MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.

A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…

DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.

A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.

OFFAL-LY STRANGE: Your day-earlier-than-normal pre-Thanksgiving Misc. begins with feast-related news from London. In that town where darn near every non-chain restaurant has a veggie page on the menu, where mad-cow disease is still a recent memory, and where vegan activists used to pass out anti-meat flyers outside McDonald’s outlets until the chain sued them for slander (the vegans won), the latest food fad is a return to a UK tradition, delicacies made from offal–organs and other animal parts not normally consumed by modern Western humans. An AP dispatch claims “more than one-quarter of London’s 600 biggest eateries” now serve such items as pig’s-head salad, bloodcake with fried egg, goose neck (stuffed with gizzards), and veal-kidney risotto with crispy pig’s-ears. Many of these meat-byproduct dishes are illegal to commercially serve in the U.S. (you can’t even get a genuine haggis, the national dish of Scotland, ’round these parts); but hey, there’s another air-fare war going on now. In other food news…

BIG STOREWIDE SALE!: Why, you ask, would Fred Meyer (the regional everything-for-everybody chain) want to buy up QFC (the fancy-pants grocery specialists)? Besides the normal drives for consolidation in today’s chew-’em-up, spit-’em-out corporate world, QFC was threatening to infiltrate Freddy’s Oregon stronghold, and QFC’s role in the Pike & Broadway urban-strip-mall complex (with its food-drug-variety-banking combo) is too close to Freddy’s under-one-roof hypermarket concept for Freddy’s to afford to ignore.

Media coverage, natch, emphasized the merger’s potential impact on the Q’s upscale core clientele. The Q responded to this press-generated nonissue by running full page ads promising the Q will remain the Q. Tellingly, there’ve been no ads promising Freddy’s would remain Freddy’s; just a brief reassuring statement from Meyer management. But with seemingly everything else getting gentrified these days, I know I’d be afraid of such possible consequences as Ralph Lauren goods taking over the Pant Kingdom department, Smith & Hawken on the hardware shelves, Aveda at the cosmetics racks, Bang & Olufson replacing the Panasonic boom boxes in the Photo & Sound section, or even a wine shelf with F. G. Meyer’s Choice Beaujolais Nouveau.

MEANWHILE, Freddy’s won an appeal earlier this month in its plan to build a big store at the former Leary Way steel-mill site. The neighborhood advocacy group SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land), which seeks to stop the plan, sez it’ll continue appealing in higher courts. It’s not against a Freddy’s in their part of town, just against it at that particular location. Its latest flyer reiterates a suggestion made in an old Misc., that Freddy’s instead take over the ex-Ernst block up the street. (SOIL’s hotline: 789-1010, fax 789-7109.) In other retail-space news…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The former Kid Mohair on Pine will reopen (maybe as soon as this week) as the Baltic Room, a piano bar (with just beer & wine). While a lot of remodeling work has been done, the space still looks largely like its elegant former self. Why’d Mohair go the way of 80 percent of U.S. small businesses? Maybe the “cigar bar” fad passed its peak; maybe the gentlemanly surroundings clashed too much with the loud, uptempo DJ music. Why might the Baltic Room fare better? For one thing, it’s phase three of the Linda’s Tavern/ Capitol Club cartel, forming a veritable market-segmented lineup of not-specifically-gay watering holes on Pine. Imagine Linda’s as the Chevy of the chain, the Capitol as the Caddy, and the Baltic as the lush-yet-comfy Buick. In other entertainment news…

WET & WILD: Scientists in Quebec City have announced an “invisible condom” they hope to market after a couple years of further testing. According to Reuters, it’s a “polymer-based liquid that solidifies into a gel at body temperature,” forming a waterproof film that blocks STD transmission. Inventors say “it can be used without telling the partner who doesn’t want to use a latex condom.” I’m sure even before the thing gets gov’t. approval, test users will quickly find additional fun uses for the stuff, some of which might even involve sex.

INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.

Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.

MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.

Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”

The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”

Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.

Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”

Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)

The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)

The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”

Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.

Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.

There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.

YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.

The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.

IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.

AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:

It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.

It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.

It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)

On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.

While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.

The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.

I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.

On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.

Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.

The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.

Online Extras:

To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.

The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.

As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.

Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.

And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.

Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.

UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.

YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.

DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.

Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.

Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!

WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”

(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)

I KNOW IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, but here’s my fantasy: We move the now-surplused Kingdome to the Interbay landfill, then turn it into a community of tomorrow. In the stands: moderately priced housing, artists’ studios, offices, and light-industrial work spaces. In the corridors: tasty brewpubs and burger stands, charter schools, and convenient shops. On the playing field: a combo park, playfield, bazaar, and art/ performance space. At least let’s dismantle and rebuild the Dome’s prefab pavilion annex for a year-round street fair, complete with food and merchandise booths, exhibits, and an all-ages music club. The gracefully-curved pavilion looks too neat (like an inner hallway in some giant space station) to just trash.

UPDATE: The bike-messenger zine Iron Lung, mentioned here in May, has a new address: c/o Stephanie Ehlinger, 1719 E. Spring St. #104, Seattle 98122.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: PMS Crunch, from a Scarsdale, NY outfit called “Time of the Month Inc.,” claims in food-trade magazine ads to be “the perfect combination of salty and sweet–the taste and the gift that’s always in season.” The can promises “Chocolate, Nuts, and More Chocolate.” Its primary slogan: “The Best Snack… Period!” (Wholesale orders can be obtained at 1-800-PMS-44ME.)

NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: I got some decidedly mixed messages from those huge newspaper ads for the Fox News Channel. I couldn’t tell whether the ads’ incessant insistance on fair, unbiased reporting on the channel is meant to trash CNN (which Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch has previously, and falsely, accused of liberal bias) or to appease viewers apprehensive about the conservative bias of other Murdoch properties (most infamously, the New York Post and London Sun).

In any event, I’m intrigued by the notion of a news source with more nuts-‘n’-bolts info and less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” Of course, that’s not what Fox News gives you. That’d require more people and money than a startup cable channel’s gonna have (even one with Murdoch’s dough). Instead, you get hour upon hour of talking-head interviews and pontification, officially “unbiased” ‘cuz the opinionating’s done by the guests, not the hosts. This is augmented during daytime hours by functional but unremarkable top-of-the-hour news briefs.

FRAG-MENTATION: The other day I was talking with a musician who said her all-time favorite childhood memories included Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson’s Canadian-produced ’80s puppet series. The more she triggered my own memories, the more the show seemed a metaphor for the precarious existence of the would-be “alternative” artist or intellectual in our day and age. If you stay where you are, you can be safe and happy, working and playing and having funny misadventures with your own kind, but at the cost of ireversibly depleting the one resource that sustains you (the rock/ the safety of your subculture). Leave in one direction, and you end up in a smotheringly bourgeois purgatory (the handyman’s shop/ middle-class satiety). Leave in another direction, and you risk more directly hostile forces (the Fraggle-eating monster boy/ censorious conservatives). In the show’s final episode, the Fraggles found a solution to their dilemma by tunnelling to a new home. Perhaps we all need to (at least metaphorically) find our way toward a new premise for our lives and work.

THE INSANITY CONTINUES: I don’t care how the Camlin Hotel’s new owners redevelop the rest of the hotel’s block (now just parking and a motor-hotel annex). And if they must upscalize the hotel rooms, the rest of us will just have to find another site for our wedding receptions and/or just-divorced parties. But the plan to replace the venerable Cloud Room with luxury penthouse suites simply must be stopped. I don’t know how, but it must.

At a time when prefab retro-cocktail hangouts and stinky “cigar bars” are sprouting all over, we mustn’t lose one of the last real, un-“restored” martini emporia. I’m sure the Camlin-block development will still be plenty profitable with an intact Cloud Room. I suggest you go there at every opportunity in the coming weeks, and let it be known (both in the lounge and at the front desk) you love the joint and seek the chance to keep going there in the future.

HERE AT MISC. we’re trying to make sense of Nike’s reported flat sales trends, after years of huge growth. Is it the shoes? Is it the controversy over sub-subsistence pay for foreign laborers? Maybe it’s the ads that don’t try to sell any products, just the logo (not even the name!).

SIGN OF THE WEEK (one of the “Rules of Conduct” at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center): “#6. We want our guests to feel at home in the Game Center, so please practice daily hygeine and tidy up after yourself.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of the industrial-culture rag Voltage profiles three highly diverse Seattle bands–the ethereal Faith & Disease, the dark-techno Kill Switch… Klick, and the piously noisesome ¡TchKung! Even better is a piece on Project HAARP, the Army’s secret radiotransmitter base in Alaska. It’s equally skeptical of conspiracy theorists’ claims about the project and of the Pentagon’s denials. Free at the usual outlets or from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.

