2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

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

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

12/90 Misc. Newsletter

MILLI VANILLA FRAUDS?

NEXT THEY’LL CLAIM ARCHIE AND JUGHEAD

DIDN’T SING THEIR SONGS!

Here at Misc., we’re holding a public wake for the 50-year-old Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge (known henceforth as Galloping Gertie II), which reached the end of its life “span” with a bang, not a whimper. Before the sinking, it had become a mile-long, 40-foot-wide construction/demolition project, strewn with a few scattered cars and Honey Buckets. It already looked like it was about to sink (something Boris S. Wart threatened but never accomplished on the J.P. Patches show). (Event info on other side.)

OUT WITH THE OLD, PLEASE!: Nostalgia is going to be the death of America. Every previous fad added something to the national heritage, for good or ill. Nostalgia only subtracts. It boils the flavor and texture away from our past, leaving a gooey syrup of vague memories. It’s getting harder and harder to find a restaurant, store, or beauty salon where the sound system plays any recent music. “Square” places play top 40 hits of 1956-69. “Hip” places play hipper music from that same era (Muddy Waters instead of the Beatles). Only in designer-jean stores can you hear songs by groups whose members are all still alive. And many of them take pride in never playing a single riff that isn’t reorganized Led Zeppelin.

ADDITIONALLY, I’m finding it harder and harder to explain to people that I’m neither (1) a nostalgist for the hippie era nor (2) a conservative. I regard hippie-era politics as a well-intentioned failure. The progressive, populist side of American leftist tradition got smothered by what we might as well call a bohemian aesthetic. There will never be a real left in this country until it stops depicting all working-class people as “the unwashed masses,” as hicks and flaming fascists. The world is not the few enlightened “Us” vs. all the ignorant “Them.” It’s all of “Us.”

NORTHERN REVOLT: The Canadian subsidiary of Popsicle Brands is under vocal attack from children from Victoria, BC (Mile 0 of the Trans-Canada Highway) to St. John’s, Newfoundland (the other Mile 0). According to the Vancouver Sun, the company promised free Nintendo cartridges to kids sending in 15,000 points’ worth of Popsicle sticks; instead, 10,000 kids got only letters of apology claiming that the company’s stock of 6,000 cartridges had been depleted and that substitute prizes would be given to everybody else sometime next year. Still, maybe the kiddie Canucks ought to be grateful to get even that; in a famous mid-’80s essay, Ontario’s ownMargaret Atwood wrote of growing up with Popsicle labels offering wonderful prizes but bearing the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Good Only in U.S.”

NO FREUDIAN COMMENTS, PLEASE: A staffer at King County Juvenile Hall reports that teenage boys inside there are signifying their gang membership by affixing Dole or Chiquita banana stickers onto their belts.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Manna Raisins & Oat Bran Flakes cereal, made in Delta, B.C. and “sprouted for life.” It’s “Certified Organic,” but (oddly, considering the name) isn’t certified kosher.

IS NOBODY INCORRUPT?: The Wall St. Journal (10/29) reports that the Doris Day Animal Fund Inc. spends 90 percent of its income on direct-mail fundraising (billed in official budget statements as “public education”).

AD VERBS: Rainier Light’s “It’s R Light” commercials are much better than the previous ad agency’s work, but they’re still hollow compared to the classic Heckler Associates spots, and for the same reason. While the Heckler ads had real fun in promoting the beer as a beverage for enjoyment, both of its successor agencies fell into the trap of selling a target audience on an image of itself, with the product merely a supporting player in the drama.

NO MORE FUR AT NORDSTROM: This is how an industry dies, when the first PR-conscious retailer proudly capitulates to public furor (and flat market shares). But fur is more than an inefficient source of outerwear; it’s one reason we’re here. The trapping of wild fur animals was the first white industry in the Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Co. and others subsidized many of the first non-military settlements in Washington Territory. They were supported by sales to the society ladies of Europe, whose essential financial contribution was totally ignored in last year’s books on women in Northwest history.

SAY IT AIN’T SO RUMOR OF THE MONTH: Is the Comet Tavern going to be upscaled?

