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MISC., THE COLUMN that likes to be dressed in tall, skinny type out here in the shade, welcomes the arrival of TicketMaster master Paul Allen to the Seahawks’ helm, tho’ it could mean a Kingdog might soon cost $2.75 plus a $10 convenience charge.
CORREC: Katrina Hellbusch, whose published first-person rape story was mentioned here last month, works in music promotion but isn’t in a band herself.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Grand Salami is a 12-page, slick-paper sports zine put out every Mariners homestand by Jon Wells and Mark Linn. Each ish features updated stats about the Ms and their upcoming home opponents. The next ish will have a cartoon of the editors’ choice for a new stadium–they want one built on top of the present Kingdome, with a AAA team playing in the old dome for quick player transfer. $1 at Bulldog News or outside the Dome before games, or $15/year at 328-1238. Speaking of running for home…
ON THE ROAD: Was amused by the minor brouhaha when a Seattle urban-advocacy group issued a report a few weeks back claiming you’re physically safer living in town than in suburbs, ’cause we might have a few more violent crimes but they’ve got a lot more car wrecks. The suburb-lovin’Â Seattle Times found a UW traffic-engineering prof to call the study flawed. He claimed the report’s methodology was insufficiently documented, and questioned its choice of neighborhoods to compare–the gentrifying upper Queen Anne vs. the sprawling, insufficiently-roaded outskirts of Issaquah. While I can buy the validity of the prof’s hesitations, I also think the report’s premise is definitely worth further study ‘n’ thought. For too long, we’ve allowed “personal safety” to be defined by interests with a decided bias against cities and walking, for suburbs and driving. I know I personally feel more secure in almost any part of Seattle than in almost any part of Bellevue. Speaking of symbols of comfort…
THE GOLDEN BOWL: You already know I think cereal, that all-time “comfort food,” is one of America’s eight or nine greatest inventions. On those rare occasions when I neglect to eat prior to leaving home in the a.m., I always look for a place with cereal on the breakfast menu. (I’m allergic to eggs, so I have few other breakfast-out options.) I was pleased when the Gee Whiz espresso palace opened near the Weathered Wall on 5th, with a modest yet tasty selection of flakes, mini-wheats and Crunch Berries. Now I’m even more pleased ’cause the Red Light Lounge is now open at 47th & U Way (at the front of the New Store’s newest annex). In a setting of classic (and increasingly expensive) diner furnishings, it offers heaping helpings (not tiny single-serve boxes) of your choice from over 50 great cereals, in beautiful oversize bowls with beautiful oversize spoons. No cartoons to watch, but you do get to look at the latest fashion magazines while you enjoy a sugar-frosted treat those emaciated models must deny themselves. Speaking of fast food and gender roles…
WHAT’S YOUR BEEF?: At a time when Burger King and McDonald’s have simultaneous Disney promos, some burger chains are indeed trying to reach adult eaters (or at least arrested-post-adolescent eaters). An Advertising Age story reports how the Rally’s chain has a TV spot (running in about 30 percent of the country but nowhere near here) that opens with a shot of a pickup truck waiting at a traffic light. As the article relates, “A convertible pulls up with a guy driving and two beautiful babes aboard. `What’s he got that I ain’t got?’ the pickup driver says to his friend, who responds matter-of-factly, `he’s probably got a Big Buford.’ The driver stares downward in astonishment: `Look at the size of that thing!’ `We see the women in the car suggestively eating their giant Big Buford hamburgers. `You like ’em big, huh?’ the driver says to one of the women. `It’s not the size,’ she says coyly. `It’s the taste, stupid.'”
‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder this from the late great Erma Bombeck: “Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.”
