UPDATE: Looks like the fabulously unkempt Lake Union Pub has indeed hosted its last punk gigs (as well as its last straight-edge-vs.-skinhead brawls and its last vomit launch on the carpet). The Off Ramp, on the other stamped hand, may reopen any week now. New owners promise “a new tile floor to wipe you off easy” and “bathrooms that won’t make you puke.”

DON’T MEX WITH ME: Ah, for the good ol’ days when a burrito was a burrito, before the invasion of Cal-Mex trendy concepts so darned “Cal” they drop all references to the “Mex.” On lower Queen Anne alone, you can now dine on World Wrapps, Global Wraps(at Macheezmo Mouse), or Todo Wraps (the new name for selected outlets of the Todo Loco chain). A conspiracy theorist (which I’m not) might even ponder whether the new Anglicized appellation constituted some sort of capitulation to election-year hate campaigns against Hispanic immigration.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The smashing success of Altoids has caused a curiously strong surge of imitation tinned mints, a trend that’s finally reached to Tacoma. There, Brown & Haley (“…Makes ‘Em Daily!”), famous for Almond Roca and Mountain Bars, has brought out its own brand of “Extra Strength Peppermints” in its own reusable tin. They’ve got a far smoother texture than Altoids. And, unlike the originals, they contain no sugar (or beef gelatin). And the tin is just as reuseable as the Altoids tin–good for sewing notions, keys, loose change, snuff, that Visa card you’ve promised to only use in case of emergency, or your first lover’s saved toenail clippings.

CARD ME: A recent Times story says those oh-so-collectible prepaid long-distance cards, which have a face value of $5 or $10 but can rate as much as $10,000 from foolish speculators, can be twice as valuable if they’ve never been used. This is taking the ol’ “mint condition” fetish to the point of ridiculousness. The card is physically unaltered by use; all it does is bear the number of a credit account at a phone company.

FOR (ST.) PETE’S SAKE: While Seattle’s politicians (and the businessmen who own them) keep insisting the next out-of-state chain-store branch will put downtown on the proverbial map, Seattle-mania continues; now spread as far as Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fla. (whose only prior interest in Seattle was trying to take away the Mariners). The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center recently mounted a play called Nirvanov, described by author David Lee as “Chekov’s Ivanov as seen through the eyes of Kurt Cobain and Frances Farmer.” As a local viewer reports via email, “Kurt angsts while Frances lurks around stage right in a black tail coat and offers advice and commentary. There is a chorus of Seattle Grunge Vampires, a fantastic Courtney imitation, several Nirvana songs recorded by a local band, and a live bat flitting around the theater (I never figured out if it was part of the show or had just wandered in).”

NO, THE CODE: The incredible shrinking 206 area code covered all of western Washington a few years ago. Next April, if US West and GTE get their way from government regulators, only Seattle, a couple of suburbs (Shoreline, White Center) and a handful of islands (Bainbridge, Vashon, Mercer) will be in 206 anymore. Tacoma and south King County will be called with the new 253 code; Everett and the Eastside will turn into 425 country.

The meanings are endless: Eastern Washington anti-sprawl bumper stickers, which now read “Don’t 206 509,” will have to be changed to “Don’t 425 509.” EastsideWeek editor Knute Berger will get a psychological boost to his only-half-exaggerated crusade for an “Independent Republic of the Eastside.” And, of course, both KVI’s hatemongers and our own scenester snobs will delight in the official declaration of Seattle to be its own territory, cut off from the realities of life in the outside world. Me? I’ll just be happy to have further proof that if a business, store, or arena isn’t in Seattle, it isn’t in Seattle. Circuit City? Incredible Universe? Ikea? Microsoft recruiting? Stop running downtown Seattle skyline photos in your ads! You’re not even in the same area code as Seattle!

MISC. HATES TO say it, but the rest of the local media were more than a bit mistaken about the hyped-up overimportance of a certain out-of-state chain restaurant opening up shop in Seattle. Now if White Castle had moved into town, that would’ve meant something.

Besides, we’ve already got a watering hole for Seattlites who love film. It’s called the Alibi Room. Instead of loudly pandering to manufactured celebrity worship (just what has B. Willis actually done to deserve this kind of Messiahdom?), this place quietly honors the art and craft of making film, with published screenplays on a shelf for browsing and many of Seattle’s growing tribe of director and cinematographer wannabes hanging out and networking. They’re even mounting a local screening series, “Films From Here.” Seldom has the divide over competing visions of America’s cultural future been more clearly shown than in the contrast between a corporately-owned shrine to prepackaged Global Entertainment and a local independent gathering place for creators.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: The Vent may be the only alternative literary zine published on that rock of antisociality known as Mercer Island. The current issue’s highlighted by “Rage,” George Fredrickson’s two-paragraph micro-essay on “how crazy it is 2 live on Mercer Isl. and b black at da same time.” Free at Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill or pay-what-you-can from 3839 80th Ave. SE, Mercer Island 98040… July’s Earshot Jazz newsletter has an important piece by new editor Peter Monaghan about DIY indie CDs and some of the pitfalls unsuspecting musicians can face when they try to become their own record producers. (Free around town or from 3429 Fremont Pl. N., #309, Seattle 98103.)

NET-WORKING: the same week I read this month’s Wired cover story on “Kids Cyber Rights,” I also found a story from last September’s Harper’s Bazaar about “Lolitas On-Line.” In the latter article, writer David Bennahum claims there’s a trend of teen females (including “Jill, a precocious 15-year-old from Seattle”) acting out sexual fantasies in online chat rooms and newsgroups. Bennahum proposes, that online sex talk isn’t necessarily a Force of Evil but can, when used responsibly, be a tool of empowerment and self-discovery; letting users explore the confusing fascinations of sexual identity safely and pseudonymously.

In the Wired piece, Jon Katz offered some similar notions. I’m particularly fond of his assertions that children “have the right to be respected,” “should not be viewed as property or as helpless to participate in decisions affecting their lives,” and “should not be branded ignorant or inadequate because their educational, cultural, or social agenda is different from that of previous generations.”

Twenty years of punk rock should have proved kids can make their own culture and don’t like being treated as idiots. Yet the Right still shamelessly uses “The Family” (always in the collective singular, as one monolithic entity) to justify all sorts of social-control mechanisms. Near-right Democrats try to muscle in on the far right’s act, using “Our Kids’ Future” to promote gentrification schemes that make family housing less affordable, while cracking down on any signs of independent youth culture (punks, skaters, cruisers) and going along with dubious “protection” schemes like V-chips and Internet censorship. And too many of yesterday’s Today Generation (like Garry Trudeau) mercilessly sneer at anyone too young to be From The Sixties. (In ’92 a Times subsidiary hired me to write for its tabloid for teens; I was laid off when its baby-boomer bosses found, to their surprise, that actual teens could indeed compose their own sentences.)

Yes, teens and preteens face a lot of problems. They always have; they always will. But they’re far more likely to get abused by daddy than by an e-mail correspondent. They’ll hear more (and more creative) cuss words in the playground than on HBO. Let’s stop stunting kids’ growth by forcing them into subhuman roles they often can’t stand. Instead, let’s treat kids as human beings, who could use a little friendly advice now and then (as could we all) but who ultimately should, and can, take responsibility for their own lives. John Barth once wrote, “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.” I’d add: Innocence excessively enforced becomes fetishization.

