11/91 Misc. Newsletter

Clarence the Cross-Eyed Judge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Impecunious”

HALLOWEEN IS SUPERFLUOUS WHEN

TODAY’S SCARIEST CREATURES LOOK THE MOST `NORMAL’

7/91 Misc. Newsletter

DOES ANYBODY REALLY CARE ABOUT

JULIA & KIEFER NOT GETTING MARRIED? REALLY?

Misc. is back, the pop-culture newsletter that can still remember when we all used to scoff at the USSR’s idea of fun — tanks and missiles on parade, “honoring” those who obeyed orders fighting to prop up dictatorial puppet regimes.

DOWN THE PIKE: Three food booths in the Pike Place Market were gutted in late May for one huge eating table with only four chairs, one of which broke the first morning. This is not how they’re going to raise revenues to buy out the New York investors and pay off both sides’ immense legal bills.

REQUIEM FOR AN ECCENTRIC: Vic Meyers, who died in late May, was one of the true northwest characters, a jazz musician who got elected to the normally meaningless post of lieutenant governor on a joke campaign and managed to keep getting re-elected on the privileges of incumbency, much to the disgust of the real politicians. One such pol was Gov. John Langlie, who felt trapped in the state during his two terms, unable to fly to the other Washington for lobbying work out of fear that Meyers would become temporary acting governor, call a special session of the Legislature and issue who knows what disorderly executive orders. Finally Langlie got a chance when Meyers was himself off on a fishing trip; until Meyers heard Langlie was gone, and Langlie heard Meyers was rushing back to Olympia. Langlie hurriedly chartered a plane to fly him back west in the middle of the night, landing in Spokane just minutes before Meyers showed up at the state capitol to call the special session he was no longer authorized to call.

DOG DAZE: The UK is trying to eradicate all pit bulls from its soil, as a probable preliminary step toward exterminating soccer hooligans and perhaps even, if they’re lucky, the unspeakable foods they make out of the variety meats.

CLOTHES HOARSE: A national fashion trade magazine noted the increasing prominence of Seattle menswear designers, but the Times tried to stick a nonexistent spin onto the story by noting that these designers “show no Seattle influence” — by which the paper means they don’t have prints of outdoorsy scenes, but instead show a variety of influences from around the world. What rubbish! Seattle is, if you haven’t noticed (and a lot of reporters haven’t), a real city, an international trade center and home of the machines that made the Jet Set possible. A fashion style that mixes the best of America, Canada, Europe and particularly urban Asia could be about as distinctly Seattle as you’re likely to get.

SHOE BIZ: How appropriate that a cache of Nike shoes, lost at sea a year ago, would wash ashore along the Oregon coast the day before the Portland TrailBlazers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Almost poetic, no?

CATCHING `EM WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN: Seattle’s American Passage Media Corp., a company that began selling term paper “guides” and now handles various ad ventures, wants to put up ads in high-school locker rooms. Called “GymnBoards,” they’d be like Whittle Communications’ ad posters in doctor and dentist offices, a little bit of consumer info surrounded by slick ad messages. (Whittle, originator of the sponsored classroom newscast Channel One, is under fire from mainstream media reporters who don’t want ad dollars to cease subsidizing reporters’ salaries) Too many teens are already almost fatally self-conscious, without having diet, food, or grooming products confronting them while nude.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Johnny’s Fine Foods of Tacoma has launched a line of salad dressings with offbeat names: Jamaica Mistake, Honey! You’re Terrific!, Garlic: The Final Frontier, Poppy Love, Great Caesar, and Gorby Light: A Kinder, Gentler Russian. (The back label of the latter sez, “…unleashes the flavor of good Russian and eliminates those harsh old overtones…”)

GOOD NEWS!: The Clark bar is being saved, by Pittsburgh financier Michael P. Carlow. He bought the venerable candy from Leaf Inc. of Illinois, which had basically let it slide before announcing plans to sell or scrap it.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #6: On-Your-Tie Cookies are no more. Neither are Uncle Billy’s Pasta Chips, Frutta di Terra dried tomato products, or seven other companies listed in the 1989 membership list of the Specialty Foods Group of Washington. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 other local specialty-food companies are struggling to survive.

