MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:

Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.

Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.

Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”

How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…

TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…

GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.

History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.

In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.

Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.

There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.

Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)

Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).

AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.

AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).

SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…

SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)

But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…

BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”

Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.

Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.

Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.

So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”

THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)

SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.

SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)

AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.

BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)

THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”

SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.

For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).

Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:

• Violence.
• Hip violence.
• Los Angeles.
• Fictional characters talking directly at the camera.
• Wacky misadventures surrounding the making of an independent movie.
• Manhattan.
• People standing around talking about their relationship problems and their going-nowhere lives.
• Beverly Hills.
• A sensitive, young, aspiring novelist/screenwriter (of any gender).
• Racist or other insult jokes excused under the rubric of daring political incorrectness.
• San Francisco.
• An “all-star soundtrack CD” of tunes inappropriate to the film or only heard for 10 seconds or less or only during the closing credits.
• Hokey new-agey music (a la Smoke Signals).
• Inappropriate product placements.
• Stories about the (black, native-American, South African, Burmese, etc.) ethnic struggle but starring a white hero/heroine whose own struggle turns out to be either getting back to civilization or arresting a white villain.
• Characters who spend more screen time walking to and from cars than doing anything else (a shtick those direct-to-video “thrillers” stole from the late TV producer Quinn Martin’s detective shows).
• Beautiful women who only end up getting killed.
• Blandly “beautiful” people who all wear the same ghastly designer clothes, work at the same Brutalist-design lo-rise office buildings, and live in identically “luxurious” houses.
• Murder mysteries in which the callous slaughter of human life is treated as the pretext for light enterainment.
• Stories where all women are Completely Good and all men are Completely Bad.
• Irresistably seductive Psycho Bitches From Hell.
• Really grim future worlds where muscle men and waif models are on the run from bloody puppet monsters that look vaguely like placentas.
• Really grim future worlds where everything’s exactly like it is today, only more extremely so.
• (Hetero) sex depicted as equaling death.
• Vancouver pretending to be Seattle.

You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.

‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”

Better Than A Pokemon With A Sharp Stick

TV essay, 3/3/99

I like Pokemon, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the awkward way the animated series’ episodes seem to have been re-edited from the original anime.

I’m intrigued by what the series might or might not be saying about human/animal relations, within its alternate-universe world where most nonhuman animal species belong to this whole other life form with odd superpowers (varying from species to species) but which can be tamed by being weakened in a fight and then forcibly teleported into an egglike “Pokeball.”

Each episode introduces viewers to at least one previously-unseen species of Pokemon, ranging from superpowered equivalents of everyday Earth animals (birds, bugs, cats, moles) to total bug-eyed monsters and abstract shapes with faces and legs tacked on. (Like I said, it’s an incredibly complicated plot, one which grownups are far less likely to comprehend than kids.)

It’s also a show and a marketing phenomenon with two local connections. The Pokemon name, and the 150 or so different critters in the Pokemon universe, are owned by Nintendo, the Japanese gaming empire whose U.S. division’s in Darkest Redmond; while Renton’s Wizards of the Coast puts out a role-playing card game based on the show’s elaborate fantasy lore.

The first Americans heard of Pokemon was when hundreds of Japanese children got epileptic seizures after viewing strobe-like patterns flashed during an episode. (The real irony’s that fewer than half the victims watched the episode’s original telecast; most were exposed when Japanese evening newscasts excerpted the scene in question.) That scene was cut when the series was redubbed for U.S. consumption. Other changes also seem to have been made; episodes are chopped up, cut to as little as 18 minutes of airtime, and then padded with low-budget extraneous material (such as the daily “Pokerap” song).

Or perhaps they’re not as heavily altered as they seem. Fans I’ve corresponded with in the process of writing this piece insist they’ve seen “Pokerap”-type segments in the original Japanese episodes. They also claim the stories were written presupposing viewer familiarity with the characters and concepts from the original games; and that that’s why the plots sometimes seem choppy by the standards of dumbed-down American kidvid.

