The Young and the Clueless: To be young today is in itself an act of defiance. You’re the target of both the whiskey-drinking old farts and the pot-smoking middle aged farts. Some people will presume you’re an idiot because you weren’t around for WWII. Other people will presume you’re an idiot because you weren’t around for Woodstock.

Earlier this year, the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a pop culture symposium, dominated by a succession of old male Madonna-bashers. (Have any of them ever heard any other contemporary performing artist?) The panel purported to encompass a right-to-left spectrum: 50-year-old Republicans who whined that we’ve gone to hell since the golden age of movie censorship, and 40-year-old Democrats who whined that we’ve gone to hell since the golden age of Dylan.

More recently, Ken Kesey made very snide remarks about “the MTV generation” having no attention span, being somehow unable to digest a traditional narrative. If that’s the case, howcum you see the bombastically long products of Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins in so many campus lunchrooms?

There’s a common assumption, based on unsupported charges in Neil Postman and Jerry Mander books, that you kids today aren’t reading anything, and that the younger kids in back of you won’t even learn to read. In truth, according to the book industry’s own figures, bookstore sales boomed in the ’80s and are holding better in the ’90s recession than many other retail sectors. The big bookstore chains are granted prime mall space precisely because they do such good business. Books for children and young adults showed the most spectacular rise of all. (Total book sales might be down, if you include school and library purchases affected by government budget cuts.)

The thousands of ‘zines produced across the country, and the hundreds of spoken-word and “poetry slam” events in hip bars, prove that this is a generation more, not less, devoted to the word. Not since the ’50s beats (a much smaller minority of their era) has a generation worked so hard at documenting itself in print, with so little encouragement from its elders. Instead, the Volvo-drivin’, NPR-listenin’ English profs eagerly swap horror stories in the faculty lounge about how stupid you are because you wear different clothes than they do or because you didn’t come to college already knowing all about their favorite ’60s heroes.

Then there’s the charge made by self-styled “radicals” for 20 years now, that all college students since them are fascistic zombies. As if every college class forever must be compared to those three brief years of (mostly futile) Vietnam protests, that quickly wound down in ’71 once the Army stopped trying to draft college boys.

I’ve seen plenty of campus political activity in the last 13 years, from big marches to backstage organizing, about everything from apartheid to nuclear power to the gulf war. These were mainly people who didn’t have their own hides on the line, but who were disgusted enough to want to do something.

As opposed to being too disgusted to want to do anything. The opposite of activism isn’t pacifism, it’s defeatism. I find it in too many folks of all ages. Not voting is the exact same thing as voting for Bush. You can’t change the system by leaving it as is. That’s like stating that, as a protest against the injustice of the rain, you’re not going to fix your roof. Too many members of my own generation, the Pleasure Islanders of the early ’80s, thought they were preserving their purity by being politically chaste. Instead, they (and we) wound up getting, well, you know… (More about that later.)

10/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and four newsletter-only items)

Here Comes Moshpit Tourism!

OK OK OK, Misc. is now ready to admit that the “Seattle Sound” is dead. The evidence: not Singles, but the 9/13 travel page of the Sunday newspaper insert USA Weekend (stuffed into the Bellevue Journal-American and dozens of other papers around the country), right after the Haband ad for mail order men’s slacks. The headline: “Get Set for the Seattle Sound: Next weekend’s rockin’ movie Singles puts the limelight on this musical metropolis.” As Jim Kelton writes, “Just as Memphis has the blues, Chicago and New Orleans have Jazz, and Nashville owns country, Seattle now has its own hard-driving sound, dubbed ‘grunge rock,’ giving travelers another reason to visit the city…Visitors will find entertaining and fiercely outspoken music in nearly every corner of this sprawling city. But first-timers should note that the best spots to hear its sounds aren’t always upscale. You can take in the sights during the day, then fill the nights with the fresh Seattle sound.” The page gave prospective grunge-tourists listings of five clubs, two costly hotels (including the Meany Tower, inaccurately described as being close to many important grunge venues), the youth hostel, and two eateries: 13 Coins and the Dog House (“the ‘in’ place for musicians and music fans”).

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The article encourages tourists to come here to see live gigs by the very bands that got into making records in the mid-’80s because they couldn’t get live gigs. The music that was rejected by so many clubs for so many years might now become a boon to the state’s hospitality industry. Maybe we should just replace Seattle Center with a Grungeland theme park. Flannel-shirted costume characters could sneeringly blow Export A smoke into the eager eyes of affluent American families, on their way to enjoy hourly indoor and outdoor performances in between stops at a Jimmy the Geek house of thrills, senior citizen moshing lessons, an all-vegan food circus, bumper cars that look like beat-up Datsuns, wandering Iggy impersonators, beer-can crushing competitions, a detox clinic fantasy ride, (for the gents) a contest to become L7‘s chaste bondage slaves, and (for the ladies) an all-scrawny, all-longhair male strip show.

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE?: The city wanted to collect 3% admissions tax on the “suggested donation at the door” for the Two Bells Tavern’s Chicken Soup Brigade musical benefit. On Sept. 23, city official Dale Tiffany sided with the tavern and withdrew the tax bill, noting in a letter that “you made a quite persuasive case”…. Meanwhile, COCA ran afoul of the police dept.’s crusade to shut down all-ages musical events. Its non-alcoholic rave party was shut down in August over a few creative interpretations of technical ordinances and the infamous “Teen Dance Ordinance,” a law ramrodded through the city council a few years back intended to ban all-ages events under the guise of regulating them.

ON DISPLAY: I saw COCA’s Native American political art exhibit, which uses images of pre-Columbian daily life as symbols of defiance, in the context of what if our entire way of life were similarly suppressed. After thinking some more about it, I couldn’t think of many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture that that weren’t already symbols of our past conquests. What music do we have that isn’t Black- or immigrant-rooted? What fashions have we got that aren’t based on street or folk dress? Through ethnic art (often designed for white consumption) and its equivalents in literature and music, armchair lefties like me get to anoint ourselves with the vicarious righteousness of pretending to be what some white ideologists call “The Other.” It’s a change from most American cultural experiences, which are typically fantasies of conquering something or someone. The only American genres to discuss what being conquered might feel like are science fiction and Red-baiting propaganda, usually as a pretext for heroic action. But imagine: What if our entire way of life was suppressed as North America’s indigenous cultures were? What practices would be kept underground? What pieces of everyday life that you take for granted would turn into symbols of rebellion? What things that you care about would be turned into jokes and stereotypes by the conquerors?

CAN’T I GET LIBERATED TOO?: The (Ero) Writes/Rights panel at Bumbershoot was mostly the usual inconclusive porn-vs.-erotica debate. But one woman made a good point about “censorship of the spirit and the intellect,” something too many of us do to ourselves. The alternative literary scene would attract more people if it weren’t always so grim and staid, if it expressed the whole range of human thoughts and feelings in our big wide world. In many ways, small press literature is the most aesthetically conservative art form this side of barbershop quartet singing (and a hell of a lot less fun). You’re not gonna get young people involved in advanced prose if it offers nothing more than Montana travelogues and ’60s nostalgia. I long for a literature of compassion, of participation. A good place to start is erotica, by its nature a genre that mustn’t be self-centered. Like Jae Carrlson and Kirby Olson in Reflex, I believe the answer to bad porn is better porn, that gleefully celebrates human connection in all its varieties.

OTHER B-SHOOT NOTES: Loved Book-It, the troupe that dramatizes short stories verbatim. Much more literate than most of the “literary” events….

Missed They Might Be Giants, who filled up the Opera House an hour and a half before they went on. In the line, two suburban kids joked about how this show should’ve been in the Coliseum instead of Queen Latifah (this year’s token non-’60s black act), because “nobody’s going to shoot anybody at this show.” I wished to hell I’d had a Walkman so I could’ve made them listen to TMBG’s song “Your Racist Friend.” The Latifah show was, by all accounts, a sedate affair full of perky White Negro wannabes….

The $25 Quick Access Pass was an elitist scam, going against B-Shoot’s one-big-crowd tradition, and should not be repeated….

Michelle Shocked had a great line at the Interview Stage comparing most rock music to “a blackface minstrel show” without the makeup — affluent whites acting out a simplistic persona of blacks as sexy savages….

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THIS GUY: I can’t wait for the Jimi Hendrix museum to open, even if it doesn’t display the uncensored Are You Experienced? cover art or Suzie Plastercaster‘s famous life-cast of his masculinity. Well-heeled local backers are looking at at least two potential sites, including the ex-Seattle Art Museum annex in Seattle Center. The guy deserves a proper public memorial. (KZOK tried a few years ago to get a memorial in a city park, but the Parks Dept. wouldn’t go along; the station settled for a pile of “hot rocks” at the African savannah exhibit of the zoo.) Besides, these days it’d be good to remind people of a guy who joined the Army just to get out of Seattle, his only hope of making it in music.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger writes, “Perhaps you might be able to enlighten us as to what exactly is the deal with this baseball cap display on the rear dashboard thing?” Would you please be more specific? What are these items, and what do you wish to learn about them?

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Husky Dawgs, in bright wrappers bearing official UW football logos, are really repackaged Canadian Jumbo Hot Dogs (the expiration date sticker says both “Meilleur Avant” and “Best Before”). As all good Seattle barflies know about Jumbos, they’re hearty if underseasoned tube steaks that can be steamed, boiled, or grilled, and are virtually impervious to decay even after rotating under a heat lamp all day….

As my budget and diet allow, I’m planning to try all of the faux Frangos being offered around town: Nordstrom Best Mints, Ala Bons, Boehm’s Encore, Seattle Chocolate Co.’s Milt Chocolate, etc. The Times sez that Nordstrom uses a higher grade of chocolate, no salt and no tropical oils. The Seattle Chocolate Co. makes the Nordstrom candy (mint flavor only), and also makes its own brand with a slightly different recipe (in three flavors). Ala Bons, the first faux Frango, are smaller and flatter, not as fully whipped. Boehms, in gold foil boxes, only have six ounces for $6.95 (Frangos and most of the imitators have eight ounces)…

MANGO TANG UPDATE: Mark Campos claims to have tried the stuff, obtained from relatives through an Oregon food warehouse outlet. “The mad chemists at the Tang labs were nowhere hear a mango flavor consensus…no matter how much I stirred, a majority of the stuff marched to the bottom of the glass and stayed there. Also, it’s the most unappealingly colored stuff. Like Mountain Dew, it should not be put into clear glasses for consumption.”

1-900-FAILURE: Megaquest, the Queen Anne-based parent company of some 50 phone talk services (many, but not all, sex-related) in a half-dozen countries, is close to bankruptcy, after earning a net income of $14 million in 1990. According to a great story in the Sept. 4 Puget Sound Business Journal, original partners Arthur Joel Eisenberg and Betsy Superfon (apparently her real name) are battling in court over control of the companies, whose revenues have tumbled as government agencies and phone companies crack down against the rights of those unimaginative Americans who can’t even abuse themselves without coaching.

AD OF THE MONTH (newspaper ad for Nationwide Warehouse and Storage Furniture): “The Chastity 4-Piece Bedroom Set, $198.” Runner-up: the Wm. Diericx Co.’s radio ad for office supplies, selling paper shredders endorsed by Fawn Hall.

“DIS” INFORMATION: Still still more proof that hip-hop culture can’t be successfully whitened comes from the Suzuki 4 x 4’s fall ad campaign, “Fear of a Flat Planet” (a notably lame exploitation of Public Enemy‘s Fear of a Black Planet).

A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE: The Florida state tourism dept. rushed out some newspaper ads insisting that their state was still open for business. The state had to produce the ads at their own Tallahassee office, because it couldn’t complete a phone call to its Miami ad agency.

CATHODE CORNER: Alert home satellite dish owners know about the supplemental feeds of network football games, with the field pictures and sound but no announcers or commercials. I saw part of a Seahawks game this way; you can tell all the important aspects of the game, and don’t have to hear any dumb anecdotes.

DUDS: One piece of good news in the Generra bankruptcy came in a Times story noting that the company, like many in the sportswear biz, is starting to get clothes made in the U.S., after years of only using overseas sweatshops where workers make as little as $1.03 a day. Seems that it takes too long to ship stuff from over there. By the time a fad item gets here, the fad can be over.

“DON’T WALK” THIS WAY: Bellevue officials are promising to make their town “more pedestrian friendly” — by beefing up citations against people walking against the Don’t Walk lights. If they really wanted to help walkers, they’d change the lights on some intersections that allow walking for only three seconds every three minutes, so you have to jaywalk to get anywhere on time.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Tiny, King of the Roadside Vendors is an affectionate tribute by Sharon Graves Hall to her late brother, Richard “Tiny” Graves, the girthy and jovial operator of Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere (one of Washington’s few authentic “roadside attractions”, with ad signs attracting tourists along U.S. highways throughout the west). For just $12.95, the book’s more fun than a case of Aplets and Cotlets….

Meet Me at the Center is Seattle Center’s authorized history, written by ex-Times guy Don Duncan. It’s chock full of World’s Fair camp images (which I can’t ever get enough of). It’s also essential reading for all of you who don’t know what Seattle was like in the era prior to Starbucks and PCC, when a small remote city was trying desperately to join the “jet set” its machines had made possible….

Journeys of the Muse is a 12-page quarterly newsletter by Pamela Reno of Naches, Yakima County. Topics include “The power of thought to influence the sun: A turning point for humanity?”

FUN WITH WORDS: Husbands and Wives stands a chance of becoming the biggest audience-participation movie since Rocky Horror. Here’s how it works: go with all your feminist friends, and hiss whenever Woody says something that turns out to have been eerily lifelike… Another great new cussing site is the downtown library, specifically at the terminals of the new computer card catalog. On any given afternoon you may find retired schoolmarms, Mormon ancestor-researchers and valedictorian wannabes struggling to cope with the confusing software and the mistake-ridden data, talking back to the VDT’s with words not found in the bowdlerized dictionaries.

