WELCOME ALL to your pre-autumnal-equinox edition of Misc., the pop-cult column that can’t decide whether the new-look Seattle Weekly represents the passing of the moderation-to-excess aesthetic that’s dominated local media for a quarter-century, or instead just signifies a corporation trying too hard to appear hip. Speaking of commercial images in flux…

EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: A half-decade ago, back when the outside world associated Seattle hipster-wear with looks actually designed in NYC by the likes of Marc Jacobs, the Zebraclub store on 1st Ave. was a bright, white showcase for the loudly-logoed products of Seattle’s real youthwear industry, with such once-hyped labels as Generra and International News. Today, the big Z sports a “homier” image, with faux-rustic walls and less abrasive lighting.

If you go there and you’re nice to them, they’ll give you the current catalog for Diesel, the Italian sportswear outfit that (a la Calvin Klein‘s ’94 “kiddie porn” ads) uses the detrius of American commercial-underground media to impart an image of American dangerousness onto its Euro-designed garments. This year’s Diesel catalog’s in the manner of a tacky small-press self-defense manual, titled Fight Me. It depicts young perfect-bodied female and male models in action poses, kicking and stabbing and choking imperfect-bodied (often overweight) villains. One aren’t-we-outrageous sequence shows a little girl punching the face of an older-woman pedophile. The attack techniques throughout the book range from the impractical to the ludicrous (“Master concentration-through detachment… will yourself to levitate”). An inside-back-cover disclaimer asserts the company “deplores, in the strongest possible terms, the current prevalence, and, in some sad quarters, vogue for violence.” Yeah, right–the common parodist’s copout, getting off on something then claiming it was just a joke. Speaking of convivial boorishness…

CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS ON PARADE: I wish the current cigar-mania (stinky, choky, life-threatening, etc.) would stop, but how? It appeals to too many universal temptations (even Freud joked, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”). Besides, in an age where the lowly mass-market cigarette’s an object of scorn and humiliation, there’s nothing like a fat, smelly cigar to make a smoker feel righteously vengeful. As long as there’s social pressure to conform to social standards of blasédom, many males and some females will always choose to rebel, albeit often in crude, loud, and ineffectual ways. The ’90s spin on this, natch, is many of today’s proponents of laid-back conformity claim to be political liberals, while many of the “rebels” are Harley-ridin’, KVI-listenin’ Young Republicans. (This has its precedents, such as the decadent rich kids of pre-Victorian England; many of whom also loved a good cigar.) Speaking of social mores…

OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE IN 2012?: Besides offering yet another clear line of demarcation between the civic-builder gang (ever pursuing “world-class” status for our fair burg) and the anti-development human-scale advocates (who’d probably leave town en masse for the event’s duration), the pro-Olympic boosters are offering a unique argument. In the past, the Games have been used by cities worldwide as excuses for massive construction projects, often using vast amounts of their respective countries’ tax dollars. The Seattle Olympics boosters claim the opposite. With the town’s two new stadia, the to-be-expanded Convention Center, and other existing or already-planned facilities, we’ll already have most of the sites a Summer Games would need. All we’d have to build would be a big swimming pool, horseback and archery venues, a few dozen additional hotels and motels, and (maybe the biggest single new one) a place to house a few thousand jocks and jills for 17 days under tight security. (The 1990 Goodwill Games housed their athletes in UW dorms, but that setup might be impracticable for the Olympics for all sorts of reasons.)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET (with more of your suggestions of yet-unrevived musical genres), be sure to become the first on your block to order the $229 Ken Griffey Jr. 12″ bronze statue seen in regional-ad editions of Time, and visit the new Seattle Art store on Wetern Ave.