FLAKING OUT: Never thought I’d see it, but even the beloved institution of cereal has fallen to the horrid force that is “collectibles” speculation. Fueled by a couple of shrewd promoters trying to turn box collecting into the next big hoarding boom (to be surely followed by the inevitable bust, when foolish hoarders realize they’ll never unload their hoards for profit onto bigger fools), manufacturers have been toying with limited-run box designs, using some of the same tricks (like foil embossing) already used on comic books and sports cards. Now General Mills has come out with a Jurassic Park Crunch cereal (really Lucky Charms with dino shaped marshmallow bits), actually shouting on the box “Limited Collector’s Edition!” At least with all the BHT “added to packaging material to preserve freshness,” any unlucky box-hoarders will eventually be able to eat their losses.

GINSBERG WITHOUT TEARS: The local aging-boomer litzine Point No Point just came out with an Allen Ginsberg tribute by Stephen Thomas, who claimed “every left-of-center social movement since the ’50s is traceable back through Ginsberg’s poetic vision.” For good or ill, Thomas might be right.

In the months since his demise, I only found one obit (in The Nation) that emphasized his writing instead of just how cool a dood he was. This may be how he’d want to be remembered. He exemplified many annoying hipster trends: the incessant self-promotion, the championing of celebrity above artistry, the simplistic Hip vs. Square dichotomy, the concept of culture as something created exclusively in NY/LA/SF and merely consumed elsewhere. No wonder the folks at MTV loved him. He had the same business plan!

But there was more to Ginsberg than his carefully groomed icon-hood. There was his actual work–writings, speeches, performances. He championed not just gay rights but gay life. During the post-McCarthy nadir of American discourse, he wrote about forgotten or suppressed details of U.S. history. His pieces often lacked craftsmanship and “quality control” but oozed with exuberance, and thus at least indirectly inspired the punk/ DIY universe.

RAMPING UP: We’ll always remember the long-awaited opening of Moe’s in 1/94 as a special night. After almost two decades of playing mostly in tiny bars, rundown ballrooms, and basements, the “Seattle music scene” had a veritable palace, expensively built just for it. But all scenes change, and so it is here, with Moe’s life as a rock club ending next week. On the upside, the formerly much less palatial Off Ramp club’s about to reopen (pending those pesky Liquor Board bureaucrats) as the Sub Zero. When last written about in this space, it was announced the joint’s sale, remodeling, and reopening would take a little longer than first expected. As it turns out, a year longer. But much was done–it’s clean, and (thanx partly to an all-new floor) no longer smells of stale beer! The cafe part’s open; drinks and bands might commence any week now.

(If you attend only one column-anniversary bash this season, let it be the fantabuloso Misc.@11 party Sunday, June 8, 7:30 p.m. at Ace Studios Gallery, 619 Western Ave., Third Floor.)

THE MAILBAG: Reader Larry Gilbert has additional info about our all-time favorite soft drink ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin: “When I last read up on it, I learned it’s added to citrus-juice-based sodas as an emulsifier, to keep the citrus oils from separating. Most soda makers think it’s undesirable to have a carbonated drink that has to be shaken up. (Orangina is a notable exception. Track it down at QFC sometime, and note the `gently shake’ direction on the can.)”

BETTING AGAINST THE HOUSE: This guy in the north end has this home he’s willing to sell for a mere $1,000 or so. All you have to do to qualify, according to the large print on the forms you get when you follow signs to the place on weekends, is write a winning essay about the American court system. But then you read the fine print on the form and it turns out there’s also a $99 “credit check” fee required from all entrants, refundable only if fewer than 2,700 entries are received (in which case the essay-contest shtick will be dropped and the house will be offered to regular brokers). While it may be within the letter of the law distinguishing legal contests from illegal private lotteries (one area where the state doesn’t want private competition), you can still experience the warm thrill of helping someone else achieve his or her dream home, for far less than one month’s payment on the place you’re living in now.

LO-DEFINITION TV: TCI Cable, still in its long-delayed replacement of low-capacity cable lines in Seattle (promised “next year” for the past few years and required by its city contract to be done by 1/99), will at least get new digital transmission equipment and new home cable boxes soon. No word yet when we’ll get it; national TCI HQ sez “most” of its local systems will switch within the year. Finally, after being stuck all these years with a mere 40 channels, you might get something close to the 500 channels promised long ago by TCI bossman John Malone.

