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LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.
And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.
Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).
Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.
When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.
I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”
Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.
But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.
The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.
But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.
(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)
Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.
Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:
“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”
Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.
TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.
IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.
ELSEWHERE:
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.
After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.
So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:
“Money. It’s not everything.”
“Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”
“Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”
“There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”
“Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”
“Is that fourth car really necessary?”
“Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”
“Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”
“You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”
(Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)
IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.
TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?
FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.
CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).
But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.
“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.
But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.
So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.
But there’s nothing like the original.
The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.
The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.
There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.
What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.
A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.
USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.
TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.
LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.
Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.
On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.
But the differences go deeper.
Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.
Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.
What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.
For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.
It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.
More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.
MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?
A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….
SHOULD’VE DONE IT YEARS AGO, I know, but the prospect of expiring dental insurance finally got me to getting my last three wisdom teeth out, in one big operation.
Because the lower two were impacted (not only stuck beneath the gums but down there sideways), it was a big-deal surgery, with full anesthetic and prescription painkillers (just ultra-strength Motrin, not anything narcotic–don’t even ask me to sell you any leftover pills), and a long at-home rehab.
Fortunately, I live in the age of cyber-capitalism and media saturation, so being groggy and alone at home all day wasn’t that much of a bother. Not with the modern conveniences available today.
Modern convenience #1: Kozmo.com. Begun in NYC last year and now operating in four cities, Kozmo (yes, the name’s a variant on Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer) delivers video rentals, snack foods, and a small selection of books and CDs. And it’s actually them doing the delivering, not some overnight service. That means in the approximate time-frame of a pizza delivery, you can start viewing any of 16,000 flicks. (Not enough of my favorite obscurities and cult-classics, but a serviceable-enough list.)
Modern convenience #2: CBC Television. My cable company finally brought the Canadian channel back, so once again view its unique public-broadcasting-with-commercials mix. In many ways it’s what PBS could’ve been if it ever had the nerve–investigative news-magazine shows, family dramas, un-cloying family dramas, late-night nudie “art” movies, sharp political satire, newscasts that actually cover foreign non-earthquake stories, great sports (currently: lotsa hockey; coming in January: curling!), and the venerable British soap Coronation Street!
Modern convenience #3: Home Grocer. They only deliver the day following your online order, but you don’t have to leave the house to be supplied with your post-oral-surgery dietary needs (diet shakes, yogurt, Gatorade, applesauce, cocoa, et al.).
Modern convenience #4: Modern oral-surgery technique. I went in and was promptly strapped to the operating chair, given the anesthetic gas and then a knockout shot. An hour later I was gently aroused and led, groggy, onto a day bed in a darkened “recovery room.” A half-hour after that, a friend led me downstairs to a waiting taxi. Except for three new mouth holes and an achy jaw, I was sufficiently clear-headed to resume working for at least a few hours the following day.
Old-fashioned inconvenience #1: Dry sockets. A surgical complication I was led to believe only smokers had to worry about. Instead, pieces of my first post-surgical meal (soft French fries with the skin on) got stuck deep in the gum folds of both lower extraction sites, beyond the reach of any salt-water rinse or Listerine, preventing the blood clot needed for wound-healing.
The result: Five days of excruciating pain, starting two days after the operation. Pain ultimately unrelievable by the pills prescribed to me or by any other legal substances (and I didn’t use any illegal ones). Pain that prevented sleep and caused near-hallucinatory states. All that, plus two bouts of nausea, before I could get back to the surgeon for a medicinal-gauze implant.
But walking to the Medical-Dental Building for the second appointment, I had to pass the Bon Marche’s breast-cancer-awareness window displays, and remembered my mother’s recent bout with the disease (she’s doing very well now, thank you).
It put my own non-life-threatening suffering into perspective.
TOMORROW: Could The Blair Witch Project be considered a Dogme 95 movie?
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the beauty that is the Amtrak Cascades train to Vancouver, B.C.
Vancouver itself is also still beautiful. But it’s not exactly running with what old Hamilton Watch ads used to call “Railroad Accuracy.”
I’d been intrigued enough to go there by the headlines back in late August: “Clark Calls It Quits.” Turns out my northern namesake, Glen Clark, was being forced to resign as B.C.’s Premier.