ASIDE FROM THE CURRENT whereabouts of conceptual artist and convicted non-terrorist Jason Sprinkle (he’s out of jail and apparently doing OK), the most-asked question these days to Misc. World HQ (www.miscmedia.com) is “What’s gonna happen to the Cinerama?” Cineplex Odeon currently continues to operate Belltown’s early-’60s-vintage film box on a month-to-month basis. Independent parties are said to be attempting to buy the place, desiring to turn it into a not-yet-officially-announced entertainment concept, probably involving film screenings of some sort. If their quest succeeds, you’re sure to hear about it.

Next, let’s figure out a future for the ex-Cineplex Newmark Cinemas. I know there’s something of a surplus of performance spaces in town right now, but a five-theater fringe/ music/ dance/ whatever cavalcade would be the perfect contempo complement to the new symphony hall going up nearby.

UP IN SMOKE: Was listening to CNN’s live press-conference coverage about the potential ban on U.S. cigarette billboards while reading the 6/19 Stranger with the Kamel ad right up next to a Queer Issue article entitled “Nobody’s Billboard.” Sure, I’ll miss the cigarette billboards and the lovely defacements placed thereupon by enterprising protestors (as reported in these pages a couple weeks back). But I’m also a little worried. (I could say “a tad worried,” but I’ve been in the Seattle music scene to long to think of “a tad” as something small.) Without dumb ads in store windows and along strip-mall highways promoting smoking as a blasé, corporate-engendered, mainstream-American habit, how are we gonna convince the kids how uncool it is? (The cig brands in current favor among Broadway’s smoking vegans include some of the least heavily advertised, such as that indie brand falsely believed by many buyers to be made by Native Americans.) Indeed, with all the curtailments on cig ads in places where kids might be able to see ’em, we might be in for even more intense smoking-is-cool marketing pushes inside 21-‘n’-over joints.

TALKED OUT: The least talked-about ramification of the Second Seattle TV Network Switch is the sudden fallout of that early-’90s broadcast staple, the daytime “reality” talk show. Former KIRO and KSTW daytime attractions Maury Povich, Ricki Lake, Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones, and Crook & Chase have been shunted into the wee hours or onto UHF indie KTZZ. It’s not the genre’s end, but it could signal the beginning of the end. If the format does disappear, I wouldn’t worry about the fate of all those potential guests who’d no longer get to share their traumas and family secrets with the world. I would, however, feel sorry for all the op-ed columnists, sociology profs, and Republican politicians who’ve dissed the chat shows as proof of the inexorable decline of American mores. (These critics never seemed to find anything disturbing about the existence of incest, abuse, fraud, poor parenting, etc.; just about the public revelations of same.) Speaking of alleged attacks on allegedly traditional values…

MY-CUP-RUNNETH-OVER DEPT.: The religious-kitsch camp collecting fad has been bubbling under the radar of media attention for a few years. It’s now gone above ground with the opening of Coffee Messiah (neon window-sign slogan: “Caffeine Saves”), the latest espresso concept on Capitol Hill’s E. Olive Way. The joint looks terrific, with more cool prayer candles and crucifixes and Mary statues and religious paintings than you’d ever find in any Italian-American grandma’s house. So what if some might call it sacreligious. I see it more as sincerely celebrating the human expressions of faith and devotion, neither insistant nor perjorative about the ideological content of any particular belief. It’s like a small-business version of the Unity Church: all the reassuring ritual and artistry of worship, without any potentially troublesome theology.

If you really wanna see some urban hipsters belittling a popular object of solemn worship for the sake of cheap laffs and shock value, go enter the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves’ raffle for the chance to “Shatter a Genuine Chihuly!” (The glass-bustin’ event’s gonna be Thursday, Aug. 7 at the Lava Lounge, where $1 entry tix are now being sold; proceeds benefit the Northwest Fine Art Search and Rescue Team.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)

MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.

His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.

WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.

THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,

LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.

Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.

It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

ENNUI GO AGAIN: Nov. 5’s just around the metaphorical corner, and acquaintances of mine say they can hardly wait. They’re psyched n’ primed to head out, wait patiently in line, and be the first to buy the CD Presidents of the United States of America II,which cleverly goes on sale Election Day.

