HERE AT MISC., we continue to view with bemusement the twists of fate regarding our allegedly post-print-media era. Blockbuster Music on Lower Queen Anne now has huge window posters announcing “We Now Sell Books!” Amazon.Com Books’ stock sale is a big hit, despite the outfit’s lack of profits to date. Book superstore chains haven’t yet led to increased overall book sales (certainly not compared to all the increased retail square footage now devoted to books), but they’ve shaken up a hidebound industry and just might lead to the end of the bestseller mentality (it’s already happening in the record biz, with the same sales dollars now spread among many more releases).

And by the end of this month, local TV newscasts (not counting Northwest Cable News) will drop from a total of 13 hours per weekday (including two hours of 7 Live) down to 8.5, due to the second realignment of station ownership in two years and the return of CBS shows to KIRO. The decimation of the KSTW news operation (and smaller cutbacks at KIRO) leave some 58 station employees on the unemployment rolls. I can see it now: Blow-dried reporters on the sidewalk, in trenchcoats with white spots where station-logo patches used to be, holding up signs (printed on the backs of old cue cards) reading WILL COVER CAR CRASHES FOR FOOD.

UPDATE #1: Virtual i-O, local makers of the Virtual i-Glasses video headsets discussed here a few months back, has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-image experience, but (according to a Puget Sound Biz Journal piece) the company couldn’t get the quality and reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the company’s leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology.

UPDATE #2: The coffeehouse cereal fad quietly faded like a soggy bowl of Total. The espresso corner in the U District’s Red Light clothing store’s dropped its cereal selections; the downtown Gee Whiz cafe’s cut its own golden-bowl offerings down to a few top-rated brands.

ON THE RACKS #1: We’re still trying to make sense of People magazine’s “Sexy Moms” cover last month. They’re surprised moms can have sex appeal? The mag’s editors, like many Americans, must not realize that most people who have children have had sex first. And many of them even liked it.

ON THE RACKS #2: It’s been a quasi-frustratin’ year for this lover of obscure magazines, with the demise of the YNOT and ALFI stapled-goodie emporia. At least there’s the U-Village Barnes & Noble, where you can still get British Cosmopolitan, perhaps the sluttiest mainstream commercial women’s magazine published in the English language. Sample articles include “Why Bitches Get All the Best Men” and “The Single Woman’s Guide to the Men of Europe” (the latter complete with jokes about Bratwurst and “Nor-Dicks”). But the articles are just warm-ups for the little ads in the back of the book: phone astrology lines, phone sex lines for women, and more before-and-after implant photographs than you’d ever ever expect in the same mag with workplace-equality and anti-harassment essays in the front.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Want more proof computer geeks are the new idols? Just examine the new Think! brand “Proactive Energy” bar, using the old IBM slogan for its name and a Mac screen window on its label. Makers “Ph.D–Personal Health Development,” list a website (www.thinkproducts.com) but give no FDA-required city-state address (the website lists it as in Ventura, CA). It’s your basic exercise/ diet energy-bar thang, a fudgy-mediciny goo with a thin chocolaty coating. Mixed up in there are ginkgo biloba, choline, “complex peanut protein,” vitamins, herbs, and amino acids. It claims to “enhance the performance of your mind by promoting concentration, calmness, and stamina” if you eat one with water “30 minutes before using your brain.” But you ask, does it work? This column was written on one. Can you tell any difference?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)

MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.

His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.

If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.

I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.

One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”

But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”

Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.

There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.

Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.

Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.

Airframe crashes; Flying High cruises:

Of Wings and Tales

Book review for The Stranger, 4/10/97

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

Chricton’s Freefall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boeing’s Highs & Lows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CORREC: GameWorks does indeed have a Sonic the Hedgehog video game on the premises. Still no Crazy Climber, though…

THE MAILBAG (via Michael Jacobs): “I realize you’ve just lost all this weight and everything, but here’s the lowdown on a couple new candies. Starburst Fruit Twists: The ad looked good so I grabbed a pack. I was a bit disappointed. It was like flavored licorice, but made (I think) of that fruit-based plastic they use to make Dinosaurs fruit snacks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fruit snacks etc. Only a little harder. Reese’s Crunchy Cookie Cups: Go find some! They’re like peanut butter cups, but the inner bottom has a chocolate cookie. It’s as if Reese took an Oreo side and built a peanut butter cup around it. Suprisingly, they’re better than you’d expect by far!”

GOING FLAT?: The Northwest microbrew craze may have peaked. A recent Puget Sound Business Journal piece by M. Sharon Baker described how, after growing 20 percent a month earlier this year, state microbrewery output fell 2.5 percent in November, the last month for which the Liquor Board had numbers. The questions: Have the indies taken as much business (now 8-10 percent of local beer sales) from the big boys as they’re gonna? Have bars run out of tap space for all the hefeweizens, porters, and ales? And has that Cocktail Nation fad permanently drawn young ladies & gents away from the foamy stuff? If the latter’s true, when will “microdistilleries” pop up?

