Further Confessions of a Boss Chick

by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies

(LAST FRIDAY, our guest columnist began her reminiscence of being a lonely teenager in Philadephia during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. She’d befriended Kathy, a party-in’ girl who had few girlfreinds but many guy friends. They’d gotten summer jobs together at Philly’s legendary top-40 station WFIL. After one day in the back offices, Kathy had been promoted to a Boss Chick–a public promo person for the station, not unlike the KNDD jobs held by the Real World: Seattle cast.)

ONE NIGHT, at about 7 o’clock or so, that guy who hired me and Kathy, who I really pretty much hardly ever saw again, found me in the Addressograph room. “What time do you have to be home?” he asked.

I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me until he threw me a “uniform” and offered me double my salary to fill in for a Boss Chick who was out sick. “Be in front of the station in a half hour”, he said.

I was about to spend the evening asking grown men to dance at WFIL Night at the Windjammer Room in the Marriott on City Line Avenue.

For a shy 16-year-old girl with braces, a night from hell.

There’s nothing like putting on hot pants in a bathroom stall while thinking up a lie to tell your mom to make you feel like an authentic red-blooded American teenage girl.

I fit my pack of Marlboros perfectly in the pocket of my handbag, slid my lighter into my boot, and boarded the bus filled with veteran Boss Chicks. They were all blonde and beautiful. Mostly between 18 and 20. None with braces. They were having so much fun being them. No sign of Kathy; I figured she must be the one I was filling in for.

I thought she was ill; but I later found out that she was keeping a low profile while healing from a shiner, which she occasionally got from Mommy’s boyfriend.

The gals tumbled off the bus together like a spinning pinwheel. I watched them bounce through the lobby of the Marriott in front of me while I strolled behind them. As we passed the restaurant I caught a glimpse of where, not long ago, me and my mom sat eating sundaes at our favorite window table, looking out onto the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter.

I entered the Windjammer Room to the classic “sounds of Philadelphia”. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass “Bad Luck”–an ominous sign.

The other “chicks” began dancing as soon as they entered the room. One by one, they grabbed one of the guys at the bar, which was filled with traveling salesmen and lecherous locals who came out that night to dance with hot-panted-bell-heel-booted girls.

The guy that hired me came up to me and said, “Debra, you have to go ask one of those guys to dance with you–that’s why you’re here.”

I was horrified. I looked up and down the bar trying to find the loser who least disgusted me. They were all equally creepy.

The first guy I asked was slobbering drunk and kept falling into me during “Soul City Walkin’.” The next guy groped me all the way through “Me and Mrs. Jones” and proceeded to call me “Mrs. Jones” the rest of the night.

Finally, I found one guy who seemed just to be interested in dancing and having fun. He had lots of energy. And lots of coke, which he proudly snorted in front of everyone from a vile and spoon around his neck (which kept getting tangled up in his Italian Stallion medallion).

Suddenly he went nuts during “I Love Music” and shook his Pabst Blue Ribbon and sprayed it all over my T-shirt, screaming like a pig. I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back out ’til it was time to board the bus back to the station.

Needless to say, they never asked me to do the “Boss Chick” thing again. I resumed my survey and Addressograph work, which I liked a lot better, even if it was only half the pay.

Soon they asked me to assist a university student named Mark Goodman with telephone research. He and I became great friends. In my senior year of high school, he helped me obtain an internship at the leading FM rock station in Philly. Mark went on to become one of MTV’s very first VJs. WFIL went on to become a Christian talk station.

The summer ended and I returned to school with a new feeling of confidence. I quickly made a new set of friends.

One early fall night I was out with Flufffy, my evening ciggarette and my WFIL handbag. Kathy was on her steps in her Catholic school uniform, and a plaid waisted coat with a fur collar.

She was kissing Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.

TOMORROW: The magazine glut.

ELSEWHERE:

• A would-be bible for sensitive straight guys everywhere, The Wussy Boy Chronicles (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….

Confessions of a Boss Chick

by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies

ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.

She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.

As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.

Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.

One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.

And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.

Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.

She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.

So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.

And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.

By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.

Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.

I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”

When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.

The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”

Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.

They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.

I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”

“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.

And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.

The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.

I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.

I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”

Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.

Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.

MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.

ELSEWHERE:

• An untapped potential for local-news web sites: local news!…
• There’s gotta be a woman out there who’s not dissatisfied with her breasts….

A FEW DAYS AGO, I briefly mentioned a vision I’d had of what social changes might potentially arise from a tech-company stock crash, should such a rapid downfall occur the way certain anti-dot-com and anti-Microsoft cynics around these parts hope it does.

(If you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and do so. I’ll still be here when you get back.)

One aspect of this vision was that a general public backlash against “virtual realities” (computer-generated and otherwise) could lead to a craze for any personal or cultural experience that could be proclaimed as “reality.”

Let’s imagine such a possible fad a little further today.

I’m imagining a movement that could expand upon already-existing trends–

• Martha Stewart’s home-arts fetishism;
• the shared frustration with the gatekeeping and intermediating functions of what conservatives call “the Liberal Media” and liberals call “the Corporate Media;”
• Old-hippie Luddites’ rants against anything to do with television;
• Neo-hippie Luddites’ rants against anything to do with the entertainment conglomerates;
• Granolaheads’ belief that anything “natural” is good for you (even cigarettes!);
• The Burning Man Festival’s “all participants, no spectators” policy;
• The retail industry’s move away from megamalls and toward “restored” downtowns;
• The tourist industry’s increasing sending of underprepared civilians to such spots as Mt. Everest; and
• The Xtreme-sports kids’ drive to live it-be it-do it.

It’s easy to see these individual trends coalescing into a macro-trend, coinciding with a quite-probable backlash against the digitally-intermediated culture of video games, porno websites, chat rooms, home offices, cubicle loneliness, et al.

As I wrote on Monday, live, in-person entertainment would, under this scenario, become the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences. The self-styled “cultured” folks and intellectuals could come to disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.

(Not coincidentally, this disdain would emerge just after technology has allowed the masses to fully create and distribute their own books, movies, recorded music, etc.)

Society’s self-appointed tastemakers could come to insist on live theater instead of films, lecturers and storytellers instead of writers, participant sports (including “X-treme” sports) instead of spectator sports, and concerts (or playing one’s own instruments) instead of CDs.

The arts of rhetoric and public speaking could enjoy a revival on the campuses. The slam poetry and political speechifiying beloved by Those Kids of late just might expand into a full-blown revival of Chataqua-style oratory. On the conservative side of politics, Limbaugh wannabes might take their rhetorical acts away from radio and further into staged rallies and intimate breakfast-club meetings.

Jazz, the music that only truly exists when performed live, could also have another comeback.

Even “alternative” minded music types could get into this line of thinking; indeed, there are already burgeoning mini-fads in “house concerts” and neo-folk hootenaneys.

As packaged entertainment becomes more exclusively associated with nerds, squares, and people living outside major urban centers, it might come under new calls for regulation and even censorship; while live performance could become an anything-goes realm.

(If carried to its extreme, this could even lead to the recriminalization of print/video pornography, and/or the decriminalization of prostitution.)

The rich and/or the hip would demand real shopping in real stores (maybe even along the model of the traditional British shopkeepers, in which the wife rang up sales in the front room while the hubby made the merchandise in the back.)

Those without the dough might be expected (or even made) to use online instead of in-person shopping; much as certain banks “encourage” their less-affluent customers to use ATMs instead of live tellers.

In this scenario, what would become of writers–or, for that matter, cartoonists, filmmakers, record-store clerks, etc.?

(One group you won’t have to worry about: The entertainment conglomerates. They’ll simply put less capital into packaged-goods entertainment and more into theme parks (manmade but still “live” entertainment), Vegas-style revues, touring stage shows, music festivals, and the like.)

MONDAY: Another local landmark gets defaced a little more.

IN OTHER NEWS: There’s one fewer employer for washed-up baseball stars.

ELSEWHERE:

• More anti-major-record-label screeds, this time from the ever-erudite Robert Fripp (found by Virulent Memes)….
• Wasn’t too many years ago when “race-blind casting” meant all of a play’s stars were white, no matter what the ethnicity of the role. Things might be changing….

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.

SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a few attempts to correct some commonly-believed but untrue “facts”:

• There is no “healthy cigarette.” Not even (or rather, especially not) that brand that’s also commonly but falsely believed to be made by Native Americans. Yeah, the additives and flavorings stuck into some other cigs aren’t nice to inhale. But tobacco itself’s lethal enough on its own.
• Safeway Food and Drug is not owned by the Mormon Church. It’s really owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the leveraged buyout/junk bond kings chronicled in Barbarians at the Gate. The Mormon church also doesn’t own CBS, Coca-Cola, or Hershey’s.
• You can’t really get away with a racist joke by backtracking and claiming you were only making a “parody” of a racist joke. That tactic’s known in the trade as a “lame excuse.” Try it too often, and you’re likely to end up with a “parody” of a punch in the face.
• You’re not ‘the next step of human evolution,’ no matter how much E you take. You’re just a normal, mortal, fallible human being like all the rest of us.

THE FINE PRINT (in the masthead of the women’s bodybuilding magazine Oxygen, no relation to the women’s cable channel and website of the same name): “Oxygen reserves the right to reject any advertisement without reason.”

At last, someone strikes a blow for rational arguments in advertising!

JUNK E-MAIL OF THE WEEK: “The domain: www.miscmedia.com, is ranked #68919 out of 400118 domains in the WebsMostLinked.com database.”

Alllrigghhttt! This month, we’re gonna try to make it all the way up to #67324!

THE MAILBAG (via Nick Bauroth): “Enough with the baby-boomers already! Can’t you find something else to blame for your shortcomings? And no, yuppies and fratboys are not acceptable substitutes.”

Actually, when I criticize others it’s for the sake of criticizing others, not out of misplaced blame or jealousy or any other excuses.

And as for any “shortcomings,” they’re just about all my doing (or the doing of specific, deep-rooted, influences upon my individual personal/career development).

I come, after all, from the same age group and race/gender status, in the same metro region, as folks who’ve gone on to win Pulitzers and Emmys, get elected to public office, record triple-platinum albums, and/or threaten to permanently stifle all present and future competition in the software industry.

IN OTHER NEWS: It may be the end of the company Seattle’s landmark Smith Tower was named after.

MONDAY: Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.

ELSEWHERE:

• The creators of this Bad Candy website appear to have a cross-cultural phobia thang going on. Just about the only product they dislike that’s not from Asia or Latin America is Circus Peanuts (which I, naturaly, love)….

FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.

TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.

Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.

Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”

Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.

Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.

Imagine a company that had the Beatles.

Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).

And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”

What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.

On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.

On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.

On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)

Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.

What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”

The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”

But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.

Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.

TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….

REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.

Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”

While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).

So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.

A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.

Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:

• “The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essense, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources….
• “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even…. If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either….
• “…By packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.
• “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.

Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.

So what to do?

Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”

That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?

Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.

More about that on Friday.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.

TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?

ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.

LAST FRIDAY, I related some of the things I told the Italian mag Jam about the Seattle music scene since the U.S. corporate media stopped caring about it.

Here’s some more of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: I think that one thing that united very different guys like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder was their attempt to negoziate the role of the rock star in the music business (it’s common opinion that only Nirvana did, but let’s not forget that it was Pearl Jam who stopped to do press and video, not Nirvana). Do you agreed? Is it something that still has an impact on today’s music scene and attitude?

  A: Nirvana tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and failed. Pearl Jam, which in its first year was more aggressively promoted than Nirvana, tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and succeeded on its own terms. PJ became a major-label act with the fan devotion of an “indie” act. By under-using the industry’s mass-marketing tools, it maintained its status as a “people’s” band.

• Q: Talking about the fifth anniversary of the Kurt Cobain’s death you wrote that now the town is as dysfunctional as it were then. And that the wrong people has a lot of career opportunities (so it’s not true what they say, that as ye sow, so shall ye reap). Can you elaborate?

  A: Let me clarify: A few people here are now tremendously wealthy, but those of us who aren’t on the upper rings of the high-tech and software industries are still struggling as much as ever. With the price of housing here having skyrocketed, some of us have struggled even more.

• Q: One big misconception about the Seattle music scene was that it was all grunge. Of course, it was a lie, or maybe ingenuity. Are things still the same? I mean, is the music scene still varied, with a wide range of different music?

