MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.

UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.

UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.

AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)

ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.

If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)

GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).

Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)

The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!

CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.

Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.

Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).

Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.

While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)

It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”

YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.

MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.

CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…

COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…

THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.

On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.

On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.

Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.

(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)

In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.

But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.

Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.

Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.

But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)

Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.

> ON THE LINE: Jack Whisner, a transit planner for King County, left a phone message claiming Misc. was wrong to describe planned north-Seattle bus changes as favoring commuters instead of the voluntarily carless. He asserts the proposals are really meant to increase cross-town routes, so more people can ride from one neighborhood to another without having to transfer downtown. However, I’ve still got reservations about the scheme. Since the county wants to shovel most new-service bucks toward the ‘burbs, some new in-town routes may start as weekday-only, daytime-only services, and some existing routes some folk have become accustomed to might be cut back or even dropped. Public hearings and comments on the scheme are now being taken; call 684-1162 for details.

THE MAILBAG: Our item a couple weeks back, seeking a replacement term for the ’80s relic “yuppie,” engendered this email response from Bryan Alexander of Louisiana: “Liking your emphasis on their aging, how about `boomer geezers’? Returning to the acronym, how about `ayuppies’ (aging young urban etc.) or `dyuppies’ (decrepit etc.), which raise both senesence and the victims’ delusions of perpetual youth? The former is a more Southern pronounciation, the latter nearly Slavic.” Jesse Walker, meanwhile, takes umbrage at a throwaway line in the original column item which claimed the young adult bourgeoisie didn’t share its elders’ taste for bland pop songs. Walker felt I was wrong to “put Bonnie Raitt on the same level as James Taylor. And what about the revived popularity of the uber-bland Elton John?” John, of course, never really went away, at least not from Lite FM stations. A more serious challenge to my remark might involve the younger Lite FM stars (F. Apple, S. Crow, et al.).

SWANKOSITY: The Pampas Club opening was like a scene out of the 1990 debutante movie Metropolitan, with exquisitely-dressed rich kids of a type I’d not previously known to exist here, all in the former site of the raucous My Suzie’s and Hawaiian-kitsch Trade Winds. It reminds me of a scene in the memoir of a Depression-era UK left activist. After living through nearly three decades of mass deprivation due to the depression, the war, and Europe’s lengthy postwar slump, he was shocked and astonished to find teenagers running around the streets of late-’50s London with the cash to spend on clothes and music and partyin’.

One side effect: The new Belltown wine-‘n’-dine clientele is, on the whole, much better-behaved in public than the Bud Light-chugging fratbar crowd more common in the neighborhood two or three years ago.

Another side effect: The ex-Sailors Union building where Pampas, El Goucho, and the (separately owned) Casbah Cinema are is right across from Operation Nightwatch, where homeless folk line up for shelter-bed tix. What used to be called “limo liberals” climb out of pug-ugly Mercedes SUVs, only to witness the less-than-formally dressed standing and arguing and cussing in line. While few affluent persons feel personally responsible for an economy that creates a few “winners” and a lot of others, maybe the sight will at least give some “winners” a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God humility. In other economix thots…

BUBBLE BURSTING?: Many of Seattle’s art-world and “alternative” denizens like to think they’re not part of the planes-and-software boom economy. But we’re all affected. I’m writing here soon about some of the writers and artists with day jobs at Microsoft. There are also plenty of actors, playwrights, cartoonists, photographers, illustrators, videographers, graphic designers, and audio engineers toiling away at assorted high-tech outfits on both sides of the lake, and at these companies’ subcontractors and spinoff firms. With the ripple effect of these bucks passing among retailers, landlords, etc., the commercial underpinnings of local alt-culture haven’t been higher.

So are its potential commercial underminings. As the Stranger‘s already mentioned, there’s a housing crisis threatening the fiscal well-being of most anybody who’s not rich. When housing prices go up, they seldom go back down. So if the Asian economic slump ravages Boeing and agribusiness exports, and if fears of a coming market saturation in the computer biz come true, even more of us will be scrambling for the remaining affordable abodes.

