It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.
ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?
INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…
WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.
They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”
Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…
SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.
At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.
So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.
Online Extras
This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.
Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.
The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.
In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.
The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”
Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.
Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.
Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)
A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.
FROM `THE PESTO OF CITIES’: You’re probably either anxiously awaiting tonight’s final episode of Seinfeld, or you’re bored to tears by all the press the show’s gotten and you’re glad it’ll all be done soon. Both camps might be interested in the Seinfeld create-a-plot guides on the Internet. Fill in the blanks and you’ve got your own wacky li’l Mad Libs-esque story, little more implausible than those the show’s actually used. I’ve used some of the categories on that list, and made up some of my own, to organize my own riff on the show’s familiar formulae:
Discussion/argument about a topic of profound unimportance: If Carly Simon wrote about somebody and wanted to get at him by saying “You probably think this song is about you,” but it really was about him, what’s the deal here?
Slightly unsightly sight gag: Sticking quarters onto your forehead.
Sexual euphemism: A soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend is derided behind his back for spending too much time “mountaineering” and not enough time “spelunking.”
Kiddie snack-food product, still remembered and/or consumed by the lead characters: Fizzies–the tablets that, when dropped in water, are supposed to create instant soda pop but actually create a vaguely cherry-flavored, non-medicinal version of Alka-Seltzer.
Celebrity name-drop: Charlene Tilton.
Humorous situation in which this celebrity appears: Fighting with one of the lead characters over an object of pathetic obsession.
Object of pathetic obsession: A M@xRack movie-ad postcard with Gwyneth Paltrow’s name misspelled, and hence potentially collectible.
Urban-etiquette peeve: People who make too many consecutive transactions at an ATM while others are in line.
Proposed solution to this peeve: Start a petition drive outside bank branches, demanding banks to set a two-transactions-at-a-time limit at ATMs during peak hours, punishable by “eating” the violator’s ATM card.
Ethnic guest character: An Italian-American mother who works at the clothing-catalog company.
Ethnic-slur aspect of that character: Demands accordion music at her daughter’s wedding reception.
Reason to start dating someone: She appreciates really good Dr Pepper, and makes special buying trips to New Mexico where the local bottler makes an especially strong version. She even knows to never spell Dr Pepper with a period, and publicly corrects anyone who tries.
Reason to stop dating someone: Goes into a hissy-fit at any restaurant (or wedding reception) that even deigns to offer Mr. Pibb as a substitute for Dr Pepper, and in fact screams to the whole world that she would rather drink cherry-flavor Fizzies.
`Wacky’ money-making scheme: The last known cache of big-E Levi’s jeans not yet sold to Japan; a cache discovered at the rural New Mexico general store that also has the world’s best Dr Pepper.
Why this money-making scheme’s doomed: Nobody bothers to figure out that, with the Asian recession, the bottom’s fallen out of the Japanese big-E Levi’s mania.
How the characters learn this lesson too late: At the wedding reception, the clothing-catalog owner is overheard casually mentioning this during a discussion about a new unusual garment concept.
Uunusual garment concept: Garanimals for grownup men.
Potential benefit of this new garment concept: You’d never look like an ill-dressed, color-conceptless dork in public.
Potential liability: If you’re a single man and you don’t look like a color-conceptless dork, women will presume you’re either gay or married.
Potential benefit from that potential liability: Attracting a woman who’s specifically after married men, because she’s turned on by the transgressiveness.
Potential liability from that potential asset: You’re now living an elaborate lie in order to keep this woman from leaving you, which she undoubtedly will do if she finds out you’re not really married.
Non-sequitur catch phrase: “Do I even look like your caseworker?”
Now go make up your own answers to these categories, or categories like them; then stick them into a standard four-subplot Seinfeld story arc. The result will probably be funnier than whatever’s gonna be on tonight’s finale. Submit your entries to clark@speakeasy.org. The best entries will be posted online, for all to share in the being and nothingness.
NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (NY Times, 3/4): “Jockey is introducing an advertising campaign intended to imbue the once-hidebound underwear company with a hipper image, particularly among younger shoppers.” Just what’s so bad about a “hidebound underwear company?” What other kind of underwear is there? Runner-up item (KIRO Radio News Fax, 3/5): “A Longview-area man plans a rally at the state Capitol to protest Indian hunting in the Mount St. Helens National Monument.” I thought we were over that despicable era of Western history.
GIRLY SHOWS: In recent weeks, the P-I Lifestyle section’s run two wire service stories, headlined “A New Heyday for Teens” and “Teenage Girl Power at the Box Office.” Of course, their idea of “girl power” is strictly limited to purchasing power, not political power or even the power to make films instead of just watching them. Still, that’s at least something. Some music historians claim we should credit teen-female fans for “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. In other over-the-counterculture news…
QUEER NATION, INDEED: By now you’ve probably seen print ads for Triangle Broadcasting, “America’s First Gay Broadcasting Network” (unless you count American Movie Classics). The L.A.-based company just opened its second branch operation here (the first is in Philly). It runs low-power transmitters out of Bremerton (1490 on the AM dial) and Tacoma, plus a three-person sales office in Pioneer Square. All the programming’s beamed by satellite from Calif. They plan to include lotsa Seattle-based events listings and talk-show guests, but that’ll diminish as more network-owned stations start up around the country. The debut lineup’s mostly talk, with some dance-music hours at night. One host is described as “the queer Rush Limbaugh;” there’s also a Dr. Laura-like tuff-advice lady and a wacky-wacky morning dude. The company’s PR literature’s light on discussing station content, but big on praising gays and lesbians the way corporate America likes to hear people praised–as upscale, upscale, upscale! I suppose it’s progress or something like it if queers can now be depicted as not only non-threatening but as a key economic sector. But to effectively reach all those double-upper-income-no-kids households, they’ll have to grow into something beyond gay/ lesbian topics tacked onto regular dumb ol’ talk radio formulae piped in from out-of-state. Let’s hope they do. Speaking of gay listening habits…
INSERT OLD HOLYFIELD `EAR’ PUNS HERE: If lesbians hear more like men, howcum there’s not a male-appeal equivalent to Ferron? (Jewel doesn’t count.) On a more practical level, imagine if a special tuning fork or whistle could be developed, producing a sound only lesbians (and men) could hear. Single lesbians could find one another in any crowd, avoiding those straight women who think it’s hip to pretend to be bi. (And, if affirmed by further research, this could give further credence to something I’ve long believed-lesbians and straight men have more in common than the more bigoted members of both camps will admit.) Speaking of gender roles…
BYTE OF SEATTLE: Employment fairs can be glum occasions, with self-esteem-challenged jobless folk solemnly filling out application forms whilst getting sermonized about good grooming and interview skills. A far brighter milieu was offered at the Northwest High Tech Career Expo at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Dozens of firms, from Microsoft and H-P down to temp agencies and software-catalog companies, even outfits not primarily tech-oriented like Starbucks and PACCAR trucks; all with flashy booths and smiling flunkies eager to take resumes and business cards–at least from applicants with enough years of the right experience. (Safeco even offered to help train folks without hardcore computer experience to learn to program in COBOL). And you didn’t even have to be a short-listable candidate to pick up some of the freebies at the booths. More candy than Halloween. Sports bottles. Key chains, compasses, letter openers. Pens and pencils of most every variety. Luscious photo postcards (from digital stock-photo agency Photodisc). Sponges. Soap-bubble kits. Plastic mini footballs and baseballs (from Starwave). And the wackiest of all: Official Boeing-logo Hackey Sack balls! (Bet they bounce great off those tall hangar walls.)
IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
Welcome to the 12th annual Misc. In/Out list, your most reliable guide to the people, places, and things coming into and away from public prominence over the following months. As always, this list predicts what will become hot and not-hot; not necessarily what’s hot or not-hot now. We are not responsible for any investment decisions which might be made on the basis of this information. Thanks to all the readers who suggested items.