INDECISION ’92: A requiem is in order for failed gubernatorial primary candidate “You Must Be” Joe King. He’s actually been a pretty good state House speaker, fighting to keep the Wm. Spafford murals up in the Capitol and to support a lot of good legislation. But for his first statewide campaign, he let image consultants package him as something just this side of a Reagan Democrat; an unlikely recipe for success this year….

Campaign commercials used to feature a big red “NO!” crashing down on the face of the sponsoring candidate’s opponent. This time, at least one candidate used “NOT!” instead.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, pick up some great bargains at Blowout Video on 1st (the video equivalent of a remainder book outlet) and the Evergreen State Store in the Center House (your one-stop tourist trinket shop), watch the Japanese soap The 101st Proposal Sat. mornings on KTZZ, and heed the words of Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the cartoon character): “Fear and I were born twins.”

PASSAGE

John Kricfalusi, the cartoonist-director-actor who made Ren & Stimpy into the cult sensation of the year (and just got fired for his trouble by Viacom bureaucrats), quoted in Film Threat before his dismissal: “Everybody’s ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody’s nose. Look in — who’s the big actress today? Look inside her nose and then think about porkin’ her.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Funambulist”

STOP THIS WEATHER CHITCHAT ALREADY.

WE’VE GOT ABOUT THE DULLEST WEATHER IN THE WORLD.

8/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger columns and an original essay)

High Fashion and Running Naked

Welcome again to Misc., the only column made with the Miracle Substance ZR-7. This is the one and only genuine, original Misc. Accept no substitutes! Especially not “High and Low” in the Weekly. The title comes from a tacky show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on “modern art and popular culture” that treated the greatest works of illustration, cartooning, entertainment and industrial design as mere fodder to inspire “real” artists. And while B. Barcott can write a halfway-decent item, his apparent assignment is to belittle anyone doing anything interesting, in the tradition of old-fogey columnists everywhere. I’m reminded of the words of

John Lydon: “Imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”

RESULTS of our last contest, wherein we asked “What does John McCaw, Mariner investor and noted recluse, look like?”: No entries were received by the deadline. You oafs.

HOW TO KILL A SCENE: Some of the same alleged criminal elements who used to be at Jersey’s Sports Bar are said to have been outside Club Belltown, starting fights on 7/19 that culminated with gunshots fired into the air, which cops didn’t respond to for 20 minutes. Some downtown residents are advocating the restriction or even closure of music clubs. It took a lot less violence and damage to shut down the live punk scene a decade ago, a loss from which local music has only now recovered. (Jersey’s is now reopened with different DJs, few problems, few customers.)

ONE HOT SHOW: It’s sad that that old Leary Way warehouse burned before the Bathhouse Theater and On the Boards could move in, but I’m glad it burned without a cast and audience inside.

PHILM PHUN: The LA Times said Bill Gates wants to start a Seattle movie company. He denies it. Maybe he dropped the idea after observing his tax-bracket comrade John Kluge, who made a mint selling some TV stations to Murdoch and has spent a lot of it keeping Orion Pictures alive. Gates’s only movie project to date is a Microsoft Press book, Moviemakers at Work. Its authors slighted the more boring film practitioners (writers, actors) in favor of what they felt were the real movie stars — designers, editors, and especially special effects crews. While I’d love to see more movies made here, I admit that most of them are bad. The only distinguished features made here were Tugboat Annie (’33), The Slender Thread (’67), and maybe Cinderella Liberty (’73). The Fabulous Baker Boys was a doze when the Bridges Boys were on. Twice in a Lifetime got undeserved praise from critics eager to proclaim a “film for grownups at last.” I won’t talk about McQ, Harry in Your Pocket, Harry and the Hendersons, and 99 44/100% Dead (though I have a soft spot for Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and the David Jannsen-Frank Gorshin thriller Ring of Fire).

A FRIEND WRITES: “The best part of Tina Brown‘s assumption of command at The New Yorker was USA Today‘s headline: ‘Vanity Fair Editor Takes Over Fave Literary Mag.’ Second best: Everything I read about Brown talked about her own strengths and weaknesses, and didn’t just call her the `First Woman Editor.'”

THE BALD FACTS: The Hair Club for Men is now one of the top advertisers on MTV, showing middle-aged out-of-its enjoying second childhoods thanks to phony-looking hair transplants. Are 40ish geezers really watching the channel, searching to stay young? Does that mean that imitation rap slang will soon be audible in lawyers’ watering holes? Will we see Body Gloves in the Columbia Center Club? Worse things have happened (cf. every men’s fashion ad in a 1971 Playboy).

THE BARE FACTS: Political Diversities, Seattle public access cable’s first all-nude talk show, is an exercise in ego-tripping under the guise of politics. The host and his guests (to misquote B. Breathed, “pretty much an ugly all-male operation”) preach indignantly about the hemp movement (they like it) and censorship (they hate it). I agreed with most of their points, but wish they could make them more persuasively, without presuming their viewers to be idiots. The show’s backdrop wasn’t designed with close-ups in mind; the painted banner features all sorts of provocative icons, but the host’s face is right in front of a swastika. I still like the idea for the show (and have, ever since I picked up a paperback of Rex Reed‘s

Conversations in the Raw and was disappointed to find the title was just a come-on).

SINCE WE’RE NEIGHBORS DEPT.: The dreaded Port Townsend Lifestyle Police struck again, ordering Safeway to replace its regular-style sign with “old style” letters. Next thing you know, they’ll stop the store from selling Twinkies and meat.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (flashing sign at Honda of Seattle): “Nikki is awesome…single & pretty.”… At Front Street Specialty Nutrition in Issaquah: “Always lowest prices! Well, usually — O.K., O.K., at least sometimes!”

ART MEETS NON-ART: Live music keeps popping up in new places. One recent Sat. nite, a clerk at the Glass Curtain porn shop on 1st was playing a saxophone on duty. His only audience: the wandering people outside and the photos of fake fun inside.

SEARCH FOR YESTERDAY: Shokus Video’s Sudsy Television is a 3-videocassette series of the true American video noir, black-and-white soap operas. Forget everything about TV being incessantly bright and snappy. These are interminably slow 15-minute shows, performed live on small, shabby sets (sometimes just furniture and prop doors in front of scrim curtains) by somber, uptight actors who stumble over half their lines but stay inside their Beckettian grimness. The infamous organ music (used on General Hospital

as late as 1978) sounds more like a restored-silent-movie soundtrack than like anything to do with modern entertainment. Even the commercials are stern: beady-eyed announcers pointing at diagrams, reiterating the values of Anacin compared to regular strength tablets. Most of the actors never went further than this, but you do see a pre-Mayberry Don Knotts and a very pre-St. Elsewhere Bonnie Bartlett.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: Margaret Thatcher‘s landed a consulting job with

Philip Morris to increase cigarette sales in developing countries. As if she hadn’t done enough to her own country…

FUTURE RULES FOR A POST-REPUBLICAN FCC: Classic R&B songs should not be used in commercials (a) for laxatives or (b) for companies that wouldn’t do business with blacks when the songs came out.

JUST PLAIN BILL: Didn’t hear much of Clinton‘s speech on 7/26 (they didn’t have speakers in every direction), but I did get handed a tract by a Korean-based fundamentalist group that predicts the Rapture for Oct. 28 (that’d make the campaign irrelevant, if it weren’t that it’s been predicted many times before, and will be many times again, especially at the turn of the millennium).

THE RACE IS ON: With Longacres on track for demolition, the big hope for horse racing may lie with Native American tribes. Following the modest new

Tulalip casino, the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes announced separate projects for tracks and huge 24-hour casinos. The Puyallup plan, which would be managed by a Vegas firm, would also have a 1,000-room hotel, mall, bowling alley and native-theme amusement park. Both plans require the state Gambling Commission’s OK, which may be tough.

‘FAMILY’ FEUD: If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, family values are their next-to-last refuge. Or, as GOP loyalist G. Will sez, “morality is the last refuge of the politically desperate.” Almost any destructive policy can be trumped up as a pean to “The Family” (as if there were only one kind anymore, and as if all families were good for the people in them). Bush/Quayle, in their total lack of contact with the real world, haven’t noticed the spectacular rise of “dysfunctional family” 12-step groups and other forces that are pointing out the basic structural faults of the nuclear-family system. “The Family” is, to millions, an image of stifling cruelty and authoritarianism — just what the Right loves.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE: Anybody who generically votes for any female candidate, no matter who she is, wasn’t living in Wash. when Dixy Lee Ray was governor. Ray was a co-founder of the Pacific Science Center and ex-head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who ran in ’76 as a Democrat (a label of convenience, to gain the party-line endorsement of our powerful senators

Magnuson and Jackson). In office, she tried to demolish environmental laws and to prop up the unprofitable Hanford nuclear industry. She amassed a massive re-election fund from timber and development interests, but lost in the ’80 primary. Today she speaks to business groups trying to quash land-use laws.

AMAZING DISCOVERIES DEPT.: Two Seattle women have invented a washable, reusable sanitary napkin. It saves trees and doesn’t use the dioxin bleaching used to make paper white. I laughed too soon when I snickered at the commercial that starts, “I’ll borrow my mother’s earrings, but my mother’s tampons?”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Seattle Mariners chewing gum is very soft (like the team), is very sweet (like the team), and has a strong aroma (like the team)…. I’m still trying to get a jar of Mango Flavor Tang, sold mainly thru Hispanic-oriented groceries in the southern tier states. It presumably tastes as much like mangoes as regular Tang tastes like oranges. I wonder if it was in the spaceship with Bill Dana, the Hungarian-born comedian who did the Mexican-dialect comedy record The Astronaut.

ON TAP AT THE KIT KAT CLUB: The gourmet pet food craze reaches a new extreme with Alpo Dairy Cat, described as a “low lactose milk for cats that have trouble digesting regular milk.” Why not go further and make sure that your cats only catch mice that eat fake cheese?

ON THE AIR: As some of you know, I was one of the first new music DJs on KCMU, one of the first to practice what they now call the “variety format”: juxtaposing hard rock, skinny-tie new wave, reggae, R&B, and anything else that seemed to fit in. The concept still works, with one exception: the momentum of the music comes to a halt four times an hour, when the volunteer DJs are told to go to the “world beat” rotation. There’s a lot of great music around the world, but KCMU’s world-beat bin is mostly bland yuppie exotica, the P. Simon/D. Byrne unthreatening Afropop or Braziliapop that belonged more on the old KEZX. I’m not asking the station to stop playing foreign music, I’m asking it to play more diverse, more exciting foreign music. To find it; they’ll have to get on the lists of a lot of obscure record companies. But it’ll be worth it.

ON THE STREETS: A middle-aged man with short-trimmed hair and a grey suit came up to me outside a deli-market and repeatedly asked, “Do you read the newspapers? Do you read the paper regularly?” After two minutes, he asked if a minor recent news item was really published. I said it was. He walked away.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, have a gourd reading at Tribes Native and Nature Art and Tea Co. in Fremont, collect all of Mattel’s Beverly Hills 90210 dolls (almost as completely hot as the people on the show and just as good actors).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Napiform”

DOES ALPHA HYDROX FACE CREME COME FROM THE INSIDES OF COOKIES?

•

BODY CONSCIOUSNESS

One recent weekend, I saw two very different events celebrating the human body. Both promoted leisure-time lifestyles baed on distinct philosophies of life:

(a) Arena 3, a fashion show at the Mountaineers Hall on a Friday night, celebrated the body strategically hidden and revealed. Night heat in the city. Crowds of people in their best clothes and brashest attitudes. Eighteen local designers and some 100 models (mostly women, mostly young, many races) slinking down the runway, to the flash of photographers and upbeat music.

(b) The Bare Buns Fun Run, a nudist foot race at the Fraternitie Snoqualmie Nudist Camp on a Sunday morning, celebrated the body unencumbered and unadorned. Searing daylight in the suburbs, halfway up Issaquah’s Tiger Mountain. Nearly 300 people (mostly men, mostly 35ish and older, almost all white) running along 5K of steep trails, most clad only in socks and shoes. Afterwards, many runners enjoyed a leisurely afternoon at the lawn, pool and sauna.

Despite its aura of proud individualism, Arena showed off a design scene that’s become a true community of people working together to bring attention and employment into Seattle. The Seattle designers have grown to attract national (or at least NYC) notice. They’ve got a diverse set of styles that all express a fun, play-dress-up attitude.

The nudists boast of being one big family living in laid-back togetherness. But their retreatist lifestyle reflects the get-away-from-it-all philosophy behind many of America’s problems (suburban sprawl, urban neglect, alienation). Also, the road up to the camp was clogged with cars; you’ve got to guzzle lots of gas to commune with nature.

Nudists like to laugh at the hypocrisy of nudity in fashion marketing (such as the Drew Barrymore cover of Interview magazine, an Arena co-sponsor), contrasting it with their own de-emphasis of lust. They assert that by treating no body part as special or shameful, they’ve become some of the least sex-crazed people around; even though much of their literature features pictures of nubile young adults. In fact, the nudists were courteously seeing and being seen. But the scene was still much less gaze-active than a normal Green Lake Saturday; maybe because it was mostly married couples and older guys. It’s too bad more women don’t join; it might help overcome negative body image to be in a safe environment with a lot of bodies that are clearly no better or worse than yours.

Arena, on the other hand, reveled in positive body consciousness with personas that ranged from ridiculous to stunning. I can’t subjectively comment on the gay costumes (Jason Harler had a topless guy in half-unzipped pants and a feather boa; other designers had see-thru shorts above codpieces). The more straightforward men’s looks were playful and joyous. As for the women’s wear, I fell in love several times per minute. Short black dresses with short red hair (by Siren Blue). Red and black patterned cocktail dresses (Carol McClellan). A cherry-red bridal gown (Tohma). A calico dress with acres of frills (Raven). A green raincoat, doffed to reveal a backless one-piece swimsuit (Susan Hanover). Orange vinyl body suits (Direct). All modeled by people clearly at home inside their bodies.