(latter-day note: It wasn’t.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 11/14): “A story of 4 kids and how they died/`Anybody who has a teen-ager will related to this’ tale of tragedy.” Now that’s headline writing in the classic manner, almost Victorian in its cadence.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: It’s a shame that The Facts has such ugly design and typography, because some truly eloquent African-American voices may be found there. For example, hear the bitter “Life Among the Thorns” edition of F. Justina Nubay’s column “Say It With Flowers”: “I wholeheartedly believe that Thanksgiving should continue to be the only day when public spirited people ply the hungry with turkeys, pies, and other filling foods, enough to last them the entire year. Like the howling hyena, the hungry and the homeless, for the time remaining, should continue to gorge themselves on carrion and roam their jungles in wild anguish.”…At Cause is a Christian paper with a difference: A Reubenesque nude drawing on the front page, an essay titled “Party On!” saying it’s OK for Christians to “have exhilaration, ecstasy, bliss” — including being gay and/or transvestite if they wish to be so. (Editor M.F. Whealen seems to be an ex-Scientologist, from the use of certain catch phrases.)…The Oregon-based Sinsemilla Tipsmagazine folds after 10 years. Publishers blame the War on Drugs, which they claim has made people scared to sell or advertise in the mag.

CATHODE CORNER: Does the rash of inside jokes on The Simpsons (Marge’s surprise at “a Simpson on a T-shirt,” the on-air homage to Bart’s Macy parade balloon, his chalkboard message “I am not a 32-year-old woman”) mean the show has passed its peak?…A producer has paid millions for all rights to The Ed Sullivan Show; plans to release several video compilations, including the censored TV debuts by famous rockers and a tape of 50 different people doing the Twist. But will they ever include the peg-legged tap dancer, or the National Model Race Car Championship? (A licensed version of Sullivan’s most popular feature, the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, now appears in Spanish on cable’s Univision.)

KRIME KORNER: A Seattle man was fatally shot by an unlicensed Safeway security guard for allegedly pocketing a pack of cigarettes. Now will you listen to me about the dangers of smoking?… The Martinsburg, W.Va. city council plans to require panhandlers to buy $25 licenses or face jail terms. But how do you get the money to tell people you don’t have any money?

MALLED DOWN: The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $50,000 grant (with a 2/1 matching requirement) to the Rouse Co. to sponsor non-threatening art programs in shopping centers (including Westlake Center). Now we know the true priorities of new NEA head John Frohnmayer. He’s using “bringing art to the people” and corporate matching-fund requirements as ways of rewarding works acceptable to business/marketing interests.

PRESSED: Our news media, presuming us all to be beer-swilling xenophobes, devoted their attention on 11/22-23 to how nothing had really happened in the Persian Gulf lately, and only cursorily mentioned that the last major European dictator fell from power. The beginning of the end might have been foretold in an item from USA Today (11/12): “Richard Needham, British minister for Northern Ireland, apologized for calling Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a “cow” during a car-phone call to his wife. A paramilitary group in Northern Ireland picked up the call on a radio monitor and sent a recording of it to a news agency.”…What they didn’t tell you about the female, Socialist, pro-contraception Irish president is that the position is largely ceremonial, a sort of elected king. She will be less able to take political stances than when she was in the Irish senate.

SECTION BEE: The Killer Bees may finally be on our way! (Times, 11/3) It turns out that they’re not really that much more vicious to humans, but they are less tameable and they do drive out domesticated breeds.

XMAS GIFT OF THE YEAR: The Dance Aerobics game cartridge by our Redmond neighbors at Nintendo. You can vicariously experience the self-punishment and body-consciousness of aerobics without having to actually do the exercises. It’s one of only two games I’ve seen with a female lead character…. The Trivial Pursuit ’80s Edition is historically inaccurate. It’s got a question about Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, who was on from ’77 to ’80….Lynnwood’s Pacific Trading Cards is drawing national attention for itsAndy Griffith Show card set….Trump: The Game (“It’s Whether You Win”) was marked down from $39.95 to $19.90….Seattle’sGenerra has a “Men’s Collective” shirt line, for junior execs old enough to remember their student-Maoist pasts (they’re even made in the PRC!).

MORE VEGETARIANS IN LEATHER: The Vancouver rockmag Discorder sez the next big thing’s “straight-edge rock,” punk-like bands (including Seattle’s Undertow) who belong to the Hare Krishna movement. Their premise: Just as punk stripped rock of impurities and distractions, so should we do with our lives.

PHILM PHIRE: Remains from the blaze at Universal Studios (soon to be owned by Panasonic) soon became a major attraction on the Universal Tour; the simulated “burning building” attraction was temporarily closed. The sale of Universal/MCA leaves Time Warner as the last major US-owned record company. It also brings Japanese money into US publishing (MCA owns Putnam, Berkley and Ace).

NOT IN STORE: You won’t get to shop this Xmas at B.N. Genius, that land of expensive electronic playthings that you’d never buy but always loved to play with in the store. Meanwhile, the end of the Northgate Woolworth leaves only the downtown store as an inexpensive source for hats, socks, and hobby supplies, not to mention the long shelf of cheesy crossword magazines. (It’s also one of the last places still selling Clark candy bars.)

