> iMPRESSIONS: The Stranger office just got a couple of them new iMac computers. They’re gorgeous; they’re screamingly fast; they’re just plain fun. The iMac’s the first “home” computer designed as a piece of home decor, like old “cathedral” radios used to be (one old radio name, Motorola, makes the CPU chip in the iMac). Just as importantly, it expresses the MacOS’s superior visual aesthetic into tangible, physical form. This has the practical effect of reducing the dissonance, the trance effect a computer user may have while really concentrating on the “mindspace” of working or running software. On plain beige-box computers, an advanced user can become almost unaware of his/her physical presence (unless, of course, something goes wrong with the hardware). The iMac’s more noticable, yet pleasant, presence might help hardcore gamers and Net-skimmers keep at least partly aware of the tangible world surrounding them. That, in turn, might help relieve or prevent the loneliness and depression cited among hardcore computer jockeys by some Carnegie Mellon U. sociologists.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Usually for weird potato-chip flavors you’ve gotta go to Canada. But Benson’s T-Bone Steak Crisps are imported directly from England to local spots like the Old Pequliar tav in Ballard. They don’t taste like steak, but have an oddly smoky flavor without being overly spicy. The slow frieght, tho’, can leave ’em a little less fresh-tasting than domestic chips.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Swaank (no relation to the porn mag Swank) is a rip-rollickin’, stylish-as-all-get-out chronicle of local swing-revival happennings. Besides musician and dancer interviews, it’s got a valuable jazz-history lesson and retro-fashion tips that thankfully go beyond the semiannual “Return to Elegance” nonsense in larger publications. There’s even a cartoon demonstrating how a neo-bopper can revise an outdated death-rock tattoo! (Free at clubs with swing nights, or $12 for four issues from 12437 110th Lane NE, #P101, Kirkland 98034.)

ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: Who’da thunk The Stranger (originally a li’l 12-page sheet of coupon ads, movie listings, sex advice, and cartoons) would become such a robust force in alterna-media, reaching some 150,000 readers and revered nationwide? The growth of the paper has parallelled the growth of its “virtual community” of readers and advertisers. While a lot of beloved stores, bands, clubs, eateries, performance troupes, galleries, etc. have left us since late Sept. ’91, a lot of others have joined us. And while the corporate-rock biz has largely left Seattle alone lately (local bands no longer even feel they have to insist on how “not grunge” they are), there are more pro musicians doing more different kinds of things here now than maybe ever. (How many of them are really good at it is another question.)

But what’s in store? Wasn’t too long ago when the stock market was supposedly on a never-to-end rise, when Wired magazine predicted a “long boom,” when the only question anybody asked about the economy was how to keep up with (or survive) the megagrowth. Nowadays, things seem a bit more uncertain, particularly among anyone with direct or indirect dependencies upon Canada, Mexico, Russia, east Asia, or the U.S. stock market (as you might guess, that’s a lot of dependents). Can’t say what’ll happen next, but it might not be all on the upswing.

If there really is a recession later this year or early next, how will it affect our community? Seattle ain’t the same place it was when we lived on the trickle-down from Boeing and its subcontractors. But now the $$ coming into Seattle isn’t merely trickling down from overall national business conditions. It’s coming from whole consumer-economy sectors (software, chain coffeeshops) centered here, shipping cash into head offices that directly employ many art-worlders and art-biz customers. Of course, an overall slowdown will slow down these companies as well; just perhaps more moderately and slowly than Boeing slumps used to be. For whatever it’s worth, the nothing-ever-happens pre-Stranger Seattle ain’t coming back.

It’s a post-April Fool’s Misc., the popcult column that hopes the popular new local band A/C Autolux will one day appear on the same gig with the even-newer local band MoPar. Let’s just hope no band members forget their parts.

UPDATE: Since writing about the Triangle Broadcasting Co., I’ve learned of another gay radio outlet, sorta: The Music Choice section of the DirecTV satellite-dish service has a nightly package of “Out” music, starting around 11 p.m. It’s commercial-free and even flashes the titles and artists’ names on screen.

CLASS-ACTION RACISM SUIT HITS BOEING: Some of you theoretically might ask, “But aren’t pocket-protector-clad Boeing engineers the virtual epitome of squaresville fair play and quiet devotion to duty?” Maybe, in myth; but any huge organization with an almost all whitebread leadership (even an officially “nice” whitebread leadership) can be prone to insult “jokes,” promotion preferences and other discriminations, even anonymous threats and attacks. It’s happened in the past decade (according to suits and pubilshed accusations) at Nordstrom, City Light, the fire department, the ferry system. And with affirmative action under attack and with every boor and bigot using the all-justifying label of “political incorrectness” as an excuse to actually take pride in their own obnoxious inhumanity, we might see more ugliness ahead. Speaking of untoward behavior at unexpected places…

CATHODE CORNER #1: The (still alive, still free) online zine Salon recently ran allegations of sexual harrassment in the offices of 60 Minutes (following that show’s sympathetic treatment of Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey). Salon‘s article was built around eight-year-old allegations by freelancer Mark Hertsgaard, who’d written a piece for Rolling Stone (which published only a watered-down version). He charged the show’s bigwigs, including exec-producer Don Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace, with acts of gender-hostility ranging from lewd jokes to groping and bra-snapping. It’s enough to bring new meaning to my old foolproof formula for “Safer sex” (imaginining that the person you’re about to have sex with is really Morley Safer oughta stop anything from happening).

CATHODE CORNER #2: KCPQ’s news, after the expected bumpy first weeks, is turning into a snappy li’l broadcast that, partly out of necessity (fewer camera crews, no helicopter), spends a little less time than the other stations chasing ambulances and a little more time covering issues, including issues deemed important to those youngish X-Files viewers. Any broadcast that gives top billing (on 3/17) to the fight to abolish the Teen Dance Ordinance at least has a set of priorities in concordance with those of some of our readers. Just one little thing: If they’re trying to skew to a younger audience, why do they follow the newscast with a M*A*S*H rerun that probably looked creaky when made (before the station’s target audience was born)?

PINNING IT DOWN: Bowling as a source for hip iconography is way on the rise. Bowling shirts (particularly the Hawwaiian variety) have been in for a couple of years now and may have another resurgence this summer (if the collectors haven’t stowed away all the good ones by now). New bars from the Breakroom to Shorty’s are festooned with balls, pins, and other acoutrements of the sport. It’s a way to be fun ‘n’ retro without the bourgeois trappings of the cigar-bar crowd. But don’t look for any new bowling alleys anywhere around here anytime soon. Banks and landlords think bowling’s a suboptimal use of square footage, compared to other entertainment or retail concepts. When a Green Lake Bowl or Village Lanes or Bellevue Lanes goes away, it doesn’t come back. All we can do is support the remaining kegling bastions (including the occasional “rock ‘n’ bowl” nights at Leilani Lanes in upper Greenwood).

QUESTION OF THE WEEK: If the Olympics come to Seattle in 2012 (and I know some of you are dead set against the idea but if the Schellites have their way it won’t be our decision to make), will you still be willing to be televised as part of a quaint, exotic human-interest piece about those strange local customs? Submit your reply, with your choice of quaint custom, at clark@speakeasy.org. (Remember, no latte jokes.)

NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (NY Times, 3/4): “Jockey is introducing an advertising campaign intended to imbue the once-hidebound underwear company with a hipper image, particularly among younger shoppers.” Just what’s so bad about a “hidebound underwear company?” What other kind of underwear is there? Runner-up item (KIRO Radio News Fax, 3/5): “A Longview-area man plans a rally at the state Capitol to protest Indian hunting in the Mount St. Helens National Monument.” I thought we were over that despicable era of Western history.

