social terrain.
Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the “rabbit ears” TV antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P. Middlemark died in ’89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, “nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all).” Sounds like my kinda guy.
‘Til our fab Feb. ish, make a ’92 resolution to petition KCTS to show The ’90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn’t count), and join us again.
Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 12/1: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of thing.”
IMPORTANT NOTICE
I don’t have a business checking account at this time. Please make all subscriptions payable to “Clark Humphrey.”
“Synecdoche”
THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92
I don’t claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That’s the logic of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what’s peaking, declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I previously predicted the rise of Estonia, ’70s music, and nose rings, as well as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.
9/91 Misc. Newsletter
Bug-Proof Pantyhose
Welcome back to an autumnally-seasoned edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that’s fond of noting that in the Robt. Venturi design with its vertical relief stripes, the name SEATTLE ART MUSEUM appears to be spelled with dollar signs.
THE RED SQUARES: On Mon., 8/19, I wrote in my ongoing computer file, “There are moments in the life of the world that make it tough to be a humor writer, even a world-weary, cynical humor writer.” Then the attempt at bringing back eight men’s sorry vision of the “good old days” disappeared faster than the stock at a Russian butcher, and I could retain my generally hopeful worldview about democratic progress in all countries except mine. I also reaffirmed how much I can hate public radio sometimes: call me a traditionalist, but world-crisis bulletins shouldn’t be combined with easy-listening background music (I refuse to call that Windham Hill-style music they use “jazz”).
A MOVING EXPERIENCE: Within weeks of the Weekly “discovering” my neighborhood, my landlord raised the rent significantly. Don’t let this happen to you! Took the increase as an opportunity to move (for only the second time in seven years; more desperate finances made me run from the upscalers eight times from ’81 to ’84). I will miss parts of the Broadway neighborhood, but will not miss the BMW car alarms malfunctioning at all hours or the ceiling that became a giant loudspeaker for the upstairs apt.’s stereo.
FILM TITLE OF THE MONTH: Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking.
FRAMED IN PUPPETLAND: The hoopla over Pee-wee, and all the child psychologists talking about how to tell your kids the sad news, is pathetic. The poor idol of millions hasn’t even been convicted yet. You’ve got to remember this was in south Fla., home of the 2-Live-Crew-busters, where there may have been official pressure to track down a white celebrity to harass in order to maintain a pretense of impartiality. Actually, it turns out that the arresting officer was part of a three-man squad assigned solely to make arrests for the most victimless sex act of all. (It’s such a Pee-wee sort of activity, too; self-possessive, compulsive, fantasy-possessed). For the record, he was watching straight porno films; a semiotics book a couple years back noted that the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters are based on common gay-camp personas.
WILD IN THE STREETS: KING and KIRO dumped Sat. AM cartoons for news (and local commercials). Now, when there’s violence on Sat. morning TV, the victims won’t be alive in the next scene. Both newscasts are heavily supplemented with filler satellite footage from other stations around the country. The stations chose just the right week to start their Sat. morn news, the morning after the traditional biggest Fri. night of brawl of the year. The Seafair riots are wimpy compared to riots in other cities for more substantial celebrations such as winning a Super Bowl, but our minor street brawls and our hydro-drunks keep the old rowdy Seattle spirit alive despite the annual proclamation that Seafair has, at last, become a “true family event.” The expectedly strident pre-parade anti-war rally was met by a Christian country-rock band sponsored by KMPS, singing “I love A-Mair-i-Kuh / I love the U-S-A” (with a military snare-drum riff) and shouting afterwards, “You know the line, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.” The TV stations, also expectedly, allowed no significant time for the protesters to tell why they were there and plenty of time for officials to insist how everybody besides a few foul-mouths is in total unquestioning obedience to our national authorities.
CATHODE CORNER: Employees of Telemation, once Seattle’s biggest video production facility, spray-painted the outside of the building the Fri. night after the company was shut down by its out-of-state buyer, the Home Shopping Network. By early Mon. morning, all offending statements (including the blacking-out of the parent company’s name) were whitewashed over….
On 8/15, KING discovered a Northwest angle to the latest Royal scandal: Di’s petite 2-piece bathing suit (that made the cover of every UK tabloid) was designed by Oregon’s Jantzen. (In The Mouse on the Moon, the film sequel to The Mouse That Roared, a BBC announcer proclaimed a British connection to the Grand Fenwick space program in the form of the astronauts’ wristwatch.)
MODULATIONS: KNDD (“The End”), the new “cutting edge” format on the old KRAB-KGMI frequency, is like Old Wave Night at the Romper Room. Instead of the greatest hits of Phil Collins, they play the greatest hits of U2. Their last format was for folks whose musical tastes stop at 1970; this is for folks whose tastes stopped in ’87. (At least they play Thrill Kill Kult in light rotation.)
TRUE CRIME: A Montana fugitive was spotted on 8/1 by his old warden when they inadvertently met at an Ms game. In any previous year he’d never have had to worry about anybody finding him there.
HOBSON’S CHOICE ’92: Rebecca Boren and Joel Connelly are reportedly feuding over who’ll get to cover the ’92 US Senate race for the P-I. On KCTS panel shows, Connelly has shown to be fond of possible Republican candidate Rod Chandler and unfond of possible Democratic candidate Mike Lowry.