Misc. was naturally bemused by the Newsweek hype piece about a Seattle only faintly resembling any real-world town, a town whose supposed biggest celebrity is New Republic/CNN Crossfire vet Michael Kinsley, esconced in Redmond to start Microsoft’s pay-per-read website Slate (presumably not named for Fred Flintstone’s boss). But we’re even more perplexed at what Kinsley told the Times a few weeks back, that Slate readers shouldn’t expect “a left wing magazine.” As if anyone familiar with his Reagan-Democrat views ever would.

A FASHIONABLE FORM OF CANCER: Tobacco companies are paying “hip” bars to sell their cigarettes. R.J. Reynolds paid Kid Mohair to exclusively sell Camels. Moonlight Tobacco (RJR’s “hipster” alias company) struck a deal (exact terms not publicized) to have its brands be the only cancer sticks sold at Moe, whose upstairs room has been renamed the Moonlight Lounge. (Both parties claim the room’s naming is a coincidence, not part of the deal.) At the opening party for the Moonlight Lounge, two Moonlight Tobacco PR drones walked around giving out long cigarette holders, wearing military-style jackets with the name patch NICK (as in -otine). Since nightclubs can be perennially on the edge of solvency, even a modest “promotional allowance” plus free ash trays is too good for many owners to resist. Speaking of club ups n’ downs…

OFF RAMP UPDATE: Here’s what we know about the glorious Eastlake dive where so much local music history was made and so much cheap Oregon gin was swilled. The old owners ran out of cash and agreed to turn the place over to new owners. But there was a snag in the liquor-license transfer process, so the place shut down at the end of April. The wannabe new management’s still trying to execute the financing and paperwork to reopen the home of “Gnosh Before the Mosh” soon.

But a revived Off Ramp will face the same problems other clubs now face. The explosion in touring indie bands these past two years has drawn audiences away from regularly-gigging local acts, whose once-steady appeal had brought a small degree of stability to the club circuit. Clubs have added an array of DJ nights, geared to draw specific sets of regular patrons, but that market’s spread increasingly thin by competition. We’re also coming on five years since the Seattle music eruption hit big; the original Mudhoney and Fallouts audiences are aging beyond the prime club-hopping years. Maybe a new Off Ramp management can figure a new recipe for sucess, one that can help the scene as a whole. Speaking of the “maturation” of indie-rock…

STOCK IT TO ME: Stock-music production companies are now coming out with “alternative rock” production music for use in commercials, TV shows, low-budget films, industrial films, video games, porn, etc. The Minnesota-based HyperClips company offers “Alterna,” a package of 40 “alternative rock and dance tracks. Give your project an edge with these grungy and atmospheric pieces. With all the moodiness and aggression that the Alternative styles have to offer, with everything from mellow acoustic grooves to hardcore distorted jams.” The Fresh Music Library, meanwhile, claims its “Alternative Rock” CD features “production values heard on today’s college and alternative rock radio stations… These themes evoke U2, Nirvana, R.E.M., the Smithereens and others. Exactly the disc for youthful energy.” Speaking of commercialism…

AD VERBS: You may have seen the cutesy ad for Seattle’s Westin Hotels, with a jealous-sounding female narrator accompanying butt shots of a stud: “Broke his neck to get the job, then broke the corporate sales record. Even broke the corporate no-jeans rule. Who’s he sleeping with?” The closing: “Choose your travel partner wisely.” Never before (to my knowledge) has a major hostelry chain so brazenly teased at the aura of naughtiness that’s always surrounded the industry.

(You’ve four days to rearrange your schedule, obtain the swankiest outfit, and leave room in your diet for the splendiforous Misc.Tenth Anniversary Party, 7 pm-whenever Sunday, June 2 at the Metropolis Gallery, downtown on University St. between 1st and 2nd. Odd video, fine food and beverage, games, entertainment, and fine memories will be had by all. More on the Misc. World HQ site, <http://www.miscmedia.com>. Be there. Aloha.)

Belltown’s Plastic Palace Closing After Three Years:

The End of the World (Pizza)

Article for The Stranger, 5/24/96

“We’ve seen a lot of changes in this neighborhood,” Aaron Cone says while sipping a Coke outside the pizza stand he runs with his brother Adam. “It’s a different town than it was three years ago. We’ve seen a lot of friends move away, out of town or to other parts of town. Places like the Dog House and the old Last Exit are gone, places where we held some of the early meetings to plan this place.”

Adam Cone nods in agreement from a ’50s molded fiberglass chair on the sidewalk. “In a place like ours you really get to see the characters that make a neighborhood. A lot of them are gone. A lot are going. It’s strange to feel antiquated in your own back yard.”

After three years and untold thousands of slices, World Pizza departs Belltown on Friday, April 26. The closure leads directly from long-standing disputes with the Cone brothers’ landlord, the Bethel Temple evangelical church across the street. But it can also be seen as a sign of changes in the neighborhood, as condo developers eye nearly every lo-rise building in sight for elimination. “When we asked about the chance of moving into another building nearby, (the property manager) said he didn’t expect anything on that block to remain standing in a few years.”

That kind of mega-capitalism is a long way from the DIY entrepreneur spirit of the Cones, two would-be artists who’d gotten into food-service work to pay the bills but hated working for other people. Deciding to strike out on their own, they each took two jobs (including a stint making collector prints for Dale Chihuly), saving up a total of $6,000 to use in starting their own place.

In late 1992, Adam (then 23) and Aaron (then 20) found a former accountant’s office in a side-street storefront on Lenora. The rent was reasonable, and it was within a late-night stroll’s distance from the Crocodile, the Vogue, the Weathered Wall, and the future Sit & Spin.

Over the winter, the Cones slept in their pizza-stand-to-be, behind papered-over windows. By day, they built it into a mini-palace of plastic furnishings while learning from experience about the inticracies of restaurant construction and health permits. Finally, in May 1993, World Pizza premiered with the first of its five semiannual private parties. The party, and the place, were instant hits. Diana Ross and ABBA blared from a boom box. Slices were inhaled seconds after arriving from the oven. Good Italian red wine was emptied by the case. Overheated Belltowners quickly expanded the party from the cramped space into the sidewalk, drawing police complaints that eventually got back to the church landlords. Despite their spoken reservations and occasional eviction threats, the church people continued to rent the space to World Pizza on a month-to-month basis.

While the parties earned no income, they instantly established World Pizza as a “scene” place, a friendly place with what Adam Cone calls “a real atmosphere.” For the first year or so, it stayed open weekends until 3 a.m. to cpature the after-the-bars business. The Cones worked seven days a week, adding hired help as they could afford to; eventually building up to a staff of nine. They even offered delivery in the neighborhood for a brief while, until Adam took an order to a Moore Hotel guest who greeted him in the nude, apparently hoping Adam was the female clerk who’d taken the phone order.

The menu was kept simple, to ensure efficient service from the compact kitchen. A meat pizza, a veggie pizza, and the house specialty, potato pizza. Whole pies made to special order. Standard soft drinks and drip coffee. Home-baked sugar cookies. Lemonheads and Red Hots candies.

Adam describes the scene at World Pizza, on a good night, as “an energy, a nervous energy.” A lot of young lovers, punkers, Vogue fetish-night patrons. A few fights. More than a few late-night patrons who’d nod off halfway through their slices. Young brides on girls’-night-out wearing penis necklaces. A few old and neo hippies who’d come in, confused by the name and perplexed when it turned out not to be a whole-earth kind of joint. A lot of what Aaron describes as “people who weren’t quite all the way there.” An old man who, informed one night the place had no anchovy pizzas, would march past it night after night screaming, “No anchovies, no pizza!” A homeless guy who always wanted half a pepperoni slice and half a lemon. A guy who’d try to sell ball-point pens or women’s coats to the customers.

