MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.

ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?

INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…

WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.

They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”

Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…

SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.

At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.

So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.

Online Extras

This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.

Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.

The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.

In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.

The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”

Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.

Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.

Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)

A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.

Gates of Hell?

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/18/98

Barbarians Led By Bill Gates

by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller

Henry Holt ($23)

Most reviews of this book talk about how co-author Jennifer Edstrom’s mom is Microsoft’s long-serving PR boss, and how this less-than-flattering portrait of the software giant must be hurting familial relations. A better focus would be on its other co-author, ex-MS programmer Marlin Eller. Barbarians can be seen as the literary equivalent of modern-day Microsoft software. It’s fairly comprehensible, and more or less gets the job done; but it’s clunky in places, with extra features abruptly tacked onto old “legacy code.”

The introduction notes this was originally to have been a straightforward memoir of Eller’s 12 years in the Redmond salt mines. The authors don’t say why the book didn’t end up that way, but the publisher clearly wanted something more applicable to recent news surrounding the company–antitrust suits, allegations of monopolistic and coercive practices. So, Eller and Edstrom re-coded the product (revised the book) to meet the new specs. The shipping version (final draft) emphasizes Eller’s toils on projects directly relevant to current MS controversies, such as early versions of Windows. Chapters about Eller’s years on projects far from MS’s operating-systems heart, like handwriting-recognition software and pay-per-view TV boxes, now emphasize object lessons about MS’s hyper-aggressive culture, its less-than-polite leadership (including Mr. Bill, depicted as an asocial geek on the world’s biggest power trip), and its drive to engulf and devour competitive technologies. Especially technologies which just might maybe nibble a bite or two away at MS’s precious OS monopoly.

MS haters will find their opinions conveniently confirmed. MS loyalists might at least grudgingly appreciate sympathetic portrayals of code warriors striving to finish impossible tasks, within inconceivable deadlines, under unliveable stress, for often-substantial material rewards. In other words, it’s designed to appeal to the largest potential user base.

Other Bill boox:

• Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry–And Made Himself the Richest Man in America, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (1994)
• Hard Drive, by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (1993)
• Overdrive, James Wallace’s Hard Drive sequel focusing on the days of Windows 95 and the first Netscape showdown (1996)
• The Secret Diary of Bill Gates, by ‘Bill G.’ (a parody consisting of pseudonymous newsgroup messages; 1998)

UPDATE #1: KING’s given the former Compton Report time slot, at least for now, to a blase travelogue show (by the station’s Evening Magazine unit) full of blase trips to blase romantic getaways. And as for the same station’s Sunday-night syndicated version of Almost Live: The same inconsistent humor, the same slick production values, just none of the here-and-now factor that gives the original AL its heart. And, of course, no Kent jokes.

UPDATE #2: Operation Nightwatch, the coordinated admissions service for local homeless shelters, just moved from across from El Gaucho and the Pampas Club to the Millionair Club building a block away. The cause–natch–redevelopment at its old building.

BETTER SHOP AROUND: The Stranger’s already written about big changes threatened and/or rumored for the funky li’l Fremont shopping district. Some funk-lovers worry that inflated rents and new developments like the adjacent Adobe abode could cause the district’s quaint knick-knack shops and cafes to get replaced by bland upscale emporia. So far the only official move is GlamORama, a Fremont anchor for almost 20 years, being put up for sale. If Fremont does get too ritzy for some current occupants, where could the new Groovytown be? It’d have to be a place within the city limits, convenient to buses, where lo-rent, hi-coolness retail stores and public-market-like booths could be amassed within less-than-glossy surroundings. Pike Place should be preserved for the merchants there now, but the moribund Newmark Center nearby might be remodelable into a sort of urbane anti-mall. Other possibilities: Georgetown, the cheap-furniture district on 1st Ave. S., Rainier Valley, or an abandoned supermarket or discount store somewhere. Roosevelt Square (the ex-Sears on NE 65th) could’ve served the bill, but it’s being largely taken over by an out-of-state “healthy foods” chain. Speaking of shopping…

MALLED DOWN: Northgate management, admitting the “Mall That Started It All” (the first modern U.S. suburban shopping center, built in 1950) has looked a bit dowdy of late, announced expansion plans. The central corridor and the exteriors would be spiffed up, but more important (and more problematic, zoning-approval-wise) are the new buildings to be added in the vast parking moats and across the street. Here’s why: There’s a nationwide decline of sales in mall stores, in favor of freestanding “big box” chains. To see the near-future of suburban shopping, look at the vast industrial-park expanses surrounding Southcenter. Where warehouses had replaced farmland, now Target and Circuit City and Borders and PetSmart have replaced the warehouses. Malls are trying to fight back with everything from frequent-shopper incentive programs to new mini-boutiques like “Piercing Pagoda.” But the one thing that keeps folks from avoiding Southcenter’s interior is the food court, which feeds big-box-store customers as well as mallrats. As department stores have served as traffic-drawing anchors for malls, now malls themselves are repositioning themselves as anchors for big-box clusters.

