MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.

AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.

JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.

YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?

SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).

WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.

UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.

UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.

SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?

WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.

Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.

SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:

• “Country music women nude”
• “Shaping breasts”
• “Essays on rap music”
• “woman size evening gown”
• “showering women”
• “loner loser `no friends'”
• “large breast”
• “large breasts”
• “my breasts grew”
• “nude gymnastics”
• “half naked comic book”
• “`thrown into’ near tub”
• “building on the moon”
• “cartoon squirrels picture”
• “Croatian Curses”
• “pretty preteen”
• “essays drinking”
• “mideval europe”
• “world images”
• “fun neon signs”
• “hetero handjob”
• “boggle”
• “women playing volleyball”
• “pageant and topless”
• “describing my dad”
• “Dr. Dreadful”
• “elliot gould naked”
• “Football throwing machine”
• “PHAT BLACKS”
• “naked waterfalls”
• “naked women on bikes”
• “nude women in tanning bed”
• “Masturbation Techniques”
• “anton chekov”
• “leaning (sic) to play guitar”
• “applepig”
• “warez windows 98”
• “Mary Throwing Stones”
• “collage (sic) football bowls”
• “patio furniture safety”

(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)

(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)

BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”

Words Against Words

Original book feature, 12/7/98

THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:

The Conflict Between Word and Image

by Leonard Shlain

(Viking) $24.95

THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD

by Mitchell Stevens

(Oxford) $27.50

Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.

Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.

His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.

In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).

Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.

NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).

While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.

Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.

IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)

HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.

SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?

AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.

MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.

This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!

SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.

The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)

Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.

SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)

Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.

Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”

Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.

Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?

NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.

SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”

As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.

Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.

HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.

Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.

My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.

My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.

In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.

So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…

PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)

As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!

At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!

STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.

(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.

The Microsoft File

Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98

The Microsoft File:

The Secret Case Against Bill Gates

by Wendy Goldman Rohm

(Times Books/Random House) $25

Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop

by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett

(Simon & Schuster) $13.95

If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.

Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).

But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.

That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).

Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.

Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.

Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”

Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.

IN STORE: Borders Books held an Ally McBeal fan party and trivia competition on 8/20. Seeing this tribute to gushily pathetic “vulnerability” next to the diet and fashion books brought me a revelation: Ally isn’t a sex-object fantasy, it’s a target-marketing fantasy. An attempt at female-oriented counterprogramming opposite the male-targeted Monday Night Football and cable pro-wrestling shows, built around the most exploitive stereotypes from modern women’s-magazine articles. Of course, that’s just as antithetical to feminist precepts as any sex-object fantasy would be.

(The same store is now selling official “Windows 98 Roast” brand coffee. Sometimes it’s hard to keep my vow to never write a coffee joke in the column.)

LOOSENING UP: The week of the Clinton quasi-confession (an attempt to defuse the “family-values” demagogues’ attacks) was the same week Rupert Murdoch took over Pat Robertson’s Family Channel, turning it into Fox Family (a repository for former Fox Kids Network cartoons, plus such non-700 Club material as Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns and a Spice Girls special). The ol’ squeaky-cleanness just didn’t produce Murdoch’s desired profit rate. A potential omen to PaxNet, the UHF broadcast network to launch this week with a format even squeakier than Family used to have.

THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD: The Oldsmobile Sihlouette Premiere, a forthcoming minivan, will offer a built-in VCR and an LED video screen (out of the driver’s view). Besides wondering if the GM-installed machine will try to scramble any attempted viewing of Roger and Me, imagine the possibilities:

• Kids will have something new to argue with each other and parents about on long trips (“But we already saw Mulan on the way to Yakima. Can’t we watch something else please?”)
• Folks on long trips across monotonous scenery could watch travelogue videos and pretend they’re going someplace interesting.
• Seahawk fans could beat the home-TV blackouts by driving ’til they can receive the Portland stations.
• Commuter vanpools and airport-shuttle buses could offer your choice of sports highlights, porno, music videos, cartoons, stock reports, or (something some Vegas shuttle buses already provide) tourist-targeted commercials.

