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11/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
DATE OF FIRST STORE XMAS DISPLAY
SIGHTED THIS YEAR: 9/20
begin our November Misc., here’s a no-prize trivia quiz: Name the only major Seattle-based bank that hasn’t changed name or ownership since ’81. Answer below.
I’m writing this, and some of you’ll read it, before 11/8. If you consider yourself a progressive but don’t vote, you’re doing just what the Right hopes you’ll do. In any case, this was last big TV election. As viewership declines and diffuses, media campaigns’ll give way to grass-roots politics, a return neither party’s ready for. The society’s already changing (perhaps not as quickly as I’d like) from that mythical Great Unwashed to a more diverse, active populace. You see it in Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega topping the charts, in a peacetime peak in campus activism, in cultural events outdrawing sports at the box office (though sports still get more beer money). Politicians don’t see it, nor do polls weighted to emphasize “likely voters” (to demographically match ’84 Reaganites).
My Kinda Town: Was recently in that mecca for all column lovers, Chicago, a town with many Seattle ties despite the wresting of Seattle’s Westin and Frederick & Nelson from their old Chicago owners. Generra, Union Bay, Shah Safari, Egghead Software, Starbucks and Eddie Bauer (in a store right under the elevated-train tracks) are strongly represented there. Their baseball teams lose as often as the M’s, but at least they (especially the Cubs) still know to put on a great show.
Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Mini-Muffins, spongy little mouthfuls in six muffiny flavors including blueberry. They’re even microwaveable (but not the foil bag they come in). Their slogan: “Tradition You Can Taste.” Some of their ingredients: Guar gum, xanthan gum, sodium stearol lactylate, sorbitan monostearate and calcium acetate.
Cathode Corner: Sure missed Jim McKay during the Olympics. If Dick Clark could have shows on all three networks at once, couldn’t McKay be on two?… Despite Ted Turner’s rush to colorize his cinematic booty (partly to gain new copyrights on the films, which start going public-domain in 15 years), his TNT channel shows how beautiful black-and-white can be with the best prints. Tugboat Annie, the only golden-age feature made in Seattle, is stupendous in crisp 35mm.
Dead Air: For the record, KJET was sold to out-of-staters and promptly replaced by the area’s sixth oldies station. DJ Jim Keller’s still on the payroll, researching the potential of new music via “pay radio” (envisioned in the ’50s by my idol, comic Stan Freberg) using cable or FM sideband frequencies a la Muzak. Backlash sez management mercilessly killed it by suddenly ordering a switch to the station’s infamous tape system, preventing on-air goodbyes. The real blame goes to the GOP-controlled FCC, for letting stations be bought and sold for pure speculation and run with no commitment to anything except a quick buck.
Mobil 1, Washington 0: There’ll be no more Mobil gas stations in the Northwest as of next year, ending a history going back to the General and Gilmore (builder of Washington’s oldest refinery) brands, bought up by Mobil back in the ’50s. I guess we didn’t watchMasterpiece Theater enough. Old Pegasus will still fly, however, on classic signs at the General Petroleum Museum on E. Pine and an Edmonds antique store.
For better or worse (probably, I reluctantly say, for better), Seattle changed forever the day Westlake Center opened. It’s architecturally flawed (and the big sign on the top level has got to go), but has a few nice stores and is a great gathering place. The mall, more “intimate” than suburban malls (less non-revenue-producing corridor space), was stuffed w/manic shoppers the first days; the only calm people were the Living Mannequins. In the 12 days the mall was open but Pine St. wasn’t, people got to the mall and other shops just fine, thank you. There’s no proven reason to let cars back on that block.
News Items of the Month: BrightStar Technologies of Bellevue’s selling computer software with “the next step toward true artificial intelligence.” Accept no imitations… KPLU reported a “multiple car semi accident” on 10/21. Does that mean somebody might have meant to crash?…Â Fame, a new mag started by ex-Interview staffers, touts sheer and see-thru fashion as the return of a classic style. Unlike the miniskirt, nobody’s likely to turn this classic into a business suit.
Local Publications of the Month: Woodsmen of the West, a 1908 Canadian novel just now released stateside by Seattle’s Fjord Press, is a lively tale of logging, shipping and drinking on the B.C. coast…. Inside Chess, a biweekly from local grandmaster Yassar Seirawan, is the biggest attempt in years at an independent U.S. chess journal. For those with at least a moderate interest in the game’s inner workings.
The Plane Truth?: Uncredited, unsubstantiated claims in the press posit that sick Boeing workers may just be stricken by “mass hysteria” and not by the admittedly-harmful chemicals they work with. I thought we were past the time when managements could just plant the company line into papers.
Frame-Ups: The best things at the Pacific Northwest Art Expo were in the WWU booth: instructor Tom Schlotterback’s small surrealist oils. “Woman Menaced by Rodent” and “Genuine Candy-Striped Jesus Christ” looked even greater than they sound.
Which Came First?: Univ. Way now has restaurants called China First and New China First. (They could have called the new space China Second, but that ‘d be a throwback to the old Two-China Policy.)
Fatty Deposits: Rainier Bank should’ve changed its name back to National Bank of Commerce; instead it’s another variation on “California Carpetbagger Bank of Washington.” I had a temp job on the 13th floor ( they dared to have one) of the Rainier Tower, in the international dep’t. (closed by the Calif. owners). This job was during the big ’85 snow; female employees who couldn’t get home that night were put up in a hotel and given X-large Seahawk T-shirts for sleepwear. (Trivia answer: Washington Mutual.)
‘Til December, send in your suggestions for our In-Out list, don’t buy Adidas cologne (advertised as “The Essence of Sports”), pay homage at G. Washington’s stained-glass portrait at UW Health Sciences (with “What, Me Worry?” inscribed in Latin at the architect’s orders) and heed the words of novelist Judith Krantz: “Dan Quayle is the sort of man who, if he were in a Theodore Dreiser novel, would get the girl pregnant, take her out in a rowboat and throw her overboard.”
9/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
ANOTHER CALIF. LAND DEVELOPER
BUYS A SEATTLE TEAM!