BETWEEN THE LINES: Last time, I complained about word worship–the popular-in-highbrow-circles notion that the mere activity of reading, regardless of content, automatically makes you smarter. Now I wanna discuss the similar notion of word nostalgia–the longing for a past Golden Age of U.S. publishing. Mark Crispin Miller’s Nation cover story, “The Crushing Power of Big Publishing,” embraced this nostalgia as a contrast to today’s big-stakes, corporate-dominated bookland. In my recent feature piece about Amazon.com Books, I said early-20th-century publishing only seemed “purer” because it was a more elitist cabal reaching a much smaller audience.

Since then, I’ve found corroboration via The Wonderful World of Books, published in 1952 as part of a Federal program to encourage reading. (Yes! Even back when TV was still an expensive toy found mostly in the urban Northeast, society’s bigwigs worried about folks not reading enough.) Among essays by spirited-minded citizens extolling how books are fun and nonthreatening and good for you and you really should try a few, there were numbers on the narrow scope of books then. There were only 1,500 regular bookstores, plus another 1,000 outlets (department stores, church-supply stores, gift shops) where books were sold along with other stuff. Darn few of those were outside the big cities and college towns. Mass-market paperbacks were more readily available, but they only accounted for 900 titles a year (mostly hardcover reprints) from 21 publishers. The industry as a whole produced 11,000 titles a year back then, of which 8,600 were non-reprints (including 1,200 fiction titles and 900 kids’ selections). Only 125 companies put out five or more “trade” (bookstore-market) books a year. The book also noted, “The output of titles in England often exceeds that in the United States.”

Today, a U.S. population one-and-two-thirds times as big as that in 1952 gets to choose from five times as many new books, from hundreds of small and specialty presses as well as the corporate media Miller vilifies, sold just about everywhere (96 “Books–New” entries in the Seattle Yellow Pages alone). I won’t presume to compare the quality of today’s wordsmiths to Faulkner or Hemingway, but there’s plenty more styles and a helluva lot more races and genders on the stacks now than then. Behind the celebrity bestsellers is a diverse, chaotic, unstable, lively verbiage scene. Not everybody in it’s making money these days, and a lot of good works aren’t getting their deserved recognition. But I’d much rather have the current lit-landscape, with its faults and its opportunities, than the tweed-and-ivy past Miller yearns for, when bookmaking and bookselling was run almost exclusively by and for folks like him.

TURNS OUT IT WAS EASY to lose 41 pounds (one-fifth my old weight) in 21 weeks, after years of vowing to get around to it. I knew enough about myself to know I couldn’t have a prepackaged regimen, lifestyle, or personality foisted upon me. That would have disrupted both my internal chemistry and my ingrained behavior patterns, to the point where I’d get desperate to give up.

As soon as I told some people what I was doing (I admit to having been nearly insuffrably boastful), they’d give me all sorts of detailed advice on complicated schemes and self-help-book tricks I’ve found I didn’t need: The “Chew-Chew” Diet, the Rice Diet, the Popcorn Diet, the Drinking Man’s Diet, the Reversal Diet, the Purification Diet, ab machines, daily eating schedules, Topp Fast, and even spirulina plankton.

Instead, it was just less of the same–my usual food intake, cut to a 1500 calories a day (averaged out by the week), plus a daily half-gallon of water and regular conditioning workouts. No Jenny’s Cuisine, no fat-gram counting, no simple vs. complex carbos, no Enter the Zone, and no macrobiotics.

Because I’m big on prepackaged foods, it was easy to read calories on the “Nutrition Facts” label listings. For dining out, I carried a Brand Name Calorie Counter book. I used Sweet Success diet shakes at first, but realized I could have cereal or soup or toast for the same calories.

Certain aspects of my old intake regime did wither away. Beer and I became more distant friends. I lost contact with Hostess Sno-Balls. Cookies, crackers, and chocolates remained in my life on a limited basis; at the level of maybe one chocolate-covered cherry a day.

Some parts of the regimen were odd. Most diet books are written for women, and don’t mention the masculine predicament of awaking at 4 a.m., needing to expel a lot of that drinking water yet turgidly unable to do so.

On the other hand, those books also neglect the particularly masculine ego trip of discovering one’s thighs are no longer the most forward-reaching aspect of one’s lower anatomy.

I used nonprescription appetite-suppressant pills the first few months. They made me want and not want to eat at the same time. I also found myself losing interest in other favorite stimuli, like movies and concerts. I worried I’d become one of those bland boomers I’ve always ranted against. I pondered why those turn-of-the-century railroad moguls were so fat–maybe they had a hunger to grow, to acquire. I also pondered the words of an ex-anorexic acquaintance; she’d been reared to fear sex, to the point where she literally couldn’t stand to have anything enter her body.