FROZEN FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Whatever happened to the New World Order, anyway? This term was used only once by Bush as a justification for the war, but has remained as a catch phrase used by Leftists for every dishonorable aspect of Reagan-Bush foreign policy. T-shirts proclaim that it’s really an “Old World Odor;” bumper stickers insert swastikas between every word. I don’t know what the band New Order thinks of it all.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH, PART 2: According to the authors of the new book The Day America Told the Truth (a survey of moral/ethical attitudes by region), the quintessential Northwest personality might be that of bad ol’ Leland Palmer. According to James Patterson and Peter Kim, roughly one in four Northwesterners is a clinical sociopath, four times the national average. “Pac Rim [their name for a “moral region” of the Northwest and northern Calif.] respondents were much less likely to have strongly developed consciences than were individuals in any other area…Coupled with the observation that Pac Rimmers are the regional respondents least likely to present themselves to others as they really are, it seems that David Lynch may be onto something”…By the way, I still believe Twin Peaks has been 32 of TV’s best hours ever. It taught me how to write Northwest fiction that has imagination and wonder, that doesn’t reek of godawful God’s-country pretentiousness. The show’s “failure” only proved that ambitious genre-splitters may not be meant to be ongoing series, especially when erratically scheduled and poorly advertised. Lynch is now working up a feature; my choice would be a string of TV movies.

MORE ON SEATTLE TODAY: The old-clips final episode claimed the show had been on for 17 years, but it was really 40 years old (even older than I said last issue). I still have the TV and T-shirt I won on it on separate occasions in the mid-’70s. Under that name as well as TeleScope, The Noon Look, Good Company, and Northwest Today, it formed a part of the daily rhythm of the city that will be missed, even if the show itself had become stale (the same old fashion tips, the same old recipes, the same old touring psychics, the same old itinerant book-pluggers).

HOME TOWN NEWS: A Marysville woman got stung in a supermarket by a scorpion stuck onto the sticker of a Del Monte banana. In a lawsuit, she’s blaming the store for a miscarriage she had weeks later.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Weekly “Clarification,” 5/2): “In a Discovery item last week, Kit Hughes was quoted as saying that before she used Aqua Mirabilis Bath Salts she was a `shallow person.’ Hughes was a shower person. In a different story in the same issue, Jim Bailey was quoted as describing Lori Larsen (Tales of Larsen) as `wild and horny.’ What Bailey said was corny.”

ADS OF THE MONTH: I was slipped a newspaper ad promoting a shopping-mall appearance by Gerardo, the Latin Rapper. But the ad to the left of that won gets this month’s honors. It’s for Lovers Package (“Try One On for Sighs”) a chain store offering “Wonderfulwedding things meant to be seen,” including “lingerie, cards, games, bachelor & bachelorette party prizes.” Half the small ad consists of a photo of a model in gartered stockings, bra, panties, and a wedding veil. Reminds me of the old nudist-camp-wedding joke, where you can always tell who the best man is… Sears ran an ad for an electronics sale that showed dozens of dazed customers wandering into the mall, carrying out big-name products at “shocking” prices. What’s delicious about it is that the whole commercial makes no sense if you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead. In a similar old-movie reference, a Brut as has Kelly LeBrock discussing the “Essence of Man.” That was also the name of a device in Barbarella, in which the women of the corrupt sky city smoked from water pipes connected to a male prisoner in a water-filled glass cage. (By the way, a G-rated cartoon version of Barbarella has been optioned for TV series development.)

THE DRUG BUG: The Tobacco Institute, a venture of the big cigarette companies, offers free booklets entitled Tobacco: Helping Youths Say No. Hmm: an industry acknowledging that its product should be kept away from kids. Or is it? Not having read the book, I imagine it might be like all that counterproductive anti-drug propaganda of the past 25 years. You know, where the only “role models” of non-users are obnoxious jocks and hopeless squares…

BODY LANGUAGE: Pat Graney’s dance performance eloquently succeeded in contrasting healthy, natural sensuality with the clumsy, contrived “sexiness” of modern life as exemplified in that symbol of everything ex-hippie women despise, high heel shoes, at one point compared by Graney dancer Tasha Cook to Chinese foot-binding. (That many younger women have found a source of power in black dresses and uncomfy shoes is dismissed in the course of the piece, with the dancers eventually shucking off their im-ped-iments of needless discipline.) One must also mention the last of Graney’s four segments, in which she and her six other female dancers crawled across the floor nude (mostly with spines arched out to the audience). That this was accompanied by Mideval-inspired music (by Rachel Warwick) did not seem the least bit sacrilegious. Indeed (in a twist on liberal orthodoxy), Graney implied that old religious-based cultures held more respect for both body and spirit than current secular society.