Some Amtrak trains, and some European intercity bus lines, already have ground-level “in-flight movies;” no reason Greyhound couldn’t do the same (or for that matter, the Green Tortoise would be the perfect venue for watching Half Baked!).

FILLING THE BILL: I’d fantasized about doing it for years, but now it’s been done: A Vancouver band has taken my all-time wannabe band name, the Special Guests. They never headline a gig, but they’ve opened for everybody! (Until this happened, I appeared to be the only person whose favorite wannabe band name wasn’t “Free Beer.”)

TAKING UP THE SLACK: I don’t read the Wall St. Journal every day, so it took an attentive reader to let me know I’d missed its 8/6/98 front-page story on the last of the slackers congregating in Seattle, where supposedly “Good Times Are Bad” for goateed Caucasians wishing to identify themselves as victims of a no-future society.

Writer Christina Duff took a rather snide attitude toward young-adult males who dared refuse to join in the WSJ-proclaimed great boom economy: “Their ranks thinning everywhere, many aging slackers are congregating in Seattle, as if circling the grunge wagons…. The slackers’ last refuge here is the Capitol Hill area, where tattooed 20-somethings walk the streets giving hugs and high-fives…. Faced with the depressing news that things aren’t as depressing anymore, some are shamed into shedding their angst.”

Of particular scorn was one D.J. Thompson, belittled for choosing to only work part-time pouring coffee while his girlfriend pursued a Real Career.

Duff’s kinder to “ex-slacker Joanne Hernon,” now “a computer consultant for law firms” with unkind words for her former fellow Linda’s barflies: “They feel they need to be on the outskirts. Keep themselves in a poor position. Blame everyone but themselves. It’s easy to make money these days.”

Duff and Hernon don’t say how it’s easier for some (such as, admittedly, pale-skinned young-adult college grads) to make money than others; or how relative prosperity can more folks the option to choose not to devote their whole lives to material pursuits or the kissing of boss-butt. (Besides, Seattle’s currently up-‘n’-coming Boho-hood isn’t the maturing Capitol Hill but Georgetown.)

MISC. CAN’T BELIEVE nobody else (to our knowledge) has noted how the new logo for Safeco Insurance (and, hence, for Safeco Field) looks a lot like a rightward-slanting dollar sign…. Speaking of stadia, turns out the Kingdome can’t be imploded on New Year’s 2000 without canceling a Christian convention tentatively scheduled for that night. Darn.

(SUB)URBAN RENEWAL: With the opening of the 3rd Ave. Deli in the ex-Bon Tire Center on 3rd, downtown has its own mobile, curb-based readerboard sign with arrow-pattern chase lights. Strip-mall flavor in the heart of the city!

AFTERWORD: Crown Books is closing all its Washington stores, as part of a nationwide retrenchment. The book superstore chains’ chief victims aren’t the specialty independents, but the smaller general bookstores of both indie and chain ownership.The stores that discounted the bestsellers, prominently displayed the most heavily advertised books, and offered very little else.

BUT DO THEY COME IN LONG-SLEEVES?: Viagra
that male-potency pill endorsed by everybody from Bob Dole to Hugh Hefner, isn’t available yet in some countries, including India. That hasn’t stopped a Bangalore, India company from marketing Viagra-logo T-shirts with the slogan “What the World Wants Today.” A co-owner explained to Reuters, “Today, Viagra is not just a pill… it is a positive attitude bringing hope to people.”