CATHODE CORNER: After a little under two months on the air, the NorthWest Cable News channel can politely be termed on a “shakedown cruise”. What oughta be a brisk, informative roundup of regional happennings is instead a clumsy repackaging of footage from the four King Broadcasting stations. The same stories are rerun hour after hour, often with only the weather updated. I won’t talk about the evening sports guy, a comedian-wannabe who spends more time on unfunny gags than on the games. Still, it’s intriguing to hear about economic conditions in Spokane (lousy) and last month’s Oregon Senate race (wacky). I remember the semipro beginnings of CNN and ESPN, so I’ll let NWCN grow into its role. Others, like TCI customers who lost CBC for NWCN, might not be as charitable. I do sorta like how they insist on spelling “NorthWest” with software-marketing style “intercaps;” it’s a way of proclaiming your media market as a virtual nation, like when the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland.” Speaking of media institutions…
FALLLING FLAT: The most inadvertantly fascinating part of last month’s PBS Fight Over Citizen Kane documentary was Wm. Randolph Hearst’s creaky newsreel sermon against FDR’s increases to upper-bracket income taxes. It reminded me a lot of Steve Forbes’s flat tax nonsense. Both publishers’ tactics use populist rhetoric to promote the self-interests of the wealthy, particularly those with significant inherited wealth such as themselves. The comparisons go beyond there. Forbes and Hearst are/ were party-lovin’ men-about-town known to hobnob with movie stars. Hearst’s papers provided a self-contained information system, in which no voice too far from his own worldview got heard or respected. Forbes’s magazines haven’t gone that far, but the right-media universe of talk radio, televangelists and opinion magazines (whose support the GOP candidates are courting) fulfill Hearst’s formula better than the old man could have imagined.
(If anyone saved a copy of Forbes’s short-lived entertainment-fashion mag Egg, I’d love to borrow it. It could potentially be a hoot.)
THE MATS: Once the media consolidation bill (the one Net censorship was tacked onto) was signed, the Disney/ ABC and Time Warner/ Turner Broadcasting merger plans went “on” again. The latter deal was protested in an NY Times ad: “Attention TBS Stockholders: Does Ted Turner have a personal vendetta against the World Wrestling Federation? Time Warner Beware!” Turner’s properties happen to include a rival faux-sport circuit, World Championship Wrestling. WCW scored a coup a couple years back when it signed Hulk Hogan, formerly WWF’s #1 star. I’m foggy on the details, but I believe there was tangled legal wrangling before Hogan was freed to use his stage name (which WWF had trademarked) on WCW shows. Methinks the WWF guys take their stage bombast too seriously.
ROOM AT THE TOP?: The gentrification of upper Queen Anne has gone into overdrive. On one block alone a hobby shop, a café, a bakery, a state liquor store, and a pharmacy have perished to make room for as many as seven espresso emporia and two bagel stands. And you know a neighborhood’s gone out of our hands when San Franciscans open ridiculously sublime restaurant/ nightclubs there (Paragon). Queen Anne News writer Robin Hamilton’s taking it in stride. Writing about a co-marketing arrangement between Starbucks and its new QA neighbor Noah’s Bagels, Hamilton shows her knowledge of Jewish lore in explaining how “Noah’s will play Ruth to Starbucks’ Naomi.”
PLAYING MONOPOLY: A fight for the hearts and minds of America’s youth ended with Mattel withdrawing its $5.2 billion hostile-takeover bid for Hasbro (which went on its own acquisition spree a few years back and owns Playskool, Romper Room, Selchow & Righter, and Milton Bradley). Re-create the excitement at home with your handy Barbie vs. GI Joe land war playset… Meanwhile, Hasbro’s lawyers keep upping demands for reparations against a Seattle-based adult website for using the name “candyland.com,” claiming it could be confused with the Candy Land game. If I wanted a porno-pun on a board game, it wouldn’t be that. Maybe Chutes & Ladders, or Go to the Head of the Class…
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.
As boosters of local small business, Misc. is pleased as punch that Hale’s Ales is building a new facility on Leary Way, but slightly saddened that it’s going to take over the site now occupied by one of my all-time favorite Seattle building names, the House of Hose.
DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK (seen before a body-piercing segment on the Lifetime cable fashion show Ooh La La): “Warning! The following piece contains images some viewers may find sorta gross.”
THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”
STUFF I GET IN THE MAIL: Each week I get PR directives that just don’t warrant a complete column item, yet are good for at least a moment’s reflection. F’r instance: Ex-KCMU manager Chris Knab now leads seminars on how to make it in the music-marketing biz. The four-week course costs $149… There’s something out for this summer called the Carol Woir Slimsuit (“The Swimsuit With A Personality”), a one-piece women’s swimsuit with a built-in corset-like thingie. Its ads say “Lose An Inch, Gain The Glamour”… C-Space, a biweekly forum/ support meeting for local S/M pursuers, is hanging up its spikes for the last time after five years. Speaking of postal submissions…
NO MILK, THANKS: I was amused when a reader sent in six pages clipped from a Cheri magazine pictorial about nude waitresses at one “Big Cups Coffeehouse.” The story claims the café’s been in business in Seattle for four years. It’s all fictional, of course (it probably wouldn’t even be legal here). Florida and Texas, though, have had a tradition of novelty nude businesses (car washes, laundromats, donut shops, pool halls); so the concept might seem plausible to some Cheri readers. Speaking of stapled Seattle sightings…
THE GOOD LOAF: Somewhat more factual than the Cheri pictorial was the May Esquire article about Seattle’s “baby boom slackers,” whitebread liberal-arts grads of the magazine’s target demographic who used to have time-consumin’ bigtime careers but now hang out at the Honey Bear Bakery, having chosen “voluntary simplicity” instead of the work-hard-spend-hard ideology long advocated by the magazine. I certainly hope the mag’s readers will realize the selectivity it used. The story notes that only 70 percent of U.S. adult males now work full-time year-round at one job; but from personal knowledge I can assure you a lot of those guys walking around in the daytime with self-DTP’d “consultant” business cards aren’t there fully by choice. Not to mention the millions who haven’t had the chance to quit a well-paying job. Speaking of the world of work…
ON THE MAKE: Was reminded three times this month of the good ol’ days of American business, the days when this country was interested in making things instead of just marketing them. The first was the Times obit for Weyerhaeuser exec Norton Clapp. The article’s lead labeled Clapp with the now-quaint rubric of “industrialist.” The second was Our World, the monthly USA Today ad supplement touting things like new concrete-fabrication plants in ex-Soviet republics. The third was when I got to play with a friend’s CD-ROM drive. Among his discs was The Time Almanac, with texts and pix from old Time magazines thru the decades. But it didn’t have the real joy of collecting old Time issues, the ads. Old Time ads from the ’40s and ’50s are wonderful evocations of a time when the Opinion Makers of most towns outside NYC were bourbon-swillin’, tweed-wearin’ managers of small and midsize manufacturing plants. The ads pushed roller bearings, conveyor belts, commercial air conditioning systems, semi rigs, axle greases, grinding wheels, and all that other cool stuff you never see around the house. I’d much rather see more ads of that type than the ads you see in today’s Time for import luxury cars and prescription hair-growth tonic. Speaking of CD-ROMS…
WINDOW PEEPING: The thing about those new X-rated videos on CD-ROM is that the images are so small and lo-res, the old adage about risking blindness via overuse might in this case actually be true.
As promised, here’s the second half of the official Misc. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List. If your question wasn’t used, you didn’t ask it frequently enough.
11. Howcum in your FAQ the questions are in italics, but in Savage Love it’s the answers that are in italics?
Dan looks better in italics than I do.
12. Why didn’t you write about that party/play/movie I saw you at?
(a) I tend not to review private events or discuss my personal life. (b, c) Either somebody else got to review it, or there wasn’t space for it that week, or it stank too bad to be worth mentioning.
13. Why didn’t you write about ___?
I probably didn’t hear about it ’til just now.
14. But you don’t really like ____ (football/beef/regular supermarkets/cold cereal/TV/ heterosexuality), do you? Don’t you have to be a redneck fascist to like that?
(a) Yes. (b) No.
15a. Isn’t the Seattle scene “over”?
If you mean a hegemonous gaggle of bands all playing the exact same “sound,” that never existed. If you mean people gathering to explore art and make statements, that’s just getting started. What made Seattle bands wasn’t a sound, but a non-Hollywood (sometimes even anti-Hollywood) attitude toward cultural production and consumption.
