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TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.
AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.
(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)
Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:
The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.
TOMORROW: We play with our food again.
ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote something for Seattle magazine, expanding on themes I’ve been exploring here about the new face of “hipness” around town.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers and others who missed the mag, here’s the uncut version of that piece (the mag didn’t cut much):
There’s a new definition of hipness emerging in Seattle, and it’s a lot more than just “Not Grunge.”
It’s a repudiation of the whole bohemian notion of an “alternative” to “mainstream society.”
The new hipness doesn’t oppose society; it wants to lead it. It doesn’t repudiate material wealth; it wants to use it more stylishly. It’s about dressing up, seeing and being seen, and making the scene.
For a long time, to be a hipster in Seattle all you had to do was proclaim your antipathy to squareness.
And that meant almost everything approved by our civic powers-that-be.
Squareness ruled Seattle, absorbing all anti-status-quo movements.
In the ’50s, regional Teamsters boss Dave Beck turned a once-militant labor movement into a force for conservatism.
In the ’70s, many local hippies aged into either docile Deadheads or domesticated professionals.
In the ’80s, Starbucks made the coffeehouse, that beat-era symbol of artful rebellion, safe for strip malls.
In the early ’90s, college station KCMU moved away from raw noise bands, toward more retro-country and ethnic acoustic music.
For every incarnation of squareness, an incarnation of hipness emerged in response.
Ultimately, that led to the anti-fashion look and gritty sound of the “grunge” scene, so loud and aggressive it could supposedly never be tamed by the squares.
The new hipness denounces that dichotomy of having fun vs. having funds.
It says you can enjoy a creative, active life without taking a vow of poverty; that you can earn a good income without becoming a dull homebody.
It’s fueled by waves of cyber-wealth, bringing in people with youth and money, and by real-estate inflation, scatterring many old-style bohemians out of town or into non-artistic careers.
A locus of the new hipness is ARO.Space, the one-year-old dance club at 10th and East Pike. The building used to house Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, the old hipness’s most lavish (yet still funky-chic) rock club. It’s now a sleek palace of pastel colors and recessed lights, where DJs mix the latest subgenres of electronic dance music for gay and mixed audiences. The design’s fancy yet understated and reassuring, a spot for beautiful people to show off their good taste.
Under Seattle’s old hipness, gay bars were obscure, underground-cachet places (some didn’t even have exterior signage).
Under the new hipness, they’re the high-profile trendsetter spots, where straight people try to look good enough and dance well enough to fit in.
The ARO.Space formula’s worked so well that two similar clubs have opened within walking distance, Spintron and the new Vogue.
The old Vogue space in Belltown (previously a new-wave bar called WREX) was an old-hip institution done up in basic black, where two generations of rock and dance-music fans co-mingled (and where Nirvana played its first Seattle gig). The new Vogue’s a little less funky, a lot more chic, and all-DJ.
[Update: Since this was written, the new Vogue added Tuesday live gigs, a former tradition at the old Vogue.]
The owners of ARO.Space just opened the Ace Hotel in the Belltown building where the Seattle Peniel Mission and Operation Nightwatch used to be. Its stark, Japanese-inspired look of small rooms with hospital-white walls and futon-level beds got it written up in hot design magazines.
The magazines’ writers were aghast that something in Seattle was so understated, so clean, so (you guessed it) not-grunge. They apparently forgot what ARO.Space’s name implies–we make passenger planes here, so a few people here would know how to make small spaces slick-looking yet efficient.
Downstairs from the Ace is the new Cyclops restaurant. The old Cyclops (demolished in 1997) was a hip icon, serving tasty food at affordable prices to aspiring artists and musicians. The new Cyclops’s decor bears some resemblance to its homier prior self, but it’s a fancier place, serving fancier dishes at fancier prices to folks who loved the old Cyclops but can afford nicer fare now.
Establishments that served the old hipsters had to keep prices down, because their customers didn’t have much money and didn’t ever expect to. Even after “grunge” bands got big, many hipsters continued to believe nothing you ever did here mattered; lasting change or influence was impossible in squaresville Seattle; the most you could do was form a community of fellow outcasts.
The new hipness, despite its occasional lapses into shallow hedonism, at least thinks certain achievements are possible. It says high-energy music and contemporary art and design play big roles in vital urban life.
But will the new hipsters’ achievements prove worthwhile in the long run? That’s a topic for another time.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Bring people with you.