It came after RCMP investigators found documents showing he’d been arranging for sweetheart deals to well-connected pals who wanted a casino license. It was one of a series of influence-peddling and corporate-welfare scandals that had befallen many B.C. politicians in the past. One such prior scandal had led to the demise of the Social Credit Party, which had run the B.C. government with an iron hand for most of the ’70s and ’80s.
Mr. Clark’s party leadership appointed a new premier, who announced immediately he wouldn’t run for the post in the next election; which means the province will have had at least seven premiers in a 10-year span.
Without going too far into the wacky realm of Canadian politics, let’s just note that it’s a Parlaimentary system. The party that elects the most legislators picks the chief executive, who has nearly full reign over the government for five years (but can call an early election if the opinion polls look promising). Political parties can be national or regional, and can come and go in a single election cycle.
Currently there’s only one dominant national party, the Liberals of national Prime Minister Jean Chretien (who, like the Democrats south of the border and the Labour party in Britain, have become a lot less liberal lately).
In B.C., provincial politics is divided between the Euro-Socialistic New Democrats (which Mr. Clark led until his forced resignation) and a pro-corporate Liberal Party branch (heavily backed by right-wing publisher Conrad Black’s daily papers). As long as voters keep electing NDP governments, Black’s papers will keep sniffing for any potential scandal and the Mounties (ostensibly an apolitical organization but ultimately answering to the federal Liberals) will keep getting called in to investigate the papers’ allegations.
Now you know just a little of why commentators regularly call B.C. politics “a blood sport.”
Of course, premiers like Mr. Clark might have a little stronger hold on power if the local economy were doing well. It’s not.
The Asian recession and the Canadian dollar’s pitiful exchange rate have depressed the import-export trade, one of B.C.’s economic stalwarts. Another big sector, timber and other resource-based businesses, has struggled under the manipulative hands of global financiers (the big logging firm Macmillan Bloedel just agreed to sell out to Weyerhaeuser).
Canada’s #2 department-store chain, Eaton’s, is folding. (Vancouver’s only home-owned department store, Woodward’s, folded a few years ago; its downtown building’s still vacant.) The country’s #2 air carrier, Canadian Airlines, may disappear in a merger deal currently being worked out. Vancouver’s most venerable bookstore chain, Duthie’s, just closed nine of its ten branches.
Things are even scarier in the downtown East End, the only true “bad area” in all of Canada. A Green River-like serial killer’s been stalking the neighborhood’s addicts, streetwalkers, and down-and-outers in recent years; taking lives and causing some British Columbians to start questioning their land’s quiet, harm-free reputation.
TOMORROW: The rest of this story: What’s still great about Vancouver.
TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS: Who sez nothing really exciting ever happens in Seattle?
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: By all means, get thee on an Amtrak Cascades train as soon as feasible.
The train itself is fine enough. It’s a spectacular-on-the-outside, comfy-on-the-inside long passenger vehicle. The passenger cars are like a modern airline cabin, only with legroom. The dining and snack-bar cars allow for pleasant stranger-meeting during the consumption of only slightly-overpriced foodstuffs and microbrews.
(The snack-bar car also features a luscious Northwest satellite map on its ceiling, with cities and towns denoted by fiber-optic points-O-light.)
The service is impeccible, too. Particularly the customs and immigration routines on the Seattle-Vancouver route. In Vancouver, the legal rigamarows are handled at the train station upon disembarking (like it’s done on planes but not on buses). Heading south, the U.S. border cops do their interrogations on the moving train between Blaine and Bellingham, meaning no delays (except for those unfortunate travelers detained in B’ham for further investigation).
And there’s entertainment, sorta, in the form of on-train movies. Some of them are dull recent big-studio “comedies” like you’d see in-flight. But on the first half of my round trip, they showed It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, considered something of a slapstick classic. (It also just so happens to be a movie in which bad things repeatedly happen to people in cars, trucks, and airplanes; i.e., not on trains.) Before and after the movie, the video monitors display regularly-updated status screens with the current time and temperature and a map of the route showing how far you’ve gone thus far.
But the real star of the two Amtrak Cascades routes (Seattle-Vancouver and Seattle-Portland-Eugene) is, natch, the scenery.
You don’t just see more of the scenic PacNW beauty, up close, than you can by plane or car.
