JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.

Among them, in no particular order:

• Toon Disney. Yes, Disney’s TV animation division has amassed enough episodes in the past 15 years (starting with Adventures of the Gummi Bears for an entire channel to do nothing but rerun them. Some of them (i.e. DuckTales) hold up better than others.
• Newsworld International. The first of three Canadian-connected channels on today’s list, this is the U.S. feed of the CBC’s cable news channel; supplemented with English-language programs from other world broadcasters. Serious news coverage about non-U.S. residents who aren’t even named Elian–what a concept!
• MuchMusic. Also Canada-based, this is cable’s last non-Viacom-owned video music channel. And it’s full of clips and tunes picked to entice audiences, rather than to fit Viacom’s and the major labels’ marketing synergies.
• Trio. Currently owned by USA Networks, but begun by the CBC, this channel (whose name is explained as standing for “Drama, Documentaries, and Film”) offers “Television the Rest of the World Is Watching.” In other words, English-language fare from Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand producers that hadn’t found any other U.S. home. Chief among this is Britain’s #1-rated series, the 40-year-old primetime soap Coronation Street, of which Trio airs two half-hour episodes from mid-1995 each weekday. (CBC airs four episodes a week, same as the show’s rate of production, on a three-month delay.)
• Bloomberg TV. Another financial channel, but simultaneously more hyped-up and more “real” than CNBC. Instead of celebrity reporters, it’s got no-name news readers whose faces are crammed into a tiny upper-left corner of the screen, surrounded by ever-changing price stats. And instead of emphasizing NASDAQ tech stocks, it gives priority to such real-world financial figures as soybean futures!
• Tech TV (formerly ZDTV, from its roots in the Ziff-Davis computer magazines). Watch the dot-coms churn and the home-PC users burn on this channel, devoted half to reporting computer-biz news and half to hyping cool hardware and software gadgetry.
• GoodLife TV. G-rated doesn’t have to mean dull, as this moldy-oldies channel proves with cool old ’40s B-movies and strange old ’60s reruns (Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters).
• CNN/Sports Illustrated. Another sports-news wheel channel, a la ESPNews (which AT&T Digital cable already carries). Aside from the likes of fired-coaches’ press conferences, there’s really little need for more than one of these (especially since you can learn what your favorite team did tonight more quickly on the Net).
• The Outdoor Channel (“Real Outdoors for Real People”). Fishing, gold-panning, hunting, target shooting, power-boating, jet-skiing, RV-ing, bird watching, outdoor cooking. Even the occasional conservation topic here and there.
• Style. A women’s magazine of the air, with shows about food, travel, decorating, makeup, and especially fashion. The latter programs include at least one see-thru runway-show shot per hour.
• WedMD/The Health Network. Medical and wellness-advice shows. One of them, Food for Life, co-stars none other than original MTV VJ Mark Goodman!
• ilifetv (short for “Inspirational Life TV”). Pat Robertson’s 700 Club was originally conceived as an all-around lifestyle and talk show that just happened to be by and for born-again Christians. This channel brings back that concept as a 24-hour thang, funded by cable-subscriber fees (no pleas for viewer donations). You can see a recipe segment that smoothly segues into an interview with the leader of Teens For Abstinence; or an evangelist described in his PR as “an MTV-savvy minister.”
• Playboy TV. The Spice channel is censored hardcore porn–depictions of real (though formulaic) sex, with all phallic shots edited out. Playboy TV is true softcore–professionally-choreographed (and halfway-professionally-photographed), semi-abstract segments intended to be both sexually and aesthetically intriguing; sometimes with real attempted stories and characters involved.

Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).

NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.

IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site that condenses popular movies to their absurd essences….

TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.

In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.

But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.

In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.

By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.

Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.

Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.

At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.

KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).

All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.

All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).

TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.

ELSEWHERE:

• The worst movies of 2001! (found by Fark)….
• The religious origins of bland American foods….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

Generation S&M, Part 2

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)

MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.

Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.

And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.

I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.

Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)

On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.

Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.

These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.

In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.

We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.

Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.

In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.

In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.

The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.

In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.

And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.

Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?

I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.

Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.

That would be SO Catwoman of me!

TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could that most Web-user-beloved of humor institutions (and former home of many of the original Stranger staff) be selling out?…
• The NY Times marks seven years after the WWW became an established institution (which, in the paper’s estimation, was when the NY Times first reported on it)….