15b. I hate Seattle bands because I hate ____ (long hair, flannel, backward baseball caps, distortion pedals, heroin, teen angst). How can you possibly like them?
The media “grunge” stereotype became so precise that no local band came close to completely fitting it. The only thing all Seattle bands have in common is that they all now boast that they’re “Notgrunge.”
16a. How much do you really like the Northwest?
Mostly I think of my region like the big sister I never had, the kind of gal all the guys in school are in love with. I adore her dearly but I still feel the need to shout out, “She’s not the goddess already! She used to throw spitwads at me!”
16b. You must have loved growing up out in the country. You want to move back there, right?
Absolutely not. I was bored to tears as a kid; the place has a few more things to do now, but it’s also turned into big ugly houses as far as the eye can see. The “Back to Eden” fantasy is one of the chief things wrong with America. “Moving to the country” is simply the intellectually-acceptable version of suburban sprawl.
17. Why do college professors still obsess about Madonna, years after everyone else has stopped?
Shh. Let’s not tell them there’s been other music in the past 10 years, or that these days “a woman in charge of her music” means one who can write songs and/or play an instrument.
18. Now that the dream of economic empowerment thru entrepreneurism is available to more and more Americans, aren’t liberals obsolete?
Absolutely not. A forest that’s been clearcut by 20 small companies is just as dead as one that’s been clearcut by one big company; small business can shaft employees and customers just like big ones–heck, those old slave plantations would now be classified as “family farms.” The basic tenet of liberalism, as I see it, is that the business of America isn’t just business. We need to care for our people and our land, not just our bottom lines. Indeed, in an evolving economy we have to pay extra attention to non-material values.
Still, a decentralized, small-biz economy is the best hope for urban neighborhoods (make your own opportunities, don’t depend on big employers or big government), minority rights, free speech, and renewed creativity (though boho types will need another philosophical basis when there’s no more “Mainstream” to rebel against). However, change can work for people or against them. We’ve seen change done wrong in the ex-Socialist countries, as pensioners and working families get the shaft to make their countries more inviting to global financiers. Can we do better? Only if we treat this transitional time with truly moral concern, not with the piousfaux-morality of the right.
19. What were Yogi and Boo-Boo doing in the same bed all winter?
You’ll have to ask Dan that one.
Here at Misc. we love the idea of the recent McDonald’s All-American Gymnastics Tourney. You probably always think of Quarter Pounders with Super Size fries when you see lithe toned athletes bulging out of their tights. It’s the weirdest corporate sponsorship since Yuban coffee sponsored the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, a story that takes place while its heroine’s asleep.
CONSUMER TIP OF THE WEEK: Dave’s cigarettes are really made by those Jesse Helms lovers at Philip Morris USA. The pseudo-small-business ad campaign is just a crock, like all the “family” winemakers in the late ’70s that were really owned by Gallo. As if a one-tractor, 20-acre tobacco farm run by one guy “who works for nobody but himself” could afford all those fancy ads, billboards and point-of-sale displays.
WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Alternative X is an online journal curated by a literary essayist using the (allegedly real) name Mark Amerika. Its main attraction is “In Memoriam to Postmodernism,” a book-length package of essays on “avant pop” fiction (defined here as everybody from Kathy Acker to Mark Leyner) and other topics. Included in the package are:
* “Strategies of Disappearance, or Why I Love Dean Martin” by Stranger interviewee Steve Shaviro (praising the eternally-indifferent “Zen Master of the Rat Pack”);
* “A Mysterious Manifesto” by Don Webb, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a mainstream science-fiction fan (because commercial SF/ fantasy denies any real sense of mystery and wonder in favor of “grey” formula predictability); and
* “An Essay-Simulacrum on Avant-Pop” by Curt White, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a “radical” (because they haven’t “advanced any description of a social organization beyond capitalism more invigorating than the oft-used and dusty phrase `true participatory democracy'”).