JUST IN TIME FOR XMAS: Mattel’s debuting a Barbie-sized Erica Kane doll. Imagine all the wedding gowns you could get for it! Or maybe you could play where she grittingly grins while your Marlena Evans and Vicky Lord dolls show off their tiny Emmys.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: A couple months back
Misc. wrote about the possibilities (for good or ill) of a new American revolution. Seems the topic’s becoming popular; at least as a selling tool. Both Taco Bell and Dos Equis invoke bizarre takes on Poncho Villa to sell consumer consumables. A golf ball called the Maxfli Revolution advertises it’ll help you “Seize Power and Take Control.” Closer to home, the highly institutional-looking ARO.Space sez its initials stand for “Art and Revolution Organization” (its ads even say “Viva le Revolution!”). If this keeps up, Baffler editor Tom Frank will have enough “advertisers co-opting the language of dissent” rant topics to keep going for years.

PASSING THE TORCH: British Petroleum (which bought Standard Oil of Ohio in the ’80s) will buy Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana); so the former Mobil (nee Standard of New York), Exxon (nee Standard of New Jersey), and assorted other gas stations in Washington now bearing the BP brand will eventually change. (Alas, no more “Petrol for the lorry” lines, and no more jokes about where bees go to the bathroom.) But it’s not known yet whether they’ll assume Amoco’s torch logo or whether Tosco
the Connecticut-based company that bought BP’s Northwest operations in the mid-’90s and kept regional rights to the BP name, will instead change them to the 76 brand, which Tosco now owns outright. (After the print edition of this column went to press, Tosco announced it would keep the BP brand on its stations for the time being.) In other energy-related matters…

A BURNING ISSUE: It’s hard right now to think about heating equipment, unless it’s everybody’s favorite gas-powered industrial space heater. I speak, of course, of the mighty Reznor. When a rock singer using that surname showed up, some fans wondered whether he was related to the brand name bearing down from near the ceilings of stores, warehouses, artists’ studios, garages, nightclubs, etc. Turns out ol’ Trent is indeed a descendent of the company’s founder George Reznor (who entered the furnace trade in 1888, in the same central Penna. town where Trent grew up).

But the Reznor family’s had little to do in decades with the company, which has changed owners several times. Current owners gave 120 or so employees an “offer” last year: Take pay cuts of up to 28 percent, or else. The workers stood their ground. The owners shipped the jobs off to Mexico. Northeast politicians are now invoking the ex-Reznor workers as poster children for the injustices of NAFTA and the Global Economy.

So next time you hear Trent’s moans about frustration and helplessness amid a decaying industrial landscape, look up. If you see a Reznor heater above you, it’s a reminder that, for some, such feelings aren’t just an act.

AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)

I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:

• Appreciating different aromas, textures, and tastes. Discerning the difference between Ritz and Hi-Hos.
• Rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language.
• Intelligent discourse with persons of other subcultures.
• Hosting a successful party.
• Dancing (Lindy hop, Virginia reel, tap, lap).
• Holding your liquor; preventing or relieving hangovers.
• Personal health and hygeine; including brushing and flossing.
• Contraception and STD prevention.
• Chemistry; including different pharmaceuticals’ good/bad effects.
• Tanning without burning.
• Posture and bearing; preventing carpal-tunnel syndrome.
• At least one athletic or semi-athletic activity (downhill skiing, swimming, yoga, step aerobics, bowling, bicycling, Buns of Steel).
• One or more social games (poker, Scrabble, Twister, pinball, foosball, Quake,

  street hockey, et al.).