  A: Perhaps even more so. Besides local outposts of whatever national trends come and go (alternative-country, lounge, techno, etc.), there’s a vital and growing avant-improv and postmodern-jazz scene. But, yes, the national magazines like Wallpaper still look at anything in Seattle that contradicts the “all-grunge” stereotypes and act all weird: “This is in Seattle but it’s Not Grunge–how strange!”

• Q: A friend of mine who went to Seattle two years ago reported to me that there’s no big exploitation of the ‘grunge era’ in town, apart from the Sub Pop Mega Mart and other little things that probably cannot attract massive ‘rock tourism’. Is it true? If it’s so, the reason is the ‘underground attitude’ of the scene, that refused to exploit ‘grunge’?

  A: Don’t worry. That will all come by the end of next year, when the Experience Music Project museum opens, including a big permanent exhibit all about the G-word era.

  But for now, yes. The ‘underground attitude’ was officially opposed to tourist attractions, theme parks, or the like. And the powers-that-be in local business and political circles have continued to eagerly play the role of intolerant authority figures (what all would-be “rebels” need in order to have something to rebel against), so there was never any threat of any city-supported Grunge Festival or anything like that.

• Q: Is Seattle rock scene still away from the starmaking machinery (the one that rules in L.A., for example)?

  A: Perhaps further away than before. Of the bands I wrote about in ‘Loser,’ the only ones still on the major labels are Pearl Jam, Built to Spill, Candlebox, Alice In Chains (who haven’t put out a lot of new stuff lately), and Chris Cornell’s new solo act. There are still bigtime producers and managers and promoters around here, but they work as much with out-of-town acts as with local ones.

• Q: The whole ‘grunge story’ showed once again that in the rock field success is a very transitory thing, that is all about trends, that rock fans today they like Nirvana and tomorrow Offspring or anything else. I’m wondering if there has been a moment when you thought that the incredible Nirvana’s success could change anything in that field? Did you ever believe that most of the people who listened to Nirvana really shared something and not simply listened to the band that was supposed to be cool listen to?

  A: Nirvana meant a lot to a lot of people. More than the studio-manufactured pop combos before or since, and more than certain California bands that sound sort of grungy but have much more industry-friendly business plans (appearing at snowboarding festivals, selling songs for movie soundtracks, etc.).

  The Industry did regain control of pop music from the upstarts. But it might just turn out to be a temporary victory. One of the six major-label groups has merged itself out of existence. The remaining five groups are cutting divisions, firing staff members, dropping bands left and right, and publicly whining about Internet-based “threats” to its well-being. While the techno-dance genre is still almost all indie-label-based; and cheap digital recording, Net-based promotion, and a club circuit invigorated by the early-’90s indie-rock mania make it easier than ever to get an act established (if not wealthy) without the majors’ waste or overhead.

• Q: How heavily the Kurt Cobain story weighted on the city’s conscience and life?

  A: It certainly made everything seem a lot less fun for a good long while.

  It also convinced some people of the wrongness of the music-industry system. Cobain had clearly been burnt out by the stress, not of being “the voice of a generation” but of being the locus of a multimillion-dollar business that used to be a little punk band. Geffen demanded videos, interviews, and long, overseas arena tours, and Cobain apparently felt unable to say no to these demands. (Of course, he was also sufferring under the drug-addict’s paradox of needing more money while becoming less capable of working for it.)

• Q: Do you think that the most popular bands (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden) departed from their background when they became successful? Or they kept on having a strong relationship with the city?

  A: None of them moved to L.A. (except Courtney Love and a couple of former Seven Year Bitch members).

  But it was traditional, in the pre-Microsoft years, for rich people in Seattle to withdraw from public life, to move out to gated suburbs or country homes and to stick to themselves. Some of the financially-successful music-scene people have done that, retreating to Idaho or Montana or the islands of Puget Sound.

  But others are still quite involved. Prime example: Krist Novoselic, who these days appears in public more often than he did during Nirvana’s heyday, and who’s been involved in anti-censorship drives and other political actions.

• Q: Do you think that the ‘Hype!’ movie correctly documents what happened in Seattle? If not, what’s missing? (Steve Fisk, for example, told me that the tragic death of Mia Zapata is underrated in the movie; he told it had a massive emotional impact on the sceners.)