MISC. CAN ONLY admire the Times for daring to run a front-page banner headline on 6/24 with the quotation “I’m Really Boring.”

THE GRIND: McDonald’s now offers official Babe Happy Meal toys with purchase of a hamburger, cheeseburger, or Chicken McNuggets. No, you can’t substitute a Sausage McMuffin (I tried).

CASH FROM CHAOS DEPT.: Remember when Misc. reprinted a slogan from the Usenet newsgroup alt.society.generation-x, “I Am Not A Target Market”? The June YM had that very phrase–as the tease line for a slick fold-out Nike ad section. Only Nike (and its ad agency, Weiden & Kennedy) would try so desperately to be hip as to try to co-opt youthful rebellion against co-option. Speaking of clever bizpeople…

WHAT’S ON SECOND?: Spurred by the success of Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, a bunch of other eatin’-&-drinkin’ joints wanted to make of Second Ave. in Belltown blossom with a whole string of sidewalk dining spots. It’s been slow in coming, thanks to bureaucrats in the city and at the state Liquor Board holding up the permitting process. The Lava Lounge and the Crocodile got their al fresco OKs, but Goodchow and Tula’s haven’t yet and the Speakeasy’s request was refused. Maybe somebody’s worried about hoped-for hordes of volunteers not being able to navigate narrowed sidewalks to get to the Norm Rice for Governor campaign office, also on Second.

MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING DEPT.: The Nation had a comparatively flimsy essay a couple months back bashing “profits from poverty”: companies discovering new opportunities from the downsizing of America (dollar stores, check-cashing stands, gambling, “secured” credit cards, telephone-reconnect services, etc.). The article claimed something was wrong in this. I say it’s not something companies persue out of spite, exploitation, or evil thoughts. It’s value-neutral, like most of capitalism. If you wanna argue that value-neutrality is exactly what’s wrong with capitalism, I’m willing to listen. Besides, what’s capitalism good for if it can’t properly service its own victims? Speaking of outfits servicing diverse clienteles (or are supposed to)…

DOWN THE PIKE: The heavy hand of demographic cleansing continues on assorted fronts around Seattle. Seems like just yesterday (really a couple years back) the Pike Place Market fended off a hostile-takeover bid from NYC investors who wanted to turn it into a prettified, market-research-driven mall-oid exclusively for yups and tourists. Now, market activists (including theInternational Examiner newspaper and sometimes-heretic market council member Michael Yeager) charge market management with attempting this process on its own. Their claimed evidence: (1) six recent evictions or lease non-renewals of Asian-American shopkeepers who’d sold non-yup wares; and (2) a statement to the press by market executive director Shelly Yapp, in which she envisioned the market as a place primarily for upscale shoppers in competition with Larry’s Markets and Westlake Center. Twenty-five years ago this summer, the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority (the city agency employing Yapp) was chartered to preserve the market as a real place for real people, including low-income, elderly, and non-whitebread people. If Yapp and her staff really are ignoring or abrogating this aspect of the market’s mission, then it’s time for a few changes. Pike Place, like the city as a whole, should be for everybody, not just the upscale elite already served by retail institutions that don’t get taxpayer support.

SIGN OF THE WEEK: The following message, each line in descending type size a la an eye chart, is the only thing visible at a boarded-up storefront in Westlake Center: “We waited a long time to get this location and we wanted to keep it a secret and build suspense but the manager of Westlake Center said that according to the lease we were obligated to put something up in the window to let everybody know something exciting is happening in the mall which really surprises us but they probably buried important information like that in the fine print just like we’re doing. Announcing the grand opening of our new store. (Coming soon!)” In the short time it took me to copy the sign’s words into a notebook, three shoppers asked if I knew what the store would be. (I don’t.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)

Generation X: The Original Poem

Here at Misc. World HQ, we’ve been trying like heck to figure out the intermediate intricacies of navigatin’ that Info Hi-Way. For a Machead like me to learn an Internet UNIX line-command interface from the online help (much of which is written for programmers and system operators, not end users) is like learning to drive by reading a transmission-repair manual.