When the Nu-Born Tribe clothing store vacated its Second Avenue storefront in the same building in early 1995, World Pizza finally had an opportunity to add an auxiliary dining room, to relieve the standiing-room-only conditions at peak evening hours. The Cones tore down a small section of back wall to join the two rooms. The new room became a more spacious version of the old, with room for more ’50s-style seating and fun posters. On Sundays, the windows were covered up and the room was rented out for life drawing classes.

The new room opened with the biggest World Pizza party of them all. Thirty cases of wine were consumed that night, at a rate of a bottle a minute. The church people forbade any further such parties on the premises. Worse, the extra dining space didn’t lead to enough increased business to pay for its rent. The Cones reluctantly retreated to their original room. Bethel Temple now plans to use the Second Avenue storefront for a temporary thrift store and food bank.

In retrospect, World Pizza was a basic recipe of a few well-chosen ingredients. It all added up to a place that, while never holding a live music event and never giving a damn about the Seattle media stereotypes old or new, became a perfect encapsulation of the real “Seattle scene” spirit. Lively yet steadfastly unpretentious, knowing but never smugly “ironic,” it took honest admiration in both a perfect pepperoni slice and a candy-colored plastic water fountain. It was a refuge for people who enjoyed good food and a good time at a good price.

But it was also a child of a specific place and time; a time that ended when the church decided to clear out the building, while preparing to receive offers for the underlying real estate. When the Cones return this fall from a long-delayed European summer, they say they’ll look into re-entering the restaurant biz. They own all the restaurant’s equipment and fixtures, and will keep them in storage while they evaluate their futures. But their next venture might not be in Belltown, might not be a short-order drop-in joint, and probably won’t revive the World Pizza name.

Still, as Adam Cone puts it, “it’s more of a beginning than anything else.”

“We made very close friends,” Adam adds. “I’m still going with a girl I met here in the first few weeks we were open… It seems more like a time period than a restaurant. It’s taken on more of a personal level. I had things confirmed; what’s really important, like friendship, a sense of place, having an idea and finishing it.

“And we learned how to make pizza.”

UPDATE: I recently sought your proposed new uses for the Kingdome. The best came from one J. Drinkwater: “1) Fill it with water and house the sea lions from the Ballard Locks. 2) Rename it the Seattle Commons.”

SPACES IN THE HEART: Back when Seattle bands were just starting to attract out-of-town notice, the center of the town’s live-music action was a pair of clubs near Eastlake and Howell, connected by a walkway under a freeway overpass. The Off Ramp and RKCNDY weren’t posh by any means, but their drinks were strong and their PAs were loud. Newer and fancier clubs since stole their thunder. RKCNDY is closed and for sale; financing for a planned remodel apparently fell through. The Off Ramp has struggled as well. A new owner and new booker vow to keep things going; but the liquor-license transfer apparently hit a snag, and the home of Gnosh Before the Mosh is, as of this writing, also shut. Meanwhile, the all-ages music scene continues to take it on the chin. Fire marshalls suddenly halved the Pioneer Square Theater’s legal capacity the night of a show, making future shows there fiscally iffy. The Velvet Elvis almost stopped hosting concerts after a few rowdy punkboys disrupted a show in late April. Instead, the VE will continue to let indie promoters run all-ages music in the space, but has asked them to de-emphasise hardcore-punk lineups. In a final note, Park Ave. Records, lower Queen Anne’s Taj Mahal of collector vinyl, has called it quits. Its purported replacement: a branch of the Disc-Go-Round chain.

LOVE, ITALIAN STYLE: Director Bernardo Bertolucci shot his share of requisitely-picturesque Seattle scenes for his film Little Buddah. Now he’s introducing that other popular image of Seattle into his work. In the trailer for Bertolucci’s new film Stealing Beauty(no relation to Britain’s 1988 sexy-novice-priest movie Stealing Heaven), a pastoral scene in a decaying Italian farm shed is gloriously interrupted by Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler), as a teen brought to the farm against her will by her family, loudly singing and dancing to a tape of Hole’s “Rock Star.” The scene transforms a personal jeer at one particular clique (the Oly rocker-than-thous) into a universal defiance against cliquishness in general.

THE DRAWING ROOM: The Meyerson & Nowinski art gallery has instantly become the ritzy-upscale “contemporary art” emporium for Seattle. The splashy opening show gathers drawings and prints from artists of different nations and decades, collectively referred to by the gallery as “Picasso and Friends.” (It’s really no worse than TNT sticking Tom & Jerry cartoons onto a show called Bugs Bunny and Friends.)

Many of you remember Bob Blackburn Jr. as the sometime statistician and broadcast assistant to his dad, the SuperSonics’ original radio announcer. Bob Jr. also played in assorted Seattle bands (including the Colorplates) before moving to L.A. in ’89. He now works for the Westwood One satellite-radio empire, conducting celebrity interviews and organizing promotions. Last month his job led to the fulfillment of a longtime dream, the chance to meet ’50s bondage model Betty Page. As you may know, the sweet-faced, dark-haired Page posed mostly for obscure and under-the-counter publications for about 10 years, then retired to a very private existence. Only now, long after her pictures became the icons of a new mainstream-fetish cult, has she partly resurfaced, giving a few select interviews and authorizing a biography. Blackburn chatted with her for an hour and got her to autograph a picture for his friends in the Seattle sleazepunk outfit Sick & Wrong. He says Page “still looks really good” at 73, but won’t be photographed. The audio interview was mostly done, he says, “for the record.” Westwood One has no plans to air it on any of its satellite feeds, most of which aren’t carried in Seattle anyway. I think Blackburn should invite her to come work with his ex-employers. The Sonics (especially Kemp) could use someone to teach some discipline!

(Be sure to keep Sunday, June 2 open for the magnificent, marvelous, mad mad mad Misc. Tenth Anniversary Party at the Metropolis Gallery, on University St. east of 1st Ave. Details forthcoming.)

IT’S TYPOGRAPHICAL MAKEOVER WEEK here at Misc., the pop-cult column that’s ever-so-slightly confused by Tropicana orange juice’s big promotion for Apollo 13 videos. Shouldn’t the Tang people be doing this instead?

SORRY, ALL YOU CLEVER MUSIC PEOPLE: Hate to tell ya, but there’s already a band named Mad Cow Disease. It’s an indie-label industrial combo (latest import CD: Tantric Sex Disco) formed in 1990 in a mostly-rural part of England where herds were already suffering from the deadly epidemic, years before authorities discovered it could spread to humans.

AIR CHECK: Two more attempts at pirate radio operations are now underway, joining the existing FUCC collective in the few open slots on the FM band. “KXTC” (info: 587-9487) hopes to be on the air next Monday night at 89.9, for once-a-week broadcasts of dance and house music. And “Seattle Liberation Radio” (PO Box 85541, Seattle 98145), a group of some 12 local political and cultural advocates, wants to start a full-time unlicensed station to primarily transmit alternative news and talk programming under the slogan, “End Corporate Hegemony of Media.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I’ve previously mentioned Dan Halligan’s approximately-quarterly punkzine 10 Things Jesus Wants You to Know. But the new issue #13 particularly stands out, due to Katrina Hellbusch’s essay “A Friend No Longer.” In explicit, downbeat, name-naming detail, Hellbusch (a member of the local punk band Outcast) writes about passing out drunk at a party, awakening to find herself being raped by a close friend (a member of another local punk band). Never straining for exploitation or self-pity, Hellbusch vividly images a crime in which the assailant degraded himself to a subhuman state and tried to shove his victim there with him. She also begs (but doesn’t specifically ask) what this means about the punk scene–whether it’s an excuse for self-styled Bad Boys to be rowdy without rules, or whether it is (or oughta be) a closer-knit community of people who cooperate with and protect one another. Free at Fallout and Cellophane Square, among other dropoff sites, or $2 from 1407 NE 45th St., #17, Seattle 98105.