TROUBLE IN FANTASYLAND?: French culture mavens, the Chicago Tribune reports, are predictably miffed at the rising upon their shores of Euro Disneyland: “A cultural Chernobyl” and “a black stain on the soul of France.” One of the American construction supervisors was quoted, “I know there were good political reasons for building it in France, but I wish they’d picked a country where the work ethic is a little more highly developed, like Germany.”

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #7: Working Women magazine lists the two hottest careers for 1991 grads as bankruptcy attorney and “outplacement specialist” — counseling the newly-unemployed.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (it was told in the Smithsonian last year; I just found it now): Before Muzak moved its HQ to Seattle, three-quarters of its 4,000-selection library had been recorded by a Czechoslovakia radio orchestra. The old owners liked its price and tolerated its admittedly odd musical flavor. It’s being steadily replaced by new tunes recorded mostly by synthesizers and “electronically enhanced” quartets. You have to wonder, though: what if Commies were hiding secret subliminal messages that got into offices and factories across America, messages like “Lower your productivity” or “Let America become a second-rate industrial power”?

CLEANING UP: Toronto entrepreneurs have brought one of Playboy’s most common and inexplicable images to life by starting the first commercial topless car wash. It’s apparently all legal (there is no contact with the customer’s body, only with the customer’s car). Perhaps this proves what Toronto’s own Marshall MacLuhan used to say about a car being essentially modern man’s new outer skin or something like that.

‘TIL AUGUST, when we might have warmth, visit Jersey’s Sports Club on 7th (a “sports bar” where people actually play sports inside instead of just watching them on TV), and resist the turning of Seafair into even more of a pro-war spectacle than it already is.

PASSAGE

One of the lines of the pathetically insufferable couple in the KBSG commercial, describing how only the sappy pop music of their childhoods saved their marriage: “We almost broke up over the wallpaper.”

REPORT

Following the “Misc.@5” anniversary show, I’ll probably hold another reading in August, as part of a COCA series. More in the next issue.

Kim Thompson insists that Mariel Hemingway’s line at the end of Manhattan was “NOT everybody gets corrupted;” somewhat diff. from my quote last time. All I can say is it ain’t the way I heard it.

Subscriptions are $7/yr., prepaid; fax subs are $9/yr.

My hypertext novel The Perfect Couple is available in photocopy-galley form for $10 prepaid.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Comogonic”

2/90 Misc. Newsletter

LATIN DEBATE: IS THIS YEAR “MCMXC” OR “MCMLXL”?

Return with us now to Misc., the monthly information source that hopes one day to earn the phrase a Wall St. Journal headline (1/16) gave to Boeing’s Pentagon spy, “Loyal to Seattle to the End.”

More Than Meets the Eye?: We love to study the mysteries of the world, the unexplained phenomena that some discount as mere coincidence. One such mystery occurred with Ranger Charlie, the jovial host of KSTW’s morning cartoons for the past year. Sometime in December, he disappeared from the screen, leaving his puppet raccoon friend Roscoe in charge. Finally, in January, Roscoe again had Ranger Charlie to banter with — only the beloved ranger had become shorter, younger, and female. Now, that’s something you don’t see in cartoons, not even on The Transformers.

The Fine Print (from a P-I ad insert): “Safeway’s 1/4-inch trim is trimmed to 1/4-inch external fat excluding natural depressions in the contour of the underlying meat.”