AD VERBS: NutriSystem’s running flashy ads pointing with pride to an endorsement by Healthline magazine. Weight Watchers announced it was promised the same endorsement, but refused to pay the magazine for favorable coverage.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH: The NY Times piece (8/6) on minor Florida theme parks: ones you might not know (Flea World, the Elvis Presley Museum, Gatorland, and “Xanadu, Home of the Future”), are in the works (the Transcendental Meditation park “Maharishi Veda Land” planned by magician/TM devotee Doug Henning), the USSR/US friendship park Peristroika Palace), and ones that never made it. The latter included Bible World, Western Fun World, Hurricane World (“a glorified wind tunnel that could transport tourists into the eye of a storm”), Little England (“a grandiose re-creation of an ancient British village,” sounding like an old G. Vidal story about Disney buying all of England), and Winter Wonderlando (“skiing in central Florida. Great name. Lousy concept”).
Runner-up: The 8/1Â Wall St. Journal report that “Kanebo Ltd. in Osaka plans to test US markets this year for pantyhose embedded with microcapsules that moisturize while the wearer walks. It sells scented pantyhose in Japan, where it just introduced insect-repellent hose.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH: The Ballard law office storefront “Mullavey, Prout, Grenley, Foe and Lawless.”
AGIT PROPS: The Downtown Seattle Assn. call for censorship against one of the In/Public sets of artist’s aphorisms, echoing a woefully ignorant and arrogant P-I editorial calling the project “not art but arrogance,” is itself an arrogant act.Bold verbal statements are indeed an artform. They have been so at least since the 10 Commandments were etched in stone. The postmod incarnation of this art takes the boldness of current T-shirt/bumpersticker philosophy and turns it around so it challenges, instead of reinforces, the consumer culture (perhaps the real reason the retailers hate it). It demands the right to not be “cheerful” or “colorful,” as a merchant spokesperson described his idea of good art. In an allegedly image-drenched era, it affirms the power of the written word. It has it limits, though, as evidenced by theGuerrilla Girls posters at the Greg Kucera Gallery. The GGs really to nothing to help female and minority visual artists; they just point out that nobody else in the mainstream art elite does. It could also be argued that declaring all female artists to be one class or even one genre, regardless of what any of them does, only keeps the artists’ own voices stifled.
A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THE GUERRILLA GIRLS WOULDN’T LIKE: A new bio claims Time-Life heiress Claire Booth Luce, archetypal career woman and wielder of unprecedented power in politics and publishing, obtained a great deal of her influence by sleeping with politicians, editors other than her husband, generals, theatrical producers, etc. A first reaction might be that she’s betrayed, from beyond the grave as it were, the millions of women who came after her fighting for a similar degree of influence on the basis of merit alone. But if she hadn’t done what she did, would there have been as much opportunity for those who followed her? (Probably.) Will today’s women live without her for a role model? (Undoubtedly; the Republicanism she espoused is the nemesis of current feminists.)
STOP THE PRESSES: At least three Misc. readers have been sending me clips from that awful Dave Barry, the “humor” columnist whose one-note theme is “Yeah, so I’m an affluent, dull white guy, so what?” Once, humorists had fun getting involved with the exciting parts of their cultures (jazz, early movies, wild fashion) and sneering at the dull and complacent. Nowadays, dorks like Barry and R. Baker take pride in their geezerdom and sneer at anything or anybody with real character. They pander to the whitebread suburban mentality of most newspaper editors, who keep making papers duller and more irrelevant while blaming the resulting circulation losses on public apathy.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Misc. subscriber James Koehnline is planning a World’s Columbian Jubilee Calendar of Saints, to celebrate the 500th anniv. of Columbus by proclaiming an end to “the Work and War Machine.” Koehnline is looking for names of cool people for saint’s days on the calendar (“no living persons, no Popes, no heads of state”). For info send $1 to Koehnline, Box 85777, Seattle 98145-1777.
CHAINED: QFC wouldn’t display the Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, claiming the image of a woman with child wasn’t “family oriented” enough (!), unfit to belong in the same store with the beer and cigarettes they sell every day (or on the same periodical racks with tabloids, serial-killer paperbacks, and rich-bitch novels).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH (from the Wall St. Journal, 8/13): “Calgene Inc. wants federal regulators to declare its genetically engineered tomato officially ‘food’…. The tomato, named the Flavr Savr, includes a gene that blocks the production of an enzyme that causes them to soften and rot.”…
Calif. now has a snack food sales tax, and is trying to figure what’s junk and what’s untaxed “real” food. On which side would you put fructose-laden “energy bars”?
THE NAKED TRUTH: The long articles in the Times and the Weekly about table dancing clubs sold sex more sneakily than the more honest commerce of the clubs themselves. The sleaziness of the clubs’ operators, as described in the articles, seems little worse than that of some mainstream entertainment promoters I’ve known and/or read about. Nude dancing can be seen as a metaphor for our entire consumer culture (all tease, no fulfillment); the sadness that pervades those places, beneath a screaming air of mandatory “happiness,” betrays a deprivation of true connectedness in such a culture.
‘TIL OCTOBER presumably finds us much cooler, celebrate the 10th anniv. of KCMU (it’s actually longer; Robin Dolan and I were playing new music there in 11/80), and heed the wisdom of Gracie Allen in The Big Broadcast (1932): “If I died I’d like to come back as an oyster, so I’d only have to be good from September to April.”
Restroom sign at a Frisco coffeehouse: “In a society that replaces adventure with mandatory fun, the only convenient adventure left is drinking good coffee.”
Please note the new address below for subs, orders for my novel The Perfect Couple on Mac disks ($10), and other correspondence. I’m still soliciting suggestions or investors toward turning this into a self-supporting enterprise.
“Terpsichorea”
WHY ARE MOST JAZZ FESTIVALS HELD IN ALL-WHITE TOWNS?
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
3/91 Misc. Newsletter
Think We’ll Ever See A Sensitive, Reverent Film
About Indiginous Americans Without A White Hero?