Many of us need to break out from our social norms and make friends with our physical nature. That can mean taking off your clothes or putting on better ones. A nudist camp membership is cheaper than a designer outfit, but you don’t have to leave town to get dressed.

(Many of the clothes shown at Arena 3 are available at Fast Forward, 1918 1st Ave.; Darbury Stenderu, 2121 1st Ave.; and Basic, 111 Broadway E.)

(The next Fraternitie Snoqualmie public event is “Nudestock” in mid-August. Tickets will be available through KISW radio; for info call 392-NUDE. Nude & Natural magazine, sold at better newsstands, covers issues related to the nudist philosophy.)

7/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Is John McCaw Batman?

A warm, warm greeting to another distinctively cool edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t decide which is sillier: calling Hollywood producers “cultural elitists” or calling them “cultural”.

HOT WEATHER DRESSING: Misc. still wears its baseball caps with the brim in front, the way Abner Doubleday intended. Besides, you can tell when a fashion trend has outworn its welcome when they start making custom caps with frat-house letters printed only on the back.

IN YOUR EAR: Last week, Misc. showed several people the Times picture of a half-dozen acupuncture needles stuck into a heroin addict’s ear to reduce his dependency; only ear-pierced women gasped “Gross” at the sight. The therapy combines the popular trend of body piercing with a sadly “hip” form of self-destruction (Seven Year Bitch guitarist Stefanie Ann Sargent died of an apparent overdose on 6/27; many other local musicians are said to use heroin). Trendy rockers are bound to imitate the look for fashion’s sake. I only hope people will take the real acupuncture or otherwise try to clean up. Remember: hard drugs are a tool of people in power to silence opposing voices.

PHILM PHUN: Here in the town that was among the first in the U.S. to discover the Dutch and Australian new waves, Hong Kong movies are the certified Next Big Thing. They just can’t churn out Chinese Ghost Story installments or vicious/spectacular gangster films fast enough. “But what,” you ask, “is gonna happen to these filmmakers in ’97, when Beijing’s butchers take over the colony?” Many of Hong Kong’s production companies, along with the crime syndicates that allegedly provide financing as well as subject matter for some films, have begun their own 5-Year Plans by setting up offices in Vancouver. Just think: we’ll have a genuine full-time Northwest feature industry, and Canada will finally make movies that don’t look like Hollywood on a discount.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Muttmatchers’ Messenger is a bimonthly photo-ad tabloid promoting “Companion Animals for Adoption.” Photos of forlorn cats and dogs appear, accompanied by a description and phone number. Some are part of display ads, “sponsored in the interest of animal welfare” by Realtors, insurance agents, lawyers, a garage, and a clinical psychologist.

NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1970-1992?: “The Humor Magazine for Adults” was more like a college paper’s April Fool edition, only with good writers and great artists. It was a true rebel without a cause. Its purpose was not to make you smile but to stare you down. Born as the student protest movement passed its peak, its only message was its own sense of self-righteous superiority to the world. No wonder original co-editor P.J. O’Rourke emerged as a right-winger, and Belushi’s character in the NL movie Animal House became a senator. Like the teen/college generation that grew up with it (mine), its only sacred cow was the Almighty Ego Trip. Some people insist that it used to be funny, before its original staff dispersed to Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. I wouldn’t give it that much credit (though it did nourish the career of a few great cartoonists, including Seattle’s own Sherry Flenniken and her droll Trots and Bonnie). The magazine’s officially on “a six month hiatus” (its NYC office is closed and it hasn’t published since February). It may not come back. But its spirit lives on, in thousands of rude stand-up comics.

SPURTS: Still no hope for NHL hockey here, but the Canadian Football League‘s considering its own southern invasion. It’s being courted by Portland, which had a team in the short-lived World Football League. See if they can live with a 110-yard, three-down game where scores of 57-36 are common. Heck, it’d still be better than either Oregon college team. Just make sure it doesn’t get an Indian-motif team name, ‘cuz the Portland paper won’t print it.

STUFF YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE HEARD: Over half of the 18,000-ish arrests after the LA riots were against Hispanics; the sweep has given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a chance to ship hundreds of immigrants back to Mexico and Central America, while others languish for failure to pay exorbitant bail (sez the Nation).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ralston Purina’s Batman Returns cereal is far better than the cereal made for the first Batman film (I didn’t like the first movie much either). The new cereal contains the following “fun-shaped” marshmallow pieces: “White bats, purple Penguin hats, tan Batmobiles, blue cat heads.”

CATHODE CORNER: The Seattle City Council is thinking about taking over the local cable TV franchises as a city-owned company. Do we really want politicians deciding whether we’d get to keep MTV, let alone the Playboy Channel?

FOLLOWING FASHIONS LIKE CATTLE: The San Angelo, TX Standard-Times (it’s called that even during Daylight Savings) reports that “the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo adopted new market steer regulations calling for animals to have no more than one-fourth inch of hair any place on their body, besides the tail switch.” Reporter Jeanne Serio quotes a show official: “The sculpting of long hair has become so intense in junior market steer shows that we have lost sight of the original intent of this competition, to teach young people responsibility, knowledge about the care and raising of animals, and skills in choosing and raising market animals with proper body structure and conformation.” I say if long hair is good enough for the entire male student population at Evergreen, it’s good enough for other neutered beasts.

PRESSED: Ever wonder if newspaper headline writers actually read the articles? A 6/24 USA Today cover blurb went, “Book Buying in Dumps: Are We Doomed?” The article itself noted that “spending on adult consumer books increased 10.7% between 1985 and 1990″ and kids’ book sales were even higher. (The story didn’t mention that newspaper circulation in that era was flat and network TV viewership dropped.)

HAD TO HAPPEN SOMETIME: The Beatniks are a new-music cover band, giving totally straight copies of your favorite R.E.M., Violent Femmes and Nirvana songs in between the more typical stale Beatle tunes. It brings to mind an idea: how about some smart promoter forming multiple “Sounds of Seattle” cover bands, all assembled from scratch, to perform your grunge-rock favorites in every Sheraton dance lounge in America.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #1: When I ask folks why don’t they like Clinton, they offer vague allusions about an unattractive personality or a simple “isn’t it obvious?” His groomers are working to give him this image. He’s being handled the way Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were, by party leaders who believe America will elect a “lite right” candidate who doesn’t bash conservatives too much and says as little as possible about non-suburban issues, all for the mythical “Bubba” vote in the south (where Jacksontook seven states in the ’88 primaries). Party leaders ignore the concrete examples that this approach will never work. Clinton’s the “beneficiary” of a primary system in which Demo fundraisers anoint the candidate most likely to run a consultant-controlled campaign — and most likely to lose the election.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #2: Winds-o-change are a-blowin’, and coffeehouse leftists may worry about the threat of actually attaining a voice that people might listen to. No problem! Just use these handy steps to let the right wing win every time: Don’t vote. Don’t run for office or support anyone who does. Never try to respectfully persuade new people to your views. Call everyone who doesn’t already agree with you a redneck, a fascist, or both. Keep using that strident us-vs.-them rhetoric that worked so well in the ’60s to turn people away from progressive causes. Shun modern media and communications, so the right can monopolize them. Do this and you can keep complaining about the world without ever having to do anything.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (handwritten flyer on downtown light poles): “Public Information Notice. If you are in a high plant pollen area, it is a good idea if you properly wrap your vegetable scraps, bread scraps and meat fat, vegetable oil-soaked paper towels-rags and tie the top of the bag securely. Wrap your cigarette, tobacco scraps separately, making sure that they are not ignited before you dispose of it. If you have meat that is `bad’ or milk that has soured, wrap it in two plastic bags and tie the top or seal it and then put it in a paper bag, writing on the paper bag `Bad Meat’ before you dispose of it, so that if anyone does look through the garbage they will not construe it as something healthily eatable. If you go to a park or a bench, instead of putting your cigarette out in the dirt or sand, bring a container along with you that is metal, like a small canister or cough drop box, and make sure that the tobacco and/or tobacco filter is no longer ignited before your dispose of it. If you wash your garbage containers on a regular basis, it will make your environment healthier also. Please try to do these things, for it will lessen the possibility of infection for yourself and others in the area. It will lessen the chance of food poisoning and may also reduce the amount of emergency intake at hospitals. Thank you for your cooperation.”… Handwritten note with a Sylvester sticker, taped to a garbage can at 3rd & Blanchard: “In our area, look for a solid wall of windows that can’t be opened by guests. The Rabbit.”

TABLED: I remain perplexed by this phony “Northwest cuisine”. In the P-I, Stouffer Madison Hotel chef Rene Pax insisted that “Seattle food means fresh food and the best of the fresh produce.” If there really is a culinary tradition here, it would have to take into account our short growing season (the freshness obsession comes from LA-trained chefs used to year-round growing) and our frontier heritage, particularly of the days before highways or rural electrification. Truly traditional NW foods would be those with brief seasons (cherries), or are made to keep (evaporated milk was invented here). A cuisine that reflects the character of the local populace (as opposed to laid-back fantasies) would stay modest and unpretentious, at least fun. Nothing gaudy or cutesy. An honest smoked salmon, adequate white wine, plain tossed salad, and the quiet elegance of an Almond Roca dessert.

WAITING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: The authorities made their second move to silence the Seattle music scene (after banning Pearl Jam from Gasworks) by shutting down the funk nights at Jersey’s Sports Bar. It must be noted that Jersey’s mostly-black crowd was, on the whole, no more or less rowdy than the white suburban crowd at local yup meatmarkets.

TRUE CRIME: I’ve had two reports of skinheads bashing homeless people outside the New Hope Mission next door to 911 Media Arts on the night of 5/2. Apparently, the skins claim to be Army men, despite their swastika tattoos and designer boots. They repeatedly kicked and beat men sleeping under the I-5 overpass to the point of major internal injuries. Despite frequent emergency calls, the attacks were unresponded to by cops too busy standing watch over Westlake Center.

VIBES: My Pleasure vibrators may be the first women’s product endorsed by porn queens (“Personally Chosen by the Girls Who Know Them Best”). According to a blurb on the box by one Ginger Lynn, “I like a vibe that’s of exceptionally high quality, and with variable speed control. Because I like sexual control. And I am quality.” What if sex stars as role models catch on? Would beauty standards come to be based on what men seem to like (instead of what women think men like)? Would women reshape themselves toward plump torsos with fat silicone lips and catatonic eyes? Would they imitate porn “acting” by slurring their words and staring blankly into space?

BET ON IT: The new Tulalip Reservation casino was described by a spokesperson on KUOW as “a touch of Las Vegas with a Northwest Indian motif.” What’s that, a Thunderbird totem stitched on the back of a silk jacket?

HYPOCRISY ON PARADE: Rupert Murdoch fired Fox TV executive Stephen Chao, at a Murdoch-convened symposium at an Aspen, Colo. hotel on “the threat to democratic capitalism posed by modern culture”, filled with the usual conservative media-bashers. Chao gave a routine anti-censorship speech at the meeting, claiming violence was more obscene than sex or nudity. On cue, a man in a hotel uniform revealed himself to be a male stripper hired by Chao; he stood nude for 30 seconds before the shocked panelists (including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney his wife, Nat’l Endowment for the Humanities head Lynne Cheney) while Chao talked about how people have to get over their hangups about the human body. Murdoch, who made his first fortune with the toplessPage Three Girls in his UK tabloids, called Chao’s spectacle “a tremendous misjudgment” and sacked him on the spot.

THE REAL CULTURAL ELITISTS: The state Republican convention, as dominated by the religious right and at least tolerated by top GOP officeholders, condemned abortion rights, homosexuality, divorce, sex education, foreign aid, the UN, arts funding, civil service, and the teaching of non-western cultures. It also denounced “channeling, values clarification, relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, yoga, Eastern religious practices, or similar ideas.” My yoga teacher might call that sort of bigotry a fiery ball of negative energy, that impassions people but can also engulf them. Meanwhile, some Nevada Republicans officially denounced that over-publicized Elvis stamp as glorifying “a habitual drug user.”

EYES WITHOUT A FACE: It’s nice that the Mariners are finally a local team again. But why won’t team investor and car-phone tycoon John McCaw appear in public? When the papers ran pictures of the other new owners, they put a blank box above his name. At press conferences, he sent a lawyer to speak for him. Is he ashamed to show his face with the hapless M’s? Will he show up in the owners’ box with a New Orleans ‘Aints paper bag on his head? What if he’s a mystery man, who can’t appear in public lest someone discern his crimefighting secret identity? We invite you to send in (a) a picture of what you think he looks like, or (b) a written explanation of his seclusion. Accuracy doesn’t count, since we don’t know what he looks like either. Stranger employees and people who’ve seen McCaw are ineligible. Results will be published here in three weeks.

ROBERT E. LEE HARDWICK, 1931-1992: Before what we now call “talk radio” took off here, he ran a chat show with a few records. He was adamant that non-rock radio needn’t mean “middle of the road.” He ruled Seattle radio (adult division) from the late ’50s to 1980, when new KVI management decided his postwar-jazz sensibility was an anachronism. He spent a decade wandering from station to station, supported in some years only by commercial endorsements. Sponsors loved his straightforward, no-nonsense persona; station managers hated it, because it contradicted the hype and hustle of modern radio. He was a Scotch-on-the-rocks guy in a wine-cooler world. Two months after losing his last gig (on KING-AM), he drove into the Cascades and blew his brains out. The KING-TV newscast that announced his death had one of his commercials (for Honda dealers).