• Knowledge of the major professional sports (other than wrestling).
• Food preparation and storage; knowing how long to microwave a leftover pizza slice.
• Dining for pleasure, not merely for sustenance. Creating unusual food combinations (peanut butter on mashed potatoes).
• Discernment of fine yet reasonably-priced liquors and beers.
• Knowledge of agriculture, food technology, and the dangers of fad diets.
• Architecture and civic planning.
• Home building and repair.
• Interior design and/or Feng Shui.
• Gardening; mulching and composting.
• Acquaintance with U.S. and world literature, art, comics, film, theater, TV, and periodicals.
• Knowledge of the world’s assorted cultures, philosophies, and religions.
• Music theory and history; awareness of at least one country singer other than Patsy Cline.
• Awareness of the natural environment of your home and the larger world.
• Awareness of the history, politics and economics of your home and the larger world.
• Political action and organizing.
• Dealing with corporate and governmental bureaucracies.
• Judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the color of their lip gloss.
• Inquisitive skepticism toward public, political, and commercial speech.
• Holding your own amid hostile situations (i.e. workplaces, playgrounds). When to engage in verbal self-defense; when to keep your big flap shut.
• Value shopping; bargaining and haggling.
• Cordial relations with neighbors, relatives, and postal workers.
• Politely yet firmly declining the entreaties of proselytizers and telemarketers.
• Being nice to young children without letting them walk all over you.
• Caring for and feeding pets (biological or virtual).
• Getting along with housemates, lovers, cubicle mates, or bandmates without killing one another or even wanting to. Social negotiation and consensus-building (deciding which film to see or which pitcher to get at happy hour).
• Falling in love hard; falling out of love soft.
• Developing a healthy self-esteem, not an unhealthy egomania.
• Reinventing oneself every few years, a la Madonna or George Carlin.
• Personal discipline (getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop without biting).
• An area of knowledge associated with a different ethnicity or gender (for a man, Barbara Cartland novels; for an African American, butoh).
• Fashion design, selection, color-coordination, accessorizing, and repair.
• Sorting laundry.
• Programming a VCR and remote (not that hard, really!).
• Personal law (wills, contracts, income tax, warranties, et al.)
• Improving or repairing your credit.
• Packing a carry-on suitcase.
• Traversing your city via public transportation; reading a timetable.
• Solving crossword and jigsaw puzzles.
• Short-term weather forecasting.
• Ability on a musical instrument (including the voice).
• At least one of thevisual arts(painting, drawing, calligraphy, photography,

  cinematography, videography, Photoshop).

• Rudimentary computer usage.
• Desiging a website with no annoying “construction signs” or bad MIDI music.
• “Netiquette”: Writing e-mails to the point, but not too pointedly.
• Grammar and spelling; knowing the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
• Composing effective thank-you notes, resumes and cover letters, yearbook salutations, personal ads, and responses to threatened legal actions.
• Dressing and grooming for various occasions (seductions, funerals, job interviews, Halloween).
• Magic tricks and parlor games.
• A healthy sense of humor; jokes and anecdotes for all occasions.
• A repertoire of film, music, and TV trivia.
• How to tell different types of trees from a far distance. Number one–the larch….

———————–

Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person
Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM
Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM
From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.

Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…

I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Erinn Kauer / eakamouse

P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.

STORE #1: I love lists, so I love how the silly Random House/ Modern Library “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” list has inspired so many folks to attempt better (more ambitious, more diverse, funnier) lit-guides. One such effort’s being compiled at the Twice Sold Tales used-book chain. Get your recommendations (up to 20) to Twice Sold’s Broadway & John store by Sunday. They’ve gotta be originally written in English and originally published since 1900; any list including Richard Bach or Bridges of Madison County will be thrown out.

STORE #2: The huge new Safeway at 15th & John opened a week before the region’s long-dominant food chain (begun by Boise’s prominent Skaggs family; now owned by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; but never owned (despite the rumors) by the Mormon Church), lost its spot as America’s #1 food vendor to the merged Albertson’s and American Stores (both with Skaggs family members in their origins). The new Safeway outlet easily matches the new Broadway QFC (now owned by Fred Meyer, which was formerly owned by KKR) in size, opulence, and ready-to-eat goodies.

Why has supermarket square footage on the hill more than doubled in the past ten years (including Central Co-op’s big new branch soon coming to 16th & Madison), when its population’s increased by much less? There’s relatively fewer kids in the area, for one thing (big folks eat more; big folks without dependents can often spend more). Big stores bring more customers past the lucrative side departments (pharmacy, video, photo, floral). And, as we mentioned when the new QFC opened, supermarkets are trying to take back business from restaurants with delis, salad bars, and convenience foods.

