2/91 Misc. Newsletter

THE REAL VIETNAM SYNDROME ISN’T ‘LOSING;’

IT’S KILLING AND DYING WHERE WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE

Don’t know about you, but here at Misc. we’re proud to live in the state where Wash. St. Univ. is studying the effect of cattle belching on global warming. My vegetarian pals will say this is proof that we shouldn’t have all these food animals. But if we have more methane gas from more cows, at least we’ll have lots of ice cream to beat the heat. (The topic you’re expecting to see is on the reverse page.)

HOMER SPENCE, 1941-1991: The guy I expected to outlive us all. America’s oldest punk rocker (due to his stint in the Telepaths). A UW poli-sci prof who had left under circumstances I never quite understood, who ended up driving cabs and, eventually, spending his last 10 years tending bar at the Virginia Inn. He remained equally passionate about new music, art, politics, world cultures, astronomy, and especially baseball. He was a focal point for Seattle’s alternative cultural “scene”. His relationships with younger women never looked strange; he wasn’t “an older man,” he was “one of us.” I last met him on New Year’s; he boasted about having lived in seven decades before turning 50 (if you mark decades with the “1” years and mark the start of life with conception, neither of which he necessarily did). He did more living in those 49 and a half years than most do in 70. That he should have a heart attack the same week as the start of war is doubly tragic; he’d have been indescribably valuable in the anti-war movement. He knew how to bring disparate people together better than just about anybody.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Theresa Morrow’s Seattle Survival Guide is the best local guidebook since the Seattle People’s Yellow Pages in 1978. It’s almost a miracle that D. Brewster’s Sasquatch Books put out something about the essentials of urban living (and not just for the Demographically Correct)…I fully support the rights of gays and of poets, though I don’t participate in either activity. The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, however, gives me at least a vision of what both these loves might emotionally be like.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: Every time I’ve ridden a Metro bus up Pine past the Bus Tunnel entrance hole, someone on a nearby seat complains openly about the huge neon art.

WHY I STILL DON’T HATE USA TODAY: ‘Twas so refreshing to read, in their In/Out list for ’91, that Seattle is Out! “…Seattle, the wilderness city (was the writer ever here?), which had a great year in 1990, now is spoiled. Everybody who could move there has. It’s time to return to real cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where the air is clean thanks to two decades of recession in their manufacturing sectors.” The following week, an interminable NY Times Sunday-magazine essays called Seattle “a Midwestern hub” that had been the hot place to move to, but is now “a victim of its own success.” (This was during the death weeks of The Other Place, Henry’s Off Broadway and Mirabeau restaurants.) What nobody accepts is that this town did not cease to be a utopia, it never was. Take our ferry system, where a captain was charged with harassing an African-American crew member and broadcasting racial insults over the public-address system. It’s just the latest shame in a century of Indian massacres, pogroms against Chinese railroad workers, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a bomb plot against a gay disco.

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: The Economist, a weekly news magazine edited in England for a readership mostly in America, had a brief item on Tacoma’s needle-exchange program among drug abusers. The sad subject matter was lightened a little by the anonymous writer’s lead, depicting Tacoma as “a smoky industrial Sparta to the high-tech Athens of Seattle.”

ANOTHER XMAS STORY: The cutest holiday TV this year was TNT’s Silent Night — a whole evening of meticulously restored silent movies. Without spoken dialogue, there’s no way to wander off to the bathroom or kitchen and still keep up. You have to pay full visual attention throughout the feature.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at a Wherehouse video rental desk): “RoboCop 2; Henry V.”

A DIFFERENT BAND OF DWARVES: Sub Pop almost had a distribution deal with Hollywood Records, the newest off-brand division of the Walt Disney Co. Instead, Hollywood’s first act will be the Party, a promoter-assembled teen dance group heavily promoted at Disneyland and on The Disney Channel.

AT LEAST IN THIS COUNTRY SHE CAN SHOW HER FACE: Producers of the movie I Am Woman will reportedly pay female lead Jamie Lee Curtis $800,000, only 40 percent of co-star Dan Aykroyd‘s fee and even less than child actor Macauley Culkin (Home Alone). What did the song of the same name say? Oh yeah, “I’m still an embryo with a long, long way to go…”

LYCRA LOVE: According to the newsletter Japan Access, Tokyo’s top designers say the 1991 trend in swimwear will be the ecology look: earth-green colors, “designs borrowed from nature, including seashell, fish and flower motifs.” The garments themselves are made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics…

LANDLESS: We’ve seen ads for nonexistent housing developments and stock sales for nonexistent companies, but the 1/7 Forbes reported perhaps the ultimate con (besides the war). An American promoter calling himself Branch Vinedresser placed Wall St. Journal ads offering to sell corporate charters and passports in a “tax-free sovereignty.” The documents are sold under the name of the “Dominion of Melchizedek,” which Vinedresser claims is a “4,000 year old ecclesiastical sovereignty” on an island off the coast of South America. The island really exists, but is fully controlled by Colombia. Vinedresser has also paid to have fictional currency and securities for his “nation” listed on international exchanges, and has promoted the sale of these securities through a network of companies in different cities, most of which are just mailbox services and phone lines with call forwarding to his California office.

Latter-Day Addendum: On 4-1-98, I received the following email:

Tzemach “Ben” David Netzer Korem, Vice President (DOM)

NOW I UNDERSTAND QUAYLE: The Times says “an outbreak of `nonsense-speak’ is sweeping Hong Kong” among working-class youngsters with little hope of escaping the 1997 Chinese takeover. (The Cantonese name for the fad is “mo lai tau,” or “you have no head.”) The paper gave only one example of nonsense-speak dialogue heard on the streets: “My sister’s going to have a baby.” “Green babies look strange.” “Green socks aren’t blue.” Sounds to me like the foundation for a code jargon, perhaps for an anti-takeover resistance movement…

WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH AMERICA: A Lava Lite is being sold at The Sharper Image, a Lava Lite with a base unit of a solid black marble-like substance. The Lava Lite is supposed to be goofy/fun, not corporate/grim. Sheesh!

FINAL VINYL: The death of records has, as predicted here, meant the loss of thousands of non-hit rock, folk, jazz, and even oldies recordings from availability. Many of the indie labels that had been getting LPs pressed in under-5,000 quantities just can’t afford to port them to CDs at such low figures. The Dead Milkmen contractually forced their record company to press a vinyl version of their latest album, but the stipulation said nothing about distributing it. The LPs are reportedly hidden in a warehouse, waiting to be melted down.

TRUE CRIME: The media went expectedly agog over a pair of killers who planted a thrash-rock CD by their victim’s corpse on Queen Anne Hill. But nobody reacted to bomb attacks at two auto parts stores by calling for the banning of spark plugs. Real thrashers never use CDs anyway, except as master copies to make 20 tapes from.

TRUER CRIME: A Spokane man was arrested after a series of residential burglaries in which the only things stolen were women’s shoes, preferably red. Over 100 such shoes, “mostly in pairs” according to the AP, were found in his home.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH: KCMU’s environmental newscast, Earth on the Air, presented (on 1/11) a woman identified as Angela, who claimed to channel thoughts from trees. The narrator said the show had become acquainted with her “when one of our members met her at a bus stop.” Angela’s message from the deciduous realm: “Mother Earth is a united, intelligent organism” whose very life is threatened by “this parasite called humanity,” and who might one day resort to catastrophic means to save herself even at our expense.

OFF THE NEWSSTAND: The Texas Dept. of Corrections banned the Feb. Texas Monthly from all state prisons, for potentially subversive content: a state highway map, which officials say might help escapees get away.

WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS MONTH: “In a world where victory is the only thing that matters, the only way to win is by risking it all.” — This Paramount ad for the video release of Days of Thunder would have only sounded as stupid as any other commercial had it not premiered during the second week of January. It could be said that a decade of pro-violence culture has led to 1/16, from joy-of-slaughter movies (approved for juvenile consumption by the make-war-not-love attitude of the Ratings Board) to the stuffing of the Pentagon budget and starvation of schools, keeping people hungry and manipulable for recruiting and propaganda purposes. The “lite wars” in Grenada and Panama and the proxy wars in Central America and Angola may have been partly to condition the public to support butt-kissing in the name of butt-kicking. (Those wars, and this one, are also tryouts for all the post-Nam weapons, the goals of the Pentagon-sponsored R&D in microcircuitry that our computers, VCRs, and import cars depend on.) Our ex-friend Saddam was reduced to offering most everything we demanded if he could only get a Mideast conference (which would have been all talk and no solution). But Bush was willing to have thousands die rather than give in on even a trivial detail. The Congressional debates contained stirring moments, but enough members finally took the stance that looked tough but was really chickening out. It was heartening to see the 30,000 or so marching on the night of 1/14 and the thousands in later events (even the ones the media refused to show, under a policy starting around 1/18 of only covering pro-war opinions); there was an indescribable sense of life and hope in even the most earnest moments. I was also heartened to see the footage of other protests from the Everett Federal Bldg. (where my father used to work) to Kent Meridian High School; to see my latest successor as UW Daily editor, Loren Skaggs, denounce the war on the Today show. After a decade of bitching on our collective barstools, opposition politics in this country have been instantly reborn (with 5 months’ hard prep work). Let’s get it right this time. And don’t be discouraged by intentionally misleading polls comparing opposition at the start of this war to that near the end of the Vietnam war. The real war is by our leaders against true democratic values, and disinformation’s only part of it.

‘TIL MARCH, warily note how consumer recycling is offered as the one true way to save the environment by media outlets beholden to industrial polluters, and keep working for peace.

PASSAGE

Bob Guccione Jr. in a 1986 Spin editorial: “Maybe the American Dream is like the Civil War chess set: Once you’ve bought the board you’re committed to buying the rest of the pieces.”

REPORT

Lite Lit 2: The Remake, an evening of readings (old Misc. items, fiction, essays) and vintage short films, will be held Wed., Feb. 13, 7 and 9 p.m., at the Jewl Box Theater within the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave. It’s a partial benefit for my novel publication fund, and is co-sponsored by the Belltown Film Festival. It replaces the reading planned for the beautiful snow-blessed night of 12/19, to which the film projectionist and I were the only attendees.

With the new postal rates, Misc. subscriptions rise to $7/year. (Fax subscriptions stay at $9.) Ads are $15 for spaces like the one below; $25 for that same height across the whole page. (To buy space, leave a message at 524-1967.)

WORD-O-MONTH

“Enlizement”

1/91 Misc. Newsletter

`IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT,

NOV.-DEC. 1990: 22

Welcome to the first 1991 edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t help but wonder what was the last comedy Norman Cousins saw before he died, and whether its makers are responsible for making him insufficiently lighthearted. It couldn’t possibly have been Haywire.

SNOW STORIES: For the first time since I was 8 or so, Xmas looked like the cards and ads always said it was supposed to look like. Astounding! (Of course, in those New England Colonial days, people simply understood they’d be home from Nov. thru March)…A guy on KPLU mistakenly called convergence zone a harmonic convergence…A whole mature elm on the east slope of Capitol Hill fell over and took a Honda with it…People who commute out to the suburbs took 5 hours to get back into town the night of 12/18. I went to a bus stop on Roosevelt Way at 4 p.m. and got right on a bus — a 2:20 bus — only to be unceremoniously booted off by a defeatist driver on Eastlake and Roanoke an hour later…The roof caved in at Northgate, the original shopping mall; what a symbol for reality crashing in on the nice-day artifice of modern commercial America…70 abandoned school buses were officially missing as of 12/21. Did the drivers tell the dispatcher that the dog ate them?…

THAT SINKING FEELING: Could Tugboat Annie have saved I-90? Don’t know, but I do know that even the 20-year flood spared my mom’s antique shop in downtown Snohomish (though she’ll probably retire before the next threat)…The end of the Stena Line to Victoria follows the end of the beloved Princess Margeurite (named for a Dutch princess born in exile in Canada during the war), now seized by the BC government on behalf of Stena creditors.

ARMED FOR ACTION: Will ’91’s big fashion thing be a sleeveless dress that lets you fully show off your contraceptive implants?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Before Columbus Review is a newsprint journal produced on the UW campus, involved in not just indigenous American cultures but a variety of ethnic issues…The Everett Herald wins praise (and a church-organized protest campaign) by listing gay and lesbian “marriage” ceremonies in a new Celebrations section. Makes me almost proud it was my hometown paper.

CATHODE CORNER: On the 10th anniversary of J. Lennon’s death, the Bon unveiled a commercial with cherubic tots singing his “Merry Xmas (War Is Over).” Wake me when they make a spot out of “Imagine no possessions…”…A Penn State psychologist claims some kids are genetically predisposed to become “chronic TV watchers.” I wonder if anybody’s born to become a maker or reader of silly pseudoscientific surveys?…Night Flight, once the hippest show on cable, is now syndicated (on KING 2:30-4:30 am Fri nites/Sat morns). Segments include the “poignant serial” Twin Geeks (really scenes from the infamous siamese-twin exploitation film Chained for Life).

AD VERBS: The original British Boy Scouts are selling sponsorships on merit badges and accompanying manuals. The “Hobbies” badge bears the logo of Dungeons & Dragons games; sports badges carry the trademarks of equipment and shoe companies.

Revenge or Set-Up for Conquest?: As 1/15 approaches, Newsweek says ABC hired a private spy satellite and found no evidence of a massive Iraqi buildup in or near Kuwait; you know, the buildup that was supposed to have one Iraqi soldier for every Kuwaiti.

CLIPPED WINGS: We’re extremely disappointed that Pan American Airways probably won’t exist any more, ‘cuz we won’t get to ride a Pan Am passenger space shuttle in the year 2001. (That was perhaps the first paid “product placement” in a movie, unless you count De Beers Consolidated Mines paying Ian Fleming to use the title Diamonds Are Forever for a novel that became a movie). Meanwhile, Black & Decker is suing 20th Century-Fox for cutting its product-placement scene from Die Hard 2. I’d be glad to have not been in that loser (but then, I wasn’t). Besides, the company doesn’t need any more association with murder and mayhem. In late-’70s Europe, “to Black & Decker” became a verb for applying a power drill to someone’s knees. (Don’t try this at home.)

SPROCKETS: The foreign control of Hollywood studios won’t affect the (largely horrible) state of movies, because films are already increasingly controlled by Asian and European investors. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was financed by a Hong Kong firm that normally backs regular ninja movies; Disney’s relying on a limited investment partnership based in Japan. These syndicates want films for a worldwide audience — stateless fantasy and male-violence films…The historic Ridgemont Theater is slated to be replaced by (what else?) luxury condos. To think of all the couples who fell in love during the year and a half that A Man and a Woman played there, not to mention all the divorced guys who relieved their loneliness during the year it was a porno house, when the comedy-tragedy masks on its marquee were changed so they were both smiling (mandatory, unrelieved “happiness” is an identifiable mark of sleaze). Cineplex Odious is closing the Market Theater this month, but at least one party wants to reopen it and return to alternative programming.

SIGN ON AURORA: “Olympic Ballot Theatre Presents Nutcracker.” If nobody showed up due to the snow, would the performance have been a secret ballot?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Official Seahawks caramel popcorn, only $2.95 a pound at Frederick’s.

LATE GIFT SUGGESTION: Turning the Tables, a board game created by two Seattle folks, all about waiting tables. The first player to collect $250 in tips wins. Along the way, you have to face, via instructions on the cards, unruly customers, constantly changing “menus,” broken wine glasses, and other fun facets of modern restaurant work. Another impressive local board game: Earth Alert, “the active environmental game”…Parker Bros.’ Careers for Girls game received major flack from Small Business Administration chief Susan Engeleiter. The six “careers” players can choose are Supermom, schoolteacher, rock star, fashion designer, college graduate and animal doctor. Careers in ecology, space, sports, the arts, politics, big business, farming and the movies were in previous versions of the game but dropped for the new edition. The company responded by noting that the game was developed and packaged by an all-woman team.

RE-TALES: Portland now has Nike Town, a 20,000 square foot “shoe experience”. Each line of shoes has its own “environment,” complete with background music and stereo sound effects for a particular sport or activity. The hottest new retail concept for Seattle, meanwhile, is a franchised laundry-tavern combo called Duds `n’ Suds. Cute, but nothing like Miami’s laundry/topless bar (could you wash all your clothes there?)…Pay n’ Pak is the first hardware chain to take the American Express card. I’m reminded of an old radio spot for Amex’s dying competitor Carte Blanche: “After all, why would you pay for a meal in a fine restaurant with the same card you use to have your swimming pool cleaned?”…The Dutch Oven restaurant on 3rd is gutted, now to become a Bartell’s. In its most glamorous moment, in the 1978 TV movie The Secret Life of John Chapman, Ralph Waite (Pa Walton), as a college professor slumming among the working class, walked in front of the Capitol in Washington DC, then turned a corner and ended up inexplicably on 3rd Ave., entered the Dutch Oven, got a job watching dishes, and went home with waitress Susan Anspach.