Also on the site is “Toward the New Degenerate Narrative,” a “literary manifesto” by Bruce Benderson that starts with a cute rant against bureaucratically-edited school textbooks and goes on to expose the classist assumptions behind the “progressive” fantasy of a utopian small-town society where everybody’s “nice” and soft-spoken–the same fantasy behind the “Northwest Lifestyle” rhetoric. Benderson notes that much of the post-hippie left’s politics “have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain lifestyle: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about The Other.” He also disses the slogan “Hate Is Not A Family Value,” asserting that “hate and resentment keep the family’s incestuous urges tensely leashed.”
THE FINE PRINT (on a tub of Dannon Light ‘N Crunchy Low Fat Yogurt with Aspartame Sweetener and Crunchies): “Contains one-third fewer calories than the leading brand of sugar-sweetened yogurt with crunchies.”
HEY SAILOR!: As some of you know, I live in the general vicinity of the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall in Belltown. So when chartreuse-haired guys n’ gals started lining up in front of the place on the evening of 3/3, some neighbors and neighborhood people shuddered out loud that they were gonna be kept awake by another of the all-night raves that had been held there over the past year. I reassured them this was different: Live bands (no incessant disco beats), in an all-ages show that’d be over before midnight.
Inside, the scene was a flashback to a time when today’s underage punks were in diapers. By the time the amazing Team Dresch played a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover, the time warp was complete. With one big difference (bigger than the gig’s total on-stage ratio of eight females to three males)–unlike the old rental-hall punk shows, where drinking, drugging, fighting and hall-trashing were constant presences or threats, this crowd grew up under the burden of the Teen Dance Ordinance, knew an all-ages show was something precious, and behaved accordingly. Part of the credit goes to promoter Lori LaFavor (a partner in the old local music tabloid Hype). She booked some of the biggest names in indie music, who also happened to share a belief that music should be more than a mere excuse for partying but a means toward communication and community.
12/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)
MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:
LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS
HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…
MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”
UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…
BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.
The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.
How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).
Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…
FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).
One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.
But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…
140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”
YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.
(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)
AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”
WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.
A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.
WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.
The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.
The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…
EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.
DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.
PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.
THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.
URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”
IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…
Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:
PASSAGE
Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”
REPORT
There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.
Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Procrustean”
12/93 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.
WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA
This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).
REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.
Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.
COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.
ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).
COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?
COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.
RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.
POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?
THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.
DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”
TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.
PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.
BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”
SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.
PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.
THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.
ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.
XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.
FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”
Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”
My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?
Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.
“Phenocryst”
1/93 Misc. Newsletter
ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:
`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’
It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”
From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.
In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).
The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)
Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.
SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.
SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….
The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.
THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”
AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….
Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.
ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.
IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.
WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….
I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.
‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).
Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”
Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).
“Flocculent”
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AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST
For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,
not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.
4/92 Misc. Newsletter
Why Men Don’t Get Madonna
We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).
Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.
Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?
Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.
The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”
Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).
Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.
Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.
Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.
Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…
Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.
Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).
Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.
License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…
The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”
‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”
Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”
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“Orthogonal”
9/91 Misc. Newsletter
Bug-Proof Pantyhose
Welcome back to an autumnally-seasoned edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that’s fond of noting that in the Robt. Venturi design with its vertical relief stripes, the name SEATTLE ART MUSEUM appears to be spelled with dollar signs.
THE RED SQUARES: On Mon., 8/19, I wrote in my ongoing computer file, “There are moments in the life of the world that make it tough to be a humor writer, even a world-weary, cynical humor writer.” Then the attempt at bringing back eight men’s sorry vision of the “good old days” disappeared faster than the stock at a Russian butcher, and I could retain my generally hopeful worldview about democratic progress in all countries except mine. I also reaffirmed how much I can hate public radio sometimes: call me a traditionalist, but world-crisis bulletins shouldn’t be combined with easy-listening background music (I refuse to call that Windham Hill-style music they use “jazz”).
A MOVING EXPERIENCE: Within weeks of the Weekly “discovering” my neighborhood, my landlord raised the rent significantly. Don’t let this happen to you! Took the increase as an opportunity to move (for only the second time in seven years; more desperate finances made me run from the upscalers eight times from ’81 to ’84). I will miss parts of the Broadway neighborhood, but will not miss the BMW car alarms malfunctioning at all hours or the ceiling that became a giant loudspeaker for the upstairs apt.’s stereo.