As for the election itself, has any major election in my lifetime been so near and yet so not-there? I’m not talking about voter apathy or ineffectual complaints about the electoral status quo; those have always been with us. I’m talking the total slouching-through-the-motions aspect of the exercise. I’ve struggled for a metaphor for this anti-spectacle: An end-of-season football game between two going-nowhere teams? The last, fitful, sex act of a couple about to split up? The rote “excitement” of Elvis- and Marilyn-dressed waiters at some silly theme restaurant, or a cover band at a high-school prom?

Sure, in ’84 everyone recognized and dismissed Mondale for being what Dole is now–a seasoned insider who got nominated thanks to connections and fundraising prowess, but whom nobody had great fondness for as a potential Prez. But then there were other things going on (like the Booth Gardner/ John Spellman gubernatorial race). Now we’ve got uninspiring sideshows like Ellen Craswell looking all lost and confused when speaking to anyone outside her ideological clique.

I was sorta hopin’ for a final public-discourse confrontation with the Religious Right’s central tenet (how Jesus Christ Himself wants you to cede all authority and power to Big Business). Instead, Clinton and Locke did an end-run and positioned themselves as the sane choice in pro-business politicians. They’re just as receptive to the desires of big campaign contributors as the Republicans are–but without the annoying baggage of a social agenda, without dependencen on followers who just might someday get around to reading that Bible verse about not serving God and Mammon.

CATHODE CORNER #1: You’d expect MTV to go all hyped-out over Madonna’s baby. Sure enough, the day the birth was announced, the channel went to all Madonna videos, with congratulations by MTV Online users crawled across the bottom of the screen, interspersed with predictions by infomercial psychics about the kid’s future life. What at least I didn’t expect was an MTV promo ad featuring drag queens dressed up as aged versions of Madonna and Courtney Love, re-enacting a scene from the cult-film classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, complete with barbed dialogue like “Why don’t you go re-invent yourself?” Given Love’s former taste for baby-doll dressing and Madonna’s former Joan Crawford fixation, it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before.

CATHODE CORNER #2: As was predicted here, the Telecommunications “Reform” Act has led to fewer media giants controlling more outlets. The Time Warner Inc./ Turner (TWIT?) combine has put the pre-1948 Warner Bros. movies back under Warner’s library for the first time since they were sold to a TV syndicator in 1957, but it also created a content behemoth big enough to threaten Rupert Murdoch’s world-domination schemes. Murdoch’s suing to get his Fox News Channel (which stops just short of promising a right-wing spin on all stories) onto TWIT-owned cable systems in NYC, systems now running their full physical capacity of channels. Murdoch-friendly Republican there have offered to stick Fox News on a city-controlled cable channel and dump the public access shows on it now. In short, give even more to the big programmers and kill what little access non-conglomerate voices now get. Fortunately, TWIT (and Manhattan’s other cable operator, Cablevision) are refusing this “solution,” at least for now.

PAY LESS DRUGS, R.I.P.: The Pay n’ Save stores, once the flagship of the local Bean family’s retail empire, were sold to NYC speculators, who then sold them to Kmart, which merged them with the Oregon-based Pay Less, then spun off the combined chain to private investors, who merged it with California’s Thrifty Drug. Along the way the G.O. Guy, House of Values, and Gov-Mart Bazaar chains also joined the Pay Less fold. Now, these 1,007 outlets will be part of the East Coast-based Rite Aid circuit. It’s a good thing drug stores don’t have the same combination-warning labels drugs have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernstein Book Finally Appears:

Jesse Lives

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/19/96

Almost five years after Jesse Bernstein’s suicide, and two years after Left Bank Books staged an all-star fundraiser to get a selection of his writings into print, the Zero Hour partnership has quietly gotten out a different set of Bernstein works. The still-pending Left Bank book [More Noise Please, published after this review’s original publication] represents one aspect of Bernstein’s star-crossed life–the frustration he faced almost daily to get his art made and appreciated. The Zero Hour book, Secretly I Am An Important Man, represents another aspect–his drive to get the work done, and to get it out by whatever limited means were available to him.

