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1/90 Misc. Newsletter
Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,
Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash
Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.
Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.
No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.
The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.
Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).
Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.
The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.
Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).
Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.
Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.
Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.
`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
PASSAGE
John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”
OFFER
All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.
Also from Fait Divers:Â The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Multivalent”
What the `90s Have Given Us
Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution
We’ll Look Back and Laff At
Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated
We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without
Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews
Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope
Top Local Stories
12/89 Misc. Newsletter
Seahawks Keep Losing,
Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties
Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.
MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.
TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.
TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!
THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”
PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!
BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.
STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.
HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.
INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).
BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.
SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.
`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”
VOICES
Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:
“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”
FORUM
We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.
“Olefiant”
INS/OUTS FOR ’90
This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.
Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.
This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.
6/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
C.A.P. WINS, WESTERN
CIVILIZATION DOESN’T END
(latter-day note: That was a city initiative measure to instill mild zoning controls on new high-rise office towers, fought bitterly by developers who are now bankrupt ‘cuz with today’s corporate downsizing they can’t fill the buildings they’ve already built.)
Welcome back to Misc., the column for a world where three AA-level pitchers are called a “good trade” and a million Chinese protesters are called a “tiny minority.” We do know why Willard Scott called Starbucks Coffee “almost as good as Maxwell House” on a recent location shoot. He’s got an ad contract with that product of General Foods (founded by Seventh-Day Adventist C.W. Post to sell health foods, now owned by a cigarette firm).
Three Men and a Pillow: A Seattle firm has invented the Empathy Belly, a 35-pound prosthetic tummy with Velcro outside and lead weights inside. It’s to help expectant fathers empathize with their wives, by sharing some of pregnancy’s discomforts. I wonder if its makers saw the Bewitched where Endora made Darren kinder to pregnant Samantha by making him crave rich foods and feel queasy in the mornings.
Prosaic Paroxysm: We’ve been amused over the years at the creation, practically from scratch, of a mythical “Northwest Lifestyle.” Less amused have been residents of hick towns rechristened as “romantic getaways.” Some of these oldtimers have formed Citizens for Lesser LaConner. Their ads in Seattle papers warn of traffic jams and inadequate facilities for the tourist hordes. It’s so rare to see an ad pleading you not to buy. Businesses there, of course, would remake the place to meet the tourist demand. It’d destroy thetown’s “rustic charm,” but that might not matter to those visitors who came here five years ago for the “lifestyle” invented by people who came here 10 years ago.
Cathode Corner: Joe Guppy, the Mark Langston of local TV, helped make Almost Live into a contender, then jumped to HBO. Another ex-Off-the-Wall Player, Dale Goodson, is now at MTV, writing comedy material for fellow Seattlite Kevin Seal. Then there’s Ross Shaffer’s ABC show, Day’s End. He mostly narrates clips from other shows, telling the late-night audience how much they’re missing by not watching more prime-time TV. As the TV nation keeps diffusing, expect desperate self-promotions like movies used against TV in the ’50s. Already, NBC’s “Come Home” slogan both plugs its living-room comedies and extols prodigal viewers to return from cable and VCRs.
Body Politics: The Christian Science Monitor’s become the nouvelle cuisine of newspapers (exquisite but too small to satisfy), but still has a good item now and then. It recently noted that teen beauty pageants are returning to Nicaragua (first prize: a trip to Melledin, Colombia). Some of the all-male leadership of the Sandinista Youth League grumbled that there should be intelligence pageants instead. A typical “male feminist” attitude, to slag feminine behavior as an irrelevant frill. A generation that’s faced so much work and self-denial (due largely to our hypocritical ideology) deserves a taste of healthy individual pride…. On a similar note, Poland’s first Bennetton store was announced. Maybe Walesa will start wearing nicer sweaters.
Junk Foods of the Month: The Nintendo Cereal System gives you the sugar rush to keep playing; the clever packaging lets you munch it from the box while keeping your joystick hand free…. Champs de Brionne in George, WA would rather be known for outdoor concerts than for Scarlet, a blend of reisling and cherry wine. It’s the same shade of pink as the dress on the label mascot (who looks more like a Barbara Cartland heroine than Scarlett O’Hara). She asks us to “look for my message on the back of the label”; I couldn’t find any…. The trade mag Restaurant Business sez the next eatery fad will be Mom Food — meatloaf, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. “Paying money for something you probably didn’t even like that much as a kid will lose its appeal, but we are reassured that it’s OK to enjoy comfortable food.”
Grinding Down: Many of Seattle’s 10 burlesque joints are feeling financial goose pimples. They’re cutting hours, raising prices, and even bringing mud wrestlers. The problem: overexpansion. Too many entrepreneurs want to make big bucks by keeping all cover and drink charges, making the performers live off tips. You often see the same scam in music and comedy clubs (though comedy clubs don’t offer “table jokes”).
That Last Hurrah Thang: In 1980, I was a student reporter on Sen. Warren Magnuson’s last campaign tour. He chartered an Amtrak train (a symbol of Magnuson’s belief in the benefits of federal spending) to the Tri-Cities (ditto). In stops at Seattle, Tacoma and Wenatchee, he spoke about the influence and privilege our state had achieved with Henry Jackson and himself (they’d been our senators since before I was born). But nationally, the Demos were too busy fighting each other to stop the Reagan stampede. That fall, Demo control of the Senate would be interrupted for six years and Maggie’s career, built on getting people to work together, would end.
Positive Steps: Until further notice, Seattle’s best window displays are at Church’s Shoes on Pike. Some of the displays have less to do with product than with cultural causes (saving the Admiral Theater in W. Seattle and the Spafford murals in Oly).
Local Publication of the Month: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. John Callahan, everyone’s favorite paraplegic, recovering-alcoholic cartoonist, expands his Clinton St. Quarterly essays (“The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life”) into a fascinating memoir. With the CSQ on apparent hiatus (editor Jim Blashfield is now a videomaker for Michael Jackson and others), it’s good to keep seeing one of its stars.
How Randy Is It?: The Rep’s mounting a revue of Randy Newman’s songs. I’d prefer a tribute to his Hollywood-composer uncles Alfred and Lionel, but there is some potential in dramatizing his better songs like “Cleveland.” I just hope they don’t re-create the “I Love LA” video (is any Seattle actor homely enough to impersonate Tommy Lasorda?).
‘Til July, visit the Karaoke Lounge at Tatsumi Express on the Ave, ask your bank for a memorial Salvador Dali MasterCard, and ponder these words of John Lydon: “Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”
5/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
PENTAGON BRASS PREDICT
GLASNOST WILL FAIL
(THEY CAN ONLY HOPE)
Here at Misc., where we’ve always brought disparate elements together, we don’t understand this “cold fusion” fuss. As a scientific discovery, it’s far less important than the new technique to remove old tattoos with lasers.