FILM TITLE OF THE MONTH: Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking.
FRAMED IN PUPPETLAND: The hoopla over Pee-wee, and all the child psychologists talking about how to tell your kids the sad news, is pathetic. The poor idol of millions hasn’t even been convicted yet. You’ve got to remember this was in south Fla., home of the 2-Live-Crew-busters, where there may have been official pressure to track down a white celebrity to harass in order to maintain a pretense of impartiality. Actually, it turns out that the arresting officer was part of a three-man squad assigned solely to make arrests for the most victimless sex act of all. (It’s such a Pee-wee sort of activity, too; self-possessive, compulsive, fantasy-possessed). For the record, he was watching straight porno films; a semiotics book a couple years back noted that the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters are based on common gay-camp personas.
WILD IN THE STREETS: KING and KIRO dumped Sat. AM cartoons for news (and local commercials). Now, when there’s violence on Sat. morning TV, the victims won’t be alive in the next scene. Both newscasts are heavily supplemented with filler satellite footage from other stations around the country. The stations chose just the right week to start their Sat. morn news, the morning after the traditional biggest Fri. night of brawl of the year. The Seafair riots are wimpy compared to riots in other cities for more substantial celebrations such as winning a Super Bowl, but our minor street brawls and our hydro-drunks keep the old rowdy Seattle spirit alive despite the annual proclamation that Seafair has, at last, become a “true family event.” The expectedly strident pre-parade anti-war rally was met by a Christian country-rock band sponsored by KMPS, singing “I love A-Mair-i-Kuh / I love the U-S-A” (with a military snare-drum riff) and shouting afterwards, “You know the line, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.” The TV stations, also expectedly, allowed no significant time for the protesters to tell why they were there and plenty of time for officials to insist how everybody besides a few foul-mouths is in total unquestioning obedience to our national authorities.
CATHODE CORNER: Employees of Telemation, once Seattle’s biggest video production facility, spray-painted the outside of the building the Fri. night after the company was shut down by its out-of-state buyer, the Home Shopping Network. By early Mon. morning, all offending statements (including the blacking-out of the parent company’s name) were whitewashed over….
On 8/15, KING discovered a Northwest angle to the latest Royal scandal: Di’s petite 2-piece bathing suit (that made the cover of every UK tabloid) was designed by Oregon’s Jantzen. (In The Mouse on the Moon, the film sequel to The Mouse That Roared, a BBC announcer proclaimed a British connection to the Grand Fenwick space program in the form of the astronauts’ wristwatch.)
MODULATIONS: KNDD (“The End”), the new “cutting edge” format on the old KRAB-KGMI frequency, is like Old Wave Night at the Romper Room. Instead of the greatest hits of Phil Collins, they play the greatest hits of U2. Their last format was for folks whose musical tastes stop at 1970; this is for folks whose tastes stopped in ’87. (At least they play Thrill Kill Kult in light rotation.)
TRUE CRIME: A Montana fugitive was spotted on 8/1 by his old warden when they inadvertently met at an Ms game. In any previous year he’d never have had to worry about anybody finding him there.
HOBSON’S CHOICE ’92: Rebecca Boren and Joel Connelly are reportedly feuding over who’ll get to cover the ’92 US Senate race for the P-I. On KCTS panel shows, Connelly has shown to be fond of possible Republican candidate Rod Chandler and unfond of possible Democratic candidate Mike Lowry.
AD VERBS: NutriSystem’s running flashy ads pointing with pride to an endorsement by Healthline magazine. Weight Watchers announced it was promised the same endorsement, but refused to pay the magazine for favorable coverage.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH: The NY Times piece (8/6) on minor Florida theme parks: ones you might not know (Flea World, the Elvis Presley Museum, Gatorland, and “Xanadu, Home of the Future”), are in the works (the Transcendental Meditation park “Maharishi Veda Land” planned by magician/TM devotee Doug Henning), the USSR/US friendship park Peristroika Palace), and ones that never made it. The latter included Bible World, Western Fun World, Hurricane World (“a glorified wind tunnel that could transport tourists into the eye of a storm”), Little England (“a grandiose re-creation of an ancient British village,” sounding like an old G. Vidal story about Disney buying all of England), and Winter Wonderlando (“skiing in central Florida. Great name. Lousy concept”).
