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MISC. DOESN’T KNOW how to start this week’s item collection, with a touch-O-bemusement (the Jack Daniel’s Faux Faulkner writing contest limiting entries to 500 words or less? Bill couldn’t write a want ad that short!) or a solemn pledge (Guaranteed: Absolutely nothing about the Baby Boomers turning 50!).
SPACE PROBES: I know this is Anna Woolverton’s department but I gotta mention the gorgeous new Sit & Spin band room. A more perfect homey-glitz look I’ve never seen, and how they made a concrete box sound so good I’ll never know. Seattle band spaces never get bigger (at least not until this year’s planned RKCNDY remodel) but they do get better. Meanwhile, Beatnix (ex-Tugs, ex-Squid Row, ex-Glynn’s Cove) suddenly went the way of 80 percent of new small businesses; it’ll be back with new owners and probably a new name after a remodel. And there was big fun a couple weeks back at the reopened Pioneer Square Theater; whenSuper Deluxe sang their Xmas song about asking Santa for a skateboard and only getting a stupid sweater, the teen punx drenched the band members with sweaters. With occasional all-ages shows continuing at the Velvet Elvis that means there’s real punk now at both former homes of Angry Housewives, the punk parody stage musical that delighted smug yuppie audiences from 1983 to 1989.
TYPO-GRAPHY: I’m developing a theory that certain grammatical errors come in and out of fashion. F’rinstance, people in many stations of life still use “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”) when they mean “its” (the possessive). A year or two back there was a similar fad of spelling “-ies” plurals as “y’s” (i.e., “fantasy’s”), but it didn’t catch on very far. The incorrect phrase “A Women” was seen about a year ago in a Wash. Free Press headline. Then earlier this month the phrase showed up in a Sylvia strip. Even in hand-drawn comics dialogue, people seem to be falling back on the computer-spell-checker excuse (“it’s a real word, just the wrong word”). Either that, or cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s succumbed to the notion of “Women” as a Borglike collective entity.
MATERIAL ISSUE: As a tangental allegation to her $750,000 LA wrongful-termination/ sex-discrimination lawsuit, ex-Maverick Records employee Sonji Shepherd charges the Madonna-owned label and its day-to-day boss Freddy DeMann with running a payola machine, bribing DJs and station managers to play Candlebox and Alanis Morrissette songs with cash, expense-paid trips to lap-dance clubs, and even flown-in visits from Heidi Fleiss’s call girls. Candlebox-haters shouldn’t go around high-fiving and shouting exhortations like “Knew it! They couldn’t have gotten big without extra help!” That’s the same line rock-haters offered during the ’50s payola scandals, when pay-for-airplay charges destroyed pioneer rock DJ Alan Freed. Also, Shepherd’s allegations are aimed at label staff; no band members are charged with committing or knowing about anything unlawful.
NAKED TRUTH DEPT.: Ongoing science exhibits don’t often get reviewed in papers like this, but the best can give as much fun and insight-into-reality as any performance-art piece. My current all-time fave: the naked mole-rats at the Pacific Science Center. These li’l four-inch-long, furless pink rodents from sub-Saharan Africa are the perfect straight-edge punk mascot animals, the ultimate combination of cuteness and ferocity. They live totally underground, in networks of burrows that can be as big as six football fields. They’ve got an organized cooperative, matriarchal social structure (some dig, some walk backwards to shove dirt around, and the biggest ones shove dirt up through surface holes). They don’t drink. They’ve got huge long teeth that can chew through concrete. Their lips close behind their teeth. Science Center PR calls them “saber-toothed sausages.”
At the exhibit they live in a plexiglass-enclosed environment with clear plastic plumbing tubes to scurry around in. It may be impractical to get your own naked mole-rat colony (you’d have to specially import a queen and two or three breeding males, as well as build their elaborate home). But there’s plenty of other fun things you can make and do with science; an invitation elsewhere in this paper should help give you an incentive.
(Next week: A vilification of all those `Apple Computer death spiral’ media stories, and an appeal to Save The Blob.)