With this installment, Misc. has graced Seattle’s more open-minded restaurants, theatres and retailers for three years. That’s longer than the Ford Administration or the original run of Star Trek! Alice Savage, who ran what was then the PR paper for the Lincoln Arts Association, said I could write anything I wanted to. As ArtsFocus has grown under Cydney Gillis into this fiercely-independent sheet, that policy’s stayed. Another policy iterated in the first edition still holds: This column does not settle wagers (not that we’ve been asked to).
Eat Your Heart Out, Updike: The Brasil restaurant on 1st showed scenes from the latest Rio samba parades as part of its Sunday-night film series. Among the 18 “schools” (each with at least 3,000 amateur performers) were several save-the-rainforest parades and one in honor of Brazilian author Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, et al.). Can you imagine giant floats, musicians, singers, children, feather-headdressed men and topless women parading for a living American writer? Brazil has serious problems, but at least it has people who actively participate in their own culture.
This participation is largely what Abbie Hoffman fought for. During his heyday and on his death, the media’ve depicted him as an ego freak, no more sincerely subversive than John Belushi. (The radicals who really were ego freaks became Republicans.) Hoffman’s `68 Demo Convention protest and his square-people-bashing at the subsequent trial might have set back support of the anti-war movement, letting Nixon and Reagan vow to protect “real Americans” from “those kooks.” Still, especially in his books, he had much to say on real democracy vs. money-power whoring and how folks must stop being easily led.
Dead Air: KJR’s resident reactionary Gary Lockwood became Millstone Billboard Man #2, standing in a giant “coffee cup” downtown for an airshift (if I only had some tomatos to throw, some ripe, young tomatos). Lockwood’s “those kids today” commercials, denouncing anything recorded since 1970 and anybody born since 1950, are just like the Mitch Miller/Lawrence Welk defenders during the so-called “classic rock” era. To think KJR was once co-owned by Danny Kaye, who worked to bring attention and respect to youth. Also on the retro beat, the speculating Floridians who bought into Seattle radio promptly sold KZOK (to KOMO) and KQUL, née KJET (to Viacom’s KBSG). I’m heartened, though, by the formation of an anti-nostalgia lobby, the National Association for the Advancement of Time. Corporate America’s obsession with 1956-69 resembles the religious “Age of Miracles” doctrine, in which great things are said to have really happened but cannot happen anymore. The only way to really preserve the spirit of the ’60s is to stay fresh, to live in what Flip Wilson called “what’s happenin’ NOW.”
Update: New Cannon Film owner Giancarlo Parretti’s bids for the New World and DeLaurentiis studios collapsed. Maybe he should’ve sent Chuck Norris to see some dissident shareholders.
Local Publications of the Month: Twistor is a “hard science fiction” book by UW prof John Cramer, in which a machine in the UW Physics Bldg. becomes the portal to a parallel universe…. Lawrence Paros’s The Erotic Tongue is back in print. The area’s foremost expert on word origins (and briefly the best columnist in the P-I) gives fascinating histories on our terms for sex and/or love.
Cathode Corner: Rude Dog, the T-shirt mascot owned by Frederick & Nelson’s David Sabey, will have his own Sat. morn cartoon on CBS this fall (produced by Marvel)…. Bombshelter Videos resurfaced on KTZZ, where even Soundgarden’s an improvement over get-rich-quick and save-your-hair “shows.”
Ad of the Month (on a 76 banner): “Our three unleaded gasolines: Cleans fuel injectors best.” Runner-up (in the N. Seattle Press): “Since 1984, Gibraltar Savings: Serving families for over 100 years.” Then there was the Ross Dress for Less clearance ad with the “Men’s” listings printed between the jumping female model’s legs.
News Item of the Month (Times, 4/22): “A letter writer suggests that car-pool lanes should be open to cars with two drivers.” Let’s hope they’re driving in the same direction.
Politix: Veteran ad man David Stern, whose mom’s on the county council, is running for mayor. His best qualification is having invented the Happy Face, the quintessential politician’s stance. (It’s also become a symbol of neo-psychedelia, ironically since he made it to give Univ. Fed. Savings a wholesome family image in contrast to the image of the U-District in `69)…. Let’s try to get this straight: Our state’s Tom Foley’ll be House Speaker if Jim Wright has to quit over moneymaking schemes, including his wife’s unspecified work for our state’s Pacific Institute (the success-seminar outfit whose payroll also includes Emmett Watson and legend-in-his-own-mind DJ Bob Hardwick). It’s almost as juicy as the discovery of a real Texas oilman named J.R. Ewing, implicated in the Iran-Contra cash flow. After involving so many guys with cartoon names (Casper, Poindexter, Felix), it’s fitting the scandal include other parts of the American mythos.
Junk Food of the Month: White Castle Frozen Burgers. After following the elaborate heating instructions (involving foil and paper towels), you get something that looks and vaguely tastes like the food at an East Coast restaurant chain of undeserved reputation…. WSU’s launching a “distinguished professorship in fast food management,” underwritten by Taco Bell.
‘Til June, wear lotsa Parfum Bic, visit the Speakeasy café on Roosevelt (latter-day note: No relation to the later Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown), and try to be patient during the remaining 14 months ’til the Goodwill Games.
4/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
THIS MONTH: ABSOLUTELY NOTHINGÂ 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.”
2/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
EVEN WITHOUT 3D GLASSES,
THIS COLUMN IS AS SHARP AND CLEAR AS EVER
Here at Misc., we’re still wondering how soon a Mercury Scorpio is going to crash into a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Aries because the driver didn’t read his signs.
Goodtime Charley’s Got the Blues: Royer chose to quit rather than face a re-election referendum on his move from neighborhoods’ champion to developers’ patsy. Instead of dwelling on it, let’s just remember what his sister-in-law Jennifer James might say: that we must “cut the losses” from relationships that have become unworkable, acknowledge the pain of betrayal, and then move on.
No No-Host Bar: Alcoholics Anonymous’ world convention is coming to Seattle next year, but the best news is the appropriate name of AA’s site-selection consultant: Slack, Inc.
21 Luscious Shades of Red Ink: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman, after buying a string of bankrupt savings and loans, just added Marvel Comics as a “cash cow” to support the S&Ls. Will America’s financial security be ruined if kids don’t buy enough copies ofShe-Hulk one month? Will folks get handsome Ultima II tote bags with every $10,000 deposit?
Holds Up Longer Than You Do: The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology and Health’s received a major federal grant to study the shelf life of condoms exposed to heat, cold, humidity, light, and air pollution. It could be another case of a package that’s more durable than the contents.