During those initial weeks, I developed a running daily calorie count in the part of my brain where I’m normally obsessing about women or money. I’d weigh myself more than once a day, even more than once an hour. I’d get to worrying about “plateaus” and even about whether exercise was causing me to gain muscle faster than losing fat.

Because I’ve traditionally had the approximate metabolism of a hibernating bear, I started exercising to make sure I lost fat instead of muscle. I took a twice-weekly aerobic conditioning class at Belltown Ballet and Conditioning. Because it’s coed, it doesn’t have the kind of body-image jealousy trips I’ve seen in all-male sessions and I’m told can exist in all-female sessions. Still, the class is definitely tuff stuff, especially for the first eight to ten sessions. There are still stretching positions I simply cannot attain. But I’m getting better at it, slowly. I still can’t accomplish a chin-up, but I can do more crunches than I ever could in high school PE class.

By the end, I’d lost fat faster than my skin shrank, leaving billowy folds of empty flesh containers. I felt like that Dick Tracy villain who smuggled guns in the folds of his multiple chins.

Not that people noticed any change at first. In the difficult first few weeks, a few people volunteered they saw something different about me; but they all concluded I’d just gotten a different haircut. One old acquaintance asked if I’d switched from glasses to contacts (I’ve never worn either). My mom couldn’t even see anything different about me. Only in recent weeks have people been telling me they see any change.

One reason I did this was to look more desirable here in an “alternative” subculture where the single straight male is a decidedly surplus commodity. In his recent book Eat Fat, Richard Klein claims fat feminizes men. He notes how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra refers to Cleo’s lovers getting fat in her presence as a symbol for ceding their manhood to the Egyptian seductress.

Lesbians have zines like Fat Girl; gay men have the “bears” clique. Men who love fat women, however, are often stereotyped as manipulative “chubby chasers,” out to control low-self-esteem women. And women who love fat men? Unheard of, except in places like the North American Association for Fat Acceptance.

Besides diet advice, dating advice is another of those genres almost never directed toward males. “You Must Not Be Fat,” warns Jim Deane in one of the few such books for men, The Fine Art of Picking Up Girls (1974). Deane claims there’s no such thing as a sexy fat man. I tried to think of some but only got to Brando, the later Elvis, Pavarotti, Babe Ruth, Barry White, and rapper Heavy D. More prevalant were images of near asexuality (Buddah, the later Orson Welles), arrested childhood (Curly Howard, John Belushi, John Candy), or inhumane lords of expanse (Jabba the Hutt, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, those railroad barons).

Klein’s book notes an archaic definition of “corporation” as a bodily protruberance, such as a gut: “…Like their anatomical counterparts, these great abdomens seem to aim only at expanding, greedily incorporating and consolidating in view of increasing their volume.”

Yet Klein also claims fat’s associated today with low-income, low-self-esteem people, while thinness is the visage for the rich and glamorous. The image of financial success these days is not the personal chef but the personal trainer; while today’s companies seem as insistant as Oprah to showcase their “downsizing” into new “lean and mean” forms. Klein quotes essayist Hillel Schwartz as calling yo-yo dieting “the constant frustration of desire,” a necessary mental state for Late Capitalism to function properly in selling unneeded goods (both excess food and diet schemes).

I still support International No-Diet Days and the Fat Pride movement. What I did was for me, and is not intended as a go-thou-and-do-likewise lesson. Different people have different bodies. Others may need or want to do something else, or nothing.

As for me, now comes phase two, best described by a zombie-bite victim’s deathbed promise in Dawn of the Dead: “I’ll try not to come back.”

HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.

CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.

UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.

SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”

UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”

A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.

EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.

PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

Amazon.Com Finds Dominance Thru Diversity:

Hard Copy, Hard Sell

Essay for The Stranger, 2/6/97

by Clark Humphrey

It took a while, but somebody noticed there’s one thing everybody on the Internet is doing: reading. Except for the light source, visual detail, and degree of portability, the act of following words on paper is little different from following words on screen. So it only seems natural that one of the first companies to accumulate substantial sales exclusively from online merchandising is doing so with books. What might be less expected is the company accomplishing this feat–a pure startup, not a division of any existing retail operation, a startup headed by an entrepreneur with no prior retail or computer experience to speak of.

Seattle-based Amazon.com Books (two years old as of March) has become an online success story. Whether it’ll become a business success story won’t be known for some time. While the company won’t release sales numbers (the Wall Street Journal estimates it had sales of at least $5 million in 1996), it acknowledges every dime it makes, and more, is ploughed back into growing the company’s infrastructure (to handle sales growth of 34 percent a month). With profits at least a year or two off, it’s currently living off $10 million from California venture capital and private investors.

