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.)

MISC. HAS FAIRLY GOOD local news and confusing/depressing international news to comment upon this week, but first your update about the best-of-Misc. book (titled, for the time being, The Misc. Book). Layout and proofreading are proceeding apace; a couple different potential cover designs are being worked on; distribution arrangements are being negotiated. Right now, we’re aiming for a June release. As for the reissue of the old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, that might come a month or two later. More details forthcoming. (In the meantime, please suggest which local musical acts of the past four years should be in the new edition; via email or at our plangent Misc. Talk discussion boards.

ON THE STREET: Misc. was momentarily confused by the proliferation of street posters up on E. Pike Street (pasted onto plywood construction scaffolds, not light poles) for TheStreet.com. When I showed this to someone who’d just moved here last year, she said “only in Seattle,” with its now-mythical corps of under-30 techno-rich, would bohos perusing this form of sidewalk commercial-graffiti be considered potential clients of an online stock brokerage and investment-advice site. I’m not so sure about the “only” part. If anything, Seattle has (or used to have) fewer trust-fund hipsters than the larger media towns. Now, though, with the cost of living around Capitol Hill creeping toward NYC levels, it might be getting to the point where you have to have money in order to live the antimaterialist ideology. Either that, or the posters were aimed at the upscale gay-dance-club clientele also swarming the Pike-Pine corridor these days. Speaking of which…

NOSTALGIA FOR THINGS NOT ALL THAT WORTHY OF REMEMBERING: The ARO.Space club recently promoted an ’80s-nostalgia dance night under the moniker “Star 80.” As if anybody who remembers the era would find exciting, joyous connotations from that sleazy movie (which starred Mariel Hemingway as a real-life Vancouver model-actress stalked and slain by the sicko hubby she’d left behind).

SUCH OCCASIONAL LAPSES OF TASTE ASIDE, though, the one-year anniversary of ARO.Space (in a club climate, particularly a dance-club climate, where high-budgeted spaces sometimes go under interior construction for eight months only to close after three) means something. Last week I ran into the Dutch journalist who interviewed me about the post-“grunge” aftermath last year; among other recent insights, she said she was surprised ARO.Space had apparently succeeded despite being so unlike anything in “The Seattle Scene.” I begged to differ. First of all, there’s always been an audience of inferiority-complexed hipster wannabes here who’ll rush to anything billed as an authentic copy of whatever’s hot in NY/SF. Of course, to get them to keep coming back means you have to have something they’ll actually like on a non-imitative level.

That’s the place’s genius: It seems alien, not at all like “The Seattle Scene,” yet it fits right in. The Nordic-cool furnishings, the MS “new money” feel, the sleek blandness, the polite aloofness of the place, all complement the current and the classic Seattle-bourgeois zeitgeist. They complement different aspects of that zeitgeist than the grungers did, but then again the grungers were, at least on one level, rebelling against the affluent, self-satisfied mindset ARO.Space gloriously celebrates. I wrote when the place opened that, on one level, it looked like the product of gay men trying to assimillate into regular upper-middle-class society. I’ve since realized it’s more like the product of gay men taking their rightful place among the taste-definers of regular upper-middle-class society.

It’s taken time, a long time, for me to accept this, but modern-day affluent Seattle really is a lot more like the fictional universe of TV’s Frasier than I’ve ever wanted to admit. Its cold aloofness can seem to outsiders as arrogance, though it’s really due more to emotional repression. It wallows in superficial benchmarks of “good taste,” often involving gourmet dining and starchy social propriety. It believes in stark, spare design, complete with pastel shades not found in nature. It defines itself by its consumer choices (even the “anti-consumerists” and the “downshifters”). And while it’s proud as heck of its town, it’s afraid to try to do its own thing. So a place that promises the hottest, beat-iest imported dance-music fads, in seemingly bold yet ultimately retro-modern surroundings, is more comfortably, reassuringly “Seattle style” than it might seem.

(Its owners should’ve been expected from the start to know this. ARO.Space’s owners are part of the informal clique of local hip-capitalists whose various members, in various combinations and partnerships, have various stakes in Tasty Shows, Sweet Mother Records, Linda’s, the Capitol Club, the Baltic Room, Bimbo’s Bitchen Burrito Kitchen and Cha Cha Lounge, Rudy’s Barber Shops, and the soon-to-open Ace Hotel.)