There’s also a semi-intentional side effect: Monstrous stores, with wide aisles and gargantuan shopping carts, bring back some of the wonder that grocery-shopping trips meant when you were a kid, mesmerized by the bounty of goodies and the old Safeway yin/yang-esque logo. Just don’t do wheelies with the carts, OK?

STORE #3, OR JUST WHAT’S A BRASS PLUM, ANYWAY?: To me, the new Nordstrom store’s opening will be the final true end of Frederick & Nelson; I’ve been able to half-pretend the grande dame of Seattle retailing was still around, I just hadn’t shopped in it for six years. It’s also (as of yesterday) the end for the old downtown Nordstrom. I’ll miss that awkward amalgam of three buildings, with the front-and-back-doored elevators, the unpretentiously-pretentious all-lower-case signage, the cramped awkward floor spaces (which suited Nordy’s then-novel “collection of boutiques” concept better than any open-plan mall space could)–a place where, no matter what year’s fashions were on the hangers, the style year was always 1974.

The Stranger’s previously criticized Nordy’s sweetheart deals with the city over the new store, its parking garage, and its reopening of Pine. But let’s remember what else this company’s wrought, for good and/or ill. The downtown Nordy’s as we’ve known it opened when lots of downtown office towers were going up. Instead of the affluent-yet-careerless women F&N targeted, Nordy’s targeted office people (particularly women) who’d begun seeing themselves not as sedate corporate drones but energetic corporate warriors. (Not exactly a feminist ideologue’s vision of empowerment, but still a change.) It told the country our far corner indeed had a fashion sense (an early Forbes article mockingly called the store “Bloomie’s in the Boonies”)–and an entrepreneurial sense. Nordy’s helped perfect the workforce-as-cult model of employee relations now associated with the likes of Microsoft. Like its dressing-for-success clientele, its staffers were encouraged (or hounded or pressured) to give their all to the company and then some.

Even as its catalogs and its out-of-state stores spread an image of the Northwest as a land of carefree outdoor leisure, its practices instilled a vigorous (or obsessive or oppressive) work ethic now common at “growth oriented companies” here and elsewhere.

A piece on Microsoft’s Slate last year suggested companies like MS and Starbucks had to have copied N.Y. or L.A. styles of institutional aggression; such drive couldn’t possibly be indigenous to our countrified region. Nordy’s proved it could be and is.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Book feature for The Stranger, 8/20/98

THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT

by Aimee Bender

(Doubleday) $21.95

The 16 stories in Bender’s first fiction collection are dark yet never morbid, funny yet never goofy. They’re constantly going just off the side of your expectations, yet their own twisted worlds function perfectly. They have just the right details in just the right places.

Bender deconstructs the Everywoman motif common among so many contemporary female authors. Bender’s women do, by more or less their own free will, things other women may find selfish, inconsiderate, or just plain icky. These heroines and antiheroines aren’t virtuous victims or scheming sirens but more-or-less ordinary folks who get caught up in (or find themselves creating) extraordinary events. Even when these women do not-too-nice things, Bender lets us fully understand why they would.

Example: The long-suffering wife in “What You Left in the Ditch,” who remains steadfastly loyal to her soldier husband until he comes home without lips. Bender doesn’t excuse the woman’s superficiality or abandonment of her beloved in his hour of need, but she lets us see how the character had been dependent upon an idealized fantasy of her faraway man, a fantasy ultimately severed from the scarred, real husband.

Another example: The mild-mannered librarian in “Quiet Please,” who learns her estranged (and possibly abusive) father has died, and who spends the rest of the day soliticing sexual favors from every adult male on the library premises–not to fulfill any of their (or her) lusts, but to engage in the act of life as atonement for the belief she’d psycically caused dad’s death by having wished him dead for years. A male reader might first imagine the thrill of encountering such a woman. A female reader might first feel mildly appalled at her actions. But by the end of Bender’s tightly-written, well-paced little tale, all readers will likely feel a tinge of pity, perhaps mixed with a sort of admiration for a character who does what she must to righten herself.