The Secret History

Is Amazon a Seattle success story? Only sorta. Founder Jeff Bezos, now 32, was an up-‘n’-comin’ Wall Street investment banker who, like lots of folks in the mid-’90s, was looking for a way to make big bucks off this newfangled Internet craze. He first settled on the concept of catalog shopping without a catalog. He then narrowed his sights further to focus on books and music. He finally chose to just sell books at first, thinking he could get more leverage with the big book publishers than with the big record labels, even though many are parts of the same conglomerates. He picked Seattle because he figured the place was awash with both book experts and computer nuts. We’re also within a one-day UPS Surface zone from Roseburg, OR, where the Ingram wholesale company runs one of America’s biggest book warehouses.

That latter fact was vital to Bezos’s business plan. While advertising itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” and boasting of 1.1 million titles in its database, Amazon actually keeps just a few hundred bestselling titles in stock. (The Elliott Bay Book Co. and the U Village Barnes & Noble each claim over 150,000 titles on the premises. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, which offers both in-person and online ordering, claims 500,000 new and used selections.)

Everything else is special-ordered, just like a regular bookstore can do for you. If a title isn’t stocked by Ingram or one of the other wholesalers with whom it’s in regular communication, Amazon will attempt to contact the publisher (or even the author) direct. Originally, this scheme meant Amazon could start in March 1995 with little more than a couple of PCs and a makeshift office in a Bellevue garage. Now, it means the company doesn’t have to worry about that bane of traditional retailers, unsold or unsaleable inventory. (Retailers can return most books to distributors for full credit; but they still cost time and money to get and hold onto.)

Why It Works

The Microsoft online zine Slate dissed Amazon in January. The article by Jonathan Chait and Stephen Glass, “Amazon.con,” claimed Amazon didn’t provide anything significantly cheaper, faster, or better gift-wrapped than one could get special-ordering from a regular bookstore. Over 200 loyal Amazon customers emailed critical letters to Slate in response, some from as far as Malaysia, Kuwait, and Germany; all exhorting the praises of Amazon’s service and selection. (Microsoft, it turns out, is in cahoots with Wal-Mart to start a rival online bookstore.)

Besides English-speakers overseas, who’s Amazon good for? Folks who are online a lot and like the convenience of staying online while they shop. Folks in search of the obscure and unusual (scientific and technical documents, car manuals, cult stuff, regional-interest books for a region they’re not currently living in). Folks who live outside big towns and don’t like the censored, mainstreamed fare at their Wal-Mart book department. Folks who like mail-order book buying but want more selection than book clubs or printed catalogs can offer.

Jennifer Cast, Amazon’s acting VP of marketing, claims the company’s secret lies in “a value proposition people can’t get in any physical bokstore. We offer the largest selection in the world, with incredible convenience. We can ship anyplace in the world, we gift wrap, we offer great discounts. Most hardbacks are discounted 10 percent, most paperbacks 20 percent, bestsellers and New York Times-reviewed books 30 percent. We’re the most heavily discounted retailer in the world.” (In many cases, though, Amazon’s shipping and handling charges more than make up for any list-price discounts.)

“Bookstores can’t order all the books we can,” Cast adds. “We have small publishers and self published titles. We have a large staff of people in the orders department making calls every single day. The time to get it is shorter; many times it’s less expensive with us.

“Moreover, if you’re in a bookstore and you don’t see a book you want, you have to know what it is and know that it exists. With us, you just use our search tools and, boom, there you are. We’ve got over 100 titles on how to play the harmonica.

People who shop in big and small stores will order from us when a value we offer is important to them.”

How It Works

The Amazon operation now employs some 160 people (up from 30 last year at this time) and is constantly recruiting for more, on its home page and on flyers posted in U District hangouts.

About half the staff’s housed in the former vocational-school building above the Art Bar downtown. There, winding corridors lead past both permanent and portable interior walls. Behind those walls, teams of fresh-faced young adults (and a few early-middle-aged supervisors) scour the major book-review publications and trade journals, write online-catalog copy, process credit-card numbers, take phone calls from customers, and program new database functions on the company’s networked workstation computers. Many of the desks are made by Amazon workers, from old wood doors and four-by-fours.

Every first-time buyer at Amazon has to fill out a detailed online form. This information (names, addresses, demographics, and buying habits) is becoming as valuable to the company as its merchandise databse. It hopes to someday sell pieces of this information to publishers. Amazon customers can also pre-order titles that have been announced but not yet printed; the company hopes to sell pre-order data to publishers too, thinking they’ll want to know how many copies to print.