The Not-So-Fine Print: A Crown Books in-store poster touts a discount dictionary as the “best in it’s class.” Never buy a dictionary from people who can’t spell. The book in question is a reprint of the ’83 version (since supplanted) of theRandom House Dictionary, inherited via a series of Random House subsidiaries by “Portland House, New York,” successor to the Oregon computer-book house dilithium press.

Local Publication of the Month: The Way of the Lover, a self-help book of sorts by West Vancouver, B.C. spiritualist Robert Agustus Masters. You might not immediately buy into the mythological or meditative content, but you’ve gotta love such chapter titles as “Releasing Sex (and Everything Else) from the Obligation to Make Us Feel Better.”… The Weekly-ization of the local press continues, as local media hype Hawaii tourism this winter as never before. The Times andWashington magazine even ran “editorial” sections trying to find local-angle stories about a place thousands of miles away…. Caverns, a “collaborative novel” by Ken Kesey’s Univ. of Oregon writing class, is a plain piece of commercial storytelling, recommended only for those interested in how it was made (like me) and Kesey completists (unlike me).

Cathode Corner: KING’s first ads after the flood-day (1/9) 11 pm news were two of those awful Infiniti spots wherein you don’t see the car, just a lot of water; followed by a spot with the opening line “drowning in a sea of high bills?”…. Ted Turner, who expects to lose millions on the Seattle Goodwill Games, tried to make a little of it back by colorizing Jailhouse Rock, a film made in ’57 (well into the Eastmancolor era) with a major star, at a time when the only major black and white films were done deliberately that way…. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was almost set in Seattle, instead of Minneapolis. According to a new book about the show, its producers felt that a show filmed before a live audience would need to be set in a town where people spent lots of their time in small indoor rooms. (As you recall, MTM went on in ’70, a year before All in the Family and after several years of sitcoms with outdoor scenes and canned laughter.) As the show coalesced, they decided Minnesota was more indoorsy than Seattle. Instead of Hüsker Du remaking the MTM theme (by old Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis), it could’ve been Capping Day or even Pure Joy.

A Classic Tragedy: Cable’s American Movie Classics channel seldom lives up to its name (most of its flicks are dated Don Ameche vehicles); but on 1/14 it ran one of the weirdest pieces of video ever shot: the Frances Farmer episode of This Is Your Life. The 1958 live telecast, made at the start of Farmer’s return to public life after her lobotomy, shows the Seattle-born actress staring into space while greasy-haired host Ralph Edwards (who also created Truth or Consequences) rattled off a summary of her sad life story. During her turns to speak, she looked offstage (possibly to a prompter). In an elegant but slurred voice, she slowly explained that “I did not believe and still do not believe that I was truly ill.” At the end, she was rewarded for her bravery with a new Edsel.

Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Lite! Thicker snack cakes, slightly less sweet, for “grown-ups.” Most of the reduction in calories is due to a reduction in size from the regular Hostess product…. Burger King announced new oat bran buns for its burgers, just before the gov’t. announced that the oat bran craze had been based on exaggerated claims…. Chateau Ste. Michelle has brought out a special bottling of ’86 Chenin Blanc to honor the UW’s 125th Anniversary. It would have been a more appropriate tribute if it had been a wine more UW people drink: cheap Chablis in a box. But then again, this grad can’t imagine what a UW frat was doing with a sheep during induction week, except perhaps to show it off as a role model.

Praying for a Space: Chicago’s Catholics are faced with declining attendance and a priest shortage, but one downtown parish is investing in a new church building, to be financed by a 20-story parking garage to be built above the sanctuary. They’re just following the lead of my childhood denomination: Chicago Methodists already have a downtown church-office tower and a neighborhood church with a Fotomat booth in its front yard.

The Severed Arm of the Law: A North Carolina firm’s selling a “lawyer doll,” the heads and limbs of which are attached with Velcro for easy mangling, apparently to place curses on lawyers for the other side of your case. Or, you could leave it headless to resemble your own attorney. Such quasi-voodoo rituals didn’t help Noriega, but who says they won’t work for you?

Reach Out and Severely Inconvenience Someone: The AT&T system crash, in which about half of the long-distance network simply refused to put calls through, shows that even the ex-Ma Bell is no longer a paragon of American technological supremacy. The big glitch was blamed on faulty software; just the admission they’d like to make while AT&T’s computer unit tries to wrestle control of its UNIX computer system software back from various licensees.