ONE, ETC., FOR THE ROAD: Recently, at two different occasions among two different sets of people, the topic arose about whether one could bar-hop in Seattle hitting only places with numbers in their names, in numerical order. I think I’ve figured how. Some of these places are far apart so you’ll need wheels (as always, be sure to have a designated driver and always drink responsibly):

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

* Either the Two Bells (2313 4th Ave.), 2 Dagos From Texas (2601 1st Ave.), or the 211 Club (2304 2nd Ave.)

* Either the 318 Tavern (318 W Nickerson), or one of the two unrelated Triangle Taverns (1st Ave. S. or 3507 Fremont Pl. N.)

* Either the Four Mile Tavern (15215 Aurora Ave. N.), the Four B’s (4300 Leary Way NW), the Four Seas Restaurant (714 S. King St.), or the lounge at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel (1300 4th Ave.).

* Either the 5 Spot (1502 Queen Anne Ave. N.), the 5 Point (415 Cedar St.), Zak’s 5th Ave. Saloon (206 5th Ave. N.), or the Old 5th Ave. Tavern (8507 5th Ave. NE).

* Either the Six Arms (600 E. Pine St.), the Six Eleven (611 2nd Ave.), or the 6th Ave. Bar & Grill (2000 6th Ave.).

* Either Cafe Septiéme (214 Broadway E.), or the 7th Ave. Tavern (705 NW 70th St.).

* The Speakeasy Cafe (2306 2nd Ave.), home of the Internet site for Dom Cappello’s Cafe 8Ball comic.

* Either the Gay 90s (700 Pike), or the bar formerly known as The Nine (now the Family Affair, 234 Fairview Ave. N.).

That’s about it sequentially. With the end of Rosellini’s Four-10 and Six-10, the closest thing to a “10” joint is the Tenya Japanese Restaurant (936 3rd Ave.). Then you’d have to skip a couple to get to the 13 Coins.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try the Hershey’s Cookies and Creme bar (yum-my!), giggle at the new Mercedes 4 x 4 (ugg-ly!), and ponder these inscrutable words credited to Winston Churchhill: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.”

WELCOME BACK to your Ides-O-March Misc., the pop-culture column that amusedly notes the first wedding of the age of media mergers, in which the widow of the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review married the retired publisher of the NY Times. Who said you can’t get far in the journalism biz these days?

UPDATE #1: The state legislature’s regular session expired with hundreds of conservative-social-agenda bills allowed to die. Among these was the Senate bill to drive strip clubs out of business via over-regulation, discussed here two weeks back. House members apparently felt the bill wouldn’t survive club operators’ lawsuits. Also gone, for this year at least, are bills to ban gay marriages, require parental consent for high-school HIV education, etc. Most of these proposals (except the anti-stripping bill) were introduced by Religious Right-friendly House Republicans but blocked by Senate Democrats. The Repo men hope to capture both chambers this November. You oughta work to try and stop that.

UPDATE #2: I asked you a few weeks back to suggest Disneyland character mascots for what might become the Anaheim Ex-Seahawks. Choices included Scrooge McDuck (natch), Jafar, and Cruella DeVil. My favorite was from the reader who, commenting on recent Seahawk seasons, recommended Sleepy.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: The guy who played Henry Blake on the M*A*S*H TV show and the guy who played Blake in the movie died within days of one another. Talk about becoming one with your role!

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK (seen in the Stranger for the Backstage, 3/6): “Maria McKee: A Punk Edith Piaf.” Don’t bait me here, guys. The real Piaf was punker than you, me, or McKee will ever be. Ever heard her version of Lieber & Stoller’s “Black Leather Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”? Didn’t think so.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The P!pe is a tabloid run by ex-International Examiner staffer Soyon Im, who sez he wants “to debunk the myth that anything cool with Asian Americans is happening down in San Francisco or L.A.” It also helps debunk the squaresville reputation of King County’s large Asian American community. Issue #1 packs eight pages with stuff about Indian dance music, Japanese power pop, Korean fashions, “Pan-Asian” restaurants, Chinese-American comix, Vietnamese travelogue photos, Taiwanese interracial relationships, and old Japanese erotic art. There’s even a sex-advice column (where’d they get that concept?) by “Soybean Milkchick,” assuring readers there’s nothing deficient about Asian-American manhood. (In other words, don’t feel bad if you don’t look like the guys in that old Japanese erotic art.) At Pistil Books and elsewhere.

ONE TOO MANY?: Cocktail Nation hype has hit overdrive, less than two years after the first Combustible Edison record (albeit 15 years after Throbbing Gristle did its homage to Martin Denny). A glance at the “Cocktail Mania” display at Borders Music shows how nearly every record label with old middle-of-the-road instrumentals in its vaults is repackaging that material as something hip n’ ironic. And a local indie TV producer’s currently trying to launch a weekly entertainment-talk show called Atomic Lounge. Don’t be surprised if reproduction smoking jackets show up this fall in the Tiger Shop.

PAT-APHYSICS: Buchanan’s proving to be more than just another lifetime DC political/ media insider pretending to be an “outsider.” His (momentary?) campaign success signals the first significant crack in the GOP’s 16-year ruling coalition of fundamentalists and corporations (something I’ve been predicting or at least desiring for some time). About a quarter of the things he says (the parts about the plight of the downsized and the ripoff that is “free” trade) make more sense than what the other Republicans say. It’s just the other three quarters of the things he says are so freakish (the tirades against gays, feminists, immigrants, pro-choice advocates, and other humans guilty only of not belonging to his target demographic). If there’s hope, it’s that Buchanan’s polls rose after he started downplaying the hatefest talk and emphasizing the anti-corporate talk. Why’s the only candidate to challenge the sanctity of big money also the biggest bigot and bully? Why don’t any national-level Democrats speak against the corporate power-grab like Pat does?

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-culture column that still gets slightly disoriented when given a “Welcome to Fred Meyer” bag upon leaving the store.

SITE LINES: Adobe Systems is looking for new area digs for the Seattle software operation formerly known as Aldus, and possibly also for some of its currently Calif.-based divisions. I got just one piece-O-advice to the desktop publishing giant: keep it in town. You’re being tempted by developers to move to some soulless office park on some Eastside flood plain. But part of what made Aldus great was that it was in Pio. Square. The firm attracted people who liked walking to Ivar’s or to Mariner games. I believe this helped grow a corporate culture of creative, energetic people who could listen to others, including the people who used your warez; as opposed to the cult-like groupthink seen within certain office-park outfits.

ON A LONELY SATELLITE: Some of you can get 30 channels of DBX satellite music on your cable TV system. But what I want are the 60 extra channels the DBX company offers retailers and other clients via satellite dish. Instead of just mainstreamed selections like “Top Hits” and “R&B Oldies,” I could choose from polka, mariachi, Hawaiian, Danish, Greek, Brazilian, Indian, “Euro Pop,” “Canto Pop” (that’s Cantonese), “Traditional South African,” and that all-time fave “German Schlagers!”

AD VERBS #1: Denny’s sponsored the Harlem Globetrotters 70th Anniversary tour, which stopped in Seattle during African-American History Month. Let’s see, twelve Globetrotter players plus the sham-opposition team, trainers, and roadies… The restaurant chain instantly doubles its black employment!