The Pokemon universe began in 1995, when Nintendo released the original “Pocket Monsters” video game in Japan, in three versions. The independent designers who created the game on Nintendo’s behalf tried to place cute kid-appeal characters within a long, engaging adventure-game format that would encourage lingering exploration of the game, its fictional world, and its puzzles and secrets. It also encouraged fan dialogue (to successfully complete the game, by capturing and taming all 150 critters, required learning clues scttered across the game’s three slightly-different versions). The smashing success of the original game spawned sequel games, Game Boy condensed games, the card game, an animated feature film (not yet here), comics, dolls,and assorted other merchandise; much of which is now showing up Stateside. The expansive, open-ended concept (sequel games now in preparation supposedly will introduce 250 newly “discovered” Pokemon species) means the phenomenon could keep going for years to come, or at least until the next batch of young gamers decides it’s dumb and wants something else (a cycle which apparently turns over in Japan even faster than over here).

At its best, the kiddie side of Japanese anime (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z) is an entertainment genre in which soon-all-too-familiar plot and design formulas can collide with moments of utterly-baffling weirdness. Pokemon is kiddie-anime at, or nearly at, its best.

MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”

MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)

Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).

All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.

It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.

In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)

WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.

This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)

(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)

The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:

• Thea Foss, matron of a regional tugboat and shipping dynasty and inspiration for the beloved ’30s film heroine Tugboat Annie.
• Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth and prominent waterfront figure until her death in 1896.
• Gypsy Rose Lee, all-time undisputed monarch of burlesque, who combined a great body (and the willingness to show much of it off), a sharp wit, and an instinct for publicity.
• Gracie Hansen, nice middle-aged lady hired as hostess for the Seattle World’s Fair’s burlesque show; ahead of her time in announcing through her presence that nice girls enjoyed sex.
• Frances Farmer, actor and Depression-era socialist sympathizer, who probably would’ve been blacklisted from the movies in the late ’40s even if she hadn’t been put away by her equally strong-willed mother.
• Dyan Cannon, who went from a quiet West Seattle childhood to marrying and divorcing Cary Grant, among other accomplishments.
• Pat Suzuki, Broadway’s first Asian-American star.
• Carol Channing, singer-belter whose performances can not only be heard but seen from the third balcony.
• Ernestine Anderson andMarilee Rush, vocalists-living legends.
• Amy Denio and Lori Goldston, instrumental geniuses who continue to prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean singing magazine-cover icons.
• The women in the rock scene: The assorted members and ex-members of Seven Year Bitch,Kill Sibyl,Maxi Badd Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Mavis Piggott, Violent Green, etc. etc.; and such frontwomen and soloists as Kim Warnick, Laura Love, Anisa Romero,Lisa Orth,Shannon Fuchness, Dara Rosenwasser, etc. etc. They continue to collectively prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean out-machoing the men.
• The women behind the rock scene: Caroline Davenport, Stephanie Dorgan, J.A. Anderson, Lori LeFavor, Kate Becker, Trish Timmers, Kerri Harrop, Susan Silver, Candice Pedersen, Barbara Dollarhide, etc. etc. The level-headed facilitators who keep the chaos possible.
• Mia Zapata, Kristen Pfaff, and Stefanie Sergeant, who, if nothing else, proved there’s nothing romantic at all about rockers dying too young.
• Jini Dellaccio, Etiquette Records cover photographer; visualizor of the finely-honed edge of pop and noise behind the Sonics’ and Wailers’ garage classics.
• Imogen Cunningham, maker of photographic art at a time when many art-snobs still disdained the idea that such a thing could exist.
• Lori Larsen, first lady of the Seattle theater circuit and an unsung force in forging the art-as-fun aesthetic still seen today at places like the Annex.
• 33 Fainting Steps and Pat Graney, dancer/choreographers helping modern dance find new ways to tell stories and express particular aspects of particular human conditions.
• Anne Gerber, art collector-patron responsible for helping support and publicize the ’50s “Northwest School” painters.
• Guendolen Pletscheff, fashion collector and advocate of the community-building institution known as high society, something few others here really bothered with in her day.
• Nellie Cornish, founder of Cornish College. (So when are they gonna start a football team, the Game Hens?)
• Kay Greathouse, longtime Frye Musuem empress and defender of visual traditionalism (as jazz teachers know, you need to know the rules before you can properly break ’em).
• Ruby Chow, restaurateur, politician, and early patron of Bruce Lee.
• Chow’s sister Mary Pang, whose frozen-food plant was the unfortunate target of a son’s misplaced sympathy.
• Ethel Mars, co-founder of a family candy dynasty still Snickering along today (and name-inspiration for its Las Vegas-based upscale division, “Ethel M”).
• Linda Tenney and Sunny Kobe Cook, frontline soldiers in the battles to preserve locally-owned retail and locally-produced advertising.
• Mary Ann Boyer (“Madame Damnable”), Seattle’s first madam; she and her successors kept Seattle going as a weekend destination for outlying lumberjacks while the town’s “legitimate” early economy went through massive ups and downs.
• Anna Louise Strong, organizer-publicist of the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
• Hazel Wolf, 100-esque year old environmental activist and thorn in the side of the likes of…
• Dixy Lee Ray, Pacific Science Center cofounder and one-term governor; elequently advocated a number of political-economic theories I completely disagreed with.
• Barbara Hedges, UW athletic director; repeatedly makes bold moves which defy the wishes of the influential football “boosters.”
• Patty Murray, successful soccer-mom icon and less-successful Senator.
• Bertha K. Landes, America’s first female big-city mayor.
• Elizabeth Montgomery (Julesberg), creator of the Dick and Jane books; envisioned a very Seattle quiet-bourgeois fantasy universe.
• Nicola Griffith, scifi writer (Slow River); envisions a different, but still very Seattle, fantasy universe.
• Rebecca Welles, K.K. Beck, J.A. Jance, Ann Rule, and Jayne Ann Krentz, masters of mass-market storytelling.
• Stacey Levine and Rebecca Brown, pioneers of Po-Mo (or is it Neo-Mo or Avant-Pop?) storytelling techniques.
• Lynda Barry, chronicler of the inner dysfunctional child within most of us.
• J.Z. “Ramtha” Knight, propagator of a revisionist “ancient warrior” mythology that allowed rich people to feel a little less guilty.
• Mary McCarthy, author, satirist, and chronicler of the futility of intellectualism.
• Sandy Hill; Good Morning America’s sucked ever since it fired her.
• Ruth “Wunda Wunda” Prins, early local kids’-TV hostess and curator of a potted-flower puppet known alternately as Wilting Willie or Stand-Up Willie (you never knew, when she watered it each day, which he would become).
• Mary Kay LeTourneau, romantic rebel. So what if the rest of the world doesn’t understand?