TOMORROW: The latest in fun inventions and designs.
ELSEWHERE: Somebody else who thinks irony is dead, and who dares to say it without “air quotes”… A next-big-thing story about Internet radio notes that traditional AM/FM listening “among those 25 and under has plummeted 10 percent in the last six years…”
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…
I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)
IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?
ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”
I’M STILL TRYING to sort out how I felt after the last First Thursday, almost two weeks ago.
It was a big week for breasts in the Seattle arts scene. Jem Studios’ “Blue Boobs” group installation, the Tule Gallery’s two 10-foot-tall hyperrealistic bust paintings, and the usual other figurative-art stuff.
I’d have enjoyed it all as I usually do, except it was the week after my mother’s partial mastectomy.
Just after I’d come to terms with near-addictive fascination, acknowledging that I had nothing to feel guilty about i/r/t my hormonically pre-programmed craving for the sight and touch of female skin, I learned my favorite female body parts had threatened to kill the first and still most beloved female in my life.
The “Blue Boobs” installation was beautiful, but the close-up breast images in monochrome-blue paintings and videos looked too creepily like, not X-rays, but like some weird other kind of medical photography.
And the breasts in the Tule pix are exactly the scale (and eye level) of a mom as seen from the POV of a nursing infant, though the women’s faces aren’t really “maternal” looking as much as pop-art sendups of ’60s-mod fashion art.
I do know a few things at this perspective. I’m not going to stop loving women’s physiques. If anything, I hope I’ll be even more appreciative of precious gifts life and beauty are.
Especially after the Friday night right after First Thursday, when I witnessed the finish of the annual Belltown bicycle race. As the winner sped across the finish line in the alley behind the Rendezvous, an apparently drunken man suddenly stepped out and slapped him. The racer fell to the ground; Medic One quickly responded to a cell-phoned 911 call but took almost 15 careful minutes to get the guy into the vehicle and away.
(Last word: He’s apparently going to be all right. As, for now, is my mom.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: On a much lighter note, e-commerce is trying to get hip.
ELSEWHERE: The next step toward taming the arts: Quantifying them… A faux-Sassy webmag likes today’s incessant “positivity”… This is not, repeat, not, a real eBay auction; but this is…
ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.
Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.
Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.
Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.
“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”
Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.
Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.
If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!
To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.
Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).
But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.
If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.
I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.
TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.
FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.
A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.
But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.
Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.
Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.
But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.
Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.
So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.
Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.
Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.
This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.
It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.
What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.
Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.
So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.
The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”
TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.
BOOKING A WOMEN’S CONVENTION by the religious-right pressure group Focus on the Family the same weekend as ArtsEdge was the best Seattle Center scheduling serendipity in years. Even better than situating the big Cobain memorial in ’94 right outside, and just after, a Sonics playoff game.
Alas, no catfights or shouting matches broke out between the blue-haired conservatives and the green-haired artsy-types–not even with the entrants in the tattoo contest, some of whom paid as little heed as was legally possible to the contest’s fine-print rule, “If your tattoo is in an area normally covered by clothing, please be prepared to wear clothing that reveals your tattoo but not the genital area. Ladies, that means nipples too–sorry, it’s the law!”).
The body art was among the highlights at the third ArtsEdge. Other notables: The parade of art cars, the Butoh Race (three women in angel-of-death-white makeup tried to run as slowly as possible without stopping), musical gigs by Rockin’ Teenage Combo and the Bosnian emigres of Kultur Shock, the neo-vaudeville of Circus Contraption and Cirque de Flambe, and Elaine Lee’s art installation in which short tales involving the artist’s “secrets” were stored inside beautifully-lit, small metal boxes.
A lot of it was fun and entertaining. Some of it was even art. Little of it, though, had any edge.
The problem: economics, natch. This year’s ArtsEdge, like the two prior installments, failed to attract many of the region’s best fringe art-theater-music people due to its policy of not paying them. (The event’s $100,000 budget goes entirely to Seattle Center staff and facilities services and to publicity.)
As long as the Seattle Center management’s allowed to think “edgy” art means art by young adults who’ll do anything for a public showcase, you’ll get an ArtsEdge that’s got little art and almost no edge. This year’s event proved it could be popular, even under less-than-ideal weather conditions. It could be more popular if more pro alterna-artists, with their already-built followings, were added.