PICK A PEC: The 11/24 Newsweek (the same issue with the essay that claimed that “Cynicism is alien to America”) reported that trendy LA men are now getting silicone implants to make their upper bodies look more muscular. Look dudes, this recent interest in “men reclaiming the feminine side of their natures” ought to mean taking up the smart things about womanhood; just as women’s assertiveness training generally excludes lessons in beer-swilling or sexual harassment.

WE’LL TALK AGAIN in the palindromic year of 1991 (that year which picky purists insist is the real start of the decade), when I’ll count exactly how many times you could have seen It’s A Wonderful Life this holiday season. Until then, watch the astounding South Africa Now 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCTS, try to avoid calling the NY Times crossword-help 900 line, appreciate the appropriateness of the big Marilyn Monroe mural inside the Broadway Pay ‘n Save (shouldn’t all drugstores bear the images of people who died from prescription overdoses?), read The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pray for snow, work for peace, and consider the words of Frank Zappa on unauthorized musical sampling: “It’s just so cheese-oid.”

NOTICE

Sign at the Wood Shop, Pioneer Square: “Authentic East German nutcrackers. Last chance. Buy now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

REPORT

It’s been threatened before, but now it’s really gonna happen. I’m holding two live readings this month: Sun., 12/16, at the Two Bells Tavern (10 p.m.) and Wed., 12/19, at the Rendezvous (7 and 9 p.m., with vintage educational films). Each show contains at least some different material; each is a partial benefit for my Perfect Couple novel publication fund. (The novel is still available only on Mac disks, for $6.)

Subscribers may notice a new mailing-label design. My old label program crashed (thank God and Apple I could retrieve the data with the ResEdit program).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Vituperative”

7/90 Misc. Newsletter

LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.

WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?

Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.

OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?

IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.

ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)

THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”

SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.

UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”

AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.

O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.

CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”

ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.

WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.

GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).

SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.

ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.

HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.

DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?

SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.

KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.

OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.

CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).

PASSAGE

Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”

REPORT

Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Plectrum”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION

The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.

features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products

(junk food for people with too much money).

Some highlights:

* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds

* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)

* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)

* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)

* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)

* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)

6/90 Misc. Newsletter

Look Out, Tuna Boats!

The Incredible Mr. Limpet’s Got A Gun!

Welcome back one and all to the fourth anniversary (and still ungraduated) edition of Misc., the essential news source for all local“Posties” (a term used in a silly KING report about all of us who are postmodern, posthippie, postpunk, etc.).

UPDATE: The Blue Moon Tavern lives; while the shell of the old Rainbow Tavern next door will be sacrificed to luxury condos. In the midst of all the fuss, developer Scott Soules (a bystander in the dispute) said about the western U-District, “The area is prime for redevelopment.” Tell that to the folks who lost affordable housing to massive apartments supported by steel posts over ugly street-level parking, or to anyone driving on NE 45th during Safeco rush hour.

AXL ROSE MARRIES DON EVERLY’S DAUGHTER: “How we gonna tell your pa?”

LOCAL BOOM #1: The 10th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens was a lot of fun. I know full well that the eruption killed 57 and could have killed hundreds more. Still, seeing the old blast footage on the endless TV retrospectives brought back fond memories of a spectacular, exciting event that affected most everybody here. My memories are also all tied up with general memories of 1980, a year when it began to look like things were getting hopeful in music, in fashion, in world affairs (the start of Solidarity, the fall of Somoza) — until the end of the year brought the rise of Reagan, the fall of Lennon, and all the stupidity that followed. Now it’s another “zero year,” and things are again looking cautiously hopeful in most areas of the world culture (except, for now, in U.S. partisan politics). This time, let’s hope it sticks. (Also loved a Spokane candy firm’s chocolate mountain with a powdered-sugar middle that you can “erupt” with a tiny plastic air pump.)

LOCAL BOOM #2: In 1980, Seattle was still (mistakenly) perceived by many people here and elsewhere as some backwater burg, an overgrown town instead of a city. Some loved the image, some hated it, but few disbelieved it. But in 1990 I’m preparing myself for the expected onslaught of Northwest Chic. Twin Peaks has turned a tiny cafe seen in two minutes of the first show (re-created in an LA studio for later episodes) into a tourist/reporter mecca. It’s going to get worse when the show appears in Europe (at last word, UK documentary crews were still prowling the streets of Dallas for anything reminiscent of J.R.). After that, throw in all the national hype over the local coffee, those flashy local sportswear companies like Generra and Nike, the Nordstrom labor flap that still helps publicize Nordy’s “uniqueness,” the increasing sight of local landmarks in national car commercials, the acclaim over local cartoonists, rappers and thrash-rock bands, and a certain upcoming cable-TV sports event. Responding to this and other activity, Newsweek almost opened a Seattle bureau this past winter, but then decided to save its money. Can such a sparsely-peopled region (only 10 million including B.C.) deserve or survive much more limelight? Well, that’s more people than N.Y.C. and much more than other places that get far more attention in the U.S. as a whole, places like Nicaragua and Israel, so why not let it be our turn (preferably without warfare).