Welcome to the in-like-a-lion March Misc., the newsletter that liked Sofia Coppola no matter what anybody said. We begin by mourning the end of Kitchy Koo, the 11-year-old boutique of waveoid fashion (and, in its peak years, the world’s coolest Post Office contract station). We’re also trying to figure the mysterious message taped to bus shelters: “Please don’t buy vegetables, furniture, clothing, toys or gifts. Buy fruits, food, and necessities only (for 4 months).”
Engulfed: At this writing, the war had been “won” but our units were still occupying a lot of Iraq, as if awaiting a march to Baghdad (like our 3-year attempt to overthrow N. Korea after quickly retaking the south). When will enough butt have been kicked? When will Bush stop acting like a wimp trying to prove his toughness? Vengeance does not stifle barbarism, it sets the stage for more… Pro-war spectacles grabbed the lion’s share of TV coverage, including a rally staged outside ABC’s LA lot by the Rick Dees show (one more reason the ex-Disco Duck sucks). Locally, KOMO loaded a Town Meeting with a one-sided audience and charged that protesters were smoking pot outside the Federal Building (they were burning sage, a memorial to those who would die in the war)… KING referred to the ground assault as a “lightning war.” In what language have we heard that phrase before?… CBS had one of its commentators, Gen. Michael Dugan (from East Texas?) run battle diagrams on a Kuwait map with the John Madden CBS Chalkboard… A new paper, War News, claims nearly all the network expert commentators come from the same conservative think tank that created the theory claiming the USSR was behind the attack on the Pope… CNN’s war theme music started out as solemn drumbeats the first week, then became more “upbeat.” By week 6, it was a brassy fanfare.
On the Lighter Side of Armageddon, the Rio de Janiero Carnaval canceled its “Night in Baghdad” party, a tradition going back 40 years. Woody Harrleston (Cheers) became the first actor blacklisted due to the war, when a Mardi Gras committee withdrew an offer for Harrleston to lead a parade after he appeared at a peace rally. The All-Breed Dog Show scheduled for the Sand Point Naval Station was scrapped “due to threat of terrorist attack”… Network newscasts replaced canceled ads with public service spots– including a cartoon reminding young men that if they don’t register for the draft, they’ll lose scholarships and will be losers the rest of their lives…Iraqi disinformation claimed U.S. troops on Muslim holy territory were entertained by thousands of Egyptian prostitutes — and, worse, by the dreaded Madonna.
Overheard on a Bus: Two fashion workers discussed how the war will affect home-front tastes: “Fluorescent nylon is out. What’s in is tough and practical clothes for people facing nuclear annihilation.”
Eastern Airlines, 1928-1991: Remember, airlines are dying and nobody can afford lots of bombers at every model change (this war is being fought from “inventory”), but Boeing will not be affected. Sure.
Cathode Corner: The Nostalgia Network, cable home for a re-titled version of KING’s Seattle Today, turns out to be owned by associates of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Fox network of Moon’s fellow conservative Rupert Murdoch canceled Haywire, a half-hour combining routines from KING’s Almost Live with astoundingly lame LA-produced skits…. The “lost episodes” of The Avengers on A&E with Honor Blackman may be cooler than the famous Diana Rigg episodes. The Blackman shows were taped without US money in a small studio, usually in one take. These disciplines enhance the show’s basic tensions, between good and evil and between weirdness and straight espionage. (Earlier episodes, where Steed had a male partner, aren’t being shown)… TBS’s Voice of the Planet is, so far, the great cheesy educational show of the year. It’s hard to describe the voices of Faye Dunaway and William Shatner out-over-emoting one another, making a mockery of the environmental disaster footage shown under the narration.
Deja Vu Isn’t What It Used to Be: Just as another unjust war re-divides American opinion, CBS trotted out retrospectives of three TV series that defined the era of the last war. At the war’s start, Ed Sullivan depicted a mass culture united by big bands and clean comedy, with a little guitar-pop mixed in for the kids. By 1970, Mary Tyler Moore showed a middle class pretending all was still holding center (its shock was a 30-year-old woman in no hurry to marry). Four months later, All in the Family (an off-Broadway play made for TV) broke through witha non-cute hippie and a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling lead. While embodying Hollywood’s stereotype of the “typical” TV viewer, the concept was based on a British show; the chief UK influence was the idea that political and class issues were a recognized part of everyday life. Seen anything like that on US TV lately?
Local Publication of the Month: The Protagonist is a quarterly newsletter produced by Tsao Lagos, Washington’s most famous Spy letter writer, on behalf of an outfit selling screenwriting courses… Deja Vu Showgirls is the first Seattle-made commercial nudie mag. Most of the models are local women you see every day in the malls, aspiring actresses, single mothers, laid-off word processors, your classmate who left school for a brief marriage… The Seattle Sourcebook by Roy F. Peterson Jr. superficially looks like an ordinary lifestyle guide. It even has “ads” for familiar restaurants, some of which went out of business since it was printed. Then you notice the pyramid behind the Space Needle on the back cover, or the spaceship chased by a flying dragon on the front. The book turns out to be an accessory rule book for Shadowrun, a role playing game that, behind the cute facade, seems to be the same old fantasy-action cliches.
Correction: Homer Spence was a UW instructor in marketing, not politics as said last time (as if you can tell the difference these days).
Computers Are Our Friends (letter in the computer magazine Macworld): “A spelling check on a recent document I was working on questioned my use of the word childcare. The editors of Microsoft’s dictionary, however, were able to offer only one alternative: kidnapper.”
Sign of the Month (inside the Pendelton store on 4th) “As long as sheep fall in love, there will be wool.” Don’t know how long the sign’s been there, but I noticed it the week after an NY Times feature about research into sheeps’ mating/nurturing hormones.