AD VERBS #2: You may have been bemused by the Nike commercial with snippets of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as remade by KRS-One) alongside images of street basketball players; defining “the revolution” as mere recreation and fashion. Now the hypocrisy deepens. Nike and its ad agency Weiden & Kennedy have hired Scott-Heron as a consultant for a planned Nike-owned cable channel. The channel has no name or launch date; but you can expect it to rival MTV in associating “rebel” youth culture with the purchase and use of apparel and other consumer products. You can also safely bet it’ll never promote any “revolutionary” thinking which might question companies that export all their manufacturing jobs to pennies-a-day Asian sweatshops and spend all the “saved” expenses on dorky ads.

SPACE CASES: The pitifully thin ranks of Seattle all-ages concert spaces briefly increased by one before shrinking again. The venerable Showbox got special dispensation from the Liquor Board to run all-ages shows under strict conditions. Ever-zealous authorities spotted a relatively minor violation of one of those conditions one night, and promptly decreed the joint 21-and-over for all further events. This was two days before the Throwing Muses gig; promoters had to refund 200 tickets from under-21ers. The onetime punk palace has since changed management (again), so don’t blame that fiasco on the guys there now. Instead, keep questioning why our Powers That Be keep making all-ages music so hard to get put on and so easy to get shut down.

MIKE TAKES A HIKE: It’s a rise-n’-fall tale almost Shakespearean if it weren’t so mundane: A politician who used his out-of-step appearance and social sense to symbolize his devotion to unfashionable policies; who did more things for more people (or tried to) than any Washingtonian since the Scoop-Maggie gravy train; whose downfall came not from opponents but from a trusted aide who’d had enough of his social manners or lack thereof, as expressed thru unwanted “bear hugs.”

We may not have seen the last of Gov. Lowry, but neither may we see anyone like him again soon. And that’s a shame. He lived both in the world of three-martini politicians and that of six-fingered sawmill workers. He used the means of mainstream politics to help those outside the mainstream, at a time when politicians prefer to work chiefly for the overprivileged. (He even dared oppose tax rollbacks for Sacred Business!) And at a time when even many coffeehouse “leftists” ignore class issues or even sneer at working-class people, we need Lowry’s progressive populism more than ever.

THE MAILBAG: Jerry Everard at Moe clarifies that, despite rumors circulating last December, he and not any ex-MS exec makes all the club’s decisions. Everard and Scott Blum, who runs Moe’s Internet broadcasts, insist the Xing software they use is the best for the job. I’m willing to reconsider my judgment about it, once Xing makes a version that runs on my computer without pausing for four seconds between every second of sound. The real problem isn’t the software but the primitive science of netcasting itself; fewer people may get to hear a concert via the Net than in person. This isn’t a condemnation; experiments must be allowed to fail to be learned from. Speaking of not-quite-ready media…

JUNIOR’S MINT: So we’ll keep Ken Griffey Jr. after all, for only the highest salary in baseball history. Sure, we all have to pay a piece of it thanks to the complexities of the Ms/ Kingdome lease. But for that, we get a genuine star athlete, a living mascot for the new stadium deal (a role he can keep playing even if he gets another half-year injury), and an affable spokesperson for Nintendo and whoever else can pay him.

I wasn’t the only one to think “superficial contract-stalling ploy” when Griffey said he thought of leaving Seattle because of “all the rain and snow.” Ballplayers spend only about 13 weeks a year in their home team’s area (the rest is spent on the road, at spring training, and wherever they make their “real” home). Advocates of a no-roof stadium note that during baseball season we get less rain than any baseball towns outside California.

Griffey also said he wanted to be on a team that doesn’t sell off some of its best players, like the Ms keep doing so they can afford to keep him. The Ms’ problems as a “small market franchise,” trying to keep one megastar plus an adequate team behind him, are well known. What isn’t known is how to keep big players in small cities in an age of luxury boxes, owner-city blackmail, and splintering TV audiences.

Baseball was historically a hierarchical business. Minor leagues fed players to the majors, which had an established pecking order with the Yankees and old NY Giants always around the top, the Washington Senators and St. Louis Browns around the bottom. Lesser teams sold any promising players to the Yankees just to pay their hotel bills. (Remember the early years of Thunderbirds hockey, when they traded a player for a team bus?) In today’s baseball, under the right circumstances, a Cleveland or maybe even a Seattle can win a pennant. Is this situation a trend or just an anomaly? Wait ’til this year. Meanwhile…

THE BIG INTERCEPTION: Didn’t it seem this past season like the Seahawks were already gone? They had only one home sellout. Fan and media interest waned, especially in the early fall in the wake of Mariner-mania. But that doesn’t mean everyone stopped caring. The day rumors the team’s move to L.A. started flying, sports-talk radio was abuzz with the usual debates and rants. Callers generally followed a line about how team owners, especially Hawks owner Ken Behring, were Scroogeoid robber barons out to shaft the communities they purported to represent. Some callers suggested that team owners were just the most visible example of corporate welfare, that people and communities oughta get together to stop this nonsense in sports and other industries. Maybe this shows sports fans aren’t all the politically-reactionary boors us “alternative” folks love to stereotype them as.

GAS ATTACKS: You may have seen the newspaper ads and billboards in Seattle for the Shell Visa card, offering modest gasoline rebates. The catch is that in Seattle, Shell’s first U.S. market, the venerable Dutch/British company now only has stations at 175th & Aurora and down on E. Marginal Way S. It also means if you want to boycott Shell over its support of the murderous Nigerian junta, you’ll have a hard time finding a station to not get gas at.

WORD-O-WEEK (citizen-activist Makoto Sataka at a meeting about Japan’s bank-loan crisis, as quoted on CNN): “Trying to find morals in politicians and bankers is like trying to find morals in cockroaches.”

MISC. DOESN’T KNOW how to start this week’s item collection, with a touch-O-bemusement (the Jack Daniel’s Faux Faulkner writing contest limiting entries to 500 words or less? Bill couldn’t write a want ad that short!) or a solemn pledge (Guaranteed: Absolutely nothing about the Baby Boomers turning 50!).

SPACE PROBES: I know this is Anna Woolverton’s department but I gotta mention the gorgeous new Sit & Spin band room. A more perfect homey-glitz look I’ve never seen, and how they made a concrete box sound so good I’ll never know. Seattle band spaces never get bigger (at least not until this year’s planned RKCNDY remodel) but they do get better. Meanwhile, Beatnix (ex-Tugs, ex-Squid Row, ex-Glynn’s Cove) suddenly went the way of 80 percent of new small businesses; it’ll be back with new owners and probably a new name after a remodel. And there was big fun a couple weeks back at the reopened Pioneer Square Theater; whenSuper Deluxe sang their Xmas song about asking Santa for a skateboard and only getting a stupid sweater, the teen punx drenched the band members with sweaters. With occasional all-ages shows continuing at the Velvet Elvis that means there’s real punk now at both former homes of Angry Housewives, the punk parody stage musical that delighted smug yuppie audiences from 1983 to 1989.

TYPO-GRAPHY: I’m developing a theory that certain grammatical errors come in and out of fashion. F’rinstance, people in many stations of life still use “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”) when they mean “its” (the possessive). A year or two back there was a similar fad of spelling “-ies” plurals as “y’s” (i.e., “fantasy’s”), but it didn’t catch on very far. The incorrect phrase “A Women” was seen about a year ago in a Wash. Free Press headline. Then earlier this month the phrase showed up in a Sylvia strip. Even in hand-drawn comics dialogue, people seem to be falling back on the computer-spell-checker excuse (“it’s a real word, just the wrong word”). Either that, or cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s succumbed to the notion of “Women” as a Borglike collective entity.