Generation S&M, Part 1

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

THE OTHER DAY I was surprised to see a preview to the new movie Quills, a tale loosely based on facts about the Marquis de Sade.

Surprised because I thought that S&M was out. The movie is complete with a star-studded Hollywood cast and lots of flogging.

Some fads go out slowly, occasionally bobbing their heads aggressively before drowning completely. You can’t really write a fair essay about a fad until it’s over. You have to give it time to die, and God knows you don’t know a fad is happening while you’re in it. No one knew the roaring ’20s were roaring until at least the ’50s.

So it’s stupid for me to reminisce about S&M and the glorious late ’90s yet, but I’m doing it anyway.

S&M made a comeback in the early ’90s. I heard someone once say that Seattle was some sort of Centre de Sadism renowned throughout the world. I don’t really think so.

I mean, of course there was the Vogue, which started having Sunday fetish nights in the nineties. Then the Catwalk, where you could playfully whip boys in leather, a few underground S&M raves that were hard to avoid if you ever danced.

There was even a more serious bordello/dungeon of sorts in Magnolia. The torturous Jim Rose Circus Side Show and The Pleasure Elite originated here. Still, I never thought of Seattle as an epicenter for S&M.

I did notice that suddenly S&M was cool. People were wearing corsets and spiked heels and dog collars again and suddenly black rubber was everywhere. People were “coming out” about their sexual strangeness. The personals started being really entertaining with all the weird fetishes. Post-grunge fashion picked up on the trend.

The S&M love story by Anne Rice, Exit to Eden, was made into a (crappy) Hollywood movie. Xena: Warrior Princess started kicking the shit out of men; as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catwoman, and Lara Croft the cyberbabe.

Obvious dominitrixes like Miss Parker of The Profiler came back to TV. The Gimp appeared in Pulp Fiction; vampires made a comeback; Clinton was elected (and everyone knows he’s a bottom).

When you write an essay about a fad, like for example the slew of Vietnam movies made in the late ’80s or the preppy movement of the early ’80s, or even anorexia nervosa, you have to say what were the factors that allowed the fad to be.

Like for example, a lot of preppy kids had these cool ex-hippie, pro-pot, pro-everything parents, and the only way suitable for them to rebel was to change their name to Buffy and buy stocks and iron their clothes. Works for me.

Much the same thing happened with S&M.

Everyone knows that our parents raised us in the ’70s and they were into the most hideous, revolting, normal sex.

Encounter groups, est, Unitarian Church Singles Groups (called USAG). I’m OK, You’re OK. The Show Me! book, the anatomically correct dolls. The ’70s, when people sang “I’m Easy” and “Sometimes When We Touch” with a straight face.

Yeeech. Blek.

Our parents’ sex, although “open” and “free”, bored us all to tears. I mean, Alan Alda and Woody Allen as sex symbols?

While their twenties were spent rebelling against the sexual repression of their ’50s-era parents, our twenties were spent trying to re-achieve the coolness of repression.

And I think I personally found it in Catwoman.

TOMORROW: A possible source of S&M fascination–’60s sitcoms.

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE:

• No products, no employees, no customers, no business plans; nothing but domain names for sale on eBay, all promising smash revenues…

THERE’S FINALLY A TARGET STORE in Seattle. The chain had previously dotted the suburbs, but came no closer to town than Westwood Village, a strip mall on the cusp between West Seattle and White Center.

Now, the “hip” discount department store (which has encouraged its fans to use the faux-French designation “Tar-szhay”) has set up shop in a new development across from Northgate–the historic “Mall That Started It All” where, 50 years ago, the then-parent company of the Bon Marche devised a centralized, all-enveloping shopping experience, separated by a giant moat of parking lots from the outside world.

In contrast, the new Northgate North development, where Target is, was planned in cooperation with city officials who wanted an “urban village” scheme–higher-density development, with leftover space for new residential units.

Therefore, the new Target’s 80,000 square feet (the chain’s standard store size) are cut up into two floors of a building that directly abuts the sidewalk (though you have to enter from the back, next to the five-story parking garage). Target’s on the building’s upper two floors. The ground floor’s devoted to smaller chains with storefront entrances (not open yet). On the lower level: Best Buy, the electronics/appliance/CD chain that once ran a national TV ad promoting itself as the best place to catch up on that then-hot “Seattle Sound,” even though it didn’t have any outlets in the area at the time.

The building itself’s done up in that currently popular retro-“industrial” style. Lotsa exposed framework and corrugated aluminum cladding give off a “busy” and quasi-friendly look, rather than the overpowering nothingness of big blank concrete walls.