MISC. CAN HARDLY WAIT to try foam dancing, the latest craze from Spain. It landed on these shores at Miami trendspots, and is now showing up at a nightclub in (of all places) the Tri-Cities. It uses a modified artificial-snow machine to blow foamy bubbles all over and above the dance floor. Reminds me of the bubble-shower scene from Revenge of the Cheerleaders, only clothed.
FARE GAME: Some of you might have been confused when you called a cab to get home from the 1/1 festivities and a different cab showed up. Broadway Cab, the prompt and reasonably courteous taxi line whose car-side boasts of LOWEST RATES were generally true, has been folded into Puget Sound Dispatch, parent company of the larger (and costlier) Graytop Cab and Yellow Cab of Seattle. Most of Broadway’s cabs are being repainted Graytop’s colors and will charge Graytop’s higher rates; however, as Graytop rep David Gordon sez, “A limited number of Broadways will continue to operate as Broadways,” at the lower rate. Also, a dozen or so of Graytop’s current driver-operators are reportedly planning to launch their own independent service, Red Top.
IRIS OUT: The past Xmas season was the last for the Whole Toon Catalog, Seattle’s nationally renowned mail-order video sales outlet for all things animated. Some observers blame Whole Toon’s demise on its downtown retail store, which closed earlier this year after failing to generate enough sales to meet its high rent. But beyond that, Whole Toon had to deal with the consolidation of the video biz under Blockbuster and other big chains–many of which targeted the sell-thru kidvid market as a prime growth center. But what we’re losing with Whole Toon isn’t just another place to order the next direct-to-video Lion King sequel. We’re losing the one place where serious animation buffs could get every cartoon video in print (and hundreds of out-of-print rarities), from silent Felix the Cat classics to Baby Huey laserdiscs–plus French-language books about Tex Avery and the only reference book to ever print the names of the anonymous producers behind Underdog.
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: According to the state Attorney General’s dept., the Zygon Learning Machine (a cassette player combined with opaque goggles that flash hypnotic light patterns into your eyes) not only doesn’t meet its claims as a subconscious brain-reprogramming device, it often doesn’t even mechanically operate properly. But if you can find a working one, it does make a good drug-free enhancement to ambient-techno listening.
I almost got a job at Zygon writing scripts for Learning Machine tapes. Its office was in Redmond’s most sterile office-park zone, near the Northern Exposurestudio (appropriate for the New Age fantasyland nature of Zygon’s claims). Hypnotic learning tapes have been a staple of the New Age industry for years; I’ve seen cassettes promising to help you do everything from find your soulmate to build your vocabulary or increase your bowling score. I’m naturally skeptical of anything that asks me to stop thinking and just receive mental reprogramming, but thousands of folks are willing to at least experiment with the things. Thus, I wouldn’t sick the state on Zygon over the Learning Machine’s basic claims. But I can support going after the machine’s mechanical frailties and Zygon’s selling tactics (including “electronic junk mail” messages sent to thousands of Internet users).
PREVIEWS OF COMING TRANSACTIONS: Expect a new owner for Seven Gables Theaters as soon as the end of the month. Seattle’s king of respectable multiplexes has been a pawn in a sequence of acquisitions over the past years, finally ending up in the hands of indie-film mogul Sam Goldwyn Jr.Goldwyn’s unsuccessful attempts at producing higher-budgeted films, along with the decline of his American Gladiators TV franchise, have led him to put various assets up for sale. John Kluge, the showbiz speculator who sold five TV stations to Fox and has used the proceeds to prop up what’s left of Orion Pictures, wants to buy everything Goldwyn’s got, including Seven Gables. Since Kluge also owns the old American International film library, maybe we should demand that if the sale goes through they should run weekly midnight screenings of Beach Blanket Bingo or The She Creature.
As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.