MATERIAL ISSUE: As a tangental allegation to her $750,000 LA wrongful-termination/ sex-discrimination lawsuit, ex-Maverick Records employee Sonji Shepherd charges the Madonna-owned label and its day-to-day boss Freddy DeMann with running a payola machine, bribing DJs and station managers to play Candlebox and Alanis Morrissette songs with cash, expense-paid trips to lap-dance clubs, and even flown-in visits from Heidi Fleiss’s call girls. Candlebox-haters shouldn’t go around high-fiving and shouting exhortations like “Knew it! They couldn’t have gotten big without extra help!” That’s the same line rock-haters offered during the ’50s payola scandals, when pay-for-airplay charges destroyed pioneer rock DJ Alan Freed. Also, Shepherd’s allegations are aimed at label staff; no band members are charged with committing or knowing about anything unlawful.

NAKED TRUTH DEPT.: Ongoing science exhibits don’t often get reviewed in papers like this, but the best can give as much fun and insight-into-reality as any performance-art piece. My current all-time fave: the naked mole-rats at the Pacific Science Center. These li’l four-inch-long, furless pink rodents from sub-Saharan Africa are the perfect straight-edge punk mascot animals, the ultimate combination of cuteness and ferocity. They live totally underground, in networks of burrows that can be as big as six football fields. They’ve got an organized cooperative, matriarchal social structure (some dig, some walk backwards to shove dirt around, and the biggest ones shove dirt up through surface holes). They don’t drink. They’ve got huge long teeth that can chew through concrete. Their lips close behind their teeth. Science Center PR calls them “saber-toothed sausages.”

At the exhibit they live in a plexiglass-enclosed environment with clear plastic plumbing tubes to scurry around in. It may be impractical to get your own naked mole-rat colony (you’d have to specially import a queen and two or three breeding males, as well as build their elaborate home). But there’s plenty of other fun things you can make and do with science; an invitation elsewhere in this paper should help give you an incentive.

(Next week: A vilification of all those `Apple Computer death spiral’ media stories, and an appeal to Save The Blob.)

MISC.’S GOTTA HAND IT to a guy we usually like to discredit, Ollie Stone. Imagine–getting accused of tarnishing the memory of Richard Nixon!

GAME THEORY: Like other segments of fantasy/ fanboy culture, video games have either failed to attract a significant female following or never tried too hard. Some would see say it proves girls are too smart for such idiocy; others would rant about inequity and girls being prevented from growing up to become fighter pilots. Still others see an opportunity, like American Laser Games, a shoot-’em-up game firm now expanding with the Her Interactive line.

Dunno, ‘tho, about Her’s first title, McKenzie & Co. In it, according to a Variety review, you take the role of one of two “practically-perfect teenage girls,” a gymnast/ cheerleader or an aspiring actress. (“McKenzie” is the nickname of the Geo Tracker the girls take to The Mall.) Your task: “Try to get cozy with one of four dreamy guys when you’re not shopping, gossiping, trying on tons of new clothes, or putting on makeup.” In one segment, your character tries to arrange a prom date but faces turmoil “when your dream date asks you to go out with him at the same time you promised to help your grandmother do volunteer work at a hospital.” You also have to deal with “non-beautiful people like Wenda Wencke, a fish-rights activist who declares `Free the Fish’ and carries a dead carp which she hugs like a teddy bear.” It comes on five CD-ROMs (one for the main game, one for each of four dream dates) and also includes an audio CD, a mini-lipstick, and a discount coupon for two more dreamy-guy disks.

I’ve never claimed anything was wrong with beauty, or with safe fantasy outlets for nascent heterosexual stirrings. But this game glorifies the very type of “popular girl” everybody in my high school loathed. I may not have ever been “dreamy” but I’d have rather hung out with the fish girl than one of these stuck-ups.

VIRGINIA’S DARE: Belltown’s venerable Virginia Inn has evolved from a workingman’s bar in the ’70s to an art bar in the ’80s to a lawyers’ bar in the ’90s, adding deli sandwiches and going smoke-free along the way. Last month it evolved again, becoming probably Washington’s first free-standing full cocktail lounge since Prohibition. It’s all thanks to a little-publicized liberalization of the state liquor laws last summer. Full-liquor-service joints still have to offer food under the revised law, but they don’t have to maintain separate restaurant rooms or uphold the old minimum ratio of food to booze sales.

The old law was installed at the behest of big steak-house operators with major political connections (one of whom, Al Rosellini, became a two-term Democratic governor). It served to stifle creative nightlife as well as smaller restaurants. But changing tastes toward lighter eats and lighter drinks reduced the sirloin-and-Scotch lobby’s power. The new law comes just in time for nightspots to try and exploit the Cocktail Nation craze. It’s already allowed places like Moe’s, the Off Ramp, and the Easy concentrate on music and beverages instead of striving to push up food volume. I just hope the VI continues to use beer glasses in its annual glass-painting benefit for the Pike Place Market Foundation. It’s harder to get elaborate designs on a shot glass.

DROP THAT METAPHOR DEPT. (Bastyr Naturopathic Univ. trustee Merrily Manthey, quoted in that big 1/3 NY Times story on the King County Council’s project to start a subsidized alternative-health center): “This clinic we’re trying to set up here will be the Starbucks of the health care world.” Will it offer red-and-black designer colostomy bags, or Holiday Blend prescriptions? Will it dispense spitcups in regular and grande sizes? (I know it won’t serve lattes; the standard naturopathic diet forbids dairy products, along with meat and wheat.) More seriously, will it become a brand name known for adequate but unexceptional work within standardized bland surroundings?

Could be worse, metaphorwise. I recall the unfortunate street-poster slogan used in the mid-’80s by Capitol Hill’s otherwise admirable Aradia Women’s Health Center: “Are you tired of the sterile environment of a doctor’s office?”

MISC. WAS BAFFLED by a notice on the Internet search site Yahoo! promising a link to a British nudist camp for transvestites. How can you be undressed and cross-dressed at the same time? Did the queens just wear wigs, and high heels? But on reading the “Garden of Eden” site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/R_Brett3/), the explanation was simple. By summer it’s a normal nonerotic family nudist camp. (As the site says, “Our club is widely recognised as being the in place to go for a fun time holiday.”) But during the miserable Welsh winter, it holds weekends for fully-cross-dressed closeted queens to express their lifestyles away from the general populace. You have three seconds to fantasize about Robert Morley types or the bluebloods from the movie Scandal sharing high tea in frilly lace things.

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a “No Food/Drink” sign outside a video arcade on University Way): “Thank You For Your Coordination.”

CATHODE CORNER: Wm. Bennett, the Bush Administration drone we’ve previously dissed for his dissing of trash TV, plans to turn his heavy-handed pieties into a cartoon show, Adventures from the World of Virtues. It’ll air on PBS, which Bennett had previously denounced as a waste of tax bucks. If I had kids I’d rather let ’em watch Melrose Place.

BACK INTO THE DRINK: Your fave bar or coffeehouse might soon stock the Canadian-made Jones Soda, the latest attempt at a Gen-X pop sold at microbeer prices (and distributed by microbeer jobbers). It’s got five fruity flavors, each with a different level of carbonation, dressed in as many as 56 different label photos including a pierced navel, a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a skateboard, barstools, an OPEN sign, a black fedora, and a Corvette logo. If you ignore the desperate-to-be-hip marketing the pop itself’s not bad, especially the cherry flavor.