(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)

OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?

Precision Ennui in the Funny Pages:

Too Clowes for Comfort

Book feature, 1/13/99

Caricature

by Daniel Clowes

Fantagraphics, $29.95 (hardcover)

Let us now praise Daniel Clowes, one of the reigning American masters of visual perfection and human imperfection in the graphic-novel field.

Clowes emerged from Chicago in the ’80s with Lloyd Llewellyn, a private-eye spoof series full of fab ’50s architecture, pre-cocktail-revival hip men’s clothes, and gag stories built around a combination of early MAD Magazine subtle outrageousness and postpunk hip irony.

For many an aspiring alterna-cartoonist back then, a modest success like Lloyd would’ve been the cornerstone of a career. But for Clowes it was just a start.

Encouraged by Fantagraphics Books to phase out the limited Lloyd format in favor of a broader pallate, Clowes launched the anthology comics series Eightball in 1990. The first few issues contrasted Lloyd-style gag humor with darker, scarier drama pieces (such as the story Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, serialized for over two years) and first-person illustrated rants and fantasies (“On a Desert Island With the People on the Subway”). By the time Velvet Glove finally ended, Clowes had constructed a recipe for low-key, high-anxiety tales that married precise, tight drawings with all-too-flawed characters moving through an urban landscape of loneliness and forever-dashed expectations.

Over the past six years, Clowes has continued to perfect this style; with more than a little influence from another Chicago-based Fantagraphics cartoonist, Acme Novelty Library creator Chris Ware. Eightball continued to combine the outrageous with the comitragic, particularly in the series’ five-year serial Ghost World.