You see a vision of what North America was like before the Interstates and the subdivisions.
What you will see on Amtrak:
<Tunnels: Beautiful, in the manner of the empty space full of possibilities.
Then there’s the train-travelin’ experience itself. It softly lulls you with the hypnotic click-clack, the size and comforts of the train car, the perfectly-maintained interior temperatures (getting hot only when late-afternoon sun bursts in thru the huge windows).
It’s enough to make one forget that, in the Golden Age of Railroading (roughly 1865-1950), the RR biz in the U.S. epitomized some of the worst examples of corporate power–and, in the western states where railroads were given huge “land grants,” the government subsidies some folks nowadays call “corporate welfare.”
Today, you’re not riding with the likes of the old Great Northern or Union Pacific (who could make or unmake whole communities by the service they chose to offer or the freight rates they charged to local shippers). You’re riding with friendly, scrappy li’l Amtrak, a publicly-supported enterprise that’s worked nearly three decades to make passenger rail service a viable alternative means of travel, and which is finally starting to succeed at this goal.
MONDAY: Arriving in glorious Vancouver, where political regimes have lifespans akin to those of fruitflies.
IN OTHER NEWS: Washington’s own role-playing game kings Wizards of the Coast are selling out to Hasbro, which over the past decade has grown from Mr. Potato Head and G.I. Joe to buying at least half of the toy-and-game biz’s best-known names, including, appropriately, Monopoly. Wizards’ owners will get $325 million, plus 100 Strength Points… and the saddest news of the day by far. Game over. (Found by EatonWeb)
THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)
SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)
AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.
BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”
SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.
For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).
Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:
You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.
‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”
THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.
As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).
Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.
NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)
During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.
SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.
Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…
BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.
Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…
WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.
This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)
Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”
MISC. ISN’T REALLY as ironic as some readers seem to believe. Really. That AFLAC commercial using a cover of John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” to sell life insurance, without commentary–now that’s ironic. In another current attempt at irony…
THE GENERATION-GAP GAP: KMTT’s promoting its “grownup rock n’ roll” format with billboards proclaiming a mantra to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop the Kids Off at Soccer.” The unspoken premise behind the slogan is the same premise that’s ruled darn near all local mainstream media outlets for the past 15 years–that everybody (or at least everybody who demographically matters to advertisers) is an ex-Sixties radical now domesticated with preteen kids. The problems with this particular gross oversimplification: (1) Despite the eternal hype, a lot of folks who were around back in that still-overhyped decade weren’t necessarily college radicals (in fact, more than half the people living in America in The Late Sixties weren’t even college students!); and (2) folks with preteen kids today are far more likely to have come of age in the late ’70s and ’80s. That’s why KMTT’s sister station KNDD peppers its 9-to-5 hours with old U2 and Duran Duran tracks, to attract the commercially-desirable ex-waveoids now toiling away in dreary office parks. Of course, it’d be harder to make a flashy billboard slogan for grownup synth-popper parents. At the youngest end, there are now households with kids who only know Jane Curtin from 3rd Rock and parents who previously only knew Curtin from Kate & Allie. Speaking of TV celebs…
NEWS FROM UP NORTH: David (Red Shoe Diaries) Duchovny, who plays an occasionally-dead FBI agent on The X-Files, wants Fox to move the show from Vancouver to L.A. so he can spend more time with his sitcom-star bride Tea Leoni. I say, they maybe oughta merge their respective shows into one production so they can be together all the time. They could play a couple of intrepid tabloid photographers in search of E.T.s, killer vampires, and other assorted grisly phenomena. They could call it The Naked Truth Is Out There. Elsewhere in the world of romance…
TAIL HUNTING: A recent Cal Berkeley study claims sexual activity can alter the brain. According to an LA Times story, the researchers claimed that after four weeks, a group of sexually-active male lab rats showed much smaller (and perhaps more sensitive and responsive) nerve cells than the control group of celibate rats. While it certainly brings new meaning to the phrase “fucking one’s brains out,” more intriguing is the name of the prof behind the study–Marc Breedlove.