DEAD AIR REDUX?: I do have nice things to say about the Weekly sometimes. F’rinstance, their Mike Romano got KUOW/KCMU boss Wayne Roth to quasi-confirm a rumor I’d published a couple months back, that Roth was considering killing KCMU and using the frequency for a classical format aimed at the affluent audiences corporate sponsors (oops, “underwriters”) love. (Roth’s office issued a statement claiming his Weekly statement only expressed speculation, not a firm policy decision.) There’s nothing wrong with KCMU’s programming or finances that can’t be traced to Roth’s mistaken belief that the station is, or should be, his personal bureaucratic turf. Public broadcasting, when it’s really public, isn’t a private business and shouldn’t be run as one. It’s a trust between a dedicated programming team and a closely-involved community of listeners.

CLUB ME: F’r another instance, a Weekly brief last month casually revealed the mysterious “Erik Shirley” lurking behind the scenes at Moe’s was the son of Jon Shirley, prominent ex-Microsoft/ Radio Shack exec, who in turn has a bit of investment in the joint. I can’t imagine a Radio Shack vet caring about music, ‘cept those cool ol’ stereo-separation LPs. Besides, if Moe’s was led by somebody who knew tech, they wouldn’t have entrusted their first live Internet concert (with the Presidents on 12/31) to Spry/CompuServe and Xing StreamWorks, the outfits behind the Paramount’s Cyberian Rhapsody fiasco.

MISC.’S TOP 7: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, dir. Nelson Periera dos Santos (New Yorker Video), the greatest all-nude Amazon cannibalism comedy ever made… The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, dir. Dave Borthwick (Manga Entertainment Video)… Safeway coupon books… Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford (Faber & Faber)… The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, Jeff Kisseloff (Viking)… Blue Raspberry Squeeze Pop, the candy that looks like a tube of Prell… Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (BBC/ Discovery Channel miniseries)…

MISC.’S BOTTOM 6: Watch This! (KING-TV)… AJ’s Time Travelers (KTZZ)… CompuServe’s Usenet censorship (one more reason to switch to an indie Internet provider)… Double-cross-platform software (stuff that’s promoted as running on different operating systems but really only works on Windows)…The NBA’s attempt to shut unofficial fan websites… Betting on the Bud Bowl (it’s pre-scripted! You could be betting with the film editor’s cousin).

Following are the results of Misc.’s quest for the best grocery stores in Seattle, by weight class. While these are my personal views, thanks for all your suggestions. These listings leave out organic co-ops and gourmet delis — I wouldn’t know how to judge such places. (For the record, Central Co-op got more votes than any other hippie store.) I also wasn’t looking for wine stores with vestigial food departments (sorry, Louie’s on the Pike). Oddly, only one letter recommended anything in the Pike Place Market (DeLaurenti’s Italian deli, with its wall of capers).

CONVENIENCE STORE: Seattle has many above-average store-lets in a genre with a pretty low average, but a particular hat tip goes to the Hillcrest Deli-Mart on Capitol Hill. A former pre-supermarket-era Safeway built in the 1920s, it’s still got a complete-enough selection of packaged goods, enough fresh stuff to bide you over until your next supermarket run, and either the best or second-best fried chicken in town; all at prices that don’t excessively punish you for avoiding supermarket crowds.

SMALL SUPERMARKET: When supermarkets first appeared as a Depression-era cost-cutting novelty, they were still small enough to fit neighborhood main streets. Every neighborhood should have one, especially if it doesn’t have a larger store (Belltown, Cascade, Georgetown, etc.). Stores like Marketime in Fremont and Red Apple in Madison Park provide everything you need (unless you’re on a special diet). Or you can stock up on staple goods at a monster store and use a store like this for perishables and restocks.

The two Ken’s (Greenwood and west Queen Anne) win overall. Lori Smith writes about the Greenwood Ken’s, “Despite its garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store, where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.” Honorable mention goes to the First Hill Shop-Rite (home of my current-fave generic cereal brand, the imitation Crispix simply called Flavorite Crispy Hexagons!).

REGULAR SUPERMARKET: Getting into the realm of the major chains, there’s still something to be said for independent spirits like Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant. Robert C. Mills calls it “the center of the known universe.” Situated in the foot-traffic heart of its area, with most of its parking spaces in a side-street auxiliary lot instead of out front, it combines the meet-n’-greet ambience of a small neighborhood store with the selection and prices of a big park-n’-gorge outlet. It’s also got a hypnotic neon sign that has a different sector on the fritz every night.

SUPERSTORE: Larry’s has its spots (the wall of cereal, all the imported South American soda pops). But there’s nothing quite like Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. On a site abandoned by Fred Meyer as too small, Art’s has built an extremely site-specific collection of perimeter departments around the brightest, boldest food selection anywhere.

Elsewhere, Ann Allen recommended Stock Market on Rainier Ave., a “warehouse look” store with a cafe section occupied by just ordinary folk. (“It’s not yuppie. It’s not bland and sterile. It’s what you want a neighborhood store to be.”) Steve Rohde recommended the ineligible Monroe Fred Meyer, but the venerable hypermarket chain has a new monster outlet in Lake City. And of course nothing can compare to the Price Costco experience (where shopping may be a baffling ordeal, but it’s great for larger households, cheap party catering, and especially for free samples).

ETHNIC: Uwajimaya is the name to beat in Asian foodstuffs, but some prefer the recently-grown cluster of Vietnamese stores at 12th and Jackson. One store there, Hop Thanh, has an in-store butcher presiding over the biggest all-pork meat dept. you ever saw. In more assimilated immigrant delights, smart consumers like Leanne Beach know the discount Italian goodies at Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, open daytime hours only on 6th Ave. S. near the INS office. Beach also likes how “They write out your bill by hand, just like an old-fashioned market!”

As promised in the Stranger, here are some of the original letters full-length:

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 17:22:21 PDT

From: THAT_GUY@eor.com (THAT GUY)

Organization: The Emerald OnRamp

Subject: Food Stores

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Favorite Ethnic Food Store: DeLaurenti (featuring a wall of capers, even!)

Favorite Superstore: The new Monroe Fred Meyer (Hate the town, but store is

great for stocking up for an Eastbound road trip.)

Favorite Mid-size Supermarket: First Hill ShopRite (I feel like I’m back in

New York when I’m in that dump.)

Favorite Checker: ‘Debbie’ at the Broadway QFC (She’s quirky yet perky.)

-Steve Rohde

aka that_guy@eor.com

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:43:10 -0700

From: Hollis Nelson <hollis@speakeasy.org>

To: clark@cyberspace.com, hollis@eve.speakeasy.org

Subject: PLENTY – the coolest, most beautiful, euphoric gourmet/organic store

There is an oasis of a gourmet food store in undiscovered Madrona called

Plenty. I must admit, I am a wine purveyor at this store, (thus the wine

selection is impeccable) but I find myself drawn this store on a daily basis. I

also happen to deliver the Stranger to them because someone in distribution at

your fine publication doesn’t “do Madrona” – but that’s a whole other tangent.