IT’S A CRIME: Ya gotta give Clinton credit even in the face of apparent defeat. By trying to push some comprehensive health-reform, no matter how kludgy, he asked Congress to inconvenience big business, something it hasn’t done on such a general scale in maybe two decades. By even bringing up the premise that perhaps what’s good for corporate interests might not be good for the country, he’s significantly altered the boundaries of public debate at the “highest” levels of our political culture. I’m a single-payer-plan fan myself, but it was clear that there wasn’t enough common sense in Congress for that to go this time. This is an example of what I’ve been saying about the need for us “progressive” types to get into practical politics. We’ve gotta expand from just protesting things, into the comparatively boring nuts-n’-bolts of getting things done. The moneybags have a powerful voice; we need to get just as loud.

6/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOSING IT: If we still don’t have a Grungeland theme park, how ’bout somebody putting out a Grunge Aerobics video? I can imagine it now: a formation of tall guys flailing their long hair about during the opening warmups, using Sheaf Stout bottles instead of hand weights, before hitting the floor for the tummy exercises that give you the ever-popular emaciated junkie physique without having to do the drugs. At the end, the moshers could give nutritional advice (“don’t stage dive 15 minutes after eating”) or even sell their own food products (Mosh Mush, the perfect post-hangover breakfast). The dancers could compare their weight-loss results at the end to determine who’s “the biggest Loser.” Just if you produce such a tape, I want credit….In an item cut from the February issue, I pondered even more future developments in watered-down corporate “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a new designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

SPECIAL EVENT!

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

REPORT

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Simsum”

11/91 Misc. Newsletter

Clarence the Cross-Eyed Judge

A cool-weather greeting from Misc., the newsletter that couldn’t afford to go to the $295 Nov. 14 touring seminar on Producing, Designing & Writing Newsletters by a Georgia consulting firm. We’ll have to get along without learning what the flyer called “the 27 essential elements of all good newsletter copy which increase readership, credibility and motivation.”

Sign of the Month (taped to the inside of a Magazine City window): “Please don’t support the belief that panhandling supports drug abuse. The fact is, most `homeless’ people don’t have the mental capacities to get on government legal panhandling programs like welfare and food stamps. Besides, it’s your money and your decision right?? O.K. Pal… Thanx, `a homeless person.'” Runner-up (orange posters on Roosevelt Way light poles): “This is a Totem Pole. This pole is talking.”

Ad Slogan of the Month: “Fits like a glove. Feels like love.” The product: Side 1 tennis shoes.

When’s A Critic Not?: P-I art critic Regina Hackett, quick to denounce any work she doesn’t like, provided an unquestioning piece on 9/28 toward controversial writer Andrea Dworkin. You could almost learn that Dworkin has, over the years, denounced all heterosexual intercourse as rape, written novels about totally-good women and totally-bad men (except those who pledge never to confront a woman with an erection), and provided true believers with a drug-free high based on the intense power of martyrdom (a universal feeling, one I’ve experienced through other means and found dangerously addictive). Her most famous assertion is that virtually any image of a woman designed for men or by “male culture,” no matter how sweet/bland/loving/silly, is a statement of violent domination against all women. There is no love in Dworkin’s world, no humanity, only rage. Her only solution to old repressive stereotypes is to create new ones. Anyone who knows anyone who doesn’t conform to her archetypes knows her worldview is incomplete; but unlike many feminists, Dworkin doesn’t appeal to reason but to passion. She exploits a very real pain and fear held by many women. They find a recognition of their pain in her that they don’t find anywhere else. Yet she offers no way out, only the same compulsion for censorship and vindictiveness I abhor in right-wing males. Speaking of whom…