Which brings us to Clowes’s newest Eightball collection, Caricature. It collects eight one-shot stories from pastEightball issues, plus one similar piece (“Green Eyeliner”) commissioned for last year’s Esquire summer-fiction issue.

The title of Caricature fits both the topic of the lead story (a once-promising commercial artist now reduced to drawing faces for hire at crafts fairs) and the book’s overall tone. In front of all of Clowes’s exquisitely-composed frames of strip-mall landscapes, motels, and “restored” blocks of former urban decay, the faces of his characters hauntingly stare straight out at you, as if pleading for your understanding. In most cases, they’re the jaded, tired faces of men and women who’ve been either burned by life, frozen out of life, or both.

These characterizations go far beyond the one-dimensonal square-bashing Clowes once practiced with gag characters such as Young Dan Pussey (the ultimate alternative-comix-world putdown of geeky superhero-comics fans). The characters in Caricature, no matter how pathetic, antisocial, or cruel, are all given a degree of human dignity by Clowes that they lack in their own lives.

Many of these going-nowhere people go through quite a bit of plot twists in their brief tales, mostly minor tragedies that leave them even more jaded and confused than before. In the collection’s longest work, the 22-page “Gynecology,” Clowes employs flashbacks, flash-forwards, asides, asides within asides, and suplots often lasting a single ninth-of-a-page drawing frame to relate the complicated, yet ultimately futile, lives of a lonely doctor’s wife, the cynical gallery painter with whom she’s cheating, and their assorted friends, spouses, lovers, rivals, and enemies. This story, like all the stories here, is a masterwork of the comix-narrative form, bouncing images and words off of one another and using sequential drawings to juxtapose subplots and ideas, only to neatly bring it all back together in the last two pages.

It’s also a bookend to the title story, in a way. The title of “Caricature” implies a seemingly shallow impression of a public face which can actually reveal much (maybe too much) about the person’s soul. In “Gynecology,” the doctor’s wife’s lover complains that her husband can coldly stare at other women’s private parts with no emotional response, that there’s something wrong about “a man who can turn off natural human impulses like a light switch whenever he feels like it.”

While Clowes never gives his characters an alternative to their Hobson’s choice between snide sarcasm and jaded reserve, his drawing and his writing offer such an alternative to us. It’s the opportunity to see the world directly around us with a little more compassion, a little less self-centeredness.

IT’S A RELATIVELY POST-HANGOVER MISC., the column that looked for streetside strangeness at the full-moon New Year’s and found lots (unfortunately, none of it printable without violating either libel laws or personal discretion.)

ST. PETER TO NORMAN FELL: “Come and knock on our door…”

COFFEE PRESS: Starbucks is starting an in-store magazine. But Seattle writers and editors need not apply–or rather, they’ll need to apply to NYC. The yet-untitled quarterly, due out in May, is being produced by Time Warner’s “custom publishing” unit under contract to the espresso chain. An NY Daily News report claims it will be “modeled on The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, with contributions from both established and emerging writers and photographers.” If it’s anything like the chain’s in-store brochures (or CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir Pour Your Heart Into It ), you can expect material that’s nice, laid-back, mellow, and ultimately forgettable.

MARKET EXPOSURE: Seattle’s own cybersmut magnate Seth Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group has become notorious for its sex websites (the official Penthouse magazine site; the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee hardcore video). But now, with the commercial skin-pic trade apparently plateauing, IEG’s expanding into new e-commerce realms. Some of these expansions are a little further from the company’s original shtick (an online casino, a home-mortgage buying-guide); some are a little closer. One of the latter’s a nude stock-trading site, sexquotes.com (“the mage-merger between high finance and high society”), mixing business news and stock prices with small but free pinup pix. You can choose the gender, explicitness level, and general physique type of your temporary beloveds, who appear on the left side of the screen; you can also choose up to 20 stock and mutual-fund prices to scroll across the right side. It’s free, with plenty of ads for Warshavsky’s other sites. One of those other sites is ready to show you how Net-porn starlets are made–www.onlinesurgery.com!