GIRLY SHOWS: In recent weeks, the P-I Lifestyle section’s run two wire service stories, headlined “A New Heyday for Teens” and “Teenage Girl Power at the Box Office.” Of course, their idea of “girl power” is strictly limited to purchasing power, not political power or even the power to make films instead of just watching them. Still, that’s at least something. Some music historians claim we should credit teen-female fans for “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. In other over-the-counterculture news…

QUEER NATION, INDEED: By now you’ve probably seen print ads for Triangle Broadcasting, “America’s First Gay Broadcasting Network” (unless you count American Movie Classics). The L.A.-based company just opened its second branch operation here (the first is in Philly). It runs low-power transmitters out of Bremerton (1490 on the AM dial) and Tacoma, plus a three-person sales office in Pioneer Square. All the programming’s beamed by satellite from Calif. They plan to include lotsa Seattle-based events listings and talk-show guests, but that’ll diminish as more network-owned stations start up around the country. The debut lineup’s mostly talk, with some dance-music hours at night. One host is described as “the queer Rush Limbaugh;” there’s also a Dr. Laura-like tuff-advice lady and a wacky-wacky morning dude. The company’s PR literature’s light on discussing station content, but big on praising gays and lesbians the way corporate America likes to hear people praised–as upscale, upscale, upscale! I suppose it’s progress or something like it if queers can now be depicted as not only non-threatening but as a key economic sector. But to effectively reach all those double-upper-income-no-kids households, they’ll have to grow into something beyond gay/ lesbian topics tacked onto regular dumb ol’ talk radio formulae piped in from out-of-state. Let’s hope they do. Speaking of gay listening habits…

INSERT OLD HOLYFIELD `EAR’ PUNS HERE: If lesbians hear more like men, howcum there’s not a male-appeal equivalent to Ferron? (Jewel doesn’t count.) On a more practical level, imagine if a special tuning fork or whistle could be developed, producing a sound only lesbians (and men) could hear. Single lesbians could find one another in any crowd, avoiding those straight women who think it’s hip to pretend to be bi. (And, if affirmed by further research, this could give further credence to something I’ve long believed-lesbians and straight men have more in common than the more bigoted members of both camps will admit.) Speaking of gender roles…

BYTE OF SEATTLE: Employment fairs can be glum occasions, with self-esteem-challenged jobless folk solemnly filling out application forms whilst getting sermonized about good grooming and interview skills. A far brighter milieu was offered at the Northwest High Tech Career Expo at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Dozens of firms, from Microsoft and H-P down to temp agencies and software-catalog companies, even outfits not primarily tech-oriented like Starbucks and PACCAR trucks; all with flashy booths and smiling flunkies eager to take resumes and business cards–at least from applicants with enough years of the right experience. (Safeco even offered to help train folks without hardcore computer experience to learn to program in COBOL). And you didn’t even have to be a short-listable candidate to pick up some of the freebies at the booths. More candy than Halloween. Sports bottles. Key chains, compasses, letter openers. Pens and pencils of most every variety. Luscious photo postcards (from digital stock-photo agency Photodisc). Sponges. Soap-bubble kits. Plastic mini footballs and baseballs (from Starwave). And the wackiest of all: Official Boeing-logo Hackey Sack balls! (Bet they bounce great off those tall hangar walls.)

Airframe crashes; Flying High cruises:

Of Wings and Tales

Book review for The Stranger, 4/10/97

The jetliner is Seattle’s first big contribution to the world, unless you count Gypsy Rose Lee. Both Michael Crichton’s Airframe (Knopf) and Eugene Rodgers’s Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry (Atlantic Monthly Press) are massive hardcover tomes (each weighing about a pound and a half) that build their narratives around the public fascination with this big, complicated, beautiful machine (perhaps the most complex machine ordinary folks regularly go inside of). Both also contain enough crash-related material, it’s a safe bet neither will be made into a movie that’ll ever be shown in-flight.

Chricton’s Freefall

In his latest plodding “thriller,” Airframe, Crichton (pronounced “Kryton,” same as the Red Dwarf ninny) pushes all his wearisome big formula-suspense buttons. At least here he has a reason to insert tech talk, unlike the ridiculous way it was tacked on to Disclosure in the form of improbable virtual-reality computing.

And the creator of ER manages to find a way to blast TV and modern journalism (a theme he previously addressed in a Wired essay), here in the form of a villanous taboid-TV producer.

Both the evil producer and our aircraft-company-investigator hero are females, a step probably intended to provide juicy roles for whoever’s the most bankable actresses when the movie version gets made. It also allows the final confrontation between the two to be mercifully free of the gender-war crap Crichton overused to death in Disclosure. (It might also be intended to placate readers who thought Disclosure dissed ambitious career women.)

In keeping with the Hollywood-intended plot devices, Crichton’s heroine is both the aircraft company’s chief crash investigator and its media spokesperson. In real life these jobs would be handled by two people (or two committees), but this trick lets Crichton keep the attention on one character, forever getting into bureaucratic, technical, and physical perils. (The physical threats to her, obviously intended to become movie action scenes, turn out to have little to do with the crash-investigation plot.)

Since I don’t like to spoil a good story, I’ll tell you the jumbo-jet crash our heroine investigates is due to human error, thanks to an underqualified foreign pilot. Among other things, this solution ensures the movie’s producers won’t get immediately turned away when they ask airplane companies for technical advice or factories to film in.

When Airframe becomes a movie, it may be the first such project involving both the main industries of Burbank, CA. While Boeing is now the king of civilian aerospace, much of the rest of the industry’s centered in that valley city where Lockheed and Warner Bros. both found the space for big hanger-like buildings. When Laugh-In and Johnny Carson joked about the nonglamour surrounding NBC’s studios, they referred to a landscape of squatty assembly shops, faceless engineering buildings, and vast employee parking lots–an area whose Pentagon-funded largesse helped enrich many of those anti-big-government California Republicans.

Boeing’s Highs & Lows

Flying High, the first major history of Boeing not funded or controlled by the company’s PR department, notes that California’s powerful politicians helped keep Boeing from a lot of military work after the ’60s. While military work has been a relatively small part of the boeing picture (at least until recent mergers), it’s still been big stuff, with B-52 and AWACS planes and missile components still in use. It wasn’t always this way.

As Rodgers notes, Bill Boeing was a rare breed of aviation pioneer–a businessman first, an air enthusiast only second. A mere decade after the Wrights’ history-making first flight, Boeing started building planes, not out of a fascination with flight itself but as a means to enhance his established timber fortune. Between the world wars, he built a lucrative Post Office air-mail contract into a vertically integrated company, including the future United Airlines. But after FDR’s antitrust guys forced a Boeing/ United divorce, Boeing fell way behind its L.A. rivals in supplying the nascent passenger airlines. When WWII turned planemaking into an all-military industry, Boeing’s company thrived. (Bill Boeing retired in the late ’30s; his descendents weren’t involved in the firm.)

In the early ’50s, the company made a last-ditch effort to get back into the passenger biz with the 707 (whose initial R&D was piggybacked onto work for a military transport).

In the 11 years from the first 707 to the first 747, Boeing (and the airlines it supplied) became a global institution. Then came the 1970-71 bust. Several boom-bust cycles later, the company again booms. For how long? The company, and Rodgers, see no immediate end, at least in manufacturing; on the engineering side, though, there may be enough already-designed airplanes to last the company for a decade or two.

Keeping with the company’s squaresville mindset, Rodgers gets into a little of the initial romance of flying, but not much. There’s almost nothing about passenger aviation in the propeller era, since Boeing was a minor player there. As with Crichton, Rodgers reveals only as much technology as is needed to tell his stories (i.e., why airlines preferred to buy a particular Boeing plane instead of a particular Douglas plane).

Both books almost hypnotically lead the reader into the pressurized, insulated world of their companies’ corporate cultures. Especially in Rodgers’s account, airplane-land is depicted as a near religious order, insulated by both internal politics and obscure knowledge, where outside interests (even airline customers) are treated with hands-off distance or even hostility.