Here Comes the Judge: The Thomas/Hill debate was like a 12-hour episode of LA Law, without the comedy relief. It was exquisite that ABC’s Day 1 coverage led into Family Matters, the sitcom about a teen geek who mistakenly thinks he’s a great lover. The behavior charged to Thomas (and charged to others in acres of local-angle stories) is one aspect of office hustler behavior. From J.R. to self-styled “right-wing rebels,” a strain of American culture has mistaken obnoxious and contemptuous people for “winners.” This attitude embodied most of the Reagan White House except Reagan himself, and was taught in seminars and self-improvement courses (including the book Winning Through Intimidation). Nobody specifically endorsed sexual harassment, but they promoted an atmosphere of arrogance that incubates many expressions of rudeness. (These men also harass subordinate men in non-sexual ways, that feel psychologically like a schoolyard beating, not rape.) This is why I say we’ve got to get rid of all bigotry, all stereotypes, all dehumanizing, or you’re just emulating the behaviors you claim to hate. Oh — and Thomas was wrong when he said, “This isn’t America. This is Kafkaesque.” Don’t be silly: America is Kafkaesque.

Dough Boys: There was a great Times piece 9/29 on corporate debt. The same politicians who used to scream about government deficits arranged the regulatory policies that led to the funny-money economy of the late ’80s. The same business advocates who bitched about public debt eagerly built up the private debt that strangulates the economy. Companies can’t borrow or spend out of the recession; they’re too busy paying for funny-money takeovers. Laid-off workers, consumers who face fewer choices at higher prices, callers cut off because AT&T cut its maintenance budget, bank depositors, and all the rest of us are paying for the games of corporate predators. A UN study shows that this is the first year since ’45 in which world industrial output declined. Some of that is due to the collapse of the Soviet economy (a different type of funny-money), but a lot of it’s due to the damage by the western world’s speculator joy-riders.

One More Reason Not to Live in LA: The music video for Fun Day, shot on the streets of LA, shows Stevie Wonder driving.

Block That Metaphor (Paul Gregutt wine col. in the Weekly, 10/16): “This takes Brusset’s Cairanne to another dimension. It’s like the difference between Star Trek on TV and Star Trek in the movies…a voyage where no palate has gone before. Berries, sage, tannin, and acid explode from a wine that might be described as a zinfandel recruited by Hell’s Angels.”

The Hammering Man Crash: I wasn’t there at the time it fell, but got to see the massive wreckage. One can question whether the Seattle Art Museum should have spent $400G on a clone sculpture from LA, the town whose business is imposing its culture onto the rest of the world. One can question the smug condescension implied in a self-styled tribute to the Working Man at a development that represents the expulsion of working-class labor from downtown, overlooking the waterfront that now represents the expulsion of working-class labor from America. (I’m reminded of Vancouver author Brian Fawcett’s assertion that malls and subdivisions are typically named after the real places they replaced.)

Yes, But Is It Alive?: Belltown Inside Out was billed as a celebration of the “artistic neighborhood;” it turned out more like a wake. The big exhibit was highlighted by people who used to live and/or work downtown, before the arrival of the real estate speculators. The new and “restored” apartments and condos on display were shoddy-to-average pieces of construction, gussied up with thick rugs, goofy light fixtures and weight rooms. The image of an art community is considered important by the developers who are driving out all the artists (one brochure touts “Sidewalk cafes, galleries, pubs, the market and the most vibrant downtown north of San Francisco”), so expect more such events. The area was swarming with cops that Fri. nite, like the tower-dwellers’ political lobby has wanted for some time; only they didn’t seem to be going after any dealers providing pharmaceuticals for the fratboy-disco clientele, but just stood near the gallery spaces looking reassuring. It was also the first weekend of the Donald Young Gallery (nothing from here; nothing anybody here not named Gates can afford) and the last weekend of the Belltown Film Festival at the Rendezvous (a program and space virtually made for one another). The promotion seems to have worked overall; as of the first week of the UW fall quarter, the 1st Ave. bars were overflowing with the fresh faces that make old hippies squirm in disgust/jealousy. Seattle’s various hipster scenes over the decades never fully capitalized on the largest student population west of Austin. It’s happened now, for good or ill.