What’s With Utne These Days?: Utne Reader, the bimonthly digest of the alternative press, now has its very own Publishers’ Clearing House stamp, right between Stamps and Time. When you win your $10 million in the sweepstakes, you can read how to put the dough into socially responsible investments.

Those Phunny Phoreigners: This sign in a Northwest Trek-style wildlife park in Nara, Japan, is noted in the book Gems of Japanized English by Miranda Kendrick: “CAUTION: Everybody: Take care of Hind! It is the season Fawn is born about this time. It may be case if you approach him, his mother deer being full of maternal love gives you a kick by her forefeet.”

We’re Only In It for the Freedom: The first U.S. private citizen to meet with new Czech president Vaclav Havel wasn’t an industrialist or banker but Frank Zappa. Havel, it turns out, is a longtime Zappa fan; during his years as a banned playwright, he let banned musicians, such as the Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe, record tapes in his country house. Zappa may use his friendship with this anti-authoritarian hero to bolster his fight against rock censorship. Zappa would probably be upset by managers of the new Yakima domed arena, who wouldn’t let the B-52s bring the Greenpeace info booth the band has had outside every tour date. The arena bosses claimed it would “set a bad precedent.”

Tomorrow Ain’t What It Usta Be: The Futurist magazine has published some wild ‘n’ wacky predictions for the ’90s. Among them: Flight from the Greenhouse Effect may make Canada more populous than the U.S. Cash money will become illegal for all but very small transactions. Computers with automatic language translation and voice synthesis will enable people to speak in one language that listeners will hear translated into another language. Computer chips will be in everything from houses to clothing. Household robots may be as common as refrigerators. Almost one-fourth of the world’s population will be Moslem. Self-propelled, computerized lawn mowers will be able to “see” where the grass needs to be cut and to avoid trees. Remember, these may be the same seers who said we’d now have home helicopters but not home computers.

‘Til March, you might as well abandon the Sonics this year and root for the Seattle-owned Portland TrailBlazers, thank the nondenominational dieties that there will be no Robert Fulghum sitcom (which would have starred John Denver), and review these words by author/educator John Gardner: “More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.”

PASSAGE

Julio Cortazar in the “Love 77” chapter of A Certain Lucas (1979):

“And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, they comb their hair, they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.”

OFFER

Tell your friends about Misc., the one piece of monthly first-class mail they’ll be glad to get. New subscribers will receive the humorous essay “God as I Understand Him” and first word on future Fait Divers products (the computer novel The Perfect Couple, special mini-posters).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Descry”

11/89 Misc. Newsletter

Empty Space Renovators Find Asbestos in Showbox Walls;

You Thought the Punks Looked Deadly!

Welcome to yet another ennui-packed edition of Misc., the column that wonders whether Monty Python’s Graham Chapman would have wanted to die on the same day as, and have his obituary upstaged by that of, the race horse Secretariat, and decides that he might well have. This is the special newsletter edition, containing (not much, but some) additional material, cut from the version in ArtsFocus. While that tabloid was on indefinite hiatus this summer, I put out a special newsletter version and solicited for subscriptions. Two people replied. This is for them, and anyone else who might end up applying for the mailing list.

NO JANE, NO PAIN: I do not mourn the impending departure of Jane Pauley, who has held her position on Today for 13 years despite a distinct incompetence. She was particularly bad in her early years, but still maintained a level of journalistic ineptitude to the end (we’ve already mentioned her interview with the Seattle Rep’s Dan Sullivan, in which she never “got” the idea that non-NYC theater is real theater).

STAGE OF DECLINE: The demise of the Pioneer Square Theater has been dissected elsewhere. I’ll simply note that at one time, a local theater company was able to support itself mostly on its own receipts, and might have continued to do so had its original team stayed in town. Another case of LA ruining everything.

SPECIAL INTEREST: The John Lennon purists (a bunch of gracelessly-aging ex-potheads) may scorn the memorial Visa cards authorized by Yoko, but I love ’em. There’s nothing quite like going over your limit as the receipt-stamper pulls across the face that sang “Imagine no possessions.”

