MISC. WAS BAFFLED by a notice on the Internet search site Yahoo! promising a link to a British nudist camp for transvestites. How can you be undressed and cross-dressed at the same time? Did the queens just wear wigs, and high heels? But on reading the “Garden of Eden” site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/R_Brett3/), the explanation was simple. By summer it’s a normal nonerotic family nudist camp. (As the site says, “Our club is widely recognised as being the in place to go for a fun time holiday.”) But during the miserable Welsh winter, it holds weekends for fully-cross-dressed closeted queens to express their lifestyles away from the general populace. You have three seconds to fantasize about Robert Morley types or the bluebloods from the movie Scandal sharing high tea in frilly lace things.

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a “No Food/Drink” sign outside a video arcade on University Way): “Thank You For Your Coordination.”

CATHODE CORNER: Wm. Bennett, the Bush Administration drone we’ve previously dissed for his dissing of trash TV, plans to turn his heavy-handed pieties into a cartoon show, Adventures from the World of Virtues. It’ll air on PBS, which Bennett had previously denounced as a waste of tax bucks. If I had kids I’d rather let ’em watch Melrose Place.

BACK INTO THE DRINK: Your fave bar or coffeehouse might soon stock the Canadian-made Jones Soda, the latest attempt at a Gen-X pop sold at microbeer prices (and distributed by microbeer jobbers). It’s got five fruity flavors, each with a different level of carbonation, dressed in as many as 56 different label photos including a pierced navel, a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a skateboard, barstools, an OPEN sign, a black fedora, and a Corvette logo. If you ignore the desperate-to-be-hip marketing the pop itself’s not bad, especially the cherry flavor.

DEAD AIR REDUX?: I do have nice things to say about the Weekly sometimes. F’rinstance, their Mike Romano got KUOW/KCMU boss Wayne Roth to quasi-confirm a rumor I’d published a couple months back, that Roth was considering killing KCMU and using the frequency for a classical format aimed at the affluent audiences corporate sponsors (oops, “underwriters”) love. (Roth’s office issued a statement claiming his Weekly statement only expressed speculation, not a firm policy decision.) There’s nothing wrong with KCMU’s programming or finances that can’t be traced to Roth’s mistaken belief that the station is, or should be, his personal bureaucratic turf. Public broadcasting, when it’s really public, isn’t a private business and shouldn’t be run as one. It’s a trust between a dedicated programming team and a closely-involved community of listeners.

CLUB ME: F’r another instance, a Weekly brief last month casually revealed the mysterious “Erik Shirley” lurking behind the scenes at Moe’s was the son of Jon Shirley, prominent ex-Microsoft/ Radio Shack exec, who in turn has a bit of investment in the joint. I can’t imagine a Radio Shack vet caring about music, ‘cept those cool ol’ stereo-separation LPs. Besides, if Moe’s was led by somebody who knew tech, they wouldn’t have entrusted their first live Internet concert (with the Presidents on 12/31) to Spry/CompuServe and Xing StreamWorks, the outfits behind the Paramount’s Cyberian Rhapsody fiasco.

MISC.’S TOP 7: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, dir. Nelson Periera dos Santos (New Yorker Video), the greatest all-nude Amazon cannibalism comedy ever made… The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, dir. Dave Borthwick (Manga Entertainment Video)… Safeway coupon books… Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford (Faber & Faber)… The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, Jeff Kisseloff (Viking)… Blue Raspberry Squeeze Pop, the candy that looks like a tube of Prell… Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (BBC/ Discovery Channel miniseries)…

MISC.’S BOTTOM 6: Watch This! (KING-TV)… AJ’s Time Travelers (KTZZ)… CompuServe’s Usenet censorship (one more reason to switch to an indie Internet provider)… Double-cross-platform software (stuff that’s promoted as running on different operating systems but really only works on Windows)…The NBA’s attempt to shut unofficial fan websites… Betting on the Bud Bowl (it’s pre-scripted! You could be betting with the film editor’s cousin).

THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.

E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.

E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”

INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)

KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”

(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source.

(2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully.

(3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians.

(4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego.

(5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.

AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).

THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.

KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.

ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).

And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…

THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).

AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

I COULD SAY I now know what it was like to be a Cubs fan in ’84 or a Red Sox fan any year, but will instead just say: Damn fine ride. All possible kudos to the players, the coaches, and especially to Dave & Rick.