The other employees, including as many as 30 temp workers and office-staff hirees in training, work in shifts at a 17,000-square-foot warehouse off Fourth Ave. South. If Argentinian fantasist Jorge Luis Borges were alive (and not blind) today, he’d love the labrynthian-library quality of the place, where thousands of unwrapped books sit on miles of industrial shelving, stacked and arranged by computer-database numbers. Because these database numbers bear no relation to the Dewey Decimal System, one shelf segment might contain a Judith Krantz bodice-ripper, a UNIX programming manual, a Simpsons picture book, and a self-published treatise predicting world economic collapse. Books last on the shelves only until a customer’s entire order has been received; usually less than a day. (Regular bookstores may turn over their stock only three or four times a year.)

From there, dressed-for-warmth young staffers put the volumes through bubble wrap and corregated-cardboard mailing sleeves, stick laser-printed address labels on the outsides of the sleeves, and collect them in bins for the UPS and US Mail trucks that pull up to the warehouse door several times daily.

For The Future

Having established its brand name, Amazon’s already seeking new worlds to conquer. It’s working deals with authors and indie publishers, to handle their online bookselling for them; so far over 550 other book-related sites handle their ordering through Amazon. The company’s also talking of starting a second base of operations in Europe next year or the year after, should European Net use finally take off to the degree it has Stateside.

“People are embracing Internet commerce,” insists Cast, rebuking media reports of a Net-hype backlash. “There are people buying on the Net and they’re buying now in droves. As more and more people get access, its time will come more and more.”

What It All Means

Amazon, and the Borders/ Barnes & Noble superstores, represent a different challenge to bookselling than the ’80s Waldenbooks/B. Dalton invasion. Those earlier mall-oriented chains specialized in high-turnover sales of a few bestsellers and perennial-sellers. Amazon and the superstore chains instead want to be everything to everybody, servicing a post-mainstream America of a thousand special interests.

On the one hand, the fact that big money’s pouring into bookstore development is proof Americans really are buying books these days. Yet literary purists bemoan this and any other threats to their near-mythologized vision of the cozy neighborhood bookseller who knows all about everything in stock, something no big organization can supposedly match. Amazon tries to make up for that with a detailed database of its titles, but even it doesn’t have all a would-be buyer would like to know, especially about those thousands of more obscure titles. Its Web pages regularly solicit reviews and summaries from customers, publishers, and even authors. Customer-submitted reviews are entered into a contest; weekly winners get free store credit.

As big-biz booster Virginia Postrel writes in Forbes, “Take the values independent booksellers celebrate: diverse literary voices, personal service, support for unknown authors. Jeff Bezos is delivering those values–and just about any book printed in English–via the Web…. Amazon threatens old-fashioned bookstores–and we can expect to hear them squak–but it furthers their professed values.”

For all its championing of “progressive” values, the book community is full of nostalgia for a past that never was, a mythical time when bungalow-dwelling gentlemen of leisure (and their educated but careerless wives) gently devoured hardcover tomes edited by tweed-clad Ivy Leaguers working out of quaint Manhattan brownstones, retailed by tiny storefronts that somehow always had what you wanted. Such a setup could only have been possible in a class-stratified society, one in which only a favored few were invited to read anything more complex than Sunday-school guides or pulp-fiction magazines. We now live in a different world, and we’re largely the better for it.

The computer magazine Web Week quoted Bezos last fall, “Are we going to put physical bookstores out of business? No. TV didn’t put movie theaters out of business. But physical bookstores will have to keep adding value to what they’ve got.” Actually, TV and suburbanization combined in the ’50s to kill half the country’s theaters, the RKO studio, and short-subject production. Already, indie publishers are trimming their backlists and adjusting their new-release priorities so their products will better reach out to customers from the vast lonely shelves of the superstores. Indie bookstores are either folding or struggling or turning to specialty niches.

But the movie biz eventually adapted to changing conditions. The book biz has faced many changes over the decades (the rise and fall of the cheap paperback, the rise of the costlier trade paperback, the consolidation of big publishers, etc.). The dawn of online retailing means a “virtual superstore” like Amazon.com can become gigantic by delivering the diversity indie stores promise. The little booksellers can’t be everything to everybody, but they can still be a few things to a few bodies. And the little book creators are having to learn to compete, not against a few others of their ilk in the confines of indie-store shelves, but against a million other titles equally available online. If Amazon.com hadn’t fed this state of affairs, someone else would have. At least this particular revolution is being led by an outfit eager to do business with indie publishers.

MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)

DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.

WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”

HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.

So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).

As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.

ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”

‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”

(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED at the announcement that Diahann Carroll would star in the touring version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, coming soon to Vancouver. We’d previously written that “race-blind casting” traditionally means all the starring roles in big commercial theatricals go to white folks. So we’re happy to note an exception (even if it’s an exception that proves the rule).