Rodgers devotes one chapter to the sociocultural effects of Boeing’s presence in Seattle. Rodgers points out how Bill Boeing’s cloisered lifestyle in The Highlands, an exclusive compound north of town, influenced the almost antisocial culture of the company’s higher-ups (and of Seattle’s rich in general), forming a perennial obstacle to those who’ve tried to develop high-art and high-society institutions. He also mentions how Boeing’s “Lazy B” work culture and its periodic massive layoffs have affected the region’s economy. He could have gone further, depicting how the firm’s introverted, hyper-rational engineering mindset combined with Scandinavian reserve to form a city where excessively bland “tastefulness” became a fetish.

Boeing turned a timber-and-railroad town, barely beyond the frontier era, into the excessively moderate burg Seattle’s musicians got famous for rebelling against. Its products have helped propel the “globalization” of world culture and trade. As much as we try to ignore Boeing (and as much as it tries to ignore its community in return), it’s helped make us what we are. Eugene Rodgers’s book is a vital first step in understanding this.

BIG GAME HUNTING: The GameWorks video-game palace, opening this weekend, is the first in the chain to open for business, but not the first one built. There’s a full-scale working prototype on a Universal Studios soundstage, where they’ve worked out everything from electrical requirements and crowd flow to lighting and acoustics. Paying customers, though, are still the ultimate test of any business. The next GameWorks (in Vegas, where it’ll fit right in) is too far along to be radically changed by the company’s Seattle experience, but the chain’s owners (Sega, Spielberg, and Seagram’s/ MCA) will do some tweaking to the concept based on which attractions prove more popular here.

Basically, GameWorks is to your neighborhood amusement arcade what Borders is to your neighborhood tome-boutique. It’s bigger, flashier, and noisier than anything outside Nevada. You really feel inside the frenetic cathode-gaming universe. But see for yourself. There’s no cost to just look around this new building made to look like an old building had been ungraciously “restored.” An “old-timey” look is enforced throughout the place with the Rosie-the-Riveter type posters, some more obviously fake than others. In one corner there’s a mural of a ’50s-dressed couple gaping at a ’70s-era game console, above the script-lettering slogan “Remember Pong?”. There’s a corner for ’80s video games on the mezzanine, next to the Internet-terminal corner (laptop computers attached to comfy lounge chairs) and the of-course-they’d-have-one Starbucks booth. Most of the main-floor game units are have sit-in consoles and big-screen monitors; several race games are arranged in rows of eight for simultaneous competition. You’ll also find video batting-practice, air hockey, and a few Space Jam pinball games. (Sega’s signature game series, Sonic the Hedgehog, was nowhere to be seen on the preview days I was there, but I’ve since learned they’ve got one Sonic unit in now.)

The place is all ages except for the Elysian Brewpub upstairs. (A note on the pub’s menu describes the Greek myth of Elysium as a place of peace and harmony; this joint’s somewhat less tranquil.) Indeed, it’s significant as the only big place in the whole downtown redevelopment juggernaut intended for people of a post-Boomer demographic, the people who do support in-city merchants, gathering places, and public transportation. Speaking of hi-tech wonderlands…

AIRING IT OUT: After all these years, I finally got to the famous Boeing surplus store a few weeks ago. It’s well worth the trip to the daytime nightmare that is Darkest Kent’s vast miles of faceless, windowless warehousery and wide, sidewalkless arterials. Best to get there just before its 10 a.m. opening, to mingle with the mechanics and home-improvement crowd waiting for first chance at the bargains. The day I was there, alas, no airplane seats or beverage carts or 10-foot-tall landing-wheel tires could be had. But many other things were there, all dirt cheap: Sheets of aluminum. Office furniture, including drafting tables. Computers (and their parts and accessories) of varying vintages and operating systems. Drill bits. Welders’ heat-shield masks, a la Flashdance. Safety goggles. Cash registers. Huge rolls of upholstery fabrics, in those reassuring dark blue colors psychologically tested to make passengers less restless. Platforms and podiums. A bicycle with no handlebars or pedals. A huge old photo-typesetter, the kind of machine that made words like these in the pre-desktop-publishing era. Fifteen- and twenty-minute VHS tapes from the company’s in-house production studio, now erased but bearing labels announcing such former contents as Confined Space Awareness, Commitment to Integrity: The Boeing Values, and even Accident Investigation: It’s About Prevention. Speaking of accidents…

GEE, THAT’S ME!: While returning from Kent on I-5, I passed the former Sunny Jim food plant, its still-standing signs harkening back to good comfort-food memories. While Sunny Jim products hadn’t been around for several years, I could remember the labels, tastes, and even smells of its peanut butter, apple butter, jams, jellies, pancake syrup, and cut-price soda pop. I had no way to know the building (which had been artists’ studios in recent years but was now only half-occupied by city maintenance trucks) would go up in a massive fire, started accidentally by a roofer, an hour later.

WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.

* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.

* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.

* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.

All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.

* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)

* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.

* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).

Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?

* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”

MISC., YOUR NEARLY OMNIVOROUS pop-cult column, admittedly felt a tinge of guilty glee hearing about e. coli cases among drinkers of unpasteurized California apple juice (as if our own Washington juice wasn’t good enuf for ’em). But infairness, organic-heads don’t deserve violent illnesses any more than burger fans. It also means it’ll be a while before we can again tell our favorite “Odwalla Walla” jokes.

TUNING OUT: While I’m glad this electoral season’s done, I already miss the near-subliminal background music used in political “attack ads.” I know these relentlessly menacing synth tones come from professional stock-music libraries; some enterprising entrepreneur should license these 30-second alarms for use by ambient DJs looking to darken the evening’s mood. Speaking of which…

BRIDGEWORK TO THE 21ST CENTURY: So after all the rhetoric, mudslinging, corporate “soft-money” donations, pompous pieties, and general turn-offs, the political picture turns out just about where it was at the campaign’s start. With two exceptions:

(1) Three of Washington’s U.S. House Newtbots were sent packing (as of this writing, pending possible recounts), and a fourth almost was.

(2) And we’ll finally get something approaching a decent public transit system here in this metro area that so dearly loves to think of itself as environmentally concerned as long as it doesn’t have to get out of its single-user-occupancy import sedans. The new transit scheme doesn’t go far enough (the Everett-Tacoma commuter rail will only run during rush hours, the light-rail doesn’t cover enough of the city, and the Eastside still just gets buses). But it’s a start. It’ll get folks hooked on the transit life, on the idea of living (not just commuting) without dragging your own ton or two of sheet metal everywhere. The wannabe Manhattanites on Capitol Hill will finally get a for-real subway station, to become operational no later than the year 2003. And with the Monorail Initiative set for next November’s Seattle ballot, we can add to the light-rail part. Speaking of regionalities and car dependence…

UP AGAINST THE WAL: Like a storm system finally enveloping over the nation’s furthest reaches, Wal-Mart arrived in the Seattle metro area. It’s on Renton’s Rainier Avenue, one of those near-soulless strip-mall hells grown parasitically around the remnants of what was once a real town. Unlike the towns where Wal-Mart became the infamous Great Sprawlmaker, Renton was lost to chain stores and parking moats long ago. I got to the store its first weekend; it was expectedly swamped. The thing’s huge and imposing, even by hypermarket standards. While Kmart and Fred Meyer at least try for inviting atmospheres despite their size, Wal-Mart simply overwhelms. The fluorescent lights are somehow harsher; the shelves are taller and deeper; the ceilings are higher; the colors are colder; the signage is starker. And everywhere, posters and banners shout out what a dynamic, energetic, powerful outfit Wal-Mart is.

It’s easy to see how this formula worked in the south and midwest towns where Clinton’s late pal Sam Walton started the chain. To residents used to small-town humdrum, Wal-Mart barged in with the biggest retail-theater experience they’d seen, one with the spirit not of nostalgia or homeyness but of a company (and a nation) on the go-go-go. But in a community that already has big-time retail, the Wal-Mart formula seems just plain shrill. Even the (nearly deserted) Kmart up the highway felt like a cozy neighborhood boutique in comparison. And as for prices and selection, Wal-Mart’s endlessly-touted “buying power” might work against the indie stores in the small towns, but it can’t significantly undersell other hypermarket chains and can’t match the selection of specialty stores.