Malls, for all the limitations caused by their restrictive management, remain the closest things to “gathering places” in a lot of sprawling suburbs and exurbs. If they continue to decline, will these communities become even less communitarian, even more isolated? Or will a revived fascination with urban living (as seen in “restored” downtowns and the upscaling of places like Fremont) lead suburbanites to crave more real gathering places of their own? (Already, some Lynnwood residents are talking about wishing to build a “downtown” in that stretch of sprawl that never really had one.)

PUTTING THE `SIN’ INTO `INSINUATION’: Misc.’s truth-be-stranger desk notes how the Northwest’s biggest recent sex scandals now include one potential soap-stud moniker (Brock) and two potential porn-star names (Packwood and Moorehead). The former two were outspoken pro-feminist politicians who got accused of delivering unwanted gropes to several women. The latter’s an outspoken queer-hating preacher who’s been accused of molesting several men. It all just goes to show the seductive power of hypocrisy.

(These and similar matters may or may not be discusses at the fab 1998 Misc.-O-Rama, an evening of readings, music, games, and other pleasures; starting 8 p.m. Monday at Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave. No cover; 21+.)

MAKING THE SQUARE SQUARER: From approximately 1971 to 1991, the official live music genre of Seattle was white-boomer “blooze,” as played at Pioneer Square bars. The “blooze” bars of 1st Ave. S. play on today, virtually unchanged. Yet P-I writer Roberta Penn recently claimed Seattle didn’t have a blues club. She probably meant we lacked a club that treated blues as a serious art form, instead of formulaic macho “party” tuneage. It’s worth noting that the only national star to emerge from this scene, Robert Cray, split for Calif. as soon as he hit big (and bad-mouthed the Square bars promptly after he left).

Now, the forces of development want to rechristen the Square as luxury-condo territory. Some developers say they’d like to rid it of such elements as nightly noisemakers (even if they’re sport-utility-drivin’ caucasisn noisemakers). I wouldn’t personally miss the “blooze” bars (though there’s something quaint about standing outside the 1st & Yesler bus stop on a Sat. night, hearing three bands from three bars playing three cacophanous variations on the same theme). But I wouldn’t want the clubs to be forced out by demographic cleansing, especially since the area’s handful of prog-rock and electronic-dance clubs would likely get the boot at the same time, if not first.

PHASES OF THE MOON: With the warm weather’s come an odd masculine fashion statement: dorsal pseudo-cleavage. It involves wearing jeans with a belt, but hanked down to show the tall waistband of designer boxer shorts. I know it originally came from tuff-guy street wear, which in turn was based upon prison garb (oversize trousers with no belts allowed). But in this incarnation, it’s like a male version of that “sex-positive” women’s book Exhibitionism for the Shy. And in case you wondered why there weren’t “sex-positive” books for men?)…

VIAGRA-MANIA: After 10 to 20 years of the magazines and the TV talk shows defining sexual issues almost exclusively from a (demographically upscale) woman’s point of view, now Time and its ilk are scrambling to out-hype one another on the concept of masculine performance, as a problem now chemically solveable. It comes amid a new wave of skin-free men’s magazines like Maxim, trying to attract male readers without that pictorial element proven to attract men but to scare off advertisers. So instead, all the sex in these mags is verbal, not visual, and it’s often in the how-to format so familiar to women’s-mag followers.

Viagra-hoopla might also mean we’re finally over the late-’70s orthodox “feminism” in which the erection was depicted as the root of all evil. In the Viagra era, an erection is seen as something all men and 90 percent of women crave and wish would occur promptly, predictably, and on cue.

Then there’s a scary story in Business Week depicting that pillow-shaped erection pill as a harbinger of a new generation of prescription lifestyle drugs, for people who wouldn’t die without ’em but would just like to “feel better.” In 1990, when the Lifetime cable channel ran programs all Sunday “for physicians only” (complete with slick ads selling prescription drugs to doctors), there was a panel discussion show in which a doctor predicted everybody in America would be hooked on at least one prescription drug (including remedies for common conditions not at the time considered “problems”) by decade’s end. Looks like he might’ve been close to right.