In this age of self-released CDs and credit-card-financed films, it can be hard to remember how tough it was not too long ago to get a piece of real artistic work out on a non-corporate level. Bernstein spent the last 25 of his 41 years in Seattle–doing odd jobs when he could, getting on and off drugs and booze (serving to inflate his already otherworldly demeanor), living sometimes in squalid apartments and residential hotels, befriending strippers, artists and other outsiders, going through three marriages, fathering three kids, taking short stays in the psych ward, and above all else working on his writing and his music; making it right, making it honest, getting it out in whatever tiny zines would have it.

The book also represents the friends who kept Jesse going and supported his work in the face of personal turmoil and an indifferent or misunderstanding public. The Zero Hour partners (Deran Ludd, Alice Wheeler, Jim Jones) knew Bernstein; Ludd had personally published two of Bernstein’s short novels, both now way out of print. They also understood what Bernstein was trying to accomplish with his writing. Many people didn’t understand him, including many who counted themselves among his fan cult.

Audiences at his spoken-word readings sometimes saw him only a “crazy” man, a junkie, a loud ranter with a strange appearance and demeanor, supplying weekend punks with entertaining travelogues about the lowlife underground. While he put a lot of intensity into his performances (his training as a nightclub jazz musician would demand nothing less), audiences’ expectations of him (with which he frequently played and teased) didn’t allow for much depth beyond the loud words about drugs and fucking and bodily functions and despair. Removed from the context of live performance, the stories and poems in Important Man show how much more there was and is to Jesse and his work. He indeed was an important man. A complex man, whose cocktail-curse of physiological, mental, and emotional troubles (many stemming from early-childhood polio) affected and sometimes overshadowed an insightful heart and a brilliant mind.

Despite his reputation, Bernstein seldom indulged in shock-for-its-own-sake on stage and never in his writing. Like the best work of his mentor William Burroughs, Bernstein sought to explore the human condition as he found it, as realistically as possible. Yes, he sometimes wrote about misery and emptiness. But he also wrote about love and hope and sweetness and people’s attempts, no matter how futile, to find a point of commonality. He was not, despite his public image, a nihilist or a cynic. He cared for the world and for people, deeply and sometimes painfully. His pain was deepened by his poignant wishes to be freed from it. As he writes in the story “Out of the Picture,” “I can no longer write about things that contribute to the collective disorder of human thoughts–but I cannot help writing such things either.”

A good starting point for exploring just how serious Bernstein can be is “The Door,” placed near the center of the book. Like many of Burroughs’ stories, it uses a sci-fi premise (here, a man from the present accidentally stepping through a time portal into the Old West) to envelope a tale of extreme behavior (including domestic violence and homicide). Bernstein doesn’t settle for wallowing in the novelty of the premise. Nor does he spew self-indulgently over the sex and violence in his narrative. Instead, he uses the premise to help bring the reader into the same sense of dislocation and helplessness felt by characters trapped in time, in the wilderness, in a hell of unrelenting sameness.

Another example is “Daily Erotica.” Read aloud, one might imagine getting enraptured by all the story’s explicit descriptions of masturbation and gay hooking and not hear much else. But in print, the story reveals itself to be really a chronicle of the narrator’s lifelong loneliness, both when in and out of sexual relationships. A loneliness rooted in a longing for an experience, a state of being, a something perhaps no human love can fulfill:

“Every lover I have had has seemed to be a figure from a mythology I had forgotten and was on this earth to be reminded of, rejoined with–a mythology that has yet to be realized, that must be remembered at the same time as it occurs, in order to be able to become part of the past, to become myth. This vanishes into the dark, scatters among the stars, and shines down on us forever. Influences the shape of things, the pool of dreams, the odd fate of the living, forever.”