INSVILLE..................OUTSKI
Mac clones.................Windows 95
Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft
Gentlemen..................Guys
Pete & Pete................Friends
Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men
Bravo......................HBO
Flagship Ale...............Muenchener
Community syndicalism......Global capitalism
Many-to-many...............One-to-many
Freedom....................Censorship
The City...................Melrose Place
Bizarro....................Dilbert
Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe
Curling....................Snowboarding
Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"
Albuquerque................New Orleans
Rotterdam..................Prague
Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk
Steak houses...............Coffee houses
Puppetry...................Computer animation
Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s
Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline
Fedoras....................Baseball caps
African food...............Thai food
Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism
Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy
Citizens Utilities.........Green Day
Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks
Padded butts...............Silicone
DVD........................CD-ROM
ADSL.......................ISDN
Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes
Coal.......................Alanis Morissette
Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey
Lounge.....................Techno
Zog Logs...................Pog
H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson
Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics
Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody
Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource
Crossroads.................Bellevue Square
Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers
Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball
Poker......................Magic: The Gathering
Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs
Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets
Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex
"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"
Mandalas...................Fractals
The power of love..........The love of power
Skepticism.................Cynicism
Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings
Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings
Black Jack.................Bubble Yum
Free Quebec................NAFTA
Percogesic.................Melatonin
Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven
Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone
ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view
Infobahn...................Wired
Phrenology.................Astrology
Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna
Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists
All Hail the Tube of Gloom:
Toyland Roundup
Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95
Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.
My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.
Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.
Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.
If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.
Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.
More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.
The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.
But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.
Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.
Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.
Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.
The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.
If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.
There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”
There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (“Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.
But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.
Welcome to a brisk autumnal Misc., the column that can’t go to the Speakeasy Cafe without being accosted by another foreign TV crew. In one week this month, Speakeasy’s hosted camcorder teams from Britain, France, and Australia (the latter for Beyond 2000,seen on the Discovery Channel). Speaking of televisual revelations…
TALK’S CHEAP, AND I LIKE IT THAT WAY: First, that professional prissy-at-large Wm. Bennett gets on the anti-gangsta-rap bandwagon. That was a surreptitiously almost-valid stance for a moralistic high-horser to take, since gangsta rap is essentially the invention of Hollywood promoters selling white mall kids on a variation of the century-old showbiz stereotype of black men as stupid but sexy savages. But now, ex-Bush aide Bennett’s taking his demagoguery further by attacking sleaze talk shows, claiming they “make the abnormal normal.” But Bill, the abnormal is normal, everywhere except in the minds of people like you. You’ve never been to a 12-step meeting? Never listened to old ladies’ gossip? Never had a relative the elders only talk about when kids aren’t around? The things on these shows are the stuff of real life heretofore repressed from public consciousness. Yes the shows are exploitive, but much less so than Republican politicians.
GAME THEORY: The new FAO Schwarz has opened in what still looks like the ground level of a bank building, completing phase 1 of the downtown establishment’s plan to move the retail axis east to 6th Ave. It’s less a store for kids than for adult collectors (the folks who buy those Scarlett Barbie and Rhett Ken dolls on QVC). It’s got just enough kid stuff, however, to make it suitably zoo-ey this Xmas season. Whenever a big chain store comes to town, the initial journalistic reaction is to pronounce doom for local independent merchants in the chain’s genre; but in this case, the chief independently-owned “competition” is Magic Mouse in Pioneer Square, which remains a store for preppy parents (“Look, Lynnette, a teddy bear covered in genuine faux cashmere!”) and hence has its own market niche which Schwarz only partly overlaps. Still speaking of the “white whine” set…
PRESSED: The free Weekly appropriately debuted with the cover headline, “Status Quo Under Siege.” The paper that’s always identified itself as the voice of the Inner Circle finds both that circle and itself under attack. The issue’s main essay was poignantly nostalgic in its defense of the notion that “progressive” politics means leaving everything in the hands of professional “leaders.” It’s a relic of the old Minnesota and Wisconsin “progressives,” who identified liberal pieties with “nice” WASP culture–partly to rally WASP farmers and laborers against decadent NYC financiers, but also partly to keep German Catholics and other immigrants out of local power. (One of the original tools used in the Upper Midwest to keep those-who-know-better in charge was at-large city council elections, which the Weekly piece exhorted Seattle voters to keep.) To this day, the whole NPR/ PCC/ Evergreen/ English-department universe is trapped in a contradiction between advocating “multiculturalism” and preseving its own hyperbland monoculture. The Right cheerfully exploits this contradiction, while promoting its own contradiction between “We the People” talk and PAC-ass-kissing action.