Airing It Out: Sandy Bradley’s Potluck, a folk hour on KUOW, included on 1/26 a “folk rap” (more like an ethnomusicologist’s attempt at a square-dance call) promoting an adult-supervised youth group called “Graffiti Busters.”One middle-class white guy simultaneously denigrated three authentic American art forms, turning two of them into smug pabulum… In Cincinnati, there’s a battle over what radio stations call themselves. WKRQ has sued to stop a rival station from using WZRQ.
The Fine Print (from the Wild Orchid video box): “This unrated version contains explicit `footage’ not included in the R-rated version released theatrically in the United States. Discretionary viewing by minors is strongly advised.”
True Crime: An Everett woman applied for a waitressing job, to receive a counter-offer from the restaurant manager to become his mistress for $3,000 a month. “He said she couldn’t get a better paying job with her credentials,” said a cop, who arrested the manager on solicitation.
School Daze: The Longview School Board voted to keep on its high-school reading list Stotan!, a novel about a Spokane swim team. A teacher said it had “vividly detailed descriptions of sadistic and erotic acts, vulgar names to degrade black women, put-downs about special education students, jokes about fornication and morally bankrupt philosophies.” In other words, it’s just like school itself.
Ad of the Month (newspaper insert): “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the vegetable.
Archi-Text: John Graham will be remembered as the designer of Seattle’s best known structure (the Space Needle) and its most destructively influential (Northgate), but not for dozens of nondescript buildings that kept his firm in business, buildings that marked the true postwar Seattle spirit or lack of same.
Striking: So the M’s are getting yoga instruction. Maybe they’d be better off with zen, particularly the proverbs where the hapless loser of the class is proven to be the wisest of all…Â Chuck Jones has drawn a set of Looney Tunes baseball cards, and made Daffy Duck a Mariner!
Ever So Humble: I’ve talked in the past about my hometown of Marysville, a place that once meant sawmill workers in dark taverns, clutching beer mugs with all seven remaining fingers. It has since become a Boeing suburb. But the Tulalip Reservation across I-5, home of several tribes “united” by Federal edict (and of the Boeing test site where live chickens are blasted from cannons onto windshields) is nearing approval to expand its bingo parlor into full casino gambling. While there won’t be any Vegas nightlife, it’ll still be the most exciting thing there since the Thunderbird Drive-In used to show sex flicks, fully visible from I-5.
Junk Food of the Month: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” Says The Economist,” “Granma failed to mention what is in the remaining 20 percent.”… Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Turtles Pies (“Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and green frosting.The “vanilla” probably came from a 42-year-old Seattle plant that made over 3 million pounds of vanillin a year, extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide and used for important drugs as well as flavoring. It’s being replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (No grumblings about how unappetizing this sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical to vanilla from a bean. Besides, some food purists drench pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)
Stuff: Women’s basketball gets corrupted by a 6-team pro league, the Liberty Basketball Association, featuring smaller balls and courts, shorter hoops, and “form-fitting uniforms.” The opposite of the no-nonsense attitude of women’s college basketball (about the only sport where women compete directly in the same space).
‘Til April, see Fantagraphics’ cartoon art exhibit Misfit Lit starting 3/15 at COCA; heed these words from Misc. subscriber Steve Shaviro’s book on social theory, Passion and Excess: “Power itself never notices, but the one thing it cannot regulate or pacify is its own violent arbitrariness, its own quality as an event;” and keep working for real peace.
The only memorable lines in Manoel De Oliveira’s obscure 1983 Portugese film Francisca: “Men have hearts like dry bread”; “I love you like God loves sinners.”
Wendy Brauer of NYC says “I’m quite amused” by Misc., but complains that “there’s a boycott on of those non-recyclable, waste-paper-backing stamps.” What? Recycle this? I thought you were all storing them carefully, waiting for me to offer deluxe collector’s portfolios. Don’t have those yet, but I do have ad spaces at $15 and $25 (first come first served); call 524-1967 for info.
A Mass. software firm might issue my novel this year. My second live reading was well-received; expect another one this summer.
Fax subs: $9/year.
“Integropalliate”
10/90 Misc. Newsletter
CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!
It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.
LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)
ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.
DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.
FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.
PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.
IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.
STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.
CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)
OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.
NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?
ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.
UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.
YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.
AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”
‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.
Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”
It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.
I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.
“Esconce”
10/89 Misc. Newsletter
(the first self-contained newsletter edition)
Welcome one and all to the never-say-die return of Misc., the only column in town that wonders why “original flavor” toothpaste doesn’t taste like “original flavor” bubble gum.
This is a successor to a column that ran monthly in ArtsFocus magazine for three years. For those who weren’t with us before our summer hiatus, this is a compendium of things that usually aren’t official art events, but are still part of the world in which we and our arts live. Much of this edition happens to consist of corporate mating and decompsing rituals; other months have dealt with politics, books, religion, music, mass behavior, fine food and wine.
WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation (far more important than the 20th anniv. of Woodstock) by meditating on the “herald of impeachment” still displayed at the Comet Tavern and reminiscing about those pre-Reagan days, when fewer people mistook corruption for a virtue. I finished a novel, to be put out somewhere within the next year. Saw the opening of the first segment of the bus tunnel, a slick brown shopping-mall-of-transit designed to make suburban commuters feel at home. Also saw the construction of the Outlet Mall, now open with complete designer stores by Liz Claiborne, Evan Piccone and others, right on the Burlington exit to the north Sound’s Calif.-colony “getaways.” The annual Popllama Records Picnic was censored by anti-rock forces in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Dept., but promoter Conrad Uno may have kept happy by pretending he was the guy all this summer’s headlines from Japan were about. This second greenhouse-effect summer ended on a stunning autumnal equinox day (even to me, not a weather person). The Ave’s venerable Cafe Allegro was closed for the wedding of two longtime employees (the reception there, the alternative ceremony at the U’s Medicinal Herb Garden). Later that night, Broadway’s Gravity Bar stayed open all night for performances and tarot readings.