INSVILLE...........................OUTSKI
Video golf.........................Quake
Co-ops.............................Condos
St. John's Wort....................Prozac
Maktub.............................Electronica
Apple comeback.....................Marvel comeback
Working for Amazon.com.............Working for Microsoft
Della Street.......................Picabo Street
KONG...............................Nick at Nite
Ice wine...........................Ice beer
Meredith Brooks....................Sarah McLachlan
Old-hotel wallpaper patterns......."Sponged" wall finishes
See-thru...........................Wonderbra
Soul...............................Funk
Pop-Up Video......................12 Angry Viewers
Crimson............................Ochre
Tennessee Oilers...................Washington Wizards
Atlanta Hawks......................Chicago Bulls
DVD (finally)......................Internet "push" ads
Neomodern..........................Postmodern
Superstores........................Megamalls
New York Exchange..................Banana Republic
NY Times in color.................Commercials in black and white
Kasi Lemmons.......................Paul Verhoven
Michelle Yeoh......................Kirstie Alley
Wapato.............................LaConner
Oxfords............................Nikes
International Channel..............Fox News Channel
Payday loans.......................Home-equity loans
Java...............................Windows 98
RVs................................Houseboats
Monorail initiative................Cabaret ordinance
New symphony hall..................New Nordstrom store
Oracle NC..........................WebTV
Privatized liquor sales............Privatized electricity sales
What're Ya Talkin' About, Sherman?.Don't Quote Me On This!
Vin Baker..........................Dennis Rodman
ABL................................WNBA
Goddess Kring......................David Kerley
Laetitia Casta.....................Tish Goff
R.D. Laing.........................Deepak Chopra
Homemade CDs.......................Fake indie labels
Sleep capsules.....................Futons
The new Zoom.......................Arthur
Men's make-up......................Women's suits
Wireless modems....................Cell phones
Emerald Queen......................Tulalip Casino
The new Beetle.....................Sport utes
Beacon Hill........................Upper Queen Anne
Rosie O'Donnell....................Dr. Laura
Pectoral implants..................Penile implants
Wormwood...........................Crystal meth
Monarch............................Absolut
Budapest...........................Prague
International Herald Tribune.......NME
Cabarets...........................Poetry slams
Tom Frank..........................Noam Chomsky
Having sex.........................Reading erotica
Bad Badz-Maru......................Elmo
Asian crash........................GATT
Breakfast movies...................Dinner theater
Golden Delicious...................Fiona Apple
Aaron Brown........................Matt Lauer
King of the Hill..................Wacky World of Tex Avery
Manhattan..........................Wired
rewired.com........................suck.com
Rowan Atkinson.....................David Schwimmer
Imps...............................Angels
Schmidt............................Budweiser
Sleater-Kinney.....................Oasis
Peasants..........................."Peasant food"
Seattle housing crisis.............Potholes
"Super duper"......................"Rad"
Cool...............................Hot
Old magazine art...................Photomosaics
Empowerment........................Self-victimization
Revolution Records.................DGC
Chocolate-covered graham cookies...Mazurkas
Pepper pot.........................Lentil
Silk shirt.........................Silk jackets
Do-gooders.........................Go-getters
And, as promised, some of your suggestions:
Subject: In/Out nominations
Sent: 12/11/97 2:54 PM
Received: 12/12/97 8:32 AM
From: Ed Harper (MacTemps), a-edharp@microsoft.com
To: 'clark@speakeasy.org', clark@speakeasy.org
IN...................................OUT
trains...............................747 center fuel tanks
MIR debris...........................Russians in space
co-ops...............................condos
St.Johns Wort........................Prozac
Cuba (if Castro dies)................Club Med
Ad Busters...........................Spy (stick a fork in it)
scotch...............................martinis (these have to go)