FANS PLAN TO SPEND
SUN. AFTERNOONS KNITTING!
Welcome to the September Back-to-Cool edition of Misc., the column that still wonders why they called it the Elliot Bay Jazz Festival when it was held on the shores of Lake Washington. We could also wonder why that group of mostly easy-listening acts was called a “jazz festival,” but we’ve too many new wonders to deal with this month.
Philm Phun: MTV’s been showing a two-minute, censored and colorized version of the Surrealist classic short Un Chien Andalou at unannounced times lately. Yes, what was once shocking is now just another part of the Cash-from-Chaos culture. Meanwhile, our buddy Jean-Luc Godard has recommended that French TV colorize his original Breathless — and show it with commercials, something they’re only starting to do over there, over the dead bodies of the French cultural priesthood…. A National Medal of Arts was just awarded to Gordon Parks, presumably for his photography, not for directing Shaft.
Junk Food of the Month: Oscar Meyer Lunchables, boxed snacks containing eight little slices of luncheon meat, eight little slices of bread, eight crackers, and one napkin, for $1.39 — about the price of a regular-size package of each non-napkin ingredient. Tastes OK, too.
Cathode Corner: KING, publicly disappointed by such syndicated offerings as The New Queen for a Day, will add another hour of local talk in the afternoon. That’ll give the station some 34 local hours a week, to my knowledge a Seattle record (aside from public-access cable)…. KIRO called its telecast of the last hydro race Super Boat Sunday instead of the Budweiser Cup. Bud had paid to sponsor the race itself, but not the telecast. ‘Tho, as about the only racing camp with enough bucks and spare parts to run a complete race, the Miss Budweiser boat kept the beer’s name on Wayne Cody’s lips all day…. Troubled? Can’t relax? Try one of two newly announced videocassettes. One shows a parade of sheep for you to count (with a soothing Brahms soundtrack); the other has a Video Psychiatrist who “listens” to your situation, occasionally nodding his head and asking you to elaborate a little further.
Local Publication of the Month: Sophie Callie’s Suite Venitienne, from Seattle’s Bay Press. The Parisian-based author/photographer trails a near-stranger named Henri B. to and around the streets of Venice, secretly taking pictures of his movements and writing a running essay justifying her actions. Not only is that cool enough, but at no extra charge you also get Jean Baudrillard’s thinkpiece on surveillance in modern life, “Please Follow Me.”
Repo Men: First and foremost, Dan Quayle does not look like Robert Redford. He looks like Pat Sajak (who did serve in Vietnam, tho’ in a noncombat role with Armed Forces Radio). In contrast, Bush looks like all the small-town lawyers on Scooby-Doo after their ghost masks were removed. The difference is that those villains were businessmen disguised as monsters; the reverse is true of George.
Slipped Discs: The compact-disc reign of terror has claimed its first victim. Jem Records, America’s pioneer distributor of import and independent music, filed for bankruptcy protection after a planned merger with Enigma fell through. Without major-label promo bucks, Jem couldn’t keep its roster of cult favorites (Brian Eno, the early X albums) from getting pushed out of stores eager to make way for more oldies CD’s. (The totally unrelated Jem rock-fashion dolls are also doing poorly, and may be discontinued.) Locally, the owners of Standard Records and Hi-Fi on NE 65th have chosen to close Seattle’s greatest non-rock record store. It was the best place to get any classical, jazz or swing record, and the last in town with ’30s-style listening booths…. The record division of Toshiba, a worldwide military-tech supplier, has refused to release a Japanese cover of “Love Me Tender” with new anti-nuke lyrics from distribution. The singer is suing. Now thank your stars GE sold RCA’s record unit.
Star Trysts: Hugh Hefner’s bride had to sign extensive anti-alimony waivers giving her no opportunity to inherit the Playboy empire (still oozing money, mainly from the last non-publishing units). Ol’ Hef wants daughter Christine (12 years older than her new stepmom) to get it all, or whatever’s still there.
Center of Dispute: A recent evening found Patti Smith’s song “The People Have the Power” on the P.A. at the Fun Forest, which the Disney consultants want to replace with an upscale (read: “Tourist”) amusement complex across 5th Ave. N. Other parts of their Seattle Center plan have been modified to have less L.A. kitsch than originally envisioned, but it’s still a potential WPPSS of parks in its scale and boondoggle potential, when all the Center really needs is some structural fix-up and a visual-arts space to replace the SAM Pavillion. Other expenditures can wait while more Seattle-appropriate ideas are developed, preferably by citizens. Or as Smith sez, “The people have the power/To redeem the work of fools.”
‘Til Next Time, avoid 7-Up Gold (the first cinnamon-flavored soda), read the new autobio of Portland’s own Mel Blanc, vote in the primary, don’t get snared into the Olympic medal-counting game, and keep those recycling cartons full.
THE OFFICIAL MISC. READING LIST
Folks often ask, “Where d’ya get all that stuff you write about?”
It’s simple: Everywhere.
Here are some of the sources I try to get around to
at least every now and then.
Read the widest possible range for a healthy intellectual diet.
3/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Back to Our Pre-Taped Profiles
After This Pause for a Sports Event
At Misc., we’re glad Metro’s finally getting those tired Earth Shoe colors off their buses (as part of their continuing belief that promotion is more important to a bus line than reliable service). Let’s paint ’em in the colors that Seattle has sold to the world: screeching primary and secondary colors, in goofily overstated patterns with odd typography along the sides. The first Generra designer bus! I can hardly wait.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: A while since we had this section, but so much to report now. First, there’s Simplesse, the genetically engineered “fake fat” from the makers of NutraSweet. Then there was that great Nova show on how food technologists take consumer demands for natural foods and end up making cylindrical wafers with imitation cheese-flavored fillings, chemically bonded to maintain a “creamy” texture and all “co-extruded” from a machine in long rolls. But perhaps the biggest news in the field is that Dannon yogurt, one of the last “pure” snacks left, now comes in plastic cups instead of waxed cardboard. You can’t even go natural anymore without buying non-biodegradable petrochemicals.