But these findings wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with TV’s famous cartoon lab mice, Pinky and the Brain. In two episodes, the genetically-altered, super-smart Brain (a sort of pint-sized Lawnmower Man with an Orson Welles voice) neglects his usual obsession with taking over the world. Both times, it’s the lure of a female mouse that does it. Elsewhere in the world of science…
REAL VIRTUALITY: The Seattle-made Virtual i-Glasses (goggles with tiny LCD video monitors inside) are no more, but another local company, Microvision, has announced it’s working on a “virtual retinal display” technology that would, if and when perfected for mass production, would use hi-tech glasses or goggles to scan video images (from TVs, PCs, VCRs, etc.) directly onto the viewer’s eye via a low-level, laser-like beam. According to the company’s PR, “the user believes he’s seeing a video image an arm’s length away.” My question is, what would happen if somebody used Microvision to watch a videocassette that’s been copy-protected with Macrovision?
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Your Misc. party-watch team personally witnessed two Xenas, umpteen sword-‘n’-sorcery warriors, lotsa devils, at least three Pippi Longstockings, two Fred Flintstones, a Grinch (with his dog Max and Cindy Lou Who), a bloodied Princess Di (trailed by a photographer sporting a “Le Press Pass” badge), one Bill Gates, several Catwomen (one with a condom on her tail), a pregnant cheerleader, a martini olive, a pair of potted poinsettias, and a Laverne & Shirley pair (I told “Laverne” how much I loved the film Awakenings; she didn’t know what I was talking about).
NOT-SO-PACIFIC RIM: What if the Salmon War escalated into a trade war on all fronts between the U.S. and Canada? It could be fun, seeing which side would dare to live without the other’s products the longest. They’d have to stop going to most movies, driving most cars, eating most packaged food products, and shopping sprees to the Burlington, WA outlet mall. We’d have to give up hockey, Crown Royal whiskey, and–oh yeah–cheaper grades of paper, like the newsprint that becomes fine weekly tabloid-size newspapers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so fun after all. Maybe we should figure out a way out of this mess before it gets to that point.
SPICE GIRLS: One of the things I miss most about Moe was its dining room’s large selection of obscure indie hot sauces. There’s more of these out there than ever, thanks to increased demand for exotic foods, bigger supermarkets with more space for different items, and that ol’ pop-cult blessing/ curse, the collector. The trade mag Fancy Food quotes Jennifer Trainer Thompson, author of The Hot Sauce Collector’s Guide, as saying there’s “such a demand today for collectible hot sauces and gifts that makers are releasing the same sauce over and over again and just putting different labels on it.”
One example of creative labeling is the same mag’s ad for Pepper Girl sauces from Calif.-based Peppertown USA. Each product has a label inspired by ’40s-’50s pin-up illustration: Fifi’s Nasty Little Secret (pineapple-jalapeno, with a French maid on the label); Kitten’s Big Banana (banana-mango-habanero, with a bathing beauty); Wrong Number (chipotle-mango-habaerno, with a lingirie model holding a dial telephone); Bad Girls In Heat (papaya-pumpkin-habaerno, with two hitchhikers in slinky dresses); and Sultan’s Main Squeeze (passion fruit-Thai pepper, with a belly dancer). Those female diners who might disapprove of those brands might instead prefer an ad elsewhere in the magazine, for the Atlanta-made Scorned Woman Fiery Barbecue Sauce (slogan: “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even!”).
BRING ON THE WARM JETS: In past years, I used to annually print my arguments in defense of Seafair. I skipped it last year, but with the Blue Angels’ noisy spectacle returning to the lineup this weekend I figure it’s time. With Bumbershoot admission getting pricier every year, the Seafair parade and hydro races comprise two of the city’s three most populist gatherings; the first is the Bite of Seattle. This annual triumverate of events reject both the “quiet good taste” of Seattle’s yuppified official culture and the too-cool-to-have-fun taboo that constricts much of our “alternative” community. Sure these are “family” events, as advertised; but they’re for real families: bratty kids, horny teens, dysfunctional parents, grumpy oldsters. They promise pleasant times out-of-doors with food, drink, and unpretentious entertainment (plus a lot of noise). They deliver humanity in all its gross-out, homely, cantankerous, troublesome, pathetic, amazing, loveable variety (plus a lot of noise).