UW mens basketball...................UW football (after the huskies lose the Aloha Bowl)
The soon-to-be-radioactive Columbia..Dilbert (maybe 'The Problem with Dilbert' will help)
real heroes..........................Diana (nah, it'll never happen)
conspiracy theories..................El Nino
Subject: My nomination for the in/out list98 Sent: 12/7/97 10:02 AM Received: 12/7/97 8:40 PM From: Jose Amador, jaguerra@vcommons.com To: clark@speakeasy.org OUT:electronica IN:Maktub Subject: In/Out list Sent: 12/17/97 5:03 PM Received: 12/18/97 8:41 AM From: Jeremy Surbrook, fishnet@u.washington.edu To: clark@speakeasy.org Dear Clarke, These are my submissions for 1998, In: sleaze Out: Political Correctness In: bland domestics Out: microbrews In: the 1930's Out: 1970's In: bargain Hunting Out: conspicuious consumption In: fast, short action films Out: long, boring ambiguious, incomprehensible art films In: word of mouth Out: the internet Thanks, Jeremy
Subject: My nomination for the in/out list98
Sent: 12/7/97 10:02 AM
Received: 12/7/97 8:40 PM
From: Jose Amador, jaguerra@vcommons.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org
OUT:electronica
IN:Maktub
Subject: In/Out list
Sent: 12/17/97 5:03 PM
Received: 12/18/97 8:41 AM
From: Jeremy Surbrook, fishnet@u.washington.edu
Dear Clarke,
These are my submissions for 1998,
In: sleaze Out: Political Correctness
In: bland domestics Out: microbrews
In: the 1930's Out: 1970's
In: bargain Hunting Out: conspicuious consumption
In: fast, short action films Out: long, boring ambiguious, incomprehensible art films
In: word of mouth Out: the internet
Thanks, Jeremy
PRE-BOXING DAY GREETINGS to all from Misc., the column that’s lived through at least three ska revivals, four rockabilly revivals, and now a second swing revival. (The last was in the mid-’80s, when Joe Jackson and David Lee Roth recorded Louis Jordan covers, Kid Creole revived the zoot suit, and New York Doll David Johansen turned into Buster Poindexter.) ‘Twas funny, but not unexpected, to see the P-I use the “Swing Revival” hype as the excuse for its fourth annual “End of Grunge” article. Swing never really went away, of course. There’ve been swing dance classes in colleges and high schools lo these many years. The New Orleans Cafe has had a swing night since ’88. The only thing that’s new is that L.A. finally caught onto it, following the success of bands like Squirrel Nut-Zippers, thus making it a “national” trend.
UPDATES: The 66 Bell art studios haven’t been depopulated for redevelopment yet, and now they won’t be until at least July. Some tenants are reportedly trying to negotiate a longer reprieve with the building owner, but nothing’s certain yet…. Just when I wrote about the blossoming of funky retail along the western stretch of E. Pine St., two of the street’s clothing veterans (Reverb and Righteous Rags) announced they’ll soon close. The former will become Penny’s Arcade (old time video and pinball); the latter will become an expansion of Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of Neal Wankoff’s Bang!Bang! is out. It’s a bright-‘n’-breezy 16-page digest-sized popzine packed full with words and pix about Tube Top, Blammo, James Bertram of Red Stars Theory, and much more. Free at the usual dropoff spots or $1 for two issues from 1600 15th Ave., Seattle 98122.
THE FINE PRINT (in an Ericsson TV commercial, set at the Carolina Panthers football stadium the Swedish cell-phone company bought the naming rights to): “Teams depicted do not represent actual football teams.”
TOYLAND GREETINGS: Hasbro reports record sales and profits on its assorted products (GI Joe, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mr. Potato Head, et al.), and a week later sez it will fire 20 percent of its staff, just so it can subcontract more work to Mexican sweatshops. We don’t know how this might affect Hasbro’s Seattle operation, which packages and re-ships products made in the company’s Asian plants. Ordinarily, I’d say there was something strategically amiss about a consumer-products company firing so many people, contributing to reduced middle-class buying power and hence reducing demand for its own products. But Hasbro’s the sponsor of the “Holiday Giving Tree” promotion on the Rosie O’Donnell Show, inviting viewers to buy new toys and send ’em in to be given to less-fortunate kids. Maybe the company’s thinking if there are more layoffs across the economy, there’ll be more less-fortunate kids, and hence a chance for bigger “Giving Tree” programs in future Xmases.