CATHODE CORNER: Previews of The Wonder Years, the first show to treat people my age as the target of nostalgia, aren’t encouraging: Horribly cute little boys and the same ’60s soul classics you hear today in bad commercials. The 12-year-old kids I knew at the time thought those songs were OK but preferred the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. — music for kids left behind by progressive rock. Just as we were becoming teens, suddenly it wasn’t cool to be a teen anymore. We learned the media only cared about people 10 years older than us and always would…. At least until MTV. In that channel’s most amazing promo yet, five young actors stand on a stage and chant, “How do you do, Mr. Ginsberg. I would like you to know that the best minds of my generation are rich and famous.” Not quite true, of course; the best minds of my generation are really bankrupting themselves in self-publishing, paying off video camcorders, and fighting to get airplay.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Shelby Gilje, Times, 2/12): “Playskool has Dolly Surprise, whose hair grows when you raise her right arm.” I knew the Sisterhood-Is-Powerful look would come back.
MUSICAL MENACE: At a performance of Seattle Opera’s Orpheus and Eurydice, a man stood up from his seat, yelled “This is dogshit,” and left. They’re trying to identify him from his seat position, in hopes of revoking his season ticket. Earlier, a guy jumped to his death from the balcony at NY’s Metropolitan Opera. I tell you, this Satanic opera music is causing demented behavior. Why aren’t officials demanding warning labels on opera records? Why are opera companies allowed to serve wine at intermissions? Why aren’t opera audiences strip-searched? You don’t know what they could be hiding in those long gowns!
CALGARY REPORT (via Dave Bushnell): “Everybody’s very friendly. When a guy I met tried to climb over a fence to get into an event, the cops asked him to come down, checked his ID, and found out he was going to have a birthday in a couple of days. They sent him a birthday card at his hotel. With all the offices built in the last oil boom, the whole city looks like it just sprang into being in the last few years. You can see multi-million-dollar developments right next to these small suburban houses. One man refused to let the Olympics tear down his little house next to the ski jump; he finally agreed to let them use it as a press office. A strip joint was told it couldn’t use the Olympics name, so it instead ran a “Miss O-Word Contest.” I was with Seattle TheaterSports in the Olympic Arts Festival. We competed against teams from the US, Canada, England and Australia, and came this close to the bronze. Really.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Ex-UW prof Molly (only spiritually related to Shere) Hite’s Class Porn suffers from the most overused plot for first novels (English teacher tries to write her first novel), but it does have one nice twist. After the heroine struggles to create a positive erotic fantasy for women, the result reads just like the plot of a Russ Meyer movie. The heroine doesn’t even realize this; Hite might not either…. Memo to Feminist Baseball: Thanx for your last ‘zine, but I really think deliberate amateurism is passé (as is Michael Jackson bashing).
CAUCUS QUIPS: As our state prepares to be ignored by the candidates and press on Sooper Toosday, let’s glimpse the political realm. Like an awakened sleepwalker saying “Did I really do that?”, more citizens are incredulously realizing they’ve let a gang of grafters, demagogues and confidence artists use our government and economy as their playthings. Others, terrified by the risks associated with reality, are frenetically trying to keep the Reagan illusion alive. But as The Nation (2/6) sez, the leading Democrats (and, to a lesser extent, Dole) are selling progressive populism to a degree beyond anything McGovern did (and often beyond their own voting records). When it’s become hard to even imagine a presidency based on real decency, it’s a miracle that so many voters are insisting that there must and can be a better way.
CLOSE: ‘Til the April Showers come our way (presuming we ever have them), be sure to watch the BBC soap EastEnders on KTPS, vote for Ray Charles and Stan Boreson in The Rocket’s Northwest Music Hall of Fame poll, go to the caucuses, and join us next time.
6/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
IT’S THE DAWS BUTLER MEMORIAL EDITION,
AND DON’T YOU FOR-GIT IT!
Welcome to the second-anniversary edition of Misc. This ragtag collection of little notices from all over does have some goals. I want to celebrate the chaotic, post-postmodern world of ours, and call for a world much like we have now but with more love and less attitude. I want to exalt English as a living, growing language. I want to separate political liberalism from the cultural conservatism that led so many post-’60s youth to view liberals as old fuddyduddies. I want to proclaim that you can be intellectually aware and still like TV.
Why the New Rainier Beer Ads Suck: They’re a Frisco ad agency’s idea of what us Northwest hicks’ll fall for: Pavlov/Spielberg stimulus-response images, based on tourist attractions and phony regional pride. They’re as awful as the big beers’ ads, without the media budget to pull it off. The new “small-capitals” logotype looks too much like that of Rainier Bank. It’s all because the brewery was sold to Australian mogul Alan Bond, who more recently bought out fellow Aussie Robert Holmes a Court (the man who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson). Bond also has large business ties with Chilean dictator Pinochet (gold mines, a phone company). Response to the ads has been underwhelming, while old Rainier posters sold briskly at the U-District Street Fair.
A Permanent Underground Tour: Bill Speidel, who died this month, was one of the first to write seriously about Seattle as a real city, with its own brief but vital history. Too few have followed his lead; “Northwest Writers” are still expected to do free verse about scenery, not narratives about people. Yet he’ll be remembered whenever Northwesterners seek an honest regional identity from holding on to one’s past: Not nostalgia for a nonexistent “simpler time” or the old west of movies, but a raucous cavalcade of pioneers and profiteers, matrons and whores, all trying to muddle through life much as we try now.
Local Publications of the Month: First, the fine mag misidentified here last time as Ground Zero is really Zero Hour. The temporal-spatial discord resolved, let’s discuss newspapers ashamed of their own towns. The Herald and The Morning News-Tribune no longer carry any front-page clue to their origins (Everett and Tacoma). The Daily Journal-American never had Bellevue in its name. Each wants to be identified not with real cities but with its own mapped-out segment of Suburbia USA, the everywhere/nowhere.
Junk Food of the Month: The experimental no-melt chocolate invented by our pals, the Battelle Memorial Institute. Since it stays solid at temperatures below 98.6 F, will the makers of car seats and kids’ clothes conspire to keep it off the market?