MISC. STILL REMEMBERS overhearing two men at a 1991 party recommending the most profitable way to sell a Seattle house–advertise it only in the LA Times. Such subterfuge is probably no longer necessary; now most Angelenos can’t afford a house here either.

UPDATES: The cool-stuff store Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony will soon have a new home near 2nd and Stewart, escaping death-by-redevelopment at its old site…. The 66 Bell art studios will probably get redeveloped, despite a ruling that the building’s outside’s a city landmark. Negotiations to keep at least some of the artists’ spaces continue…. US West’s high-speed home Internet service, using ADSL technology, has been delayed by state regulators who want the phone co. to become more accepting toward local-service competition.

IN CLUBLAND: The Lava Lounge has a doorman whose name really is Carlton. If you get the coincidence, you’re probably old enough for him to let you in. (But bring picture ID anyway.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Glyph (“Monthly Tales of Highbrow Pulp”) is a well-put-together comix tabloid from Labor of Love Studios, described by editor Sarah Byam as “a sweat equity cooperative for working artists and writers.” The tab format’s perfect for elaborate layouts and visual storytelling, exemplified in the first issue by Byam and artist Ted Naifeh’s “Past Hope” (an ambitious, ironic four-page parable about “The woman who could not love and the man who loved too much”). (Free plus postage from 117 E. Louisa, #253, Seattle 98102.)

LI’L FOLKS: Seems everybody in the Seattle creative community’s getting preggers or getting somebody preggers these days. Some of the lucky mommies and daddies include: Our own art-crit Eric Fredericksen, arts-promotion vets Tracey Rowland and Larry Reid, Gourmondo Cafe co-proprietess Jennifer Clancy with antiquarian-book and punk-record collector Jeff Long, videomaker Debra Geissel, comedian/ singer Kathy Sorbo, and gallery owner Linda Cannon (she’ll close her exhibition space to concentrate on mommyhood, though she’ll still sell some art privately). Call it a massive coincidence; call it a release of long-suppressed maternal/ paternal urges at a time of relative prosperity. Just please don’t call it “something in the water.”

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: Small bookstores might be a threatened species amid big-chain consolidations, but one that’s thankfully not going away any time soon is the U.S. Government Printing Office bookstore on the ground floor of the Federal Building (900 1st Ave.). It’s small, but chock full o’ stuff you can’t get anywhere else–Posters of old Air Force planes! Colorful field guides to the national parks! Statistical abstracts of the nation’s consumer-buying habits! NASA fact guides! A gazillion volumes of tax codes! Research studies on teen alcoholism! Helpful guidebooks with names like Whistleblower Appeals, World Class Courtesy, Aviation Weather, Building a Nation of Learners, A Safe Trip Abroad, and Your Guide to Women’s Health! And (even cooler) you get to go thru a metal detector on your way in! Kids’-book advocates always say reading’s like an adventure trip; but this is the only bookstore that’s like getting on an airliner.

FREAK OUT: A second book about the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is coming out, and this one’s unauthorized. Circus of the Scars, from the married team of writer Jan Gregor and illustrator Ashleigh “Triangle Slash” Talbot, promises to be a lavish hardcover account of the troupe’s early years (much of it from the viewpoint of ex-member Tim “Torture King” Cridland). For now, it’s being sold only by mail-order (via Brennan Dalsgard Publishers, Box 85781, Seattle 98145) and online (at www.circusofthescars.com). I haven’t seen the volume yet, but its creators hint Rose might not like its portrayal of him. What–like he gives a darn about his reputation (except to make sure it’s a nasty one)? I could only imagine one way you could really damage Rose’s public image: Claim he’s a mild-mannered teetotaler who plays a gentlemanly golf game, never cusses offstage, cried during multiple viewings of Titanic, and loves nothing better than to mellow out to the soothing sounds of the Smooth Jazz station.