I’VE GOT IT: Here’s the way to make that maybe-finally-funded but yet-undesigned retractable-roof Son-of-Kingdome thang a better investment, and attract the last major-league sport we haven’t yet got: Make it the world’s first combination baseball-hockey arena! Just make the natural-turf baseball surface in a removable-tile format (that’s how they made instant natural-turf fields in some of the stadia for World Cup soccer last year). Then acquire some of those mobile bleachers like they use for Kingdome basketball. Then bring in whatever they use to make that temporary rink inside the Flag Pavilion at Xmas and stick it on top of the whatever floor’s left when the boxes of turf-tiles are trucked away for the winter. Even if we don’t get an NHL team (what with Seattle money investing in Vancouver’s team and Portland’s franchise try), truck-away turf would let the new ballpark be used as an off-season Kingdome annex for car and boat shows.

THE BROTHER ‘HOOD: Watched parts of the Million Man March on C-SPAN and CNN. The former’s unedited coverage was better, but CNN’s mix of speech segments, commercials and “analysis” brought up some of its own issues. The transitions between the sea of solemn Af-Am faces in the crowd and the pale yup models in the commercials was enough to bring home the message about America’s continuing class struggles.

CATHODE CORNER: You can now see Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the show with a guy and some robot puppets heckling bad sci-fi movies) even if you don’t live in a Viacom Cable neighborhood, thanks to KCPQ. The syndicated rerun version’s only an hour, so the movies are heavily truncated and/or split into two episodes. And so far they’re showing only films from the same repertoire of a couple dozen public domain 50’s badfilms that have circulated the cheapo-video circuit forever (probably due to trouble getting syndication rights to still-copyrighted B flicks). But at least there’s now something for Saturday stay-homes to watch at midnight that’s not the reeking undead corpse of SNL.

CONFIDENTIAL TO RYAN B.: Yes, I know Soma magazine’s a pathetic goop of “cliché generational angst” and “anti-marketing marketing.” But it’s no more so than any of those other 20-odd pretentious Frisco mags that claim to cover “The West Coast” but end up only writing about Frisco. At least the title’s appropriate, taken from a cutesy name for a “restored” ex-industrial district there but reminiscent of the mind-control drug in Brave New World. Speaking of printed effluent-for-the-affluent…

I KNOW I PROMISED to cease Weekly-bashing and stick to going after more worthy targets, but I couldn’t resist its sarcastic, classist ad depicting a glass-eyed, square-jawed, power-suited reactionary yuppie as its mythical average reader under the headline “One of the punk rock weirdos you’ll find in the Seattle Weekly/ EastsideWeek personals.”

MISC.’s TOP 6: I Should Coco, Supergrass (Capitol)… VCRs that mark recording/ playback progress in minutes and seconds, not “counter” numbers… The “Opportunities” ads in USA Today offering prepostrously unlikely franchise or multi-level-marketing schemes… Endust for Electronics (Johnson Wax)… The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine (Little, Brown & Co.)… The downscale, pulp-paper, ’60s-’70s men’s magazines sold at That’s Atomic on E. Olive (mags that relied less on sex than on faux-Spillane tuff-guy writing and garish graphics)…

MISC.’s BOTTOM 2: Internet service providers that go down for whole weekends, leaving users in acute Web Withdrawal… The slowness of America’s bookstore distribution system…

(Thanks to those who overcame the Sunday-night weather and Mariner Fever to attend my book release party and see four of the rockin’-est sets-O-tunes ever performed. The book itself (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) oughta be in more stores this week. As always, info’s on the Misc. World HQ website.)

Unabombs Away:

F.C.’s Dreams for Agrarian Authoritarianism

Manifesto review for the Stranger, 10/4/95

Industrial Society and its Future (a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto) was published as a supplement to the Washington Post and as a “virtual book” at the Time website. Because the daily Post is unavailable outside the Eastern Seaboard, this anti-technology tract is accessible to most readers only via computer. [NOTE: The uncopyrighted work has since been issued in an unauthorized paperback edition, available thru this link.]

Its author is known popularly as “the Unabomber,” but he (the FBI believes it’s a lone male) uses the unexplained pseudonym F.C.

While F.C. doesn’t cite ideological inspirations, he stands in a long line of anti-tech thinkers from William Blake to Gerry Mander. Many of these authors are slicker and more coherent than F.C., but that’s part of F.C.’s point. Early reviewers described F.C.’s writing as stilted and dry, detracting from his persuasiveness. I disagree. Any work of criticism carries the aesthetic of its ideal alternative. F.C.’s stodgy, authoritarian pronouncements express his wish for a stodgy, authoritarian future. His rambling arguments visualize his dream for a slower-paced world. His overgeneralizations about human nature reveal a utopia where most people would be treated as “masses,” placed in socially-useful labor.

F.C. believes “the industrial-technological system” is a social, psychological and environmental “disaster for the human race.” He believes people have become slaves to a system working for its own growth, not for human betterment; a system too complex and powerful to ever be “reformed;” a system which, unless overthrown, will eventually destroy the planet. Plenty of non-murderers have said things like that. In his way F.C. essentially says he’s tired of talk and wants action. He’s tired of college leftists because they just talk, and also because Marxist ideals of collective “progress” and planned economies would require the industrial state he wants to smash.