One More Time: Sequels, those efficient re-uses of pre-sold titles, have become vital parts of conglomerate-owned film studios. The trend has grown to the literary classics with the announced book project Gone With the Wind II. But I’m waiting for the Romeo and Juliet follow-up being written by ’68 movie Romeo Leonard Whiting. I want to know how they manage to be alive after part 1, but also whether they can keep their relationship growing amidst the problems of everyday life.
The Big Lie Indeed: Drugs continue to be used as the Red Scare of the Late ’80s, an excuse for anti-democratic actions of many kinds. Locally, Doug Jewett uses it to promote the destruction of low-income housing, and the Blaine feds are seizing vehicles for just an ash of pot (not the most enlightened way to reduce the budget deficit). Nationally, the Army’s being brought into domestic law enforcement (just like in drug-exporting states such as Panama). Some would prefer that the anti-drug cause remain associated with fascist tactics, so that non-fascists will keep getting hooked and killed in the name of rebellion. But there are better ways to approach the issue, such as shown on a new bumper sticker: “Stop Contra Aid — Boycott Cocaine.”
Goin’ to Jackson: It’s no wonder some have tried, and others may try, to kill Jesse Jackson, for he’s more than a soon-to-be-ex-candidate. He’s overseen a realignment of American politics, away from of the era of the Gilded Right and the Gelded Left. No longer can liberals bask in smug defeatism, readily accepting conservatives’ portrayal of things. (Most Americans never were flaming Falwellians, but the anti-Falwell set bought Falwell’s claim that they were.) Jackson’s shown that a universal movement for change can happen, whether party regulars are involved or not.
Cathode Corner: Johnny Carson may be writing his own bad jokes during the writers’ strike, but you won’t hear any gags about his financial advisor, “Bombastic Bushkin.” Johnny and the real Henry Bushkin have broken their long partnership. Some of Bushkin’s deals, such as investing in Houston real estate just before the oil bust, have come too close to the ones in old Carson monologues.
Loco Affairs: Martin Selig sez he wants a more beautiful downtown. He’s offered to pay the city to let him tear down the homely Public Safety Bldg. We could think of a few other buildings worthy of removal, ones for which he already owns all rights….The Westlake Center nears completion, and the developers’ intentions for the land the city gave them are appearing. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports local merchants as essentially fainting or laughing at the center’s proposed rents. Most tenants, the Journal sez, “are expected to be national chains.”
Ad Copy of the Month (by CBS Records for UK band Raymonde): “Let’s just say it falls someplace between Joy Division and the Beach Boys.”
Ride ‘Em: Metro’s losing passengers while Snohomish County Community Transit can’t stuff folks on board fast enough. To learn why, just ride a CT bus to Everett some night. It’s a nice, big, comfy bus, in pleasant colors. It’s a bus people can actually want to ride, and they do. But the folks at Metro were too busy to notice one of their own officials skimming the cash boxes, so we can’t expect ’em to learn from their neighbors’ success.
Close: ‘Til next time, petition KIRO to bring back Mighty Mouse, visit the 6 Star Factory Outlet store in W. Seattle, and heed the words of gambler-lawman Bat Masterson: “There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in winter.”
1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?
Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.
XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.
FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.
CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.
MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).
ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.
JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.
CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.
CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.
SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.
CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.
INS AND OUTS FOR ’88
12/87 ArtsFocus Misc. Cheer Our UW in the Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl
INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.
FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.
UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)
ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.
CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.
ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.
MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.
CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).
10/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Here’s Misc., the column that’s more fun than a Shaw Island heretic nun. Opinions here aren’t necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates or its advertisers. In fact, offer me a Supreme Court post and I’ll retract or explain away any position I’ve ever taken.
The Summer of ’67 commemorations turned out to be largely duds. That’s OK, really; it’s good to see folks being respectfully apathetic towards the hippie dregs’ shrieks about their own importance. I mean, everybody back in the late ’60s can’t have been as hip ‘n’ progressive as the ex-rads now claim everyone was – somebody voted for Nixon.
But all summers must make way for autumn. Each year at this time, Seattle’s five-month ennui generated by the Mariners vanishes with the first frenzied football crowds. But this year, there’s only half the madness, with the NFL players away. One issue: owners’ demands that players take mandatory drug tests for the privilege of entertaining 60,000 drunks.
The NY Times reports an unnamed Seattle air express firm sent a rare Picasso to a Texas Air Force base instead of the eastern museum expecting it. The story didn’t say if the museum got the aircraft parts the Air Force was expecting, but they would’ve made a great found-sculpture installation (they probably cost more than the Picasso, too).
Junk food of the month:Â Souix City Sarsaparilla (made in New York), with a taste that blows root beer clean away and two stunning cowboy relief images on each exquisite bottle. Available at the Sunnyside Deli in Wallingford.
Local publication of the month: No one selection this time. Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle by Seattle is finally out, four years after it was made, and indeed worth the wait (it’s even turned out to be prophetic in its theme of an entire city disappearing before your eyes). Semiotext(e) USA, a compilation of underground-press materials co-assembled by ex-local Sue Ann Harkey, is out six months late with the best material being supplied by SubGenius Foundation cartoonist Paul Malvrides. Four-Five-One is back seven months after its fundraiser with a beautiful poster-mag featuring Marsh Gooch on Hank Williams, Angela Sorby on practical nihlism, and Kenneth M. Crawford on a toy-factory worker replaced by a machine, until “the machine eventually goes Union and puts the company back to square one.”
We’re not the only town to lose its semblence of economic power to outside speculation. AÂ Philadelphia paper sez that town, the country’s 4th biggest, is also now bereft of any big local banks and of many locally-based industries. The city celebrating the 200th birthday of the Constitution has lost the last of its economic independence.
Ann Wilson Update: The Heart singer is now seeking a husband with “streetwiseness.” Object: to sire 3 kids. . . . In other celeb gossip, one of the less harrowing parts of Patty Duke‘s memoir Call Me Anna is how she left hubby John Astin when he fell in with the fundamentalist-Buddhists and pressured her and the kids to do the same. Somehow, the vision of Gomez Addams sitting in the lotus position chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” through his cigar all day has an eerie sort of appeal to it.