BLACK & WHITE ISSUES: Seattle photographer Mel Curtis won a $140,000 copyright case against an ad agency that used one of his pictures in a “comp” for a proposed General Dynamics corporate image ad, then substituted a new, almost-identical picture when the ad was published.

UNSUNG HERO: Martha Wash, one of the boisterous 2 Tons of Fun/Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame, turns out to have been the real singer behind songs credited to Black Box and Seduction, two svelte disco girl-groups assembled by manager-producers on the basis of looks. Ex-Seattle singer Marni Nixon (singing voice of the female leads in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The King and I, West Side Story, and other musicals) was quoted in the P-I as saying, “Voice dubbing will always be with us.” But was it really her saying that, or…?

PUNK LIVES! (SORT OF): The KOMO reactionaries discovered the evils of hardcore again, thanks to a Federal Way thrash-nostalgia band whose only provocative aspect is its name, Date Rape. Everything else about it is really tired — slam dancing, flannel shirts tied around the waist. This stuff’s older now than hippie stuff was when punk started. At least it lets KOMO condemn music by white kids, for a change. Geov Parrish, meanwhile, writes that straight-edge rock (discussed last ish) is four or five years old and “already pretty much played out.” Furthermore, Hare Krishna recruiting out of that scene started a couple of years ago but “the word is spreading and they’re getting fewer converts that way.”

RESPONSE: A postcard signed with a scrawled one-word name beginning with “A” takes issue with my claim that “sci-fi” was an OK term since 20th Century-Fox used it in a corporate ad: “Since when have the ad writers been the arbiters of taste or literacy?” I was almost ready to side with A. when across my desk at The Comics Journal came a catalog for cassettes of “filk,” listing singers whom the catalog’s readers were expected to already know. Nowhere did the brochure describe or define filk. I finally learned that it’s pop tunes with new lyrics poking ever-so-gentle fun at sci-fi movies, TV shows and books, performed by the lyricists at fan conventions. People this obsessed with excessively-serious trash art deserve any nickname I can give.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH (when, if we’re at all lucky, we’ll not be out killing people), read The Ascent of Mind by UW neurobiologist William P. Calvin, join our kudos to Charles Johnson for his National Book Award, don’t read American Psycho (more proof that literature is not necessarily the most enlightened of the arts), and stay warm.

REPORT

The 28 people who attended the first Lite Lit reading 12/16 appeared to have fully enjoyed the experience (except one guy who wrote in later, suggesting I should learn to speak more like the Red Sky poets. Sorry, but monotone rants hurt my throat). I’m sure the audience at the following Wednesday’s reading would have been equally entertained, had anybody shown up. Watch for a re-schedule in February.

VISION OF HELL #2

Being trapped in the chair of a hair stylist whose radio station plays all stupid songs (Bread, America) — and who sings along.

VISION OF HELL #3

Being trapped in the only restaurant open in a small town Xmas Eve, with big-screen TVs blasting continuous NFL Films retrospectives of Super Bowls X thru XX.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pish”

INS AND OUTS FOR 1991

Our fifth annual In/Out list follows the same rules as the previous ones: We’re predicting what will become big in the next year, not declaring what’s already big now. In the past, we correctly picked Winona Ryder, Roseanne Barr, plaid, women singers, The Simpsons, pantsuits, Arsenio Hall, minor-league hockey, crystals, fax machines, Anne Rice, nose rings, and minivans.

11/90 Misc. Newsletter

TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’

Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.

To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.

FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)

UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)

THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”

PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.

WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”

STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.

TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).

DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.

LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…

FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”

BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.

CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.

WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.

THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…

KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.

BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.

WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.

‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.

PASSAGE

Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”

REPORT

Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lachrymose”

LITE LIT

(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)

Page Passage

2 He was a smiling, handsome man…

8 She smiled at him.

11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…

13 …he said, and smiled at me…

14 He smiled at me.

21 …he said, and smiled…

22 She smiled at me…

27 …looked around at him and smiled.

31 He was smiling and looking at me…

34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.

37 She smiled up at me…

37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.

38 …my mother said, still smiling.

38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.

40 …and she was smiling.

40 She smiled at him.

44 She smiled and shook her head.

48 She smiled.

52 …she was smiling.

52 …and one of them smiled.

53 …my mother said, and smiled.

53 …and smiled at me.

56 …she said, and smiled at me.

63 She looked around at me and smiled.

70 …he was smiling.

72 …then she smiled at me…

72 She was smiling…

73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…

75 She smiled…

77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.

77 She smiled at me.

82 …he looked up at her and smiled…

82 She looked at me and smiled.

84 He was standing there smiling…

88 …the woman was smiling…

90 She smiled at me.

91 …smiling and fanning herself.

92 My mother smiled.

92 Warren…smiled at my mother.

93 She smiled at him.

100 My mother smiled at me.

101 She smiled at me again.

101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.

104 She smiled at me again…

110 He was standing…and smiling…

111 …my father’s clean smiling face…

120 She smiled at me…

122 She smiled at me…

123 She smiled…

131 …looked at me and smiled…

133 She looked up at me and smiled…

134 She smiled.

136 She smiled at him.

136 He was smiling.

136 And then she smiled at him again.

137 She smiled at him…

139 My father smiled at me.

143 …smiled at her.

143 …and smiled.

143 …and smiled again.

144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.

154 …and he was smiling.

170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.

9/90 Misc. Newsletter

NORTHGATE BACK-TO-SCHOOL SLOGAN:

“DO THE BRIGHT THING”

Welcome to Misc., since 1986 your honest source about the weird, the gross, the fresh, the beautiful and the damned. One reason take pop culture seriously is that the “serious” media don’t. The NY Times did a long profile of actor Paul Benedict, mentioning his roles on Broadway and in such films as The Goodbye Girl, but completely ignoring his 11 years on The Jeffersons. The New Republic, the opinion mag that recently decided it would rather be rich than liberal, did an interminable essay about Madonna as Image, as Marketing Machine, as Sociological Phenomenon — as everything but an entertainer.

IRAQI AND HIS FRIENDS: Saddam Hussein used to be a U.S. ally. We were asked to pity his poor government in its long hard war against Khomeini’s Iran, not quite realizing that each leader was ruthless in his own way. Again, “realpolitik” (unquestioned support for strategically-convenient dictators) has backfired. There are no democracies in that region to support, only monarchies or other dictatorships which treat their women, dissidents, and intellectuals with greater or lesser severity. Even Israel, the lone multi-party state in the area (besides the powerless govt. of Lebanon), is not the example of tolerance and human rights that it still could become. Among the frozen Kuwaiti assets are the oil ministry’s 6,500 gas stations in Europe, bearing the genuinely cute name of Q8.

KOMO SAID IT: “Bush is laying down an iron curtain on Iraq.” Thirty years ago, we condemned the immorality of E. Germany trying to starve West Berlin. Now we do the same. The would-be Oil War fulfills 11 years of accumulating U.S. warlust, incompletely satiated by the conquests and skirmishes in Latin America and the Caribbean; all as the long-lead-time monthlies still displayed think pieces about the possibility of a post-Cold War, post-military nation. Was this conflict escalated so sharply, so swiftly, as a way to keep the Pentagon and its suppliers in business at current levels?… Meanwhile, a Sony-owned theater chain in NYC changed its marquees to promote the temporarily-renamed IRAQNOPHOBIA. There will, of course, be movies about all this. Unlike Vietnam movies, these films could all be made in the close-to-Hollywood Mojave desert; like Vietnam movies, they’ll likely depict conflicts between different American characters, with no Arabian people in sight.

ROSEANNA ARQUETTE IN PLAYBOY: What would her grandfather Charley Weaver have thought?