  A: Anything running two hours or less, covering a topic so complex, will by necessity be a condensation.

  Home Alive, the women’s self-defense coalition formed after Zapata’s death, has had some attrition of volunteers and funding but is still active after six years. Zapata’s death, still unsolved, left a lot of people with a sense that they were in a seriously threatening environment; that death and violence weren’t just the stuff of goth or cartoon-heavy-metal fantasies.

• Q: Is the dj’s and electronic music big in Seattle now?

  A: You bet. It taps into one eternal Seattle schtick–the mistaken belief by would-be hipsters that everything in Seattle sucks, that the only really hip thing is to copy whatever San Francisco or New York says is hip. But it also taps into a certain spirit you can find in the Microsoft coprorate culture, where everybody’s young, ruthlessly “positive,” aggressively modernistic, and into hot-hot-hot hype.

• Q: What is now the impact and the role of Microsoft and Boeing in the city?

  A: Boeing’s corporate culture used to set the rules for mainstream society in Seattle–businesslike, rational, respectable, unassuming, consensus-oriented, square, and obsessed with quiet good taste.

  Today, Microsoft sets the tone–loud, fast, brash, aggressive, ambitious, arrogant, power- and success-oriented, and obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth.

TOMORROW: Is irony dead, or just playing possum?

MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).

THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.

THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).

EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?

MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…

A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”

Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:

• “Sex–it’s not just for gays and lesbians anymore.”
• “Sex-positive attitudes–now men can have them too.”
• “Don’t drink and drive–stay home and have some sex.”
• “Sex–it does a body good.”
• “Sex–Just Do It.”
• “Eat less, lick more.”

Speaking of public service sloganeering…

CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.

THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)

THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?

THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).

ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.

(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)

MISC. CAN’T BELIEVE nobody else (to our knowledge) has noted how the new logo for Safeco Insurance (and, hence, for Safeco Field) looks a lot like a rightward-slanting dollar sign…. Speaking of stadia, turns out the Kingdome can’t be imploded on New Year’s 2000 without canceling a Christian convention tentatively scheduled for that night. Darn.

(SUB)URBAN RENEWAL: With the opening of the 3rd Ave. Deli in the ex-Bon Tire Center on 3rd, downtown has its own mobile, curb-based readerboard sign with arrow-pattern chase lights. Strip-mall flavor in the heart of the city!

AFTERWORD: Crown Books is closing all its Washington stores, as part of a nationwide retrenchment. The book superstore chains’ chief victims aren’t the specialty independents, but the smaller general bookstores of both indie and chain ownership.The stores that discounted the bestsellers, prominently displayed the most heavily advertised books, and offered very little else.

BUT DO THEY COME IN LONG-SLEEVES?: Viagra
that male-potency pill endorsed by everybody from Bob Dole to Hugh Hefner, isn’t available yet in some countries, including India. That hasn’t stopped a Bangalore, India company from marketing Viagra-logo T-shirts with the slogan “What the World Wants Today.” A co-owner explained to Reuters, “Today, Viagra is not just a pill… it is a positive attitude bringing hope to people.”

JUST IN TIME FOR XMAS: Mattel’s debuting a Barbie-sized Erica Kane doll. Imagine all the wedding gowns you could get for it! Or maybe you could play where she grittingly grins while your Marlena Evans and Vicky Lord dolls show off their tiny Emmys.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: A couple months back
Misc. wrote about the possibilities (for good or ill) of a new American revolution. Seems the topic’s becoming popular; at least as a selling tool. Both Taco Bell and Dos Equis invoke bizarre takes on Poncho Villa to sell consumer consumables. A golf ball called the Maxfli Revolution advertises it’ll help you “Seize Power and Take Control.” Closer to home, the highly institutional-looking ARO.Space sez its initials stand for “Art and Revolution Organization” (its ads even say “Viva le Revolution!”). If this keeps up, Baffler editor Tom Frank will have enough “advertisers co-opting the language of dissent” rant topics to keep going for years.