SINGIN’ THE BREWS: If you remember when Bud Dry was hawked as “The Alternative Beer,” get ready for another contender to that dubious title. New management at Maxwell’s, that longtime rock club inside a former Hoboken, NJ coffee factory (on what that PBS Baseball miniseries claimed was the first site where baseball as we know it was played), has installed a brewpub on the premises, with its own “Alternative Brew” and “Percussion Ale.” If market conditions seem plausible (right now the business press claims there’s an impending microbrew glut), they might get sold at other outlets, perhaps even out here.

LIVING OFF THE LAND: Eat the State!: A Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor is an often-clever li’l four-page lefty newsletter. So far it’s been consistently witty and has had a good mix of local and national topics, though it leans a bit too heavy for my taste on the side of self-righteous ranting, too lightly on organizing and solution-seeking. I also have troubles with the name. At a time when even pork-barrel senators now purport to oppose “Big Government,” that ol’ punk-anarchist concept of “The State” seems almost like nostalgia for yesterday’s problems. The old nation-states are indeed being eaten, but it’s Global Business that’s doing the digesting. (Free weekly at the usual dropoff points; online at speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ets/; or $24/year from P.O. Box 85541, Seattle 98145.) Speaking of social theorizin’…

YOU’RE SO VEIN: I also have problems with the political piece in issue #2 of the regional visual-art journal Aorta, relating the Clinton/Dole rivalry to “The Twilight of The Patriarchy.” For nearly a quarter-century now, the leftist labeling of mainstream American society as “The Patriarchy” has utterly failed to recognize the significant contributions individual women have made in service to reactionary politics and social stagnation. After all, if women are capable of doing anything, they’re certainly capable of doing things you or I might not approve of. A writer living in the state of Craswell and Dixy Lee Ray oughta know this. Still speaking of social theorizin’…

GRIN AND BARE IT: As instigator of the cable-access show Political Playhouse, Philip Craft was a master provocateur, attracting the wrath of bluenoses like Sen. Gorton for his on-camera nudity and protest-comedy skits. Toward the end of his show’s two-year run, Craft had begun to move beyond simple protesting and had started to articulate a vision of his ideal alternative society based on practical anarchism. Unfortunately, his new self-published book The Fool on the Hill doesn’t spell out that vision, beyond calling for political power to be recentered onto the county level (an idea similar to ones expressed by the militia cults). Instead, he offers an autobiographical tale about cheating on his wife, taking lotsa drugs, getting investigated by the Feds for advocating some of those drugs on his show, taking on paranoid delusions, and hiding out in the woods. It’s a long way from Craft’s introductory claim that it’s “a paranoid comedy that will forever change the way you view the world… that conspires to bring down the political, economic, and religious institutions that enslave us today.” Rather, it’s a downbeat story of personal loss and confusion, imbued with a sense of vulnerability and humility unseen in Craft’s TV work. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 17320, Seattle 98107.)

WHAT I’LL MISS ABOUT ERNST HARDWARE: The clashing aromas of freshly-cut flowers and freshly-cut lumber. The annual Show Me How Fair in the old Coliseum. The Sonics “In The Paint” promotion. The slogan, “We’ve got a warehouse too; we just don’t make you shop in it.” And, of course, The Fellow In Yellow.

AS LONGTIME MISC. READERS know, I love snow in Seattle. That pre-Thanksgivin’ white surprise we had was a perfect example. It kept Eastsiders out of town while blessing urban denizens with a two-day-duration Wonderland of brightly altered vistas. Its glistening blanket offered a temporary respite from our normal Seasonal Affective Disorder-inducing grayout conditions. It created an instant holiday, a Jubilee interrupting the routines of work and school and shopping. It turned everyday life into an adventure, from Counterbalance snowboarding to parking-lot snowball fights. Yes, I know it was a horror for the homeless, but we oughta be taking better care of our brethern year-round anyway.

CATHODE CORNER: As you assuredly all know, Frasier contains enough Seattle inaccuracies to make a drinking game. (“Finish your glass if Niles pronounces Oregon “arra-gone.”) But even that didn’t prepare me for seeing John Mahoney, who plays Dad on the show, miss the following answer on Jeopardy!: “This Seattle-based coffee chain takes its name from the first mate in Moby Dick.” Speaking of local landmarks…

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH THE AVE: No merchant-sponsored rent-a-thugs harassing the street kids will improve the currently sorry state of U District retail. The District’s problems go back a decade, to when Ave landlords decided to jack up rents in one big hike. Longtime indie businesses were replaced by chains. Some of those, like Crown Books and Godfather’s Pizza, then bugged out of their leases at first opportunity). Other stores spent so much on rent, they cut back on interior improvements, merchandise, personnel, etc. Meanwhile, the long-slumbering U Village blossomed into a shopping theme park for the Volvo set. The Ave has risen and fallen several times before. It can rise again. But strong-arm tactics won’t do it; indeed, they’d just make the street’s young-adult target market feel unwelcome. Speaking of questionable neighborhood “renewals”…