RUSTLE THEM SOYBEANS: B.C.’s own k.d. lang has based her career around appropriating the music and the images of the cowboy culture, as filtered through kitsch art over the years. Now she speaks out against the industry that all the real cowboys were in – meat — and gets flack from country radio stations afraid of offending today’s cowboys, not to mention fast-food advertisers. It leads one to wonder what country music would have been like with no burgers, no cattle drives, no branding irons, no rodeos. k.d. may be the Angel with a Lariat, but with nothing to lasso.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: MU Press’ Balance of Power comic book is mostly the same old stuff about corporate assassins and ninjas jumping around, but the futuristic Seattle setting does give us one cool panel: a sign on Broadway, “Dick’s 60th Anniversary: 1954-2014.”

THE LAST LAFF: The Improvisation, a national chain of comedy clubs, is moving into the Showbox. Now, where the leather-jacketed vegetarians used to pogo and fight, where the Police and Psychedelic Furs once played to under 800 people, now generic yups will pay a big cover charge to sip cocktails and hear well-dressed smartasses tell insults about all the rest of us.

GOODWILL GAMES LOSE $44 MILLION: Did the official theme of the “spirit of goodwill,” of international friendship and pulling together, diminish the spirit of ruthless battle TV sports viewers have been used to?

WHAT’S IN STORE: The Bon had this really strange Goodwill sculpture by the main-floor elevators. Three male figures held up a large sphere, while wearing bottom-baring loincloths over what from a side view clearly showed as hemispheric, one-part bulges. The Bon also quietly closed the 62-year-old Budget Store, a refuge not so much for moderate prices as for moderate styles, an island of calm in a sea of fashion victims. Now we’re all expected to go to chains in the far suburbs to get cheaper clothes.

ELEVATOR MUSIC IN ONE-STORY BUILDINGS: A Tillicum 7-Eleven store drives teens away by blasting easy listening music into the parking lot. This music was scientifically engineered, based on 40-year-old principles, to be as inoffensive as possible; but to today’s generation, this is the most offensive thing imaginable (with the possible exception of worldwide environmental disaster or Ed McMahon). But the Muzak company is now trying to reshape its image. It’s getting the rights to make easy-listening versions of contemporary hits by such artists as P. Abdul and even U2. Maybe if 7-Eleven could get a tape of the Muzak “Pride in the Name of Love” and play it over and over, they’d never worry about anybody under 35 showing up within half a mile of the place.

THE FINE PRINT: “At Kellogg Company, we are committed to making the highest quality toaster pastries available. We do not make generic or store-brand toaster pastries. To insure Kellogg quality inside the box, make sure there is a Kellogg’s label outside.”

WASHINGTON MAGAZINE R.I.P.: It tried to do nothing but make money, and failed at that. The next people to try a regional magazine should learn from Washington‘s mistakes and, instead of just running lavish but bland peans to scenery, pay some attention to covering people.

ADS OF THE MONTH: The McDonald’s commercial in which a white guy, shaving, sees a black female singer in his mirror (with shaving cream on her face!), exhorting him to start his day with an Egg McMuffin…A Wild Waves amusement park commercial shows a teenage boy in swim trunks sliding into a tunnel section of a water slide, intercut with shots of bikini-clad females. Honest, this really aired! . . . Frito-Lay‘s youth-bashing ads, which alternate between condescendingly depicted kids and childishly acting alleged adults only prove how smugly out-of-it the yups really are (or at least the role-model yups who may be more populous in advertising than in actual existence).

HOW INFOTAINING: KIRO is actually running those commercials disguised as talk shows, in the former Pat Sajak slot. Those “shows” belong on the chintzier cable channels, if even there (though, I must admit, most of them are funnier than Sajak ever was). . .

HOW COME?: King Broadcasting is about to be sold; bringing an end to its status as the largest women-owned company operating in Washington (with the possible exception of the Sisters of Providence). KING is a Seattle institution, one of the few network-affiliate stations in the country that has its own strong identity. The papers have talked about KING’s documentaries and editorials, about its Seattle magazine of the ’60s (still perhaps the best thing published here). They haven’t talked about its great movie The Plot Against Harry, or about KING’s once-great arts coverage, or about The Great American Game (the first public-affairs game show, where all the contestants had to be volunteers in community organizations) Or about Wunda Wunda, the TV kiddie star who was this sort of harlequin character, and her potted flower Wilting Willie. When she watered it every day and sang the Wilting Willie song, you never knew whether the flower would proudly rise up to become Stand-Up Willie (with appropriate fanfare from the organist) or stay Wilting Willie and lie there drooped over the edge of the flower pot. God, don’t let GE buy the station.

AUTO MOTIVES: Chrysler is offering cash payoffs to any of its 60,000 union employees who retire early. Or, as Joe Garagiola might say, “Quit your job — Get a check!”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Chicago’s Viskase Corp. will supply any company with hot dogs containing an advertising message printed in edible inks. So far, no takers… A Dallas-area company that already makes Miracle Smile teeth bleach, is now entering the soft drink field with Cool Cola, a drink that’s not only caffeine-free and preservative-free but vitamin-enriched.

READERBOARD AT MEAD MOTOR CO. on Roosevelt: WE PAY CASH FOR ARS. If Roosevelt Way were in England and this were the new Ms. magazine, you’d be reading this on the “No Comment” page.

BREMERTON, MOST LIVABLE CITY?: Maybe in the past, when there was a cool, compact downtown with Bremer’s Dept. Store and one of the nation’s last classic 3-story Montgomery Ward units. But not these days. Other Money ratings: Seattle 2, Tacoma 4, Eugene 6, Olympia 8. Michael Moore would love to hear that Flint, Mich. is no longer last on the list of 300 metro areas; it’s not even in bottom 10. Why does Money’s list so often favor the Northwest? Could be that a Portland consulting firm, Fast Forward, does the research and makes the judgements.

YOUR CHEATIN’ MAYOR: In the city that made adultery the stuff of gold records, Nashville, Mayor Bill Boner (no jokes please), 45, has been appearing in public with aspiring country singer Traci Peel (ditto), 34. He’s calling her his fiancée, even though he hasn’t yet divorced his third wife (whose $50,000 salary from a defense contractor had led to a House ethics committee investigation of him, before he left Congress to be mayor). A local newspaper reporter said they’d told him he’d called them “at a bad time,” with Peel adding that they’d gone at it with one another for as long as seven hours.

BUT AREN’T ALL POLITICIANS LIKE THAT?: Illone “Cicciolina” Staller, the ex-porn star in Italy’s parliament, offered to sleep w/Hussein to persuade him to make peace. Perhaps she was inspired by the New Age book, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take War Out of Them, about ancient “sacred prostitutes” who performed spiritual rituals (of which sex was merely a part) to initiate returning soldiers back into the community.

NAKED TRUTH: If I may overgeneralize, the women at the Silver Image Gallery‘s Nudes show seemed much more comfortable with looking at women’s bodies than the men were with looking at men’s bodies. It’s odd, considering that men pay big money to look at men’s bodies that are dressed in athletic uniforms.

UNTIL OUR BRISK AND COOL October ish, demand the saving of the Boeing Supersonic Transport mockup plane (now in a Fla. church), read Willie Smith’s Oedipus Cadet (an odd little novel about troubled boyhood), and work for peace.

QUOTATION

An El Camino with major dents, parked outside Temple de Hirsch Sinai, bears white press-on lettering on the driver’s door: “Graduate of the Dale Ellis Driving School.”

REPORT

Still no ads in Misc., still no bigger size, Probably won’t be unless some generous reader’s willing to help out (selling space, distributing copies, etc.).

More of my writing can be seen in The Comics Journal (a magazine available at better comics shops; accept no substitutes) and occasionally in the Times arts section.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Celerity”

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH

“Jimmy, the dominant male of the Seattle Aquarium northern fur seal colony, has died of congestive heart failure. Jimmy had been receiving medical care for the bast month from Drs. Joslin and Richardson of the Woodland Park Zoo. Jimmy was collected in the Pribilof Islands in November 1976, at the age of two years. In his 13 years at the Aquarium, Jimmy fathered two pups — Baabs, born in 1988, and Woodstock, born in 1989 — and was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. One of the Aquarium’s females is currently pregnant and, if all goes well, will deliver Jimmy’s third pup this summer. At age 16, Jimmy was indeed an ‘oldster,’ having lived a normal lifespan for males of this species.” (Thanx and a hat tip to Sunny Speidel)

7/90 Misc. Newsletter

LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.

WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?

Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.

OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?

IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.

ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)

THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”

SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.

UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”

AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.

O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.

CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”

ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.

WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.

GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).

SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.

ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.

HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.

DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?

SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.

KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.

OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.

CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).

PASSAGE

Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”

REPORT

Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Plectrum”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION

The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.

features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products

(junk food for people with too much money).

Some highlights:

* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds

* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)

* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)

* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)

* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)

* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)

2/90 Misc. Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

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

OFFER

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

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Descry”

Art of Music Video

Review for Wire, 1/9/90

I will hear no grumblings about whether the 911 Contemporary Art Center was proper in running The Art of Music Video, five Saturday nights of video clips screened in 911’s new, beautiful but as-yet unheated room. Yes, you hippie Luddites and punk purists out there, the music video is an art form. And, yes, most of it isn’t worth the magnetic media from which it can be erased. But the existence of Patience does not diminish the power of Accidents Will Happen, just as Harlequin Romances do not nullify the work of Daphne Du Maurier.

It’s an older art form than most people realize. Even in the silent era, animators Max and Dave Fleischer made sing-along cartoons, accompanied in theaters by an organist. The first experimental sound films were musical shorts. The images in Busby Berkeley’s 1930s musical numbers often held no relation to the narrative of the films surrounding them. Through the ’50s, top singers and bands made shorts for theaters and “movie jukeboxes”. By the ’60s, TV channels in Europe ran clips by the Beatles, the Stones and others. In the early ’70s, the Residents and Frank Zappa were setting their idiosyncratic identities down on film. Devo made videos before they made a record.

Since The Art of Music Video was a series of clips that themselves were sequences of momentary images, it may be best to review it with some random highlights:

* Bruce Conner has pioneered the collage film almost since the first mushroom-cloud stock footage became available. He’s worked with Devo and David Byrne, but back in ’61, he put together Cosmic Ray, using Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” as the rhythm for intercut shots of burlesque dancers and explosions. Typical music-video cliches, done first and more intense.

* The Residents, in a medium known for self-aggrandizement above all else, have been making videos since 1972 without showing their faces. They may even work better on video than on record, since images and narrative give a greater immersion into their refracted universe.

* Megadeth’s Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? proves that art and art-pop bands aren’t the only ones who can do good video. Director Robert Longo succeeds with these guitar antiheroes by cutting image after image into a visual assault as aggressive as the band’s aural one. (Longo was also represented with Tonight Tonight Tonight, a one-minute dialogue sketch done entirely in song titles. That was shown in a selection of MTV Art Breaks, little fillers commissioned from avant filmmakers, a concept whose logical extreme lies in G. Brotmeyer’s colorized version of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

* Jim Blashfield of Portland may be the first great Northwest filmmaker. Blashfield (co-founder of Clinton St. magazine) uses an unmistakable “cut-out” animation technique with still photos. Whether the artist in question is Paul Simon or Byrne (or even Tears for Fears or Michael Jackson), they’re but tourists, traveling in the form of hand-painted matte shots through Blashfield’s world.

* Two contractual-obligation videos, made with as little participation as possible by bands still scorning video (at the time), proved to be among the best. Noted UK filmmaker Derek Jarman supplied the Smiths with appropriately moody, slowly-moving visual wallpaper. Bill Pope and Randy Skinner gave those back-to-basics Replacements about the ultimate in back-to-basics video: just a throbbing bass speaker on a stereo system playing the song on a vinyl record. (It’s one of a series of Replacements clips with slight differences; in one, a Young Fresh Fellows LP can briefly be seen.)

* La La La Human Steps’ modern-dance film only vaguely qualifies as a music video, but it was a great clip and may be the final filmed record of the great Showbox (whose fate is open again, the Empty Space Theater having decided not to use it after finding asbestos in all the walls).

In conclusion, a good video DOES NOT turn your mind to mush, obliterate the imagination or overpower the music. It adds another dimension to the ideas being communicated. Of course, acts with no ideas in their music tend to have none in their videos either; as video became more popular, more formulatic people made them. The trick now is to reclaim the creativity behind the best of both sight and sound media, to insist that music and music video can and should be wonderful.

1/90 Misc. Newsletter

Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,

Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash

Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.

Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.

No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.

The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.

Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).

Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.

The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.

Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).

Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.

Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.

Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.

`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

PASSAGE

John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”

OFFER

All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.

Also from Fait Divers: The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Multivalent”

What the `90s Have Given Us

Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution

• USA Today, music video, performance art, personal computers, Nordstrom Rack, rap, punk, world beat, self-help movements, Pee-Wee Herman

We’ll Look Back and Laff At

• The Brat Pack, Reagan, Gary Hart, Lionel Richie, power breakfasts, whale music, Jimmy Swaggart, L.A. metal, The Last Temptation of Christ, Black Monday, tanning beds, cosmetic surgery, Tom Clancy, herbal energy pills, U2, the Suzuki Samurai, George Peppard, big-budget B movies

Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated

• Watt/Burford/Meese/North/etc., Joan Rivers, Joan Collins, Wrestlemania, cocaine, wine coolers, “blue-eyed soul,” Robert Palmer, Donald Trump, Tipper Gore, Mergermania, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” all-oldies radio, Albert Goldman,15-second commercials, Bill Cosby, homelessness, Exxon

We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without

• Futons, styling mousse, anti-smoking policies, NutraSweet, VCRs, CNN, vitamin stores, oat bran, Roseanne Barr, C. Everett Koop, Spike Lee, 976 lines,trade paperbacks

Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews

• Bell System break-up

Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope

• New communications technologies available to individuals, from the computer programs that make this document possible to the fax machines that helped give the world the real news from Beijing
• The end of economies of scale favoring big business over independent business, as merged corporations make consumers and employees pay for the misadventures of the speculation parasites
• The whole Eastern Europe thing
• A progressive, aware populace that doesn’t know how big it is compared to any era except ’67-’70
• A slowly-growing realization that the sins of the Nixon-Reagan era shouldn’t be mistaken for virtues

Top Local Stories

• Few noticed in ’80 when tiny Seattle Software sold a computer operating system to a slightly bigger company, Microsoft. MS-DOS made King County the world leader in making computers work for people. It was this leadership that led an obscure Japanese toy company to put its U.S. HQ here, leading to the Nintendo video games now sharpening the hand-eye coordination of so many pre-adolescents.
• In ’82, I was among those who scorned the new official nickname “Emerald City.” It was totally inappropriate to the Seattle I knew and loved. In the eight years since, large portions of the city and its suburbs have been rebuilt to fit the name. The bus tunnel, the Bagley Wright Theater, Westlake Center, 10- and 11-cornered office towers, “luxury townhomes,” candy-colored Archie Bunker houses in the north end and the fake chateaus on the eastside, the planned gussying-up of Seattle Center — all these reflect the dangerous idea that this is some fantasy paradise where all will be mindless nirvana. This is a real place, with real people and real problems. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can start working on real solutions.

12/89 Misc. Newsletter

Seahawks Keep Losing,

Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties

Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.

MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.

TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!

THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”

PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!

BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.

STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.

HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.

INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).

BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.

SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.

`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”

VOICES

Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:

“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”

FORUM

We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Olefiant”

INS/OUTS FOR ’90

This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.

Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.

This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.

6/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

C.A.P. WINS, WESTERN

CIVILIZATION DOESN’T END

(latter-day note: That was a city initiative measure to instill mild zoning controls on new high-rise office towers, fought bitterly by developers who are now bankrupt ‘cuz with today’s corporate downsizing they can’t fill the buildings they’ve already built.)

Welcome back to Misc., the column for a world where three AA-level pitchers are called a “good trade” and a million Chinese protesters are called a “tiny minority.” We do know why Willard Scott called Starbucks Coffee “almost as good as Maxwell House” on a recent location shoot. He’s got an ad contract with that product of General Foods (founded by Seventh-Day Adventist C.W. Post to sell health foods, now owned by a cigarette firm).

Three Men and a Pillow: A Seattle firm has invented the Empathy Belly, a 35-pound prosthetic tummy with Velcro outside and lead weights inside. It’s to help expectant fathers empathize with their wives, by sharing some of pregnancy’s discomforts. I wonder if its makers saw the Bewitched where Endora made Darren kinder to pregnant Samantha by making him crave rich foods and feel queasy in the mornings.