DENTAL FLOSS TYCOONS: According to a Wall St. Journal piece, two guys in a New York jail spent months quietly trading cigarettes for dental floss, then hand-weaving the nylon thread into a sturdy rope. They used it one night to carefully climb down from their fourth-floor window. They were still seen by a passerby and got caught.
THE EMPEROR’S NUE CLOTHES: Robert Campeau was forced to turn over control of his dept. store empire to bankers. For a clue to his possible mismanagement, note Campeau’s Bon Marché and its slogan, “The Nue Hits for Back to School.” You’d think a Quebeçois would know better than to sell clothes via the French feminine word for “nude.” (Of course, it’d fit if the promotion includedGuess? jeans.)… Nordstrom might buy Marshall Field of Chicago, which owned Frederick & Nelson for over 50 years. If so, then Frederick’s will be paying Nordy’s for the right to make Frangos (Frederick’s invented them, but Field’s kept the copyright when it sold Frederick’s).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 8/12): “Incarceration for man called too short.” Runner-up (P-I, 8/30): “Margo St. James wants to see a prostitute for president” (haven’t most of them been?).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Frosty Paws are imitation ice cream treats for dogs, made with no harmful lactose. “Not harmful to humans, but made for dogs.” For humans, meanwhile, there are the new Trix Pops, by General Mills subsidiary Vroman Foods, in the three classic Trix colors (including Orange Orange!)…. Ralston Purina’s new Barbie cereal is the same recipe as its Nintendo cereal; only the shapes and boxes are different. If boys and girls can’t be taught to play with the same toys, at least they can eat the same sugar puffs.
DIRTY DANCING ON MY GRAVE: Just a few months after Vestron Pictures flayed itself all over the Seattle International Film Festival, it went under. Still undetermined: the fate of Vestron’s unreleased products like the fake-DePalma ripoff Paint It Black and of Dan Ireland, whose onetime beloved Egyptian Theater was, at time of Vestron’s first layoffs, showing a cultured, sophisticated James Bond shoot-em-up…. Meanwhile, thanks to Sony’s buyouts, Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records are finally owned by the same company; while Disney’s acquisition of the Jim Henson organization was probably inevitable. Henson’s recent shows have gotten mired in the worst Disneyesque cutesy-wootsies.
WHOLE LOTTO BLUES: A Portland man killed himself in early Sept., thinking he’d lost a $3 million lottery ticket. In fact, he never had it, since the lottery computer registered no winner in that drawing. Undaunted by the bad PR, Ore. still plans to start legal football betting.
HOW WE DOIN’ ON TIME?: David Letterman turns out to be a shareholder and board member of one of the companies buying baseball’s own stupid human trick, the Mariners. He’s said how much he loves Seattle during segments with ex-locals George Miller and Lynda Barry, but that alone wouldn’t stop the majority owners from moving the team. We’ll know their intentions the next time they have to choose whether to keep a star player (Argyros got rid of anybody who got good enough to become expensive).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: National Boycott News. Far from the amateur rabble sheet depicted in a recent Lacitis column, it’s a very long, well-researched compendium on who in corporate America is doing what and why we should care. Editor Todd Putnam keeps revising his listings to reflect changes in commercial behavior or new information, leading to fascinating sagas about the evolving notions of “good business.”
END OF THE ’80S ( #1): David Horsey’s Boomer’s Song, proclaimed “the worst comic strip in the papers” by our first Misc. column in ’86, has gone out with a whimper. No big Gary Larson/Berke Breathed sendoff; the P-I buried the strip’s discontinuation in a notice about the return of Andy Capp (formerly in the Times).
END OF THE ’80S (#2): That American institution, the convenience store, is in deep trouble. Circle K tried to make up for disappointing national sales by raising prices, a counterproductive move. Plaid Pantry is in bankruptcy, after trying to strike an alliance with Arco. Even the mighty 7-Eleven is reeling in debt from a buyout, and is raising short-term cash by turning company-owned outlets into franchises.
END OF THE `80S (#3): Cuisinarts Inc. declared bankruptcy. Only major asset: unsalable inventory. Has it been so long since its food processors were so scarce, you could only buy a certificate for one?
NO MORE MEAN GREEN?: The gov’t’s thinking of redesigning our money, officially to make cash transactions more traceable. They’d be the first changes since the exchange-for-silver guarantee was dropped. They could change the colors or even print Universal Product Codes with each serial number! This society sorely needs to de-mystify money; turning it into just another ugly official document might help.
’90S PREDICTION #1: The “drug war” is replacing the cold war as the official excuse to stage military adventures abroad. By strange coincidence, the only countries to be targeted will just happen to be countries where U.S. business interests seek more control over the local governments.
NORTHERN BYTES: If you haven’t been to Vancouver lately, you haven’t seen a city “go big time” and do it right, with some big exceptions. The downtown East End, a collection of residential hotels and pubs that some feared would be eradicated with Expo 86, has been preserved as a neighborhood and as a film site. It’s the unnamed city in 21 Jump Street; the downtown-underground portion of the light-rail system (above-ground elsewhere) was a murder site in the last Friday the 13th film. Expo itself is now a vacant concrete slab winding along the waterfront, except for three buildings: the Science World museum (check out the “Music Machines” room, sounds just like Throbbing Gristle playing Charles Ives); the 86 Street disco (where any slam dancing is punished with a thorough beating by the most fascistic bouncers in the west); and the floating McDonald’s. The BC gov’t sold the the rest to Hong Kong developers, whose predatory developments elsewhere in town have led to unfortunate racial attacks against the established Chinese-Canadian community. But the best sight in today’s Vancouver is a stencil-painted graffito downtown, “Jesus Saves,” modified by the spray-painted addition, “Gretzky scores on the rebound.”