I finished my afternoon at the nearby Lazy Bee, a highly independent restaurant and Boeing workers’ hangout. With model planes hanging from the ceiling and booths made from surplus 727 seats, it’s a place no chain operator could conceive of. (Even my chalkboard-special meal was priced to come out, with tax, at $7.07!) I was reminded of zine editor Randolph Garbin’s Recipe for an American Renaissance: “Eat in diners, ride trains, shop on Main Street, put a porch on your house, live in a walkable community.”

10/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAIN IS.

Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.

WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”

BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.

Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.

How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.

We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.

Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.

If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.

KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.

MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.

WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.

FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.

ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.

BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.

GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?

COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.

CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.

FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.

BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”

DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.

`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.

MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.

STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).

ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.

GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.

SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.

PASSAGE

Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”

REPORT

Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.

Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Audile”

4/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

GREAT! GATES GETS HITCHED

JUST AFTER I TOSS MY OLD LIST

OF COMPUTER-NERD SEX PUNS…

Misc. hopes you’ve all got your copy of the white-on-black T-shirt featuring a hypodermic needle superimposed on the Space Needle beside the slogan, ” I went to Seattle to make a score and all I got was this lousy recording contract.”

UPDATE: I recently said we should preserve Seattle as a working city and resist the huge “Seattle Commons” yuppification project. Advocates of the Cascade neighborhood, a neglected pocket of affordable housing threatened by the Commons plan, have now formed the Cascade Residents Action Group to fight the wrong kind of redevelopment (info: 624-9049 or 523-2569).

BEEHIVE VIDEO, R.I.P.: It began 15 years ago on N.E. 45th as a far-flung outlet for the Peaches record chain, housed in an ex-Ford dealership. When that chain went Chapter 11 in ’81, the local manager bought it and added a Ballard outlet. It was the last large locally-owned record store in town, and the last to stock new vinyl. The first sign of trouble came in ’87, when the Wherehouse chain opened across the street, followed by Blockbuster down near U Village. In ’90, the store stopped paying for the Peaches name and held a contest for a new name (which meant no more word-balloon signs with the “Peachy” mascot pointing to the “Gay and Bisexual Videos” shelf). In ’92, they sold the Ballard store and made the 45th outlet all-video. It bravely (foolishly?) failed to stock umpteen multiple copies of blockbuster action hits, instead keeping a large stable stock of cool obscurities. The strategy cut costs and attracted a loyal clientele, but it still wasn’t enough. On 3/22, I rented my regular Monday 2-for-1 titles and saw nothing strange, except that the sale shelf of close-out tapes was a bit fuller. The next afternoon, I went in and was abruptly told I couldn’t rent anything else: “I’m sorry, we just went out of business. We’re only taking returns.” Its loss leaves a lot of frequent-renter cards that’ll never get filled up, and leaves the central U District without a decent foreign-film store.

OUT TO DRY: The Squire Shops are in Chapter 11; many of the remaining 23 outlets are closing. Just as the ugly clothes that made ’em famous are coming back! Squire sold clothes that young mall-crawlers thought were hip. In its heyday, that meant jeans with cuffs nearly as wide as the waist. Seattle wore bellbottoms years after the rest of the country stopped. Several companies formed here to keep Seattle in clothes the national companies no longer made. That scene led to the local firms that gave the world loud sweatshirts with goofy slogans and Hypercolors; some of those firms are now on the wrong side of that fad and face money trouble themselves. (“Designer grunge” has virtually nothing to do with the local fashion biz.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Washington Free Press promises to be the hard-hitting investigative newspaper Seattle’s never really had, with the possible exception of the pre-JOA P-I. Several tabloids over the years promised this, but soon turned into lifestyle rags that just used `politics’ to define their subcultures (Community Catalyst is just as guilty of this, in its way, as the Weekly). Free Press isn’t like that. It doesn’t tell you what clothes you have to wear or what food you have to eat. It just reports the under-reported big stuff. In the April ish, that’s a huge piece about Boeing’s spotty environmental record and vigorous influence-peddling. The rest of the free monthly tab’s weaker (talk radio-style rants against Jack in the Box) but shows promise….Beyond the Cultural Dustbin is Hans and Thelma Lehmann’s personal history of highbrow art, music and dance in Seattle since 1938, when UK conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (scion of the drug empire that now owns Contac) came to lead the Seattle Symphony. He left a year later, calling Seattle “a cultural dustbin.” The book argues that we’ve come a long way since then, from the Northwest School painters of the ’50s and John Cage‘s residency at Cornish to today’s proliferation of dance and theatrical troupes. The book implies but doesn’t directly ask: We’ve got culture now, but is it art?

JESUS JONES WITHOUT THE JONES: Counter Culture is the first Christian alternative-music zine I’ve seen in Seattle since the Jesus Freak scene of the ’70s. Its cover interviewee, Tonio K., was a minor ’79 LA singer-songwriter (best-known LP: Life in the Food Chain) who’s now born-again and wants a crossover hit just like Amy Grant. The writers insist at several parts that you can still like Jesus even if you don’t like the Religious Right. It displays calls to prayer in standard cut-up punkzine design. It covers Christian grunge bands that mix “`70s funk with the anxious mind of `80s punk rock with the heart of God.” But then, punk and its descendants, even in their nihilism, held a righteous notion of good and evil, a conviction that the world should be better than it is. Bands like U2 and 10,000 Maniacs already use songs as sermons. Take out sex and drugs, add New Testament imagery, and you too could exhort the faithful at the Vineyard coffeehouse in the U District.

TO WOMB IT MAY CONCERN: First Moments is a local firm offering “videos of your child’s first moments” — ultrasound images of the fetus, to be treasured as a family heirloom; there’s blank tape at the end so you can add birth and infancy footage. Forgetting the unspoken anti-abortion implication, it makes you wonder: if you’re sick of friends’ cloying baby pix now, just wait!

OPEN MEMO TO CURSE: You’ve successfully exposed the hypocritical machinations behind KCMU-Lite and its instigators. But to restore the station as a community resource, you’ve gotta deal with the UW Board of Regents, who control the license. The current managers were turning the station into nothing but a self-serving fundraising machine, something the Regents can identify with. After fundraising, their no. 2 priority is saving face; with all the other campus scandals, they might seek the safest way out of the KCMU dilemma. Unfortunately, there are “safer” ways than restoring Classic KCMU. They could turn it into an automated classical outlet, or return it to the Communications School. You’ve gotta assert that any format change would violate the promises made in membership drives. Then, offer an olive branch. Ask your comrades, the fired DJs with the class-action suit, to back off if the Regents will let you help set up a new structure for the station, not like it’s now but not quite like before either. Tell them you don’t want to restore all of the station’s rough-hewn past. You want to build on its heritage, to more strongly serve students, alternative-music communities, and others now unserved by local radio. Even after that, you’ll have to deal with KUOW management down the hall, people who’ve asserted excessive control over KCMU and who honestly don’t get what’s wrong with institutionalized “public” radio. People who only seek the most upscale listeners. People who mistake blandness for a virtue. The announcers on NPR stations all sound like HAL 9000, for chrissakes! They oughta sound more like the booming, colorful voice who used to announce the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They oughta reflect the glorious pomposity of orchestral and opera music, the twee affectations of chamber music, the life-affirming spirit of real jazz, instead of a yup variation on BBC English. Public radio should be by and for the public, not just by the bureaucracy for the upscale.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Ex-KCMUers Debbie Letterman and Kathy Fennessy are now spinning CDs as live “queue jockeys” for callers on hold for Microsoft’s product-support lines. While it’s a novel job that pays OK, Letterman told the Puget Sound Business Journal that she’s still tied into as restrictive a format as she faced at KCMU-Lite before she quit. “The key word is mellow:” Enya si, Ministry no.