There’s a catch, of course. As anybody who’s worked with computer graphics knows, digital images can be compressed and transmitted at a vast range of levels, from the super-hi-res rates sometimes called “high definition TV” to the super-lo-res rates of Internet movie clips. According to an NY Times story, TCI plans to squeeze 12 digital channels onto the bandwidth it now uses for one old-style analog TV channel. Each of these new channels will have half the image detail of a current analog broadcast or cable channel. (If you’re squinting to follow a baseball game on a big-screen TV now, just wait!) TCI insists most viewers won’t notice the difference. But if they’re smart, they’ll equip these new cable boxes for variable compression-rate reception. That way, they can get away with videocassette-quality images for, say, BioDome reruns on Showtime, but still provide the ultra-sharpness for High Noon on AMC.

ONE-POINT-FIVE CHEERS: It took a bit, but I decided I support the Paul Allen football stadium scheme. It’s not just to infuriate all my conformist-nonconformist pals on Capitol Hill, who seem to hate pro football even more than they hate TV or the popular religions. (Maybe they’re still in rebellion against the jocks who were mean to ’em in high school.) Here are my reasons: 1) If Allen’s gonna spend his middle age commissioning monuments to himself and his relatives (a UW gallery and library, the Experience Music Project, the twice-aborted Seattle Commons, a big Renton office park, that private home in the San Juans where a summer camp used to be), one of these monuments might as well be one where soccer games and the Boat Show can happen. 2) The financing scheme’s less onerous than it could’ve been, and less than the baseball stadium’s tax plan is. The existing hotel-motel tax will run a few more years, and stadium contractors won’t have to pay sales tax on their concrete. 3) I happen to like watching football, if the price is right and if it’s at least a team of lovable losers like the Hawks. So there.

IN STORE: The operators of Pin-Down Girl and Speedboat, those two nearly-adjacent Belltown hipster-clothing boutiques, have decided to no longer run two stores with such similar stuff so close. Some of Speedboat’s current stock will be consolidated at Pin-Down; the rest will be shipped to a new store the owners plan to open somewhere in California. They’re keeping the Speedboat space, and will turn it into a new business concept, as yet not officially announced.

SPIN AND MARDI: Sit & Spin’s little Mardi Gras Burlesque Revue was everything one could reasonably expect from a Carnival celebration among the infamous reservedness here in City Lite. It expressed a more sophisticated debauchery, and a more spirited approach to sexuality, than “alternative” subcultures usually endulge in.

Among the most pleasant surprises at the show was the presence of a large deaf contingent (serviced by a sign-language interpreter) at such a relatively non-saintly affair. Think about it: Blind people, in media representations, get to have the full range of human qualities (Ray Charles, Scent of a Woman, that Air Touch Cellular spokesdude), but deaf people are stereotyped as benchmarks of PC propriety (the closest thing to an exception was Ed Begley Jr.‘s womanizing character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). Even Edison and Beethoven are usually depicted as saintlier figures than they really were. Until TV closed-captioning and opera “supertitles” became widespread, the only culture thangs the hearing-impaired were welcomed into tended to be either evangelical church services or concerts by self-congratulatory folk singers. I’d always figured that putting up with such unrelenting sanctimonies could be a tougher thing to live with than deafness itself.

KIDSTAR RADIO, R.I.P.: Worthy attempt at a business model for commercial radio that didn’t depend on Arbitron’s ratings, instead using “membership” magazines and other promotional goodies to attract and keep sponsors. I’ve been writing and complaining about the suckiness of the Arbitron-controlled radio biz for over a decade. The problem has merely been exacerbated by recent government-approved station consolidations. Today’s radio biz only gives a damn about specific segments of the citizenry, ignoring preteens, people too old to be boomers, and (in this region) minorities. Teens and young adults were similarly ignored by almost all local radio throughout the ’80s, when virtually nobody who wasn’t an upscale ’60s-generation person was deemed worthy of the medium’s attention. In the universe of commercial radio (and of essentially commercial “public” radio), to be demographically incorrect by Arbitron’s standard is to not exist.

INSIDE SCOOP: Someone at the Kingdome Home Show was passing out “Save Our Shows” petitions, asking the powers-that-be to ensure room for home shows, auto shows, RV shows, etc. in any future Kingdome or replacement-stadium project. It’s only fair. The original idea behind the Dome was one structure to host different sports and different floor shows. If economics now indicate separate arenas for each game are more lucrative, there’s still a need for a place to have rotating sales booths in.