Consider this another case of the “If-we-can-build-these-big-ass-sports-palaces-why-can’t-we-…” routine, which we’ll talk a little more about on Thursday and Friday.
Tomorrow: More reasons why Pokemon is such a hit with the kids and so incomprehensible to the grownups.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, has read the hereby-linked, viciously beautiful review of the movie by that much-acclaimed, recently-crashed, Time art critic Robt. Hughes (Time wouldn’t run it, so the NY Daily News picked it up).
UPDATE: The Big Book of MISC. is now in the heat of production. By the time you read this, the covers should be printed and the insides should be ready to roll. Online ordering’s now available at this link.
Actual copies of the book should be ready for the big pre-release party and annual Misc.-O-Rama, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue near Bell Street (across from the back of the Cadillac lot). There’ll be outrageous snack treats, videos, strange DJ music, games, surveys, a live demonstration, and lots lots more. Free admission; 21 and over. Be there. Aloha.
RIDDLE: What do you call the last pint of Hefeweizen that causes a yuppie to total her fancy-ass luxury car? (Answer next week.)
TIMES OF THE SIGNS: There actually is one and only one piece of signage at the Broadway and U District Taco Bell outlets that’s in Spanish–the bottom half of the front-door warning sticker boasting of the joint’s anti-robbery systems.
SAY WHAT?: US West TV spots are currently promoting Caller ID boxes as ways to avoid those annoying life interruptions from pesky telemarketing calls. Besides the commercials, can you guess one other method the company’s using to try and sell the service? That’s right.
ON THE EDGE: Hope some of you noticed the name of the apartment-redevelopment company charged (as shown on both KIRO’s and KING’s late news Wednesday) with violating even Seattle’s wimpy tenant-rights laws: “No Boundaries.” The logo on the company’s possibly-illegal notices of eviction and attempted rate-hike retaliations against protesting tenants, as seen on the newscasts, looks just like the letterhead of some sci-fi video-game company. There’s some lesson somewhere here about today’s money-and-power mentality, in which strong-arm business tactics are mistaken for acts of daring rebellion by self-worshipping hotshots who can’t stand the idea of having to do anything they don’t want to.
(“No Boundaries” also happens to be the title of a new benefit CD for Kosovo refugees, with two Pearl Jam tracks.)
ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND OTHER EXPANSIONS: An LA Times story claims the latest thing in La-La land is affluent high-school girls asking for breast implants as graduation gifts, or paying themsleves for the procedure as soon as (or even a few months before) they reach legal adulthood. The article quoted a couple of doctors who noted some women are still well within the developmental process at age 17 or even 18, but an increasing number are just so darned vain and body-conscious as to want to immediately achieve the ol’ top-heavy look.
If I were still working in the realm of “alternative” weekly urban tabloids, I’d probably be expected to sneer at these women–or, even worse, condescendingly treat them as mindless victims of the fashion industry (the same fashion industry that’s recently been enamored of unbusty petite model looks, not that the industry’s critics ever notice).
The same urban-tribal folks who most loudly scoff at implants might themselves have tattoos, piercings, even (as a particularly exploitive KING-TV piece last Monday noted) brandings. Some of these critics might seem hypocrites on at least some level; but on another level, it’s perfectly OK to believe in the general concept of body-modification while having well-defined personal tastes about which modifications one prefers to have or to see on others.
I personally don’t viscerally care for the over-augmented look, but I can understand that certain women might wish it. A big bust projects you out and demands attention (along with the sneers from other women you can interpret as jealousy). But a large fake bust is also a shield, a kind of permanent garment keeping all others firmly away from your heart (and other vital organs).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Instant Planet isn’t just another new age tabloid. For one thing, it promises regular coverage of issues facing some of those indigenous peoples that the white new-agers love to take inspiration from. For another, it’s got some first-rate contributors, including master collage-illustrator James Koehnline and my former yoga trainer Kirby Jacobsen. Free at the usual dropoff spots, or $16/4 issues from P.O. Box 85777, Seattle 98145.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The Seattle-based New Athens Corp. has jumped on the herbal-beverage bandwagon with two odd-tasting concoctions. “Kick Start” promises to help you get “a robust, active feeling” with Gotu Kola, Ginkgo Bilboa, Guarana, Kava Kava, and ginseng, There’s also “No Worries,” a drink that’s supposed to “produce a relaxing effect that soothes and quiets your mood.” Both taste like Coke’s old OK Soda with a touch of peach flavoring. But unlike other pops marketed as all-ages treats, these have a label disclaimer: “Not intended for children under 6 or pregnant or nursing mothers.” Elsewhere in foodland…
Q BALLS: While small indie supermarkets in other neighborhoods have fallen with little more than a shrug of inevitability from area residents, the citizens of Wedgwood have rallied ’round to valiantly (and, apparently, futilely) defend Matthew’s Red Apple Market, set to close in less than two weeks after its landlord struck a deal to let the Kroger-owned QFC circuit take over the site.