CATHODE CORNER: While the eruption footage on the St. Helens TV specials still looked spectacular, some of the news tape from the weeks before the blast was washed out and bereft of many “scan lines”. Will current video footage last? When high-definition TV comes along, will current video images look so bad in comparison that they’ll be retired from common viewing? If so, that’d make filmed shows and news footage from the ’50s and ’60s eternal but leave taped stuff from the ’70s and ’80s to rot. The Beverly Hillbillies would live forever, while Married With Children becomes a trivia question. Many shows now shot on film are still edited on tape, and would also look decidedly low-definition on HDTV…. Graham Kerr is taping a new syndicated series at KING. The ex-Gallopping Gourmet still lives in Tacoma, across town from the Frugal Gourmet’s house.

AD VERBS: Those spots touting Puget Sound Bank as the last home-owned big bank also display an anti-city bias. The outside-owned banks are represented by urban scenes of LA, SF, Portland and NYC (for Key Bank, actually based in Albany), while the narration about the good home boys accompanies country and suburban scenes….The Home Club hardware warehouse stores are running commercials with The Addams Family theme song (“Yes!, I wish they said, “your house can look just like theirs!”)….Those cable commercials for Mace for women, in tasteful pocketbook-size applicator cans, exploit fear of the opposite-sex, opposite-race stranger in the parking garage (while most violent crimes against women are actually done by acquaintances).

THE FINE PRINT (small sign posted in downtown library): “Title Change: Switch Fund Advisory has become Mutual Fund Investing.“

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Tina is the typewritten/photocopied journal of the Church of Tina Chopp in Bellingham. It’s a variant on the Church of the SubGenius fun and games, built around the “Tina Chopp is God” graffiti that was everywhere in B’ham and Seattle in the early ’80s. Like real churches, it has a detailed philosophy and an us-vs.-them demarcation (in the “Tinite” worldview, to “go Safeway” is to become that most unforgivable of sinners, a suburbanite). Don’t expect any facts about who Tina Chopp is or was (various rumors peg her as a male WWU student’s unsuccessful love pursuit or as a Seattle rock groupie). If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.

Latter-Day Note: On 9/28/99, I received the following email:

the little blurb about The Church finished with the request “If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.”

now i realize that this article was originally written in 1990, and someone may have directed you towards our web site since then (it has been online since 1995), but if not, you can read “the true story” for yourself at http://www.aa.net/cotc/

if you would like any further information about the church, please feel free to write.

Praise Tina Chopp!

Rev. Guido S. DeLuxe, DD, LDD, OGG, OHS, ST, MSU

High Priest – The Church of Tina Chopp

deluxe@marijuana.com — http://www.aa.net/cotc/

CUCKOO’S NEST CUISINE: Officers at the Oregon Correctional Center in Salem can now resume their experiment in disciplining inmates while reducing waste. A state appeals court ruled that Nutra Loaf, baked ground leftovers served to disobedient prisoners, was not cruel or unusual punishment.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Envir-O-Mints are little chocolate mint wafers from Seattle’s Environmental Candy Co. Each mint is stamped with the image of a different endangered species; each wrapper also holds a tiny photo-card of another threatened animal, plus an address on the back for your own Wildlife Action Kit (free) or Endangered Species T-shirt ($3 and 20 wrappers).

IN A JAM: Like most tots in the (then) farm and sawmill town of Marysville, I served my penance as a summer strawberry picker at Biringer Farms, a large operation that sold fresh fruit to traditional wholesale markets. It also had a U-Pick operation and shortcake stands at county fairs. Now my past has risen, in the form of a Biringer store and shortcake stand in the Pike Place Market. Besides breakfasts and desserts (with local fruit when in season), it sells its own new line of gourmet jams, fruit taffy, honey, tea, cocoa, dessert pasta, rum cake, and “Ecstasy” ice cream toppings. They package many of the items in gift sets; they take mail, phone, and fax orders. I know they had to do something like this or lose the farm to tract houses. Still, there’s an ol’ loss-O-innocence about it all, like a nice homely old building “restored” with gaudy paint.

PHILM PHACTS: The most belovedly odd hit of this year’s Seattle Int’l Film Festival could be The Documentator, a 3.5-hour Hungarian orgy of re-cut video (action and sleaze films, TV commercials, socialist economic speeches), interspersed with the story of three people illegally amassing western currency by selling pirated videocassettes. This decidedly peculiar attraction sold out (though several dozen left the Harvard Exit at the start of hour 3).