THE WORLD SERIOUS: So the A’s, thanks to Mike Moore and their other ex-Mariners, finally won. “But where in all this,” you haven’t asked, “is ex-A’s owner Charles O. Finley, the man who wanted to give us orange baseballs?” He’s still dabbling in sports. While Oakland was in mourning over the quake, Finley was safe up here, giving a public demonstration of his new glow-in-the-dark footballs. Their fluorescent green stripes are supposed to make them more visible at night in dimly-lit high school stadia; which would ruin one of the joys of the high-school game. O well, at least they’ll still have under-the-bleachers fights and the sound of both schools’ bands simultaneously playing “On Wisconsin” as their own fight song.

COME BACK, SAM! ALL IS FORGIVEN!: Am still trying to learn whether the Samuel E. Schulman credited as publisher of the new magazine Wigwag is the illustrious ex-Sonics owner and B-movie mogul of the same name. The mag is subtitled “A Picture of American Life;” it looks a bit like Spy and reads a lot like the last half-hour of All Things Considered. Lotsa smug Ivy League “populism” and pretentious cuteness. It does have one nice item on loneliness from the only single black woman in Tucson.

THE PLANE TRUTH: At this writing, the Boeing strike is going strong. It’s a novelty among recent U.S. strikes: it’s against an industrial manufacturer that’s been doing well enough that the usual pleas that the battered workers “sacrifice a little more” to keep management comfy just don’t work. If successful, this may be the turning point in American labor. People at Boeing and other firms may be getting tired of being pushed around, of getting sick from hazardous chemicals only to have management claim it’s just psychosomatic or “hysterical,” of being treated as a mere “cost” to be “contained,” of having any disagreement with any of this denounced as disloyalty to the corporate “family.”

MEANWHILE, Martin Selig’s fall from the heights of local office development should not surprise. In an ongoing attempt to cut corners from the costs of his big projects, he’s been late on payments to smaller suppliers for years. He got caught when he tried to slow down his payments to outfits big enough to fight back: first City Light, then some big creditors. In the end though, an ex-strip-mall-builder in an overbuilt market was no match for the big guys from LA and Toronto, now poised for total dominance.

TOY BOY: The first Xmas product with promise is the Heartthrob game by Milton Bradley, the years-late answer to Mattel’s Mystery Date game (circa 1962). It’s for girls ages 8-12, who draw and trade cards pertaining to their ideal boy’s traits, trying to assemble the most attractive guy possible.

GAS PAINS: The great oil slump continues, as Chevron sells or demolishes some of its most prominent locations (Ballard and Market, Evergreen Point) while the independent Gull sells all its Seattle stations. Gull, along with Mobil, thus joins these other long-gone brands from town (how many do you remember?): American, Carter, Douglas, Enco, Flying A, General, Gilmore, Gulf, Hancock, Hudson, Payless, Phillips 66, Red Crown, Richfield, Rocket, Signal, Standard, Time, USA, Valvoline, Vickers, and Wilshire. Seattle never had any outlets, however, for Clark Oil (no relation), the Midwestern brand that sold premium gas only.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Belgian waffle snacks at Gaufres (“gauf”), a storefront at 106 James with the shortest menu of any restaurant in town. For a buck, you get a small cup of coffee and a hot, glazed waffle on a sheet of wax paper. No butter, syrup, or whipped cream; this is finger food. Eat too many, though, and you’ll have a “gauf figure.”…Seattle’s Starting Right Co. now has the first gourmet frozen dinners for babies – strained, pre-cooked mounds of rice/squash/cod, zucchini/potatoes/beef, and pasta/carrots/turkey.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Miscellania Unlimited (again, no relation) is launching a new line of Northwest-produced comic books. The starting lineup ranges from the funny-philosophical Morty the Dog (who was “killed off” during his previous series from Starhead Comics; how he returns is the chief mystery) to the all-too-typical Rhaj (a female warrior in ancient Egypt with big eyes, a big knife, and a bigger bare bosom)…. I wish somebody here had a paper as lively as the Portland Free Press. It’s a monthly left-anarchist broadsheet concerned with toxic dumping, deforestation, and particularly with the Citizens Crime Commission, a panel of Oregon’s wealthiest and most powerful people who lobby for more prisons and fewer civil rights using the “drug emergency” for a justification….Every two months Factsheet Five, a national directory of small-press and self-published matter, includes several listings of Seattle-area “zines” available only by mail. As space permits, I’ll occasionally reprint one of these listings. This time it’s The Whetstone, described by FF (haven’t seen it myself) as “a new ‘magazine for independent people’ on news ignored by the major media…the alleged A-bomb test at Port Chicago in 1944, the AIDS-syphilis connection and alternative high-energy sources.” Available for $15/4 issues from FIFE Publications, Box 45792, Seattle 98145-0792.