PASSING THE TORCH: British Petroleum (which bought Standard Oil of Ohio in the ’80s) will buy Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana); so the former Mobil (nee Standard of New York), Exxon (nee Standard of New Jersey), and assorted other gas stations in Washington now bearing the BP brand will eventually change. (Alas, no more “Petrol for the lorry” lines, and no more jokes about where bees go to the bathroom.) But it’s not known yet whether they’ll assume Amoco’s torch logo or whether Tosco
the Connecticut-based company that bought BP’s Northwest operations in the mid-’90s and kept regional rights to the BP name, will instead change them to the 76 brand, which Tosco now owns outright. (After the print edition of this column went to press, Tosco announced it would keep the BP brand on its stations for the time being.) In other energy-related matters…

A BURNING ISSUE: It’s hard right now to think about heating equipment, unless it’s everybody’s favorite gas-powered industrial space heater. I speak, of course, of the mighty Reznor. When a rock singer using that surname showed up, some fans wondered whether he was related to the brand name bearing down from near the ceilings of stores, warehouses, artists’ studios, garages, nightclubs, etc. Turns out ol’ Trent is indeed a descendent of the company’s founder George Reznor (who entered the furnace trade in 1888, in the same central Penna. town where Trent grew up).

But the Reznor family’s had little to do in decades with the company, which has changed owners several times. Current owners gave 120 or so employees an “offer” last year: Take pay cuts of up to 28 percent, or else. The workers stood their ground. The owners shipped the jobs off to Mexico. Northeast politicians are now invoking the ex-Reznor workers as poster children for the injustices of NAFTA and the Global Economy.

So next time you hear Trent’s moans about frustration and helplessness amid a decaying industrial landscape, look up. If you see a Reznor heater above you, it’s a reminder that, for some, such feelings aren’t just an act.

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

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

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

  street hockey, et al.).

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

  cinematography, videography, Photoshop).

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

———————–

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

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

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

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

Thanks for hearing me out!

Erinn Kauer / eakamouse

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

MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.

ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?

INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…

WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.

They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”

Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…

SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.

At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.

So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.

Online Extras

This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.

Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.

The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.

In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.

The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”

Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.

Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.

Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)

A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.

MAKING THE SQUARE SQUARER: From approximately 1971 to 1991, the official live music genre of Seattle was white-boomer “blooze,” as played at Pioneer Square bars. The “blooze” bars of 1st Ave. S. play on today, virtually unchanged. Yet P-I writer Roberta Penn recently claimed Seattle didn’t have a blues club. She probably meant we lacked a club that treated blues as a serious art form, instead of formulaic macho “party” tuneage. It’s worth noting that the only national star to emerge from this scene, Robert Cray, split for Calif. as soon as he hit big (and bad-mouthed the Square bars promptly after he left).

Now, the forces of development want to rechristen the Square as luxury-condo territory. Some developers say they’d like to rid it of such elements as nightly noisemakers (even if they’re sport-utility-drivin’ caucasisn noisemakers). I wouldn’t personally miss the “blooze” bars (though there’s something quaint about standing outside the 1st & Yesler bus stop on a Sat. night, hearing three bands from three bars playing three cacophanous variations on the same theme). But I wouldn’t want the clubs to be forced out by demographic cleansing, especially since the area’s handful of prog-rock and electronic-dance clubs would likely get the boot at the same time, if not first.

PHASES OF THE MOON: With the warm weather’s come an odd masculine fashion statement: dorsal pseudo-cleavage. It involves wearing jeans with a belt, but hanked down to show the tall waistband of designer boxer shorts. I know it originally came from tuff-guy street wear, which in turn was based upon prison garb (oversize trousers with no belts allowed). But in this incarnation, it’s like a male version of that “sex-positive” women’s book Exhibitionism for the Shy. And in case you wondered why there weren’t “sex-positive” books for men?)…

VIAGRA-MANIA: After 10 to 20 years of the magazines and the TV talk shows defining sexual issues almost exclusively from a (demographically upscale) woman’s point of view, now Time and its ilk are scrambling to out-hype one another on the concept of masculine performance, as a problem now chemically solveable. It comes amid a new wave of skin-free men’s magazines like Maxim, trying to attract male readers without that pictorial element proven to attract men but to scare off advertisers. So instead, all the sex in these mags is verbal, not visual, and it’s often in the how-to format so familiar to women’s-mag followers.