YES, THERE WILL be another of these reports, and it will feature our own ’80s nostalgia review (get your nominations in now for what’s worth remembering and what’s lest-we-forget). `Til then, read the haunting comic book Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, listen to Car Talk on KPLU, and heed these words of the immortal Irving Berlin: “You’re not sick. You’re just in love.”
Published monthly. Subscriptions: $6 per year by check to Clark Humphrey, 1630 Boylston #203, Seattle 98122. Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS. (c) 1989 Fait Divers Enterprises.
11/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
DATE OF FIRST STORE XMAS DISPLAY
SIGHTED THIS YEAR: 9/20
begin our November Misc., here’s a no-prize trivia quiz: Name the only major Seattle-based bank that hasn’t changed name or ownership since ’81. Answer below.
I’m writing this, and some of you’ll read it, before 11/8. If you consider yourself a progressive but don’t vote, you’re doing just what the Right hopes you’ll do. In any case, this was last big TV election. As viewership declines and diffuses, media campaigns’ll give way to grass-roots politics, a return neither party’s ready for. The society’s already changing (perhaps not as quickly as I’d like) from that mythical Great Unwashed to a more diverse, active populace. You see it in Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega topping the charts, in a peacetime peak in campus activism, in cultural events outdrawing sports at the box office (though sports still get more beer money). Politicians don’t see it, nor do polls weighted to emphasize “likely voters” (to demographically match ’84 Reaganites).
My Kinda Town: Was recently in that mecca for all column lovers, Chicago, a town with many Seattle ties despite the wresting of Seattle’s Westin and Frederick & Nelson from their old Chicago owners. Generra, Union Bay, Shah Safari, Egghead Software, Starbucks and Eddie Bauer (in a store right under the elevated-train tracks) are strongly represented there. Their baseball teams lose as often as the M’s, but at least they (especially the Cubs) still know to put on a great show.
Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Mini-Muffins, spongy little mouthfuls in six muffiny flavors including blueberry. They’re even microwaveable (but not the foil bag they come in). Their slogan: “Tradition You Can Taste.” Some of their ingredients: Guar gum, xanthan gum, sodium stearol lactylate, sorbitan monostearate and calcium acetate.
Cathode Corner: Sure missed Jim McKay during the Olympics. If Dick Clark could have shows on all three networks at once, couldn’t McKay be on two?… Despite Ted Turner’s rush to colorize his cinematic booty (partly to gain new copyrights on the films, which start going public-domain in 15 years), his TNT channel shows how beautiful black-and-white can be with the best prints. Tugboat Annie, the only golden-age feature made in Seattle, is stupendous in crisp 35mm.
Dead Air: For the record, KJET was sold to out-of-staters and promptly replaced by the area’s sixth oldies station. DJ Jim Keller’s still on the payroll, researching the potential of new music via “pay radio” (envisioned in the ’50s by my idol, comic Stan Freberg) using cable or FM sideband frequencies a la Muzak. Backlash sez management mercilessly killed it by suddenly ordering a switch to the station’s infamous tape system, preventing on-air goodbyes. The real blame goes to the GOP-controlled FCC, for letting stations be bought and sold for pure speculation and run with no commitment to anything except a quick buck.
Mobil 1, Washington 0: There’ll be no more Mobil gas stations in the Northwest as of next year, ending a history going back to the General and Gilmore (builder of Washington’s oldest refinery) brands, bought up by Mobil back in the ’50s. I guess we didn’t watchMasterpiece Theater enough. Old Pegasus will still fly, however, on classic signs at the General Petroleum Museum on E. Pine and an Edmonds antique store.
For better or worse (probably, I reluctantly say, for better), Seattle changed forever the day Westlake Center opened. It’s architecturally flawed (and the big sign on the top level has got to go), but has a few nice stores and is a great gathering place. The mall, more “intimate” than suburban malls (less non-revenue-producing corridor space), was stuffed w/manic shoppers the first days; the only calm people were the Living Mannequins. In the 12 days the mall was open but Pine St. wasn’t, people got to the mall and other shops just fine, thank you. There’s no proven reason to let cars back on that block.
News Items of the Month: BrightStar Technologies of Bellevue’s selling computer software with “the next step toward true artificial intelligence.” Accept no imitations… KPLU reported a “multiple car semi accident” on 10/21. Does that mean somebody might have meant to crash?…Â Fame, a new mag started by ex-Interview staffers, touts sheer and see-thru fashion as the return of a classic style. Unlike the miniskirt, nobody’s likely to turn this classic into a business suit.
Local Publications of the Month: Woodsmen of the West, a 1908 Canadian novel just now released stateside by Seattle’s Fjord Press, is a lively tale of logging, shipping and drinking on the B.C. coast…. Inside Chess, a biweekly from local grandmaster Yassar Seirawan, is the biggest attempt in years at an independent U.S. chess journal. For those with at least a moderate interest in the game’s inner workings.
The Plane Truth?: Uncredited, unsubstantiated claims in the press posit that sick Boeing workers may just be stricken by “mass hysteria” and not by the admittedly-harmful chemicals they work with. I thought we were past the time when managements could just plant the company line into papers.
Frame-Ups: The best things at the Pacific Northwest Art Expo were in the WWU booth: instructor Tom Schlotterback’s small surrealist oils. “Woman Menaced by Rodent” and “Genuine Candy-Striped Jesus Christ” looked even greater than they sound.
Which Came First?: Univ. Way now has restaurants called China First and New China First. (They could have called the new space China Second, but that ‘d be a throwback to the old Two-China Policy.)