THE KING AND THEM: Yul Brynner, according to one of those son-of-star-tells-all books, had steamy affairs with many of your favorite Hollywood leading ladies, and also with the actress who later became Nancy Reagan. It’s a gruesome thought, I know, but not as shocking as a pic published last year in the French Photo magazine, a full-frontal nude of a pre-stardom Brynner — with hair on his scalp!

COLOR ME BLUE: COCA recently held a performance by NY artist Mike Bildo. Three local women walked onstage and spent the next 10 minutes brushing bright blue paint on their nude selves. Occasionally, Bildo instructed the models to tastefully flay themselves on one of two large paper “canvases.” A group calling itself the Gorilla Girls picketed outside, calling the work an “appropriation” of women. The Gorillas’ literature drew heavily on quotes from Alice Walker, a writer who has dismissed any criticism of her work with the all-damning phrase “white male attitude.” The Bildo piece did NOT advocate male power over women. It questioned the valuesof originality and individualism, a topic frequently covered in feminist art writing. The models, the six clothed musicians, and Bildo were all re-enacting roles devised in 1960 by conceptual-art pioneer Yves Klien, who in turn was commenting on both French ooh-la-la exhibitionism and on the role of the nude figure in art. (Bildo’s enactment was closer to Klein’s concept than was the re-edited version of Klien’s event in the exploitation film Mondo Cane ). Body painting is an old tradition in other cultures, and has oft been used in Western alternative art. Weeks before Bildo, Karen Finley appeared on the same stage, her nude self covered in chocolate syrup, giving a charged lecture on bodies and body images. The chocolate motif had been used in ’74, with similar metaphors, in Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie. The UK female punk band The Slits once posed for an album cover in mud and loincloths (as re-created this fall by the Seattle male punk band Mudhoney). Had the Gorilla Girls overcome their own stereotypical notions about gender and power, they’d have been treated to a spectacle full of images worthy of smart criticism. (Something like this section may appear in the KCMU Wire).

IN CONCLUSION, copies of the special “What I Did This Summer” report are available by sending a SASE to Box 203, 1630 Boylston, Seattle 98122, as is information on my novel The Perfect Couple (currently available only as Macintosh computer software). Until our next report, vote for Rice (claiming you’re “too hip to vote” is just the same as voting for Jewett), see the Art of Music Video Festival at 911 (no, I won’t bow to the current fashion and call it “the 911 space,” though I might start calling my home “the Clark space”), and remember this quotation from Goethe: “Everything that needs to be found out has been found out.The hard part is finding it again.”

4/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

THIS MONTH: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE FINAL FOUR

Here at Misc., the slickest column around, we think Exxon ought to go back to one of its former names, Humble (though a name with a double cross in the middle is also somewhat appropriate).

Confessions of a Critic: In December, I wrote a Times book review of Marianne Wiggins’s stunning novel John Dollar. I couldn’t have known that her husband would be marked for death for writing a book that questioned mindless obedience to (any) authority. When the review appeared, the Times thankfully didn’t add a lead calling Wiggins Mrs. Rushdie. It may have been the last time Wiggins was discussed for her own work (recently displayed at a Crown Books with the handwritten sign, “It’s By HIS Wife”).