This also means (not as ironically as it might seem) that the dance-music scene isn’t as un-Seattle as its biggest local fans might wish it to be. Passive-aggressive consumption of imported sounds, looks, and attitudes is as endemic to Seattle as it is to any city in the “other 48” states. In an age of corporate-media consolidation, nothing’s more timely (or less “alternative”) than “live” entertainment that’s all “in the can” (or on CDs and 12-inch vinyl records), whose only human components (the DJ/curators) are themselves often NY/Calif. fly-ins. What would be out of place in this particular aspect of Seattle would be to develop dance musicians, DJs, and audiences who were less afraid of trying to create their own sounds.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WAR: That’s how it seemed this week. The town was collectively bored by the Sonics’ irregular performance during the NBA’s irregular regular season, and indeed generally blase; as the long dreary winter refused to completely go away. The Fringe Festival had come and gone, leaving the small-time theatrical promoters exhausted and burned-out. Downtown, more excitement came from a high speed chase on Friday (cop cars had followed a carful of bank robbers all the way from Shoreline to the GameWorks block) than from the now-familiar ritual of antiwar protests. It just might be that Clinton’s lite-right Pentagon-coddling has finally succeeded in silencing the pacifist left and the isolationist right (or, rather, cowering them into a stance of hopelessness to change the situation).

This means this president (and probably the next one) will get to use the last-remaining-superpower-blah-blah-blah not to “fight two major wars simultaneously” (the Pentagon planners’ latest excuse for ever-escalating weapons budgets) but to push around any little regime anywhere, within carnage-levels the domestic opinion polls say the U.S. voting public will tacitly accept, and when and where it’s deemed strategically valuable to do so. It’s true the Serb regime’s despotic and genocidal.

It’s also true the Kosovo war is essentially a war of secession, like the U.S. Revolutionary and Civil wars (and Chechnya, Bangladesh, Tibet, East Timor, Eritrea, and other wars in which the White House either stayed out or supported the existing regimes). So, after a decade of Serbs and their vassals and ex-vassals fighting and killing and retaliating with too-little-too-late U.S./UN/NATO involvement, why bomb Belgrade now? Maybe becuase it’s politically feasible now. Maybe because the realpolitik gamers decided to take down one of Europe’s last vestiges of Soviet-style rule. Maybe because the realpolitik guys felt they needed to support a Muslim-dominated self-rule movement for a change, after verbally or physically bashing Islamic fundamentalists in so many other lands. And maybe because our leaders could somehow identify with the Kosovars’ plight to an extent they couldn’t with the Timorese or the Eritreans.

But now that the bombs have fallen, the situation can’t help but keep getting stickier and bloodier and more intractable. The bombing strafes might be promoted as clean, modern warfare minimizing potential U.S. casualties, but war’s never as clean in real life as it seems on paper (or in role-playing games).

UNTIL NEXT TIME, when we hope there’ll be happier news to report, ponder these thoughts from Aldous Huxley: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards..”

THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.

As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).

Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.

NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)

During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.

SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.

Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…

BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.

Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…

WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.

This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)

Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”

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.”

SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”

As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.

Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.

HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.

Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.

My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.

My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.

In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.

So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…

PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)

As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!

At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!

STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.

(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.

WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)

KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.

THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.

Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.

Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.

WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:

• A citywide monorail line. It’s being worked on.
• Repeal of the Teen Dance Ordinance. It’s being worked on.
• A sign in the library: “This is not a convenience store.”
• A community radio station. A collective called Free Seattle Radio is currently raising money to start another pirate FM operation. But what I’m talking about is a real station, licensed and above-ground, with just enough resources to cover the issues, arts, and voices that make the city.

  Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”

• A theater festival for the troupes and directors too big for the Seattle Fringe Fest (which is fringier than most other North American fringe festivals).
• A good Scottish pub (not Irish or English).
• Better bus service, particularly between neighborhoods (like Magnolia) and non-downtown workplace districts (like Elliott Avenue).
• Rent control or something like it. A reader named Dee writes, “I’ve heard enough horror stories and I feel Seattle is going in the same direction as San Francisco with the big money moving in, and people of low to moderate incomes becoming further displaced. My one hope is Seattle has strong working class roots with a bit of a socialist heart. I think enough educated people will become pissed off enough to make the noise which will lead to better changes.”
• A local, live hip-hop showcase club. For that, we might need–