Junk Food of the Month: Seattle’s Hilton Seafoods is trying to develop the world’s first sexless clam, which presumably would be larger and/or better tasting. But would it still be an aphrodisiac?
Local Publications of the Month: For a major writing project, I’ve been researching local New Age papers. Preeminent is Seattle’s New Times, a monthly broadsheet with stories on everything from ethics for the ’90s to meditation helpers that you put on like goggles and that send pulses of light into your brain. The same publisher also does Spiritual Woman’s Times; other local journals include Olympia’s The Light (with the syndicated psychic-comic Swami Beyondananda), Bellevue’s Common Ground (items on a new locally-designed tarot deck and on “Love, Fear and Linear Thinking”), and Federal Way’s Universal Entity (the tabloid chronicle of “Zanzoona the Old Warrior” as channelled through Vancouver, WA’s MariJo Donais, who is also the reincarnated wife of Ulysses S. Grant)…. Elsewhere in the print world, the second Placebo, an occasional journal of downtown writers, has an extensive, fascinating interview with a mercenary-turned-cab-driver.
Cathode Corner: Matt Groening has made his first commercial, a Butterfinger ad with his Tracey Ullman Show characters. Too bad it wasn’t Abkar and Jeff for Doublemint…. Geraldo Rivera and Cheech Marin have gotten together to buy TV stations. I can just see their “Point-Counterpoint” segments on the nation’s drug menace.
Dead Air: KLSY now has a fax request line, so you can use the newest technology to hear the most archaic music of any non-oldies station. I was recently force-fed two hours of the station in a dentist’s chair and can define one version of hell as sitting under bright fluorescent with a stranger of the same sex in your mouth and George Michael on loud. (Even worse, I got gold put in me the same month I called gold “outski” for ’89.)
Boox & Bux: For too long, bibliophiles have overrated the written word as more honest than other media. That myth should be retired now that we have “product placements” in novels (Maserati paid to be mentioned in Power City by Beth Ann Herman). So that’s what all the brand-name-dropping in the Literary Brat Pack has been about. The book’s publisher, Bantam, is one of three US publishing giants now owned by Germany’s Bertlesmann, who also bought RCA/Arista Records (yes, Spike Jones’s classic song “In Der Fuhrer’s Face” is now owned by the Germans).
Graphic Details: The new Pogo is almost as good as the old. It’s even done what Doonesbury never really has: slam the newspaper biz (though its target was USA Today, considered the young hussy of the industry by the genteel journalism establishment)…. TheTimes has deservedly awarded Calvin and Hobbes the highest honor a comic strip can get: the top Sunday space, displacing Peanuts after more than 20 years.
Bend Over, Johnny Depp: A 25-year-old Dallas undercover cop, posing as a high school student, was spanked by an assistant principal for tardiness. (He could have alternately faced detention.)
Shifting Into “D”: The Democratic Party has finally done something smart in getting ready to pick ex-Jesse Jackson aide Ron Brown as its new national chair. Brown’s strategies for Jackson (healing rifts between races and interest groups, attracting previous nonvoters) are just what the party needs. The Demos’ve lost two presidential races with the “Lite Right” policy of shunning the party’s heritage and most faithful followers to aim slick marketing at some mythical conservative “swing voter.” That policy will not work with any future candidate, as some Demo bigwigs are figuring out at last.
Hershey’s Kisser: Barbara Hershey, for reasons explicable only by vanity and Hollywood trendiness, has had silicone implants put in her lips. This is the same person who, when she was married to one of the Carradine boys, was such a Natural Woman that she briefly changed her last name to Seagull.
`Til the March column (which may include a report from the First Annual Singles’ Festival and Trade Show), beware of films about the Black Struggle in which no black actor’s billed higher than fifth, read Dictionary of the Khazars, and ponder this appropriate-for-Valentine’s line from local writer Theodore Roethke: “I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?”
1/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
WHAT’S MORE PATHETIC:
JAMES BROWN IN JAIL
OR LITTLE RICHARD ON HOLLYWOOD SQUARES?
Welcome to the first `89 edition of Misc., the column that celebrates the end of the eight-year Age of Reagan and awaits the end of the 13-year Age of Cocaine. That’s about how long American attitudes and behavior have reflected those of coke users (aggressive euphoria, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money). In what drug experts call “co-dependency,” these traits have spread to non-users, even to many who officially oppose the drug itself. It’s clearly shaped the power madness of much of the Reagan Administration. Reagan himself is a coke-addicted filmmaker’s stereotype of a statesman, a “high concept” hero. As violent as today’s coke gangs are, the big damage done by the drug is that done to our economy, culture and social fabric by business and government leaders who, often unknowingly, take the coke rush as their model for success.
This derangement is most visible in the obsessive speculation that’s captivated big business, exemplified by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Besides its recent gobbling of RJR Nabisco, KKR now controls Safeway and Fred Meyer (for a near-monopoly of the Oregon grocery biz), plus Dillingham-Foss Tug, Red Lion Inns, Motel 6, Playtex, and the onetime icon of corporate appetites, Beatrice.
International House Style: The next phase of drug-inspired behavior may be a return from effrontery to withdrawn introspection. Seattle’s Happy Face symbol and Seattle’s big sweatshirts are keystones of the Acid House style now popular in UK discos. The fad, which also involves Chicago-invented dance music and Swiss-invented LSD (or at least visuals inspired by it), should reach these shores in toned-down form this year. By then the Brits’ll be into something else.
Brought to You by the Letter “X”: Roscoe Orman, the kindly Gordon on Sesame Street, has celebrated the show’s 20th year by settling on child support for a viewer he helped create in Oregon in 1985. Some who grew up with the show may gasp at the thought of Orman and his therapist lover singing “Which of These Things Belong Together,” but I knew there was another side to him since the time he challenged the “exclusive” terms of his contract by moonlighting as a pimp on All My Children.
From Pawn to Queen: This was the first American Xmas for Elena Akhmilovskaya, now settled in Seattle after suddenly marrying US National Team captain John Donaldson. You’ll find our fair city far different from Moscow. Here, jeans are plentiful and chess players rare. And please go to more restaurants than just the Last Exit.
Cathode Corner: Filming PBS’Â Ramona in Toronto destroys the thing I loved most as a kid about Beverly Cleary’s books: that unlike anything else in kid-lit, they took place in a land I’d actually been to (Oregon)…. The new baseball TV deal means more $$ to the owners, fewer games to the viewers (12 instead of 30). More games’ll be on cable, but at what price? At least we might have to see fewer racist Joe Piscopo commercials.
Stamp Act: The US Postal Service is retouching a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, removing a bare nipple from the goddess of Liberty. Maybe we could use a revolution of our own.