The Hollywood idiots are at it again: Responding to the popularity of sexual themes in films like Betty Blue and She’s Gotta Have It, the studios have done their usual misinterpretation of the market and come up with a cycle of virulently anti-sex films. Don’t see Fatal Attraction (jilted mistress on a rampage), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (N. Mailer writes AND directs, ’nuff said), Lady Beware (creator of erotic window displays stalked by a sicko), Kandyland (exotic dancer stalked by pimps & pushers), or Blood on the Moon (feminists slaughtered by serial killer).
Among the fall TV season‘s only promising shows is Trying Times, a comedy anthology coming to PBS later this month. It was filmed in that familiar Vancouver-pretending-to-be-America, and was shown on the CBC as part of its series Lies from Lotus Land. It’s the perfect treat for your friends visiting Seattle, trying desperately to find the locations they saw in Stakeout….The Garbage Pail Kidscartoon show was unceremoniously yanked by CBS days before its debut, but don’t fret: a feature-film version is in the works.
Looks like a great theatre season in town with hot offerings coming from Performa ’87, the Group and Seattle Children’s Theatre among others. The best stage value of all has got to be New City‘s Late Night shows with music, dance and a serialized staged reading, “The Life and Times of Baby M,” every Saturday night for 99 cents.
One of Seattle’s best dinner-floor show combos is at the Broadway Jack-in-the-Box. Every Friday night, patrons are treated to the entertainment of watching an endless stream of teens barging in, walking right past the counter to the restroom doors, discovering that the restrooms are now locked to non-customers, and barging right out again without buying anything or speaking to anyone.
While you spend the next month figuring out what the Australians will buy next (after Rainier Beer and Ms. magazine; it was also an Aussie who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson), we close with some of Team Chalk‘s work at Bumbershoot: “Outwit the great theif despair — an exercise in radical trust…It’s always tornado season in someone’s heart.”
7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”
It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.
On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.
TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.
No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?
(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)
In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.
Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.
PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….
NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.
The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.
Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…
Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.
CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.
Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.
Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.
‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.
6/87 ArtsFocus Misc
(one-year anniversary)
Welcome to the first issue of the new Arts Focus and the first anniversary of Misc., the at-large column that tries to keep ahead of a world where Hüsker Du goes on the Today show, the Central Area’s Liberty Bank becomes the largest Seattle-owned commercial bank by default, the M’s briefly take first place, and the Pope tries to stop people from doing all they can to have babies.
Top story of the month: Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s and other top national advertisers are refusing to place any ads in Florida, after that state passed a tax on advertising and other professional services. If Booth had gotten his original tax plan past our myopic Legislature, we too would be sharing in this rare and wonderful blessing.
At that same time, Contragate and Hartbreak battled for the public viscera, with many Americans somehow finding lying, cheating, and killing in the name of democracy to be less immoral than sleeping around.
Local junk food of the month: Midnight Sun Dark Chocolate, made in south King Co. by an Alaska firm, with such a bold flavor that it’s the Everclear of candy bars. No relation to the “Midnite Sun Chocolate” in Eskimo Pies.
Local publication of the month: Moviemakers at Work. Despite what the Times says, this is Microsoft Press’ first non-computer book, and its choice of interviewees reflects the real star system in late-industrial Hollywood. Not a single actor, writer or composer is in the book; the only subjects with director credits are two animators. Instead, we get audio technicians, photographers, editors, and most especially special-effects artisans. The newfound prominence of these people indicates how the big-money boys now in charge at the movies have dropped all notions of story, dialogue and character in a relentless rush toward old Darryl Zanuck’s dream: to find a movie formula wherein investing in a certain level of pure spectacle will bring a guaranteed return. It didn’t work for Zanuck (Cleopatra, Dr. Doolittle); it’s not working today.
Time Travelers, one of this column’s favorite record and comic stores, hopes to move away from 2nd near Pine this summer. The folk there say it’s ‘cuz the neighborhood has become too scuzzy, and I agree. That Nordstrom Rack has attracted totally the wrong element. In other comic news, Marvel is now owned by New World Pictures, presumably meaning we’ll get more great comic-based films in the grand tradition of Howard the Duck. Gary Larson, meanwhile, has sold rights for a live-action Far Side movie to Alan Rudolph (Trouble in Mind, Welcome to L.A.) would fit in perfectly, as long as he doesn’t sing.
Sports spurts: Have the Sonics’ recent playoff successes led me to reconsider my stance against letting more than half of any league’s league’s teams into its playoffs? No. This does not mean I don’t love the Supes or will approve of any move to Bellevue (what would they be called then? The Evergreen State Warriors?)…
Most of the potential new local owners for the Mariners are stingy bean counters just like George Arduous. They might meet the requirements of Commissioner Peter Uberalles, but could keep the team strictly a stop for players on their way up or down. The M’s may be contenders now, but the question is whether this year’s stars’ll get paid what they deserve here next year or go to someone who will.
Cathode Corner: Joan Rivers has finally been fired by Murdochvision. Why didn’t it happen sooner? ‘Cuz Rivers & Rupert shared the same worldview, one based on gross-out aesthetics and Righteous Right politics. With any luck Murdoch’s Fox Network will fold this year, leaving KCPQ to running its great movies (with the usual breaks from greatness for the monthly Gratuitous Violence Week). I’d hate to see the Ding-Ding Channel’s uniqueness become lost to more of those fashionable-but-dumb Fox shows, shows which prove that it’s square to be hip.
Richard Nixon has received a Fine Arts award from the French government, presumably for such acts of support for the arts as helping Joe McCarthy’s terror crusade against filmmakers and artists, trying to kill PBS, and putting half the big names in showbiz on his hit list. Of course, this award is coming from the nation that idolizes Jerry Lewis.
The Rep’s production of Red Square inspires this comment from P. Shaw: “The biggest thing about it is the conflict between the cold, badly conceived, laborious Rep set and the fast-paced, anarchic nature of the farce. The way that the fast action stops cold for these slow, slow scene changes sets up a whole other kind of absurdity in the spirit of farce, where inappropriate things are happening all the time.”