• A city attorney who’s not a stooge for gentrification. Sure lotsa people hate the classist, possibly racist policies of Mark Sidran, but nobody even ran against him the last election.
• Saner liquor laws. The Washington Liquor Control Board was born in post-Prohibition times when the more “upstanding” elements of local society were worried at the threat of the wild-west saloon culture coming back. To this day, the liquor bureaucracy believes its mission to be keeping a tight lid on what adults can and cannot do on licensed premises while consuming legal drugs. A healthy urban society needs a strong nightlife industry; while the liquor bureaucrats are less restrictive in some aspects than they used to be, they’ve a ways to go toward abetting this the way other “regulatory” departments help the industries they lord over.
• A movie theater with booze. The truly-vast McMenamin’s brewpub empire in Portland has a couple of these. Up here, General Cinemas is planning to convert its low-profile multiplex at 130th & Aurora to a movie theater with food, but no word yet on a liquor license. Before Paul Allen bought the Cinerama theater downtown, another bidder on the property wanted to turn it into a viewing-‘n’-sipping establishment. The Rendezvous restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater has hosted many film screenings with full booze service. Some think there must be a Washington liquor regulation against booze and movies, but that appears to be not the case. Besides, if you can have sports bars with multiple big-screen TVs, you oughta be able to have a bar with a movie screen.
• A real winter bacchanale, not the tame bar-promotion event Fat Tuesday quickly became. Something with real joie de vivre. For that matter, our all-too-fair city could use a little less prudery overall. Scrap that ten-year “temporary” moratorium on new strip joints, so we could get one of those nice “gentleman’s clubs” your girlfriend’s not ashamed of you going to. Establish at least one public clothing-optional beach in the county. Even legalize (or at least decriminalize) prostitution, and make it a co-ed biz (old widows and middle-aged divorcees need love too, ya know).
• A bowling alley in or near downtown. Maybe one could go in part of the yet-unleased old Nordstrom complex, or in the Convention Center expansion (as a leisure amenity for tourists and locals alike).
• More spirit and less “attitude.”
• More democracy and less demographics.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)

WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: Here it comes! No, not television’s most exciting hour of fantastic prizes, but the next phase in the 12.5 year history of the Misc. column. You can think of this as Misc. Version 4.0 if you like. The first version was a monthly column in the old Seattle tabloid ArtsFocus, from June 1986 thru July 1989. The second was the self-published monthly newsletter beginning later that summer, and continuing until January 1995. Third came the weekly installments in The Stranger, starting in November 1991 (concurrent with the newsletter version) and eventually reaching some 200,000 Seattle-area readers before the “alternative” tabloid’s bosses stopped running the column in October 1998.

THE NEW ONLINE COLUMN MIGHT BE more leisurely paced than the previous print versions, given that for the first time the column has no pre-set space limit. I may also experiment with different types of content, shuffling topics and departments in and out to test reader response. And new audience-building features might be added to the Misc. World website as well. More about that next week.

BUT FIRST, for those who came in late, a restatement of the column’s purposes and concepts. Under the classic “three-dot” newspaper column format, and within the meta-topic of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond,” Misc. World discusses the people, places, and things that combine to make up public life here at the edge of America and the end of the century. Some of the items in the column are as short as one sentence (or sentence fragment; some take up the whole space by themselves. Some of the subjects I write about are Seattle-specific; some are national (or have their equivalents in other towns across the country). Some involve big sociocultural trends such as stock-market fluctuations and downtown redevelopment schemes; others involve matters as small and specific as new junk foods and catch phrases. But they’re all parts of the cacophanous racket that is postmodern, pre-who-knows-what urban life, and as such they all have lessons to teach us about the cross-currents and cross-pollenizations of culture.

DISCLAIMERS: Misc. World contains no rain jokes, slug jokes, or coffee jokes. All statements of fact in Misc. World are, to the best they can be verified, true. The author will gladly retract all items proven false. All statements of opinion represent the author’s sincere beliefs; not spoofs. This column does not settle wagers.

COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The same week The Stranger pulled the plug on the newsprint version of Misc., the art-studio lofts at 66 Bell (where the first ArtsFocus Misc. was written a dozen years back) started getting vacated under orders from the building owner, who’s finally making good on his year-long threat to upscale the place out of artists’ price ranges.

BOARD-ING SCHOOL: At ARO.Space a month or two back there was this performance-art night hosted by an apparent New York snotface who, after each act, taunted the audience with condescending remarks like “This is something called performance art. Something nobody in this town has ever heard of.” I never learned whether this dork was being real or just playing a character. If he really was as parochial and obnoxious as he made himself out to be on stage, he could’ve learned a bit about Seattle’s love of the ol’ perf-art by following the growth and institutionalization of our main perf-art staging outfit.