Local Publications of the Month: ‘Twas a big season for local nonfiction (Boz, Knox, Robert Fulgham). I was more impressed by a well-made if kitschy fantasy, Frederick & Nelson’s Freddy Bear’s Favorite Christmas, a combined book-music box with text by our ol’ buddy Gretchen Lauber… Portland’s Northwest Computer News has started a Washington edition to compete with Puget Sound Computer User. The first News is full of cracks at User for reprinting a lot of material from its Minnesota parent paper…. The Real Comet Press plans to start a quarterly anthology of local comix, to be sold nationally.
Update: Last Jan., I told of changes in my hometown of Marysville. Now it’s a whole different place. Half the downtown’s been razed for a mall. The north side of town has two huge discount stores and a full compliment of middlebrow chain stores. Running between the two retail areas is a bus made up to look like a trolley (talk about a Neighborhood of Make-Believe). The countryside’s almost all gone from farming to tract houses. There’s even an indoor movie house (all we had was the Thunderbird Drive-In, still there). Still, some aspects of the old mill-town lifestyle remain: the video stores have such titles as Cut Your Own Deer At Home.
`Til our fab Feb. edition, visit the CT&T Gift Shop in Wallingford, admire the McDonald’s-sponsored hologram cover on National Geographic’s centennial edition (an issue all about our threatened Earth, not discussing the danger from foam boxes or razing forests for beef grazing), and ponder whether Shelley was predicting oldies radio when he wrote, “The world is weary of the past/Oh, might it die or rest at last.”
INS & OUTS FOR ’89
As always, this list might not reflect what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the year. This is not a substitute for professional tarot reading.
12/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
WE’LL SUPPORT UNITED KEEPING THE TOKYO ROUTEONLY IF THEY’LL CUT THE “DISCO GERSHWIN” ADS
Look: I’m not “just kidding folks.” When I say something here in Misc., I MEAN IT. (OK, the call for a crackdown on violent opera music was a bluff, but nothing else.) The louder I state that these are my sincere opinions, the more some people brush me off with a smug wink. If I were the uncaring, insincere cynic I’ve been cracked up to be, I’d be a Republican, or at least the Good Company producer who put a Gamblers Anonymous show on election day.
Anyhow, this month’s column is dedicated to Seattle’s newest grocery chain, Shop-Rite. Shopping, of course, IS a rite, especially in December. Hot Xmas gifts this year include the new plastic teen makeup kit (for plastic teens?) that looks just like a fishing-tackle box (“date bait” indeed). Those going east can get that special gift at NYC’s new Soap Opera Furniture Store, selling surplus room settings from daytime dramas. Sign up now for a bar stool from Ryan’s Hope. The 13-year-old show, which launched the career of sometime Seattle actress Kate Mulgrew, is being axed to give more time to local legend Sandy Hill’s Home show.
Unlisted: Washington mag’s list of “100 Washingtonians Who’ve Changed the World” left out Ray Charles, Judy Collins, David Lynch, Mary Livingstone, Dyan Cannon, Carol Channing, Lynda Barry, Martha Graham, John Cage, Quincy Jones, Steve Miller, Willie Nelson (once a Vancouver, Wash. DJ), the Sonics rock group, Robert Culp, Dawn Wells, Patrick Duffy, Mark Tobey, Mark Morris, Larry Coryell, Robert Cray, Chet Huntley, John Saul, etc. My biggest beef is leaving out Spokane-born Chuck Jones, perhaps the greatest maker of animated films ever. Any list to leave him out must have been edited by Elmer Fudd.
Towering Achievement?: In a rare show of minor courage, the City Council voted a temporary, slight restriction on new highrises (with exceptions for some well-connected projects). In all other recent cases save one, the city’s succumbed like a lapdog to the developers. Will it really serve the public interest at last? (Personally, I like the Wash. Mutual Tower and some of the others, and realize that office-building is inevitable in an economy gone from making stuff to pushing paper. But that’s no excuse to do it as poorly and inconsiderately as it’s too often been.)
Space Exploration: You may know that the name of the new AFLN gallery-cafe on E. Madison stands for “A Frilly Lace Nightie.” You may not know that the bldg. was the shrink’s office in House of Games (one of the few sites in the film still standing, just two years later). The nearby Bagel Deli on 15th now has keen art shows of its own.
Faulty Femmes: I submit that Robin Givens IS NOT the “most hated woman in America,” as charged by some paper. But who is? Imelda Marcos, the likeliest prospect, is just a resident alien here. Others frequently disliked, often undeservedly, include Phyllis George, Tammy Bakker, Tipper Gore, Yoko Ono, Linda Ronstadt, Phyllis Schlafley, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Burford, and Springsteen’s new girlfriend. Pretty slim pickings, but once more women achieve positions of real power, more will emerge who truly deserve our loathing.
Music Notes: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Posse on Broadway, with great shots of Dick’s and Taco Bell, made the MTV rap show, but became “Stir Mix-A-Lot” in the credit…. Yuban Coffee is sponsoring this year’s performances of The Nutcracker. If the girl had had the coffee, she wouldn’t have slept and there’d be no show.
Local Publication of the Month: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. To Vancouver, B.C.’s Brian Fawcett, Pol Pot’s crimes are just an extreme form of what the media/corporate culture’s doing to us: fostering passive obedience by destroying history, memory, community and individuality. I don’t buy all of it, but admire his passion and technique, cross-referencing St. Paul, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Homer, satellite dishes, Expo 86 and Reggie Jackson…. On the Bus,Metro’s newest newsletter, gives driving but not bus directions to a bus-base open house.
Graphic Details: Fantagraphics Books, America’s premier publisher of alternative comics (including Seattleite Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff ), is moving here from LA. It’s not a big boost to the local economy (its prestige title, Love and Rockets, sells under 20,000 copies), but is a clear sign of our emergence as a graphic-arts mecca. In another positive move, the UW’ll now require arts credits by incoming frosh. Maybe that’ll stop state school districts from killing arts classes.
Disappearing Ink: As you know, we believe in reading everything. Now, that “everything” may shrink. Two vital news sources, theChristian Science Monitor and Mother Jones magazine, are reportedly switching to yuppified formats with less political and foreign news, and in MJ even “upscale” lifestyle features. MJ, which prides itself as the biggest left-leaning rag since WWI, ought to know that the Yuppie media aesthetic, selecting a rich minority as the only people worthy of attention, is inherently reactionary.
The REAL Skinhead Story: After a tragic murder in Portland, the media have branded every kid with a shaved head a racist thug. Not true. The few who are thugs specifically follow 10-year-old UK grooming fads and the “ethnic-purity” policies of the British and French “National Front” movements (and the most virulently pro-apartheid groups in South Africa). Purity, of course, is for geeks. Anybody who goes killing or bashing people to prove how superior he is obviously isn’t.