CATHODE CORNER#1: Viacom management may have killed KSTW’s local-news operation, but at least they’ve let the station maintain one of its traditions–the annual alkie movie on, or shortly after, the hangover-strewn Jan. 1. In years past, the station’s assauged the suffering viewers with Under the Volcano, When A Man Loves a Woman, and more. This Jan. 2 (the night of Jan. 1 was, unfortunately, taken up by Viacom’s dumb UPN shows): Clean and Sober.

CATHODE CORNER #2, or BANDWIDTH ENVY:A couple months or so ago, the feisty indie Summit Cablevision finally added a bunch of the cable channels viewers have been pleading for for two years or more. Most TCI customers elsewhere in Seattle (as well as viewers stuck with similarly outmoded cable systems across the country) are still wondering what all these supposedly great channels with these supposedly great shows are really like. Herewith, a few glimpses:

• Win Ben Stein’s Money (Comedy Central) is easily the best non-kiddie game show ever made for cable. After years of badly-structured, badly-timed, badly-designed, and badly-lit shows like Loves Me, Loves Me Not, a cable channel’s finally figured out what makes a great game show great–it’s a pure televisual experience, involving the audience in a well-planned ritual of fun. WBSM is also that rarity, a “hard quiz” show with truly tough questions.

  I just wished I could feel a little less guilty about finding such screen-magnetism and loveability in a host whom you know as the monotoned droner from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, and Clear Eyes commercials, but who in “real” life is a former Nixon lawyer who writes virulently anti-choice, pro-impeachment screeds for Rabid Right journals such as the American Spectator–and who keeps a home-away-from-Hollywood at the infamous compound collection that is Sandpoint, Idaho.

• One Reel Wonders (Turner Classic Movies) exhumes some of the live-action short subjects that thrilled and/or bored movie-theater audiences in the ’30s and ’40s, and which have generally remained unseen ever since.

  Besides finally giving lifelong Looney Tunes fans an at-last reference to the original sources of many cartoon running gags (Technicolor travelogues ending “as the sun sinks slowly in the west,” etc.), they fill in a vital hole in any film buff’s historical knowledge. And any aspiring filmmaker (or storyteller) could learn a thing or two about how these shorts told complete stories in seven to 10 minutes.

• ESPN2 has recently devoted its 10 am (PST) hour most weekdays to reruns of its past Fitness America Pageant shows. These were originally conceived as a cross between aerobics and bodybuilding, skewed toward audiences (and advertisers) scared off by the masculine-looking figures popularly associated with women’s muscle meets.

  So instead of weightlifting and other tests of pure strength, each contestant performs two minutes of Flashdance-esque athletic dancing, then returns to the stage for a short swimsuit-modeling stroll. The swimsuits (and the dance costumes) are often of the bare-bunned variety; and the dances often display a vigorous eroticism that would probably be particularly popular among western-states men (it’s in our blood to admire a woman who’s no dainty waif, but who instead looks like she probably could’ve survived a frontier winter in the years before rural electrificaiton).

  But don’t for a second think the show’s “male oriented”–the ads are all for women’s vitamin supplements, women’s workout gear, and Stayfree. This is intended for a woman who likes to admire other women’s bodies, but who’d slug you in the stomach if you accused her of maybe, just maybe, having closet lesbian desires.

  Also of note: During set changes beetween segments, an announcer narrates short taped clips of past champions, most of whom are described as now working as “fitness celebrities.” Our fame-ridden culture’s gone so far, we not only have people who are famous merely for “being famous,” we have obscure people who make a living for merely “being famous” among relatively small subcultures–lingirie models, motorcycle-magazine centerfolds, pro wrestling’s “managers” and other outside-the-ring costars, CNN “expert commentators,” “celebrity greeters” at Vegas casinos, and, yes, Internet-based commentators.

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Cartoon Network) started out as the “hip,” grownup-oriented spot on a channel usually devoted to relentlessly exhuming old Hanna-Barbera and Kids’ WB shows.

  But the producers and writers have gotten further and further afield from the original talk-show-spoof concept over each of the show’s five seasons (CN often pairs a new and an old 15-minute episode in the same time block). It’s now the ultimate metashow, deconstructing not just cliché host-guest banter and backstage politics (the stuff of so many, many other self-parody shows from Conan to Shandling) but the very narrative structures of TV and of commercial entertainment in general.