The Empty Space’s Gloria Duplex raises lots of questions on religion, sex, artistic inspiration, and hip-art-world attitudes toward lowbrow and folk culture, but none more intriguing than that of why Seattle doesn’t have anything like the intimate passions of body and soul celebrated in Rebecca Welles’ Louisiana-set work. It’s probably a combination of our Nordic Lutheran heritage (in which the only fully accepted alternative to quiet piety is quiet drunkenness) and our post-frontier heritage (in which most expressions of the free human spirit are suppressed to try and prove that the Wild West has “grown up”). In any event, we could use just the revival of both true spirituality and true sexuality promoted so sweetly in Gloria’s Kitten Paradise Temple and Lounge.
‘Til we talk again in midsummer, remember these memorable words from Shaka Zulu (the first live-action nudity-violence miniseries from the producers of Robotech): “Don’t just stand there like a pack of old women, kill me!”
3/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hi again, pop-culture fans, and welcome to Misc., the only column that ate at the Silver King, drank at the Trade Winds, and lived to tell the tale.
The building that until recently housed the Lesbian Resource Center and Seattle Women’s Gym is about to become a bridal shop. This trivium is offered merely for the sake of irony, and is not in any way to be considered an encouragement of the new homophobia. (Ever notice how many of the mass media only talk about AIDS when straights get it, or how the new soft-focus-scare condom ads never mention the existence of gays?)
In business news, B. Freshman’s in Wallingford, the noble experiment in drawing the hypertasteful Nouveau Riche to mark prices on groceries with great pencils inside a cramped basement, somehow failed. (More closures in our handy sidebar.)
In new business activity, Razz-Ma-Tazz on Denny offers all the essential elements of a topless bar without toplessness or a bar. For a small fee, you can enter a room with flashing lights and blaring Bon Jovi where legally-dressed young women will smile, touch your shoulder and request additional fees for a soft drink, a conversation or a 2-minute “table dance.”… Could that ’80s nostalgia landmark, the Showbox Theater, really be slated for conversion into a movie multiplex?
(latter-day note: Razz-Ma-Tazz went topless and is now all-nude, at least on stage; its table dances are still less explicit than those described in police reports about suburban strip clubs. And the Showbox became a comedy club with an ugly interior remodel.)
CATHODE CORNER: Continuing our theme of antisexploitation, KSTW is following the lead of the USA Network in running cheap sex comedies with the sex scenes all cut out. What’s left makes less sense than the Spanish channel makes if you don’t know Spanish….
Hope you didn’t watch Amerika. Remember: The networks don’t care if you love or hate a show, as long as you keep watching. The only effective protest is to turn it off….
The most fascinating show on the Discovery Channel’s week of Soviet TV was Serious and In Jest. Segments on the value of satire in increasing industrial productivity were intercut with film of degrading police interrogations of vodka scalpers and a melodramatic sketch in which a boy suffers a total breakdown after learning his parents met while dealing in the black market….
The CBC this month is presenting not only the curling championships but also the return of Seeing Things, the offbeat mystery show about a clairvoyant crime reporter. It can descend into corn, but at its best blows the slick US crime shows out of the water.
Now that Bob Barker has successfully used the Miss USA pageant to campaign against furs, maybe he’ll now talk about the way humans are treated in the countries where he MCs Miss USA’s parent show, Miss Universe. I don’t remember him commenting when Imelda Marcos raided the Philippines’ public-housing budget to build an auditorium in Manila, which opened by hosting that year’s Miss Universe show. (By the way, the introduction of computerized scoring to Miss USA may encourage those who criticize pageants for the wrong reasons. A pageant queen is not the idealized lover but the idealized daughter. The spectacle does not objectify the start of the breeding cycle but its final result.)
I keep telling people computers can be our friends. Now it turns out that a White House mainframe, which preserved even “erased” files, may become the best witness to the Iran-Contra scheme and a whole network of other potentially illegal acts organized under the doublespeak moniker “Project Democracy.” As the nation takes what John Chancellor has called a “trip down memory lane,” the Reagan Discs may prove more useful in uncovering abuses of power than the Nixon Tapes.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Amazing Adventures of Mighty Mole, a comic book distributed to elementary schools by Metro. Our tunnel-digging hero exclaims that the downtown bus tunnel is “a totally rad concept,” excavating equipment is “totally awesome,” and that “digging a tunnel is really exciting work.” And I always thought it was boring. (For our slower readers, that was a pun.) (For our early readers, more local publications will be featured at the Underground Press Convention, Feb. 28 here at Lincoln Arts.)
The Globe Radio Theater production of Gogol’s Dead Souls, produced in Seattle by Jean Sherrard and John Siscoe, will soon be available on cassettes for repeated nuance-hunting. KPLU has aired the mini-series right after Bob and Ray Sunday evenings, for a whole hour of consciousness-bending, low-key humor. With great intellectual entertainment like this on public radio, who’ll miss Garrison Keillor (who ran out of ideas three years ago anyway)?
DUMB AD OF THE MONTH (in the P-I): “If it’s true that automatic transmissions are capable of unintended acceleration, then all cars with automatic are suspect. Audi is the only manufacturer to date who has addressed the problem to protect their owners.” A local dealer thus attempted to depict as the leader in responsibility a manufacturer who refused to do anything about the problem until it could not hide from the evidence any more….
Several more respectable cars are on display in a great new book, I’ll Buy That: 50 Big Deals and Small Wonders. It’s published by Consumer Reports as a 50th-anniversary celebration, and covers 50 major contributions to American life, including not just consumer products (the Mustang, the Beetle, the minivan, detergents, frozen foods), but such other innovations as the Salk vaccine, the birth control pill, the credit card and the suburban housing tract.
EARLY WARNING: With spring coming soon, the New City Theater Directors’ Festival is also coming soon, and then the Seattle International Film Festival. Only a few weeks of winter remain in which to stare at your Video Aquarium tape from the How-To-Do-Anything Store. ‘Til then, let’s return to Soviet TV for this closing thought, from its equivalent to CBS’s Morning Program: “If we entertained you, made you smile, and did not make you late for work, then our job here has been a successful one.”