Runner-up: The 8/1Â Wall St. Journal report that “Kanebo Ltd. in Osaka plans to test US markets this year for pantyhose embedded with microcapsules that moisturize while the wearer walks. It sells scented pantyhose in Japan, where it just introduced insect-repellent hose.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH: The Ballard law office storefront “Mullavey, Prout, Grenley, Foe and Lawless.”
AGIT PROPS: The Downtown Seattle Assn. call for censorship against one of the In/Public sets of artist’s aphorisms, echoing a woefully ignorant and arrogant P-I editorial calling the project “not art but arrogance,” is itself an arrogant act.Bold verbal statements are indeed an artform. They have been so at least since the 10 Commandments were etched in stone. The postmod incarnation of this art takes the boldness of current T-shirt/bumpersticker philosophy and turns it around so it challenges, instead of reinforces, the consumer culture (perhaps the real reason the retailers hate it). It demands the right to not be “cheerful” or “colorful,” as a merchant spokesperson described his idea of good art. In an allegedly image-drenched era, it affirms the power of the written word. It has it limits, though, as evidenced by theGuerrilla Girls posters at the Greg Kucera Gallery. The GGs really to nothing to help female and minority visual artists; they just point out that nobody else in the mainstream art elite does. It could also be argued that declaring all female artists to be one class or even one genre, regardless of what any of them does, only keeps the artists’ own voices stifled.
A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THE GUERRILLA GIRLS WOULDN’T LIKE: A new bio claims Time-Life heiress Claire Booth Luce, archetypal career woman and wielder of unprecedented power in politics and publishing, obtained a great deal of her influence by sleeping with politicians, editors other than her husband, generals, theatrical producers, etc. A first reaction might be that she’s betrayed, from beyond the grave as it were, the millions of women who came after her fighting for a similar degree of influence on the basis of merit alone. But if she hadn’t done what she did, would there have been as much opportunity for those who followed her? (Probably.) Will today’s women live without her for a role model? (Undoubtedly; the Republicanism she espoused is the nemesis of current feminists.)
STOP THE PRESSES: At least three Misc. readers have been sending me clips from that awful Dave Barry, the “humor” columnist whose one-note theme is “Yeah, so I’m an affluent, dull white guy, so what?” Once, humorists had fun getting involved with the exciting parts of their cultures (jazz, early movies, wild fashion) and sneering at the dull and complacent. Nowadays, dorks like Barry and R. Baker take pride in their geezerdom and sneer at anything or anybody with real character. They pander to the whitebread suburban mentality of most newspaper editors, who keep making papers duller and more irrelevant while blaming the resulting circulation losses on public apathy.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Misc. subscriber James Koehnline is planning a World’s Columbian Jubilee Calendar of Saints, to celebrate the 500th anniv. of Columbus by proclaiming an end to “the Work and War Machine.” Koehnline is looking for names of cool people for saint’s days on the calendar (“no living persons, no Popes, no heads of state”). For info send $1 to Koehnline, Box 85777, Seattle 98145-1777.
CHAINED: QFC wouldn’t display the Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, claiming the image of a woman with child wasn’t “family oriented” enough (!), unfit to belong in the same store with the beer and cigarettes they sell every day (or on the same periodical racks with tabloids, serial-killer paperbacks, and rich-bitch novels).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH (from the Wall St. Journal, 8/13): “Calgene Inc. wants federal regulators to declare its genetically engineered tomato officially ‘food’…. The tomato, named the Flavr Savr, includes a gene that blocks the production of an enzyme that causes them to soften and rot.”…
Calif. now has a snack food sales tax, and is trying to figure what’s junk and what’s untaxed “real” food. On which side would you put fructose-laden “energy bars”?