THE URBAN TOURIST: Columbia Center sounds as strange as it looks. The climate-control hum and rushing air from elevator shafts give the 5th Ave. entrance cool noises (they’d be great for a sci-fi movie). Even weirder is the Seafirst Corridor, a passageway under 5th and Columbia from Columbia Center (where the bank execs work) to Seafirst 5th Ave. Plaza (where the back-office staff works). It’s the most surreal walkway since the United terminal at O’Hare. On the walls, plastic-covered pastel lights flash in a slow sequence of colors, while New Age music and ocean sounds enhance the creamy dreamscape. At the end, two elevators take you one flight up to the harsh utilitarian corridors of the 5th Ave. Plaza, where a security guard waits to let you back into a numbing temp job.

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: If you think Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy‘s Subaru spots are already odd, wait ’til you see the one with a dude in black jeans saying that the Impreza’s “like punk rock, only it’s a car”.

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS (via Michelle McCarthy and David Humphries): “London news has reported the NY bomb news prominently, but I think Londoners were squinting a little at the panicky New Yorkers having had their first initiation to bomb-based evacuation. Since we’ve lived here, areas as populous as Wall Street are evacuated for bomb threats close to weekly, and one actually goes off about once a month. It’s hard to imagine the US tolerating the constant shutdown and occasional destruction of its biggest cities and business districts.”

CHRISTIAN GORE AT 911: Three years ago, Gore was the uppity editor of a Detroit ‘zine about perverse film and video. Now, he’s the uppity editor of a slicked-up, mass-market Film Threat, based in Beverly Hills (at that ZIP Code) and financed by Hustler‘s Larry Flynt. Gore puts big stars on the cover (for sales) and trashes those stars inside (for credibility). He covers “B” Hollywood horror and sci-fi, and still promotes a few undergrounds. Gore promised two different nights of video treats, but the Friday and Saturday shows shared half the same material: drive-in movie trailers, Sid & Marty Krofft theme songs, banned Ren & Stimpy episodes (Gore’s cronies with the original R&S team), psychedelic computer animation. At both shows, Gore passed around cans of cheap beer and asked the audience to sit back, yell if they thought something was boring, and act like they were in his living room. I took advantage of this after he showed a student film about an “artist” who has naked women with blue paint on their bodies press up against butcher paper: “Everybody knows that’s based on a real artist, right?” Gore, incredulous: “It is?” Me: “Of course. Yves Klein! He was in the first Mondo Cane movie.” “I didn’t know that.” A guy who doesn’t know the daddy of schlockumentaries shouldn’t call himself a weird-film authority.

IT’S SQUARE TO BE HIP: I don’t just want you to question the assumptions of mainstream culture. I want you to question the assumptions of your culture, like the assumption that it’s sacred to be “hip” and profane to be “square.” The hip-vs.-square concept is the alternative culture’s unexamined legacy from the beats’ misinterpretation of jazz lingo. In the NY jazz scene, “hepcats” (derived, sez Zola Mumford, from the Senegalese word hipicat, “one who is very aware of their surroundings”) were those who played and/or listened to advanced black music (instead of the watered down Paul Whiteman versions) and who’d mastered the complex codes of social gamesmanship in Manhattan. It was a concept for a specific time/place that no longer exists. Square people these days are a lot hipper than a lot of self-proclaimed hipsters. Squares enjoy drag queens on Geraldo and buy male pinup posters. Squares buy Soundgarden CDs and watch The Simpsons. Squares grow and haul the food we eat. Squares make our cars. Squares support education and world-relief drives. As Wes “Scoop” Nisker writes in Crazy Wisdom, “the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering.” There is no superior race (not even yours). There is no superior gender or gender-role (not even yours). There is no superior culture (not even yours). The real enemies are people who think they’re hip but aren’t: The Religious Right (not a mass movement but a tightly organized minority that gets out its vote in low-turnout elections); the civic fathers/mothers who want to outlaw youth culture. (More on this below.)

IN BLOOM: When I told people I wanted to write a book about the local music scene, most said “you’d better get it out right away. Nobody will care about Seattle next month.” I don’t know if the “Seattle sound” is really the flash in the pan that so many local wags think (hoping they can go back to their familiar nihilism?). People here are so used to obscurity, when the spotlight shines they squint and wait for it to stop. But like I’ve written before, this could just be the flash that lights a lasting fire. Jonathan & Bruce shrewdly took a subgenre that’s been developing for 10 years, put a slogan on it, made it the Next Big Thing and made us its capital. But the sound they built isn’t one of those short-half-life sounds like power pop. It’s an identifiable sound, imitable yet sufficiently diverse to allow infinite variations. The dozens of “generic grunge” bands now playing opening sets at the Off Ramp could form the tourist bedrock of a permanent scene, like the “generic country” bands in small Nashville bars, bringing in the bucks and attention to support more advanced work. If we play our cards right, Seattle could become the Nashville of rock.

BUT NOT IF the forces of repression have their way, as led by our city’s “progressive” political machine. Most mayors like to kiss up to their town’s fastest growing industry, but not ours. From feminist/prohibitionists to the tepid No Nukes concert film, some of the most adamant political liberals were cultural conservatives. Norm Rice wrote the Teen Dance Ordinance as a City Councilmember; as mayor, he’s apparently behind the actions to shut down all-ages concerts and raves and the effort to seize part ownership of RKCNDY. Rice comes from the disciplinarian side of the black middle class, where adults want young people to strive hard at all times and avoid idle temptations like pop music. Rice doesn’t get that the rock scene is a hard-working, industrious bunch of people empowering themselves. He calls himself a “supporter of the arts” while clamping down against Seattle’s first indigenous artform since the ’50s Northwest School painters. He promotes Seattle as a “KidsPlace” while trying to shut young people up.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to check out the Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at the ex-Penney’s site on 2nd & Pike (where the real homeless are studiously kept outside), and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

PASSAGE

Christine Kelly in Sassy:

“While watching the inaugural balls, I realized that Hillary Clinton is the Courtney Love of politics. If the people want Kurt (Bill), they gotta take Courtney (Hillary) too. People will accuse Courtney (Hillary) of trying to break up the band with her constant meddling and poisoning influence, even though Courtney (Hillary) has her own band (office). Hillary (Courtney) said provocative things to the press about baking cookies (taking heroin). Courtney (Hillary) was on MTV with her husband. Both chicks have a cute, sassy daughter. There is one major difference: Courtney has too much taste to mix jewel tones like amethyst and royal blue while watching her husband accept an MTV award (get inaugurated).”

REPORT

Like I said somewhere here, I’m starting to write the major history of the Seattle music scene from ’76 to today. I’ll need to talk to everybody who was a major part of it (players, promoters, ‘zine editors, designers, producers, club people). Write for details. If any of you know the addresses of ex-locals who’ve left town, also write.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pecuniary”

3/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:

HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK

Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.

BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.

WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).

THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.

WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.

JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.

NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)

WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”

WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.

MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.

FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.

ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.

ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.

AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.

DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?

BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.

‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

PASSAGE

In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”

REPORT

I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)

I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000 Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Captious”

9/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?

TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,

A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …

Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?

CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.

APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.

ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”

PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.

MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.

IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)

STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.

MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.

ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.

A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.

TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)

MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.

DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?

RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.

`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).

He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.

SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.

Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.

The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.

Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.

PASSAGE

Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Crenellated”

4/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Why Men Don’t Get Madonna

We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).

Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.

Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?

Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.

The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”

Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).

Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.

Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.

Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.

Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…

Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.

Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).

Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.

License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…

The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”

‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”

PASSAGE

Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”

READER SURVEY

What if Jesus were alive now, in his teens, training to re-enter public life at the turn of the millennium? What’d he be doing? Where’d he live? Send replies to the address below; results next month.

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WORD-O-MONTH

“Orthogonal”

3/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN THE PAPERS SAID

MISSILE CUTS AND AIRLINE RED INK

COULDN’T POSSIBLY HURT BOEING?

At Misc., we feel Tsongas’ primary success will turn out to be a great boon to the stand-up comedy industry. Imagine: a Presidential candidate who talks like Elmer Fudd! We also finally admit that the “Seattle sound” has arrived after seeing an arena organist playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” during a hockey telecast. An LA Kings game, natch.