Prosaic Paroxysm: We’ve been amused over the years at the creation, practically from scratch, of a mythical “Northwest Lifestyle.” Less amused have been residents of hick towns rechristened as “romantic getaways.” Some of these oldtimers have formed Citizens for Lesser LaConner. Their ads in Seattle papers warn of traffic jams and inadequate facilities for the tourist hordes. It’s so rare to see an ad pleading you not to buy. Businesses there, of course, would remake the place to meet the tourist demand. It’d destroy thetown’s “rustic charm,” but that might not matter to those visitors who came here five years ago for the “lifestyle” invented by people who came here 10 years ago.

Cathode Corner: Joe Guppy, the Mark Langston of local TV, helped make Almost Live into a contender, then jumped to HBO. Another ex-Off-the-Wall Player, Dale Goodson, is now at MTV, writing comedy material for fellow Seattlite Kevin Seal. Then there’s Ross Shaffer’s ABC show, Day’s End. He mostly narrates clips from other shows, telling the late-night audience how much they’re missing by not watching more prime-time TV. As the TV nation keeps diffusing, expect desperate self-promotions like movies used against TV in the ’50s. Already, NBC’s “Come Home” slogan both plugs its living-room comedies and extols prodigal viewers to return from cable and VCRs.

Body Politics: The Christian Science Monitor’s become the nouvelle cuisine of newspapers (exquisite but too small to satisfy), but still has a good item now and then. It recently noted that teen beauty pageants are returning to Nicaragua (first prize: a trip to Melledin, Colombia). Some of the all-male leadership of the Sandinista Youth League grumbled that there should be intelligence pageants instead. A typical “male feminist” attitude, to slag feminine behavior as an irrelevant frill. A generation that’s faced so much work and self-denial (due largely to our hypocritical ideology) deserves a taste of healthy individual pride…. On a similar note, Poland’s first Bennetton store was announced. Maybe Walesa will start wearing nicer sweaters.

Junk Foods of the Month: The Nintendo Cereal System gives you the sugar rush to keep playing; the clever packaging lets you munch it from the box while keeping your joystick hand free…. Champs de Brionne in George, WA would rather be known for outdoor concerts than for Scarlet, a blend of reisling and cherry wine. It’s the same shade of pink as the dress on the label mascot (who looks more like a Barbara Cartland heroine than Scarlett O’Hara). She asks us to “look for my message on the back of the label”; I couldn’t find any…. The trade mag Restaurant Business sez the next eatery fad will be Mom Food — meatloaf, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. “Paying money for something you probably didn’t even like that much as a kid will lose its appeal, but we are reassured that it’s OK to enjoy comfortable food.”

Grinding Down: Many of Seattle’s 10 burlesque joints are feeling financial goose pimples. They’re cutting hours, raising prices, and even bringing mud wrestlers. The problem: overexpansion. Too many entrepreneurs want to make big bucks by keeping all cover and drink charges, making the performers live off tips. You often see the same scam in music and comedy clubs (though comedy clubs don’t offer “table jokes”).

That Last Hurrah Thang: In 1980, I was a student reporter on Sen. Warren Magnuson’s last campaign tour. He chartered an Amtrak train (a symbol of Magnuson’s belief in the benefits of federal spending) to the Tri-Cities (ditto). In stops at Seattle, Tacoma and Wenatchee, he spoke about the influence and privilege our state had achieved with Henry Jackson and himself (they’d been our senators since before I was born). But nationally, the Demos were too busy fighting each other to stop the Reagan stampede. That fall, Demo control of the Senate would be interrupted for six years and Maggie’s career, built on getting people to work together, would end.

Positive Steps: Until further notice, Seattle’s best window displays are at Church’s Shoes on Pike. Some of the displays have less to do with product than with cultural causes (saving the Admiral Theater in W. Seattle and the Spafford murals in Oly).

Local Publication of the Month: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. John Callahan, everyone’s favorite paraplegic, recovering-alcoholic cartoonist, expands his Clinton St. Quarterly essays (“The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life”) into a fascinating memoir. With the CSQ on apparent hiatus (editor Jim Blashfield is now a videomaker for Michael Jackson and others), it’s good to keep seeing one of its stars.

How Randy Is It?: The Rep’s mounting a revue of Randy Newman’s songs. I’d prefer a tribute to his Hollywood-composer uncles Alfred and Lionel, but there is some potential in dramatizing his better songs like “Cleveland.” I just hope they don’t re-create the “I Love LA” video (is any Seattle actor homely enough to impersonate Tommy Lasorda?).

‘Til July, visit the Karaoke Lounge at Tatsumi Express on the Ave, ask your bank for a memorial Salvador Dali MasterCard, and ponder these words of John Lydon: “Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”

5/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

PENTAGON BRASS PREDICT

GLASNOST WILL FAIL

(THEY CAN ONLY HOPE)

Here at Misc., where we’ve always brought disparate elements together, we don’t understand this “cold fusion” fuss. As a scientific discovery, it’s far less important than the new technique to remove old tattoos with lasers.

With this installment, Misc. has graced Seattle’s more open-minded restaurants, theatres and retailers for three years. That’s longer than the Ford Administration or the original run of Star Trek! Alice Savage, who ran what was then the PR paper for the Lincoln Arts Association, said I could write anything I wanted to. As ArtsFocus has grown under Cydney Gillis into this fiercely-independent sheet, that policy’s stayed. Another policy iterated in the first edition still holds: This column does not settle wagers (not that we’ve been asked to).

Eat Your Heart Out, Updike: The Brasil restaurant on 1st showed scenes from the latest Rio samba parades as part of its Sunday-night film series. Among the 18 “schools” (each with at least 3,000 amateur performers) were several save-the-rainforest parades and one in honor of Brazilian author Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, et al.). Can you imagine giant floats, musicians, singers, children, feather-headdressed men and topless women parading for a living American writer? Brazil has serious problems, but at least it has people who actively participate in their own culture.

This participation is largely what Abbie Hoffman fought for. During his heyday and on his death, the media’ve depicted him as an ego freak, no more sincerely subversive than John Belushi. (The radicals who really were ego freaks became Republicans.) Hoffman’s `68 Demo Convention protest and his square-people-bashing at the subsequent trial might have set back support of the anti-war movement, letting Nixon and Reagan vow to protect “real Americans” from “those kooks.” Still, especially in his books, he had much to say on real democracy vs. money-power whoring and how folks must stop being easily led.

Dead Air: KJR’s resident reactionary Gary Lockwood became Millstone Billboard Man #2, standing in a giant “coffee cup” downtown for an airshift (if I only had some tomatos to throw, some ripe, young tomatos). Lockwood’s “those kids today” commercials, denouncing anything recorded since 1970 and anybody born since 1950, are just like the Mitch Miller/Lawrence Welk defenders during the so-called “classic rock” era. To think KJR was once co-owned by Danny Kaye, who worked to bring attention and respect to youth. Also on the retro beat, the speculating Floridians who bought into Seattle radio promptly sold KZOK (to KOMO) and KQUL, née KJET (to Viacom’s KBSG). I’m heartened, though, by the formation of an anti-nostalgia lobby, the National Association for the Advancement of Time. Corporate America’s obsession with 1956-69 resembles the religious “Age of Miracles” doctrine, in which great things are said to have really happened but cannot happen anymore. The only way to really preserve the spirit of the ’60s is to stay fresh, to live in what Flip Wilson called “what’s happenin’ NOW.”

Update: New Cannon Film owner Giancarlo Parretti’s bids for the New World and DeLaurentiis studios collapsed. Maybe he should’ve sent Chuck Norris to see some dissident shareholders.

Local Publications of the Month: Twistor is a “hard science fiction” book by UW prof John Cramer, in which a machine in the UW Physics Bldg. becomes the portal to a parallel universe…. Lawrence Paros’s The Erotic Tongue is back in print. The area’s foremost expert on word origins (and briefly the best columnist in the P-I) gives fascinating histories on our terms for sex and/or love.

Cathode Corner: Rude Dog, the T-shirt mascot owned by Frederick & Nelson’s David Sabey, will have his own Sat. morn cartoon on CBS this fall (produced by Marvel)…. Bombshelter Videos resurfaced on KTZZ, where even Soundgarden’s an improvement over get-rich-quick and save-your-hair “shows.”

Ad of the Month (on a 76 banner): “Our three unleaded gasolines: Cleans fuel injectors best.” Runner-up (in the N. Seattle Press): “Since 1984, Gibraltar Savings: Serving families for over 100 years.” Then there was the Ross Dress for Less clearance ad with the “Men’s” listings printed between the jumping female model’s legs.