Yes, But Is It Mutating?: Seattle artist James L. Acord Jr., who makes “nuclear sculpture” using old luminous, uranium-containing Fiesta Ware, received a giant 2-part profile in the 10/14 and 10/21 New Yorkers, with an apparent first for that mag’s editorial pages: a color photo. (Color has occasionally been in New Yorker cartoons in recent years.)

Stages of Life #1: Penta, who as Leslee Swanson sang perky pop tunes with the early-’80s band The Dinette Set, has returned momentarily from NYC with a husband, a baby, and a street-theatre company. The Alchemical Theatre collectively creates and choreographs song/dance/chant/rant rituals to promote nonviolent anarchism. It sounds heavy and didactic, and some of it is; but parts of their work are also stirring indeed, as the seven performers mingle with the audience to seek a world without violence, hate or wasteful work. Their next piece will touch upon “desire, technology, pleasure, and revolution.” Look for it in a Pioneer Square cellar near you, or call 682-9359 or 447-1566 for reservations.

Stages of Life #2: It’s appropriate that Intiman’s Mary Traverse keeps the heroine clothed while stripping her mate during an abstracted simulated-sex scene. Nudity is oft used in film to strip the male hero’s girlfriends while not exposing him. Here, the heroine (who presumably knows what her own body looks like) offers her reaction to seeing a man’s body. Demystifying the male body would be a step toward more sexual honesty. Maybe those “butt shots” in male-action movies are a positive sign.

Cathode Corner: There’s a peculiarity to listening to football on the radio while watching the same game on TV. The TV signal is bounced off a far-away satellite, so we see the outcome of a play a second after it’s told by the radio announcers…. Al Owens is slowly growing into his job as KSTW entertainment reporter. His rhetorical reach still exceeds his grasp, but it’s still entertaining to see what his next overblown comment is going to be.

Fashion Plate of the Month: The woman on Broadway with a denim jacket, painted in blue with the slogan “Read Chomsky.”

Get a Life Dept.: A man was convicted for continually trespassing at Ann Wilson’s house. Maybe he could get hitched up with Letterman’s female trespasser and they could invade each other’s homes and stop bugging others.

Deconstructivism: The Music Hall’s back wall looked forlorn this past month, with a giant Jerry Mouse hole cut into it to let the demolition machines in. A tragedy that should have been permanently prevented years ago, when credit wasn’t as tight.

Steven Jesse Bernstein, 1951-1991: Didn’t really know one another that well (he sometimes confused me with ex-local writer David Humphries). I knew him well enough to chat up with him outside the Bon circa ’82 while waiting for his fiancée to come out. He talked all hopeful about the forthcoming marriage ;watching from inside a bus a minute later, I saw him cussing out loud for her to get out already. I kept wishing his work would show more discipline, more coherence.But people loved his incoherence, and his reality. He appealed to a punkoid audience who play-acted at despair, because he displayed real despair. For more than a decade, he alternated between periods of fpopular readings and periods of withdrawal (including visits to the U Hospital psych ward, to keep his emotions in check and to stay off drugs, a battle he lost months before ending up with a slit throat on Neah Bay).

‘Til our gala year-closing December saga, see the new SoDo Center (the good-ol’ 1st Ave. Sears plus Bizmart discount computers-n’-things), ask the folks putting up Anita Hill for President posters if they remember that she’s still a conservative, and ponder whether it’s time to listen to something else when those Silent Radio electric signs add a “Top 5 World Music LPs” chart.

PASSAGE

Walter Kendrick in The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment: “Our next age is the first in human history that will have all prior ages to gaze upon at will.”

REPORT

Not a single person responded to my request for ideas on turning this into a less unprofitable venture. If I don’t think of something, I may eventually have to reconsider this whole thing (at least in its present form).