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to go to the Seattle Hits exhibit of local pop culture at the Museum of History and Industry (including the gallant return of Bobo the stuffed gorilla), visit the exquisite Collector’s Doll Store on 35th and Northlake, and ponder this Cynthia Tucker commentary from the Times: “Successive tides of human progress have rolled back slavery, the subjugation of women, and more recently the oppression of communism.” About time we stopped oppressing communism, don’t you agree?

PASSAGE

A Tri-Cities community college student’s guide to life from Shampoo Planet, the forthcoming new novel by Generation X author Douglas Coupland: “Flippant people ask stupid questions and expect answers. Secrets divulged under flippant circumstances aren’t valued. People don’t value other people’s secrets, period. That’s why I keep my secrets to myself.”

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is supposed to finally come out on disk this summer. Contact Eastgate Systems Inc., (800) 562-1638.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Adumbration”

EVERY VEGETARIAN I KNOW SMOKES THE HIGHEST-TAR CIGARETTES AVAILABLE.

ARE THEY TRYING TO GET EXTRA PROTEIN OR WHAT?

6/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating five Stranger columns)

QUAYLE SHOULDN’T PICK ON CANDICE BERGEN.

SHE GREW UP LEARNING HOW TO ARGUE WITH A DUMMY

We at Misc. bemusedly note the spectacular rise of Perot as the candidate of bus commuters, computer bulletin board users, and talk radio callers. He appeals to their sense of independence, of freedom from the petty rules of governance. The GOP has long appealed to the frontier mentality of people living outside the old social structures, especially in the west. But when times got tough, the Repos retreated to their old-money, old-power base, leaving the Mad-As-Hell crowd to seek a new champion. But Perot’s not beholden to special interest groups, he is one. He ran a bureaucratized company with a Safeco-like dress code, courted politicians of both parties for sweetheart contracts, and sponsored dubious foreign adventures on behalf of right-fringe causes. (His name is a soundalike to moralistic fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault, whose version of Red Riding Hood was an uppity female who paid for her unladylike curiosity by becoming wolf chow.)

PAY ‘N SAVE, 1947-1992: Washington’s dominant drug chain for four decades grew from a single outlet at 4th & Pike to over 120 outlets. It was the flagship of the Bean family’s retail empire, which at various times included Tradewell, Rhodes of Seattle, Ernst, Malmo, Lamonts, Sportsland, Sportswest, Schuck’s, Bi-Mart, Price Savers, The Bean Pod, and Pizza Haven. The Beans were known for their Mormon paternalism, particularly in their generous employee benefits — which made the company ripe for a hostile takeover and dismemberment in 1984. Shorn of its sister chains, Pay ‘n Save lost its focus and market share. Now, the stores will be absorbed by Pay Less, a much less classy operation started in the ’20s by the Skaggs family (also involved in the founding of Safeway and Albertson’s). By the ’60s the Pay Less logo was divided among three completely separate companies: one in Oregon and Washington; one in California; and a four-store chain in Tacoma. The northern and southern Pay Lesses were both bought by K mart a few years back; they remained somewhat gaudy places, while P ‘n S was getting glitzy in past years. P ‘n S stores will now change to PL’s garish pastels. But the P ‘n S headquarters staff will be thrown out. A similar front-office closing is rumored for for Seven Gables Theaters, which will now be run directly from LA by the parent company, Samuel Goldwyn. As we’ve seen with banks, fewer people will be able to authorize local charitable or arts donations. Fewer firms will be able to respond to local market needs.

ICONO-GRAPHICS: CNN’s Showbiz Today lists the weekly Neilsen ratings against a graphic of TV antennas rising from urban rowhouses. A cable channel offering nostalgia for the pre-cable days…

CORRECTION (Times, 5/12): “To keep cats away from indoor herb and vegetable plants, sprinkle leaves with red cayenne pepper. An article in the home/real estate section on Sunday listed another spice.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Journal of Northwest Music is Bruce Blood and Chris Carlson’s catalog of discs (real and compact) by area bands from the Dynamics up to the Melvins. It’s also got an interview with jazz guitarist Larry Coryell (an ex-UW Daily writer just like me), on his early days in Seattle rock, circa ’61 (“the kind of music the local bands were playing for the kids was a higher, more sophisticated type of R&B than they might be getting in other regions”).

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT: In endorsing the destruction of most spotted owl habitat in Washington, Bush gave final proof of his total submission to big bucks. The owl is an indicator species whose disappearance signals the decline of an ecosystem. To move a few birds away as an excuse to level that ecosystem is the most cynical action that could be taken. Few jobs will be saved by clearcutting at an already too-high level. Timber workers are out of work because of log exports, mill automation, corporate consolidation, and excess cutting from past years that’s left too little old growth left and not enough tree-farm stands to replace them.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at the Christopher Paul Bollen print gallery on 3rd): “Hi. Popcorn, candy, children and pets are most WELCOME in this gallery. If you break it, no big deal. No shoes, no shirt? Goodness, it must be sunny. COME ON IN.”

AD OF THE MONTH: (huge boldface slogan on a brochure for Ultra Meditation tapes from Zygon of Issaquah): “In 28 Minutes You’ll Be Meditating Like a Zen Monk!”… We’re always mesmerized by the Horizon Shuttle billboards with the digital clocks flashing in half-hour increments every second, bearing the slogan “Nonstop Non-stops to Portland.” As I recall, Delta was the first to run billboards proclaiming, “Fly Non-Stop to Portland.” Every flight from Sea-Tac to Portland is non-stop. There’s no place for a commercial-class plane to stop, except an emergency landing at McChord AFB.

CATHODE CORNER: When Sony took over Columbia Pictures, it inherited rights to the Merv Griffin and Chuck Barris game shows. Now, it plans the latest specialized cable network, The Game Show Channel. (What’s next: The Soap Channel? The Blooper Channel? The Station Break Channel?)

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: The much-touted Milky Way II bar has the solid, chalky taste of the original Milky Way imitator, Milk Shake. The 25-percent calorie reduction comes from Caprenin, “a reduced calorie fat made from natural sources”… Get ready to welcome back that fond relic of the ’80s, New Coke, rechristened “Coke II.” It’s being test-marketed in Spokane, and may go national this fall…. People call me a cynic but I’m not. When I shop for a soft drink I look for Minute Maid Orange Soda because I enjoy the bizarre combination of syllables of that mystery ingredient, “glycerol ester of wood rosin.” I enjoy the slippery thickness it gives to the beverage, making a glass of flavored water feel like something juicier.

THE MAILBAG: The anonymous editor of something called Eye on Nirvana: A Report on Nirvana and Nothing Else writes in part that I shouldn’t scoff at Rolling Stone‘s comparison of Seattle to Liverpool; since we’re “becoming one of the power centers of the alternative music scene”, I could only oppose publicity for the town if I were living “in fear daily of having our little pan of heavenly mazurkas sliced into even thinner pieces and distributed to even more `outsiders.'” Yes, I used to scoff at outsiders. But the people coming here now are making real contributions to our community. They’re moving here to be part of something. People used to come here to avoid social involvement. That horrible “Emerald City” slogan, adopted by the Convention and Visitors Bureau in ’82, typified a post-hippie generation wanting to get away from it all to a dreamland where nothing ever happens. So many people wanted their own nature oasis that they destroyed a lot of nature so they could have their big ugly estate houses. We don’t need that. We do need all the people we can get to make great cultural stuff, to make a better community.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1 (NY Times “Surfacing” brief, 5/14): “Test Tube Pets: Today, leopards by artificial insemination. Tomorrow, sperm banks for cats.”

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: In the unauthorized bio Hard Drive, an ex-girlfriend of Bill Gates describes him as “a combination of Einstein, Woody Allen, and John Cougar Mellencamp.”

THE FINE PRINT (from Cakes Men Like, Benjamin Darling’s book of photostatted pages from old food-company recipe brochures): “The recipes in this book are the product of an earlier era, and the publisher cannot guarantee their reproducability or palatability for contemporary readers.”

LATEX LESSON: Without straying too far into Mr. Savage’s topic range, Misc. wants to briefly note how the ex-“new morality” generation just doesn’t understand the cultural implications of safe sex. They think that anybody having sex must be having it the way it was had in the ’60s, either as strict monogamy or undisciplined licentiousness. They don’t get that with today’s much more assertive women, relations would naturally be more protection-conscious even without STDs to worry about. Contraception alone would be taken more seriously. Women taking more charge, even in short-term relationships, invariably means more discipline (I don’t mean S&M but simply more thought and planning). That attitude shows in the elaborate visions of club fashions, in dance music that’s all about energy and control instead of “letting it all hang out”.

WIRED: Pat Robertson tried, then gave up trying, to buy what remains of United Press International, the news service that reported the end of World War I a couple days prematurely in 1918 and hasn’t had editors’ full respect since. It’s no longer carried by many papers, including the Times. (It’s still a big supplier of news bulletins to computer information services.) Anyone who’s seen a 700 Club “news” segment knows that Robertson’s idea of news is more like sports reporting, cheering his heroes (Reagan, Helmes, Israel, the Pentagon) and hissing his villains (abortion-rights supporters, peaceniks, artists, the First Amendment, rock music, unions, environmentalists, anybody to the left of Franco). The UPI name may live a while longer, but any remaining credibility it had is shot.

YOU THOUGHT THE SIMPSONS WERE TOO MERCHANDISED: The Channel 9 Store in Rainier Square is one of a series of boutiques run by PBS stations. They sell books, soundtrack CDs, videos, toys and assorted doodads inspired by your favorite “noncommercial” shows. No MacNiel/Lehrer salt and pepper shakers, yet…

OFFICE HUMOR TURNS PRO: The Wall St. Journal sez a New Jersey branch of Seattle’s Red Robin restaurant chain has comedy shows in its bar, and is getting local companies to sponsor employee entrants in a Corporate Laugh-Off. Do you tell your cruelest boss jokes to win, or not tell them and keep your job?

FOR YOUR TRAVEL PLANS: Seattle-area McDonald’s are sporting paper tray liners with a cartoon map of all its 25 outlets in Alaska. It shows a Coke straw-sipping salmon, a French fry-eating moose, and burger bags delivered by float plane, snowmobile, and in an eagle’s talons. However, the lifelong Dog House fan in me can’t help but be offended by the headline on the liner, “All Roads Lead to McDonald’s” — a ripoff of the “All Roads Lead to the Dog House” placemats.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, voice your opposition to those who want to ban musicians and street vendors from Broadway, and heed the words of local artist Joanne Branch in her recent show at Art/Not Terminal: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, at least for a little while.”

PASSAGE

Hugh Hefner’s editorial in the first Playboy (1953), on why his would be one of the few men’s mags of the day not about hunting or fishing: “We plan to spend most of our time inside. We like our apartment.”

BIG EVENT!

The sixth birthday of Misc., and the 35th birthday of your correspondent, will be celebrated Mon., 6/8, at the Queen City Film Festival Dream Theater, 1108 Pike St. (Enter thru the mystery bookshop.) Bring stuff to celebrate with. There’ll be readings, short films, and audience participation.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amanuensis”

IN THE STREETS

The Weekly, in one of its best reportages ever, noted that the 4/30 mixed-race window-busting spree downtown was smaller than fight scenes at two Rainier Valley dances last year that the white media ignored. As you know, the following night’s mob scene was mostly white guys, led by U-District anarchists who wanted a riot of their own. They’re the successors to the punks I knew in the early ’80s, whose idea of creativity was to imitate the latest LA fad. But like the second wave of most subcultures, today’s circle-A guys are more orthodox and serious than their forbearers. They may think they were formenting revolution in solidarity with blacks, but (with the help of irresponsible media who exaggerated the threat) they just made white Seattle more afraid of African Americans, who will now be collectively blamed for the anarchists’ work. Most of the busted windows, except for the Bon and a 7-11, were at youth- or hip-oriented stores, including a sneaker outlet, blue jean boutiques, the Broadway Jack in the Box and Kinko’s Copies. Most were independent businesses that could least afford the damage and the panic-driven loss of clientele; none had anything to do with the Rodney King verdict. The nightclubs that weekend were shut or mostly empty; the anarchists directly threatened a youth culture that’s taken 10 tough years to build. To the people who stayed home, I say: Two isolated sprees of highly visible property damage must not kill the scene. If anything, we need more people out at night, making positive contact with one another.

BACK SOUTH, who’s to blame for the conditions that sparked the rage? Every CEO who moves jobs to the suburbs, the Sunbelt or overseas. Every politician who ignores lower working class people or treats them as something to protect “decent people” against. Every baby-boomer who treats minorities as sexy savages, not as human beings. Every yuppie customer of drug dealers. Every bank that “invests” in funny-money schemes instead of in its own community. A tax system that insures that only rich suburbs get the best schools.

I HOPE THIS IS THE END OF LA LA LAND, of the disgusting mythical SoCal of Fleetwood Mac and Tommy Lasorda, limos and liposuction. Of celebrities who’d rather care for the rainforest than for their own city. Of violence movies celebrating “cops who break all the rules”. Long before this, when people tried to turn me on to the latest “alternative scene” in LA, I told them that LA is what everything else in the world is an alternative to. If LA’s so hip, how come it gave us Nixon and Reagan? Calif. wasn’t just home to those old student rebels, it was home to most of the things they were rebelling against. Then, the more violent faction of the white New Left accomplished little except to serve its own ego trips, drive working-class whites into the law-&-order Right, and destroy any hopes for a real broad-based movement to actually help people. Few “relevant” white songwriters mentioned racism except as a pretext for peace-n’-love sentiments. One song that did address the issue was Frank Zappa‘s “Trouble Coming Every Day,” from the now-reissued Freak Out! album. In biting monotonic couplets that predate rap, Zappa describes watching the 1965 Watts riots through the then-new gimmick of live TV helicopters. At one point he shouts, “I’m not black but there are times when I wish I could say I’m not white.”