First of all, this small store is aesthetically beautiful – PCC meets

Metropolitan Home. This is due in large part to one of the owners, Rolf. Also,

not only do they have an amazing selection of specialty organic and gourmet

items, but they have Jim (former chef at Cafe Flora). He whips up the most

flavorful, dare I say yummy, unique and completely healthy meals, snacks etc.

daily. Lastly, not only do they have a beautiful enviroment, amazing selection,

and yummy food, but they have some of the nicest people due in large part to

the last of the “mod squad” owners Loree. Plenty is a must try experience – a

thousand apologies for my long windedness, but I love this place.

your biggest fan,

Hollis A. Nelson

Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 10:53:04 -0700

To: Clark@cyberspace.com

From: dsackett@newsdata.com (Daniel Sackett)

Subject: grocery markets

Upon reading your call for suggestions for the best grocery stores I felt

compelled to copy down your web site address and immediately began to

conceptualize how I could possibly communicate the sublime and gross

pleasures of shopping at Central Co-op. I once saw a documentary on Frank

Sinatra’s reign as a teen idol–the image of one panting fan saying “He’s

just so…sincere” comes to mind when I think of Central. Sure both Central

and Sinatra are sincere, but the experience is so much more. From a REAL

committment to putting out a wide, fresh and reasonably priced organic

produce selection (thanks ol’ Tom the wacky, art-crazed produce manager) to

a cornucopia of treats and staples that commercial stores pass over (yea

Rhondi!), to a staff that upon hearing the words “vegan” or “organic”

actually helps instead of staring blankly from the hollowness of their

bourgeois, status quo enslaved souls, to aesthetically soothing indirect

lighting, to cool check-out folk (Alex and the piscean guy with the wry

smile), to the occassional kitty-cat rendition of Old King Wenceslaus on the

PA, man, Central is IT. Besides, I like spending my money in a co-op instead

of feathering Joe Albertson’s corporate schemes. I believe I am what I

eat–including the experience of gathering food–and I’ve had many happy

moments shopping Central Co-op.

Date: Sat, 19 Aug 95 13:28:00 -0700

From: robert_c mills <rcmills@cac.washington.edu>

Message-Id: <9508192028.AA05447@burlap2.cac.washington.edu>

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Subject: Misc. Misc. miscellany

Food Giant – Wallingford = Center of the known universe

Non-surfing web use term = “sponging”

Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 13:16:40 -0700

From: Lisa Roosen-Runge <lrr@discovery.ca>

X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Windows; I; 16bit)

Mime-Version: 1.0

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Subject: supermarket

Here’s a suggestion – Uwajimaya (hope I spelled it correctly)

I think it should be just a supermarket, but it may fall into the ethnic

category.

It is a lot of fun – there’s a cafe, books upstairs, excellent junk food

and neat kitchen implements.

I went to the one in the “International District”, but I guess they have

other outlets as well.

I have been checking in here fairly regularly, I really appreciate you

posting your columns on the Web.

p.s. I am looking forward to the final version of your book.

From lesmith@netmedia.co.il Tue Aug 29 19:31:42 1995

Message-Id: <199508300233.CAA05166@chava.netmedia.co.il>

Date: Wed, 30 Aug 95 02:37:34 -0300

From: “Lori E. Smith” <lesmith@jer1.co.il>

X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K)

Mime-Version: 1.0

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Clark,

Re your grocery store search, I’m going to nominate Ken’s, the grocery

store at the corner of 73rd & Greenwood in that neighborhood that’s not

quite Phinney Ridge, not quite Greenwood or Greenlake and not really

Ballard either. When my family moved there in the 70s (I’m also one of

those rare Seattlites who actually have _roots_ in the city, my

great-grandfather went to the UW) Ken’s was quiet and pokey, like the

neighborhood. As it has gone uptown and yuppy so has Ken’s and you can

now get packaged sushi and all the comforts of home. But despite it’s

garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the

Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store,

where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.

Thanks for going on-line and helping to keep Seattle’s alternative

tradition alive. (One of the things I like about Seattle is that despite

the attempts of various establishments to promote Seattle’s various

environmental and civic amenities it’s the “other” side of Seattle that

always gets national press, cf the prostitutes of the boom era, the

general strike of 1919 and more recently the assorted group of drifters

from out of town who became “grunge”.)

And by the way, I like the Macintosh a lot too.

THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.

The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.

Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.

One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.

JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.

YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.

CLARIFICATION: When I said the branch of the Left that the local Freedom Socialist Party descended from was now the least-active aspect of the Left, I should’ve added that the FSP is a major active player in comparison to other outfits with the S-word in their names.

WHAT A CROC: Somebody opened a Crocodile Cafe in Bellevue Square. It’s not only unrelated to the Seattle Crocodile, but our Croc only found out about it when the mom of a Bellevue Croc worker called the Seattle Croc demanding to speak to her daughter. The Seattle Croc was originally to have been called the Live Bait Lounge (as listed on pre-opening posters), until owner Stephanie Dorgan (an ex-lawyer) made a trademark search and found the “Live Bait” name was already owned by some joint on the east coast.

NOMENCLATURE DEPT.: While recently heading back to the safety of town from Darkest Redmond, feeling the sensations of comfort I always feel when I make it to the west side of the bridge, I tried to devise an alternative to Tricia Romano’s description of suburban dance-club goers in a recent Stranger as “tunnel people.” That’s a term used by Manhattanites to insult those who live in other NYC boroughs or Jersey. If we have to use an NYC term to describe Eastsiders, it oughta be one based on the NYC meaning of the name “Bellevue” (look it up). I suggest “floaters.” It symbolizes not only the floating bridges and certain airheaded attitudes, but also compares the suburban everywhere/nowhere experience to the old Japanese floating world, the culture of aristocrats and courtesans who traveled around in leisure, unconnected to the land surrounding them…. More suggested new terms for Net use: “schlepping,” “tangling,” “netting off,” “cavorting,” “crawling,” “gallivanting,” and my fave-of-the-week “hydroplaning.”

DIY-TV VS. THE OLD ORDER: KOMO Town Meeting host Ken Schram has never let the details get in the way of contrived moralistic posturing. Latest example: the “threat or menace?” episode about public access cable. Producers of access shows that, in Schram’s staff’s opinion, weren’t “controversial enough” didn’t get to be on the show. He ignored all the religious, political, cultural and just-plain folksy shows so he could use a few examples of body parts and bad words as an excuse to call for censoring access (i.e., reining in an alternative to corporate media like KOMO). The way he did it just proved one reason why people are increasingly looking for alternatives to corporate media. His attempted bombast was frequently attacked and occasionally deflated by a studio audience packed with media-manipulation-savvy access producers (betcha never thought you’d see Philip Craft (Political Playhouse), Donna Marie (Hot Tub TV) and the Rev. Bruce Howard in the same place at the same time!).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: AriZona iced teas, previously mentioned here, now come in bottles. The one to get is the ginseng flavor, with the most exquisite blue bottle, useful for dried-floral arrangements and as future yard-sale bricabrac.

GETTIN’ BUFFALOED: Found a flyer on orange paper on a downtown street, purportedly from the National Park Service. It warns Yellowstone visitors not to not approach park buffalo: “Many visitors have been gored by buffalo. Buffalo can weigh 2000 pounds and can sprint at 30 mph, three times faster than you can run. These animals may appear tame but are wild, unpredictable, and dangerous.” At the bottom is a line drawing of a camera-toting tourist being tossed into the air from a buffalo head-butt. Some folks I’ve shown it to think the flyer has to be a fraud done up by those Cacophany Society people or types like them. But I wouldn’t get close to a buffalo anyway.

HE’S NOT BAD, HE’S JUST DRAWN THAT WAY: An Olympia guy was arrested in Tacoma for trafficking in stolen animation cels. The fun part of the story came when the deadpan cops in a press conference monotoned in perfect lifeless Joe Friday-ese about the perpetrator and the evidence while surrounded by bright acetate paintings of Fred and Barney. The real fun part came when KING revealed that Hanna-Barbera cels legitimately released to the collector market contain a seal of authenticity, which contains a sample of Joe Barbera’s DNA!