My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is apparently going to be out sometime this winter. More info when I learn it.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Impecunious”

HALLOWEEN IS SUPERFLUOUS WHEN

TODAY’S SCARIEST CREATURES LOOK THE MOST `NORMAL’

12/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Cheer Our UW in the
Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl

INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.

FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.

UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)

ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.

CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.

ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.

MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.

CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).

9/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

Hello again, pop culture fans. Welcome to episode 3 of Misc., the column that asks just how lucky we are to live in an era when we can get gas with “High Tech Techroline.”

This has been a summer of torn streets, noisy construction, disappearing bus stops and other hassles, many of which will be with us for the next four years. The good news is by that time, the only people left downtown will be those of us who demand urban life. Life may soon become a lot less overcrowded for those who refuse to go to Bellevue. Sadly, we’re losing Chapter 2 Books in the University District to that Nowhereland to the east, and are in danger of even losing the Pacific Science Center. This threat to Seattle’s cultural life must be stopped. You wanna have to tell your kids someday that they can’t pitch pennies into the fountains or get their hair raised in the static-electricity exhibit without spending an hour on the bridges? The only arches that belong in Bellevue are golden.

(By the way, the widow and daughter of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc have started a California peace group, Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament. With nuclear weapons, they must have finally found something to crusade against that’s worse than their food.)

Passionately urban life does seem to be catching on in Seattle as a permanent thing. Broadway this summer has been a wonderland of all different kinds of people making all different kinds of scenes. At Dick’s alone you can find some 200 people being sociable at 1:30 a.m. Whenever anybody in Seattle has this much fun, somebody has tried to outlaw it. Already business interests are demanding something be “done” about this “problem” — which is really the best thing that has happened to Seattle since the saving of the Market. Any real city has spontaneous street scenes — gatherings of ordinary people who may not have a destination in mind when they take to the streets, but have an invigorating time getting there. Not everybody who stands on a sidewalk and talks to friends is a criminal; we should be glad the attempts to make Broadway a district for yuppies and only yuppies has gloriously failed. Now if they can only tear up those nauseatingly-cute footsteps…

THINGS I DID THIS SUMMER: Saw the University Book Store remainder sale and was pleased to find How To Sell What You Write marked down to $1.49. Noticed the resemblance between International News’s brightly colored, slogan laden clothes and those of the 1900s comic strip star, The Yellow Kid. Discovered Seattle’s ultimate food store, other than the Pike Place Market: Marketime Foods in Fremont. Was captivated by Cisterna Magna, an exquisite dance/visual performance at Belltown’s Galleria Potatohead. Concluded that any movie, fashion style, entertainer or politician advertised as “hot” is probably going to be dreadful.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Heritage Music Review. Longtime area piano player/disc jockey Doug Bright uses a Braille word processor to make this knowledgeable guide to old rock, R&B and jazz performers of the region and nation. Available in regular print at Elliot Bay Books and other select sources.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bubble gum cards that didn’t make it. The Sports Stop in the Center House basement has cards for entertainment properties that outstayed their welcome (Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper) or never caught on at all (the Dune andSupergirl films). The cards are collector’s items; the gum’s undoubtedly stale, though.

Our last column had a snide remark about an SRO theater. I don’t really hate SRO. About a decade ago, when smart people were briefly being courted as audiences by major motion pictures, SRO was considered the “Establishment” of area theaters. Lately though, SRO has shown itself capable of the finest in theater architecture (though the pink and gray on the Uptown has got to go) and concession food. They continue to subsidize KJET, the closest thing we have to a progressive commercial radio station, and in 1970 tried to save the Seattle Pilots baseball team. Now, this heritage is threatened by a takeover attempt from Paramount Pictures. It might be seen as Paramount’s revenge on Washington state; it was our native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the famous “U.S. vs. Paramount” decision forcing the big five studios to sell the theater chains though which they controlled the entire industry. With today’s federal antitrust regulators (who could more rightly be called protrust), the big distributors are itching for their old monopoly powers back. The remnants of the original Paramount theater chain (not including the Seattle Paramount) are now owned by Coca-Cola, which also owns the Columbia and Embassy studios and half of Tri-Star. Other alliances are underway. If you think the movies this past year have been pitiful, just wait until the big studios control so many theaters they can lock out independent films.