Most dystopians are utopians at heart, and most utopians seek a society in which people like themselves would rule or at least fit in better. While his prescriptions for the world are far more vague than his condemnations, F.C. clearly pines for a society guided not by the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace, nor by the impersonal demands of production and consumption, but by the force of muscle and will — presumably other people’s muscle and his will.

He doesn’t mention that modern experiment in a planned neo-agrarian society, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Here was a philosopher-activist who, like F.C., was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to bring about a more “natural” state; except his system couldn’t feed an industrial-age population base, and the industrialist Communists of Vietnam had a stronger army. In F.C.’s utopia, there wouldn’t be heavy machinery or internal-combustion engines (he fantasizes about “burning all technical books” so these things can’t be brought back), hence no armies capable of reversing his revolution. Cold Warriors used to rant about the Reds’ ability to “bomb us into the stone age.” F.C. would settle for bombing us into the Bronze Age.

SPACES IN THE HEART: While watching this year’s fifth annual Belltown Inside Out, a “community” festival originally sponsored by condo developers and now increasingly run by local Scientologists, an acquaintance told me the newly-widened 2nd Ave. sidewalks were an omen that the whole neighborhood was doomed to become “another Rodeo Drive.” Dunno ’bout that; the Nordstroms, who have de facto control of retail zoning in Seattle, are getting all the new costly stores situated next to them. Indeed, the movie megaplexes planned for the Pike/ Pine corridor (30 total screens) are helping end Belltown’s mini movie row. The King has closed for probably the last time. And now it’s been announced the ugly-outside-gorgeous-inside Cinerama will close when or before the mega-cinemas open. The Cinerama was the first Seattle movie house I went to (for the minor musical Song of Norway). Only the UA’s two screens remain, as discount houses… Similarly, a belated goodbye goes to Village Lanes, closed for redevelopment into an Office Depot just as bowling becomes the hip sport of the ’90s (many of your fave Seattle musical performers are also keglers). Speaking of things hip-n’-now…

BUZZ BIN TO BARGAIN BIN?: We’ve written recently about the continued flow of big money into the book biz, disproving the common notion that nobody reads anymore. Now there’s MTV Books, out to disprove the notion that no young’ns read anymore. It’s an imprint of MTV’s fellow Viacom unit Simon & Schuster, launching with such tie-in titles as The Real Real World and Aeon Flux: The Dossier.

Underlying all this is Viacom’s mistaken notion that there’s a generation out there that loves its MTV and will eat up anything bearing its name (in the trade mag Advertising Age, MTV claims to be sponsors’ gateway to “32.1 million impressionable young minds”). What there really is, as known to everyone except Viacom, is a generation that reluctantly turns to MTV for a few specialty shows and the flips to it when there’s nothing else on, but doesn’t think of it as anything more than a corporate-media compromise.

You could really see it if you were on America Online during the recent MTV Online promotion. The channel solicited comments from AOL users, some of which were retransmitted on a censor-delayed basis across the bottom of the MTV screen during select video segments. There was quite a bit of MTV bashing, in various degrees of maturity and intelligibility, in the messages posted on AOL that didn’t make the censor’s cut. What made the MTV cablewaves was generally limited to the likes of “Eddie Vedder Roolz.” Speaking of online revelations…

THEATRICS: Hope you’re not tired of Courtneymania ‘cuz it’s spreading to the theatrical world. Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), a one-woman play by Elyse Singer based on Love’s uncopyrighted Internet newsgroup messages, just ended a three-week run at NYC’s HERE performance space. Carolyn Baeumler gave what by all accounts was a dead-on impersonation of Love, writhing about the stage while reciting online posts about everything from rock-star sexism to life with and after Cobain to a recollection of the first record she ever owned (Marlo Thomas’s ode to non-gender-specific child rearing, Free to Be You and Me). She’s accompanied by a lone guitarist, offstage voices playing her online correspondents, and slides and videos of her career and life trials. A positive review comes in the online zine Addicted to Noise from Carol Mariconda, Love’s personal volunteer liaison with the newsgroupalt.fan.courtney-love. Mariconda writes, “Courtney’s intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having experienced more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively short existence, is captured by Baeumler in a powerful portrayal.”

PLUGS OF THE SHAMELESS VARIETY: My huge book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, is now at the printer and should be in stores by the start of October. A release party’s tentatively set for Sun., Oct. 15; details to follow… Still looking for your favorite local grocery store, in the convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic categories. Details on theMisc. website.