SONIC DOOM?: It’s quite appropriate that Barry Ackerly’s proposed basketball arena, for which city taxpayers would directly and indirectly bribe him not to move the Sonics, is on the site of a former railroad yard, near the old terminus of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. These and other lines received massive tracts of free land by the U.S. government and decades of virtual land-transportation monopoly in their operating regions, in return for “opening” the American west to white settlement.

BORN TO HUSTLE: Convicted swindler Ivan Boesky has deducted his fines from his income tax, and even bribed fellow prisoners to do his laundry. Did he ever see the last scene ofThe Producers ?

CENSORY OVERLOAD: Dennis Miller got to perform at the White House, but all his jokes were pre-screened for questionable content (can’t have any obscenities in earshot while you’re working on strengthening our friendship with the Chinese government). Locally, the King County Arts Commission put part of an exhibit in its upstairs Smith Tower gallery behind black butcher paper, later replacing that with a partition. The hazardous image? A male nude.

O NO CANADA!: My favorite foreign country may be irreversibly headed toward dissolution, yet the U.S. media virtually ignore it. If the confederation fails, will it be considered a sign of the inherent weakness of the North American capitalist system?…In lighter news, the new Toronto Skydome has hotel rooms overlooking the stadium, where one guest couple made their own show with the curtains wide open during a Blue Jays/M’s game.

UNTIL OUR NEXT EXCITING CHAPTER, get all the plastic postage from cash machines that you can (bound to be a collector’s item), avoid the espresso bar at University Ford (inferior lattes fail to protect against thermal breakdown of viscosity), get those neato Graffiti Gear jackets that you can decorated with marking pens then wash clear, see the Russian constructivist art at the Henry Gallery, and join me in celebrating the 25th birthday of the Lava Lamp.

PASSAGE

Author-social critic Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling ) in New York mag: “I left my exercise session after I’d only done one leg. I risked asymmetry.”

HYPE

The Weekly seems to like Misc. “The best one-page read in town,” sez their Bruce Barcott. All Weekly readers are invited to subscribe to Misc. this month for $6 and get a bonus sample from my forthcoming novel. Age, height, race not important.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Optative”

HOW OFFICIAL ARE YOU?

In order to be a true Goodwill Games fan,

you must consume as many Official Products and Services as you can.

Use this handy checklist.

5/90 Misc. Newsletter

NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT

FOR TEARING DOWN

THE MUSIC BOX THEATER

Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).

Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.

Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.

As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.

Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”

Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.

Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.

Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.

The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”

Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.

Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.

Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).

News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.

Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.

Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”

Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.

‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”

PASSAGE

One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”

REPORT

If you want Misc. every month (we don’t get to every drop-off every time), subscribe.

My novel The Perfect Couple is available on Macintosh discs for $10.

CALL TO ACTION

ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Syncretize”

12/89 Misc. Newsletter

Seahawks Keep Losing,

Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties

Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.

MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.

TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!

THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”

PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!

BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.

STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.

HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.

INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).

BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.

SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.

`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”

VOICES

Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:

“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”

FORUM

We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Olefiant”

INS/OUTS FOR ’90

This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.

Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.

This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.

7/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

The Reds Will Never Get Our Military Secrets —

They Can’t Outbid the Private Sector

Ahh, what better reading for the Age of the Greenhouse Effect than Misc., the column that always keeps its cool?

STUFF: Now that we’re through booing the Lucking Fakers for another year, we can examine Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s purchase of the Portland TrailBlazers. Will fancy computer analysis come to basketball? Will it result in increased throughput?

THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE continues, with Union St.’s beautiful Post Office Grocery and the legendary Market Theater the latest victims (of development and Reaganomic monopolization, respectively). The next front is the Music Hall Theater. Allied Arts is striving to keep the Clise Agency from razing the ornate movie palace for yet another cheap “luxury” hotel. Other interests are trying schemes to keep the Paramount standing. But don’t look to Royer Roi for any help; the onetime “people’s mayor” now acts as a stooge for those who would destroy Seattle in order to save it. (Speaking of hotels, the finally-done Convention Center won’t rent space to local people unless they’ll bring at least 1,000 out-of-towners to area hotels.)

MODULATIONS: The local airwaves are now safe for cool music. KJET is apparently sticking around for a while, and has added more hours of live programming. And the FCC declined to let the Jack Straw Foundation knock KNHC off the air. Straw, whose old KRAB devolved from beatnik eclecticism to hippie senility before it made a quick buck selling its frequency, will now start a small station in Everett, where people talk almost as slowly as the old KRAB announcers did.