He didn’t write to promote himself as some celebrity brand name. A lot of his stories are about himself (and nearly embarassingly revealing). But others have first-person narrators who are clearly not him. The stories in Important Man concern women, men, gays, children, architecture, war, brutality, politicians, nuclear fear, crippling illness, unsatisfying sex, the inevitability of decay, and everyday victories of survival.

Bernstein wrote much about these things, and many others as well. He left hundreds of stories and poems, three short novels, several plays, and several hours of spoken-word material on tape and film. Left Bank’s anthology is still supposed to come out one of these months. With any hope (and Bernstein’s despair was of the kind that always acknowledged the existence of hope), more of his work will become available.

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.)

MISC. SAYS GOODBYE this week to one of its favorite conglomerates, American Home Products, maybe the biggest company you never heard of. It’s being broken up, with divisions sold off, so management can focus on its drug operations (Anacin, Advil, Dristan, and many lucrative prescription patents). Unlike the late Beatrice, AHP kept its corporate profile low while promoting its brands (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pam, Brach’s candy, Ecko kitchenware, Easy-Off, Aerowax, Black Flag) with near-monomaniacal aggression. It was be said if you didn’t have a headache before an Anacin ad, you had one after. When Procter & Gamble’s ’50s soap operas offered up Presbyterian homilies of hope and family alongside the tears and turmoil, AHP’s soaps (Love of Life, The Secret Storm) relished unabashed melodrama, the harsher the better. While AHP was never a household name, its contributions won’t be forgotten by anyone who ever dined on Beefaroni while listening to a Black Flag LP.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! (NY Times blurb, 5/6): “If television is the Elvis of communications media and the Internet is Nirvana, radio is Bach.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: From our pals in the Seattle Displacement Coalition comes Seattle’s Urban Counter-Point, a four-page tabloid chastising the city’s inaction against homelessness and its action against homeless people. It does a better job than anybody at explaining how and why Seattle’s political machine, giving lip service to “progressive” homilies while actually serving at the beck and call of big money, is “a system of establishment control that is more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright graft.” Issue #1 doesn’t propose many solutions to homelessness, but does get in some well-placed digs at public officials’ war against the poor, and promotes a public forum where more proactive policies will be debated (Mon. June 10, 6 p.m., downtown library). The paper’s free (donations accepted) from the Church Council of Greater Seattle, 4759 15th Ave. NE, Seattle 98105.

FOAMING: KIRO-TV’s feature series earlier this month about the “fake microbrew” phenomenon successfully revealed the philosophy that sets real “craft” brewers apart from not only mainstream beer, but from mainstream business in general. “Contract brewing” is the product of a notion, increasingly popular in American business, that all that matters is a product’s concept and its marketing; actually making the stuff is a technicality to be dealt with as expediently as possible. That philosophy is why ad agency Weiden & Kennedy and its stable of spookejocks earn more money from Nike than all the Third World sweatshoppers who actually make the shoes. Craft brewers, on the other hand, put great pride and/or elaborate PR into the brewing process, into being able to control and refine every step.

This lesson hasn’t been lost on Minott Wessinger, the Henry Weinhard heir who sold that company, got into the malt-liquor trade, then tried to re-enter mainstream beer in ’93 with Weiden & Kennedy’s Black Star ad campaign. Wessinger’s about to re-launch the Black Star brand, without W&K and with a new corporate identity. He’s now doing business as the Great Northern Brewing Co., and proudly advertising every aspect of his new brewhouse in Whitefish, Mont. Black Star will now be promoted as something as carefully produced as microbrews, but with a more mainstream taste.