MISC. WANTS TO THANK all the attentive readers who wrote, emailed or faxed in to confirm the flyer I wrote about warning Yellowstone visitors against head-butting buffalo is real. One reader even claimed “I’m still alive today thanks to that advice;” another said park employees maintain a tote board every tourist season saying something like “Buffalo 6, Humans 0.”

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (from the front page of Murdoch’s notorious London tabloid News of the World): “My Sex And Smoked Salmon Romp.” Ahh, the two great tastes that taste great together…

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE AT ITS FINEST: Pee-On-It is a urinal sanitizer-deodorizer by the Ohio-based Anthem Inc., with one of seven pictures on it: A guy holding an umbrella with the caption “And you thought you were having a rough day,” a woman with her mouth open, another woman laughing “What’s That, A Joke?”, a bull’s eye with the caption “If You Don’t Have Length Try For Aim,” a guy getting a “shower,” another guy holding his nose and ranting “You Drank THAT?,” and an opened beer can with the caption “Ecology project: Recycle Your Beer Here.”

META-FICTIONS: Seems that not only is there already a real Gramercy Books, the fictional Gramercy Press of the MCI ads will put out a sort-of real book, Apocalypse of the Heart. Romance queen Barbara Cartland’s allegedly been contracted to pen the tome, to be issued under the pen name of “Marcus Belfry,” a fictional writer in the commercials. Speaking of the word. It’s not the first time a “fictional character” has written a book. Many early Brit novels were written in the first person and presumed by some readers to be true stories. The Ellery Queen mysteries listed the hero as author, tho’ they were written in the third person. Then there’s Venus on the Half Shell, a sci-fi spoof attributed to one Kilgore Trout, a hack-writer character in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. (To this day most folks don’t know Vonnegut didn’t write Venus; real-life sci-fi hack Philip Jose Farmer did.) Speaking of the word…

MANLY READING: It’s common in semiotics texts these days to ascribe homoerotic meanings to the archtypal adult-male heroes of boys’ adventure fiction, from the old Pee-wee’s Playhouse gang to today’s Batman Forever cast. What these texts haven’t mentioned as far as I’ve seen is how all those PR campaigns to sell “Books” to kids as one generic commodity always trot out past generations’ boy-adventure heroes (pirates, knights in armor, your basic Pagemaster cast). I’m sure something could be done with that, maybe something scandalous about how Barbara Bush and the American Library Assn. are propagating homoerotica to children. Speaking of the word…

SEGREGATED SENTENCES: The Times quoted an 1853 Old Farmer’s Almanac homily as warning householders to keep books by male and female authors (unless married to one antoher) stocked on separate shelves. Finally: An explanation for the fiction racks at Left Bank Books. Still speaking of the word…

VOLUME SELLING: The arrival of one of them huge Barnes & Noble book emporia at U-Village points out the perception/reality thang re: the alleged non-popularity of the written word in PoMo America. If nobody were buying these paper artifacts, huge corps. wouldn’t be spending proudly to install great print palaces (and potentially drive the li’l folks outta the biz). Still speaking of the word…

IT’S ONLY WORDS: Thanks to your diligence in reply to our recent solicitations, we have a veritable bevy of non-“surfing” words for Internet use: gigging, looking around, skimming, roamin’, ramblin,’ and my favorite of the week, that ol’ Situationist Internationale term “dérive.” I’ll try using some of these in sentences over the next few weeks, to see how they work.

NOW I HAVE ANOTHER FAVOR to ask of you, to enter your suggestion in our drive to find the best grocery stores in Seattle. Base your nominations on atmosphere, attitude, cool products, and price, and place them under one or more of these categories: convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic. Mail them here to the paper or leave them at the Misc. website.

Pike St. Cinema Says Adieu:

The Last Rewind

Essay for the Stranger, 8/9/95

Adventurous filmgoers have another month or so to visit the Pike Street Cinema, Seattle’s smallest and most curious film space. In mid-September Pike Street proprietor Dennis Nyback will take his projectors, his old-time movie posters and memorabilia, and his 2,000-reel collection of film oddities to New York, where he’s certain he’ll be better appreciated. The closure marks the end of three and a half years of what Nyback boasts of as “unfunded, unadvertised, and unrepentant” exhibition.

The origins of the Pike Street actually go back to mid-1988, when Nick Vroman and Geof Spencer began the Belltown Film Festival in the Jewel Box Theater of the Rendezvous Restaurant. Vroman and Spencer rented the grand old space on Second Avenue, originally a screening room used by major film distributors, to show the kinds of movies they liked and couldn’t see anywhere else — things like obscure foreign dramas, prewar German dada shorts, and ’80s New York underground films. Despite the special-event implications of the “Festival” name, they had the space one night a week on an ongoing basis. When they began to run short of available, affordable films in their favorite genres, they opened up the Belltown Film Festival to local filmmakers, show-and-tell nights, and other concepts.