As it turned out, the underfunded City Council reformers lost. So did Referendum 48, that nasty scheme endorsed by Republican legislators to officially bestow big property owners with a status akin to that of old feudal lords, as rulers of their domain. Proponents hoped for a Seattle vs. Downstate vote, but forgot the whole Puget Sound basin is filling up with folks who might themselves live in ugly suburbs built by pro-48 developers, but who don’t necessarily want those developers to have even more power than they do now.
As for the Weekly itself, can it boost its circulation numbers (in sharp decline the past two years) while continuing to identify solely with staid whitebread baby boomers? Maybe, by rededicating itself to its target audience’s infotainment needs. Right now, the Puget Sound Business Journal does a more thorough job of reporting mover-n’-shaker matters, with far less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” A paper that covers politics and highbrow culture with the clarity PSBJ uses to cover corporate junk might have a chance.
Following are the results of Misc.’s quest for the best grocery stores in Seattle, by weight class. While these are my personal views, thanks for all your suggestions. These listings leave out organic co-ops and gourmet delis — I wouldn’t know how to judge such places. (For the record, Central Co-op got more votes than any other hippie store.) I also wasn’t looking for wine stores with vestigial food departments (sorry, Louie’s on the Pike). Oddly, only one letter recommended anything in the Pike Place Market (DeLaurenti’s Italian deli, with its wall of capers).
CONVENIENCE STORE: Seattle has many above-average store-lets in a genre with a pretty low average, but a particular hat tip goes to the Hillcrest Deli-Mart on Capitol Hill. A former pre-supermarket-era Safeway built in the 1920s, it’s still got a complete-enough selection of packaged goods, enough fresh stuff to bide you over until your next supermarket run, and either the best or second-best fried chicken in town; all at prices that don’t excessively punish you for avoiding supermarket crowds.
SMALL SUPERMARKET: When supermarkets first appeared as a Depression-era cost-cutting novelty, they were still small enough to fit neighborhood main streets. Every neighborhood should have one, especially if it doesn’t have a larger store (Belltown, Cascade, Georgetown, etc.). Stores like Marketime in Fremont and Red Apple in Madison Park provide everything you need (unless you’re on a special diet). Or you can stock up on staple goods at a monster store and use a store like this for perishables and restocks.
The two Ken’s (Greenwood and west Queen Anne) win overall. Lori Smith writes about the Greenwood Ken’s, “Despite its garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store, where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.” Honorable mention goes to the First Hill Shop-Rite (home of my current-fave generic cereal brand, the imitation Crispix simply called Flavorite Crispy Hexagons!).
REGULAR SUPERMARKET: Getting into the realm of the major chains, there’s still something to be said for independent spirits like Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant. Robert C. Mills calls it “the center of the known universe.” Situated in the foot-traffic heart of its area, with most of its parking spaces in a side-street auxiliary lot instead of out front, it combines the meet-n’-greet ambience of a small neighborhood store with the selection and prices of a big park-n’-gorge outlet. It’s also got a hypnotic neon sign that has a different sector on the fritz every night.
SUPERSTORE: Larry’s has its spots (the wall of cereal, all the imported South American soda pops). But there’s nothing quite like Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. On a site abandoned by Fred Meyer as too small, Art’s has built an extremely site-specific collection of perimeter departments around the brightest, boldest food selection anywhere.
Elsewhere, Ann Allen recommended Stock Market on Rainier Ave., a “warehouse look” store with a cafe section occupied by just ordinary folk. (“It’s not yuppie. It’s not bland and sterile. It’s what you want a neighborhood store to be.”) Steve Rohde recommended the ineligible Monroe Fred Meyer, but the venerable hypermarket chain has a new monster outlet in Lake City. And of course nothing can compare to the Price Costco experience (where shopping may be a baffling ordeal, but it’s great for larger households, cheap party catering, and especially for free samples).