  The show sometimes plays so fast and furious with viewer expectations, one can leave it fully forgetting how clean it is. (Its self-imposed rating is the squeaky TV-Y7.) Two or more generations have grown up equating avant-garde artistic styles with risqué subject matter (an assumption spread in part by CN’s sister channel HBO). But one of the most innovative Hollywood films of the’60s, Head, was rated G. Maya Deren’s experiments in filmic form and storytelling could have passed the old Hollywood Production Code; Satyajit Ray’s exquisite films all passed India’s even-tougher censorship.

  I’m not saying artists, filmmakers, or TV producers should be prohibited from creatively using what used to be called “blue” material. I am saying they shouldn’t feel they have to, either. Space Ghost can thoroughly alter your notions about well-made comedy while still being funny, and without a single poop joke.

• Star Trek: The Sci-Fi Channel Special Edition presented its presenters with a time-management dilemma. Sci-Fi execs wanted to promote this as the most faithful rerunning in decades of the old Kirk-and-Spock episodes, but they weren’t about to give up the extra minutes of commercials their channel (and most ad-bearing cable channels, except Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) stick into their reruns. Network shows of Star Trek‘s day usually ran up to 51 minutes of show per hour. Sci-Fi usually cuts that to as little as 43 minutes.

  The answer: Stretch the shows into an hour and a half! That way, they could add even more commercials, promos, etc. To pad the remaining time, Shatner and Nimoy have been propped up to offer ponderous behind-the-scenes commentaries. (Q: Just how do they manage to speak in segments totalling 10 to 13 minutes about the making of even the minor, budget-balancing episodes? A: Very patiently.)

  Most viewers I know claim they tape the shows and fast-forward past the ads and extraneous material. But I like the new segments, for the sheer unadorned Shatnerity of them.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, consider these seasonally-appropriate words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches fifty, and a fool if he doesn’t drink afterward.”

Uncensored and Eager:

Miso Horny

Original online essay, 12/16/98

My Fair Masseuse (Kitty Media)

1996 (U.S. release 1998), dir. Naruo Kuzukawa/Akita Shoten

Japan, as many of you know, is a society with plenty of sexual hangups and contradictions–much like America’s, but with just enough differences to seem exotic. The country of floor-length, figure-hiding kimonos is also the country of delicate, yet often extremely explicit, “floating world” prints. Japan’s animated films, TV shows, and direct-to-video productions have expressed these contradictions at least as well as any of the country’s other contemporary art forms.

By legal censorship restrictions, and by a system of genre formulae pretty much set in stone by the early ’80s, anime works could display explicit violence (the louder and more explosive the better), but had to depict sex only without showing male genitalia or female pubic hair. This meant lower-hairless damsels could be grotesquely raped by the squid-like tentacles of outer-space monsters or underground demon creatures (the subgenre containing these scenes is known among fans as “Hentai” (perversions), but could only engage in loving relations with other humans via discreet “camera angles.”

One less-violent anime sub-genre has traditionally managed to make up for what little it couldn’t show by applying exaggerated cartoon techniques to the time-honored tradition of sex farce. Young adults (and some apparent teens) engage in somewhat exaggerated versions of typical sex and relationship problems (somewhat complicated when some of the females are disguised angels eager for a taste of earthly pleasures, and some of the males develop instant pants-bulges bigger than their skulls). Semi-realistically drawn faces morph into hyper-cartoony caricatures when confronted with lust, embarrassment, or any mixture of the two.

But with My Fair Masseuse (which apparently isn’t the first video to show it all, just the first I’d learned about), these visual elements are accompanied by delicately drawn lower organs engaged in full-motion versions of sex acts not unlike those depicted in those old-time Japanese prints.

The gender-depiction issues in the video, perhaps to some of your dismay, are similar to some of those in the prints, which often involved noblemen cavorting with courtesans. Here, our heroine Moko is a former nurse who’s decided she’d rather carry out a “life of service” as a high-class prostitute, who strips out of something as close as copyright allows to an old Playboy Club bunny costume.