CATHODE CORNER: The CBS special on the plight of local Vietnam vets was a great piece of filmmaking, marred at the end by an obscene promo for the network’s newest Joy-of-Violence cop show…. The long-announced Boris & Natasha movie is now in production, with #1 hoser Dave Thomas recently cast opposite Sally Kellerman. Variety ads, made to lure investors while only Kellerman was signed, show a male model in a Boris suit with a hat over his face…. MTV’s Museum of Unnatural History was an amazing lesson in the contradictions of commercial surrealism, even more bizarre by being in the recursive maze that is Bellevue Square. The exhibits scattered along the mall (and decorated in Late Pee-wee) included two banks of 24 video screens each. One had Pontiac ads, the other a montage of MTV promo spots including a shot of singer Mojo Nixon (but, alas, not his great song “Burn Down the Malls”).

UPDATES: The end of the ’80s (discussed in a prior column) was celebrated in a mock funeral by NYC performance artists The Blue Man Group, cremating a deconstructivist print, a model of a postmodern office building, and a yuppie doll…. The ’70s revival continues, as dinosaur rock and neo-disco race up the charts while several late-’70s celebs stage publicized comebacks (Devo, Patti Smith, Jimmy Carter)…. The Monthly, a local ad trade paper, asked 10 ad-biz experts about the new Rainier Beer ads. The only guy who liked them works for the brewery.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (USA Today, 6/21): “Wives of economic summit leaders wave as they leave on a boat tour Monday… Absent: Denis Thatcher.” Runner-up (P-I “Correction,” 6/10): “The relish tray (at Le Petit Prince) comes with an original dip made on the premises, not a sort of Green Goddess dip as suggested by the reviewer.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Hardball, best of the many local sports rags, takes the familiar “literary fan” approach to baseball, covering the three local pro teams and assorted other aspects of the game…. Pacific Northwest’s cover on films made and/or set in the Northwest is astounding. Richard Jameson included many memorable NW movies but did neglect my favorite, Ring of Fire (1961). Long unavailable, it featured Mason County deputy David Janssen abducted by three teen hoodlums led by Frank Gorshin. They wander the woods and inadvertently start a raging forest fire, but not before Janssen and seductive hoodette Joyce Taylor share a quiet embrace, followed by shots of a tall tree and rolling hills.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Linda’s Lollies are “hand made lollipops” in many sophisticated flavors, including Samduca (a licorice taste with three real coffee beans inside). At Paper Moon in the Market…. Godfather’s now has a “Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza,” complete with pickles.

ON A ROLL: By the time this comes out the Suzuki Samurai jokes may have come and gone (dealers with high turnover, the teal-blue car it takes a real man to drive, etc.). The best and most real comment is that Univ. Village uses a Samurai with “Security” boldly painted on the side. Just don’t ask me to go after shoplifters across speed bumps in it.

LEFTOVERS: As usual, there’s just too much going on in Our Wacky World to fit the column, so we can’t talk much about Reagan vs. the Native Americans (only a movie cowboy with a mistaken sense of reality could call massacres and the reservation system “humoring”); George Bush (sez he’s less elitist ‘cuz he only went to Yale, not Harvard); the plan to put casinos in Detroit (buying their cars is a gamble enough); the censoring by US West and the state of phone sex and porn books, respectively (threatening all expressions of politically incorrect lifestyles); and the Mariners’ latest woes (why couldn’t they at least be lovable losers?).

‘TIL OUR AUGUST EDITION (our first ever), see Baghdad Cafe and the Burke Museum’s Far Side of Science, don’t see The Morton Downey Jr. Show (not even to “love to hate it”), see the Ivar’s fireworks (accept no substitutes), and register to vote. See ya.

6/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

IT’S THE DAWS BUTLER MEMORIAL EDITION,

AND DON’T YOU FOR-GIT IT!

Welcome to the second-anniversary edition of Misc. This ragtag collection of little notices from all over does have some goals. I want to celebrate the chaotic, post-postmodern world of ours, and call for a world much like we have now but with more love and less attitude. I want to exalt English as a living, growing language. I want to separate political liberalism from the cultural conservatism that led so many post-’60s youth to view liberals as old fuddyduddies. I want to proclaim that you can be intellectually aware and still like TV.

Why the New Rainier Beer Ads Suck: They’re a Frisco ad agency’s idea of what us Northwest hicks’ll fall for: Pavlov/Spielberg stimulus-response images, based on tourist attractions and phony regional pride. They’re as awful as the big beers’ ads, without the media budget to pull it off. The new “small-capitals” logotype looks too much like that of Rainier Bank. It’s all because the brewery was sold to Australian mogul Alan Bond, who more recently bought out fellow Aussie Robert Holmes a Court (the man who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson). Bond also has large business ties with Chilean dictator Pinochet (gold mines, a phone company). Response to the ads has been underwhelming, while old Rainier posters sold briskly at the U-District Street Fair.