For 20 years, the On the Boards organization staged dance, music, and mixed-performance events at Washington Hall in the Central District. For the past 10 of those years, OTB’s been trying to move to a bigger, newer facility. Finally, the opportunity arose when A Contemporary Theater abandoned the lower Queen Anne digs it had occupied since ’63, and moved into a fancy multi-million dollar remodel of the old Eagles Auditorium downtown.

OTB then raised its own big-donor bucks to remake the old ACT building for its own purposes. The results are quite impressive: A 350-seat, proscenium-style main auditorium with state-O-the-art sound and light gear, a 99-seat studio theater (still unfinished as of this writing), a library/video room, and all the other tech and support facilities a bigtime staging entity needs.

OTB had always had a reputation as one of the most “ground-level” of Seattle’s full-time arts organizations, as being open to new local talent (even in years when most of its major shows were touring imports) and in touch with the frontiers of live art and music (even in years when much of its fare rehashed the previous decade’s avant-garde).

The Brave New OTB, however, is a whole different animal. The new building, like most other new public buildings around here, bears the name of somebody who paid for the privilege (it’s “the Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance”). The group’s newsletter announcing the opening of the new building is full of plugs for various corporate sponsors and contributors, (including AT&T, US Bank, Boeing, and Microsoft), offers a “new and expanded Business Club” which “gives local companies of all sizes an opportunity to benefit from a great incentive package–while also supporting On the Boarts.” Only time (specifically forthcoming schedules) will tell how well local and smaller-scale creators will fit in the new OTB’s scheme-O-things.

SO THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE SECRET SAUCE: McDonald’s stores now sport Big Mac 30th anniversary posters, featuring pseudo-psychedelic graphics reminiscent of Starbucks’ 25th anniversary posters from two years ago. Hippies then and now, of course, have loved to invoke McDonald’s as a quintessential symbol of everything they hate about corporate America, suburban lifestyles, and meat consumption.

The mistrust was mutual. The company’s dress code back then, natch, frowned on excessive male hirsuteness. More importantly, the chain’s whole operation was (and is) built around the un-hippie values of uniformity, conformity, neatness, and efficiency. The Fifties (a Learning Channel cable documentary series based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name) featured a telling memo from McD’s top management, calling individualism a dangerous trait and asserting all managers, employees, and franchise owners will be broken into the organization’s proper spirit of total conformity. McD’s arch rival Burger King briefly used the ad slogan “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules;” Outback Steak Houses currently feature the slogan “No Rules, Just Right.” These are so false they’re not even preposterous: A restaurant chain, especially a fast-food franchise, is nothing but a set of rules. Without the standardized products, prices, and premises stipulated in a franchise agreement, there’s no reason for the national advertising or other brand-building techniques that make a chain franchise more valuable to a franchisee than simply starting his or her own indie restaurant concept. (Of course, even that’s no guarantee of success, as seen by the bankruptcy of the once-booming Boston Market circuit and the resulting sudden closure of all its Northwest outlets.)

OTHER VOICES (from KJR-FM DJ Norm Gregory): “The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a proposed new rule which would limit beer and alcohol sales at events when 25 percent of the fans are under age 21. This could end beer sales in the stands at the football and baseball games. Part of the thrill of going to the games for my kids was passing drinks down the row. I didn’t mind them handling alcohol–it was when they started the one-sip-per-drink rule.”

SURVEY SAYS: I’m asking your help for next week’s column. Seems the aforementioned changes in my publishing situation have triggered what self-help books used to call a “midlife crisis.” I don’t have a spouse to mercilessly cheat on or thinning hair to cover-up. I wouldn’t buy a monstrous SUV even if I had the money, and I’ve no desire to do the Green Acres thang (I grew up in the countryside and won’t go back). But that still leaves lots of new directions into which a gent could place one’s life. Please send any suggestions on how I should devote the next year or three (for cash income or otherwise) via email to clark@speakeasy.org. The best will appear in this virtual space next week.

‘TIL THEN, ponder these words attributed to one Louise Beal: “Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.”

Combustible Edison Gets Serious:

Life After Lounge?

CD review for The Stranger, 10/8/98

COMBUSTIBLE EDISON The Impossible World (Sub Pop) ***

The Cocktail Revolution is dead; OD’d on bad self-parody acts.

So how do neo-lounge pioneers Combustible Edison try to stay relevant? By dropping the rhinestone-tiara kitsch and reinventing themselves as a somewhat more serious ambient-progressive combo, suitable for indie-film soundtracks, KMTT airplay, and wedding showers.