The plot’s paean to modern gender mores comes in Moko’s repeated assertions that she’s nobody’s victim, but rather an assertive career woman who loves her work (even with fat, old clients). In the last of the video’s three episode segments, she tries learning to role-play with her clients as a demure, innocent waif, only to find neither she nor they really like it that way–so she returns to energetically jumping atop her man-of-the-hour and draining all the yang right out of him.

Of course, this could be seen as a pivotal distinction between old and new favored attitudes toward work in many professions, in many parts of the world. It’s certainly a distinction Japan’s facing in its forced transition from its paternalistic, quasi-feudal old business culture to today’s go-go global entrepreneurial culture. Submissively acquiescing to your job like an old-time courtesan (i.e., quietly admitting you’d rather be doing something else) is the new taboo of Global Business. Rather, more and more of us are expected to eagerly, passionately, put everything we’ve got into–well, you know…

WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….

WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).

WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?

WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.

WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.

WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.

THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.

LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….

Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)

SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”

THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”

HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?

NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.

As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:

“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”

A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:

“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.

“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”

Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.

I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’

YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”

UPDATE: A loyal reader called to report some longer Greyhound routes already do offer in-bus movies, having had to endure Parenthood on the way to Vancouver.

THE SILVERY SKIN: Didn’t see as much of Bumbershoot as in prior years (either the crowds have finally gotten to me or my ongoing diet left me too carbo-depleted to stand in hot lines). But I did find out that the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ stadium show really could produce Lindy hopping in the moshpit.

I also saw a few dozen wholesome grownups watch an hour of ’30s-’40s stripper movies (projected in an outdoor courtyard) without turning into rampaging degenerates. On a beautiful night, in a beautiful setting (right by the atomic neon art near the North Court meeting rooms), a mixed-gender audience got to witness beautiful B&W footage of beautiful women (including burlesque legend Sally Rand and someone billed on the re-release print as Marilyn Monroe, though I have my doubts) making beautiful moves in beautiful costumes of various small sizes.

After the dance shorts, the projector was stopped while various bigwigs conferred whether to show an encore segment. When they finally gave their OK, the crowd saw 10 minutes of naughty-funny XXX animations from the early ’30s (gags involved beastiality, oversized and detachable penises, and copyright-violating renditions of Krazy Kat and Bosko). As the audience strolled happily into the night, I realized the end-of-porn essay in this paper last month was right when it proclaimed a truly vital city needs a healthy element of public vice. There’s nothing like a little good clean sex to bring people together. These exhibitions like these also help prove the apparently little-known fact that people have been having sex since before you were born.

COMING HOME TO ROOST: Seattle’s affordable-housing crisis can be interpreted as a counterpart to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription for third-world economies: Enforce “austerity measures” on the masses, so a caste of financiers and speculators can have unfettered opportunities. Just as IMF shock-treatments are officially justified as being for everybody’s ultimate trickle-down benefit, Mayor Paul Schell’s proposed tax-and-zoning breaks for big condo developers are being touted as help for the thousands of citizens being priced out by the very developments Schell wants to further encourage.

Another intrepretation: When Schell became mayor, he inherited a municipal establishment that for over a decade had actively pursued a system of policies intended to prevent Seattle from becoming one of those islands of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence. We’ve had a government/ business elite devoted almost exclusively toward making Seattle’s population as upscale as possible–not by improving the lot of those already here, but by encouraging the upscale to move and stay here (and by almost criminalizing the underclass, when and where that was deemed necessary). You could see it in Rice’s caving in to Nordstrom’s every demand; in the school district’s use of busing to prop up enrollment in affluent-neighborhood schools; in the developer-friendly Urban Village and Seattle Commons schemes; and in city attorney Mark Sidran’s crackdowns against anyone too publicly black, young, or unmellow. If the pursuit of demographic purity meant other populations were discouraged (actively or passively), even when it made a joke of our professed love of “diversity,” it was considered a necessary cost.

But now, it’s gone far enough to price middle- and upper-middle-class folk out of Seattle–the core voter base of Seattle’s pro-corporate Democrat machine. So the insiders are reconsidering their policy of demographic cleansing, at least on the PR level. They’re talking about providing special incentives to make homes affordable to the merely well-off instead of just the really-really rich.