Fatty Deposits: Rainier Bank should’ve changed its name back to National Bank of Commerce; instead it’s another variation on “California Carpetbagger Bank of Washington.” I had a temp job on the 13th floor ( they dared to have one) of the Rainier Tower, in the international dep’t. (closed by the Calif. owners). This job was during the big ’85 snow; female employees who couldn’t get home that night were put up in a hotel and given X-large Seahawk T-shirts for sleepwear. (Trivia answer: Washington Mutual.)
‘Til December, send in your suggestions for our In-Out list, don’t buy Adidas cologne (advertised as “The Essence of Sports”), pay homage at G. Washington’s stained-glass portrait at UW Health Sciences (with “What, Me Worry?” inscribed in Latin at the architect’s orders) and heed the words of novelist Judith Krantz: “Dan Quayle is the sort of man who, if he were in a Theodore Dreiser novel, would get the girl pregnant, take her out in a rowboat and throw her overboard.”
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.”
1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?
Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.
XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.
FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.
CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.
MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).
ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.
JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.
CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.
CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.
SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.
CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.
INS AND OUTS FOR ’88
9/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
ArtsFocus is back and so’s Misc., Seattle’s only whole-grain rumor mill. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates, its advertisers, or Brian Bosworth.
Welcome to the summer of our discontent. Some complained this summer about the traffic, the leaky roof at the Bagley Wright, about paying $8 to see the hydros without being able to get drunk n’ crude, about paying $16.50 for Dana “Church Lady” Carvey in the rain at the Mural Amphitheater, about paying $2 more for Madonna than for the Dylan/Dead show in Eugene, about celeb sellouts like Lou Reed for American Express. Me: I’m not complaining that much, though I did wish we could have had a combined Contra hearing/Isuzu ad, so you could always know when they were lying.
FOR THE RECORD, it’s also been the summer when Seattle got its own overpaid sports legend-in-his-own mind, its own MTV VJ, its own near Presidential hit-and-run, and the start of its own Underground.
Hope y’all had an enlightening time during the Harmonic Convergence. Remember: Author Jose Arguelles sez 144,000 of you had to be meditating at local sunrise 8/16. If the world ends 25 years from now, I don’t want to hear you moaning, “Darn it, I knew I should’ve set my alarm early.”
Already some hopeful news has emerged from the heart of New Age country, on people finding the personal energy to influence the world around them. Port Townsend’s local teens are battling one of the most backward, reactionary social forces known to humanity, the Northwest Nature Poets, over the right to eat Big Macs without having to drive to Port Angeles. More karma to them.
Patrick McDonald has endorsed the Young Fresh Fellows as a local band bound to make it big. As McDonald’s pick-to-click has traditionally meant the Kiss of Death (anyone remember the Heats?), the Fellows should immediately renounce it, declaring that they have absolutely no intention of ever getting a national hit record.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Flavored fortune cookies, as introduced at the Bite of Seattle. Seattle’s Rose Brand will soon market the treats in vanilla, mocha, strawberry, mint, raspberry, banana and bubblegum flavors. Every fortune has two happy-face symbols on it (you can also special-order cookies with custom fortunes).
Procter & Gamble’s announced multi-million losses from its Duncan Hines Soft Cookies. P&G expected a big hit due to a chemical emulsifier that made them soft, figuring it wouldn’t matter how poorly they tasted. They’re not giving up, though: Their next product will be diet cookies, made with a new “sucrose polyester” to be called Olestra.
PHILM PHUN: Japan’s Tampopo, easily the best comedy of the year, is also one of the few films anywhere to deal entirely with the preparation and consumption of food. The most that US films have come to discussing with this most pervasive of all human activities are Fatso, a few cannibalism pictures and some good Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Seattle Design Association Newsletter. Issue 18 has die-cut finger holes in all 12 pages; 11 of those pages have extremely clever illustrations by Carl Smool, Linda Owens, Michael Dougan and other famed local artists, all supervised by (who else?) Art Chantry. A measly $1.50 at Peter Miller Books on 1st Ave.
CATHODE CORNER: The use of retro rock in TV ads gets ridiculous when Time magazine uses the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a song originally made in part to protest the Vietnam War — a war that Time supported.
T. Boone Pickens, who tried to conquer Boeing, has made a fortune attacking companies; some of them have surrendered to other overtakers rather than face his wrath. Unocal, Phillips 66, Gulf and Citgo got no government help against his assaults, but state and federal pols rushed to the side of our beloved big employer/big defense contractor. One of the govt’s fave companies was threatened, starting the end of unregulated company-poaching, one of the hallmarks of ’80s commerce….
In other big news, the Easterners who bought Seattle Trust claimed at the time to be impressed by the bank’s reputation and good name — so why’d they demolish it all, as soon as the takeover deal was cleared, by slapping on those ugly Key Bank signs?….
Microsoft’s illustrious reputation has finally gained a little tarnish. A major software program was released full of bugs; then the Redmond firm received undeserved criticism when IBM released new computers designed for an operating system that MS won’t have ready for another year.
Get those “Save the Turf” badges back out. A Contemporary Theater has replaced Intiman as the cultural villain in a plot to destroy one of Downtown’s last truly human spaces for yet another totally unneeded office project. Expect no intervention from the city, which has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the developers…. Give thanks that the Paramount Theater/KKFX empire was rescued from possible bankruptcy. With its prime Convention Center location, the grand ol’ Paramount just might have been bought and razed.
As the moths swarm around the Frederick Cadillac floodlights this hot August night, a final reminder to avoid the $.25 foil-pouch wine at the Liquor Stores, take the 911 Homes for Art tour, read the new bio of cartoonist Winsor McCay, watch Cruzin’ Northwest Sat. morns on KSTW, and come back here next month. ‘Til then, peace and flowers for all.