A Permanent Underground Tour: Bill Speidel, who died this month, was one of the first to write seriously about Seattle as a real city, with its own brief but vital history. Too few have followed his lead; “Northwest Writers” are still expected to do free verse about scenery, not narratives about people. Yet he’ll be remembered whenever Northwesterners seek an honest regional identity from holding on to one’s past: Not nostalgia for a nonexistent “simpler time” or the old west of movies, but a raucous cavalcade of pioneers and profiteers, matrons and whores, all trying to muddle through life much as we try now.

Local Publications of the Month: First, the fine mag misidentified here last time as Ground Zero is really Zero Hour. The temporal-spatial discord resolved, let’s discuss newspapers ashamed of their own towns. The Herald and The Morning News-Tribune no longer carry any front-page clue to their origins (Everett and Tacoma). The Daily Journal-American never had Bellevue in its name. Each wants to be identified not with real cities but with its own mapped-out segment of Suburbia USA, the everywhere/nowhere.

Junk Food of the Month: The experimental no-melt chocolate invented by our pals, the Battelle Memorial Institute. Since it stays solid at temperatures below 98.6 F, will the makers of car seats and kids’ clothes conspire to keep it off the market?

One More Time: Sequels, those efficient re-uses of pre-sold titles, have become vital parts of conglomerate-owned film studios. The trend has grown to the literary classics with the announced book project Gone With the Wind II. But I’m waiting for the Romeo and Juliet follow-up being written by ’68 movie Romeo Leonard Whiting. I want to know how they manage to be alive after part 1, but also whether they can keep their relationship growing amidst the problems of everyday life.

The Big Lie Indeed: Drugs continue to be used as the Red Scare of the Late ’80s, an excuse for anti-democratic actions of many kinds. Locally, Doug Jewett uses it to promote the destruction of low-income housing, and the Blaine feds are seizing vehicles for just an ash of pot (not the most enlightened way to reduce the budget deficit). Nationally, the Army’s being brought into domestic law enforcement (just like in drug-exporting states such as Panama). Some would prefer that the anti-drug cause remain associated with fascist tactics, so that non-fascists will keep getting hooked and killed in the name of rebellion. But there are better ways to approach the issue, such as shown on a new bumper sticker: “Stop Contra Aid — Boycott Cocaine.”

Goin’ to Jackson: It’s no wonder some have tried, and others may try, to kill Jesse Jackson, for he’s more than a soon-to-be-ex-candidate. He’s overseen a realignment of American politics, away from of the era of the Gilded Right and the Gelded Left. No longer can liberals bask in smug defeatism, readily accepting conservatives’ portrayal of things. (Most Americans never were flaming Falwellians, but the anti-Falwell set bought Falwell’s claim that they were.) Jackson’s shown that a universal movement for change can happen, whether party regulars are involved or not.

Cathode Corner: Johnny Carson may be writing his own bad jokes during the writers’ strike, but you won’t hear any gags about his financial advisor, “Bombastic Bushkin.” Johnny and the real Henry Bushkin have broken their long partnership. Some of Bushkin’s deals, such as investing in Houston real estate just before the oil bust, have come too close to the ones in old Carson monologues.

Loco Affairs: Martin Selig sez he wants a more beautiful downtown. He’s offered to pay the city to let him tear down the homely Public Safety Bldg. We could think of a few other buildings worthy of removal, ones for which he already owns all rights….The Westlake Center nears completion, and the developers’ intentions for the land the city gave them are appearing. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports local merchants as essentially fainting or laughing at the center’s proposed rents. Most tenants, the Journal sez, “are expected to be national chains.”

Ad Copy of the Month (by CBS Records for UK band Raymonde): “Let’s just say it falls someplace between Joy Division and the Beach Boys.”

Ride ‘Em: Metro’s losing passengers while Snohomish County Community Transit can’t stuff folks on board fast enough. To learn why, just ride a CT bus to Everett some night. It’s a nice, big, comfy bus, in pleasant colors. It’s a bus people can actually want to ride, and they do. But the folks at Metro were too busy to notice one of their own officials skimming the cash boxes, so we can’t expect ’em to learn from their neighbors’ success.

Close: ‘Til next time, petition KIRO to bring back Mighty Mouse, visit the 6 Star Factory Outlet store in W. Seattle, and heed the words of gambler-lawman Bat Masterson: “There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in winter.”

2/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

MAKE LOVE NOT WARHOL

Welcome to Misc., the column that loved seeing all the Martin Luther King Day signs at banks accused of redlining. We’re also not the official column of Family TV Viewing Month, a recent publicity stunt that involved two households going tubeless for a week. I can’t imagine what’d be worse: another Cagney & Lacey rerun or following the advice of state first lady Jean Gardner.