WANTON-DESTRUCTION DEPT.: The end of Belltown’s 11-year artist-housing experiment SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers, named years before the Gulf War) and its downstairs eatery neighbor Cyclops had been rumored for over a year. Now it’s official, with MUP boards announcing plans to raze the lo-rise for condos. Cyclops’ owners are already looking for a new restaurant site, perhaps in Fremont. As for the much-photographed golden Jell-O molds gracing the SCUD exterior these past five years, no fate has been announced. I’d have ’em auctioned off to benefit new artist housing (and I mean real artist housing, not the millionaire penthouses sometimes promoted under that term). Speaking of goodbyes…

`PANDEMONIUM,’ 1992-96: Most of what I’ll miss about the idiosyncratic music monthly had already disappeared from its pages in recent months: The schmooze-free gossip column, the Tacoma-centric features, the odd columns like “Town of the Month.” ‘Twas sad to see the tabloid’s “Final Print Issue” carry a Seattle instead of a Tacoma mailing address. Seattle Square, a budding commercial Web company, has bought the Pandemonium name and will now use it for music review and interview pages on its site. Speaking of what’s-in-a-name…

INTO THE DRINK: In the spirit of Husky Cola (that early-’90s fundraising soda for UW athletics) comes Keiko Draft Root Beer, from Newport, OR. Every can bears the image of America’s most famous killer whale, who starred in the two Free Willy films and now lives in a rehab tank at Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium. An unspecified “portion of the proceeds” from the pop has been pledged to the foundation paying for Keiko’s veterinary treatment. I’ve only seen the stuff in regular, not diet, so if you consume too much you could become, you know… There’s also Keiko Brand coffee, but I’m still holding to my no-coffee-jokes policy.

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: Because he’s just a commontator.

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT FOR XMAS: Your suggestions for the year-end Misc. In/Out list. Send ’em to clark@speakeasy.org. ‘Til then, consider these words by ex-Philly restaurant critic Jim Quinn: “Never eat in a restaurant where the menu is larger than the table, the pepper mill larger than your date, and the baked potato larger than your steak.”

IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)

THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.

BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.

On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…

MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.

But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.

IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.

IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, but MISC. is a bit leery about this week’s touring performances of The Wizard of Oz on Ice. When the witch melts, do they freeze over her remains before they resume skating? If they don’t, how do they finish the show?

UPDATE: Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant has indeed been taken over by QFC, but the only visible change so far is on the employee name tags. The signs, labels, bags, and product mix won’t change until the building’s remodeled and expanded in January. The big FOOD GIANT neon sign will then be replaced by an as-identical-as-feasible sign to read WALLINGFORD, if QFC can get the legal OK to exceed modern sign codes… Just a block away, an ex-Arco mini-mart has switched franchisors and now pumps Shell gas. Those who’ve wanted to protest Shell’s ties to the Nigerian dictatorship now have a place in Seattle to not get gas at. (The store’s independently owned, so you can still get your Hostess Sno-Balls there.)

SUDS ON THE SOUND: If the WALLINGFORD sign gets built, it’ll add to the parallels between Seattle and All My Children. We already have two businesses deliberately named after fictional businesses on the soap (Glamorama and Cortland Computer), plus institutions coincidentally sharing names with AMC characters (Chandler’s Cove restaurant, the band TAD). As longtime viewers know, when AMC dumps a character without killing them, they often get shipped to Seattle. A book by Dan Wakefield about the show’s early years had a passage noticing this and explaining how Seattle, with its nice-n’-civil rep, was the perfect place to send ex-Pine Valleyans. He didn’t add how Seattle, like Pine Valley, is sometimes referred to as a quiet little town but is filling up with morally-ambivalent entrepreneurs and weird criminals, while its old-money institutions remain in a few incestuous hands. If a soap had a family with as many political and media tie-ins as our ’80s Royer-James family, it’d be called a hokey plot device. Certainly the three new books about KING-TV reveal founder Dorothy Bullitt as a matriarch just as lively and outspoken as AMC crone Phoebe Wallingford (if less snooty).

WAVES: Broadcast demagogue Mike Siegel, fired from KVI for refusing to let trifles like the facts get in the way of his bullying, resurfaced a couple months back on Everett station KRKO, once the Top 40 station I grew up to. Back then, its slogan was “The Happiest Sound Around.” It could now be called “The Angriest Sound Around,” but instead is using the rubric “Talk Too Hot for Seattle.” I could say “they can have him,” but that would be not caring… KVI’s sister station KOMO-AM, longtime bastion of Ike-esque literate civility, now hawks its news-talk format with TV spots looking like KNDD rejects. Rave-flyer color splotches and snowboard-logo bleeding type exhort listeners to “Get Connected” and “Go Global.” It’s like seeing a golden-years relative suddenly sporting sideburns and driving a Miata; scary yet poignantly sad.