It’s way too little, and for the politicians it might be too late. If the “single-family neighborhood” populists who stopped the Commons and the Urban Villages spread the idea that Schell’s scheme will help only developers by encouraging more replacement of existing affordable housing by new “market rate” units, we could witness a movement that could eventually topple the municipal regime like, well, a house of cards.

MISC. STILL REMEMBERS overhearing two men at a 1991 party recommending the most profitable way to sell a Seattle house–advertise it only in the LA Times. Such subterfuge is probably no longer necessary; now most Angelenos can’t afford a house here either.

UPDATES: The cool-stuff store Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony will soon have a new home near 2nd and Stewart, escaping death-by-redevelopment at its old site…. The 66 Bell art studios will probably get redeveloped, despite a ruling that the building’s outside’s a city landmark. Negotiations to keep at least some of the artists’ spaces continue…. US West’s high-speed home Internet service, using ADSL technology, has been delayed by state regulators who want the phone co. to become more accepting toward local-service competition.

IN CLUBLAND: The Lava Lounge has a doorman whose name really is Carlton. If you get the coincidence, you’re probably old enough for him to let you in. (But bring picture ID anyway.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Glyph (“Monthly Tales of Highbrow Pulp”) is a well-put-together comix tabloid from Labor of Love Studios, described by editor Sarah Byam as “a sweat equity cooperative for working artists and writers.” The tab format’s perfect for elaborate layouts and visual storytelling, exemplified in the first issue by Byam and artist Ted Naifeh’s “Past Hope” (an ambitious, ironic four-page parable about “The woman who could not love and the man who loved too much”). (Free plus postage from 117 E. Louisa, #253, Seattle 98102.)

LI’L FOLKS: Seems everybody in the Seattle creative community’s getting preggers or getting somebody preggers these days. Some of the lucky mommies and daddies include: Our own art-crit Eric Fredericksen, arts-promotion vets Tracey Rowland and Larry Reid, Gourmondo Cafe co-proprietess Jennifer Clancy with antiquarian-book and punk-record collector Jeff Long, videomaker Debra Geissel, comedian/ singer Kathy Sorbo, and gallery owner Linda Cannon (she’ll close her exhibition space to concentrate on mommyhood, though she’ll still sell some art privately). Call it a massive coincidence; call it a release of long-suppressed maternal/ paternal urges at a time of relative prosperity. Just please don’t call it “something in the water.”

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: Small bookstores might be a threatened species amid big-chain consolidations, but one that’s thankfully not going away any time soon is the U.S. Government Printing Office bookstore on the ground floor of the Federal Building (900 1st Ave.). It’s small, but chock full o’ stuff you can’t get anywhere else–Posters of old Air Force planes! Colorful field guides to the national parks! Statistical abstracts of the nation’s consumer-buying habits! NASA fact guides! A gazillion volumes of tax codes! Research studies on teen alcoholism! Helpful guidebooks with names like Whistleblower Appeals, World Class Courtesy, Aviation Weather, Building a Nation of Learners, A Safe Trip Abroad, and Your Guide to Women’s Health! And (even cooler) you get to go thru a metal detector on your way in! Kids’-book advocates always say reading’s like an adventure trip; but this is the only bookstore that’s like getting on an airliner.

FREAK OUT: A second book about the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is coming out, and this one’s unauthorized. Circus of the Scars, from the married team of writer Jan Gregor and illustrator Ashleigh “Triangle Slash” Talbot, promises to be a lavish hardcover account of the troupe’s early years (much of it from the viewpoint of ex-member Tim “Torture King” Cridland). For now, it’s being sold only by mail-order (via Brennan Dalsgard Publishers, Box 85781, Seattle 98145) and online (at www.circusofthescars.com). I haven’t seen the volume yet, but its creators hint Rose might not like its portrayal of him. What–like he gives a darn about his reputation (except to make sure it’s a nasty one)? I could only imagine one way you could really damage Rose’s public image: Claim he’s a mild-mannered teetotaler who plays a gentlemanly golf game, never cusses offstage, cried during multiple viewings of Titanic, and loves nothing better than to mellow out to the soothing sounds of the Smooth Jazz station.