THE SKINS GAME: Another International No-Diet Days has come and gone. This year, the week of body-acceptance forums and events followed a curious NY Times piece on high schoolers across America these days (girls and boys) refusing to undress in the shower. Apparently, if you believe the article, kids everywhere are hung up on not looking like supermodels and/or superjocks. (It doesn’t seem to get any better in the gay world–papers like the Village Voice are now full of ads with bare male chests, all completely pumped and completely hairless.) As one who is neither jock nor model, I say there’s billions of great body types out there. Standards of perfection are for machine tools, not people.

(Party games, entertainment, performance art, memories–the giant Misc. 10th Anniversary Party’s got ’em all. Sunday, June 2, 6 pm-whenever, at the Metropolis Gallery, University St. between 1st and 2nd downtown. Be there. Details at the Misc. World HQwebsite, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.)

THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.

KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.

ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).

And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…

THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).

AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”

Welcome, good buddy, to the high-rollin’ 10/4 Misc., in which we attempt to figure out the rationale behind the recent rash of beers with dog names. There’s already Red Wolf and Red Dog (one’s owned by Coors, the other by Busch, but I can’t remember which is which). Now, Seagram’s trying to get into the beer biz with something entering local test markets this week called Coyote. Dunno ’bout you, but as one who grew up in a dog-owning household, the association of yellowish-colored liquids with dogs is not an appetizing one.

WITH POPULARITY comes a wider audience not all in on the same cultural reference points. Some folks thought that recent Stranger Performance Issue cover was “kiddie porn.” (It was even banned by the Spokane post office!) It was really taken from an early-’60s lesbian-domination photo book, originally distributed in the pre-Stonewall gay underground. The brouhaha over it shows how folks “read” images based on their own suppositions. I was more shocked by a P-I front page the same week, with banner photos of glass-art renditions of what obviously were a diaphragm, a uterus and a dildo — with a headline about how the artists were “Showing Off Their Talent at Blowing.”

KNIT PICKING: I don’t think the discontinued Calvin Klein ads were “kiddie porn” either (more like deliberately antisexual sleaze, using old underground photography as another retro-pop-cult “inspiration”). However, there’s now a line of junior-size knit tops called Betty Blue. Do teenage girls wearing the tops know about the movie of the same name? Quite possibly. Do moms buying ’em for their daughters know about the movie? Maybe not.

TAB KEYS: For those of you still stuck in post-adolescent snickering, the Weekly World News is now on America Online. I doubt it’ll be a hit there. It removes the only thing I like about the paper, its typography. Besides, online distribution too effectively targets that made-to-be-laughed-at tabloid’s real target audience of fratboys and hipster wannabes, negating the effect of imagining you’re the only WWN reader who knows it’s a joke.

REBEL WITHOUT A LUNG: Hope you’re ready for New Left nostalgia, corporate-style; for here come Politix cigarettes, with a peace hand-sign and a rainbow on the pack. It’s one of several brands (along with Sedona, exploiting the Arizona new-age colony of the same name) from the pseudonymous Moonlight Tobacco Co. (really R.J. Reynolds). The NY Times business-section story about Reynolds’s latest gimmick came the same day as a front-page story about the megabux being shoveled from the cig industry into GOP campaign funds…. Elsewhere in the product world, Coca-Cola quietly dropped OK Soda from its remaining test-market regions, three months after it ceased to be sold here. Chalk it up as another failure from Portland ad whizzes Wieden & Kennedy (of Subaru “Lack of Pretense Days” and Black Star Beer infamy). W&K’s string of flops may revive the old-school ad theory that cleverness might get your agency famous within the ad biz but doesn’t move product.

E.T. STAY HOME: The AP reported “three self-styled mediums” in Sofia, Bulgaria led some 1,500 followers to an airstrip to await eight space ships. Among other things, the mediums promised the aliens would help the poor Balkan country pay its $12.9 billion foreign debt. No non-earthers showed up. Just as well; if the space people had acted like Bulgaria’s last patron state, the ol’ USSR, the financial aid would’ve been in inconvertible currency that could only be spent in its home country.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, recall the words recited by Tom Berenger as Brigham Young’s bodyguard in the cable movie Avenging Angel: “The problem with polygamy is when you have 27 wives and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you.”