Until we next meet in the new year, with our annual In/Out list (your suggestions still solicited), help fight to save the Music Hall and the Hat n’ Boots gas station, and heed the words of VH-1 VJÂ Ben Sidran: “War is never as much fun as a good piece of music.”
11/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
DATE OF FIRST STORE XMAS DISPLAY
SIGHTED THIS YEAR: 9/20
begin our November Misc., here’s a no-prize trivia quiz: Name the only major Seattle-based bank that hasn’t changed name or ownership since ’81. Answer below.
I’m writing this, and some of you’ll read it, before 11/8. If you consider yourself a progressive but don’t vote, you’re doing just what the Right hopes you’ll do. In any case, this was last big TV election. As viewership declines and diffuses, media campaigns’ll give way to grass-roots politics, a return neither party’s ready for. The society’s already changing (perhaps not as quickly as I’d like) from that mythical Great Unwashed to a more diverse, active populace. You see it in Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega topping the charts, in a peacetime peak in campus activism, in cultural events outdrawing sports at the box office (though sports still get more beer money). Politicians don’t see it, nor do polls weighted to emphasize “likely voters” (to demographically match ’84 Reaganites).
My Kinda Town: Was recently in that mecca for all column lovers, Chicago, a town with many Seattle ties despite the wresting of Seattle’s Westin and Frederick & Nelson from their old Chicago owners. Generra, Union Bay, Shah Safari, Egghead Software, Starbucks and Eddie Bauer (in a store right under the elevated-train tracks) are strongly represented there. Their baseball teams lose as often as the M’s, but at least they (especially the Cubs) still know to put on a great show.
Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Mini-Muffins, spongy little mouthfuls in six muffiny flavors including blueberry. They’re even microwaveable (but not the foil bag they come in). Their slogan: “Tradition You Can Taste.” Some of their ingredients: Guar gum, xanthan gum, sodium stearol lactylate, sorbitan monostearate and calcium acetate.
Cathode Corner: Sure missed Jim McKay during the Olympics. If Dick Clark could have shows on all three networks at once, couldn’t McKay be on two?… Despite Ted Turner’s rush to colorize his cinematic booty (partly to gain new copyrights on the films, which start going public-domain in 15 years), his TNT channel shows how beautiful black-and-white can be with the best prints. Tugboat Annie, the only golden-age feature made in Seattle, is stupendous in crisp 35mm.
Dead Air: For the record, KJET was sold to out-of-staters and promptly replaced by the area’s sixth oldies station. DJ Jim Keller’s still on the payroll, researching the potential of new music via “pay radio” (envisioned in the ’50s by my idol, comic Stan Freberg) using cable or FM sideband frequencies a la Muzak. Backlash sez management mercilessly killed it by suddenly ordering a switch to the station’s infamous tape system, preventing on-air goodbyes. The real blame goes to the GOP-controlled FCC, for letting stations be bought and sold for pure speculation and run with no commitment to anything except a quick buck.
Mobil 1, Washington 0: There’ll be no more Mobil gas stations in the Northwest as of next year, ending a history going back to the General and Gilmore (builder of Washington’s oldest refinery) brands, bought up by Mobil back in the ’50s. I guess we didn’t watchMasterpiece Theater enough. Old Pegasus will still fly, however, on classic signs at the General Petroleum Museum on E. Pine and an Edmonds antique store.
For better or worse (probably, I reluctantly say, for better), Seattle changed forever the day Westlake Center opened. It’s architecturally flawed (and the big sign on the top level has got to go), but has a few nice stores and is a great gathering place. The mall, more “intimate” than suburban malls (less non-revenue-producing corridor space), was stuffed w/manic shoppers the first days; the only calm people were the Living Mannequins. In the 12 days the mall was open but Pine St. wasn’t, people got to the mall and other shops just fine, thank you. There’s no proven reason to let cars back on that block.
News Items of the Month: BrightStar Technologies of Bellevue’s selling computer software with “the next step toward true artificial intelligence.” Accept no imitations… KPLU reported a “multiple car semi accident” on 10/21. Does that mean somebody might have meant to crash?…Â Fame, a new mag started by ex-Interview staffers, touts sheer and see-thru fashion as the return of a classic style. Unlike the miniskirt, nobody’s likely to turn this classic into a business suit.
Local Publications of the Month: Woodsmen of the West, a 1908 Canadian novel just now released stateside by Seattle’s Fjord Press, is a lively tale of logging, shipping and drinking on the B.C. coast…. Inside Chess, a biweekly from local grandmaster Yassar Seirawan, is the biggest attempt in years at an independent U.S. chess journal. For those with at least a moderate interest in the game’s inner workings.
The Plane Truth?: Uncredited, unsubstantiated claims in the press posit that sick Boeing workers may just be stricken by “mass hysteria” and not by the admittedly-harmful chemicals they work with. I thought we were past the time when managements could just plant the company line into papers.
Frame-Ups: The best things at the Pacific Northwest Art Expo were in the WWU booth: instructor Tom Schlotterback’s small surrealist oils. “Woman Menaced by Rodent” and “Genuine Candy-Striped Jesus Christ” looked even greater than they sound.
Which Came First?: Univ. Way now has restaurants called China First and New China First. (They could have called the new space China Second, but that ‘d be a throwback to the old Two-China Policy.)
Fatty Deposits: Rainier Bank should’ve changed its name back to National Bank of Commerce; instead it’s another variation on “California Carpetbagger Bank of Washington.” I had a temp job on the 13th floor ( they dared to have one) of the Rainier Tower, in the international dep’t. (closed by the Calif. owners). This job was during the big ’85 snow; female employees who couldn’t get home that night were put up in a hotel and given X-large Seahawk T-shirts for sleepwear. (Trivia answer: Washington Mutual.)
‘Til December, send in your suggestions for our In-Out list, don’t buy Adidas cologne (advertised as “The Essence of Sports”), pay homage at G. Washington’s stained-glass portrait at UW Health Sciences (with “What, Me Worry?” inscribed in Latin at the architect’s orders) and heed the words of novelist Judith Krantz: “Dan Quayle is the sort of man who, if he were in a Theodore Dreiser novel, would get the girl pregnant, take her out in a rowboat and throw her overboard.”
9/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
ANOTHER CALIF. LAND DEVELOPER
BUYS A SEATTLE TEAM!
FANS PLAN TO SPEND
SUN. AFTERNOONS KNITTING!