ETHNIC: Uwajimaya is the name to beat in Asian foodstuffs, but some prefer the recently-grown cluster of Vietnamese stores at 12th and Jackson. One store there, Hop Thanh, has an in-store butcher presiding over the biggest all-pork meat dept. you ever saw. In more assimilated immigrant delights, smart consumers like Leanne Beach know the discount Italian goodies at Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, open daytime hours only on 6th Ave. S. near the INS office. Beach also likes how “They write out your bill by hand, just like an old-fashioned market!”
As promised in the Stranger, here are some of the original letters full-length:
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 17:22:21 PDT
From: THAT_GUY@eor.com (THAT GUY)
Organization: The Emerald OnRamp
Subject: Food Stores
To: clark@cyberspace.com
Favorite Ethnic Food Store: DeLaurenti (featuring a wall of capers, even!)
Favorite Superstore: The new Monroe Fred Meyer (Hate the town, but store is
great for stocking up for an Eastbound road trip.)
Favorite Mid-size Supermarket: First Hill ShopRite (I feel like I’m back in
New York when I’m in that dump.)
Favorite Checker: ‘Debbie’ at the Broadway QFC (She’s quirky yet perky.)
-Steve Rohde
aka that_guy@eor.com
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:43:10 -0700
From: Hollis Nelson <hollis@speakeasy.org>
To: clark@cyberspace.com, hollis@eve.speakeasy.org
Subject: PLENTY – the coolest, most beautiful, euphoric gourmet/organic store
There is an oasis of a gourmet food store in undiscovered Madrona called
Plenty. I must admit, I am a wine purveyor at this store, (thus the wine
selection is impeccable) but I find myself drawn this store on a daily basis. I
also happen to deliver the Stranger to them because someone in distribution at
your fine publication doesn’t “do Madrona” – but that’s a whole other tangent.
First of all, this small store is aesthetically beautiful – PCC meets
Metropolitan Home. This is due in large part to one of the owners, Rolf. Also,
not only do they have an amazing selection of specialty organic and gourmet
items, but they have Jim (former chef at Cafe Flora). He whips up the most
flavorful, dare I say yummy, unique and completely healthy meals, snacks etc.
daily. Lastly, not only do they have a beautiful enviroment, amazing selection,
and yummy food, but they have some of the nicest people due in large part to
the last of the “mod squad” owners Loree. Plenty is a must try experience – a
thousand apologies for my long windedness, but I love this place.
your biggest fan,
Hollis A. Nelson
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 10:53:04 -0700
To: Clark@cyberspace.com
From: dsackett@newsdata.com (Daniel Sackett)
Subject: grocery markets
Upon reading your call for suggestions for the best grocery stores I felt
compelled to copy down your web site address and immediately began to
conceptualize how I could possibly communicate the sublime and gross
pleasures of shopping at Central Co-op. I once saw a documentary on Frank
Sinatra’s reign as a teen idol–the image of one panting fan saying “He’s
just so…sincere” comes to mind when I think of Central. Sure both Central
and Sinatra are sincere, but the experience is so much more. From a REAL
committment to putting out a wide, fresh and reasonably priced organic
produce selection (thanks ol’ Tom the wacky, art-crazed produce manager) to
a cornucopia of treats and staples that commercial stores pass over (yea
Rhondi!), to a staff that upon hearing the words “vegan” or “organic”
actually helps instead of staring blankly from the hollowness of their
bourgeois, status quo enslaved souls, to aesthetically soothing indirect
lighting, to cool check-out folk (Alex and the piscean guy with the wry
smile), to the occassional kitty-cat rendition of Old King Wenceslaus on the
PA, man, Central is IT. Besides, I like spending my money in a co-op instead
of feathering Joe Albertson’s corporate schemes. I believe I am what I
eat–including the experience of gathering food–and I’ve had many happy
moments shopping Central Co-op.
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 95 13:28:00 -0700
From: robert_c mills <rcmills@cac.washington.edu>
Message-Id: <9508192028.AA05447@burlap2.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: Misc. Misc. miscellany
Food Giant – Wallingford = Center of the known universe
Non-surfing web use term = “sponging”
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 13:16:40 -0700
From: Lisa Roosen-Runge <lrr@discovery.ca>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Windows; I; 16bit)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Subject: supermarket
Here’s a suggestion – Uwajimaya (hope I spelled it correctly)
I think it should be just a supermarket, but it may fall into the ethnic
category.