Mark your calendar to attend the book release party for my hefty tome, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, Sun., 10/15 at the Crocodile. It’s 21-plus, but an all-ages reading event’s in the works for later this month. More info at the Misc. World HQ website.

Welcome to the Seafair Week Misc., the column that can’t wait for the annual return of the hydros. Reactionary hippies sometimes accuse me of political conservatism for daring to like the hydros. I was once asked to speak at the “Alternative to Loud Boats” poetry reading, accepted, and shocked the crowd by telling ’em how much I liked the boats. Still do. There’s something endearing about these mechanical manic-depressives that sometimes go 250 m.p.h. but more often just sputter dead in the water. They’re an unabashedly non-chic relic of pre-yup Seattle, combining three or four of the old city’s once-dominant subcultures (they were built by solemn engineers, driven by rugged pioneer types, watched by hard-drinkin’ workingfolk, and promoted by oldtime hucksters). One of my longtime fantasies, besides having my own cereal, is to have my own hydro. “Miss Misc.” would be run by one of those hard-luck indie racing teams with no spare hulls and maybe one spare engine, the kind of guys who win fans’ sympathy while the big-money Budweiser team wins the heats.

FIGHTING FOR HER HONOR?: At the Lollapalooza show in E. Washington Courtney Love allegedly punched out Bikini Kill singer and original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, one woman who wouldn’t stand up to Love’s business. This is almost too perfect to be believable: our region’s two biggest icons of strongly contradictory definitions of “A Strong Woman,” in a fight for the title of The True Righteous Rebel. It’s an exciting notion as a fantasy, but somewhat pathetic if it’s true. They oughta put aside any past personal differences and combine forces for the real battles ahead. Speaking of which…

THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUES: Meanwhile, as Love relishes her new role as Molson beer spokesmodel, another Canadian company (Pyramid Productions) is soliciting investors for a youth-market exploitation film to be called Horsey. In a fundraising announcement the film’s writer/co-producer, Kirsten Clarkson, calls it “a story that appeals to the MTV generation… `Baby Busters’ and `GenXers’ are prime multi-level consumers of small ticket items, such as movie tickets, soundtracks, comics, and other ancillary products.” Clarkson describes her script’s heroine as “a hard-core, explosive, and sexy artist, who after quitting university to become the next Van Gogh, finds herself unable to paint. Delilah drinks too much, smokes too much and fucks whoever she wants. Women or men. She falls in love with Ryland Yale, the utterly dedicated and monogamous heir to a lumber empire. Ryland sings in an underground punk band and is gleefully building up a tolerance for heroin… Tragically, Ryland starts to disappear under the layers of a heroin haze. Although she is overwhelmed by loneliness, Delilah struggles to rebuild her life.” Sound like thinly-fictionalized versions of anyone we know?

TASTY BITS: For a long time, lotsa people thought computer-age aesthetics would be all cold-n’-sterile. Then by the mid-’80s, emerging PC-related visual styles (in game software, user-group literature and digital illustration) threatened to drown us all in bad sword-and-sorcery geekdom. Now, I’m happy to report, it’s a whole new picture, especially in the homespun friendly covers of CD-ROMs by small independent developers.

There’s something promising about CD-ROMs, even the ones that suck. It’s a vital artform that can inspire this kind of generic mediocre content in identical bright-n-bouncy packaging. Just lounging in the CD-ROM section of Future Shop is a thrilling experience. If there’s shelf and catalog space for all those discs of generic clip-art, old shareware video games and swimsuit pictures, there’s gotta be a market for something really good if and when it ever arrives.