The marketplace-bazaar setup, with ailes of separately-run sales and demonstration booths, is among the world’s oldest and most widespread social institutions. More diverse and enticing than big single-operator stores, more sociable than scattered strip-mall stores, it appeals to a sense of discovery and spectacle rather than mere utilitarian acquisition. If I were county exec Ron Sims, negotiating with Paul Allen’s people about subsidies for a replacement football stadium, I’d demand an exhibition space at least as big as today’s Dome plus its overflow pavilion, with the county getting a slice of rental income from it. And I’d hustle to have that space booked year-round: Health fairs, book fairs, computer fairs, kid fairs, senior fairs, new-age fairs, arts and performance fests, carnivals, Convention Center overflow exhibits, world’s-largest-rummage-sales, etc.

FAST MONEY: Somebody tried to tell me once how computer technology was like Jeopardy!, an answer in search of a question. I replied if that was the case, then Microsoft was more like Family Feud, where the most popular answer is decreed to be correct. Whether this means Gates will be compared by posterity to the eternally gladhanding Richard Dawson (or even to the more tragic figure of Ray Combs) remains to be seen.

MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…

SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…

IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.

The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.”

HERE AT MISC. we’ve figured out the easy way to figure out whom to vote for next month: Vote for all the candidates who appear on TV ads in color, and against all the guys who appear in black-and-white.

BELO CO. TO BUY KING, SELL KIRO: This leaves a wonderful opportunity. Let’s buy KIRO-TV. We (myself and you dear readers) will form a private-stock corporation, get some venture capital, and take over Channel 7. First, we’ll bring back J.P. Patches. Then we’ll show America how a station oughta be run. Imagine: A local performance-art variety show, with the Black Cat Orchestra and Pat Graney Dancers. Consumer-watch segments attacking the real corporate crooks, not nickel-and-dime mail-order frauds. The Sanjyit Ray Movie of the Week. Art lessons with Ed Fotheringham. Live curling matches. Late-night rerun marathons of Thunderbirds (the original versions, not the cut-up Fox manglings from two years ago).

FIRST XMAS CAROL spotted on a Seattle restaurant background music system: Sept. 23.

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Sailors Union of the Pacific Hall, home of such nice all-ages shows last year, is now about to house the reincarnation of El Gaucho, formerly one of Seattle’s best-loved steak and bourbon outlets. Its old downtown manifestation, now the Olive Way branch of the Red Balloon Co., was famous as the watering hole of old KVI DJs Bob Hardwick (the official Ninth-Coolest Seattleite Ever) and Jack Morton.

DILLARD’S DULLARDS: During a post-speech Q&A at a Michigan writers’ conference some six months ago, Connecticut essayist/ poet Annie Dillard was asked if she missed living in the Northwest (she was holed up in Bellingham and the San Juans in the late ’70s). She said no, claiming “it’s no place for an intellectual woman” and offering a brusque retort imaging NW females as breast-feeding, fruit-canning, chainsaw-wielding mutes. Dillard’s remark eventually caught the attention of editors at the Seattle Times, who don’t have a particular interest in intellectualism but do have a lot invested in the image of Seattleites as at least a pseudo-sophisticated sort. A Scene section front page was assembled around Dillard’s brief quotation, headlined “Women intellectuals: A Northwest oxymoron?.” To fill the rest of the space, the paper added interview quotes from local citizens and defensive editorial commentary (“OK, Northwest women, dab that drool off your chin, put down your chainsaw and listen up”), treating readers as if they were as dumb as Dillard claimed they were. The Times, which would rather cultivate readers who can grapple with complex wines than ones who can grapple with complex ideas, treated Dillard’s throwaway remark as a call to defend, not the Northwest Mind, but the Northwest Lifestyle. The notion that there could be some bright earth mamas out there, or some well-dressed urbane ditzes, hasn’t seemed to occur to the paper.

Incidentally, here’s a perhaps-fortuitous slice of Dillard’s only novel to date, The Living (set in 1890s B’ham): “…But the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary… No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.” (Italics added.) (The Times’ review called The Living “a novel of character that blends history, social change, and individual dreams in a sophisticated, seamless prose.”)