2/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Love Songs for Vacuum Cleaners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GOOD OLE DAYS

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

REPORT

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Fueilletonist”

JUST CUZ WE MAKE CARS TOO BIG FOR JAPANESE CITIES,

WITH THE STEERING WHEELS ON THE WRONG SIDE…

Videophobia

Essay for the Seattle Times, 1/28/92

If you visit independent bookstores, you may have seen the National Book Week poster showing one book surrounded by 51 blank TV screens, with the slogan “One week a year is all we ask.”

The poster exploits an almost religious belief held by many book lovers against TV, despite the fact that talk shows are the greatest sales tool the book business has ever known. Despite the fact that the top book publishers and sellers are stronger than ever, while the big TV networks and many local stations are bleeding red ink.

Literary folks love to think that they’re a downtrodden enclave of true believers surrounded by video heathens. To admit to even owning a TV set is to be labeled as one of the unclean hordes.

Allow me to state this with no guilt or shame: I do not hate television.

It’s the most flexible communications medium in the world today. It combines the languages of film, theater, oratory, music, graphics, and every other visual and performing genre, plus a video vocabulary all its own. Its presence is immediate and intimate, not overwhelming like feature films. It can mix genres and formats much more easily than film, which is pretty much stuck with straight narrative. TV news has grown from a simple headline service to a true window on the world.

But still, the videophobes scoff at the entire medium. Every so often, some parents’ group launches a “turn-off week” campaign, accompanied by publicity campaigns designed to get them on the TV news.

Some videophobic comments involve pseudo-scientific rhetoric, based on vague “evidence” or pure speculation. Author Jerry Mander claims that since the video image is an array of colored dots and lines, it’s inferior to a “real” picture. If that’s true, then we should toss out all pointilist paintings, tile mosaics, and Oriental rugs. Mander also charges that TV consumption is inherently passive and unquestioning. Has he never seen baseball fans arguing over a play? Or a family heatedly discussing a news report? He also can’t explain why literacy rates and per-capita college graduation are higher than in the pre-tube ’40s (though still not high enough for our high-tech society).

Many TV-bashers, including Mander, came of age during the 1960s and have failed to appreciate all of society’s changes since then. They talk as if there were still just three or four channels all showing bland shows like “My Three Sons”.

But their prejudices really go back further, to an old intellectual prejudice against oral and visual expression. Before the Protestant Reformation, religious faith had been inspired largely by the spoken liturgy and visual icons. But after Martin Luther and moveable type, many Europeans believed that ideas were somehow purer when expressed in writing. They believed that words informed and enlightened, while pictures seduced and deceived.

Of course, words can deceive very easily indeed. Holocaust-revisionist “scholars” use reasonable-sounding rhetoric and seemingly authoritative documentation to assert that six million Jews weren’t systematically murdered — unless you notice that their only “substantiation” comes from one another’s books.

And reading alone doesn’t make you smarter. Some of the most mindless people I know devour a book every two days, books carefully chosen to provide predictable entertainment and predictable rhetoric.

The top 10 book publishers did more business last year than the major movie studios. Bookstores were the second-fastest-growing retail industry during the past 10 years (after restaurants). Much of their sales consist of gossipy bestsellers, formula romances and thrillers, and self-help homilies. Can you honestly say that Sidney Sheldon’s trash novels are better than his classic series “I Dream of Jeannie”?

Still, the book business has always had room for a healthy highbrow segment, while TV used to have very little intellectual content. The networks originally promised to bring high culture to every corner of the nation. But after a while, culture shows like Alistair Cooke’s “Omnibus” were replaced by westerns and cops. By 1960, you were basically stuck with light family entertainment every night of the week.

But that was the Old TV. The rise of PBS in the early ’70s was the first step in making a New TV. That was soon followed by the domestic satellites that made cable networks feasible. Also at this time, a few “video artists” started experimenting on new, smaller cameras and recorders; they explored subjects and styles that video could handle differently from film.

Home VCRs showed up in 1976 and brought a new relationship between programs and viewers. People tend to be more involved with a program that they’ve physically left the house to get. Tapes let anyone examine a show or movie, to study the techniques that make a production work. With the camcorder, millions could apply this knowledge toward making their own material.

The New TV goes beyond just watching “whatever’s on.” You can (indeed, you have to) plan in advance. Choose from the best of broadcast, cable and home video, and you can have several evenings a month of quality viewing, to complement the other activities of a well-cultured person.

Mainstream TV entertainment is, on the whole, smarter than mainstream movies with all their lurid violence and visceral special effects. If I had kids, I’d rather they like “Beverly Hills 90210” than Steven Seagal.

CNN may be the first American mass news medium to take everyday, non-disaster news from other countries seriously. Even the network newscasts have a better eye on the nation these days. We get to see the human survival stories behind the abstract word “recession.” in the ’60s, we’d only get to hear what various pinstripe-clad analysts had to say about it.

The cost of TV production and the limitations of TV distribution used to mean that only a few people got to make any. But now, adequate-quality camcorders can be rented for $10 a day. To see what a few smart people with camcorders can do, watch the independent documentary series “The ’90s” (which KCTS will only show at 3 a.m. Wednesday nights). There are also scattered spots in the MTV schedule that expose new visions, new ways of seeing and hearing things.

Also, check out the video-art screenings held at 911 Media Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and elsewhere. You’ll see a generation of people making their own TV, questioning the preconceptions of their culture. People who expose themselves to the widest range of influences, who learn new views and new languages — verbal, aural, and visual.

The New TV is an almost limitless tool. It’s not always pretty, but neither is life. Like any medium, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. Its main weaknesses are its informality and its overambitiousness (it seldom has the time or money to do anything perfectly). Its main strength is that it can take the widest spectrum of material and bring it into the home. Now there’s a new TV, and a new generation of people using these tools to make their own audiovisual vocabulary. The enemy of good writing isn’t other media, it’s bad writing (resulting from sloppy thinking). Taking control of your media is a big step in thinking for yourself.

(Clark Humphrey reads plenty of books, some of which he reviews in The Times. He also edits Misc., a monthly newsletter on popular culture.)

1/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and

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

1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

IMPORTANT NOTICE

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Synecdoche”

THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92

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

12/91 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating the first four Stranger Misc. columns)

Elegance? What Elegance?

Welcome back to the sixth year-ending edition of Misc., the newsletter that hopes the end of the cold war will mean the end of gratuitous mushroom-cloud shots in experimental films. And despite recent tragic events, we still root against all LA sports teams.

Silence = Debt: You may have heard how KIRO’s top brass censored a report on 7 UW football players with police records (basic jock crimes like speeding and assault). You may not have heard another TV censorship tale. The KCTS Arts and Performance Group had its entire funding cut by its sole patron, Puget Sound Bank, after a Seattle Men’s Chorus show with transvestite segments. (The bank and the station denied any cause-and-effect accusations.) The unit must now hustle for funding for individual events (insuring more conformity to corporate tastes). It may be about time to give up on allegedly “public TV,” set up financially by the Nixon administration expressly to be beholden to big business. KCTS has shunted documentaries like Tongues Untied to the wee hours, while devoting prime time to animal shows, Kissinger interviews, and Lawrence Welk reruns. The ’90s, the one regular forum for true independent points of view, is now only seen on KCTS at 3 a.m. Thursday mornings. Nationally, shows that don’t suck up to corporate America don’t get (or stay) on. Mobil asserts a lot of creative control over Masterpiece Theater and Mystery serials; nothing goes on that doesn’t support the British class system as a model society. It’s time to find a real alternative distribution system for professional, independent video.

The Fine Print (card wrapped with a Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers figurine in a Frosted Flakes box): “Parents: The toy in this package meets or exceeds currently applicable government and voluntary toy industry standards. As with any toy, we suggest you provide guidance to your children regarding proper use.”

Notes: The local media made a big to-do about Nirvana having to buy out an LA band’s claim to the name. In fact, this sort of thing happened a lot in the punk days. The beloved late English Beat was known as just the Beat everywhere but in North America, where a lame Calif. band had already released an LP as the Beat. A fledgling Seattle band had to stop calling itself The News after Huey Lewis’s lawyers showed up. In 1979, there were unrelated bands in NY, SF and Detroit all called the Mutants… For two minutes of video airtime, M. Jackson ceased to be a bland, commercial imitation of weirdness and became a real provocateur. Of course, that footage had to be dropped.

What’s In Store: The downtown Bon has been running this big “Return to Elegance” ad campaign. Seattle’s newcomers might be fooled into thinking this was some grand dame of merchandising that had lost its focus before recovering its past glory. But we know better. We know this is the same place that used to have flannel fabrics and a great homely budget floor and acres of Qiana and stretch pants and a quintessentially 1977 boutique called “Annie’s Hall.”

News Item of the Month (P-I correction, 10/24): “The jicama is a brown, crisp-fleshed tuberous vegetable; the kiwano is a fruit with orange, spiky skin and green, seedy pulp. Due to a typesetting error, a story in the Oct. 16 editions confused the two.”

Ad Verbs: There was this wonderful USA Today story on 10/31 about national ad campaigns that didn’t make it. Along with the usual everyday rejections (a 3 Stooges fax-machine ad rejected by the Japanese product manager who never heard of the Stooges), there was an ad that would’ve warned against taking an inferior 4 x 4 into remote rugged terrain where it might leave you stranded: “Drive a Landcruiser or drink your own urine.” Then there was a magazine ad with a simple before-and-after equation, with a tube of Clearasil photographed on the Before side and a wrapped Trojan on the After side. Wrote the Clearasil managers: “This promise cannot be substantiated.”

Xmas ’91: One place you might not think to look for gift ideas is the American Bar Association Journal. There you can find a sweatshirt bowdlerizing Shakespeare to read, “The first thing we do, let’s kiss all the lawyers.” Another outfit, Legal Artworks of Chester, Conn., offers framed reproductions of “distinguished works of art with legal subject matter: trial scenes, lawyers, jurors, etc. by Daumier, Thomas Hart Benton, others.”

Still Earning Their 10 Percent: The Curtis Publishing Co. (the Indianapolis right-wing couple who run the nostalgia/revival version of the Saturday Evening Post) now has a subsidiary, the Curtis Management Co., merchandising agents for about 100 sports and entertainment celebrities, most of whom are dead (Twain, Abbott & Costello, Buckwheat, Bogart, Garland, Belushi, Hank Williams Sr., Satchel Paige, Babe Ruth). The company’s PR documents identify its living clients (the third Benji and some ex-football players) with an asterisk denoting “Available for personal appearance bookings”).

When Will the Madness Cease?: Thenext victim of upscaling is the legendary Valhalla Tavern in Ballard, now the Old Pequliar Ale House.

Getting Mighty Crowded: I’ve had little positive to say about Joe Bob Briggs, the redneck-pretending to be a yuppie-pretending to be a redneck who writes lovingly about bad movies. But in a recent issue of his We Are the Weird newsletter, he noted that “in Seattle, which used to be one of the friendliest places in America, people will very openly tell you how much you are not welcome there, especially if you intend to build a house, open a new shopping center, or for that matter just move there to live with your idiot cousin.” His advice to Seattle and other “anti-growth” places: You don’t have to sell a house. Don’t say you’re against growth and then beg United Airlines to move its HQ to your town. If you don’t want more traffic, don’t demand that builders include so many parking spaces. And “watch it with the `I was here first’ syndrome. Seattle, after all, is a man’s name. He was an Indian.”

Junk Food of the Month: Fun Food Inc. of Portland offers a line of kiddie microwave breakfasts, including mini-servings of “wacky” waffles, French toast and pancakes (all with turkey sausage) and an egg-muffin sandwich. The foods are moist enough to eat without syrup; the names include My Dream Breakfast and SuperSports Breakfast.

Local Publication of the Month: Where’s Dan Quayle?, the The Waldo-parody drawn by Puyallup’s Bron Smith, is the first non-Trudeau political-cartooning book on the bestseller list in recent memory. Like the Waldo books and Quayle himself (and unlike traditional political cartoons), it’s obsessively “light.” I’ve said that mandatory “happiness” is a hallmark of sleaze; the book’s creators display this more effectively than any blatant editorial cartoon ever can.

Art in Form, 1981-91: It lived and died as a store selling fancy (often costly) books on progressive art and art theory. Its greater value for 10 years was as a gathering place for smart people. The merchandise is being cleared in a “deconstructing” sale. The space will live as a world-music shop serving the same clientele, but it won’t be the same.

Painful Realization for the New Millennium: By the time I’m 60, tourist towns will hold upscale rap festivals with mostly-white casts and all-white audiences sipping wine and basking in what they’ll call the first art form of the 21st century. The music will sound like Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs backed by bad jazz. Already, a jazz combo has covered Grandmaster Flash’s The Message.

Sign of the Month (on a city Landscape Dept. truck): “A city without trees isn’t fit for a dog.”

The Drug Bug: The new Pay n’ Save on 2nd & Union has Seattle’s first inside drugstore espresso bar. And I still remember Seattle’s last drugstore soda fountain…

Happy Returns?: The Init. 120 turnout helped Seattle gain its first predominantly-female city council. The networks chose not to cover this election; CBS preferred to run a cheap made-in-Vancouver movie about three women (why do women in TV movies and modern novels run around in packs of three?) who defy possessive boyfriends by posing for Playboy…. As the next “on-year” election approaches, the Repo men insist that the recession’s over, based on obsolete “leading indicators” and other financial data that don’t relate to real un-/underemployment or shrinking real wages. A pro-business government that’s good at nothing but doling out favors, borrowing money, and destroying people/things is a perfect match for an economy that’s good at nothing but advertising, distribution, and “earning” paper profits.