Welcome to the September Back-to-Cool edition of Misc., the column that still wonders why they called it the Elliot Bay Jazz Festival when it was held on the shores of Lake Washington. We could also wonder why that group of mostly easy-listening acts was called a “jazz festival,” but we’ve too many new wonders to deal with this month.
Philm Phun: MTV’s been showing a two-minute, censored and colorized version of the Surrealist classic short Un Chien Andalou at unannounced times lately. Yes, what was once shocking is now just another part of the Cash-from-Chaos culture. Meanwhile, our buddy Jean-Luc Godard has recommended that French TV colorize his original Breathless — and show it with commercials, something they’re only starting to do over there, over the dead bodies of the French cultural priesthood…. A National Medal of Arts was just awarded to Gordon Parks, presumably for his photography, not for directing Shaft.
Junk Food of the Month: Oscar Meyer Lunchables, boxed snacks containing eight little slices of luncheon meat, eight little slices of bread, eight crackers, and one napkin, for $1.39 — about the price of a regular-size package of each non-napkin ingredient. Tastes OK, too.
Cathode Corner: KING, publicly disappointed by such syndicated offerings as The New Queen for a Day, will add another hour of local talk in the afternoon. That’ll give the station some 34 local hours a week, to my knowledge a Seattle record (aside from public-access cable)…. KIRO called its telecast of the last hydro race Super Boat Sunday instead of the Budweiser Cup. Bud had paid to sponsor the race itself, but not the telecast. ‘Tho, as about the only racing camp with enough bucks and spare parts to run a complete race, the Miss Budweiser boat kept the beer’s name on Wayne Cody’s lips all day…. Troubled? Can’t relax? Try one of two newly announced videocassettes. One shows a parade of sheep for you to count (with a soothing Brahms soundtrack); the other has a Video Psychiatrist who “listens” to your situation, occasionally nodding his head and asking you to elaborate a little further.
Local Publication of the Month: Sophie Callie’s Suite Venitienne, from Seattle’s Bay Press. The Parisian-based author/photographer trails a near-stranger named Henri B. to and around the streets of Venice, secretly taking pictures of his movements and writing a running essay justifying her actions. Not only is that cool enough, but at no extra charge you also get Jean Baudrillard’s thinkpiece on surveillance in modern life, “Please Follow Me.”
Repo Men: First and foremost, Dan Quayle does not look like Robert Redford. He looks like Pat Sajak (who did serve in Vietnam, tho’ in a noncombat role with Armed Forces Radio). In contrast, Bush looks like all the small-town lawyers on Scooby-Doo after their ghost masks were removed. The difference is that those villains were businessmen disguised as monsters; the reverse is true of George.
Slipped Discs: The compact-disc reign of terror has claimed its first victim. Jem Records, America’s pioneer distributor of import and independent music, filed for bankruptcy protection after a planned merger with Enigma fell through. Without major-label promo bucks, Jem couldn’t keep its roster of cult favorites (Brian Eno, the early X albums) from getting pushed out of stores eager to make way for more oldies CD’s. (The totally unrelated Jem rock-fashion dolls are also doing poorly, and may be discontinued.) Locally, the owners of Standard Records and Hi-Fi on NE 65th have chosen to close Seattle’s greatest non-rock record store. It was the best place to get any classical, jazz or swing record, and the last in town with ’30s-style listening booths…. The record division of Toshiba, a worldwide military-tech supplier, has refused to release a Japanese cover of “Love Me Tender” with new anti-nuke lyrics from distribution. The singer is suing. Now thank your stars GE sold RCA’s record unit.
Star Trysts: Hugh Hefner’s bride had to sign extensive anti-alimony waivers giving her no opportunity to inherit the Playboy empire (still oozing money, mainly from the last non-publishing units). Ol’ Hef wants daughter Christine (12 years older than her new stepmom) to get it all, or whatever’s still there.
Center of Dispute: A recent evening found Patti Smith’s song “The People Have the Power” on the P.A. at the Fun Forest, which the Disney consultants want to replace with an upscale (read: “Tourist”) amusement complex across 5th Ave. N. Other parts of their Seattle Center plan have been modified to have less L.A. kitsch than originally envisioned, but it’s still a potential WPPSS of parks in its scale and boondoggle potential, when all the Center really needs is some structural fix-up and a visual-arts space to replace the SAM Pavillion. Other expenditures can wait while more Seattle-appropriate ideas are developed, preferably by citizens. Or as Smith sez, “The people have the power/To redeem the work of fools.”
‘Til Next Time, avoid 7-Up Gold (the first cinnamon-flavored soda), read the new autobio of Portland’s own Mel Blanc, vote in the primary, don’t get snared into the Olympic medal-counting game, and keep those recycling cartons full.
THE OFFICIAL MISC. READING LIST
Folks often ask, “Where d’ya get all that stuff you write about?”
It’s simple: Everywhere.
Here are some of the sources I try to get around to
at least every now and then.
Read the widest possible range for a healthy intellectual diet.
3/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Back to Our Pre-Taped Profiles
After This Pause for a Sports Event
At Misc., we’re glad Metro’s finally getting those tired Earth Shoe colors off their buses (as part of their continuing belief that promotion is more important to a bus line than reliable service). Let’s paint ’em in the colors that Seattle has sold to the world: screeching primary and secondary colors, in goofily overstated patterns with odd typography along the sides. The first Generra designer bus! I can hardly wait.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: A while since we had this section, but so much to report now. First, there’s Simplesse, the genetically engineered “fake fat” from the makers of NutraSweet. Then there was that great Nova show on how food technologists take consumer demands for natural foods and end up making cylindrical wafers with imitation cheese-flavored fillings, chemically bonded to maintain a “creamy” texture and all “co-extruded” from a machine in long rolls. But perhaps the biggest news in the field is that Dannon yogurt, one of the last “pure” snacks left, now comes in plastic cups instead of waxed cardboard. You can’t even go natural anymore without buying non-biodegradable petrochemicals.
CATHODE CORNER: Previews of The Wonder Years, the first show to treat people my age as the target of nostalgia, aren’t encouraging: Horribly cute little boys and the same ’60s soul classics you hear today in bad commercials. The 12-year-old kids I knew at the time thought those songs were OK but preferred the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. — music for kids left behind by progressive rock. Just as we were becoming teens, suddenly it wasn’t cool to be a teen anymore. We learned the media only cared about people 10 years older than us and always would…. At least until MTV. In that channel’s most amazing promo yet, five young actors stand on a stage and chant, “How do you do, Mr. Ginsberg. I would like you to know that the best minds of my generation are rich and famous.” Not quite true, of course; the best minds of my generation are really bankrupting themselves in self-publishing, paying off video camcorders, and fighting to get airplay.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Shelby Gilje, Times, 2/12): “Playskool has Dolly Surprise, whose hair grows when you raise her right arm.” I knew the Sisterhood-Is-Powerful look would come back.