BASES OF OPINION: So “Refuse to Lose II” ended with a whimper (and a wild pitch), not with a Grand Salami. That’s OK. Last year was the grand Drive for Repsect, when the Ms (and, by extension, the region) proved it had contender stuff. This Randy Johnson-less year was more for fun, for accomplishment for its own exhilarating sake, and for the fans to prove to the taxpayers there really was long-term support behind the team (and, by extension, the new stadium scheme).

‘TIL NEXT WE GRAPPLE with the limitations of the written word, recall these words from the legendary Hedy Lamarr: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

This installment of Misc. is being written on a gorgeous, sturdy office table obtained dirt cheap at the old REI store’s after-closing fixture sale. While many of us working in the Pike/Pine corridor are thankful to no longer compete for parking with Suburbans from the suburbs, there’s still a certain feeling of loss over what was a solid, utilitarian place selling solid, utilitarian goods. REI began as an outgrowth of the ’30s Mountaineer movement, a quasi-bohemian subculture that believed communing with Nature could bring empowerment and even spiritual growth. These folks wanted a consumer-run resource for practical tools. That’s a ways from the mass-merchandising behemoth that is today’s REI, with its huge new Retail Theater Experience on Denny Way.

Another survivor of the pre-WWII co-op craze, Group Health, admits to being in merger negotiations with Kaiser Permanente, a huge HMO with operations in 18 states. Some news accounts questioned whether such a scheme could preserve Group Health’s “cooperative spirit.” I say without the actual practice of cooperative governance, such a “spirit” is little more than an image; and at organizations the size of today’s REI or Group Health, real hands-on co-op management might not even be possible. Speaking of forgotten populist dreams…

STEAMED OR FRIED?: TV commentators on Primary Night claimed to be mildly astounded by the size of Norm Rice’s loss in his run for governor. They attributed the defeat to his failure to get out the vote among his supposed core constituency of “urban liberals.” Nobody mentioned how Rice wrote off that vote before his second mayoral term started. From his status as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nordstrom to his (or rather, the city’s) continued attempt to remake Seattle into a city where only upscale baby boomers are welcome, Rice had nothing to offer progressives and little to offer voters elsewhere in the state. He made no viable promises that he wouldn’t sell out the rural environment to Weyerhaeuser and agribusiness the way he’s tried to sell out the urban environment to the condo developers and Paul Allen. (Then there’s the way his development program as Seattle mayor played against the rest of the state, by vying for housing stock and nonindustrial jobs that might otherwise go to other jurisdictions.)

I knew several Rice campaign staffers; while they’re articulate, outgoing folks, they couldn’t tell me what Rice’s candidacy had to offer non-affluent and non-boomer voters. He might have had a chance running as a Dan Evans-style, mainstream, pro-business Republican, if that party were still run by sane people. Indeed, Demo primary victor Gary Locke is now running against GOP nominee Ellen Craswell as just that voice-O-moderation the GOP once claimed to be. Speaking of business and hype…

EXPOSED: You’ve seen corporate ads swipe graphic, type, and copy elements from home-published zines. You may have seen record-company promos made by professional design studios to look like the work of no-budget zinesters. But Hollywood Highballis an apparent first: a paid-circulation ($4.95) publication purporting to be a real street-level zine, sold at the same record and comix stores, but made by a national ad agency (Gyro Worldwide of Philadelphia, described in the NY Times as an outfit that “Prides Itself on Understanding Generation X”).

Subtitled “Indie-Rock’s Nudie Magazine,” its 48 pages combine retro “cocktail culture” lifestyle features, celebrity swipes (reserving any real negativity to dead celebs), parody cheesecake photos (black asterisks cover all bare nipples), and ads for Gyro’s regular clients–MTV, Reactor clothes, Goldschlager liquor, and especially Red Kamel cigarettes. The NYT quotes Gyro founder Steven Grasse about Highball, “It helps our agency’s image. If we say we understand urban hipsters, we have to continue to prove it.” Having ad execs running a magazine sure removes the danger of pesky content getting in the way of the ads (that’s one place you’ll never see an anti-smoking article). Even the concept’s advertiser-friendly–consumer hedonism disguised as a spoof of yesterday’s consumer hedonism, with the erotic aspect of the ’50s source material toned down to inoffensiveness.

This week at Misc. World HQ, we seek your suggestions for the ex-REI building.