ON THE RACKS #1: Beth Nugent’s novel Live Girls (Vintage Contemporaries trade paperback) has a cover with Kristine Peterson’s photo of the famous sign of the same name outside downtown Seattle’s Champ Arcade, but the story itself takes place in a “decaying Eastern port city.”
ON THE RACKS #2: Nancy Manahan, author of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence (one of at least three books that year with the same subtitle but different topics) now has a new anthology, On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience. Mind you, while some lesbians may have fond coming-O-age memories of the Girl Scouts, that doesn’t mean the Girl Scout organization holds many nice thoughts toward lesbians. I’m reminded of the lesbian promoters of the Kit Kat Klub cabaret space in east Fremont (circa 1982), who had to fold their operation after their liquor-license application was challenged by the Girl Scouts’ regional office up the street.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK and the annual Misc. In/Out List, think about the KeyArena crowd who cheered when Perry Farrell shouted, “How many of you here believe God is a woman?” and whether, considering some of the capricious and vengeful behaviors attributed to the Judeo-Christian deity, these cheering boys were really being all that complimentary to the feminine spirit.
MISC. ISN’T REALLY as ironic as some readers seem to believe. Really. That AFLAC commercial using a cover of John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” to sell life insurance, without commentary–now that’s ironic. In another current attempt at irony…
THE GENERATION-GAP GAP: KMTT’s promoting its “grownup rock n’ roll” format with billboards proclaiming a mantra to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop the Kids Off at Soccer.” The unspoken premise behind the slogan is the same premise that’s ruled darn near all local mainstream media outlets for the past 15 years–that everybody (or at least everybody who demographically matters to advertisers) is an ex-Sixties radical now domesticated with preteen kids. The problems with this particular gross oversimplification: (1) Despite the eternal hype, a lot of folks who were around back in that still-overhyped decade weren’t necessarily college radicals (in fact, more than half the people living in America in The Late Sixties weren’t even college students!); and (2) folks with preteen kids today are far more likely to have come of age in the late ’70s and ’80s. That’s why KMTT’s sister station KNDD peppers its 9-to-5 hours with old U2 and Duran Duran tracks, to attract the commercially-desirable ex-waveoids now toiling away in dreary office parks. Of course, it’d be harder to make a flashy billboard slogan for grownup synth-popper parents. At the youngest end, there are now households with kids who only know Jane Curtin from 3rd Rock and parents who previously only knew Curtin from Kate & Allie. Speaking of TV celebs…
NEWS FROM UP NORTH: David (Red Shoe Diaries) Duchovny, who plays an occasionally-dead FBI agent on The X-Files, wants Fox to move the show from Vancouver to L.A. so he can spend more time with his sitcom-star bride Tea Leoni. I say, they maybe oughta merge their respective shows into one production so they can be together all the time. They could play a couple of intrepid tabloid photographers in search of E.T.s, killer vampires, and other assorted grisly phenomena. They could call it The Naked Truth Is Out There. Elsewhere in the world of romance…
TAIL HUNTING: A recent Cal Berkeley study claims sexual activity can alter the brain. According to an LA Times story, the researchers claimed that after four weeks, a group of sexually-active male lab rats showed much smaller (and perhaps more sensitive and responsive) nerve cells than the control group of celibate rats. While it certainly brings new meaning to the phrase “fucking one’s brains out,” more intriguing is the name of the prof behind the study–Marc Breedlove.
But these findings wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with TV’s famous cartoon lab mice, Pinky and the Brain. In two episodes, the genetically-altered, super-smart Brain (a sort of pint-sized Lawnmower Man with an Orson Welles voice) neglects his usual obsession with taking over the world. Both times, it’s the lure of a female mouse that does it. Elsewhere in the world of science…
REAL VIRTUALITY: The Seattle-made Virtual i-Glasses (goggles with tiny LCD video monitors inside) are no more, but another local company, Microvision, has announced it’s working on a “virtual retinal display” technology that would, if and when perfected for mass production, would use hi-tech glasses or goggles to scan video images (from TVs, PCs, VCRs, etc.) directly onto the viewer’s eye via a low-level, laser-like beam. According to the company’s PR, “the user believes he’s seeing a video image an arm’s length away.” My question is, what would happen if somebody used Microvision to watch a videocassette that’s been copy-protected with Macrovision?