UPDATE: I’ve now talked to more people who saw different parts of January’s Broadway riot. They describe how a few demonstrators and counter-demonstrators acted like jerks, but their consensus is that the cops went bonkers and started beating up on everybody in sight, shoving innocent bystanders into walls, threatening to arrest people who were just trying to walk home. (There’s a lot more on this in the 2/5 Seattle Gay News.) Last time, I chastised those who provoked the bashing; that does not excuse the cops who too eagerly escalated the violence.

CRUELTY, MISTAKEN FOR A VIRTUE: The State Legislature’s playing a sick game of one-downsmanship, with leaders of each party competing to see how many destitute and mentally ill people they can force out onto the streets. Most so-called “welfare reform” does nothing for people, only against them. Beware of any legislation that seeks to institutionalize the bigoted attitude that “those people” must be perpetually disciplined and humiliated. Poor people are not different from any of us, as increasing numbers of us are finding out.

GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: The Weekly‘s new look may be a sign that it’s ready to acknowledge the existence of non-yups. They’re even writing about the black community now (maybe next year they’ll even hire a black writer). But they were never alone in rejecting the Demographically Incorrect. For a decade TV morning shows, magazines, and daily papers have narrowed the definition of their primary community to the point where you only count if you were born from 1945 to 1954, went to college, and can afford the investments discussed in “Your Money” columns. Bush, Clinton, and Tsongas tailored their economic fixes to appeal to the “Your Money” audience, knowing it’d get noticed by editors who belong to the upscale 20 percent. Journalists won’t address the non-upscale population except as “those other people,” because their bosses don’t want their precious demographics sullied by non-upscale readers. Millions have been removed from the realm of political discourse because they’re outside the ad market for luxury products. In a real way, demographics could kill democracy.

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The Univ. of BC engineering students, who briefly stole the UW Rose Bowl trophy, are known for their pranks. One year, they rigged the lights on Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge to flash in Morse code: “UBC Engineers Do It Again.” UBC’s female business students hold an annual Lady Godiva Run, donning bikini bottoms and long wigs to race on horseback through the woods of the university’s Endowment Lands. The event’s always denounced by male writers on the student paper, who tell the women what’s the right and the wrong way to be liberated.

FORGIVE ME: I didn’t fill out the opinion survey for the Boeing/P-I/KIRO Crisis in the Work Force: Help Wanted project. I couldn’t answer its questions except with more questions. The first page asked, “What’s causing our problems?”; its choices were “Too much government regulation,” “Decline in American work ethic,” “Businesses taking a short-term approach instead of planning for the future,” “Rising rates of illiteracy in the U.S.,” “The federal budget deficit,” “Demands for higher wages by American labor unions,” etc. I didn’t get to write in “Weighted questions on opinion polls.”

THAT `N.W.O.’ PHRASE WON’T GO AWAY: Leftists still utter those three words in every second sentence, a year after Bush said it just once as a throwaway line. Stuck-in-the-sixties left-wingers, as much as demagogic right-wingers, yearn for the good old days of American imperialism. Neither wants to believe that we’re in relative socioeconomic decline. Instead of seeking today’s answers, they’d rather pretend we still had yesterday’s problems. Kuwait was not Vietnam. We weren’t colonizing anybody; we weren’t claiming to bring them “democracy” or even “free enterprise”. We sent an army-for-hire to restore a 70-year-old mercantilist monarchy on whom the western economy had become dependent. If there really is a new world order (that’s questionable, considering how disorderly the world is getting), its nexus isn’t in Washington, D.C. but in Tokyo and Berlin. This doesn’t mean the end of America. It could be our renewal. For moral-righteousness types, there are advantages to a country off the cutting edge of world dominance. It’s easier to make your ideals into your country’s national policy when you’re in a backwater to the currents of conquest (cf. Sweden).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 2/14): “…the Canadian government measures, aimed mostly at consumer electronics and small appliances, won’t stop the flow of about 30 million Canadians who cross the border into Washington state every year. Most are shoppers.” An impressive figure, except there aren’t 30 million Canadians.

SPURTS: It may be better that the M’s produce their own telecasts, as they’re threatening to, instead of leaving it to Prime Sports Northwest, whose offer is hitting delays. I recently saw a PSN repeat of a UW-WSU basketball game that ended abruptly with a minute to go and the outcome in doubt. An announcer hurriedly apologized for technical difficulties and read the final score…TheOregonian will no longer mention sports team names that allegedly demean native Americans. The editor calls such names “stereotypes that demean the dignity of many people in our society.” They’ll still print the name of the Oregon State Beavers.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: P.O.V. is the monthly newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Film and Video Association. The Feb. issue contained a fascinating piece on the economics and politics of high-definition TV. While HDTV might eventually make film obsolete, P.O.V. sez the short-term result of the changeover will be to increase TV/video work shot on film. The new technology will eventually be the standard, but it hasn’t been perfected yet. Therefore, the only way to be sure your production will transfer well to hi-def is to shoot on film and transfer later to whatever HDTV system we eventually get.

GUY STUFF: After I saw SAM’s opening night, I was just as impressed by the photo show at Benham Studio across the street, including male nudes by female artists. I’ve since seen two films by R.E.M. videomaker James Herbert that used male bodies as the chief images in hetero-erotic scenes. Finally, there was the life-size male nude sculpture smiling from inside the window at the Donald Young Gallery (a cheesy mannequin to which a Calif. artist stuck on hyper-realistic fiberglass genitals). I concluded that I was attracted to female images that represent people I’d like to be with, and to male images that represent people I’d like to be. In most art and literature by both women and men, the female body is the land where sex lives, while the male body is portrayed as the instrument of work. Our strongest non-gay male images are of muscular action: athletes, rock stars, socialist working-man art, SAM’s Hammering Man. It’s only since ’70s porn that we’ve had straight male sex objects, viewed with admiration by other straight men. While the porn business treats men as soulless stimulus machines (a view it shares exactly with the anti-porn crusaders), it led to men looking at other men as sexual creatures. Contemporary artists are going further in demystification, showing that a phallus is an awkward work of biology, not the iron rod or missile invoked by sexists of both genders. These artists are affirming that men are people too.

WIRE, 1982-1992: For three years, back while the now-acclaimed Seattle music scene was really a promotion and art-direction scene, Denis Twomey and his editors ran a local music magazine that was about music more than about style or attitude. It’s tough to discuss aural art in print; even the prosperous UK music papers emphasize celebrity (sometimes in the guise of “alternative” celebrity). But it never recovered from devastating debts, including an ad default from Sub Pop.

AD VERBS: AT&T promoted its new TTD public phone/computer terminals for the deaf with a totally soundless commercial. The most attention-getting device yet; why didn’t anyone think of it before?… KIRO sold sponsorships for its “bumpers” updating what would be on each night’s Olympic coverage. To my knowledge, no other station’s sold advertising during its own advertising. Maybe we’ll get back to the old days when every nonfiction show would have sponsor logos decorating the scenery…. Plymouth has commercials with talking cars, under the slogan “The Intelligent Choice.” Need we remind you what make of car Christine was?

FREDERICK & NELSON, 1890-1992: Department stores were the retail flagships of mid-century America. They set the aesthetic/cultural tone for their towns, both in the styles they promoted and in the newspapers their ads supported. Seattle had the middlebrow Bon Marché, the lowbrow Penney’s and Sears, and the also-rans Rhodes, Best’s, and MacDougall-Southwick. But Frederick’s was the queen, the setter of style. Its distinction wasn’t just Frangos or a doorman. In our rough-hewn port city it was a bastion for the traditionally feminine arts of fashion, decorating, interior design, food, and society. It was headquarters for a clientele of women with upbringing and money but not jobs. It was considered such a female institution that it set up a special Men’s Grill where gentlemen could take a respite from shopping among all the ladies. Its decline was predicated on a series of tightfisted owners (starting when longtime owner Marshall Field’s wouldn’t let it build a Northgate store). But its dominance really passed in the ’60s when Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes, selling flashy career outfits to women who had more to do during the day than sit in Frederick’s tearoom. Frederick’s reacted by turning inward, taking pride in its refusal to change with the times. (It only admitted blue jeans in an obscure corner under a plain “Today Casuals” sign.) The store was made weak, prime for a series of raiders to bleed it dry. But now, maybe too late, people are looking back fondly at a store that had real standards of quality and service, without the designer-trash styles and motivational sales-zombies found across the street. No matter what happens to the store buildings, the impending loss of Frederick’s is a major turning point in our history.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see the gorgeous Until the End of the World, and ponder role-playing-game creator Steve Jackson‘s policy on not depicting fantasy swordsmen/women in G-strings: “Battle is not the place for recreational nudity.”