Another Local Publication of the Month: Adam Woog’s Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats: 100 Years of Invention in the Pacific Northwest is the kind of book I’ve always wanted to write, but could never get away from the need for a day job long enough.

The Mailbag: About a dozen of you responded to my plea for suggestions on turning this into a more self-sufficient enterprise (thank you). Zola Mumford said I should market Misc. to young adults about “to make Kerouacian journeys westward…for Seattle’s `Golden Country.’ You could sell Misc. to them before they come here, and they can be just as hip as you and me.” Thanks, but I don’t run a Hipster Chamber of Commerce. I’m here to expose harsh realities, not for smug boosterism. Besides, the Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. I mean, the Elks lodges started here. How hip can we be?

Writes & Wrongs: In my day job at the Comics Journal, I was phoned by a Univ. of Chicago intellectual writing an article on “the declining role of words in American society.” He pumped me for any info that would support his presupposition that we (or our younger peers) have become non-reading, non-writing, non-talking image addicts. I replied that we’re really more inundated with words than ever: in little publications like this, piles of documents in schools and offices, computers and fax machines, hundreds of specialty magazines, thousands of paperback novels. Talk radio, phone sex, rap, and virtually all TV (except commercials and music videos) depend on the spoken word. My caller refused to consider my arguments. He sounded like one of those non-thinking highbrows who blissfully assume that “those kids” have all gone to hell since his generation was in young-adulthood (whether his generation is that of 1945 or of 1968 doesn’t matter; the syndrome’s the same). So-called “serious” writers can be the most reactionary people in the cultural world, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics.

Philm Phun: The Addams Family, despite pans by fuddy-duddy critics, is the best macabre comedy since Young Frankenstein (or at least since Santa Sangre). It could’ve been an all-time classic if it hadn’t been ruined by product placements and the obligatory out-of-place hit songs (by Hammer). It’s intensely appropriate that Grandmama was played by Judith Malina, a founder of NYC’s Living Theatre, which believes in unleashing desire and imagination to defeat conformity and free the human spirit. Just the message of the most life-affirming Hollywood movie of the year.

We’ll return in the next year with our annual In/Out list. ‘Til then, be sure to visit Castle Cash and Carry on U. Way and Mr. Haney’s Curio Emporium on Ballard Ave., and recall the words of archy and mehitabel creator Don Marquis: “When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?”

PASSAGE

Harvard Russia-watcher Russell Seitz, in the 11/4 NY Times, on the USSR’s increasingly desperate deals to sell any technology that might attract hard currency: “Nobody ever contemplated that the Soviet military-industrial complex would end up in Chapter 11. It’s the yard sale at the end of history.”

REPORT

For an undetermined amount of time, excerpts from recent Misc. issues will be reprinted in The Stranger, giving thousands more potential readers a glance at the wonders to be found here.

If anyone can help me distribute future newsletters, please leave a message at 524-1967.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Indivuous”

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE STUPID LOOKING

THAN FOOTBALL UNIFORMS WITH BARE MIDRIFFS?

10/91 Misc. Newsletter

Bart and Buster Simpson

An autumnal welcome to Misc., the quite serious pop culture letter that wishes it had gotten the “Bumbershooters from Hell” T-shirt: “There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.”

We mark the passing of Wes Anderson, 39, dead of cancer in NYC, part of the Seattle art-direction mafia who used the Rocket as their portfolio for landing jobs at the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere. A lot of musicians over the years have complained that the Rocket cared more about design than about local music. On the whole, though, those designers (including Anderson) got a lot more success in their field than our musicians had. As Anderson’s comrade Art Chantry noted a few years ago, the Seattle music scene had left a more notable visual legacy than a musical one (at that time).

Correction: This issue is #61, and the September issue was #60, despite what it said on the indicia. Sorry, collectors. That slip up will not stop us, however, from exposing other people’s slip-ups, such as the book bag sold at Tower Books: “Never Judge a Book By It’s Cover.”

Philm Phacts: The Commitments proves what the management of Bumbershoot and Pioneer Square clubs have known for some time now: that everybody loves black music, just so long as it’s 20 years old and performed by whites. It’s just what you could expect from the director of Mississippi Burning, that film “about” the U.S. civil-rights movement that had an all-white starring cast.

Needles-N’-Pins: TOf all the performances Larry Reid has conducted to pander to the thrill-cravings of the white-skin, black-clothes crowd, the piercing exhibition at COCA may have been the artsiest and classiest. It also brought a lot of questions about women and pain, women and self-righteousness, and women and the need to look beautiful (of the three most prominent spots in the room, two were given to the most conventionally attractive performers, with heavier or otherwise less “ladylike” figures positioned along the sides and back.) The third prominent spot, the front stage, was for a woman made-up as a marionette with her eyes masked by swim goggles and her arms and legs made up to look like puppet hinges. Her pierces were attached to strings, which were pulled by two assistants in a performance that Tristan Tzara might have thought of if he’d had the guts. She was clearly high on her own endorphines, as her pale arms and legs betrayed a massive shutdown of blood circulation. There was also a real-life log lady in the form of a tattooed, topless bodybuilder strung to a log to symbolize what a sign called “The Fate of the Earth;” a nude blonde with platinum-dyed hair (even below) who “wore” a hoop-skirt-like wire construction; and one in black tights who stood before a fan blowing a breeze onto streamers connected to her arms, the only participant who smiled and looked like she knew she was strong and beautiful. One beef goes to the sign outside the room, warning not to “touch or attempt to talk to the exhibits.” As if they were objects.

Cathode Corner: Bill Nye the Science Guy appeared on a syndicated special promoting the new cable version of the Mickey Mouse Club. He provided the only entertaining moment in a show of cute, talentless preteens in bad skits and dance numbers (including the requisite rap version of the old theme). Let’s hope this success doesn’t send him south for good…. The NY Times claimed that Law and Order is the only prime-time TV show this fall produced in New York City, dismissing The Cosby Show as a product of “Queens, N.Y.” — a place which has been part of New York City for about a century. Remember, this is the same paper that ran a huge essay questioning whether this country needed a (privately-supported) Museum of TV and Radio, implying that broadcasts that captured the hearts of America were too prole to be worth preserving.

Stuff I Missed, just because I didn’t like the featured attraction: A Rockcandy gig with the normally insufferable band the Mentors had an unannounced extra on 9/4, when a woman jumped onstage and stripped during the set. A young man soon joined her onstage, then joined her onstage. The baffling part is how any woman could be aroused by such a notoriously sexist, stuck-up band.

Sign of the Month (at the Varsity concession stand): “Special Award for an act of distinction: Scott White, `a man of congeniality,’ for explaining that `Exclusive Engagement’ is not the title of a film.”

Good Buy, Baseball!: The Mariners’ woes have a lot to do with a flaw in the social culture of Seattle. In the pioneer days, people (particularly women) came here to build a city, to create a society. In the recent past, Seattle attracted people who wanted to escape social obligations, to retreat to million-dollar “cabins” where they could carry out “lifestyles” close to nature but far from people. It’s an unattainable, narcissistic fantasy, of course; but it’s a powerful fantasy that gives would-be baseball investors (or arts patrons) an excuse not to get involved. The sports that work here are those with tradition here (football) or league salary caps (basketball) or low costs (junior hockey). Baseball, with 81 stadium-capacity home games, farm teams, and salaries essentially decided by the NY/LA teams, requires more (and more loyal) fans, more broadcast money, more ad money, and more long-term investment. Can we raise those things for good?

The Fine Print (excerpts from Playboy’s style manual, written by Arlene Bouras and quoted in the newsletter Copy Editor): “Always capitalize Playmate when referring to the girl on our centerfold. And try to avoid using the word in any other context…. Once a Playmate, always a Playmate. Never refer to a former Playmate.”

Legal-Ease: The exoneration of Oliver North on a technicality does not mean he’s innocent. It means that, at least this time in this place, our legal system believes in the law — something North, to all evidence, didn’t give a damn about. Or rather, he thought he was so totally and utterly right that he could do illegal things and it’d still be OK. He represents the same twisted morality that gives us mass-murdering”heroes” in movies and video games, the right-justifies-might lie shared by the most ruthless communists and the most repressive anticommunists.

Sports Spurts: Football claims to be the most popular men’s sport among women, as evidenced by a new line of NFL merchandise for women including costume jewelry with team logos. To contrast, in the long tradition of the “making it in the male dominated world of…” article, Ms. is pontificating about the status of women in baseball (perhaps as a plug for the forthcoming women-in-baseball movie). It is true that all these soggy baseball-mysticism books are total guy stuff, even as they blather about magic numbers and dewey outfields and de-emphasize references to the game as an athletic contest performed by jocks. On the other hand, there are a hell of a lot more women into playing amateur baseball and softball than amateur football.

It’s Only Words: The recent revival of Story magazine, a forum for short-story writers, turns out to be owned by the publishers of Writer’s Digest. Could it be that they’re subsidizing one magazine of freelance fiction, in order to keep up unreasonable hopes among the thousands of would-be writers that Writer’s Digest and its costly books, workshops and merchandise exploit?

It’s Square to be Hip: There are serious limits to bohemianism as a political philosophy. You simply can’t build a popular coalition for real change if you just sit around mourning the end of the ’60s or if you treat everybody “squarer” than yourself as an idiot. The anti-gulf war movement was, let’s face it, dominated by people who seemed more interested in proving their loyalty to the hippie subculture than in persuading outsiders to their views. What a coalition of right-wing groups and their journalistic stooges demagoguily calls the “politically correct thought police” is really just a few scattered groups who would love to see a revolutionof “the people” in this country but only if none of those unsightly working class saps were in it.

Local Publications of the Month: The Stranger is an exceptionally promising weekly free tabloid of reviews (everything from the book Black Elk Speaks to scat singing), essays (including quasi-serious defenses of smoking and Barbie dolls), a love-advice column for all orientations “by a queer nationalist,” a combo film review and searing fag-bashing memoir, indescribable fiction (my favorite kind), and graphics by the great James Sturm…. Performance artist/filmmaker/astrologer Antero Alli’s Talking Raven is back, this time in a tabloid format. I’m no poetry critic so I can’t judge most of the contents, but I adore the haunting illos by James Koehnline, Tim Cridland and others, as well as the Cataclysm and Apocalypse Survey (“Vote for your favorite doomsday scenario”)….

Big Storewide Sale: Frederick & Nelson, the ex-grande dame of Northwest retailing that in recent years has acted like a dowager in gaudy make-up, is in bankruptcy and closing half its stores so that the remaining locations will have enough (old) stock to fill the shelves this winter. Most of the closed stores came from the Liberty House and Lipman’s acquisitions in the ’70s, when the chain tried to buy the market penetration needed to justify TV and newspaper ads. Also now dead is the least of the chain’s original four stores, leaving Aurora Village even more desolate (it’s now worthless as a mall but remains a well-situated site for a future outdoor baseball stadium).

Billy Jack Goes to Washington: ’70s filmmaker Tom Loughlin is running for President. Don’t scoff: his movies preached peacemaking and practiced violence. By recent standards, he’s perfect for the job.

The Spin Doctor Is In: Local phone bills in Sept. carried the following statement: “Through the efforts of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission and US West, we have implemented the five year Washington Revenue Sharing Plan which was approved in January 1990… It’s our way of thanking you for using US West services in Washington state.” The “plan” is actually a state-mandated rebate on windfall profits from regulated phone services, imposed after the post-breakup company stuck line fee after user fee onto phone bills.

Yes, But Is It Tableware?: Seattle’s own “environmental artist” Buster Simpson made the pages of Simpsons Illustrated, the kids’ activities magazine, under the heading “Unrelated Simpsons in the News.” The magazine noted how Simpson once “cast a set of vitreous plates and placed them at various sewage outfalls on Puget Sound. As the tide came in and out, pollutants in the water formed a hideous glaze on their surfaces. It’s clear that Buster could just as easily have conducted his work near the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.”

‘Til we greet you again in the throes of November, read my interview in the Oct. Belltown Brain Fever Dispatch, check out David Carradine’s Kung Fu Workout videos, see Slacker (the most seamless experience of exiting a movie and entering real life I’ve ever known) and the Seattle-set sitcom Good and Evil, and recall these words from Peter Brooks’s The Mahabharata: “Love, well made, can lead to wisdom.”

PASSAGE

Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, quoted in the Village Voice (8/6): “The fabric of our society is composed of strands of synthetic desire.”

REPORT

Still waiting to hear from the software company that more or less promised to put my novel out on disk. Until then, The Perfect Couple is still available (Mac only) for $7.

I do not have a business checking account at this time. All subscriptions, fax subs ($9), ads ($15), and Perfect Couple orders should be on checks made out to me. I’m still accepting suggestions on how to turn this into a potentially profitable publication (come on, one of you must have an idea!).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Dolorous”

NOTE TO OUR OUT OF TOWN READERS

90 percent of Seattle’s bands don’t sound a thing like Soundgarden

6/91 Misc. Newsletter

(fifth anniversary)

THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!

MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.

AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.

EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)

BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).

TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.

TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.

WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.

CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…

GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.

DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.

(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)

THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.

THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)

THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.

STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…

MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?

OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.

NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.

`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.

PASSAGE

From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”

EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′

The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Exsanguinate”

Jet City Lit:

So Many Seattle Writers, So Few Seattle Books

Article for Wire, May 1991

When I was a kid in a typically underfunded Washington school district, we were always hearing or reading stories about exotic lands like Korea or Harlem. But except for the incisive children’s books of Oregon’s Beverly Cleary (the Ramona series, etc.), we read nothing that took place in our own region. Without it ever being openly said, it was made clear that we were a forgotten corner of the world, stuck out in the west-coast-that-wasn’t-California, the region that didn’t count for anything.