Another thought: D’ya think music CDs could be sold in 5- or 10-packs “in promotional packaging” like the grab bags of low-end CD-ROMs? With the Wall St. Journal reporting a “glut out there” in indie rock releases, maybe low-sellers could be repackaged as The Five-Foot Pack of Punk, or 1,001 Straight Edge Rants, or even Super Value Bundle of White Kids Who Think They’re George Clinton.

Here at Misc. we love the idea of the recent McDonald’s All-American Gymnastics Tourney. You probably always think of Quarter Pounders with Super Size fries when you see lithe toned athletes bulging out of their tights. It’s the weirdest corporate sponsorship since Yuban coffee sponsored the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, a story that takes place while its heroine’s asleep.

CONSUMER TIP OF THE WEEK: Dave’s cigarettes are really made by those Jesse Helms lovers at Philip Morris USA. The pseudo-small-business ad campaign is just a crock, like all the “family” winemakers in the late ’70s that were really owned by Gallo. As if a one-tractor, 20-acre tobacco farm run by one guy “who works for nobody but himself” could afford all those fancy ads, billboards and point-of-sale displays.

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Alternative X is an online journal curated by a literary essayist using the (allegedly real) name Mark Amerika. Its main attraction is “In Memoriam to Postmodernism,” a book-length package of essays on “avant pop” fiction (defined here as everybody from Kathy Acker to Mark Leyner) and other topics. Included in the package are:

* “Strategies of Disappearance, or Why I Love Dean Martin” by Stranger interviewee Steve Shaviro (praising the eternally-indifferent “Zen Master of the Rat Pack”);

* “A Mysterious Manifesto” by Don Webb, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a mainstream science-fiction fan (because commercial SF/ fantasy denies any real sense of mystery and wonder in favor of “grey” formula predictability); and

* “An Essay-Simulacrum on Avant-Pop” by Curt White, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a “radical” (because they haven’t “advanced any description of a social organization beyond capitalism more invigorating than the oft-used and dusty phrase `true participatory democracy'”).

Also on the site is “Toward the New Degenerate Narrative,” a “literary manifesto” by Bruce Benderson that starts with a cute rant against bureaucratically-edited school textbooks and goes on to expose the classist assumptions behind the “progressive” fantasy of a utopian small-town society where everybody’s “nice” and soft-spoken–the same fantasy behind the “Northwest Lifestyle” rhetoric. Benderson notes that much of the post-hippie left’s politics “have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain lifestyle: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about The Other.” He also disses the slogan “Hate Is Not A Family Value,” asserting that “hate and resentment keep the family’s incestuous urges tensely leashed.”

THE FINE PRINT (on a tub of Dannon Light ‘N Crunchy Low Fat Yogurt with Aspartame Sweetener and Crunchies): “Contains one-third fewer calories than the leading brand of sugar-sweetened yogurt with crunchies.”

HEY SAILOR!: As some of you know, I live in the general vicinity of the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall in Belltown. So when chartreuse-haired guys n’ gals started lining up in front of the place on the evening of 3/3, some neighbors and neighborhood people shuddered out loud that they were gonna be kept awake by another of the all-night raves that had been held there over the past year. I reassured them this was different: Live bands (no incessant disco beats), in an all-ages show that’d be over before midnight.

Inside, the scene was a flashback to a time when today’s underage punks were in diapers. By the time the amazing Team Dresch played a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover, the time warp was complete. With one big difference (bigger than the gig’s total on-stage ratio of eight females to three males)–unlike the old rental-hall punk shows, where drinking, drugging, fighting and hall-trashing were constant presences or threats, this crowd grew up under the burden of the Teen Dance Ordinance, knew an all-ages show was something precious, and behaved accordingly. Part of the credit goes to promoter Lori LaFavor (a partner in the old local music tabloid Hype). She booked some of the biggest names in indie music, who also happened to share a belief that music should be more than a mere excuse for partying but a means toward communication and community.

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”