At first peep, a media observer used to the recent unwritten rule that everything in Seattle had to be “unique” (in exactly the same way, of course) might not see what all the fuss is supposed to be about.
Matthew’s doesn’t have the fun neon of the old Wallingford Food Giant or the odd mix of food and variety departments of the old Holman Road Art’s Family Center (both of which were QFC bought up directly, rather than arranging for their eviction like it’s doing with Matthew’s).
Matthew’s doesn’t make a big fuss about a lot of those higher-profit-margin items and departments QFC and Larry’s lavish attention on (salad bars, hot take-out items, wine, cell phones, live lobster, “health” foods, etc. etc.)
It’s just a plain-looking, small supermarket in a slightly-run-down building, with a fried-chicken deli counter and fresh flowers and a Lotto machine.
But that’s the whole point. In a town increasingly weighted down by the expectation of pretentious “uniqueness,” and in a national retail landscape increasingly overrun by big-chain consolidations, Matthew’s is loved by its customers precisely because it’s just a good ol’ fashioned neighborhood indie grocery.
(“Red Apple,” by the way, is merely a franchised name belonging to Associated Grocers, the wholesale consortium to which Matthew’s and 200 or so other Northwest stores belong, including, at least for the time being, QFC.)
Matthew’s might not stock 17 different kinds of cilantro, but it more than makes up for that in that unstockable, uncatalogable quality known as community spirit. It’s different precisely because it’s refused to conform to the current-day standards of “uniqueness.”
The Wedgwood area’s well-stocked with well-off folks, some of whom offered to outbid QFC for the lease on the Matthew’s block. When that initially failed, the store’s supporters then offered to help Matthew’s find a new site. But usable commercial blocks are scarce in that dense residential area.
(One of the few supermarket-sized tracts in the area not currently used for retail is the Samuel Stroum Jewish Community Center, co-funded by and named for a longtime QFC exec.)
So this particular battle against the Forces of Consolidation may be lost–unless someone could design a Matthew’s-like store on a smaller real-estate footprint, a la Ken’s Markets or Trader Joe’s.
(Current status: Matthew’s management sez it stands a good chance of winning at least a little more time in court. It’s asking friends and neighbors to keep signing the petitions and engaging in nonviolent protests, while asking customers to bear with spot shortages of stuff on some of the shelves (it held off on ordering new stock while waiting for the legal action to progress.)
WE’RE STILL LOOKING for your ideas on What This Town Needs. Suggest yours at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, check out my page in the June Seattle magazine, work for peace, and consider the words of Marshall McLuhan: “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).
THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.
THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).
EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?
MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…
A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”
Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:
Speaking of public service sloganeering…
CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.
THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?
THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).
ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.
(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)
SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”
As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.
Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.
Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.
My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.
My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!
NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.
In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.
So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…
PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)
As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!
At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!
STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.
(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.
Combustible Edison Gets Serious:
Life After Lounge?
CD review for The Stranger, 10/8/98
COMBUSTIBLE EDISON The Impossible World (Sub Pop) ***
The Cocktail Revolution is dead; OD’d on bad self-parody acts.
So how do neo-lounge pioneers Combustible Edison try to stay relevant? By dropping the rhinestone-tiara kitsch and reinventing themselves as a somewhat more serious ambient-progressive combo, suitable for indie-film soundtracks, KMTT airplay, and wedding showers.
On several tracks (“Hot and Bothered,” the closing “Scanner’s Reprise”), the band strives for admittance onto the hip-love-rock trail blazed by the likes of Pigeonhed. On others (“Tickled to Death,” “Pink Victim”), Lily Banquette works hard to gain your respect as a legitimate pop-jazz vocalist.
The Impossible World is more ambitiously composed, arranged, and produced than any previous CE disc. It’s also not as much fun as CE’s old stuff (though you might find it to be fine makeout music).