Aural Threat: For five and a half years, on a tiny budget and a tinny frequency, KJET has been one of the few commercial radio stations in town doing anything worthy of criticism (the best in progressive pop played announcers who dare to assume that their listeners have brains). Now that owner SRO has a few bucks to spend, it’s pondering the removal of this proven format. KJET has extremely loyal listeners. It could have more of them with better equipment and more promotion. The station’s outspokenly asking us to plead with them to let the Jet live. Do it. They’re at 200 W. Mercer, 98119.

No reprieve, however, is apparently possible for the beloved Rainier Beer ads. For 12 years, Heckler & Associates’ campaign (always “zany,” sometimes truly witty) has made Rainier #1 in Washington by distinguishing it from the majors and their cloying, zillion-dollar ads. The brewery’s new Australian owner’s hiring an Australian agency to make Rainier’s ads more like Bud’s and Miller’s –certain doom for a regional brand. Before Heckler, Rainier was sinking in the market. It tried a light beer and a draft beer years before Miller, a dark beer years before Michelob, fancy bottles, fictional spokesmen, outdoorsy jingles — nothing worked until it made commercials people wanted to watch. The campaign also helped put the Seattle production community on the map. It proved that local people can top the LA gold-chain crowd (though some local advertisers, like Bell and the Lottery, still send their customers’ money south).

Sunken Treasures?: Another endangered landmark is Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Seattle’s second oldest retail business (after L&H Engraving on Elliot). The pier on which the venerable souvenir stand is situated is in danger of collapsing, under the strain of drywall construction further up the waterfront. The contractor won’t ease up on the heavy vibrations until April, when the shop’ll move next to Ivar’s. If Sylvester the mummy sinks, he’ll become the eternal martyr to Seattle’s construction mania.

Philm Phacts: Housekeeping is a great film with great characters, set in a believably matriarchal Northwest town. Its only flaw is easily attributed to a Scottish director filming in Canada: The heroines as girls, being driven across Washington, stop at an Esso station. Standard Oil of N.J. never had rights to the name (an acronym of “S.O.”) in the western U.S., and so used Carter and then Enco before switching nationwide to Exxon. More fascinating info on the gas biz is at the General Petroleum Museum, which sells old pumps, signs, and memorabilia to collectors and rents a hall filled with the stuff for banquets and meetings.

Tunnel Woes: Wouldn’t it’ve been nice if Metro’d kept boring through the soft ground? They could do it at night with advance notice, so nobody’d be hurt when the Century Square building drops to a more reasonable height. If some of the Sharper Image merchandise gets damaged in the process, so much for the better.

Truth is Stranger Dept.: A while back, some clever folks published a parody of the Seattle Arts Commission newsletter. In the fictional lead story friends of commission members were being hired as “Art Buddies” to inspire local artists. It was a slap at programs to “support the arts” without giving a dime to artists. Now the real commission wants to hire three “nationally known” (your tax $$ going to NYC) art critics to advise artists with commission grants. Even Regina Hackett (the William Arnold of art writers) questions the idea (“Artists who want advice should ask artists whose work is in sympathy with their own”).

Wet Dreams: The recent Boat Show was a spectacle of American grandiosity at its finest. Best was the seemingly endless series of interconnected tents outside the Dome, just dying to become the site of a movie chase scene. The boats themselves generally got uglier as they got costlier. By $300G you had Joan Collins beds and blue plush carpeting on the walls. Still, there’s a lot to be said for living on a boat, with its split levels and cozy quarters. If you could only get a moorage with cable TV….

Local Publication of the Month: Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History. Read, in lovely type with by quaint picures, of the early years of our remote corner of the world — but remember that “early history” here is “modern history” most anywhere else.

Headline of the month (Times, 1/25): “Two hospitals weigh liver transplants.” Lessee, at $1.87 a pound….

Cathode Corner: Some of the best TV entertainment is in commercials on obscure cable channels. Financial News Network has five-minute “paid programs” twice an hour. Gruff-voiced brokers insist that their option-futures-ratio-index packages are still sound investments. Sometimes they appear in phony “interviews” with actors hired to say “Sounds very impressive, Mr. Goldman.” Their heads are electronically squeezed into the top three-quarters of the screen, with stock prices swimming on the bottom.

‘Til March, visit the Old Firehouse second-hand mall at 110 Alaskan Way, watch Bombshelter Videos 1 a.m. Thurs. night/Fri. morn on KSTW, and remember the Valentine’s Day greeting on Pine Street: “Do Not Enter Except Metro Busses” (Look it up).