Another question could be posed from the hype: Is the legal “feel-good” drug industry morally distinguishable from the illegal “feel-good” drug industry? In the past, I’ve dissed both those who seek all the answers to life thru pharmaceuticals and those who piously seek to punitively condemn such seekers. Both camps, I wrote, were on ego trips more potentially dangerous than any drug trip. But with ordinary citizens going more or less permanently on chemicals for little more or less than self-confidence, perhaps that dichotomy will transform into something different.

SORRY TO LET YA DOWN, but Misc. just couldn’t come up with a sufficiently good/bad pun to describe the announced Quaker State/ Pennzoil corporate merger. Not even one involving the phrase “lube job.”

THE MAILBAG (via Michael Miller): “Regarding your question about being televised during a future Seattle Olympics under the `quaint local customs department,’ the answer depends. If a film crew expects me to walk around in Doc Martens, drink Starbucks, wear flannel, drive a 4 x 4, and brainlessly idolize Bill Gates, Boeing, and that idiot Chihuly, then the answer is `blow me!’ However, if they are willing to film me coming home from work in my classic Mustang, changing clothes, playing with my dogs, sneaking over to my neighbor’s mailbox, `borrowing’ her Victoria’s Secret catalog, and then jerking my stuff before yelling `Hi mom!’ into the camera, then fine, film away.”

LOADS OF SUDS: Anheuser-Busch, ever on the prowl for ways to replenish flat or slightly-declining beer sales, is now test-marketing Catalina Blonde, the “first beer for women,” in select areas (not around here yet). It’s a lighter-than-Lite concoction–half the alcohol content of regular Bud; fewer calories than Bud Light. No word on whether it’ll be promoted with tightly-dressed Catalina Blonde Boys tossing out key chains at the Flower & Garden Show.

PILOT LIGHT EXTINGUISHED: We neglected to previously report on the early-April passing of Dewey Soriano, the tugboat pilot who took effective control of the Pacific Coast League in the mid-’60s, and was rewarded for his efforts by the baseball establishment by getting Seattle’s first MLB franchise, the 1969 Pilots. He held a name-the-team contest as a PR stunt, but had already chosen to name it after his own former (and future) profession piloting commercial boats; that’s why its logo had a nautical, rather than an aviation, theme. Of course, his thin pockets could only take one year of losses at the beloved yet creaky old AAA ballpark, and by April 1970 (the same season Boeing laid off half its staff) the Pilots were sold and became the Milwaukee Brewers (now threatening to move again). The City of Seattle sued the American League, and in the settlement got the Mariners franchise seven years later. While the local dailies’ obits praised Soriano for bringing the majors to Seattle, I still wished the Pilots had owners who could’ve kept the team alive until the Kingdome finally got done. And it was touching, in a way, to see the ’98 Mariners remember Soriano by serving up Pilots-quality relief pitching in the weeks immediately following his passing.

SODDEN: Damn! The webzine Salon already did what I wanted–to request your own phony Microsoft support letters. If you’re tuning in late, the LA Times revealed a scheme wherein MS’s hired PR firms would concoct a supposedly spontaneous gush of letters and newspaper opinion pieces–all begging state and federal governments to back off from their assorted antitrust actions against the software giant. Commentator Jim Hightower calls these sorts of fake-grassroots campaigns “AstroTurf politics.” MS denied the allegations, claiming the newspaper had merely uncovered documents of unapproved PR-campaign proposals. The paper stood by its story.

It does read like something with which MS could conceivably try to get away. Except the trickery would’ve been all-too-obvious if all these supposed ordinary civilians all spouted the same leap-O-faith line–that the company’s dominance wasn’t really the result of its relentless deal-wringing and strong-arm tactics, but simply of releasing “popular” products within an unfettered open marketplace. It’s the kind of complex reality-distortion construct that too easily collapses when you try to translate it from spin-doctor lingo into more “natural”-sounding prose.

That’s where Salon’s invite comes in. They’re asking for original, equally preposterous, leave-MS-alone arguments. (Their own example letter: “Since I upgraded to Windows 95, my pancreatic cancer has gone into remission, my daughter was accepted to law school, and I won $50 in the Lotto Quick Pick.”) Send your own to www.salonmagazine.com. Or send ’em to us at clark@speakeasy.org.

THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…

I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…

LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…

SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.

MISC. IS PLEASED AS PUNCH, well at least pleased as non-alcoholic punch, that US West’s directory-assistance service has adopted the classic information number 411. Now, even the most clueless white mall gangsta-wannabe will get it when hip-hoppers they rap about being “down with the 411 boyyieee.”

UPDATES: KCPQ now has the made-to-be-rerun-forever Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine after its 10 p.m. news weeknights, an improvement over the tired M*A*S*H repeats previously at that time…. King County will probably ask voters to approve a 2012 Seattle Olympics bid, if the idea gets that far. I still wanna learn what quaint “local color” TV segments you’d be willing to appear in should the games come here; send suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org clark@speakeasy.org.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: We’ll be kind and say the two new Joey Cora chocolate bars are for baseball-stuff collectors, not for candy lovers. Lovely label, though. ($2 at Safeway.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: With seemingly everybody today caught up in the mad dash for bux, it’s not surprising a zine like Space for Rent would show up. In fact, I’ve seen publications like it before, wherein everything’s really a paid ad, including the text articles. This thing’s so cheaply produced, though, it’s hard to see why any would-be pay-to-play writer or illustrator wouldn’t just put out their own photocopied pamphlet. (Available from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.)… like ex-Rocket Veronika Kalmar, who’s put together her own modestly-sized newsprint zine, The Iconoclast. The first li’l issue’s got Kalmar dissing celebrity journalism (perhaps a disguised potshot at her ex-employer), fellow sometime Rocketeer Dawn Anderson trashing “post-feminist” reactionaries, and assorted show and record reviews. (Free at the usual spots or $1.50 from 117 E. Louisa St., #283, Seattle 98102).

THE HOLE STORY: The Seattle bagel craze has apparently gone day-old. The Brugger’s Bagels chain has turned into a “Breads & Cafe” chain, Zi Pani (a name as meaningless as Håagen-Dazs). We could be in for a rerun of the mid-’80s retreat when all those cookie shops tried to reposition themselves as “treats” shops. Elsewhere in changing-storefront land…

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Rumor has it that the next hip outfit to be evicted later this year by the Samis Foundation (that alleged nonprofit that acts more money-grubbing mercenary than some for-profit companies) just might be Colourbox, for some five-plus years the odd duck of 1st Ave. S. niteclubs (i.e., the one place on that “Blooze”-bound street where you could actually hear tunes composed since 1970). No word yet on just when it’ll get kicked out, or what its operators might plan to do in the future. Elsewhere in clubland…

SQUARELY GAY: ARO.Space, the new mostly-gay dance club in the old Moe building, is as clean looking a night spot as any I’ve seen. With its muted pastels and recessed lighting, and retro-modern furnishings, it could easily pass for a set in a ’60s sci-fi film or in the future world fantasized at the Seattle World’s Fair. It might also be seen as a desperate attempt to be fake-London, or as something too damn institutional looking to be really fun, or as an expression of gay designers too enraptured by Ralph Lauren colors or by that new interiors magazine Wall.Paper. Under this theory, the space evokes gay men trying to prove they’re just as respectable as anybody else by being bland in a Zurich airport terminal kind of way. But I prefer to see it as a “neutral” gallery-type space, only with the dancers and clientele as the “art” on display. It enhances its clientele’s outrageousness by not competing with it.

CRASS? WELL…: Ex-GOP gubenatorial candidate Ellen Craswell has quit the Republican Party to start her own political movement, one where the purity of her authoritarian right-wing ideology wouldn’t be compromised by those success-obsessed corporate Republicans. She plans to call her movement the American Heritage Party. She apparently hadn’t realized the name “American Heritage” is already trademarked, by a magazine and book line owned by that quintessential corporate Republican Steve Forbes, who’s currently on a personal crusade to keep Religious Right followers within the Republican fold. Will Steve object, or even care? Time will tell, or rather Forbes will.

WHEN `REAL’ ISN’T: I’d long ago defined porn as fantasies for purposes of masturbation, and early-’90s cyberporn as fantasies about masturbation. Sex robots, “dildonics,” virtual reality glasses, dream machines, holograms–whatever you call the schticks in cyberporn fiction, they’re still mere get-off gadgets, means to avoid the sacred confusion that is interpersonal contact.