Viagra-hoopla might also mean we’re finally over the late-’70s orthodox “feminism” in which the erection was depicted as the root of all evil. In the Viagra era, an erection is seen as something all men and 90 percent of women crave and wish would occur promptly, predictably, and on cue.

Then there’s a scary story in Business Week depicting that pillow-shaped erection pill as a harbinger of a new generation of prescription lifestyle drugs, for people who wouldn’t die without ’em but would just like to “feel better.” In 1990, when the Lifetime cable channel ran programs all Sunday “for physicians only” (complete with slick ads selling prescription drugs to doctors), there was a panel discussion show in which a doctor predicted everybody in America would be hooked on at least one prescription drug (including remedies for common conditions not at the time considered “problems”) by decade’s end. Looks like he might’ve been close to right.

Another question could be posed from the hype: Is the legal “feel-good” drug industry morally distinguishable from the illegal “feel-good” drug industry? In the past, I’ve dissed both those who seek all the answers to life thru pharmaceuticals and those who piously seek to punitively condemn such seekers. Both camps, I wrote, were on ego trips more potentially dangerous than any drug trip. But with ordinary citizens going more or less permanently on chemicals for little more or less than self-confidence, perhaps that dichotomy will transform into something different.

Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Book review for The Stranger, 5/7/98

The mostly-British anthology Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: Stories to End the Century (Serpent’s Tail trade paperback; edited by Sarah LeFanu) purports to chronicle the return to the “traditional values” of social repression following the end of the purported ’60s-’70s Bacchinale. Actually, it’s more like a reassertion of one particular traditional value of U.K. fiction: the pre-’60s kitchen sink drama, Angry Young Man version. That was a genre particularly suited for the England of grey skies and grim industrial towns and lingering postwar depression, a place where things new and invigorating just didn’t occur. The protagonists of most of these stories don’t find satori or mind-expansion from their earthy pursuits. At best, they achieve a little solace or escape from their everyday tedium.The sex is mostly of the “alternative” variety, and mostly in conformance with current “alternative” propriety. Professional dominatrixes; gay men searching for mates while on ecstasy; future lesbians engaged in girlhood role-playing; a married woman whose husband supplies her with another man as her birthday present; a honeymooning intellectual couple sitting at cafés while discussing the philosophical implications of fucking.

Similarly, the drugs are mostly used to escape the darkness of one’s life (Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born to Bleed”) or to build an artificial sense of self-confident fuckability (the aforementioned ecstasy users in Philip Hensher’s “The Chartist”). The main exception: Laurie Colwin’s “The Achieve, or the Mastery of the Thing,” in which a student bride in the nascent hippie years turns her professor bridegroom onto the then-novel joys of spending one’s entire life too stoned to feel pain.

Not much rock ‘n’ roll is in here, and that’s OK since there’s so little good writing about that world that isn’t really about the sex and drugs. Certainly the main rock story here, Cherry Wilder’s “Friends in Berlin,” has little novel to offer about bandmates getting on one another’s nerves while on tour. Again, nostalgia for the days of potential rebellion provide the highlight–Christopher Hope’s “Gone,” about a ’50s white boy learning to love rock music in apartheid South Africa.

The notion of intense pleasures as dulling narcotics reaches its ultimate point in Michael Carson’s “Postcards of the Hanging,” imagining a near-future in which humans are implanted with 24-hour radio receivers in their bodies, letting the outside world fade away while listening constantly to the top pop hits (with commercials). Like much modern-day sci-fi, it’s based on the schtick of taking a present-day trend (Walkmen and boom boxes) and simply imagining it will become more-O-the-same in the future. In this day of “chaos theory” and “quantum thinking,” many science and pop-science writers no longer believe trends necessarily “progress” in one direction forever. Too bad so many science fiction writers haven’t discovered this notion yet. But then again, maybe chaos-influenced fiction would constitute stories to begin the next century, not stories to end this one.

Welcome to the 12th annual Misc. In/Out list, your most reliable guide to the people, places, and things coming into and away from public prominence over the following months. As always, this list predicts what will become hot and not-hot; not necessarily what’s hot or not-hot now. We are not responsible for any investment decisions which might be made on the basis of this information. Thanks to all the readers who suggested items.