The Target store was worth the wait, and suggests the chain should’ve built in-town sooner. While Kmart constructed its merchandising for suburban squares, and Wal-Mart was devised to be Small Town America’s everything-for-everybody store, Target applied niche marketing (also known as “target marketing”) to what had been a mass-marketing genre. Like Ikea, it sought out young-adult singles and new families with more style than cash. From shoes to lingerie, from kids’ coats to tableware, from home-office furniture to home-entertainment centers, what Target’s got is at least a little cooler (and not much costlier) than the stuff at the other big-box chains.

This strategy dates to the chain’s origins. As the chain’s website notes, it’s the only national discount chain to have been started by “department store people, not dime store people.” Specifically, it was started by Dayton Hudson Co., owners of Dayton’s dept. store in Minneapolis (where Mary Tyler Moore flung her hat). Target has now become more important to Dayton Hudson than its collection of regional dept.-store chains; the parent company recently changed its official name to Target Corp. When family scion Mark Dayton won a U.S. Senate election this month, most commentators referred to him as “heir to the Target fortune.”

Indeed, the brand’s become so powerful that the company was able to run commercials earlier this year with rave DJs and hot-panted dancers cavorting around backdrops of the chain’s bull’s-eye logo, with no products being sold and the store’s name not even mentioned.

TOMORROW: Another of our little fiction pieces.

IN OTHER NEWS: There’s a movie out there this week with a supposed anti-materialism message, that has lots of merchandising tie-ins with Nabisco, Hasbro, Visa, the Post Office, and more. Here’s a review, in Seussesque verse.

ELSEWHERE:

• The unsung story of Canadian comic heroes!…
• A bizarre, but actual, dumb comic-book cover every day (found by Boing Boing)….

TWO OR THREE SHORT THINGS TODAY, starting with a defense of a perennial, and perennially maligned, American institution.

YES, I LIKE NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS. The rest of the time, TV and radio commercials are all bright ‘n’ bouncy, overstuffed with that incessant mandatory happiness that’s pervaded American life from employee-motivation courses to theme-park architecture and even many evangelical churches. But during election season, suddenly the tenor of spots changes.

We get Our Man depicted in bright, cheery color, hugging the wife and kids. The Other Guy, meanwhile, gets portrayed in stern black-and-white still mug shots that get shrunk and darted across the screen; while buzzwords get electronically stamped on his face like canceled postage.

And judging from this year’s slander spots, the received ideas behind the buzzwords are ossifying into a formulaic ritual, of little relation to either the candidates or the voters. Republican consultants still expect the populace to get scared out of our wits by the mere mention of “bureaucrats,” “big government,” and especially “liberal,” as if the Reaganisms of 20 years ago were still a novelty instead of a bore. And the corporate Democrats can’t seem to think of anything to smear Republicans with besides the spectre of an anti-choice Supreme Court.

(There’s plenty of other legit complaints to be made against the Repo Men, of course; but the corporate Demos don’t want to bring up issues on which they could themselves be called to account.)

So if smear ads have become a rite engaged in strictly for its own sake, why haven’t other advertisers hopped on the trend? I’m still hoping to hear something like: “Pepsi says they’ve got the most refreshing soft drink. But take a look at the facts….”

‘SWING’ KIDS: Here’s a recommendation for a book you can’t get, at least not very easily.

Canadian author Billie Livingston was in town a month or two back, accompanying a friend of hers who’d gone to participate in a joint reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. While here, Livingston consigned a few copies of her new novel Going Down Swinging, thus far published only in Canada.

It’s a gorgeous, poignant little tale about a severely alcoholic mom whose second husband and teenage daughter have both abandoned her. Her only solace, besides bottles and pills and lines, is the seven-year-old second daughter she struggles to keep custody of and who loves her dearly, despite mom’s frequent blackouts and occasional hooking. It’s a tale of real family values and survival, mainly set in Vancouver’s threatened-with-gentrification east end.

You should try to get it, at Elliott Bay or thru a Canadian online bookseller such as Chapters.

UPDATE: Thanks for your emailed comments about our forthcoming experiment with fictional alter-ego characters in the online column. The first episode to include some of them will appear in the next week or two, and will be duly identified as fictional, maybe.

UN-SPOOKED: Halloween 2000 turned out about as expected, at least at the events attended by myself and our intrepid team.