So it’s not surprising to hear all the hype surrounding a California (natch) company called Real Doll, promising a partial fulfillment of one common cyberporn schtick. For $5,000 or so they’ll custom-build a full-size plastic version of your dream woman (they say they’re thinking of adding a male-doll line later). They promise the look and feel of real flesh, hair, and bone-muscle structure, in a variety of heights, bust sizes, and skin and hair colors. The pictures I’ve seen of the products look like the more grotesquely hyperreal creations of some NYC hotshot shock artist in the Jeff Koons tradition. The more “realistic” these things get, the less they rely on the imagination and the more aware you are that you’re staring not at a fellow biological creature but at a hunk of lifeless petrochemicals. Cyber-freaks might be turned on by that, but I’d just find it icky.

MORE IMAGINATIVE PLAY equipment might be found at Seattle Surgical Repair, 10726 Aurora N. The location (right next to the cemetery) might not be the most tasteful site for a dealer in used medical equipment, but the tiny building’s crammed full of goodies. Examination tables! Speculums! Knee-reflex hammers! Stethoscopes! Gurneys! (Old car and motorcycle parts, too.) Just play safe when you’re playing doctor, and don’t perform any actual procedures that should be left to qualified personnel.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Li’l Hassan’s Bleeding Head is Marcus Surrealius’s eight-page take on the sort of gentle new-agey satire pioneered by the likes of, say, the Church of the SubGenius. Issue #3 includes a cover tribute of sorts to Nico and Yoko Ono, a scrambled analysis of Huckleberry Finn, and an “Ebonic Hail Mary” that reads just like the fake-Black-dialect Bible passages I was once forced to listen to in my old liberal-Methodist youth group. Even better are the little slogans here and there (“Neachy is pietzsche”). Free at the usual dropoff spots, or online at www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/4475…. Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan’s quarterly True Northwest is my kinda regional-history zine. Why, right on page 2 there’s a reprinted old ad for the late, lamented Pay ‘n Save stores! Further inside are a big retrospective of Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, an interview with Seattle Pilots/ Portland TrailBlazers announcer Bill Schonely, and references to the Elephant Car Wash, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, TV’s Here Come the Brides, Spokane’s Bing Crosby memorabilia collection, Jimi Hendrix’s days playing guitar with Tommy Chong in Vancouver (the closest to Seattle Hendrix lived in his whole adult life), and much much more. $3.50 from P.O. Box 22, Olympia 98507; or online at www.olywa.net/truenw/.

CROSS-CUTTING: The editors of True Northwest previously wrote Seattle on Film, a fun little book chronicling locally-shot movies from the years before the sight of a car on screen with Washington plates automatically meant “filmed in Vancouver.” Is it fair for our neighbors to the north to have The X-Files and Millennium while we’re stuck with a certain cheeky cable show amply discussed in recent Strangers? Since this is the start of baseball season, a trade metaphor springs to mind. We should try to acquire at least one B.C.-filmed show in exchange for the aforementioned cable production. Since that wouldn’t quite be an equal exchange, we’ll have to throw more in the pot. Maybe some tanker trucks of cheap U.S. gasoline, a couple of 10-year-old rock bands, and a cartoonist to be named later. If we can’t get a spooky sci-fi series, maybe we could at least deal for other Canuck assets like decent health insurance or adequate arts funding.

PASSAGE (pianist-author Charles Rosen in the March Harper’s): “A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.”

IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.

UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.

THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.

CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.

(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)

MISC. CONTINUES to be haunted by the Winter Olympics opening-ceremony theme song, “When Children Rule the World.” Sometimes it seems they do now, only in grownup bodies…

SHADES OF PALE: The Times reported this month that Kenny G’s one of the most respected white musicians among black jazz purists. My theory: G represents a stereotype of whiteness corresponding almost perfectly to the stereotypes of blackness profitably portrayed for years by some white people’s favorite black acts.

DELIVERING INFLUENCE: A recent Wall St. Journal told how United Parcel Service tried to pay the Univ. of Wash. to lend its institutional credibility onto pro-corporate research. The formerly locally-owned UPS offered $2.5 million to the UW med school in ’95. But instead of directing its gift toward general areas of study, UPS insisted the money go toward the work of UW orthopedic surgeon Stanley J. Bigos. The WSJ claimed UPS liked Bigos because “his research has suggested that workers’ back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job.” The company’s fighting proposed tougher worker-safety laws, and wanted to support its claims with “independent” studies from a bigtime university that happenned to need the money. Negotiations with UW brass dragged on for two years, then collapsed. Bigos insists he wouldn’t have let UPS influence his work if he’d gotten its cash. But if companies can pick and choose profs already disposed to tell ’em what they wanna hear, “academic independence” becomes a bigger joke than it already is.