THERE GO THE BRIDES: In an economy move few years back, the Seattle Times stopped running free wedding pictures on Sundays, moving them to a once-a-month section in the lower-circulation weekday paper. That section, The Registry, will appear for the last time next month; to make the last installment, your ceremony has to be before Dec. 1. Because the section had a one- to two-month backlog, readers could amuse themselves by guessing which of the happy couples had already split up. After Dec. 2, if you want your nuptials remembered on newsprint, you’ll have to buy an ad.

SQUARE, INDEED: The demographic cleansing of Seattle continues with the Sam Israel estate’s plans to tear down the building now known as the Pioneer Square Theater (now we know why they refused to bring it up to code) for offices and the conversion of several other Pio. Square structures into “market rate” (read: only upscale boomers need apply) housing. The boomer-centric local media just adore the scheme, of course; just like they adored the Israels’ previously-announced plans to evict Fantasy (un)Ltd. for yet another blandly “unique” retail complex. It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressingly familiar.

ON A ROLE: Because of the deadline structure at The Stranger, this week’s Misc. (like Wednesday’s Christian Science Monitor) was sent to the printer before election returns came in. Therefore, we’ll just have to pretend it wasn’t happening or wasn’t worth talking about (which most citizens seemed to feel anyway).

Instead, let’s discuss the annually-weirder spectacle that is grownup Halloween, now America’s #2 shopping holiday. Is it me, or have grownup Halloween parties gotten simultaneously more elaborate and blasé? The art of costuming, of adopting temporary personas for celebration and/or awakening, is among humanity’s oldest traits. But the way middle Americans (even young, urbane middle Americans) do it is like the way middle Americans do a lot of things, half-hearted and aloof. “Square” middle Americans often keep their inner passions inhibited because they’re afraid; “hip” middle Americans often keep their passions inhibited because they’re afraid, but pretend they’re doing it because they’re too cool. The mainstreaming of fetish dance parties might have helped change that, but (at least in this town) that trend seems to have peaked. (It didn’t help that the Liquor Board’s lifestyle police have borne down hard on such events, contributing to the Catwalk’s fiscal problems.)

I don’t think the answer is to replace today’s Halloween festivities with World Beat-style “tribal” role playing events. The gods, demigods, devils, and myths of pre-industrial societies are those people’s property–in many cases, the only things colonists didn’t take from them. We have plenty of our own gods, demigods, devils, and myths to explore; including the myths propagated via popular entertainment and media. So keep going to parties as Audrey Hepburn or Capt. Janeway or Ross Perot–but don’t stop at the clothes.Become Hepburn or Janeway or Perot for one night. Explore the presence of Hepburnness, Janewayism, or Perotosity within your soul.

(For the record, the Champion’s costume store ran out of plastic breasts, couldn’t sell the formerly-popular Power Ranger costumes even at 50 percent off, and had to turn down many frustrated requests for Xena costumes (the show’s producers neglected to have any made).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #3 of the NW Sleep Guide, a newsletter for ambient-DJ music fans, contains a conceptual Brian Eno review consisting of the words “A light sharp touch refined but so ugly so merciless like the stinging rain,” repeated and rearranged to fill all the available space. Clever. (Free at Ohm Records and Wall of Sound.)

EYE ON POTATOES: The Wall St. Journal recently exposed the secret behind the “crispier French fries” now promised by Jack-in-the-Box and other chains. They’re coated with a batter made of potato starch, augmented in some formulae with wheat starch and dairy protein. It’s supposed to keep ’em warm and unsoggy up to 15 minutes, three times as long as untreated spud-segments. I tell ya, does this country have an ingenious food-tech industry or what?

IN A BIND: Organizers of the second NW Bookfest made a few improvements to the Pier 48 site but kept the site good and funky and un-Convention-Centery. It’s still the sort of event where the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor is made most literal, with authors on microphones and sellers in booths all hawking their wares. KOMO-TV weekend anchor Eric Slocum was prominently hawking his Childrens Hospital-benefit poetry book (remember, you can always donate direct instead) right next to a booth hawking political tracts about what “the globalists” don’t want you to know.

But it was a trek to find anything really interesting in the interstices between whale-poetry chapbooks, Men Are From Orion/ Women Are From the Crab Nebula homilies, and Windows 95 recovery manuals. By the time I got back out and faced the literacy volunteers with their hype for literature-as-generic-commodity, I wanted to tell ’em, “Next time you ask me to Support Books, tell me which ones.”

With KTZZ now up for sale, three of the area’s six commercial TV stations are up for grabs, thus driving down any one station’s prospective price. This is a rare moment of opportunity. Leave your suggestions on what you’d do if you owned your own channel atMisc. World HQ, www.miscmedia.com/intro.html.