On several tracks (“Hot and Bothered,” the closing “Scanner’s Reprise”), the band strives for admittance onto the hip-love-rock trail blazed by the likes of Pigeonhed. On others (“Tickled to Death,” “Pink Victim”), Lily Banquette works hard to gain your respect as a legitimate pop-jazz vocalist.

The Impossible World is more ambitiously composed, arranged, and produced than any previous CE disc. It’s also not as much fun as CE’s old stuff (though you might find it to be fine makeout music).

AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)

I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:

• Appreciating different aromas, textures, and tastes. Discerning the difference between Ritz and Hi-Hos.
• Rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language.
• Intelligent discourse with persons of other subcultures.
• Hosting a successful party.
• Dancing (Lindy hop, Virginia reel, tap, lap).
• Holding your liquor; preventing or relieving hangovers.
• Personal health and hygeine; including brushing and flossing.
• Contraception and STD prevention.
• Chemistry; including different pharmaceuticals’ good/bad effects.
• Tanning without burning.
• Posture and bearing; preventing carpal-tunnel syndrome.
• At least one athletic or semi-athletic activity (downhill skiing, swimming, yoga, step aerobics, bowling, bicycling, Buns of Steel).
• One or more social games (poker, Scrabble, Twister, pinball, foosball, Quake,

  street hockey, et al.).

• Knowledge of the major professional sports (other than wrestling).
• Food preparation and storage; knowing how long to microwave a leftover pizza slice.
• Dining for pleasure, not merely for sustenance. Creating unusual food combinations (peanut butter on mashed potatoes).
• Discernment of fine yet reasonably-priced liquors and beers.
• Knowledge of agriculture, food technology, and the dangers of fad diets.
• Architecture and civic planning.
• Home building and repair.
• Interior design and/or Feng Shui.
• Gardening; mulching and composting.
• Acquaintance with U.S. and world literature, art, comics, film, theater, TV, and periodicals.
• Knowledge of the world’s assorted cultures, philosophies, and religions.
• Music theory and history; awareness of at least one country singer other than Patsy Cline.
• Awareness of the natural environment of your home and the larger world.
• Awareness of the history, politics and economics of your home and the larger world.
• Political action and organizing.
• Dealing with corporate and governmental bureaucracies.
• Judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the color of their lip gloss.
• Inquisitive skepticism toward public, political, and commercial speech.
• Holding your own amid hostile situations (i.e. workplaces, playgrounds). When to engage in verbal self-defense; when to keep your big flap shut.
• Value shopping; bargaining and haggling.
• Cordial relations with neighbors, relatives, and postal workers.
• Politely yet firmly declining the entreaties of proselytizers and telemarketers.
• Being nice to young children without letting them walk all over you.
• Caring for and feeding pets (biological or virtual).
• Getting along with housemates, lovers, cubicle mates, or bandmates without killing one another or even wanting to. Social negotiation and consensus-building (deciding which film to see or which pitcher to get at happy hour).
• Falling in love hard; falling out of love soft.
• Developing a healthy self-esteem, not an unhealthy egomania.
• Reinventing oneself every few years, a la Madonna or George Carlin.
• Personal discipline (getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop without biting).
• An area of knowledge associated with a different ethnicity or gender (for a man, Barbara Cartland novels; for an African American, butoh).
• Fashion design, selection, color-coordination, accessorizing, and repair.
• Sorting laundry.
• Programming a VCR and remote (not that hard, really!).
• Personal law (wills, contracts, income tax, warranties, et al.)
• Improving or repairing your credit.
• Packing a carry-on suitcase.
• Traversing your city via public transportation; reading a timetable.
• Solving crossword and jigsaw puzzles.
• Short-term weather forecasting.
• Ability on a musical instrument (including the voice).
• At least one of thevisual arts(painting, drawing, calligraphy, photography,

  cinematography, videography, Photoshop).

• Rudimentary computer usage.
• Desiging a website with no annoying “construction signs” or bad MIDI music.
• “Netiquette”: Writing e-mails to the point, but not too pointedly.
• Grammar and spelling; knowing the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
• Composing effective thank-you notes, resumes and cover letters, yearbook salutations, personal ads, and responses to threatened legal actions.
• Dressing and grooming for various occasions (seductions, funerals, job interviews, Halloween).
• Magic tricks and parlor games.
• A healthy sense of humor; jokes and anecdotes for all occasions.
• A repertoire of film, music, and TV trivia.
• How to tell different types of trees from a far distance. Number one–the larch….

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Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person
Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM
Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM
From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.

Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…

I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Erinn Kauer / eakamouse

P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.

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.