THE NAKED TRUTH: The long articles in the Times and the Weekly about table dancing clubs sold sex more sneakily than the more honest commerce of the clubs themselves. The sleaziness of the clubs’ operators, as described in the articles, seems little worse than that of some mainstream entertainment promoters I’ve known and/or read about. Nude dancing can be seen as a metaphor for our entire consumer culture (all tease, no fulfillment); the sadness that pervades those places, beneath a screaming air of mandatory “happiness,” betrays a deprivation of true connectedness in such a culture.
‘TIL OCTOBER presumably finds us much cooler, celebrate the 10th anniv. of KCMU (it’s actually longer; Robin Dolan and I were playing new music there in 11/80), and heed the wisdom of Gracie Allen in The Big Broadcast (1932): “If I died I’d like to come back as an oyster, so I’d only have to be good from September to April.”
Restroom sign at a Frisco coffeehouse: “In a society that replaces adventure with mandatory fun, the only convenient adventure left is drinking good coffee.”
Please note the new address below for subs, orders for my novel The Perfect Couple on Mac disks ($10), and other correspondence. I’m still soliciting suggestions or investors toward turning this into a self-supporting enterprise.
“Terpsichorea”
WHY ARE MOST JAZZ FESTIVALS HELD IN ALL-WHITE TOWNS?
6/91 Misc. Newsletter
(fifth anniversary)
THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!
MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.
AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.
EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)
BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”
WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).
TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.
TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.
WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.
CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…
GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.
DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.
(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)
THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.
THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)
THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.
STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…
MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.
PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?
OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.
NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.
`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.
From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”
EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′
The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.
“Exsanguinate”
11/90 Misc. Newsletter
TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’
Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.
To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.
FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)
UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)
THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”
PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.
WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”
STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.
TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).
DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.
LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…
FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”
BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.
CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.
WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.
THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…
KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.
BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.
WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.
‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.
Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”
Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).
“Lachrymose”
LITE LIT
(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)
Page Passage
2 He was a smiling, handsome man…
8 She smiled at him.
11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…
13 …he said, and smiled at me…
14 He smiled at me.
21 …he said, and smiled…
22 She smiled at me…
27 …looked around at him and smiled.
31 He was smiling and looking at me…
34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.
37 She smiled up at me…
37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.
38 …my mother said, still smiling.
38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.
40 …and she was smiling.
40 She smiled at him.
44 She smiled and shook her head.
48 She smiled.
52 …she was smiling.
52 …and one of them smiled.
53 …my mother said, and smiled.
53 …and smiled at me.
56 …she said, and smiled at me.
63 She looked around at me and smiled.
70 …he was smiling.
72 …then she smiled at me…
72 She was smiling…
73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…
75 She smiled…
77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.
77 She smiled at me.
82 …he looked up at her and smiled…
82 She looked at me and smiled.
84 He was standing there smiling…
88 …the woman was smiling…
90 She smiled at me.
91 …smiling and fanning herself.
92 My mother smiled.
92 Warren…smiled at my mother.
93 She smiled at him.
100 My mother smiled at me.
101 She smiled at me again.
101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.
104 She smiled at me again…
110 He was standing…and smiling…
111 …my father’s clean smiling face…
120 She smiled at me…
122 She smiled at me…
123 She smiled…
131 …looked at me and smiled…
133 She looked up at me and smiled…
134 She smiled.
136 She smiled at him.
136 He was smiling.
136 And then she smiled at him again.
137 She smiled at him…
139 My father smiled at me.
143 …smiled at her.
143 …and smiled.
143 …and smiled again.
144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.
154 …and he was smiling.
170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.
10/90 Misc. Newsletter
CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!
It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.
LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)
ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.
DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.
FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.
PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.
IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.
STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.
CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)
OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.
NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?
ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.
UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.
YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.
AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”
‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.
Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”
It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.
I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.
“Esconce”
7/90 Misc. Newsletter
LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.
WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?
Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.
OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?
IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.
ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)
THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”
SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.
UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”
AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.
O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.
CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”
ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.
WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.
GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).
SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.
ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.
HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.
DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?
SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.
KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.
OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.
CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).
Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”
Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Plectrum”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION
The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.
features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products
(junk food for people with too much money).
Some highlights:
* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds
* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)
* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)
* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)
* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)
* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)