It is a lot of fun – there’s a cafe, books upstairs, excellent junk food
and neat kitchen implements.
I went to the one in the “International District”, but I guess they have
other outlets as well.
I have been checking in here fairly regularly, I really appreciate you
posting your columns on the Web.
p.s. I am looking forward to the final version of your book.
From lesmith@netmedia.co.il Tue Aug 29 19:31:42 1995
Message-Id: <199508300233.CAA05166@chava.netmedia.co.il>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 95 02:37:34 -0300
From: “Lori E. Smith” <lesmith@jer1.co.il>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K)
Clark,
Re your grocery store search, I’m going to nominate Ken’s, the grocery
store at the corner of 73rd & Greenwood in that neighborhood that’s not
quite Phinney Ridge, not quite Greenwood or Greenlake and not really
Ballard either. When my family moved there in the 70s (I’m also one of
those rare Seattlites who actually have _roots_ in the city, my
great-grandfather went to the UW) Ken’s was quiet and pokey, like the
neighborhood. As it has gone uptown and yuppy so has Ken’s and you can
now get packaged sushi and all the comforts of home. But despite it’s
garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the
Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store,
where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.
Thanks for going on-line and helping to keep Seattle’s alternative
tradition alive. (One of the things I like about Seattle is that despite
the attempts of various establishments to promote Seattle’s various
environmental and civic amenities it’s the “other” side of Seattle that
always gets national press, cf the prostitutes of the boom era, the
general strike of 1919 and more recently the assorted group of drifters
from out of town who became “grunge”.)
And by the way, I like the Macintosh a lot too.
Some things make even Misc. disoriented. The Mariners winning in Sept.? Vying for not just a newfangled wild-card playoff berth but (at this writing) not far from a real division lead? Aargh! My whole reality system is collapsing on me!
READ YOUR TV: Early-morning television has always been radio with faces. Producers presumed breakfast-time viewers were too busy grooming and feeding to watch the screen. Bloomberg Information Television on the USA Network and its “lite” version, VH-1in the Morning, challenge that notion. They’re cablecast live to the East, so you’ll have to get up at (or set your VCR for) 5:30 a.m. Both Bloomberg shows fill the screen with words and numbers: News headlines, weather for cities across the country, sports scores, and trivia. The USA show has a gloriously jumbled screen packed with info, while announcers in the top-right corner read news and business stories. The VH-1version has a slightly less-cluttered screen of data surrounding easy-listening music videos. Both require a TV big enough to read from, and would work better in still-far-away hi-definition TV or as hi-bandwidth computer services. The USA version is like a video caffeine jolt compared to the snooze-button blandness of regular morning shows.
NO ESCAPE: As the notion of “mass media” deteriorates, marketers get ever more creative in seeking ways to market to people who don’t particularly like to be marketed to. They’re now putting paid product placements in video games. Now, the trade journalInteractive Week sez game maker Digital Pictures wants to stick on “interactive commercials.” In one proposed example, game players would point-and-click through Coke logos and arrive at an 800 number to get a free six-pack — if they agreed to be in demographic surveys. I can imagine more creative stuff, like a Mortal Kombat warrior endorsing Coke as the perfect refresher after you’ve ripped out your opponent’s skeleton.
NOTED: The Seattle Symphony, refusing to surrender amid anti-arts mania, has worked damn hard to draw younger and/or nontraditional audiences. It’s performed with Peter Gabriel, created a Frank Zappa tribute night, and even appeared on Almost Live!The culmination of this drive to bring orchestral music into the 20th Century is Cyberian Rhapsody. Billed as the first symphonic concert on the Internet, the Nov. 10 event at the Paramount will include string-n’-brass versions of Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Queensryche tunes, as well as material by those boomer favorites who left town at the dawn of their careers (J. Hendrix, Q. Jones). For the first time, Seattle’s cultural establishment is noting the existence of living (or recently-deceased) people who’ve created original music in Seattle whose last name isn’t G. Whether it’s a mark of long-overdue respect or an omen of attempted co-option is for you to decide.