To fill other schedule holes, and to help prop up the operations side of their venture, they turned to Nyback, who’d run the Rose Bud Movie Palace in Pioneer Square from 1979 to 1981. Nyback had developed a part-time business as a mail-order dealer in old movie reels and mystery novels, supplemented by various day jobs (including at least one stint as a porno-theater projectionist). Nyback not only owned his own collection of rare prints, he corresponded with similar collectors around the country who had their own peculiarities. He also owned his own 16mm and 35mm projectors, and knew enough amateur carpentry to rebuild the Rendezvous projection room into a workable facility.

In 1989-90, Nyback gradually took more responsibility over the Belltown Film Festival. By early 1991 he was running it by himself. The festival’s programming evolved away from French and Japanese features toward programming built around Nyback’s collection — prewar jazz shorts, cartoons, and comedies; ’50s and ’60s TV commercials and movie trailers; educational and industrial shorts; ’60s music shorts originally made for Scopitone film jukeboxes; and pre-1970 stag films.

Nyback, who admits to preferring total control over his ventures instead of partnerships, broke with the Rendezvous’s owners in September 1991. He held screenings at a couple of other Belltown spaces that fall. Then at the start of 1992 he leased a storefront on the ground floor of a somewhat notorious transients’ apartment building at Pike and Boren, an area of Capitol Hill only now starting to get “upscaled.” He put his book operation, Spade and Archer (named for the Maltese Falcon detective agency) in the front room, separated by a sliding bookcase from the 50-seat screening room in back. For $600 and donated materials he created a funky yet elegant space, complete with old-time theater seats and curtains.

In retropsect, it might not have been the best possible site. People often got lost confusing address, 1108 Pike, with 1108 East Pike; either that or they confused the name “Pike Street Cinema” with the former Pike Place Cinema in the Pike Place Market. And in his first few months at the space, he didn’t even have a sign above his tiny storefront big enough to be seen by drivers heading up from downtown — just a small sandwich board outside and some posters in the window.

Additionally, Nyback had trouble drawing suburban baby boomers, many of whom told him they thought were afraid to venture into Seattle after dark: “People used to say, ‘Go to the Pike Street Cinema and get mugged.'” Nyback admits to the presence of lowlife types in the apartments above the theater and in the tavern next door, but insists none of his audience members were ever hassled by them.

But the space was cheap enough that Nyback broke even for three and a half years on an average attendance of 125 people per week.

Some of the Pike Street’s better attended programs have included a Charles Bukowski bioflick, a show of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, the underground farces of San Francisco director George Kuchar, a package of ’70s Mormon Church instructional films, a festival of old softcore sex films curated by Something Weird Video, the Seattle-made 1970 porno feature The Last Bath, Craig Baldwin’s recent Negativland profile Sonic Outlaws, and Bad Bugs Bunny (a collection of Warner Bros. cartoons no longer shown on TV due to racial caricatures).

Still, Nyback wasn’t earning a living wage from the theater. It didn’t help that “I didn’t charge enough to the people who rented out the space on off nights” for other film programs and cabaret parties. He also couldn’t afford paid advertising and didn’t want it if he could afford it, preferring low-key promotion through flyers and posters.

Yet Nyback isn’t worried about his chances in the New York entertainment scene, a scene even more reliant on high-profile promotion than Seattle’s. “New York just seems like more of a real city, where there’s word-of-mouth, where people my age (he’s in his early 40s) still go out at night.” He’s got friends back east scouting for potential sites, and hopes to be back in business before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Seattle experimental filmmaker Jon Behrens hopes to open a new screening room elsewhere in town with a similar schedule. In the past, Behrens has screened his films at the Pike Street and at 911 Media Arts (including a program held on July 29). But he says he wants to break away from what he perceives as an increasingly institutionalized atmosphere at 911, and to keep the anything-goes indie spirit of the Pike Street Cinema alive in Seattle.

Return with us now to Misc., the pop-cult column that found the cutest li’l picture book of classic poems about animals down at the Borders Books sale shelf, put out by an obscure Random House subsidiary really called Gramercy Books. Wonder what long-distance company they use?

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK: I’m fully supportive of the Gothic Singles Network, a new for-profit enterprise aiming to bring pale-skinned types together for mutual moping and potential groping. I just don’t wanna be around when they exchange rings…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Trolli Swamp Stuff is a sour-hot lollipop imported from Spain, packed in a plastic wrapper combined with a modicum of “Sour Quicksand Powder.” Nasty, just the way I like it.