MUSICAL MENACE: At a performance of Seattle Opera’s Orpheus and Eurydice, a man stood up from his seat, yelled “This is dogshit,” and left. They’re trying to identify him from his seat position, in hopes of revoking his season ticket. Earlier, a guy jumped to his death from the balcony at NY’s Metropolitan Opera. I tell you, this Satanic opera music is causing demented behavior. Why aren’t officials demanding warning labels on opera records? Why are opera companies allowed to serve wine at intermissions? Why aren’t opera audiences strip-searched? You don’t know what they could be hiding in those long gowns!
CALGARY REPORT (via Dave Bushnell): “Everybody’s very friendly. When a guy I met tried to climb over a fence to get into an event, the cops asked him to come down, checked his ID, and found out he was going to have a birthday in a couple of days. They sent him a birthday card at his hotel. With all the offices built in the last oil boom, the whole city looks like it just sprang into being in the last few years. You can see multi-million-dollar developments right next to these small suburban houses. One man refused to let the Olympics tear down his little house next to the ski jump; he finally agreed to let them use it as a press office. A strip joint was told it couldn’t use the Olympics name, so it instead ran a “Miss O-Word Contest.” I was with Seattle TheaterSports in the Olympic Arts Festival. We competed against teams from the US, Canada, England and Australia, and came this close to the bronze. Really.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Ex-UW prof Molly (only spiritually related to Shere) Hite’s Class Porn suffers from the most overused plot for first novels (English teacher tries to write her first novel), but it does have one nice twist. After the heroine struggles to create a positive erotic fantasy for women, the result reads just like the plot of a Russ Meyer movie. The heroine doesn’t even realize this; Hite might not either…. Memo to Feminist Baseball: Thanx for your last ‘zine, but I really think deliberate amateurism is passé (as is Michael Jackson bashing).
CAUCUS QUIPS: As our state prepares to be ignored by the candidates and press on Sooper Toosday, let’s glimpse the political realm. Like an awakened sleepwalker saying “Did I really do that?”, more citizens are incredulously realizing they’ve let a gang of grafters, demagogues and confidence artists use our government and economy as their playthings. Others, terrified by the risks associated with reality, are frenetically trying to keep the Reagan illusion alive. But as The Nation (2/6) sez, the leading Democrats (and, to a lesser extent, Dole) are selling progressive populism to a degree beyond anything McGovern did (and often beyond their own voting records). When it’s become hard to even imagine a presidency based on real decency, it’s a miracle that so many voters are insisting that there must and can be a better way.
CLOSE: ‘Til the April Showers come our way (presuming we ever have them), be sure to watch the BBC soap EastEnders on KTPS, vote for Ray Charles and Stan Boreson in The Rocket’s Northwest Music Hall of Fame poll, go to the caucuses, and join us next time.
6/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
IT’S THE DAWS BUTLER MEMORIAL EDITION,
AND DON’T YOU FOR-GIT IT!
Welcome to the second-anniversary edition of Misc. This ragtag collection of little notices from all over does have some goals. I want to celebrate the chaotic, post-postmodern world of ours, and call for a world much like we have now but with more love and less attitude. I want to exalt English as a living, growing language. I want to separate political liberalism from the cultural conservatism that led so many post-’60s youth to view liberals as old fuddyduddies. I want to proclaim that you can be intellectually aware and still like TV.
Why the New Rainier Beer Ads Suck: They’re a Frisco ad agency’s idea of what us Northwest hicks’ll fall for: Pavlov/Spielberg stimulus-response images, based on tourist attractions and phony regional pride. They’re as awful as the big beers’ ads, without the media budget to pull it off. The new “small-capitals” logotype looks too much like that of Rainier Bank. It’s all because the brewery was sold to Australian mogul Alan Bond, who more recently bought out fellow Aussie Robert Holmes a Court (the man who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson). Bond also has large business ties with Chilean dictator Pinochet (gold mines, a phone company). Response to the ads has been underwhelming, while old Rainier posters sold briskly at the U-District Street Fair.
A Permanent Underground Tour: Bill Speidel, who died this month, was one of the first to write seriously about Seattle as a real city, with its own brief but vital history. Too few have followed his lead; “Northwest Writers” are still expected to do free verse about scenery, not narratives about people. Yet he’ll be remembered whenever Northwesterners seek an honest regional identity from holding on to one’s past: Not nostalgia for a nonexistent “simpler time” or the old west of movies, but a raucous cavalcade of pioneers and profiteers, matrons and whores, all trying to muddle through life much as we try now.
Local Publications of the Month: First, the fine mag misidentified here last time as Ground Zero is really Zero Hour. The temporal-spatial discord resolved, let’s discuss newspapers ashamed of their own towns. The Herald and The Morning News-Tribune no longer carry any front-page clue to their origins (Everett and Tacoma). The Daily Journal-American never had Bellevue in its name. Each wants to be identified not with real cities but with its own mapped-out segment of Suburbia USA, the everywhere/nowhere.
Junk Food of the Month: The experimental no-melt chocolate invented by our pals, the Battelle Memorial Institute. Since it stays solid at temperatures below 98.6 F, will the makers of car seats and kids’ clothes conspire to keep it off the market?
One More Time: Sequels, those efficient re-uses of pre-sold titles, have become vital parts of conglomerate-owned film studios. The trend has grown to the literary classics with the announced book project Gone With the Wind II. But I’m waiting for the Romeo and Juliet follow-up being written by ’68 movie Romeo Leonard Whiting. I want to know how they manage to be alive after part 1, but also whether they can keep their relationship growing amidst the problems of everyday life.
The Big Lie Indeed: Drugs continue to be used as the Red Scare of the Late ’80s, an excuse for anti-democratic actions of many kinds. Locally, Doug Jewett uses it to promote the destruction of low-income housing, and the Blaine feds are seizing vehicles for just an ash of pot (not the most enlightened way to reduce the budget deficit). Nationally, the Army’s being brought into domestic law enforcement (just like in drug-exporting states such as Panama). Some would prefer that the anti-drug cause remain associated with fascist tactics, so that non-fascists will keep getting hooked and killed in the name of rebellion. But there are better ways to approach the issue, such as shown on a new bumper sticker: “Stop Contra Aid — Boycott Cocaine.”
Goin’ to Jackson: It’s no wonder some have tried, and others may try, to kill Jesse Jackson, for he’s more than a soon-to-be-ex-candidate. He’s overseen a realignment of American politics, away from of the era of the Gilded Right and the Gelded Left. No longer can liberals bask in smug defeatism, readily accepting conservatives’ portrayal of things. (Most Americans never were flaming Falwellians, but the anti-Falwell set bought Falwell’s claim that they were.) Jackson’s shown that a universal movement for change can happen, whether party regulars are involved or not.