Nature poets (like the poets who used to hold anti-Seafair reading events every year) love to move to communities connected to The Land and The Water, but have a hard time cohabiting with the castes of people who live off of said resources. Seafair honors the people who work in and on the water (sailors, fishers, shipbuilders, stevedores) and those who feel affinity with them (regular working stiffs)–not the people with million-buck “cabins” on the islands. Similarly, the Bite (particularly the Times-sponsored portion) purports to honor the town’s yupscale restaurant segment, but really celebrates the all-American deadly sin of gluttony as thoroughly as Mardi Gras revels in lust and modern Christmas honors greed. Unlike Folklife’s moderate hammered-dulcimer lovers, the Bite’s a true celebration of the common person. The streets of downtown, increasingly unhospitable to the non-affluent, became on Aug. 1 a temporary invasion site for the forgotten Seattleites. This weekend, the brahmins of Lake Washington are bracing for the onslaught of gauche sex-joke T-shirts, decidedly non-REI rubber rafts, and people at least officially not drinking alcohol in a public park. Plus a lot of noise. Even noisier with the Blue Angels back. I can’t wait.
(Next week: The Misc. midsummer reading list.)
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED at the announcement that Diahann Carroll would star in the touring version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, coming soon to Vancouver. We’d previously written that “race-blind casting” traditionally means all the starring roles in big commercial theatricals go to white folks. So we’re happy to note an exception (even if it’s an exception that proves the rule).
SINGIN’ THE BREWS: If you remember when Bud Dry was hawked as “The Alternative Beer,” get ready for another contender to that dubious title. New management at Maxwell’s, that longtime rock club inside a former Hoboken, NJ coffee factory (on what that PBS Baseball miniseries claimed was the first site where baseball as we know it was played), has installed a brewpub on the premises, with its own “Alternative Brew” and “Percussion Ale.” If market conditions seem plausible (right now the business press claims there’s an impending microbrew glut), they might get sold at other outlets, perhaps even out here.
LIVING OFF THE LAND: Eat the State!: A Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor is an often-clever li’l four-page lefty newsletter. So far it’s been consistently witty and has had a good mix of local and national topics, though it leans a bit too heavy for my taste on the side of self-righteous ranting, too lightly on organizing and solution-seeking. I also have troubles with the name. At a time when even pork-barrel senators now purport to oppose “Big Government,” that ol’ punk-anarchist concept of “The State” seems almost like nostalgia for yesterday’s problems. The old nation-states are indeed being eaten, but it’s Global Business that’s doing the digesting. (Free weekly at the usual dropoff points; online at speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ets/; or $24/year from P.O. Box 85541, Seattle 98145.) Speaking of social theorizin’…
YOU’RE SO VEIN: I also have problems with the political piece in issue #2 of the regional visual-art journal Aorta, relating the Clinton/Dole rivalry to “The Twilight of The Patriarchy.” For nearly a quarter-century now, the leftist labeling of mainstream American society as “The Patriarchy” has utterly failed to recognize the significant contributions individual women have made in service to reactionary politics and social stagnation. After all, if women are capable of doing anything, they’re certainly capable of doing things you or I might not approve of. A writer living in the state of Craswell and Dixy Lee Ray oughta know this. Still speaking of social theorizin’…
GRIN AND BARE IT: As instigator of the cable-access show Political Playhouse, Philip Craft was a master provocateur, attracting the wrath of bluenoses like Sen. Gorton for his on-camera nudity and protest-comedy skits. Toward the end of his show’s two-year run, Craft had begun to move beyond simple protesting and had started to articulate a vision of his ideal alternative society based on practical anarchism. Unfortunately, his new self-published book The Fool on the Hill doesn’t spell out that vision, beyond calling for political power to be recentered onto the county level (an idea similar to ones expressed by the militia cults). Instead, he offers an autobiographical tale about cheating on his wife, taking lotsa drugs, getting investigated by the Feds for advocating some of those drugs on his show, taking on paranoid delusions, and hiding out in the woods. It’s a long way from Craft’s introductory claim that it’s “a paranoid comedy that will forever change the way you view the world… that conspires to bring down the political, economic, and religious institutions that enslave us today.” Rather, it’s a downbeat story of personal loss and confusion, imbued with a sense of vulnerability and humility unseen in Craft’s TV work. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 17320, Seattle 98107.)