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Steve’s Broiler has lost its lease and closed. The 37-year-old downtown restaurant/ lounge was beloved by seniors, sailors, and punks for dishing out ample portions of good unpretentious grub and drinks, in a classic paneling-and-chrome-railing setting. (It was also the setting for Susan Catherine’s ’80s comic Overheard at America’s Lunch Counters.) The owners might restart if they can find another spot. It was the last tenant in the former Osborn & Ulland building, which will now be refitted for the typical “exciting new retail” blah blah blah…. Remember Jamie Hook’s Stranger piece last year about the Apple Theater, one of America’s last all-film porno houses? If you want to witness this landmark of archaic sleaze, better hurry. The Apple’s being razed soon for an affordable-housing complex incorporating the apartment building next door where the Pike St. Cinema was, and where the rock club Uncle Rocky’s is now. Rocky’s will close when the remodeling starts, and won’t be invited back (the housing people don’t like late-night loudness beneath residences).

MORE, MORE, MORE!: A recent Business Week cover story calls it “The Entertainment Glut.” I call it a desperate attempt by Big Media to keep control of a cultural landscape dividing and blossoming to a greater extent than I’d ever hoped. BW sez the giants (Disney, Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, et al.) are trying to maintain market share by invading one another’s genre turfs and cranking out more would-be blockbusters and bestsellers than ever before, to the point that none of them can expect anything like past profit margins. (Indeed, many of these “synergistic” media combos are losing wads of dough, losses even creative accounting can no longer hide.) It gets worse: Instead of adapting to the new realities of a million subcultures, the giants are redoubling their push after an increasingly-elusive mass audience. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book company scrapped over 100 planned “mid-list” titles to make up for losses on costly big-celeb books. BW claims the giants’ movie divisions are similarly “spending lavishly” on intended Next Titanics and trying “to stop producing modestly budgeted fare.” Their record divisions are dropping acts after one album, while ardently pushing the retro rockstar-ism of Britpop. The longer the giants try to keep their untenable business plans going, the better the opportunities for true indies in all formats–if the indies can survive the giants’ ongoing efforts to crowd ’em out of the marketplace.

(If Jean Godden can make personal appearances at coffee shops, so can I. I’ll be “guest barista” the evening of March 10 at Habitat Espresso, on Broadway near John. Mark your calendars.)

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that asks the question global economists have as yet refused to address: How will the Korean fiscal crisis affect the continued production of Simpsons and King of the Hill episodes?

WHEN’S ORGANIC NOT?: The health-food business (and don’t be fooled; it really is a business) doesn’t want the Feds deciding what is or isn’t an acceptable nutritional supplement or health remedy. But it does want the Feds to define what is or isn’t an “organic” food. Some within the biz want stricter rules on the “organic” name than the government’s latest proposed guidelines recommend, particularly regarding the use of pesticides on crops. If you wanna learn more, the folks at Central Co-Op will be glad to bend your ear.

WHEELIN’ N’ DEALIN’: Call me retro, call me picky, but I know I’m not the only one to believe there hasn’t been anything really good in U.S. automotive design since the fall of American Motors. From the awkward K-Car, to the once-innovative but now-tiresome Taurus teardrop, to today’s bland minivans and macho-gross sport utilities, mediocrity rules showrooms across the land. The new VW Beetle represents a small forward step, though it doesn’t look enough like the old Beetle and costs too much. Things are a little brighter overseas, especially in Japan. Nissan’s got a number of way-rad cars it sells only in Asia (including a slug-shaped miniwagon called the “S-Cargo”), while continuing to saddle its U.S. division with the same poor-selling Altimas.

Now I have a new object of desire. The Smart car, made by the unlikely joint venture of Mercedes and Swatch, was supposed to hit Euro streets this month (production-startup problems have now held back the launch ’til fall). Think of it as a scooter with a roof. It seats two people snugly inside its eight-foot-long plastic body (surrounding a steel safety cage). It looks like the perfect super-fuel-efficient tool for urban errands, leisurely country drives, or any other transport use that doesn’t involve mucho cargo or wintertime pass-climbing. Naturally, there are no plans to bring the Smart to North America. They don’t think enough people here would want a human-scale vehicle to be worth developing a U.S.-street-legal version and setting up dealers to sell and service it. Sadly, they may be right.