PUNTERS: The Seahawks, after way-losing seasons and declining attendance, want govt. subsidies, mostly for Kingdome improvements where we’d pay the costs and the team would get the profits, or they’ll threaten to move like the Mariners. It’s not just a jock thing, it has ramifications for public policy:

• (1) The GOP Sleaze Machine’s drive to move public assistance, environmental control and other operations to state and county levels is designed to increase this kind of socialism-for-business groveling, as localities compete to have the most “pro-business climate” by slashing social services and beefing up corporate giveaways.
• (2) This will, natch, result in a lower quality of life, a lower standard of living, and further demands that government spending be “unwasteful.” More public building projects will be designed with initial cheapness in mind, just like the Kingdome — or like the Municipal, Public Safety and City Light buildings, our own postwar-vintage Einstruzende Neubauten. Now there’s a move afoot to move those and other city offices into an underoccupied, bankrupt office tower, the same bldg. the Times did an extensive “Making Of” feature series about while it was being developed under the auspices of original Seahawks partner Herman Sarkowsky.

X MARK(ET)S THE SPOT: There’s an Internet newsgroup called alt.society.generation-x. Someone named Jody put up a message, claiming to be flying off to speak at some marketing convention in Amsterdam about “ads that target Generation X” and wanting newsgroup readers to report their favorite spots. As you’d imagine, it led to several indignant replies (“I am not a target market!”).

But it also generated several more lighthearted responses. One went, “How about the one that asks if you were thinking about your cat’s urinary tract health? How did they guess? They must be psychic.”

Or how about: “My favorite is the son on the phone with his mom (for Unisom) and right before he says, ‘I love you too,’ in a cranky voice he says, ‘Mom? Am I going to tell you to take something that isn’t safe?’ in the most patronizing voice. I want his mom to reach through the phone and smack him.”

Another wrote, “Definitely the Australian car wax dood. That infomercial got to me. I even went around dousing people’s car hoods with lighter fuel and setting it ablaze. I should be off probation in a year or so.”

And finally, “I like the audience-reaction ones for movies. Especially the one for Die Hard with a Vengeance where they have one group of chiyx saying ‘Yipee’ and then a group of middle-aged people saying ‘kai’ and then a group of token ethnic people saying ‘yay’ and then a group of precious grade schoolers saying ‘motherfucker!'”

As for me, the ads that attract my attention (though not my wallet) include:

• (1) Products endorsed by fictional, trademarked motion picture characters (if you can’t trust a guy in Batvinyl or the Pink Ranger, who can you trust?);
• (2) Products endorsed with “classic rock” (when the Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn” was used to advertise Time, I almost forgot the song was partly written to protest a war Time supported);
• (3) Incessant, aggressive hype, especially if tied into exploitations of snowboarding culture; and
• (4) Hip-hop dress, slang or style used by retailers who won’t open a store anywhere near an inner city.

WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Foison”

My apologies to all those who sent letters, e-mails and voice-mails to me about the anti-homophobia initiative. Haven’t had the time to personally tell each of you “you got the wrong Humphrey.” I support my non-relative Steve’s work, but he deserves the credit for it (or the hate mail, or the rabid calls from clueless reporters).

SHOW STOPPERS: My real brother’s in Alaska this summer, at his regular seasonal job driving tour buses. He gets to be the target of tourists’ disillusionment when they discover the truth about Alaska (and Alaskans), that the joint’s a lot more rugged and surly and a lot less “nice” and “wacky” than that mildly quirky fantasy Alaska on Northern Exposure.

While he’s in the real Alaska, I finally visited the heart of the show’s fake Alaska, for the for-profit auction of the Northern Exposureprops and costumes. Hadn’t been to the set before, but did go to another building in the office park where it was once for a job interview. The show was essentially a boomer fantasy about a “return to community,” yet its operations base was in the most sterile, life-denying corner of suburban purgatory — exactly the kind of soulless modern environment the show offered an alternative to. Once you got past the gate and the parking lot and inside the huge plain white building, it looked much more inviting inside.

The soundstages took up three large rooms of a humanely dank warehouse area, with carpet samples tacked onto the walls for soundproofing (making it look like the world’s largest band practice space). The sets had mostly been dismantled before the auction preview, except for a couple of big view-outside-the-window backdrop murals. Floor plans posted at the fire exits showed where the permanent sets had been (the doctor’s office, the restaurant, the town hall, etc.). The stages took up about 25,000 square feet, with more than that used by set-construction shops and storage in adjoining areas.

I only went to the preview; I could tell I couldn’t afford a winning bid on any auctioned items I might potentially want, ‘cuz the preview was full of well-to-do couples making notes about props from their favorite episodes (“Look dear, it’s the plastic gloves from when the bubble boy went outside”). Still, I wouldn’t have minded owning a moose-head desk lamp, a flight jacket worn by the retired-astronaut character, or a matched set of log-dugout furniture. (Most actual filmmaking equipment wasn’t included in the auction.)