PASSAGE

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist imagining the sayings of a Delphi oracle in The Sibyl (1956): “We gather knowledge which we call truth from those in whom we least believe, and unconsciously let ourselves be led by what we most heartily detest.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This may be your last free issue of Misc. With the Stranger now running weekly excerpts from the report, I’m severely cutting back on the number of drop-off points for the main newsletter. It’ll still be around at about 20 spots, but the rest of you really ought to subscribe.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Obstreperous”

2/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Love Songs for Vacuum Cleaners

Welcome to another morosity-packed edition of Misc., the pop culture report that believes all Presidential candidates, just to be fair, should have to eat (Times, 1/9) “marinated raw salmon, consommé with mushrooms, filet of Japanese beef, cooked vegetables, salad, passion fruit and ice cream with strawberry flavor.” If Brown wants to forego the beef, he can substitute stale bean curd.

UPDATE: Puget Sound Bank indeed cut funding for local arts on public TV, but both the bank and the station insist that the decision came long before they saw the Seattle Men’s Chorus show. So don’t call ’em homophobic. If you must complain, complain that as a proud urbanite you deplore last year’s commercials where PSB showed itself as the bank of wholesome white suburbia while associating its out-of-state competitors with evil inner cities (even using Manhattan images to bash Albany, NY’s Key Bank).

GOOD BUY, BASEBALL!: Nintendo of America singlehandedly brought an entire industry back from the dead. It may be the shrewdest entertainment marketer in the world today. I can think of no higher qualification for a Mariners owner. Besides, it couldn’t hurt the team to adopt some of the philosophies in those zen-of-baseball books or in the Asian-American Theatre’s play Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder. As I write this coming home from a sold-out SAM retrospective of Yoko Ono films, I think of how this town is socially closer to Japan than it is to certain other US regions. Not only are Boeing and the timber companies among the nation’s top exporters, we’ve got the Nissan and Subaru docks. Hardly the “xenophobia” attributed to us by nature writer Andrew Ward… The 1/27 “Morning” (née Tacoma) News Tribune had a headline, “M’s deal shows where the action is: in Seattle’s suburbs.” The paper, whose current circulation push is into those suburbs, noted that none of the would-be buyers works in Seattle. It didn’t note that the government and business leaders who brokered the deal are all downtown.

IN THE STREETS: I witnessed the anti-hate-crime march on Broadway 1/25, but didn’t catch the start of when it turned violent. People who saw part of it put the source of the roughness at provocations toward cops by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, run by Bob Avakian, who claims to be a purer Maoist than China’s current leaders. For 12 years, I’ve seen the RCYB as the smallest, loudest part of any protest march, ready to move in on any movement and pretend to be leading it. Members of another of his groups started that whole flag burning fuss. They know how to make precise, irrelevant acts that provoke the most fiery backlashes. This is not the same skill as building a real movement to empower real people.

STAGES OF LIFE: A major hit of the London theater season is A Tribute to the Blues Brothers, starring Aykroyd/Belushi impersonators ripping off their ripoffs of R&B greats. Ads quote a Times of London review: “The most slickly staged concert since the last Madonna tour, and much more fun.” Maybe somebody could do a tribute to it, so you’d get a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff (or politely, a tribute to a tribute to a tribute).

IMPRESSIONISM: Behind all the hoopla surrounding the end of the Reds, there was a little item about how the freedom movement survived at its nadir, thanks to one of my favorite things in the world, self-publishing. Newsweek sez that during the ’81 crackdown on Solidarity, the Polish underground fashioned a printing system using inks made from detergent and silkscreens made from elastic from men’s underwear. Imagine: the Soviet Union undone by union suits.

DEFENSIVENESS: The Weekly immediately followed its sensational date rape cover (proving just how hard it is not to get tabloidy about the subject) with an equally tabloidy self-defense story, with circulation staffers studiously removing the “This Image Offends Women” stickers from the vending-box windows. Let’s hope they find another reason soon to have two non-restaurant covers in a row…. And what’s this new pseudo-Rocket logo, anyway? The old Weekly logo was no award-winner, but it was a mark of design evolution going back to the paper’s founding in ’76 — when it ignored people too young to be “from the sixties,” instead of scoffing at us like it did in recent years. Now, the paper can only maintain its circulation/ad base by reaching out at last to us Generation X-ers. Natch, it does this in a patronizing way, with an uninspiring pomo logo that looks like what out-of-it oldsters think “those kids” will eat up. (I may have a totally diff. opinion a month from now.)

BUSH CAMPAIGN HEAD WILL PETUS (in USA Today, 1/12) insisted the campaign was not hopeless by saying, “George Bush has been declared dead more times than Elvis Presley.” The thing is, Elvis was declared dead just once, accurately. It’s the folks who declare him undead who are insistent and wrong. Which is the better metaphor for Bush’s chances?

PHILM PHUN: The Seattle film-production community is growing to the point of extensive postproduction facilities. This means we get such spectacles as Rebecca de Mornay, dubbing her lines from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, telling techies how proud she is of how her breasts look in one scene. Forsaking us for cheap Vancouver filming are the producers of This Boy’s Life, based on Tobias Wolff‘s Skagit County coming-O-age saga that’s the closest anybody’s come in nearly years to the Great Northwest Novel. R. DeNiro and E. Barkin star.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Commas Are Our Friends is English teacher Joe Devine’s “painless, fearless, and fun-filled approach to the rules of grammar.” At last: somebody who doesn’t use the language to belittle his inferiors, but who communicates the importance of communicating, the elegance of well-designed writing that leads to (and from) well-designed thinking…The Cereal Killings is Stranger cartoonist James Sturm’s new comic book that uses a standard murder mystery to ponder what if breakfast talking animals were real (and not like Roger Rabbit but like any sensitive artist forced into the compromise world of advertising). The premise brings a whole new dimension to the American iconography of spokes-critters. You could even stick in an analogy between black customers not allowed into the Cotton Club and the Trix Rabbit never getting the cereal with his own face on the box. (Well, maybe not.)

THOUGHT WHILE LISTENING TO KNDD replay the greatest nonhits of my youth: The punk/newave era can be said to have begun in ’76 with the first Ramones LP. Its end is somewhere between Angry Housewives, Duran Duran, and the LA hardcore bands that made punk orthodox and stale. But the real deathknell came with the emergence of rap, which fulfilled what the bebop guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t need white people to “popularize it” (i.e. muscle in). The whole century-old premise of what it meant to be a hip white boy was dislodged. (KNDD, by the way, is using its mention in last month’s In/Out List in its sales brochures. They didn’t mention my earlier, less nice, piece about ’em.)

EVENTS WE OUGHTA HAVE: Chicago’s Berlin Club advertised an “8th Annual Anti-New Year’s Party…No midnight announcements. No party favors. No cheap champagne. No `Auld Lange Syne.’ No more Father Time to kick around. We’re going to be covering all watches with tape at the door to prevent cheating.”

COLOR ME BEMUSED: There’s a distinct color-scheme generation gap. Yuppies (and yuppie ad agencies trying to appeal to teens) are into bright, gaudy, neony colors. Teens themselves are dressing in black and watching b/w music videos…Why is it that the kids who are supposed to be the New Chastity generation strut about in skintight spandex and black bras, while the newly middle-aged who still boast of their wild swinging pasts wear ugly grey sweaters and shapeless faded jeans?