LET US RETURN to Misc., the pop-culture column that’s indifferent about the threatened Federal ban on goofy cigarette brand merchandising like Marlboro Gear, Camel Cash, and the near-ubiquitous Your Basic Hat. Wearing or carrying that stuff’s a walking admission of subservience to a chemical god, disguised (as so many human weaknesses are) as bravado. Speaking of personal appearance…

BEAUTY VS. COMMERCE: The Portland paper Willamette Week reports many employers in that town are altering their dress codes to regulate employees with nose and lip rings. An exec with the espresso chain Coffee People was quoted as saying his company allows up to “three earrings per ear and a nose stud,” but forbids nose rings. Starbucks baristas in the Rose City may wear up to two earrings per ear but no face rings, no tattoos, and no “unnatural” hair colors. Dunno ’bout you, but I like to be served by someone who shows she knows there’s more important things than serving me. Speaking of trendy looks…

UPDATE: Got a bottle of Orbitz pop thanks to the guys at Throw Software, who’d smuggled three bottles from NYC. It’s made by a Vancouver company (Clearly Canadian) whose US HQ’s in Kent, but it’s only sold so far in the Northeast. It’s more beautiful than I imagined–a clear, uncarbonated, slightly-more-syrupy-than-usual concoction with caviar-sized red, yellow, or orange gummy globules in perfect suspension, neither floating nor sinking. It uses Clearly Canadian’s regular bottle shape, which is already sufficiently Lava Lamp-esque for the visual effect. As for the taste, reader Jeannine Arlette (who also got hers in NY) sez it’s “less icky tasting than the dessert black-rice-pudding, but just a little… The little neon `flavor bitz’ lodge in the gag part of your throat as you swallow, and, they have no flavor except possibly under some very loose definition where texture is considered a flavor.” Speaking of beverages…

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of an ad offering video-rental “happy hours,” complete with cocktail-nation cartoon imagery): “Rain City Video does not condone the use of alcoholic beverages with some movies.” What? Without a few good highballs or mint-liqueur martinis in your system, what’s the point of watching something like Leaving Las Vegas, Barfly, Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? Certainly the Thin Man films nearly demand six martinis. Speaking of film and morals…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in his paper The Final Call, recently blasted the producers of Independence Day.He claims they knowingly stole and corrupted a 1965 prophecy by his predecessor, Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, that a fleet of space ships will one day descend from their “Mother Plane,” secretly built by Africans in 1929 and currently hidden in high orbit, to destroy white America. (This is the source of the “mother ship” imagery George Clinton sanitizes for mainstream consumption.) Farrakhan claims all the world’s political and media leaders know about the Mother Plane but have never admitted it, except to slander it in a movie. (Farrakhan’s also displeased that the UFO-blasting hero in Independence Day is so openly Jewish.)

Many of you first became acquainted with the advanced mysteries of the Nation of Islam at the Million Man March, when Farrakhan preached about conspiracies revealed by magic numbers. A nonbeliever might find it strange, but it’s no stranger than tenets followed by Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, and New-Agers.

Besides, the premise of an apocalypse from the skies is as old as War of the Worlds. Several sects have predicted violent or benign spaceship-based takeovers over the years; the Church of the Sub-Genius parodied it in its tracts claiming that “Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet.” And compared to real-life crimes against blacks (like the recent report in the mainstream press that CIA-connected crooks jump-started the crack industry, and the resulting gang violence, in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras), and Farrakhan’s charges seem relatively mild and almost plausible.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder these thoughts of Courtney Love on smells, from a 1993 issue of Mademoiselle: “All boys love Chanel No. 5 because it reminds them of their moms when they got dressed up.”

DUD RANCH: Montana’s got the (alleged) Unabomber, but in Seattle it’s the summer of the Unbomber! Indeed, we’ve got Unbombers all over town! Even though a certain politically ambitious prosecutor’s trying to throw the book at one alleged Unbomber, subsequent Unbombs continue to pop up everywhere! Since an Unbomb isn’t a bomb, it can be anything–unclaimed luggage, grocery bags, stalled cars, a garage-sale lamp, stray free samples of Honey Bunches of Oats, that Arch Deluxe box in the gutter–any unattended physical object of any appreciable size. Remember, don’t be a litterbug–you could get charged with planting an Unbomb, with un-threatening hundreds of innocent lives!