ELSEWHERE ON THE MUSICAL FRONT: KCMU can’t seem to stop rumors spreading among the new-music community that it’s gonna be forced off the air so sister station KUOW can have both frequencies (one for classical music, the other for news/ talk). Station management denies it, saying the recent merger of KCMU’s and KUOW’s administrative and fundraising operations was merely an efficiency measure. The KCMU Kontroversy a couple years back hurt the station’s fan rapport and financial stability, but proved there’s an active community of listeners who love the station and want it to be better at what it now does. At a time when public broadcasting’s threatened on all sides, it needs to make friends by seeking diverse audiences instead of narrowcasting everything to Upscales only. Let’s hope the UW administration realizes this.
SILO R.I.P.: It’s one thing for suburban superstore chains to seize the retail dollars of Tukwilans. It’s another thing when chains that situate stores in town (like Silo in the U District) pull out of a region ‘cuz they can’t match superstores’ marketing clout. You could have foretold Silo’s fate when its ads got panicky n’ defensive about matching superstore prices, foregoing old such slogans as “Silo: Where people have fun with electricity.”
(Nothing new this week at the Misc. World HQ website <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>, but please see it anyway.)
WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre’s heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens “hard chilled” (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin’ threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.)
A HEARTY GET-WELL WISH goes to art-music promoter Larry Reid. He and sometime partner Tracey Rowland were sideswiped by a car on 8/25 while driving their classic Italian scooters near Eastlake (Reid and Rowland helped run Seattle’s first scooter club in ’84). Reid hit the pavement head-first and was rushed to the hospital, where he was originally diagnosed with broken neck vertebrae. The next day an MRI scan showed just a few compressed discs. He’s home now but will have to take things easy for a while.
AD VERBS: Washington Mutual’s “Free Checking” billboard shows a checkbook with human female legs jogging at dawn. That’s not freedom, that’s rigorous discipline (which itself could be a positive metaphor for a bank, but that’s a whole other issue).
CATHODE CORNER: Harry Anderson, a member of the growing Hollywood colony out on the Puget Sound islands, wants to move production of his sitcom Dave’s World to Seattle after this upcoming season. It would be the first three-camera filmed sitcom shot outside LA since the ’50s. You can guess I don’t love the show, since I find nothing particularly amusing about the real-life Dave Barry (at least the show’s dropped the Billy Joel theme song). But after years of Florida trying to take away the Mariners (presumably over, now that it looks like Tampa’s getting an expansion team), it’d be fun to have a show set in Miami but made here.
WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: Dallas kid Scott Glazer’s Page of Evil, <<http://rampages.onramp.net/~scottgl/index.htm>>, contains an almost Shavian lambaste of fantasy-novel hack Piers Anthony: “Some (fantasy) authors start with the germ of a good idea in the first book of a series and grind it down to pure crap as the books wear on…. (Anthony) has the courage and wisdom to eliminate the hard work that comes along with coming up with that good idea, instead skipping to unmitigated smegma from book one, page one…. The number of books in the Xanth series has been proven to be equinumerous with aleph-zero; in other words, infinite. This is possible because it actually takes a negative amount of time to produce a Xanth novel.”
ALL YOU’LL EVER HEAR ME SAY ABOUT WINDOWS 95: Leno really was the perfect choice to emcee the Windows hypefest in Darkest Redmond (the talk-show host who’s almost as good as Letterman but not really, shilling for the operating software that’s almost as good as the Mac OS but not really). Still, I understand why Windows 95 could be considered a significant introduction in some quarters. So many people have been suckered into using Windows, and have been so frustrated by it over the past five years or so, that the promise of a Windows version that sucks even a little less is cause for celebration among ’em…. In other MS news, the company denies its talks about pouring money into Turner Broadcasting have anything to do with Turner’s desire to raise cash for a raid on CBS. Some observers called MS’s statement a retraction worded so it could itself be retracted later.
GROCERY UPDATE: You’ve got another week to send your recommendations for Seattle’s best food stores, in the convenience, small-supermarket (under 10,000 sq. ft.), regular-supermarket, superstore (over 20,000 sq. ft.) and ethnic categories. More info is at the Misc. World HQ website. Organizers of the mass letter-writing campaign on behalf of a certain gourmet boutique in Madrona may stop now.