NETTING: Nearly two years ago, I told you to look forward to a new, high-speed Internet connection called ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line). Now at last, US West promises ADSL hookups in Seattle no later than June. It’ll cost $200 to start up such a connection, plus another $300 or so for the special all-digital modem US West will sell you. From there, you’ll pay $60 a month ($40 if you use a separate Internet service provider). For that, you get 256kbps, five times the speed of the best current analog-modem connections. (Even faster rates, up to 7 mbps, will be offered at higher prices.) You might not receive complex web pages all that faster–much of today’s “World Wide Wait” is due to heavy demand on the Internet’s transmission infrastructure, not to the home connection. But it’ll be a boon to Net-based multiplayer games, and it could make streaming video practical at last (opening another potential explosion of many-to-many communication, as mentioned here last week). And you’ll be able to talk on the phone and use the Net at the same time, without an extra line.

A couple caveats: The high speeds only come to, not from, you; it’ll still cost more to become your own Net server. And it’s all promised by a company whose on-time performance record has left more than a little to be desired.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (ad card on the front of a Seattle Times vending machine): “Out of the Box News.” That’s dangerously close to KIRO-TV’s 1993 slogan, “News Outside the Box.” The station’s only starting to recover from that debacle.

HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)

Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.

Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”

`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…

WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.

Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.

I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.

(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)

Welcome back to MISC., the pop-cult column that thinks it’s finally figured the reasoning behind the Spice Girls’ second CD cover, which looks almost exactly like the first one except the letters SPICE are tall instead of wide. It’s probably a subtle claim that these women can get anything elongated. Elsewhere in gender-land…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: By now even the most budget-minded among you probably have your clearance-sale ’98 wall calendars. You few remaining stragglers might consider the just-out Sensitive Geek Boys of Seattle calendar by Christina Malecka and Erika Rickel. Assorted sweet-faced models are photographed (by Trish Dickey and Cory Smith) exploring their feminine sides, in ways ranging from the sublime (smelling flowers, sewing) to the ridiculous (hugging at a “Pet Loss Grief Support Group”). Free at the Lava Lounge and elsewhere, or $6 from Rickel, SBRI, 4 Nickerson St. #200, Seattle 98109.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (at Larry’s Deli on 4th): “`Food’ Stamps Accepted Here!” Perchance a comment on the actual-food status of convenience store staples? Elsewhere in foodland…

PUT ‘EM UP, JOE: In the past couple of years, Metro route #2 has become a veritable study in contrasts for Seattle grocery fans. It passes by or within three blocks of the Plenty gourmet boutique in Madrona, the fancier-than-they-used-to-be Rogers on MLK Way and Red Apple on 15th, the already-mentioned-in-this-column Broadway QFC, the First Hill Shop Rite, the Pike Place Market, Belltown’s quite-fancier-than-it-used-to-be Dan & Ray’s, a smaller QFC, the great big Larry’s, the smallish lower Queen Anne Safeway, the fancy Queen Anne Thriftway, and the exquisite little jewel that is Ken’s Market.

And now the 2 goes right in front of the new Trader Joe’s gourmet convenience store at 1st W. and Galer. As you might expect from the slogan “Your Unique Grocery Store,” it’s from California (Pasadena to be exact). It’s got 113 stores scattered across nine states; this is its seventh Washington outlet. In less than 5,000 square feet (a tenth the size of the Broadway QFC) it’s full of goodies for gourmands with more taste than time. Everything about the store’s designed to increase the company’s profit margins above industry average while offering near-supermarket prices. Fresh meat, produce, and dairy (those notoriously low-margin departments) are almost nonexistent. There’s no bulk bins, no on-premises butchers or sandwich makers, no deli counter, no magazines, few staple goods (sugar, flour, etc.), and few housewares. Just about everything’s prepackaged, and most of it’s under the chain’s own house brands (various ethnic-flavored items are branded Trader Jose’s, Trader Giotto’s, or Trader Ming). This cutesy, “informal” style extends to store design (wood-paneled interiors, fake-driftwood aisle signs) and flyers (set in the Times Roman font family, a la early desktop publishing). The merchandise mix emphasizes wine (natch), prepacked veggies and salads, ethnic rice mixes, trail mix, candy and cookies (like you’d find at Cost Plus), frozen entrees (many of them vegetarian), frozen seafood, canned fruits and juices, soups, organic cat food, cheese, fake milk, microbrew beer and pop (including Ernest Borgnine’s Coffee Soda!), canned unground coffee, and vitamins. Unlike the monster-marts, Trader Joe’s doesn’t try to be everything to everybody. It just sells stuff that tastes good and/or lets you feel good.