WHAT I’LL MISS ABOUT ERNST HARDWARE: The clashing aromas of freshly-cut flowers and freshly-cut lumber. The annual Show Me How Fair in the old Coliseum. The Sonics “In The Paint” promotion. The slogan, “We’ve got a warehouse too; we just don’t make you shop in it.” And, of course, The Fellow In Yellow.
UPDATE: Some months back I named the Wallingford Food Giant Seattle’s best full-size supermarket. Since then, the north end’s been abuzz w/rumors that the place was being sold to Alfalfa’s, the out-of-state yuppie health-food chain. Not so, insists FG management.
THE MAILBAG: I can say the most outrageous things and get no response (perhaps because, as I’ve learned, some folks just assume I’m kidding); while the slightest throwaway gag can cause the most irate responses. Like my little joke about Vancouver’s new Ford Theatre. I’ll readily accept the letter writers’ assertions that Canadians probably know more about American history than Americans know about Canadian history–or than Americans know about American history. I know enough about Canada to endorse DOA singer Joey Shithead’s campaign for the BC legislature (can’t ya see it, “The Honourable M.L.A. Shithead”?). On a related note…
CANADIAN CATHODE CORNER: Canada, especially Vancouver, is gaining awareness as the prime filming site for exploitation TV dramas. I wouldn’t be surprised if next fall Fox aired more Canadian-made prime-time hours than Canadian network CTV. I also wouldn’t be surprised if sci-fi conventions started circulating “fan fiction” stories in which the universes of all the Vancouver-filmed shows (X-Files, Strange Luck, Sliders, Profit, et al.) collided at a dimensional gateway somewhere near the Cambie St. Bridge.
REFLEX, RIP: The regional visual-art tabloid was great while it lasted, and (particularly under first editor Randy Gragg) provided frequent glimpses into the peculiar jargon of art-crit (‘tho sometimes I wished they’d run a glossary of terms). It illuminated issues surrounding the corporate/ institutional art world and the role of creative individuals therein. And it gave many artists precious review clippings. But it was never all it could be, or all its community needed. Its bimonthly schedule meant it could never recommend a show while it was still up. Its nonprofit-bureaucratic structure meant it was eternally begging for gifts from the same funding sources as the artists the paper advocated.
AD VERBS: Still recovering from its old pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads, Subaru is turning toward marketing at specific market segments. As part of this, it’ll soon run specially-designed ads in lesbian magazines, touting its autos as the perfect acoutrement to a practical, sensible Womanlove lifestyle. Meanwhile, Elvira (aka Cassandra Peterson) has quit as a Coors spokeswitch–not due to Coors’ support of right-wing causes but ’cause indie brewery Beverage International offered to market her own line of Elvira Brews. Look for the first bottles in test markets by July.
LET ‘EM GO: EastsideWeek’s new “Independent Republic of the Eastside” promotion sounds a bit like certain secessionist movements in Montana and Idaho, or at least like these pro-sprawl “new county” movements across the Cascade foothills. On the good side, the promotion (devised largely by editor Skip Berger) calls into question the “community spirit” of folks who’ve moved to the burbs precisely to avoid civic commitment, to drive from office park to mall to cul-de-sac without feeling any expressed need for “public space.” And it gives Berger a chance to question some assumptions about suburban growth by offering alternatives: “Will we become Paris, Rome, Venice, or Orange County?” (Place your own joke answer here.)
DOME SWEET DOME: What to do with the Kingdome, with no baseball in three years and possibly no football? (The NFL’s hinted at demanding a new arena in return for keeping or replacing the Seahawks.) The obvious is to keep it for auto shows and tractor pulls, and as an exhibit annex for the Convention Center. The county’s been planning this anyway.
I say, let’s go build two new stadia, with as much private money as possible. Make the football field convertible for NHL hockey; make both convertible for trade shows.
Then take the existing Kingdome, gut its current interior, and rebuild it into the living and recreation space of the future. A World’s Fair domed-city fantasy made real, or a pansexual “intentional community” utopia. Level upon level of PoMo condos around the concourses, looking onto an indoor plaza and celebration zone. The mind reels with the possibilities! (Got any fantasy Dome uses of your own? Send ’em here.)