DOWNTOWN BUSINESS WHICH HAVE CLOSED
SINCE THE START OF CURRENT CONSTRUCTION JOBS
Seattle Design
Kentucky Fried Chicken
Florsheim
Weisfield’s
Town Theater
Music Box Theater
Golden Crown
Bernie’s
TJ’s Men’s Wear
The Frankfurter
J.K. Gill
Pipelane Ltd.
ABC Corral Western Wear
Walden Books
Leed’s Shoes
Lindy Shoes
Copper Kitchen
J. Spencer Books
12/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome to Misc., the regional pop-culture section of ArtsFocus, the second most widely-read publication among the Seattle arts community.
The first is, of course, the Weekly World News. And if I may be presumptuous, I think we’re better. Sure, the WWN is handsome looking and has great mail-order ads, but buying something just so you can laugh at everyone else who buys it is an aesthetic dead end. It leads to an unattractive smugness, an attitude of scoffing at other people’s lives without ever questioning one’s own.
The logical extreme of this attitude is shown by audiences of the documentary Rate It X. “Progressive” guys watch this film of interviews with sleazy redneck guys and come away confirmed about their superiority to those working-class creeps. “Progressive” women come away knowing they don’t have to care about anyone or anything to be morally superior, since men obviously aren’t really people.
There are more pressing crises in this day than anti-thought “intellectual” films, though — like the closing of the Rainbow Tavern, just as it had finally broken the stranglehold of aging hippie R&B bands that had ruled all local clubs for too many years, and had established the most eclectic, truly progressive array of live music this town’s ever seen. The Seattle music scene will never be the same, even if a “New Rainbow” opens in the spring in some less-convenient location.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Seattle Star. One of the best free papers around, it’s a forum for the wittiest just-above-ground comics created anywhere.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Soup in a tube. From Germany, where everything from mayonnaise to milk comes in toothpaste-like tubes, comes Nutri-Soup, a thick sludge of bullion, herbs and natural and artificial flavorings. Just two inches (one tablespoon) is enough for a cup of great-smelling and adequately-tasting soup.
I hope you all saw the Art Expo in the Trade Center last month. It was a true cash-from-chaos scene, as the city’s art hustlers abandoned all remnants of cultured propriety. From now on, the question in visual art won’t be whether creative people can also sell, but whether salespeople can also create.
One answer to that question is found at D’Art, the home of Quality Artist’s Products. The permanent D’Art store may now be closed, but a holiday edition is now open in the Madison Valley neighborhood. As always, it’s filled with cute, outrageous and just plain rockin’ things, all at somewhat reasonable prices.
Alan Lande’s recent Autocratic, a “ballet for cars” in the new SCCC garage, was also tons-O-fun. Where they got a wrecked car in the same color as the rented wreckers was only the first of many great mysteries that night, as four concrete floors of dance, live and recorded music, video bonfires, signs with names of parts of the human digestive system, and other post-industrial entertainments were explored by an audience of carpools stretching a quarter-mile north of the site.
There’s a wine store in Post Alley with a great tabletop miniature of a modern winery. It uses taped narration, flashing lights, and motorized machinery to show the entire winemaking process, from vineyard to tasting room. It does not contain a tiny AA or MADD meeting.
This is being written in a tiny room overlooking the central downtown waterfront. The Port of Seattle and the usual development suspects are out to destroy the waterfront we know and love, by putting up yet another scheme of junky “gourmet” boutiques, junky “luxury” hotel rooms and junky “upscale” offices. I love the waterfront just as it is now, and don’t want it turned into another lifeless pseudo-suburb like today’s lower First Avenue or Broadway. It’s the same sort of destructive “improvement” that threatened the Market and Pioneer Square, before those great areas were “saved” by putting the trashy new businesses in the great old buildings. The waterfront deserves more than that — it deserves to stay the honest, funky, lo-rent district it is now.
In more uplifting news, Sen. Fishstick has been granted a permanent leave of absence from his taxpayer-supported position of being “hard on Communism” in Latin America as an excuse for being soft on fascism, of promoting the censorship of musicians who even suggest that religious and lifestyle alternatives exist, of making deals to let incompetent but ideologically-correct men become judges. America is even rediscovering the grand and noble tradition of disrespect for one’s president. Now comes the hard part: Getting away from complaining about the way things are done long enough to do them some other way.
Despite the posters, the local small-press book Young Men Can Sing is not “the first novel with advertisements.” Mass-market paperbacks have often had ads stuck in the middle. I remember one ’50s paperback with an ad for Time magazine, promising to inform me all about “Pasternak, Voice of the World’s Free Spirit… Einstein, Investigator Into the Unknown… Kruschev, Frank Lloyd Wright, Brigitte Bardot.” And I’d always thought she was the Voice of the World’s Free Spirit….
CATHODE CORNER: The first Christmas commercial this year came on Oct. 13 on WTBS, for an LP of holiday favorites….
Viacom Cablevision will soon add the Cable Value Network, one of many channels and individual programs established in the wake of FCC regulations regarding all-advertising “shows” and “services.” Using sophisticated marketing techniques at relatively unsophisticated audiences, these companies prey on compulsive shoppers to buy tacky wall clocks and briefcases. Cable systems running the channels get a percentage of all sales from their subscribers. No system that runs this form of unabashed audience manipulation should ever again claim to be providing a public service to plea for exorbitant rate increases. Not that it’s necessary; by this time next year the FCC will let cable systems charge whatever they can get away with.
Don’t ask where I got it, but I’ve now got a 1972-vintage tourist map of scenic El Salvador. It looks just like a Tourmap publication, with cheesy drawings of local industries and recreational opportunities. The saddest part, though, is the color photos of ugly modern lo-rise office buildings. The government is obviously proud of its attempts to make its capital city look like an imitation LA. Pity.
I’ll see you at the Incredibly Strange Matinees, noon weekends at the University Cinemas. Until then, remember to always be a good sport, be a good sport all ways. So long.
9/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hello again, pop culture fans. Welcome to episode 3 of Misc., the column that asks just how lucky we are to live in an era when we can get gas with “High Tech Techroline.”