Cathode Corner: Johnny Carson may be writing his own bad jokes during the writers’ strike, but you won’t hear any gags about his financial advisor, “Bombastic Bushkin.” Johnny and the real Henry Bushkin have broken their long partnership. Some of Bushkin’s deals, such as investing in Houston real estate just before the oil bust, have come too close to the ones in old Carson monologues.
Loco Affairs: Martin Selig sez he wants a more beautiful downtown. He’s offered to pay the city to let him tear down the homely Public Safety Bldg. We could think of a few other buildings worthy of removal, ones for which he already owns all rights….The Westlake Center nears completion, and the developers’ intentions for the land the city gave them are appearing. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports local merchants as essentially fainting or laughing at the center’s proposed rents. Most tenants, the Journal sez, “are expected to be national chains.”
Ad Copy of the Month (by CBS Records for UK band Raymonde): “Let’s just say it falls someplace between Joy Division and the Beach Boys.”
Ride ‘Em: Metro’s losing passengers while Snohomish County Community Transit can’t stuff folks on board fast enough. To learn why, just ride a CT bus to Everett some night. It’s a nice, big, comfy bus, in pleasant colors. It’s a bus people can actually want to ride, and they do. But the folks at Metro were too busy to notice one of their own officials skimming the cash boxes, so we can’t expect ’em to learn from their neighbors’ success.
Close: ‘Til next time, petition KIRO to bring back Mighty Mouse, visit the 6 Star Factory Outlet store in W. Seattle, and heed the words of gambler-lawman Bat Masterson: “There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in winter.”
1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?
Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.
XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.
FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.
CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.
MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).
ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.
JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.
CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.
CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.
SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.
CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.
INS AND OUTS FOR ’88
12/87 ArtsFocus Misc. Cheer Our UW in the Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl
INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.
FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.
UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)
ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.
CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.
ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.
MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.
CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).
10/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Here’s Misc., the column that’s more fun than a Shaw Island heretic nun. Opinions here aren’t necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates or its advertisers. In fact, offer me a Supreme Court post and I’ll retract or explain away any position I’ve ever taken.
The Summer of ’67 commemorations turned out to be largely duds. That’s OK, really; it’s good to see folks being respectfully apathetic towards the hippie dregs’ shrieks about their own importance. I mean, everybody back in the late ’60s can’t have been as hip ‘n’ progressive as the ex-rads now claim everyone was – somebody voted for Nixon.
But all summers must make way for autumn. Each year at this time, Seattle’s five-month ennui generated by the Mariners vanishes with the first frenzied football crowds. But this year, there’s only half the madness, with the NFL players away. One issue: owners’ demands that players take mandatory drug tests for the privilege of entertaining 60,000 drunks.
The NY Times reports an unnamed Seattle air express firm sent a rare Picasso to a Texas Air Force base instead of the eastern museum expecting it. The story didn’t say if the museum got the aircraft parts the Air Force was expecting, but they would’ve made a great found-sculpture installation (they probably cost more than the Picasso, too).
Junk food of the month:Â Souix City Sarsaparilla (made in New York), with a taste that blows root beer clean away and two stunning cowboy relief images on each exquisite bottle. Available at the Sunnyside Deli in Wallingford.
Local publication of the month: No one selection this time. Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle by Seattle is finally out, four years after it was made, and indeed worth the wait (it’s even turned out to be prophetic in its theme of an entire city disappearing before your eyes). Semiotext(e) USA, a compilation of underground-press materials co-assembled by ex-local Sue Ann Harkey, is out six months late with the best material being supplied by SubGenius Foundation cartoonist Paul Malvrides. Four-Five-One is back seven months after its fundraiser with a beautiful poster-mag featuring Marsh Gooch on Hank Williams, Angela Sorby on practical nihlism, and Kenneth M. Crawford on a toy-factory worker replaced by a machine, until “the machine eventually goes Union and puts the company back to square one.”
We’re not the only town to lose its semblence of economic power to outside speculation. AÂ Philadelphia paper sez that town, the country’s 4th biggest, is also now bereft of any big local banks and of many locally-based industries. The city celebrating the 200th birthday of the Constitution has lost the last of its economic independence.
Ann Wilson Update: The Heart singer is now seeking a husband with “streetwiseness.” Object: to sire 3 kids. . . . In other celeb gossip, one of the less harrowing parts of Patty Duke‘s memoir Call Me Anna is how she left hubby John Astin when he fell in with the fundamentalist-Buddhists and pressured her and the kids to do the same. Somehow, the vision of Gomez Addams sitting in the lotus position chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” through his cigar all day has an eerie sort of appeal to it.
The Hollywood idiots are at it again: Responding to the popularity of sexual themes in films like Betty Blue and She’s Gotta Have It, the studios have done their usual misinterpretation of the market and come up with a cycle of virulently anti-sex films. Don’t see Fatal Attraction (jilted mistress on a rampage), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (N. Mailer writes AND directs, ’nuff said), Lady Beware (creator of erotic window displays stalked by a sicko), Kandyland (exotic dancer stalked by pimps & pushers), or Blood on the Moon (feminists slaughtered by serial killer).
Among the fall TV season‘s only promising shows is Trying Times, a comedy anthology coming to PBS later this month. It was filmed in that familiar Vancouver-pretending-to-be-America, and was shown on the CBC as part of its series Lies from Lotus Land. It’s the perfect treat for your friends visiting Seattle, trying desperately to find the locations they saw in Stakeout….The Garbage Pail Kidscartoon show was unceremoniously yanked by CBS days before its debut, but don’t fret: a feature-film version is in the works.
Looks like a great theatre season in town with hot offerings coming from Performa ’87, the Group and Seattle Children’s Theatre among others. The best stage value of all has got to be New City‘s Late Night shows with music, dance and a serialized staged reading, “The Life and Times of Baby M,” every Saturday night for 99 cents.
One of Seattle’s best dinner-floor show combos is at the Broadway Jack-in-the-Box. Every Friday night, patrons are treated to the entertainment of watching an endless stream of teens barging in, walking right past the counter to the restroom doors, discovering that the restrooms are now locked to non-customers, and barging right out again without buying anything or speaking to anyone.
While you spend the next month figuring out what the Australians will buy next (after Rainier Beer and Ms. magazine; it was also an Aussie who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson), we close with some of Team Chalk‘s work at Bumbershoot: “Outwit the great theif despair — an exercise in radical trust…It’s always tornado season in someone’s heart.”