When I was 12, the hope of every young male Washingtonian for national respect, the Seattle Pilots baseball team, left for Milwaukee. I remember national sports writers saying things like “Seattle, with its small-town country atmosphere, is clearly not ready for major league baseball.” Even from the perspective of a country boy who only got into Seattle occasionally, I knew that was mistaken as hell.

In the early ’70s, I discovered Ken Kesey’s two major novels. In the years since, a whole scene of “regional” novelists took inspiration from one of those novels. Unfortunately, they all chose the wrong one. Instead of Cuckoo’s Nest, with its bleak, wry humor and its portrayal of universal themes with a regional twist, they all chose to imitate the stoic machismo of Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nowadays, according to literary scene-chronicler Mitch O’Connell, there are at least a dozen guys (and, in a contrast from most fiction genres, they’re almost all guys) churning out what I consider to be Great Notion clones. (O’Connell actually gave me two dozen names, but he counts rural eastern Montana as “Pacific Northwest;” I don’t.) They’ve got titles like A River Runs Through It, Yellow Fish, and Honey in the Horn. They’re about hard, quiet men who live off The Land. Mainly, they’re romanticized fantasies of how noble and stoic Western farming is supposed to be. They’re upscale Westerns, and like most Westerns they’re fantasies created for Eastern consumption. The only member of this crew I’d recommend is Craig Lesley, who uses Native American mythology to contrast the romanticized memories of his people’s forbearers with the often harsh realities of modern Native life.

From what I’ve been able to piece together about my grandparents’ existence on the wheat ranches before World War I, it was a milieu of despair, disease, alcoholism, the frustration of staying married to somebody you hated, and the madness or weirdness that derives from all of that and gets passed on to future generations. It’s no wonder pre-WWII Eastern Washington seemed to be all Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic and Mormon. Only people who believed in an eternal reward for present suffering would stick around. That solemnness was not a mark of centeredness but a mask hiding a world of unfulfilled desires. Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson’s eastern Washington saga that became a 1988 film, shows this off quite well. So does This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, set in the beer-guns-and-cars teenage scene in the town of Concrete.

The Egg and I, Betty McDonald’s 1946 comic novel of a city slicker trying to make it as born-again farmers, not only tells a lot about the area as it was then but also launched the legendary low comedy of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Oh yeah, there’s also that Tom Robbins guy, whose books contain at least portions set in the back-to-nature fantasy that his fellow ex-hippies think Puget Sound and the Skagit Valley are or were.

So far, all the stories we’ve talked about had to do with Oregon, Idaho, and rural or pseudo-rural areas of Washington. I asked O’Connell if anybody wrote about places like Seattle and Tacoma; he was confused about why I’d even ask. “This is a literature about man and the environment. If people want to read about a city, there’s a million books about New York.” (As if that pair of islands off the Atlantic coast had anything in common with any mainland American city!)

In recent years, the Seattle area has become the home for many bestselling writers of stories set elsewhere. In the cases of Charles Johnson, Mark Helprin, and Pete Dexter, I’m proud that writers of their stature and quality are here. I hope they can inspire young writers to stick around. Writers who leave Washington tend to leave virtually no fictional record of their having been here. There’s little or no area content in the works of Frank Chin or the late Richard Brautigan, who both became known (in different decades) as San Francisco writers who happened to have lived here prior to their fame. Thomas Pynchon wrote much of his first novel, V., while living in a cheap U-District rental unit. (Surprisingly with the district’s recent massive development, it’s still standing.) The only piece of Seattle that’s in it, though, is the Yoyodyne Company, a lampoon of Boeing (where Pynchon worked as a technical writer).

I know of a 1987 local playwrights’ workshop at the New City Theater, where the instructor specifically told the writers not to set anything in an identifiable Seattle, because it was such a “given” that Seattle wasn’t worth talking about. Compare that to the situation in Portland, where novelist Katherine Dunn andfilmmaker Gus Van Sant aren’t afraid to confront the urban realities around them.

I don’t know more than a couple of people who are even trying to write fiction or drama set in Seattle, other than formula romances and mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local landmarks. It’s refreshing to read a J.A. Jance or Earl Emerson whodunit just to read about fictional characters eating at the Dog House, but I soon tire of the mystery genre’s predictability.

There are also a few romantic histories, such as Jane Adams’ Seattle Green, or Seattle by Charlotte Paul (“a passionate American saga of men and women fighting for the wealth and power of their chosen land…by the bestselling author of Phoenix Island“). Both feature the sort of billowy, porcelain-skinned woman who wouldn’t have lasted three weeks on the frontier. The early local white women were more like Norman Reilly Raine’sTugboat Annie stories in the Saturday Evening Post. While the stories (set in the fictional city of Secoma) really creaked along in Raine’s proto-sitcom style, the Annie character is quintessential Seattle: a woman who can work and drink as hard as any man, without needing to make a fuss about it.

Any look at the scores of nonfiction Seattle books shows a wealth of stories and story ideas. There’s quite a lot that remains to be documented about the last “real” city built in America before the suburban era, about a city just over a century old whose history is already being forgotten, about a city now considered a role model of tolerance but which was the birthplace of the officially racist Elks lodges, about a region that was a hotbed of radical labor movements (violently crushed) but later became obsessively middlebrow with the rise of Boeing’s corporate culture, a place that in the midst of being turned into a laid-back yuppie theme park has spawned the angry, passionate rock music discussed in other pages and issues of this magazine.

One of the most enduring nonfiction Seattle books is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the story of the Pilots. The economic forces that led to the birth and sudden death of that team tell a lot about a city trying too hard to become “world-class.”

I’ve met Weekly cover boy Jonathan Raban, whose new book of travel essays, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, includes a passage on why Seattle would be an ideal setting for a novel (its size, youthfulness, ethnic mix, Far East connections, last-frontier dynamic, etc.). Raban is a tall, affable middle-aged fellow with a Masterpiece Theater London accent. He offered several observations that would make great story fodder, such as the ludicrousness by Euro standards of a city whose “oldtimers” go back no more than three or four generations, whose “classic” era of architecture means the 1920s.

While “serious” writers disdain local subject matter, area cartoonists such as Portland’s John Callahan and Seattle’s Peter Bagge have no problem telling vibrant, personal stories of dark humor about themselves and the societies around them. The foremost of these cartoonists, ex-Seattleite Lynda Barry, has built her memories of her multiethnic Central Area childhood into a weekly comic strip, a bimonthly short-short story in Mother Jones magazine, and her novella The Good Times are Killing Me. A play based on her book has been running to good reviews in New York, where nobody apparently minds that it takes place in a mainland city.

Indeed, for the past year or so an obsessive cult following has gathered around a TV series about (among other things) the social structures of a typical Washington town. My sawmill-town home overlooked the mouth of the river fed by the Twin Peaks waterfall; I can assure you that virtually all the characters and stories on that show are a lot more naturalistic than you’d ever believe. While the show’s future is uncertain at this writing, it has proven that there is a culture here worth discussing and people eager to hear about it. It also showed me how to appreciate my culture in ways my grade-school teachers never dreamed.

5/91 Misc. Newsletter

GOOD THING DANNY PARTRIDGE HAS

A SISTER WHO’S A LAWYER NOW

A hearty welcome to Misc., where we’re perfectly willing to pay a little more for our hydro power and our agribusiness-raised produce in order to save the dam-threatened Columbia River salmon. You’ve gotta love a creature who’ll go upstream a thousand miles or so just to squirt onto some eggs.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The North Broadway 76 station was demolished, ending an era when the street began and ended with turning 76 balls. I’ll never get to live in the second-floor apartment on 10th Ave. E. that directly overlooked that sign, its bright orange globe turning outside like a postmodern successor to the blinking neon signs outside every seedy film noir hotel room.

STRUNG OUT: Palm Springs, Calif. mayor Sonny Bono tried to ban string bikinis. Now we know why his wife left him….

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture is a neat disjointed narrative by Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland about three young nihilist-ettes trading fanciful stories of rootlessness and sexlessness in between their no-future “McJobs.” St. Martin’s Press did a too-cute job on the design and illustrations, but the text itself is one of the first to treat people born since 1960 as having brains.

OPEN LETTER TO ANDREW WARD: Not all of us Northwest natives are “xenophobic” hicks as implied in your book of sentimental essays, Out Here. We just don’t like smug yuppies from the East coming here and expecting us to kneel to their alleged intellectual/aesthetic superiority. And this region is not the chichéd billowy paradise you imagine. It’s a real place, with real people and real problems. Wake up!

CATHODE CORNER: In Living Color, normally the most astute sketch show on TV, ran an “Iraqi fashion show” segment with women totally draped in black, including their faces. The catch is that Iraq had been one of the secular Arab states, eager to round up all political opposition but ambivalent towards modern clothes. It’s our friends in Saudi Arabia and our once-and-future friends in Iran who jail women for showing their faces….The Comedy Channel and Ha!, two cable comedy networks not carried locally, have merged to become CTV. The name is a takeoff on MTV (whose parent company partly owns the new venture). But there’s already a CTV in Canada (unofficially standing for Commercial TV, as opposed to the public but ad-bearing CBC). On Seattle cable until 1987, it mainly carried Hollywood shows with Canadian commercials. Its mandated quota of (really cheap) domestic programs included a lot of the schlock shows directly parodied on SCTV.

BUT DID HE EVER INJECT HIM WITH WINDOW CLEANER?: Merv Griffin, pal of the Reagans and rival of Donald Trump, was sued for $1 million in “palimony” by a male ex-driver who claims to also be his ex-lover. But what does this mean about lovable late sidekickArthur Treacher?

THE DIRT: The City of Seattle used to sell cedar-shingle composting bins at the subsidized price of $8 for the first box, $26 thereafter. Now the city’s distributing bins made of recycled plastic, and selling the wood bins for $49.50 through Smith & Hawken, the garden-supply catalog for rich snobs who’ll gladly pay twice what something’s worth just so they don’t have to be seen entering Sears.

MORE DIRT: A minor cause celébre occurred during the closing of seven Seattle artists’ joint installation Earthly Delights at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue Square. During the month the exhibit was up, visitors were asked to fill out questionnaires about themselves, their biggest fears, the things they liked most about the mall, and their opinions on compost and whether a wink was better than a handshake. They were then to tear off one sheet of the carbonless forms on which the questionnaires were printed, and to fold that copy into a paper airplane. But on the day before the closing, mall management canceled the scheduled launching of the 1,300 collected planes from the museum’s mezzanine into the main mall space. The official notice stated “there will be no artist presence in the mall.” Instead, organizers invited the 50 or so people at the closing party to take a folded questionnaire home as long as they treated it respectfully, “like a fine sculpture.” In order to exit through the mall without danger, partygoers were given stickers boldly stating NOT AN ARTIST. The six-part installation utilized video monitors, displays of old household goods, compost, trash bags, weaved-together plastic spoons, a glass-encased array of rotting food items in the arrangement of an American flag, and a Terry Amadei sculpture of a face-down child figure surrounded by moss. It was a pointed comment on how suburbanites delude themselves into believing they’ve moved to a “natural, country” lifestyle when they’ve really isolated themselves (perhaps due to fear of biological reality) with their cars, parking lots, malls, tract houses, and glassed-in buildings.

OPUS TWO: Everybody’s favorite living political-funny-animal cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is now living on Vashon Island, where he draws the weekly best-of-Bloom-County strip he still calls Outland, and works on an animated TV script for Steven Spielberg.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Mikakuto Pudding Candy is little caramel custard-flavor drops with a maple-flavored liquid center. It’s sold only at little Japanese convenience stores in the International District (where you can also sometimes get Felix the Cat Mystery Candy, whose pieces have different fruit flavors but are all colored black)… Vegi Snax are little poly bags of carrot and celery sticks selling for 69 cents, from a company called FreshWorld, described by the Weekly as a joint venture of Du Pont and something called DNA Plant Technology Corp.

OPENING THE AMERICAN MIND: Multicultural education is NOT a force for intolerance, as a coordinated right-wing push of articles in Time, the New Republic, the Atlantic and elsewhere suggests. Just the opposite: it recognizes the white-Euro “canon” of literature as the philosophy of our country’s dominant culture to date, but insists that the cultures of the rest of the world must also be studied, because we must live with those other lands and because America is becoming a “majority of minorities”. It’s the guys trying to keep non-white lit out of the classroom who are the real “new McCarthyites”. I wished I’d had more ethnic studies when I was in college. In grade school and junior high we did get to hear/read a lot of stories about Harlem, Korea, and Africa. (But, except for the works of Portland’s Beverly Cleary (Ramona, et al.), we never read a single story set in the Northwest. More about that in the June Wire.)

(latter-day note: The referenced article is `Jet City Lit,’ available from my essays index.)

OUTSIDE DIAMANDA GALAS: Some people at her show were moved to tears; others were bored to them. The screeches and moans she sang in her AIDS/Biblical-metaphor performance piece reminded some of actual cries of AIDS patients; others in the audience told me they thought she was just loud and pretentious. But nobody I spoke with or overheard after the show, save one, mentioned her topless evening gown. Any woman who performs solo (her music was recorded) while revealing her body, yet drawing all attention away from it, has a rare control over her audience indeed.

THE MALL OF FAITH: ABC ran a fascinating item on mega-churches, huge suburban facilities (the early ones were evangelical; most now are nondenominational) with arena-sized sanctuaries, complete lifestyle facilities (including bowling lanes and soft-rock concerts), few crosses or other childhood-church reminders, and noncontroversial doctrines designed to please as many boomer families as possible. One Colorado institution transformed itself from a Full Gospel Church/Assembly of God into “The Happy Church” (complete with happy face signs).

ONLY IN NYC: Several boxes containing severed human heads were stolen from a dissection-class instructor’s car. The crooks dumped their loot about a block away; an alert nearby cab driver picked up the parts and kept them in his cab until the doctor returned.