News Item of the Month (Times, 4/22): “A letter writer suggests that car-pool lanes should be open to cars with two drivers.” Let’s hope they’re driving in the same direction.

Politix: Veteran ad man David Stern, whose mom’s on the county council, is running for mayor. His best qualification is having invented the Happy Face, the quintessential politician’s stance. (It’s also become a symbol of neo-psychedelia, ironically since he made it to give Univ. Fed. Savings a wholesome family image in contrast to the image of the U-District in `69)…. Let’s try to get this straight: Our state’s Tom Foley’ll be House Speaker if Jim Wright has to quit over moneymaking schemes, including his wife’s unspecified work for our state’s Pacific Institute (the success-seminar outfit whose payroll also includes Emmett Watson and legend-in-his-own-mind DJ Bob Hardwick). It’s almost as juicy as the discovery of a real Texas oilman named J.R. Ewing, implicated in the Iran-Contra cash flow. After involving so many guys with cartoon names (Casper, Poindexter, Felix), it’s fitting the scandal include other parts of the American mythos.

Junk Food of the Month: White Castle Frozen Burgers. After following the elaborate heating instructions (involving foil and paper towels), you get something that looks and vaguely tastes like the food at an East Coast restaurant chain of undeserved reputation…. WSU’s launching a “distinguished professorship in fast food management,” underwritten by Taco Bell.

‘Til June, wear lotsa Parfum Bic, visit the Speakeasy café on Roosevelt (latter-day note: No relation to the later Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown), and try to be patient during the remaining 14 months ’til the Goodwill Games.

4/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

THIS MONTH: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE FINAL FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

EVEN WITHOUT 3D GLASSES,

THIS COLUMN IS AS SHARP AND CLEAR AS EVER

Here at Misc., we’re still wondering how soon a Mercury Scorpio is going to crash into a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Aries because the driver didn’t read his signs.

Goodtime Charley’s Got the Blues: Royer chose to quit rather than face a re-election referendum on his move from neighborhoods’ champion to developers’ patsy. Instead of dwelling on it, let’s just remember what his sister-in-law Jennifer James might say: that we must “cut the losses” from relationships that have become unworkable, acknowledge the pain of betrayal, and then move on.

No No-Host Bar: Alcoholics Anonymous’ world convention is coming to Seattle next year, but the best news is the appropriate name of AA’s site-selection consultant: Slack, Inc.

21 Luscious Shades of Red Ink: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman, after buying a string of bankrupt savings and loans, just added Marvel Comics as a “cash cow” to support the S&Ls. Will America’s financial security be ruined if kids don’t buy enough copies ofShe-Hulk one month? Will folks get handsome Ultima II tote bags with every $10,000 deposit?

Holds Up Longer Than You Do: The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology and Health’s received a major federal grant to study the shelf life of condoms exposed to heat, cold, humidity, light, and air pollution. It could be another case of a package that’s more durable than the contents.

Junk Food of the Month: Seattle’s Hilton Seafoods is trying to develop the world’s first sexless clam, which presumably would be larger and/or better tasting. But would it still be an aphrodisiac?

Local Publications of the Month: For a major writing project, I’ve been researching local New Age papers. Preeminent is Seattle’s New Times, a monthly broadsheet with stories on everything from ethics for the ’90s to meditation helpers that you put on like goggles and that send pulses of light into your brain. The same publisher also does Spiritual Woman’s Times; other local journals include Olympia’s The Light (with the syndicated psychic-comic Swami Beyondananda), Bellevue’s Common Ground (items on a new locally-designed tarot deck and on “Love, Fear and Linear Thinking”), and Federal Way’s Universal Entity (the tabloid chronicle of “Zanzoona the Old Warrior” as channelled through Vancouver, WA’s MariJo Donais, who is also the reincarnated wife of Ulysses S. Grant)…. Elsewhere in the print world, the second Placebo, an occasional journal of downtown writers, has an extensive, fascinating interview with a mercenary-turned-cab-driver.

Cathode Corner: Matt Groening has made his first commercial, a Butterfinger ad with his Tracey Ullman Show characters. Too bad it wasn’t Abkar and Jeff for Doublemint…. Geraldo Rivera and Cheech Marin have gotten together to buy TV stations. I can just see their “Point-Counterpoint” segments on the nation’s drug menace.

Dead Air: KLSY now has a fax request line, so you can use the newest technology to hear the most archaic music of any non-oldies station. I was recently force-fed two hours of the station in a dentist’s chair and can define one version of hell as sitting under bright fluorescent with a stranger of the same sex in your mouth and George Michael on loud. (Even worse, I got gold put in me the same month I called gold “outski” for ’89.)

Boox & Bux: For too long, bibliophiles have overrated the written word as more honest than other media. That myth should be retired now that we have “product placements” in novels (Maserati paid to be mentioned in Power City by Beth Ann Herman). So that’s what all the brand-name-dropping in the Literary Brat Pack has been about. The book’s publisher, Bantam, is one of three US publishing giants now owned by Germany’s Bertlesmann, who also bought RCA/Arista Records (yes, Spike Jones’s classic song “In Der Fuhrer’s Face” is now owned by the Germans).

Graphic Details: The new Pogo is almost as good as the old. It’s even done what Doonesbury never really has: slam the newspaper biz (though its target was USA Today, considered the young hussy of the industry by the genteel journalism establishment)…. TheTimes has deservedly awarded Calvin and Hobbes the highest honor a comic strip can get: the top Sunday space, displacing Peanuts after more than 20 years.

Bend Over, Johnny Depp: A 25-year-old Dallas undercover cop, posing as a high school student, was spanked by an assistant principal for tardiness. (He could have alternately faced detention.)

Shifting Into “D”: The Democratic Party has finally done something smart in getting ready to pick ex-Jesse Jackson aide Ron Brown as its new national chair. Brown’s strategies for Jackson (healing rifts between races and interest groups, attracting previous nonvoters) are just what the party needs. The Demos’ve lost two presidential races with the “Lite Right” policy of shunning the party’s heritage and most faithful followers to aim slick marketing at some mythical conservative “swing voter.” That policy will not work with any future candidate, as some Demo bigwigs are figuring out at last.

Hershey’s Kisser: Barbara Hershey, for reasons explicable only by vanity and Hollywood trendiness, has had silicone implants put in her lips. This is the same person who, when she was married to one of the Carradine boys, was such a Natural Woman that she briefly changed her last name to Seagull.

`Til the March column (which may include a report from the First Annual Singles’ Festival and Trade Show), beware of films about the Black Struggle in which no black actor’s billed higher than fifth, read Dictionary of the Khazars, and ponder this appropriate-for-Valentine’s line from local writer Theodore Roethke: “I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?”

1/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

WHAT’S MORE PATHETIC:

JAMES BROWN IN JAIL

OR LITTLE RICHARD ON HOLLYWOOD SQUARES?

Welcome to the first `89 edition of Misc., the column that celebrates the end of the eight-year Age of Reagan and awaits the end of the 13-year Age of Cocaine. That’s about how long American attitudes and behavior have reflected those of coke users (aggressive euphoria, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money). In what drug experts call “co-dependency,” these traits have spread to non-users, even to many who officially oppose the drug itself. It’s clearly shaped the power madness of much of the Reagan Administration. Reagan himself is a coke-addicted filmmaker’s stereotype of a statesman, a “high concept” hero. As violent as today’s coke gangs are, the big damage done by the drug is that done to our economy, culture and social fabric by business and government leaders who, often unknowingly, take the coke rush as their model for success.

This derangement is most visible in the obsessive speculation that’s captivated big business, exemplified by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Besides its recent gobbling of RJR Nabisco, KKR now controls Safeway and Fred Meyer (for a near-monopoly of the Oregon grocery biz), plus Dillingham-Foss Tug, Red Lion Inns, Motel 6, Playtex, and the onetime icon of corporate appetites, Beatrice.

International House Style: The next phase of drug-inspired behavior may be a return from effrontery to withdrawn introspection. Seattle’s Happy Face symbol and Seattle’s big sweatshirts are keystones of the Acid House style now popular in UK discos. The fad, which also involves Chicago-invented dance music and Swiss-invented LSD (or at least visuals inspired by it), should reach these shores in toned-down form this year. By then the Brits’ll be into something else.