When that time comes, we’ll all have to go to VCRs to see anything interesting. Already you can check out an amazing variety of stuff, including a series of tapes called Video Romance. One store has them in the Adult section even though they’ve no sex, nudity or cussing, and are in fact far tamer than the evening soaps. What they’ve got are impossibly innocent (especially for their glamorous professions) women meeting and taming tall men who have wavy hair and vague accents. All this plus cheap productions (we never see the exotic locales in which the stories are set, only living rooms), syrupy music, bad acting and “Your Host, Louis Jourdan” and you’ve got more real entertainment than in the entire collected works of Michael J. Fox.

Another recently viewed tape: Urgh! A Music War, 1981 concert footage of some 35 bands gathered under the awkward, inaccurate label “new wave.” Only one of them was big at the time (the police, who helped finance the film). Others became stars (the Go-Gos, UB40, Devo), had solid cult followings (Magazine, Steel Pulse, XTC), or met deserved obscurity (Athletico Spizz 80, Splodgenessabounds). I found myself viewing the proceedings as nostalgia for my own generation, and seeing how, even while many of the best bands never had a major hit, the attitudes they represented have become quite pervasive in American society — in butchered form, of course. A lot of the worst aspects of punk/new wave (shallow imagery, aggressive hype, destructiveness to self and others as romanticism, bigotry as nostalgia, shamelessness, lousy manners, celebrations of stupidity) have become everyday aspects of modern business, government and lifestyles. Even agriculture has gone punk: It’s dependent on drugs and panhandling, lives fast, dies young and leaves a good-looking corpse.

Home video’s an even bigger happening in the Asian American community. The wonderful variety stores of the International District all have amazing tape boxes promising music, farce, soap opera, horror, kinky sex, and serious drama, as well as the martial arts you’d expect (often more than one genre in the same production). While you might not want to buy a membership for unsubtitled tapes in a language you don’t speak, the stores will usually have a video playing while you buy some of their fine foods, clothes, jewelry, toys and housewares. Treat yourself to a view of another culture’s pop culture.

We close this edition with a call for entries in the first Misc. Helga Lookalike Contest. The Northwest is abundant with the stoic Nordic romantic look now associated with painter Andrew Wyeth’s mystery woman, as seen in both Time and Newsweek. Send a picture of yourself in any appropriate costume to Misc. c/o Lincoln Arts Center, 66 Bell St., Seattle. All ages and races welcome; bonus points will be awarded for the best floral headband.

7/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

Welcome back, cult following, to the second installment of Misc., the column that explores popular culture in and out of Seattle. (Unlike that national “arbiter of popular culture” Ian Shoales, I’m not a fictional character created by a comedian. To the best of my knowledge, I really exist.) The opinions herein are not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or anyone affiliated with it. This column is appointed to be read in churches.

A professional person recently asked me, “How would you define a positive attitude?” A reasonable question, deserving a reasonable answer. Increasingly, the phrase “positive attitude” is used in our society to encourage the worst sorts of behavior. To me, artificial perkiness is not a positive attitude. Conformity is not a positive attitude. Masochism is not a positive attitude. Blind, unquestioning loyalty to your company or your country is not a positive attitude. To be truly positive is to see the things that need changing and to commit to helping change them. It’s easier than it sounds; it just starts with a commitment to be a professional person.

The immediate vicinity of Lincoln Arts now has its own positive-thinking honorary mayor. Ann Nofsinger, actress-writer-Two Bells Tavern waitress, was the narrow victor in a week-long campaign which became far more serious than many people had expected, especially considering that the first Mayor of Belltown was a drag queen named Dominic. This time, the three candidates had official-sounding slogans and platforms on real issues. Suffice it to say not all the debate/balloting audience at the Two Bells was as serious as the candidates.