CATHODE CORNER: Who at NBC saw to place a Teen Spirit deodorant ad in Sat. Nite Live‘s last network commercial slot (separated by two local slots) before Nirvana’s network debut of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (whose title wasn’t mentioned in the intro and isn’t in the lyrics)?…Some of the 71 Awards for Cable Excellence categories: “Directing live sports events coverage special or series. International educational or instructional/magazine/talk show special or series. Business or consumer programming special or series. Extended news or public affairs coverage. Entertainment host. Program interviewer. Stand-up comedy series. Game show special or series.”

REWIND: I’d like to advise you to avoid Blockbuster Video stores. You may already know that they’re trying to drive indy video stores out of business (exec Scott Beck in Video Business: “We’ve done our best to eradicate as many as we can, but they just stick with it”), that they’ve banned NC-17 movies while amply stocking repulsive slasher and shoot-em-up flicks. Now, film zine Ecco sez BBV’s imposed chainwide buying (preventing local stores from choosing anything), and has cut back sharply (some sources say entirely) on independent, foreign or classic films. If you don’t want the video revolution to die, don’t go there, or else we could end up with nothing to see but action hits.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Gosanko Chocolate Art makes chocolate baby coho salmon, $5 at fancier non-chain candy shops near you. Since the same molding process can be used to make both candy and plastic toys (indeed, a Quaker Oats division sells “industrial chocolate” to candymakers), sweetness can be made in virtually any 3-D shape. We’ve already mentioned the Ken Griffey Jr. bar, the Space Needle on a stick, and the skyline-of-Seattle collection. We can hardly wait for the Stars of Grunge Rockcollection.

NO DIRTY WORDS: Thanks to my antique-dealer mom, I now have a copy of Songs of Regina, a 1931 songbook for door-to-doorvacuum cleaner salesmen. The lyrics, written to the tune of popular songs of the day, were presumably to be sung at motivational sessions. “Glory, glory what a cleaner/Yes, the name of it’s Regina/And the money it will bring ya/As we go marching on.” The company survived the depression, perhaps due in part to these pep-rally songs. But it couldn’t survive the ’90s recession. The brand recently disappeared in a merger.

THE WORKS: A sense of realistic despair fell over the country rather swiftly, after years of strained overconfidence and hip nihilism. America’s hi-tech/service sector future was replaced by visions of a nation of glorified temp workers with no pensions, no insurance, no futures, no ability to buy the luxury goods and services that our economy was restructured around. What little investment was made in this country was made in the expectation of an affluent professional class that the rest of us would serve. That class is now shrinking, and nobody’s making anything for any other class. We’re reaping the fruits of the cynical ’70s-80s, from non-voting liberals to conservatives who’ll sell themselves (and the country) to anybody. From speculators who buy companies to loot their them, to CEOs who annihilate their workforces (decimating the consumer wealth needed to support their own companies’ products).

MAILBAG: Michael Protevi sez, “Misc. is wonderful. I can’t wait to show my friends/family back East. I really appreciate `The Real NW.’ It’s refreshing to hear news of the old Seattle, the pre-deluge. It always bothered me that they would tear down so many great buildings (Music Hall, etc.) and then pat themselves for being the most environmentally conscious (`recycling,’ etc.). What a crock! Obvious where the real power lies (and lies).”

‘TIL OUR RITE-O-SPRING March ish, vow to ask the next would-be tuff guy on the street in an LA Kings jacket if he’s ever in his life been to a hockey game, see the Museum of History & Industry’s five wooden-ship maidens on a stairwell wall (all sealed up in plastic packing wrap like seabound Laura Palmers), visit the new Signature Bound bookstore on 2nd, and recall the wisdom of child-development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce (from the Canadian journal Edges): “Intellect alone has never changed anyone. All change comes from the heart.”

THE GOOD OLE DAYS

Time, 9/15/61: “The ban the bomb campaigners…are dedicated to the dubious proposition that any political fate is preferable to the horror of atomic war.”

REPORT

Thanks to the person who listened to my KING radio appearance on 1/15.

The format of Misc. will remain stable for the near-term. Should I find a way to reduce the number of other things I do in order to support this, a bigger newsletter may ensue (maybe with ads, graphics and/or a cover price).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Fueilletonist”

JUST CUZ WE MAKE CARS TOO BIG FOR JAPANESE CITIES,

WITH THE STEERING WHEELS ON THE WRONG SIDE…

1/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and

the 1992 In/Out list, also published in the Seattle Times)

1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21

Welcome to a new ever-lovin’ fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture report that doesn’t follow trends and doesn’t really lead them either, but just stays out of their way.

Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero’s Books on 11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don’t think I’m going to see The Rapture…. There appear to be two Addams Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I saw. Maybe it’s like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw the critics’ edition, tell me what it was like…. This year’s best-of list by Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and never bothers to check what’s playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of 14) that didn’t show here, down significantly from previous years.

Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11 p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station’s next owner, the Providence Journal, was one of the papers that didn’t run the Doonesbury strips about Quayle’s possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them… Almost Live might go national next fall. Worldvision’s offering a syndicated weeknight version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.

Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like “Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed” and “Complex, condensed, SAM tough to build.” It had “thank you Seattle” vanity ads from Acme Iron Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the Carpet Resource Center. It’s more proof of how much easier it is to get politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing contractors, instead of uncouth artists.

Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): “What’s that up there?” “It’s a gas station.” “No, that’s a flower. Don’t you know, flowers are bee pee stations.” The real BP has a kids’ book promotion with G. Burghoff saying it’s important for children to read, so “you can become anything you want to be.” No — it’s important so America can regain a capable workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies like BP.

No “Willie” Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels. First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys who insist they’re not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN’s electronic masking made her look like Madonna’s “Blank” character in Dick Tracy. The defendant’s name is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy’s nephew but seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten Kennedys.

Ad Slogan of the Month: “It’s not your mother’s tampon.” I should hope not…

Good Buy, Baseball!: So let’s get together and buy the Mariners. Granted, it’s not as important as saving Frederick’s, but it’s still a good cause. At $100 million, it’ll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I’m reminded again of Jim Bouton’s words at the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle’s first attempt to keep a team: “Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can’t be all bad.”

Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested, presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)… The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It’s appropriate that Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).

Xmas ’91: Frederick’s save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that’s a sign of confidence to the store’s bankers remains to be seen… Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment of Hasbro’s product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle dock.

Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in hardcover.

None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, “David Ansen of Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of your seat.'” Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: “The twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone’s Movie Can’t Be Trusted.” But the last word, as always, goes to Oliver (“Fuck me, rock god!”) Stone: “I think a president was illegally killed.”

The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the Northwest is not Paradise. There’s this whole mystique that gets more exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters “turned conservative” in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women’s-choice initiative was due more to opponents’ well-funded lies than any deep anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson to the Senate, how we’re no more or less conservative than ever. It’s just getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the early ’70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: “Northwest Style: Laid Back with Dockers.”) The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our “tolerance” was more like apathy. We’re not mellow, we’re cold and sullen. The real spirit of the Northwest isn’t in aPoulsbo bed-n’-breakfast, it’s in the acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The syndrome’s worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by folks who think our State Reps are called “assemblymen.”)

Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and shrillily demand the right to destroy the few “real” spaces left.They built the S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan’s deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L’s) Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture. Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds, was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the nation’s social terrain.

Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the “rabbit ears” TV antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P. Middlemark died in ’89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, “nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all).” Sounds like my kinda guy.

‘Til our fab Feb. ish, make a ’92 resolution to petition KCTS to show The ’90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn’t count), and join us again.

PASSAGE

Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 12/1: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of thing.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I don’t have a business checking account at this time. Please make all subscriptions payable to “Clark Humphrey.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Synecdoche”

THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92

I don’t claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That’s the logic of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what’s peaking, declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I previously predicted the rise of Estonia, ’70s music, and nose rings, as well as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.