7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”
It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.
On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.
TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.
No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?
(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)
In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.
Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.
PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….
NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.
The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.
Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…
Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.
CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.
Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.
Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.
‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.
11/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome again to Misc., the regional pop-culture column with the same non-aspirin pain reliever as the prescription brand Motrin.
The astounding playoff and World Series performances by ex-Mariners Dave Henderson and Spike Owen, now in Boston, prove there really has been some Big League Stuff in the Kingdome, if not in the team owner’s box.
Twenty-four percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans got their fortunes in entertainment or publishing. You’ll notice the name printed at the top of this column was not on that list.
The long nightmare is over:Â Expo 86 closed. Even with almost as many visitors as there are Canadians, the thing still lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Canadian dollars, but it’s still a lot). The deficit will be paid from BC lottery revenues which normally support charities.
Speaking of what BC politicians call “megaprojects,” seen (or better yet driven under) the Convention Center yet? That thing’s a monster! It’s already totally out of scale with the surrounding First Hill neighborhood, just a few months into its four-year construction cycle. It’s fun looking now as a Paul Bunyan-sized Erector set, but once it gets walls it’ll be a horrible monolith — at least until the graffiti artists get to it, we can only hope.
HUGE STOREWIDE SALE DEPT.: Frederick & Nelson is now under local management and I’m sure they’ll do well, particularly if they follow these few suggestions: bring back the fabric and pet departments, the lending library, the Men’s Grill, and especially the Paul Bunyan Room. The big Paul & Babe mural and the serpentine counter may need to be rebuilt from scratch, but it’ll be worth it….
The Bon may be bought by a Canadian company. If it happens, don’t expect the name to ever revert to The Bon Marche. The original name, borrowed from a Paris store, originally means “good buy,” but in colloquial French has come to mean “cheap” in the demeaning sense — not the best image to promote to the French-literate Canadians who drive to Seattle to shop….
The Heart of Pay n’ Save, that great section with discount imported trinkets of all sizes, colors and uses, has been dropped by that chain’s new out-of-state owners. They concluded shoppers here aren’t as bargain-driven as elsewhere. Much of the “Heart” merchandise will remain in the stores — but at higher prices….
Three of the U District’s best stores and one of Broadway’s have been replaced this year by candy-colored sweatshirt stands. Can the horror be stopped before it devours us all?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Market Tab. This photocopied sheet contains gossip, items of interest around town and pithy comments, much like another writing product I know of.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cheese sticks at the Gourmet Thrift Shop. Each fresh batch is made with a food processor full of real cheeses. Like everything at the quaint little shop in the old Rubato Record space on Broadway, it’s amazingly good and amazingly cheap. Now if they’d only stop playing that same Steely Dan tape over and over….
In other junk food news, the Dr Pepper Co. just bought the 7 Up Co. Upon hearing the news, I used a can of each product and one drinking glass to determine just how well the companies will merge. Results: a definite clash of corporate cultures.
FILM CLIPS: Jumpin’ Jack Flash isn’t a big hit; audiences are comparing Penny Marshall unfavorably to the three other directors in her immediate family. I still may see it, ‘cuz Whoopi Goldberg’s bank-telecommunications job in it is the same job I used to have. Never got involved w/any spies or killers like she does, ‘tho….
Children of a Lesser God raises some interesting questions. Will Hollywood ever find another starring role for hearing-impaired star Marlee Matlin? And the special subtitled screenings for the hearing impaired are nice, but why don’t studios make similar prints for other domestic films? Deaf people are interested in other things than just deafness, ya know.
Foreign films come with subtitles, of course, like the ones shown by The Cinematheque, which I associate-direct, at the University Cinemas on 55th and U Way. This month a new Cinematheque series begins weekends at noon, with (non-subtitled) horror, cult, comedy and other specialty films. Like the foreign films, these are for the viewer who wants an active, adventuresome film experience.
EARLY WARNING: A local theater company is planning a musical based on a certain very popular cartoon property. High-level rights negotiations are underway between the theater’s fearless leaders and a Mr. Big in LA.
Industrial art takes on a new meaning as construction begins on 6th Ave. S. for a new office-warehouse for the Frye Art Museum. How the Industrial District’s loft photographers, painters and video artists will react to the pastoral oils and watercolors moving in is anyone’s guess.
We all know the local literary scene generally won’t accept anything too far removed from free-verse nature poetry, the written equivalent of a Frye painting. Other writers give me flack for not hating technology (writing this on Lincoln Arts’ word processor instead of in longhand, watching TV). Our local Luddite authors, however, have a ways to catch up to the reactionary behavior of a Chicago group, Writers Without Phones.
There’s one piece of electronics I do despise: The compact disc. They don’t give you big cover art or colorful labels. You can’t make a scratch mix with them. They sound sterile, flat, too clean for any of the music that made this country great: Hot jazz, swing, bebop, bluegrass, gospel, folk, blues, R&B, country, and their mongrel child rock n’ roll. What’s worse is that the record biz is realigning itself to favor the high-priced spread. Already Motown has dropped 82 oldies albums, which henceforth will be sold only on CD. Those records, like most good non-classical music made since 1950, owe their original existence to the low cost and mass market created by cheap vinyl discs. If CDs take over, all you’ll get is slick, bland product (like the current Motown roster). CDs suck real big.
CATHODE CORNER: Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the undisputed Best Show on TV this year, is now on at 9 a.m. Saturdays, despite what the papers say. Don’t miss it, or the rest of the day people will scream when you inadvertently say the Secret Word and you won’t know why.
Maybe I’ll see you at the next Ballard Market Singles Night. If not, keep stroking your miniature replicas of Waiting for the Interurban until next month. We’re in touch, so you keep in touch.