THE SCIENCE OF THE LAMBS: Amid all the media furor over the threatened spread of sheep-like cloning to human subjects, there wasn’t much heard from people who might like it. Here are a few groups of potential supporters: Separatist lesbians who want reproduction without any involvement from men; bigots or twisted eugenicists dreaming of a super-race; medical-world types wishing to custom-engineer immunity to diseases (or to cultivate “spare parts” for transplants); sci-fi fans who’d like real-life mutant superheroes; techno-hippies seeking “the next plateau of human evolution;” rich people who want their own personages to live on; caste-society proponents who’d like a real Brave New World; fetishists who want to keep (or bring back) specific examples of human beauty. (Your question this week: Who’d you clone and why? Respond at clark@speakeasy.org.)

Due to early holiday-season deadlines, this Misc. installment’s the first to get to comment on that very peculiar New Year’s, during which those Seattle residents not blotto-drunk might as well have been, since all attempts to see the Space Needle fireworks resulted only in a fog-blurred haze of colors like something from a Mark Tobey painting.

ERROR MESSAGES: Hardly a day goes by without somebody saying something nasty about Microsoft. The Dept. of Justice disses the way MS tries to strong-arm PC makers. Nader warns about MS trying to monopolize “electronic commerce” tools, wanting a piece of every buck that’ll ever change hands online. Sun and Netscape claim MS wants to quash their “cross-platform” software lines, which threaten the notion of an MS-dictated computer universe. Mother Jones charges an MS-funded antipiracy group promising not to prosecute offices for using unpaid-for software if they promise to not only buy their warez but to buy all-MS software. And MS’s temps and perma-temps complain about their second-class treatment within the firm (including, thanks to new state legislation, no more overtime pay).

In most of these cases, the company claims it’s being unfairly targeted due to its “success” at creating products that just happen to be “popular among consumers.” That’s not quite the way it is, of course. Just about anybody who’s not working for the company (or for one of its media joint-venture partners) will acknowledge MS writes better contracts than code. Instead of innovation and competition, it operates by buying friends and crusing enemies. While its staff ideologues publicly pontificate about a cyber-future of decentralized societies and limitless opportunity, it behaves like an old-fashioned oil or railroad monopoly. In the past, MS’s enemies wanted the feds to split the company in two, spinning the DOS/Windows side into a separate company. That move by itself wouldn’t solve anything now, since the DOJ’s main argument is against MS turning Internet application software into a piece of Windows, making it tough for others to sell separate browser programs. It’s not just using its operating-system dominance to sell application software, but to give away software other companies want to sell. In other industries, it’d be called anti-competive “dumping.”

Our fair region is the born-‘n’-bred home of perhaps the most widely hated American company outside the oil or media businesses. Gates and Allen come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively new corner of western civilization. What does it mean to the longstanding image of this place as, for better or worse, “The City of the Nice” (as proclaimed by Tom Robbins in ’81)?

That, of course, always was an exaggeration. We weren’t “nice” so much as polite and businesslike, eager to please when it’s in our interest. (Author Roger Sale wrote in ’75 that Seattle was “bourgeois from the start.”) Despite the popularity of drunks, scoundrels, labor radicals, and whoremongers as local historical icons, most of the real settlement of the city was led by would-be timber, transportation, and real estate barons. The ones who made it didn’t just have what the new agers call “prosperity consciousness;” they maneuvered themselves into the right places, befriended the right people, made the right deals. Behind today’s Boeing boom lies a heritage of sales execs who forged long-term friendships with airlines, sealing deals Lockheed and Douglas couldn’t match. Rainier and Oly stayed prominent as long as they did because regional Teamster boss Dave Beck used his influence to make sure local beer outlets preferred local beers. The burgeoning Seattle biotech industry’s due to Sen. Warren Magnuson’s pipeline of federal bucks into the UW med school. MS started by signing deals with early hobbyist-computer maker Altair, and became a giant by signing deals with IBM. Much of the Seattle/ Oly “indie rock” philosophy has to do not just with alternative kinds of music but with forging alternatives to the music industry’s contractural practices.

Seattle’s a town of dealmakers as much as it’s a town of engineers. MS took this craft to a hyper-aggressive level. The extent to which this aggression succeeds and/or backfires will affect the company, the region, and the world.

MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.

A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…

DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.

A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.