Brought to You by the Letter “X”: Roscoe Orman, the kindly Gordon on Sesame Street, has celebrated the show’s 20th year by settling on child support for a viewer he helped create in Oregon in 1985. Some who grew up with the show may gasp at the thought of Orman and his therapist lover singing “Which of These Things Belong Together,” but I knew there was another side to him since the time he challenged the “exclusive” terms of his contract by moonlighting as a pimp on All My Children.

From Pawn to Queen: This was the first American Xmas for Elena Akhmilovskaya, now settled in Seattle after suddenly marrying US National Team captain John Donaldson. You’ll find our fair city far different from Moscow. Here, jeans are plentiful and chess players rare. And please go to more restaurants than just the Last Exit.

Cathode Corner: Filming PBS’ Ramona in Toronto destroys the thing I loved most as a kid about Beverly Cleary’s books: that unlike anything else in kid-lit, they took place in a land I’d actually been to (Oregon)…. The new baseball TV deal means more $$ to the owners, fewer games to the viewers (12 instead of 30). More games’ll be on cable, but at what price? At least we might have to see fewer racist Joe Piscopo commercials.

Stamp Act: The US Postal Service is retouching a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, removing a bare nipple from the goddess of Liberty. Maybe we could use a revolution of our own.

Local Publications of the Month: ‘Twas a big season for local nonfiction (Boz, Knox, Robert Fulgham). I was more impressed by a well-made if kitschy fantasy, Frederick & Nelson’s Freddy Bear’s Favorite Christmas, a combined book-music box with text by our ol’ buddy Gretchen Lauber… Portland’s Northwest Computer News has started a Washington edition to compete with Puget Sound Computer User. The first News is full of cracks at User for reprinting a lot of material from its Minnesota parent paper…. The Real Comet Press plans to start a quarterly anthology of local comix, to be sold nationally.

Update: Last Jan., I told of changes in my hometown of Marysville. Now it’s a whole different place. Half the downtown’s been razed for a mall. The north side of town has two huge discount stores and a full compliment of middlebrow chain stores. Running between the two retail areas is a bus made up to look like a trolley (talk about a Neighborhood of Make-Believe). The countryside’s almost all gone from farming to tract houses. There’s even an indoor movie house (all we had was the Thunderbird Drive-In, still there). Still, some aspects of the old mill-town lifestyle remain: the video stores have such titles as Cut Your Own Deer At Home.

`Til our fab Feb. edition, visit the CT&T Gift Shop in Wallingford, admire the McDonald’s-sponsored hologram cover on National Geographic’s centennial edition (an issue all about our threatened Earth, not discussing the danger from foam boxes or razing forests for beef grazing), and ponder whether Shelley was predicting oldies radio when he wrote, “The world is weary of the past/Oh, might it die or rest at last.”

INS & OUTS FOR ’89

As always, this list might not reflect what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the year. This is not a substitute for professional tarot reading.

12/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

WE’LL SUPPORT UNITED KEEPING THE TOKYO ROUTEONLY IF THEY’LL CUT THE “DISCO GERSHWIN” ADS

Look: I’m not “just kidding folks.” When I say something here in Misc., I MEAN IT. (OK, the call for a crackdown on violent opera music was a bluff, but nothing else.) The louder I state that these are my sincere opinions, the more some people brush me off with a smug wink. If I were the uncaring, insincere cynic I’ve been cracked up to be, I’d be a Republican, or at least the Good Company producer who put a Gamblers Anonymous show on election day.

Anyhow, this month’s column is dedicated to Seattle’s newest grocery chain, Shop-Rite. Shopping, of course, IS a rite, especially in December. Hot Xmas gifts this year include the new plastic teen makeup kit (for plastic teens?) that looks just like a fishing-tackle box (“date bait” indeed). Those going east can get that special gift at NYC’s new Soap Opera Furniture Store, selling surplus room settings from daytime dramas. Sign up now for a bar stool from Ryan’s Hope. The 13-year-old show, which launched the career of sometime Seattle actress Kate Mulgrew, is being axed to give more time to local legend Sandy Hill’s Home show.

Unlisted: Washington mag’s list of “100 Washingtonians Who’ve Changed the World” left out Ray Charles, Judy Collins, David Lynch, Mary Livingstone, Dyan Cannon, Carol Channing, Lynda Barry, Martha Graham, John Cage, Quincy Jones, Steve Miller, Willie Nelson (once a Vancouver, Wash. DJ), the Sonics rock group, Robert Culp, Dawn Wells, Patrick Duffy, Mark Tobey, Mark Morris, Larry Coryell, Robert Cray, Chet Huntley, John Saul, etc. My biggest beef is leaving out Spokane-born Chuck Jones, perhaps the greatest maker of animated films ever. Any list to leave him out must have been edited by Elmer Fudd.

Towering Achievement?: In a rare show of minor courage, the City Council voted a temporary, slight restriction on new highrises (with exceptions for some well-connected projects). In all other recent cases save one, the city’s succumbed like a lapdog to the developers. Will it really serve the public interest at last? (Personally, I like the Wash. Mutual Tower and some of the others, and realize that office-building is inevitable in an economy gone from making stuff to pushing paper. But that’s no excuse to do it as poorly and inconsiderately as it’s too often been.)

Space Exploration: You may know that the name of the new AFLN gallery-cafe on E. Madison stands for “A Frilly Lace Nightie.” You may not know that the bldg. was the shrink’s office in House of Games (one of the few sites in the film still standing, just two years later). The nearby Bagel Deli on 15th now has keen art shows of its own.

Faulty Femmes: I submit that Robin Givens IS NOT the “most hated woman in America,” as charged by some paper. But who is? Imelda Marcos, the likeliest prospect, is just a resident alien here. Others frequently disliked, often undeservedly, include Phyllis George, Tammy Bakker, Tipper Gore, Yoko Ono, Linda Ronstadt, Phyllis Schlafley, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Burford, and Springsteen’s new girlfriend. Pretty slim pickings, but once more women achieve positions of real power, more will emerge who truly deserve our loathing.

Music Notes: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Posse on Broadway, with great shots of Dick’s and Taco Bell, made the MTV rap show, but became “Stir Mix-A-Lot” in the credit…. Yuban Coffee is sponsoring this year’s performances of The Nutcracker. If the girl had had the coffee, she wouldn’t have slept and there’d be no show.

Local Publication of the Month: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. To Vancouver, B.C.’s Brian Fawcett, Pol Pot’s crimes are just an extreme form of what the media/corporate culture’s doing to us: fostering passive obedience by destroying history, memory, community and individuality. I don’t buy all of it, but admire his passion and technique, cross-referencing St. Paul, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Homer, satellite dishes, Expo 86 and Reggie Jackson…. On the Bus,Metro’s newest newsletter, gives driving but not bus directions to a bus-base open house.

Graphic Details: Fantagraphics Books, America’s premier publisher of alternative comics (including Seattleite Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff ), is moving here from LA. It’s not a big boost to the local economy (its prestige title, Love and Rockets, sells under 20,000 copies), but is a clear sign of our emergence as a graphic-arts mecca. In another positive move, the UW’ll now require arts credits by incoming frosh. Maybe that’ll stop state school districts from killing arts classes.

Disappearing Ink: As you know, we believe in reading everything. Now, that “everything” may shrink. Two vital news sources, theChristian Science Monitor and Mother Jones magazine, are reportedly switching to yuppified formats with less political and foreign news, and in MJ even “upscale” lifestyle features. MJ, which prides itself as the biggest left-leaning rag since WWI, ought to know that the Yuppie media aesthetic, selecting a rich minority as the only people worthy of attention, is inherently reactionary.

The REAL Skinhead Story: After a tragic murder in Portland, the media have branded every kid with a shaved head a racist thug. Not true. The few who are thugs specifically follow 10-year-old UK grooming fads and the “ethnic-purity” policies of the British and French “National Front” movements (and the most virulently pro-apartheid groups in South Africa). Purity, of course, is for geeks. Anybody who goes killing or bashing people to prove how superior he is obviously isn’t.

Until we next meet in the new year, with our annual In/Out list (your suggestions still solicited), help fight to save the Music Hall and the Hat n’ Boots gas station, and heed the words of VH-1 VJ Ben Sidran: “War is never as much fun as a good piece of music.”