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.
THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.
The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.
Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.
One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.
JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.
YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.
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.
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:
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:
WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Foison”
Welcome to the Seafair Week Misc., the column that can’t wait for the annual return of the hydros. Reactionary hippies sometimes accuse me of political conservatism for daring to like the hydros. I was once asked to speak at the “Alternative to Loud Boats” poetry reading, accepted, and shocked the crowd by telling ’em how much I liked the boats. Still do. There’s something endearing about these mechanical manic-depressives that sometimes go 250 m.p.h. but more often just sputter dead in the water. They’re an unabashedly non-chic relic of pre-yup Seattle, combining three or four of the old city’s once-dominant subcultures (they were built by solemn engineers, driven by rugged pioneer types, watched by hard-drinkin’ workingfolk, and promoted by oldtime hucksters). One of my longtime fantasies, besides having my own cereal, is to have my own hydro. “Miss Misc.” would be run by one of those hard-luck indie racing teams with no spare hulls and maybe one spare engine, the kind of guys who win fans’ sympathy while the big-money Budweiser team wins the heats.
FIGHTING FOR HER HONOR?: At the Lollapalooza show in E. Washington Courtney Love allegedly punched out Bikini Kill singer and original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, one woman who wouldn’t stand up to Love’s business. This is almost too perfect to be believable: our region’s two biggest icons of strongly contradictory definitions of “A Strong Woman,” in a fight for the title of The True Righteous Rebel. It’s an exciting notion as a fantasy, but somewhat pathetic if it’s true. They oughta put aside any past personal differences and combine forces for the real battles ahead. Speaking of which…
THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUES: Meanwhile, as Love relishes her new role as Molson beer spokesmodel, another Canadian company (Pyramid Productions) is soliciting investors for a youth-market exploitation film to be called Horsey. In a fundraising announcement the film’s writer/co-producer, Kirsten Clarkson, calls it “a story that appeals to the MTV generation… `Baby Busters’ and `GenXers’ are prime multi-level consumers of small ticket items, such as movie tickets, soundtracks, comics, and other ancillary products.” Clarkson describes her script’s heroine as “a hard-core, explosive, and sexy artist, who after quitting university to become the next Van Gogh, finds herself unable to paint. Delilah drinks too much, smokes too much and fucks whoever she wants. Women or men. She falls in love with Ryland Yale, the utterly dedicated and monogamous heir to a lumber empire. Ryland sings in an underground punk band and is gleefully building up a tolerance for heroin… Tragically, Ryland starts to disappear under the layers of a heroin haze. Although she is overwhelmed by loneliness, Delilah struggles to rebuild her life.” Sound like thinly-fictionalized versions of anyone we know?
TASTY BITS: For a long time, lotsa people thought computer-age aesthetics would be all cold-n’-sterile. Then by the mid-’80s, emerging PC-related visual styles (in game software, user-group literature and digital illustration) threatened to drown us all in bad sword-and-sorcery geekdom. Now, I’m happy to report, it’s a whole new picture, especially in the homespun friendly covers of CD-ROMs by small independent developers.
There’s something promising about CD-ROMs, even the ones that suck. It’s a vital artform that can inspire this kind of generic mediocre content in identical bright-n-bouncy packaging. Just lounging in the CD-ROM section of Future Shop is a thrilling experience. If there’s shelf and catalog space for all those discs of generic clip-art, old shareware video games and swimsuit pictures, there’s gotta be a market for something really good if and when it ever arrives.
Another thought: D’ya think music CDs could be sold in 5- or 10-packs “in promotional packaging” like the grab bags of low-end CD-ROMs? With the Wall St. Journal reporting a “glut out there” in indie rock releases, maybe low-sellers could be repackaged as The Five-Foot Pack of Punk, or 1,001 Straight Edge Rants, or even Super Value Bundle of White Kids Who Think They’re George Clinton.
Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.
PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…
THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…
LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.
THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…
WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!
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.