UPDATES: While the Off Ramp’s rebirth has taken a little longer than expected (don’t these things always?), its Denny/ Eastlake neighbor in noise, RKCNDY, may also arise from the ashes. Lori LaFavor, who booked many of the 1994-95 Sailors’ Union Hall shows, says she hopes to book a few all-ages shows in the space while the new owners get their remodeling plans and liquor-license application going… The couple who ran the Toaster Museum in Seattle’s AFLN and Wonderful World of Art galleries have moved to Portland and are raising funds to open a larger display of historic bread-burners there. To learn how to help write The Toaster Museum Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 11886, Portland, OR 97211, or email <ericn@SpiritOne.com>.

THE MAILBAG: Blaine Dollard writes, “What’s up with these buses?” It’s simple, really: In honor of King County taking over Metro Transit, a new luscious purple-based exterior color scheme was devised for the buses. But to save money, existing buses won’t be repainted until either (1) an advertiser pays to get a bus painted and that deal expires; or (2) a particular coach has its turn in the five-year cycle in which all the buses get repainted anyway. So from now until the new millennium, when you peer down the road to see if your bus is coming, you’ll have to squint to perceive either the luscious new colors or the old burger-chain browns (or for those weird ad buses, but that’s another item).

NO `SAX’ PUNS HERE: ‘Twas nice to unexpectedly spot the Billy Tipton Memorial Sax Quartet a few weeks back on Black Entertainment Television’s Jazz Discovery show, a mail-us-your-video-and-maybe-we’ll-play-it affair similar to MTV’s old Basement Tapes. It marked the first time I saw five white women on BET and it didn’t turn out to be an infomercial.

INTO THE DRINK: In the good ol’ days of the ’80s (trust me, they’re already being marketed by the nostalgia industry as “A Simpler Time”), the General Brewing Co. in Vancouver USA used to put fun little rebus picture puzzles inside the bottle caps of its Lucky Lager and generic “Beer Beer.” Pabst, which bought and closed General, still uses the puzzle-caps on its cheaper brands and malt liquors; unless you’re an Old English 800 fancier, you’re more likely to see such a cap strewn on the sidewalk than on a bottle you’ve personally bought. The gang at Portland’s Widmer Bros. Brewery must have remembered these; for their new bottled-beer line includes a line drawing inside the cap of two clinking glasses, the slogan “A Prost” (German for “toast”), and one of 20 different salutations (“To Palindromes,” “To Paleontologists,” “To Button Fly Jeans,” “To Firewalkers,” “To Dogs Named Steve,” “To the Platypus,” “To the Polar Bear Club”). Frankly, I’d rather have a rebus. At least with them, if you couldn’t solve it you knew you’d had enough. Speaking of beverages…

CALL TO ACTION 1: I previously asked if any of the column’s out-of-town readers could supply me with some of those Olestra fake-fat snacks. Nobody did, but now I’ve got another favor to ask. The Clearly Canadian drink company’s supposed to be launchingOrbitz, a soft drink with neon-colored “flavored gel spheres” floating in the bottle like edible little Lava Lamp bits, in selected test markets. Damn, I want some.

CALL TO ACTION 2:I now seek your opinions on whether the Sex Pistols’ slogan “Kill the Hippies” ever was, or is still, valid. Email your responses to clark@speakeasy.org. The more interesting replies will appear on this site sometime in September. Thank you.

The Official Drinking Game of the 1996 Olympics!

by Clark Humphrey with guidance from

Susan Rathke, Eric Fredericksen, Regan Holden, Nicolle Farup, and Skillit.

7/25/96

1. You can’t go to the bathroom until you see a close-up of a non-US athlete.

2. Drink every time an advertiser is mentioned as “an official sponsor of the Olympics.”

3. Finish off your drink every time an advertiser tries to cheat by calling itself merely “an official broadcast sponsor of the Olympics telecast.”

4. Anyone who laughs during the mini Leno show is immediately disqualified.

5. Drink with every “walking along the beach” reflective shot.

6. Puke continuously with every montage of heroic little girls.

7. Finish your drink every time they say, in an “up close and personal” interview, “How did the death of your mother/father affect your training/performance today?”

8. Drink twice every time they accuse a non-US winner of using drugs and/or cheating.

9. Drink whenever the color guy working gymnastics with John Tesh criticizes a gymnast’s dismount.

10. Drink whenever anyone refers to Ahmad Rashad as “NBC’s ambassador to the Olympics.”

11. Drink whenever someone mentions the buses not running on time.

12. Drink any time the clop showing Bela Carolyi carrying whatsherbutt with the sprained ankle is shown.

13. Throw your drink at the TV whenever they say, “Here in Hot-Lanta!”