AUGMENTATIONS: Some music CDs are beginning to be released with CD-ROM material stuck in at the end: A lo-res version of a music video, say, or an interview with the singer. Imagine the further possibilities: Dylan box sets with extra tracks of “scholars” claiming to have literal interpretations of every lyric. Heck, I’d rent a laserdisc version of a Madonna video collection if it had a Second Audio Program with a round-table troup of semiotics profs explaining every image to death.

NOMENCLATURE DEPT.: Still looking for a new term for Internet/World Wide Web usage that isn’t “surfing.” Recent suggestions include “crawling” (there’s already a WWW search site, WebCrawler, originally developed at the UW but now owned by America Online), “cavorting,” and “gallivanting.” More to come, I’m sure.

THE FINE PRINT (from a Rocket concert ad for Live and Collective Soul): “MCA Concerts is not responsible for, and has no control over, the contents of advertised performances.”

UNHINGED AND ONLINE: The Misc. web site is now up. Those of you with computers (or who can get onto the computers at the Speakeasy Cafe (2nd & Bell), the Internet Cafe (15th Ave. E. next to the Canterbury) or the downtown library) will be able to read every Misc. written in the past nine years, as well as a few samples of my fiction and essays, a preview of my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story (still not out yet and I don’t know when it will be), and my X-Words (you do know this paper has a crossword and I make it, right?).

A happy post-7/4 greeting to all Misc. readers who, thanks to draconian govt. crackdowns against even “Safe and Sane” home fireworks, still have all their fingers. You can use those fingers of yours to pick up free postcards from the racks popping up at “hip” spots around town. The cards themselves are impeccably natty-looking, but they turn out to really be flyers inexplicably advertising L.A. hair salons. Speaking of snazzy graphics…

DESIGN FOR LEAVING: Graphic design magazines have been abuzz recently about attempts to form a “professional” association that would “accreditate” graphic designers like architects and somehow keep non-members out of top-paying markets. Besides being a monopolistic restraint-of-trade move, it’s not needed. Architects need to be accredited; a badly-designed building can fall down and hurt people. A badly-designed magazine ad can do no worse than waste its client’s money. Speaking of corporate centralization…

MY BONNIE: In today’s corporate climate, even success can lead to trouble. Case in point: the Bon Marché, the dept. store of the masses (old, anti-upscale slogan: “Where All Seattle Shops”). In 1929 it was a founding member of Allied Stores, a combine of local stores whose owners banded together for financial reasons. In the recent years of merger madness, Allied became part of Federated Dept. Stores, which did what merged companies often do: it shed pieces of itself (including the Seattle I. Magnin) and consolidated what was left into new operating groups. In the process it’s retired such classic store names as Magnin and Abraham & Strauss. Now the Tacoma News Tribune sez upper Federated management wants to replace the Bon name with another of its acquired brands, Macy’s West. Bon managers in Seattle were quick to deny the report. The L.A.-based May Co. has owned Portland’s Meier & Frank for years, but has wisely kept the M&F name. Let’s hope Federated knows enough to keep the Bon Marché appellation, derived from Paris’s original 1-stop-shopping palace of the late 19th century. Otherwise, the parent co. would surely qualify for the modern colloquial French interpretation of the phrase “bon marché” (look it up). Speaking of chain-store shenanigans…

ANOTHER DRUG WAR: The local pharmacy biz has also been consolidating, with chain operations rising and independents falling. The one constant has been regional management at most of the chains: Bartell has remained locally-owned, and the Oregon-based Pay Less absorbed the formerly Seattle-owned Pay n’ Save. That’s changing. Walgreen, the Illinois-based giant, is about to invade Seattle in a big way. Work has begun on locations in Greenwood and the Central Area; the chain’s reportedly applied with the state pharmacy board to open as many as 60 sites. Some of the new Walgreen stores reportedly will even have that onetime drugstore staple, the lunch counter (Walgreen claims to have invented the milk shake, at a Chicago luncheonette in the ’20s). Speaking of refreshments…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Hero lemon soda (available at the Hillcrest deli-mart on Cap. Hill) is a tasty tarty carbonated substance with a friendly yellow color and a cute, space-saving eight-and-a-half-ounce can. Even better, it comes from that new global junk-food mecca, Breda, Holland (hometown of that ultimate postmodern cultural icon Mentos, The Freshmaker!). Speaking of PoMo icons…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: If you enjoy Steve Shaviro’s occasional appearances in these pages, you’ll enjoy Doom Patrols, his collection of essays (he calls them “theoretical fictions” for no readily apparent reason) on PoMo heroes and heroines ranging from Kathy Acker to Bill Gates and, yes, ex-Doom Patrol comic book writer Grant Morrison. It’s even got the Dean Martin essay he first published here. Doom Patrols isn’t yet available on paper, but the entire text can be downloaded from the Web at <<http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html>>. Speaking of the Web…

UPDATE: I’m still looking for a term for Internet/World Wide Web use that isn’t “surfing.” Suggestions so far include “trolling” (found out it has a Net meaning already, a derogatory one), “waltzing,” “meandering,” “strolling,” “courting” (my favorite so far) and even “geoducking” (please!). Got anything better? Lemme know.