Interest is now bound to increase in Nofsinger’s acting role in “White Elephants,” a 20-minute video play by Debla Kaminsky and Kurt Geissel. Originally devised to accompany a gallery show of “white paintings,” the play includes over 90 visual and verbal references to the all-reflective color, ranging in obscurity from a sack of flour and a man named Clifford Dover to the patron saint of virginity. It’s all served up within a story of feisty-innocent Nofsinger trading innuendoes with braggart Earl Brooks as they’re painting her apartment all in – you guessed it.

Not to be in Belltown much longer is Display and Costume Supply, the wonderful store where slumming normal people stood outside in line every Oct. 30 to get Halloween office party costumes. The latest victim of the real estate boom is going out with a public auction July 22, when loyal customers can stock up on Conehead wigs, mirror balls, sequins, vampire teeth, party favors, trophies, styrofoam Statue of Liberty torches, lamé fabrics, and plastic hot dogs, croissants, and lobsters. It’ll all still be available, but you’ll have to go north of Northgate to get it.

Also joining the ranks of the disappeared is WorkShop Printers, home of high-quality, low-cost printing for posters, newsletters, flyers, etc. by cultural and political groups. WorkShop products have bee so pervasive in these circles that I always thought they’d been around forever, or at least since the late ’60s, when in fact it has only been in business since 1980.

The new Display and Costume Supply is in the same general area as the Oak Tree Cinemas, the state-of-the-art sixplex everybody’s raving about. I’ll give a full review of the place as soon as it shows something worth seeing or at least something better than Top Gun,that two-hour commercial for the Pentagon budget. The willingness of Rolling Stone to hype that film is the final proof that the magazine no longer cares about anything and probably never did.

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH: “Silo, Where People Have Fun With Electricity.”

LICENSE PLATE HOLDER OF THE MONTH: Seen on Capitol Hill, this white-on-black custom job with the middle blacked out with masking tape, DAVE ‘N’ 4-EVER.

FOOD FAD OF THE MONTH: Teriyaki fast food. Once the monopoly of the former Toshi’s stands at Queen Anne and Green Lake, they’re now popping up all over town, from Beacon Hill to a resurrected Toshi’s on Aurora. You can eat huge helpings of calrose rice, crisp greens and your choice of beef, pork or a half chicken, usually for under $3. It’s the Pacific Rim-inspired alternative for non-vegetarians who really like to eat.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Wiggansnatch. James Leland Moore has been making this incredibly handsome “Alternative Realities Literary Magazine” for three years now, overseeing its growth into one of the Northwest’s most original, contemporary media of fiction and art. Faced with rising losses, he’s cut back on size and scope with the latest issue, dropping the astute news-briefs column and returning Wiggansnatch to its roots in stories based on pagan and mystic traditions. It’s still great reading for your $2 at Left Bank Books and other select spaces.

The Interstate 90 landscaping in the Rainier Valley has, with the hot weather, bloomed tall grasses along rolling slopes. It’s as if the unfinished freeway has already started making Eastern Washington closer to Seattle.

A Lincoln Arts tenant, the Youth Defense Campaign, has a page in the California-based punk magazine Maximum Rock n’ Roll. YCC’s David Stubbs writes about the group’s efforts to stop the official suppression of independent underage entertainment. The July issue also has the shocking story of LA police arresting and indicting Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, America’s premier political-punk band, on trumped-up charges of “distributing pornographic materials” — an explicit painting by Academy Award-winning graphic designer H.R. Geiger, printed on the fold-out inside cover to an album with a warning sticker on the front. To quote a DKs song. “California Uber Alles” indeed. It’s time to take a true positive attitude and, to quote Biafra’s girlfriend Suzanne Stefanac in the article, “defend your right to deviant behavior.”

That’s it for now. Don’t get overdrawn on your Linda Farris Gallery custom credit card before we meet again.