This has been a summer of torn streets, noisy construction, disappearing bus stops and other hassles, many of which will be with us for the next four years. The good news is by that time, the only people left downtown will be those of us who demand urban life. Life may soon become a lot less overcrowded for those who refuse to go to Bellevue. Sadly, we’re losing Chapter 2 Books in the University District to that Nowhereland to the east, and are in danger of even losing the Pacific Science Center. This threat to Seattle’s cultural life must be stopped. You wanna have to tell your kids someday that they can’t pitch pennies into the fountains or get their hair raised in the static-electricity exhibit without spending an hour on the bridges? The only arches that belong in Bellevue are golden.
(By the way, the widow and daughter of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc have started a California peace group, Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament. With nuclear weapons, they must have finally found something to crusade against that’s worse than their food.)
Passionately urban life does seem to be catching on in Seattle as a permanent thing. Broadway this summer has been a wonderland of all different kinds of people making all different kinds of scenes. At Dick’s alone you can find some 200 people being sociable at 1:30 a.m. Whenever anybody in Seattle has this much fun, somebody has tried to outlaw it. Already business interests are demanding something be “done” about this “problem” — which is really the best thing that has happened to Seattle since the saving of the Market. Any real city has spontaneous street scenes — gatherings of ordinary people who may not have a destination in mind when they take to the streets, but have an invigorating time getting there. Not everybody who stands on a sidewalk and talks to friends is a criminal; we should be glad the attempts to make Broadway a district for yuppies and only yuppies has gloriously failed. Now if they can only tear up those nauseatingly-cute footsteps…
THINGS I DID THIS SUMMER: Saw the University Book Store remainder sale and was pleased to find How To Sell What You Write marked down to $1.49. Noticed the resemblance between International News’s brightly colored, slogan laden clothes and those of the 1900s comic strip star, The Yellow Kid. Discovered Seattle’s ultimate food store, other than the Pike Place Market: Marketime Foods in Fremont. Was captivated by Cisterna Magna, an exquisite dance/visual performance at Belltown’s Galleria Potatohead. Concluded that any movie, fashion style, entertainer or politician advertised as “hot” is probably going to be dreadful.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Heritage Music Review. Longtime area piano player/disc jockey Doug Bright uses a Braille word processor to make this knowledgeable guide to old rock, R&B and jazz performers of the region and nation. Available in regular print at Elliot Bay Books and other select sources.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bubble gum cards that didn’t make it. The Sports Stop in the Center House basement has cards for entertainment properties that outstayed their welcome (Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper) or never caught on at all (the Dune andSupergirl films). The cards are collector’s items; the gum’s undoubtedly stale, though.
Our last column had a snide remark about an SRO theater. I don’t really hate SRO. About a decade ago, when smart people were briefly being courted as audiences by major motion pictures, SRO was considered the “Establishment” of area theaters. Lately though, SRO has shown itself capable of the finest in theater architecture (though the pink and gray on the Uptown has got to go) and concession food. They continue to subsidize KJET, the closest thing we have to a progressive commercial radio station, and in 1970 tried to save the Seattle Pilots baseball team. Now, this heritage is threatened by a takeover attempt from Paramount Pictures. It might be seen as Paramount’s revenge on Washington state; it was our native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the famous “U.S. vs. Paramount” decision forcing the big five studios to sell the theater chains though which they controlled the entire industry. With today’s federal antitrust regulators (who could more rightly be called protrust), the big distributors are itching for their old monopoly powers back. The remnants of the original Paramount theater chain (not including the Seattle Paramount) are now owned by Coca-Cola, which also owns the Columbia and Embassy studios and half of Tri-Star. Other alliances are underway. If you think the movies this past year have been pitiful, just wait until the big studios control so many theaters they can lock out independent films.
When that time comes, we’ll all have to go to VCRs to see anything interesting. Already you can check out an amazing variety of stuff, including a series of tapes called Video Romance. One store has them in the Adult section even though they’ve no sex, nudity or cussing, and are in fact far tamer than the evening soaps. What they’ve got are impossibly innocent (especially for their glamorous professions) women meeting and taming tall men who have wavy hair and vague accents. All this plus cheap productions (we never see the exotic locales in which the stories are set, only living rooms), syrupy music, bad acting and “Your Host, Louis Jourdan” and you’ve got more real entertainment than in the entire collected works of Michael J. Fox.
Another recently viewed tape:Â Urgh! A Music War, 1981 concert footage of some 35 bands gathered under the awkward, inaccurate label “new wave.” Only one of them was big at the time (the police, who helped finance the film). Others became stars (the Go-Gos, UB40, Devo), had solid cult followings (Magazine, Steel Pulse, XTC), or met deserved obscurity (Athletico Spizz 80, Splodgenessabounds). I found myself viewing the proceedings as nostalgia for my own generation, and seeing how, even while many of the best bands never had a major hit, the attitudes they represented have become quite pervasive in American society — in butchered form, of course. A lot of the worst aspects of punk/new wave (shallow imagery, aggressive hype, destructiveness to self and others as romanticism, bigotry as nostalgia, shamelessness, lousy manners, celebrations of stupidity) have become everyday aspects of modern business, government and lifestyles. Even agriculture has gone punk: It’s dependent on drugs and panhandling, lives fast, dies young and leaves a good-looking corpse.
Home video’s an even bigger happening in the Asian American community. The wonderful variety stores of the International District all have amazing tape boxes promising music, farce, soap opera, horror, kinky sex, and serious drama, as well as the martial arts you’d expect (often more than one genre in the same production). While you might not want to buy a membership for unsubtitled tapes in a language you don’t speak, the stores will usually have a video playing while you buy some of their fine foods, clothes, jewelry, toys and housewares. Treat yourself to a view of another culture’s pop culture.
We close this edition with a call for entries in the first Misc. Helga Lookalike Contest. The Northwest is abundant with the stoic Nordic romantic look now associated with painter Andrew Wyeth’s mystery woman, as seen in both Time and Newsweek. Send a picture of yourself in any appropriate costume to Misc. c/o Lincoln Arts Center, 66 Bell St., Seattle. All ages and races welcome; bonus points will be awarded for the best floral headband.