A non-foolish April greeting from Misc., the column that wishes it’d coined the slogan of the Mpls. zine Cake: “Copyright Infringement Is Your Best Entertainment Value.”

THE LOWRY FIASCO might not have caused our Gov. to reconsider his past actions, but it still offers the rest of us a lesson: There’s not a line between excess chumminess and harassment, there’s a continuum. A politician, whose success depends on making and keeping friendships, oughta know enough to err on the safe end of that continuum. If Lowry really was the kind of “traditional politician” conservatives denounce him as, he’d have known this. In the end it doesn’t matter that Lowry probably wasn’t trying to get those staff women into bed when he nudged or slapped them or whatever. But he should know in the world of politics, persuasion is everything. And in the world of persuasion, perception is everything.

NOT FADE AWAY AND RADIATE: I’ve dissed Wired magazine in the past, but must draw praise toward a one-page plug in its April ish all about Ed Grothus. He’s a junk collector in Los Alamos, NM. His Los Alamos Sales Co. shop buys and sells leftover artifacts (computer stuff, office stuff, construction stuff, scientific equipment) from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and longtime recipient of Cold War spending waste. The piece doesn’t mention Ed’s son Tom, the Seattle writer-cartoonist who in the ’80s made a cute series of exquisitely droll mini-comics (Manzine, Errata, The Bermuda Love Triangle).

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Better Faster Be$t$ellers (http://www.digimark.net/mful/bselcurr.htm) is a weekly fanciful satire of commercial literature that purports to be “entirely the result of algorithmically compressing (or compacting together) the less dense, slower titles of the current Publishers Weekly bestseller list.” It’s doubtful, tho, that a random-recombination program could come up with such mirthful titles as “Men are From the Hot Zone, Women Are From the Surface of Common Sense,” “The Celestine Bedtime Stories,” “Time to Correct the Warrior Treatment” (“by Seinfeld with Fyodor Dostoevsky”), or “Makes Me Wanna Do Ten Highly-Effective Stupid Things to 7 Driven People.” The same home page also contains Most Fucked Up Person Alive Tells All, an anonymously written pseudo-autobiography written in a cut-up nonsense style similar to that of Mark Leyner.

OF OXFORDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS: While I’ve admittedly not been Evergreen State’s biggest rah-rah booster (the world’s a lot more diverse than the world they teach at Evergreen, the mythical world of the New England/Upper Midwest “progressive” utopia), the state House’s plan to slash its budget and ratchet up its tuition strikes as pure censorship. Some GOP legislators admit it, using the word “liberal” as an all-purpose purjorative to justify their McCarthyite vindictiveness against the school. But the smear campaign against Evergreen goes beyond demonizing people who look or act different. There’s something about the very notion of a school that encourages (or at least claims to encourage) “free thought” that strikes a nerve among some who want to build a sociocultural system of naked fear, greed and obedience.

MISC.’S TOP 9:

• Jet Dreams: Northwest Artists in the ’50s, Tacoma Art Museum: At last, a regional-art show in a mainstream museum without a single glass bowl in sight!
• Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The copycat shows might equal the original in silly dialogue, but just can’t beat the childlike wonder and excitement of Power Rangers’ borrowed Japanese costume footage (from the studio that made the Gameramovies).
• Pickapeppa, Jamaican pepper sauce
• Presidents of the United States of America (PopLlama)
• Green patio furniture
• Self-folding maps
• The Literary Companion to Sex, Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Random House)
• Alaskan Amber Ale
• Marie Callender’s frozen pasta entrees

MISC.’s BOTTOM 6:

• Using that Janis Joplin song in a real Mercedes ad
• Cheap boom boxes that eat tapes for lunch
• Store chains that say “We’re Here Seattle!” or show the downtown skyline in their ads, but only open stores in the far suburbs
• Turbo Charged Thunderbirds: Live-action space teens shouting would-be hip lingo while watching Supermarionation footage shot before they were born
• “Ice” versions of cheapo beers
• Disclosure: Hot interoffice sex in the software biz? Come on now.