There were the usual assortments of robots, furry critters (rabbits, cats, dogs, et al.), politicians, celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Elvis), lumberjacks, devils, ’70s disco dudes, loinclothed adventure heroes, bare-butted samba belles, firefighters, detectives, politicians, superheroes, and at least one woman dressed as a kitschy lamp (gold body paint, gold grass skirt and bra, a shade on her head).

Not seen, at least by our team were any of the characters that would’ve been really scary here and now:

• A WTO riot cop.

• John Carlson.
• A mummy wrapped in old copies of The Rocket.
• Mariners relief pitcher Arthur Rhodes.

OTHER WORDS (from Aldous Huxley): “I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”

TOMORROW: The Clash, Motown, and three generations’ notions of musical empowerment.

ELSEWHERE:

• According to Fortune’s dot-com-mania post-mortem piece, “Let’s face it: Nobody wants to buy shampoo over the Internet….”

NORTHWEST BOOKFEST isn’t really the Great Affirmation of Seattle As Book-Lovers’ Capital of America that its sponsors like to claim.

It’s merely a stop on a North America-wide circuit of consumer-oriented book confabs (as opposed to industry-oriented book confabs, like the annual trade fairs in Chicago and Frankfurt). Some of these confabs are older, bigger, and/or more prestigious than Seattle’s.

But the Seattle show’s organizers can take credit for having started big six years ago and just gotten bigger since. Originally held in a rustic old pier (where the cover image of Loser had been photographed, at one of Nirvana’s last shows), it’s moved, as of last week’s 2000 edition, to Paul Allen’s Stadium Exhibition Center next to Safeco Field.

There, spread over two of the hall’s three huge rooms, what had previously been a boistrous bazaar of literary hucksterism became little more than another exercise in feelgood moderation.

The front hall was only about two-thirds filled with booths and readings stages. A couple more stages, plus some activity areas and another dozen or so sales booths, were even more thinly spread across the cavernous rear hall. The spaciousness prevented the event from generating the kind of critical mass of people, noise, and energy it needs.

Face it: Reading is (and writing especially is) a lone, quiet entertainment. Even audio books are often listened to while one’s stuck alone in a car. A festival celebrating books and reading needs to be a coming-out event, a joyous gathering where people openly share the experiences, ideas, and fantasies they keep to themselves the rest of the year.

My suggestion: Play up the “fest” part of Bookfest. If it’s going to be held in a space built for auto and boat shows, it should adopt some of the showmanship of those events.

Make it a “World of Words Lit-O-Rama.”

I can see it now:

• A Vanna White lookalike letter-turning contest, with separate competitions for women, girls, and cross-dressers.

• An Algonquin Round Table re-creation, with actors portraying those 1920s wits while audience members listen in from other tables in the NYC-hotel bar setting.
• “Literary Concessions,” special foods and beverages tying in to favorite books (madelines, green eggs and ham), language in general (Alpha-Bits), or decadent-writerly fantasies (whiskey, absinthe). (If this special food and drink service contractually has to be arranged through the exhibition hall’s regular concessionaires, let it be done that way.)
• Readings and panel discussions that go beyond the mere hyping of new books. Actors and “local celebrities” (the usual crowd of athletes, musicians, TV newspeople, radio hosts, politicians, etc.) could share passages from their favorite (kid and grownup) authors. Authorities and scholars could discuss the past and future of written/spoken language. Book collectors could show off examples of once-popular genres and formats (pulp magazines, penny dreadfuls, nurse romances, underground comix).
• A book-arts demonstration area, only more diverse than the one Bookfest had in prior years. Besides the paper-making and hand-binding crafts, there could be brief tutorials in page-layout and web design, self-publishing, and agent-getting. There could even be hands-on demonstrations of those much-hyped but seldom-seen “eBook”-type devices (which were notably absent from Bookfest this year).
• More games. Not just the Scrabble mini-tourney but spelling bees, literary-trivia competitions, and add-on-story writing games.
• For the kids, a Harry Potter character costume contest.
• For the adults, a Pillow Book body-paint calligraphy exhibition.

TOMORROW: Here today, gone to Kenmore.

ELSEWHERE:

• It’s the return of big hair. Be afraid. Be very afraid….
• Learn the business basics of Net porn with Letterman’s ex, Merrill Markoe (found by Media News)….

TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Julie London, the former B-movie actress who was turned into the prototypical lounge singer by second husband Bobby Troup; then was hired, with Troup, by first husband Jack Webb to star in his TV show Emergency. We’re all crying a river over you, Julie.

MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, memories of rock joints of the recent past.

Linda’s Tavern opened in early 1994 on the site of what had been the Ali Baba restaurant. Four years earlier, the Ali Baba had hosted some of the first freak-show performances by former pest-control salesman Jim Rose (advertised with word-heavy flyers headlined “He Is NOT A Geek”). Shortly after Linda’s opened, the Ali Baba sign became part of a shrine to Rose and his “sick circus.” The shrine wasn’t at Linda’s but at Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, at the present site of ARO.Space.

The Kincora Pub is in one of those buildings that’s had umpteen different identites. In the ’70s and early ’80s it was Glynn’s Cove, one of Capitol Hill’s last true dive bars. Then it was the live-music club Squid Row, which (after a failed jazz-fusion format) emerged in 1987 as one of the few places to hear those loud, slow rock bands everybody in America would soon think was the only kind of rock band in Seattle. (Things got so loud iin there, the doors could only be opened between songs to appease the neighbors.) More recently it was Tugs Belmont, successor to the still fondly-remembered pioneering gay dance club Tugs Belltown.

The Vogue, dean of Seattle dance clubs, now resides within the DJ-circuit neighborhood on Capitol Hill anchored by ARO.Space. Its former site on First Avenue, seen here, still stands vacant after more than a year. It had first opened as a leather gay bar in the mid-’70s; then in late 1979 became Wrex, one of the first joints in town devoted to that new wave/punk/whatever-you-called-it music. It became the Vogue in 1983, pioneering a post-disco, not-exclusively-gay dance shtick (including the town’s longest running fetish night). It still hosted live acts on off nights, including Nirvana’s first Seattle gig in 1988.

The Hopvine Pub on 15th Ave. E. was once a somewhat more rough-hewn joint called the Five-O Tavern. The Five-O had hosted blisteringly-loud rock gigs in the mid-’80s. Even after noise complaints stopped those shows, it remained a hangout for young-adult heteros at a time when most other Capitol Hill bars were either gay or yuppie. It’s now a finely-appointed microbrew joint, but still attracts some of the ex-Five-O crowd, with singer-songwriter gigs by the likes of Pete Krebs and Marc Olsen.

TOMORROW: Secrets for making a magazine catch on.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Before you pour yourself into the pair of jeans you used to wear in college or bust out those bike shorts, check for the presence of camel toes….”
• Now available in the U.S., the Hello Kitty Toaster! (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)…

CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.

The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.

The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on “How to Dress for a Nudist Camp.” Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.

While the Nova story’s text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre’s, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something’s loony about males and un-“beautiful” females treating their bodies as unshameful.

Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I’ve yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I’ve written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone’s expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.

Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.

Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one’s inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.

As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement’s ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)

No, nudists aren’t weird in Bizarre’s usual definition. They’re normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.

Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.

(P.S.: I’ve been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I’ve found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn’t sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)

TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.

ELSEWHERE:

• The pathetic spectacle of self-styled bad boys whoring for the record industry in the Napster suit (found by Slumberland)….

I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.

Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.

I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.

Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.

We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.

One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)

I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.

But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.

Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.

Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.

Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.

Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.

Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.

What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.

I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).

But I want you to do these things with a purpose.

Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.

But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.

You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.

TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.

IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”

ELSEWHERE:

• Forget Whatchamacallit County. Here’s “The Bridges of Portland…”

GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.

Men’s designer fashions have become just as silly as women’s designer fashions!

The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. “Hip” white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).

The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men’s fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase “A Return to Elegance” or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in “menswear,” they almost always referred to the “menswear look” for women, not to clothes for males.

There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, “casual Friday” khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch’s gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between “casual elegance” and “elegant casualness.”

But that’s apparently changing. And, once again, it’s at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.

In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the ’90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap’s biggest market.

That concept “filtered up” to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.

While that particular look hasn’t “graduated” to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.

Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.

So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months’ time.

And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE’S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn’t have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me.

TOMORROW: We are driven.

ELSEWHERE:

• About time there was a humor site devoted to the funniest topic in the world….

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….

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.

HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.

But not everybody’s caught on.

Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.

(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)

Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.

Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.

Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.

Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)

Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.

I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.

Oops–sorry. That was already tried.

Some people called it “grunge.”

TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.

ELSEWHERE:

• All four Golden Girls are still alive (found by Mister Pants)….
• This guy doesn’t have many yet, but he wants to amass a great collection of weird fortune-cookie sayings….