Astral Plane: Twice a year, enlightenment comes to a warehouse-like space in a lonely Kent industrial park, next to the Domino’s Pizza plant. It’s the Boeing Activity Center, home of the Boeing Employees’ Parapsychology Club Psychic Fair. A bazaar of merchants offered tarot decks, crystals, astrological charts, and motivational tapes on everything from attracting a soul-mate to improving your vocabulary (sample affirmation: “The dictionary is my friend”). Local company Loving Spoonful (not the ’60s band) sold a kids’ success tape with cartoon squirrels promoting the fun of obeying your parents. A guy who channels information from dolphins cancelled a scheduled appearance, but over 60 psychics and palm readers gave 10-minute consultations. The big room was crowded with eager true believers — the opposite of the stuffed-shirt image outsiders have of Boeing. To find engineering types, you had to see the UW Computer Fair earlier in March. With the PC now commonplace, the fair’s mainly returned to industrial-design applications — except for the Seattle software company peddling a program called Bowling League Secretary. Now that’s personal productivity.

Mixed Media: The Time-Warner merger is only possible because the US antitrust dept. is acting less like Warner’s DC Comics heroes and more like Warner’s Police Academy cops. Meanwhile, Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti’s assembling Cannon, New World, DeLaurentiis and France’s once-mighty Pathé (the United Optical building on 3rd was originally a Pathé distribution office). Parretti’s move may save London’s historic EMI-Elstree Studios, which Cannon bought then threatened to turn into an office park. It’s also an epitaph for the boomtown ’80s film biz, which made hundreds of unwatchable films believing home video’d eat up anything with a halfway exploitable theme…. Tim Matheson liked National Lampoon so much, he bought the company. After a long takeover food fight and a Fundamentalist-led ad boycott, Matheson may need spunk and resourcefulness to bring the Lampoon back — a small challenge for the original voice of Jonny Quest.

Cathode Corner: Bainbridge author Aaron Elkins created the Gideon Oliver character in books without imagining he’d be played on TV by Lou Gossett (finally, TV cast a black actor in a role that didn’t specifically call for one). The show’s marred by clumsy post-writers’-strike scripts, but is better than Sable, the last series from a local writer (Mike Grell)…. The Coca-Cola Co. pledged to pull ads from Married… With Children. Since Coke’s the biggest shareholder in the show’s producer, Columbia Pictures, it may be the first conglomerate to boycott itself.

Smell of Liberation: Debbie Gibson has signed with Revlon to market an Electric Youth fragrance. Where I’m from, many gals were forbidden to wear perfume at her age.

That Drafty Gust: The “voluntary” youth service program proposed by Sen. Sam Nunn is really a scheme to keep working-class kids out of college, at least temporarily. Federal student loans would be available only to those who put in two years of low-pay, low-skill labor, perhaps far from home. This quasi civilian draft would leave less school and job-ladder competition for affluent kids, while leaving the country even less prepared for a future of global hi-tech competition.

News Item of the Month (NPR, 3/9): “The measure would raise the minimum drinking age to $4.61 an hour by 1990.” Runner-up (NY Times, 3/28, on the worldwide spandex shortage): “The market is very tight.”

Local Publications of the Month: Continuum, a slick arts quarterly from KidsProject at Metrocenter YMCA, has a kid’s own true pot story, a woman who imitates Patrick Nagle’s art, and an insightful comment on Royer’s KidsPlace hype. Get it at Bulldog now before a complex funding dispute kills it…. Northwest Extra is Olympia’s low-budget answer to the Clinton St. Quarterly. It’s mostly compiled from syndicated material, but the April ish has a magnificent Peter Bagge graphic on the Reagan legacy…. Geek Love, from Portland novelist Katherine Dunn, is a tale of people genetically bred to be circus freaks. It’s the perfect antidote for the Reagan/Teutonic image of “The” Family.

Unconstructive Criticism: Martin Selig, like many natural-born hustlers, has little sympathy for anyone who isn’t. At a recent City Club forum, Selig scoffed at the homeless problem his developments helped create, saying the poor just weren’t being productive. He seemed to sincerely not understand people born without his privileges or advantages. People like him should NOT be allowed to control the destiny of the city.

‘Til next month’s lovely 3rd anniversary edition, see Manifesto and Baron Munchausen, and ponder these telling words from everybody’s role model Pete Rose: “I’m a great father. I bought my daughter a new Mercedes Benz last year.”