ONLY IN AUBURN: A 21-year-old was asked by a 17-year-old in a restaurant parking lot, “Where’s the party?” The young man told the stranger, “You’re not invited.” According to the Tacoma News Tribune, the teen slugged and threatened to kill the man, and engaged other nearby youths in the assault.

ONLY IN FEDERAL WAY: Someone has been randomly shooting at cats in house windows, killing five. Stuffed decoy cats have been placed in houses in the so-far futile hope of catching the sniper.

FROM THE LAND THAT TRIED TO BAN 2 LIVE CREW: The AP reports that a former aide to a Florida legislator charges that he regularly insulted and harassed her, and at a 1983 staff party tore the front of her dress off of her “in front of dozens of people.”

AD VERBS: Ivar’s first “Dances With Clams” commercial was withdrawn at the demand of Orion Pictures. What do you expect from a studio owned by a guy named Kluge (a computer term for an awkward, clumsily-designed system)?…Here’s one rock song you never expected in a commercial: The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (without the title line) for Bud Light.

THAT EXPLAINS HIS LAPSES IN MEMORY: Biographer Kitty Kelley romantically linked Nancy Reagan with the subject of her last book, Sinatra. More startingly, Kelly claims the Reagans once smoked pot while Ron was the staunchly anti-hippie Calif. governor. If true, it disproves a famous assertion in the ’60s book The Greening of America: “If a `straight’ college athlete, with little interest in politics, tries marijuana, it will inevitably lead him to social and political concerns.”

FERRY TALES: Talk of a new Everett-Seattle walk-on ferry brings back memories of growing up in the vicinity of that sad little city, and also the memory of my first writing teachers at North Seattle Community College, all ex-hippies (in 1976) who all responded to learning of my origin with variations on the phrase, “But every-body hates Everett.” It was my first discovery that hippies, despite claims to being the apex of intellectual/moral superiority, were no more immune to bigotry than anybody.

DID YOU KNOW?: The New York Public Library Desk Reference lists a visual symbol for “Weapons Needed.” It’s virtually identical to the two-piece Chevron logo in use since 1974.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (NY Times correction, 4/12:) “A picture caption yesterday about a concert by the Pet Shop Boys misidentified the theater where it took place. It was Radio City Music Hall, not Carnegie Hall.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (one one side of the tunnel-project clock at 5th and Pine): “Clock under repair. Meanwhile (options): Call 526-7777 (time). Consult your watch. See other side. Correlate the sun’s position with today’s date. OR, slow down and relax.” Runner-up (Puget Sound American Atheists’ billboard in Central Area): “Atheism: It’s Not What You Believe.”

TEACHER’S FRET: The statewide teachers’ strike came during National Education Week, with all the sitcoms showing reruns of learning-related episodes and with all sorts of public service spots along the lines of “Don’t be a dope. Stay in school.” One teachers’-union lobbying ad on KING came right after an ad for college loans by Pacific First Federal with the slogan “We Fund Reality.”

‘TIL OUR GLORIOUS 5TH ANNIVERSARY issue in June, be sure to watch The ’90s Sun. nights on KCTS, check out the Bible Adventures cartridge for Nintendo, and learn Amy Denio’s new word “Spoot,” meaning her concept of spontaneity and of music as a shared experience of player and listener.

PASSAGE

From W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Razor’s Edge (1944): “I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.”

REPORT

The fifth anniversary of Misc. will be celebrated next month with a special reading, to be held the second week in June (after the Film Fest). For details on that or on ads in Misc., leave a message at 524-1967.

Misc. received a “Publisher’s Choice” citation from the small-press review mag Factsheet Five. “A fine observer of the cultural scene, with comment and quote to amuse and provoke,” sez FF’s Mike Gundelroy. “His commentary is light and witty, though he can get serious when the matter warrants.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Badinage”

4/91 Misc. Newsletter

ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN

“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”

ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE

We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.

CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.

STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.

A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”

THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…

STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.

TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!

SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.

MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.

OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.

LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”

NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.

VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).

SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.

PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”

‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”

PASSAGE

The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”

REPORT

The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.

I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.

Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Approbation”

3/91 Misc. Newsletter

Think We’ll Ever See A Sensitive, Reverent Film

About Indiginous Americans Without A White Hero?

Welcome to the in-like-a-lion March Misc., the newsletter that liked Sofia Coppola no matter what anybody said. We begin by mourning the end of Kitchy Koo, the 11-year-old boutique of waveoid fashion (and, in its peak years, the world’s coolest Post Office contract station). We’re also trying to figure the mysterious message taped to bus shelters: “Please don’t buy vegetables, furniture, clothing, toys or gifts. Buy fruits, food, and necessities only (for 4 months).”

Engulfed: At this writing, the war had been “won” but our units were still occupying a lot of Iraq, as if awaiting a march to Baghdad (like our 3-year attempt to overthrow N. Korea after quickly retaking the south). When will enough butt have been kicked? When will Bush stop acting like a wimp trying to prove his toughness? Vengeance does not stifle barbarism, it sets the stage for more… Pro-war spectacles grabbed the lion’s share of TV coverage, including a rally staged outside ABC’s LA lot by the Rick Dees show (one more reason the ex-Disco Duck sucks). Locally, KOMO loaded a Town Meeting with a one-sided audience and charged that protesters were smoking pot outside the Federal Building (they were burning sage, a memorial to those who would die in the war)… KING referred to the ground assault as a “lightning war.” In what language have we heard that phrase before?… CBS had one of its commentators, Gen. Michael Dugan (from East Texas?) run battle diagrams on a Kuwait map with the John Madden CBS Chalkboard… A new paper, War News, claims nearly all the network expert commentators come from the same conservative think tank that created the theory claiming the USSR was behind the attack on the Pope… CNN’s war theme music started out as solemn drumbeats the first week, then became more “upbeat.” By week 6, it was a brassy fanfare.

On the Lighter Side of Armageddon, the Rio de Janiero Carnaval canceled its “Night in Baghdad” party, a tradition going back 40 years. Woody Harrleston (Cheers) became the first actor blacklisted due to the war, when a Mardi Gras committee withdrew an offer for Harrleston to lead a parade after he appeared at a peace rally. The All-Breed Dog Show scheduled for the Sand Point Naval Station was scrapped “due to threat of terrorist attack”… Network newscasts replaced canceled ads with public service spots– including a cartoon reminding young men that if they don’t register for the draft, they’ll lose scholarships and will be losers the rest of their lives…Iraqi disinformation claimed U.S. troops on Muslim holy territory were entertained by thousands of Egyptian prostitutes — and, worse, by the dreaded Madonna.

Overheard on a Bus: Two fashion workers discussed how the war will affect home-front tastes: “Fluorescent nylon is out. What’s in is tough and practical clothes for people facing nuclear annihilation.”

Eastern Airlines, 1928-1991: Remember, airlines are dying and nobody can afford lots of bombers at every model change (this war is being fought from “inventory”), but Boeing will not be affected. Sure.

Cathode Corner: The Nostalgia Network, cable home for a re-titled version of KING’s Seattle Today, turns out to be owned by associates of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Fox network of Moon’s fellow conservative Rupert Murdoch canceled Haywire, a half-hour combining routines from KING’s Almost Live with astoundingly lame LA-produced skits…. The “lost episodes” of The Avengers on A&E with Honor Blackman may be cooler than the famous Diana Rigg episodes. The Blackman shows were taped without US money in a small studio, usually in one take. These disciplines enhance the show’s basic tensions, between good and evil and between weirdness and straight espionage. (Earlier episodes, where Steed had a male partner, aren’t being shown)… TBS’s Voice of the Planet is, so far, the great cheesy educational show of the year. It’s hard to describe the voices of Faye Dunaway and William Shatner out-over-emoting one another, making a mockery of the environmental disaster footage shown under the narration.

Deja Vu Isn’t What It Used to Be: Just as another unjust war re-divides American opinion, CBS trotted out retrospectives of three TV series that defined the era of the last war. At the war’s start, Ed Sullivan depicted a mass culture united by big bands and clean comedy, with a little guitar-pop mixed in for the kids. By 1970, Mary Tyler Moore showed a middle class pretending all was still holding center (its shock was a 30-year-old woman in no hurry to marry). Four months later, All in the Family (an off-Broadway play made for TV) broke through witha non-cute hippie and a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling lead. While embodying Hollywood’s stereotype of the “typical” TV viewer, the concept was based on a British show; the chief UK influence was the idea that political and class issues were a recognized part of everyday life. Seen anything like that on US TV lately?

Local Publication of the Month: The Protagonist is a quarterly newsletter produced by Tsao Lagos, Washington’s most famous Spy letter writer, on behalf of an outfit selling screenwriting courses… Deja Vu Showgirls is the first Seattle-made commercial nudie mag. Most of the models are local women you see every day in the malls, aspiring actresses, single mothers, laid-off word processors, your classmate who left school for a brief marriage… The Seattle Sourcebook by Roy F. Peterson Jr. superficially looks like an ordinary lifestyle guide. It even has “ads” for familiar restaurants, some of which went out of business since it was printed. Then you notice the pyramid behind the Space Needle on the back cover, or the spaceship chased by a flying dragon on the front. The book turns out to be an accessory rule book for Shadowrun, a role playing game that, behind the cute facade, seems to be the same old fantasy-action cliches.

Correction: Homer Spence was a UW instructor in marketing, not politics as said last time (as if you can tell the difference these days).

Computers Are Our Friends (letter in the computer magazine Macworld): “A spelling check on a recent document I was working on questioned my use of the word childcare. The editors of Microsoft’s dictionary, however, were able to offer only one alternative: kidnapper.”

Sign of the Month (inside the Pendelton store on 4th) “As long as sheep fall in love, there will be wool.” Don’t know how long the sign’s been there, but I noticed it the week after an NY Times feature about research into sheeps’ mating/nurturing hormones.

Airing It Out: Sandy Bradley’s Potluck, a folk hour on KUOW, included on 1/26 a “folk rap” (more like an ethnomusicologist’s attempt at a square-dance call) promoting an adult-supervised youth group called “Graffiti Busters.”One middle-class white guy simultaneously denigrated three authentic American art forms, turning two of them into smug pabulum… In Cincinnati, there’s a battle over what radio stations call themselves. WKRQ has sued to stop a rival station from using WZRQ.

The Fine Print (from the Wild Orchid video box): “This unrated version contains explicit `footage’ not included in the R-rated version released theatrically in the United States. Discretionary viewing by minors is strongly advised.”

True Crime: An Everett woman applied for a waitressing job, to receive a counter-offer from the restaurant manager to become his mistress for $3,000 a month. “He said she couldn’t get a better paying job with her credentials,” said a cop, who arrested the manager on solicitation.

School Daze: The Longview School Board voted to keep on its high-school reading list Stotan!, a novel about a Spokane swim team. A teacher said it had “vividly detailed descriptions of sadistic and erotic acts, vulgar names to degrade black women, put-downs about special education students, jokes about fornication and morally bankrupt philosophies.” In other words, it’s just like school itself.

Ad of the Month (newspaper insert): “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the vegetable.

Archi-Text: John Graham will be remembered as the designer of Seattle’s best known structure (the Space Needle) and its most destructively influential (Northgate), but not for dozens of nondescript buildings that kept his firm in business, buildings that marked the true postwar Seattle spirit or lack of same.

Striking: So the M’s are getting yoga instruction. Maybe they’d be better off with zen, particularly the proverbs where the hapless loser of the class is proven to be the wisest of all… Chuck Jones has drawn a set of Looney Tunes baseball cards, and made Daffy Duck a Mariner!

Ever So Humble: I’ve talked in the past about my hometown of Marysville, a place that once meant sawmill workers in dark taverns, clutching beer mugs with all seven remaining fingers. It has since become a Boeing suburb. But the Tulalip Reservation across I-5, home of several tribes “united” by Federal edict (and of the Boeing test site where live chickens are blasted from cannons onto windshields) is nearing approval to expand its bingo parlor into full casino gambling. While there won’t be any Vegas nightlife, it’ll still be the most exciting thing there since the Thunderbird Drive-In used to show sex flicks, fully visible from I-5.

Junk Food of the Month: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” Says The Economist,” “Granma failed to mention what is in the remaining 20 percent.”… Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Turtles Pies (“Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and green frosting.The “vanilla” probably came from a 42-year-old Seattle plant that made over 3 million pounds of vanillin a year, extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide and used for important drugs as well as flavoring. It’s being replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (No grumblings about how unappetizing this sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical to vanilla from a bean. Besides, some food purists drench pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)

Stuff: Women’s basketball gets corrupted by a 6-team pro league, the Liberty Basketball Association, featuring smaller balls and courts, shorter hoops, and “form-fitting uniforms.” The opposite of the no-nonsense attitude of women’s college basketball (about the only sport where women compete directly in the same space).

‘Til April, see Fantagraphics’ cartoon art exhibit Misfit Lit starting 3/15 at COCA; heed these words from Misc. subscriber Steve Shaviro’s book on social theory, Passion and Excess: “Power itself never notices, but the one thing it cannot regulate or pacify is its own violent arbitrariness, its own quality as an event;” and keep working for real peace.

PASSAGE

The only memorable lines in Manoel De Oliveira’s obscure 1983 Portugese film Francisca: “Men have hearts like dry bread”; “I love you like God loves sinners.”

REPORT

Wendy Brauer of NYC says “I’m quite amused” by Misc., but complains that “there’s a boycott on of those non-recyclable, waste-paper-backing stamps.” What? Recycle this? I thought you were all storing them carefully, waiting for me to offer deluxe collector’s portfolios. Don’t have those yet, but I do have ad spaces at $15 and $25 (first come first served); call 524-1967 for info.

A Mass. software firm might issue my novel this year. My second live reading was well-received; expect another one this summer.

Fax subs: $9/year.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Integropalliate”