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Your Misc. party-watch team personally witnessed two Xenas, umpteen sword-‘n’-sorcery warriors, lotsa devils, at least three Pippi Longstockings, two Fred Flintstones, a Grinch (with his dog Max and Cindy Lou Who), a bloodied Princess Di (trailed by a photographer sporting a “Le Press Pass” badge), one Bill Gates, several Catwomen (one with a condom on her tail), a pregnant cheerleader, a martini olive, a pair of potted poinsettias, and a Laverne & Shirley pair (I told “Laverne” how much I loved the film Awakenings; she didn’t know what I was talking about).
WELCOME ALL to your pre-autumnal-equinox edition of Misc., the pop-cult column that can’t decide whether the new-look Seattle Weekly represents the passing of the moderation-to-excess aesthetic that’s dominated local media for a quarter-century, or instead just signifies a corporation trying too hard to appear hip. Speaking of commercial images in flux…
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: A half-decade ago, back when the outside world associated Seattle hipster-wear with looks actually designed in NYC by the likes of Marc Jacobs, the Zebraclub store on 1st Ave. was a bright, white showcase for the loudly-logoed products of Seattle’s real youthwear industry, with such once-hyped labels as Generra and International News. Today, the big Z sports a “homier” image, with faux-rustic walls and less abrasive lighting.
If you go there and you’re nice to them, they’ll give you the current catalog for Diesel, the Italian sportswear outfit that (a la Calvin Klein‘s ’94 “kiddie porn” ads) uses the detrius of American commercial-underground media to impart an image of American dangerousness onto its Euro-designed garments. This year’s Diesel catalog’s in the manner of a tacky small-press self-defense manual, titled Fight Me. It depicts young perfect-bodied female and male models in action poses, kicking and stabbing and choking imperfect-bodied (often overweight) villains. One aren’t-we-outrageous sequence shows a little girl punching the face of an older-woman pedophile. The attack techniques throughout the book range from the impractical to the ludicrous (“Master concentration-through detachment… will yourself to levitate”). An inside-back-cover disclaimer asserts the company “deplores, in the strongest possible terms, the current prevalence, and, in some sad quarters, vogue for violence.” Yeah, right–the common parodist’s copout, getting off on something then claiming it was just a joke. Speaking of convivial boorishness…
CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS ON PARADE: I wish the current cigar-mania (stinky, choky, life-threatening, etc.) would stop, but how? It appeals to too many universal temptations (even Freud joked, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”). Besides, in an age where the lowly mass-market cigarette’s an object of scorn and humiliation, there’s nothing like a fat, smelly cigar to make a smoker feel righteously vengeful. As long as there’s social pressure to conform to social standards of blasédom, many males and some females will always choose to rebel, albeit often in crude, loud, and ineffectual ways. The ’90s spin on this, natch, is many of today’s proponents of laid-back conformity claim to be political liberals, while many of the “rebels” are Harley-ridin’, KVI-listenin’ Young Republicans. (This has its precedents, such as the decadent rich kids of pre-Victorian England; many of whom also loved a good cigar.) Speaking of social mores…
OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE IN 2012?: Besides offering yet another clear line of demarcation between the civic-builder gang (ever pursuing “world-class” status for our fair burg) and the anti-development human-scale advocates (who’d probably leave town en masse for the event’s duration), the pro-Olympic boosters are offering a unique argument. In the past, the Games have been used by cities worldwide as excuses for massive construction projects, often using vast amounts of their respective countries’ tax dollars. The Seattle Olympics boosters claim the opposite. With the town’s two new stadia, the to-be-expanded Convention Center, and other existing or already-planned facilities, we’ll already have most of the sites a Summer Games would need. All we’d have to build would be a big swimming pool, horseback and archery venues, a few dozen additional hotels and motels, and (maybe the biggest single new one) a place to house a few thousand jocks and jills for 17 days under tight security. (The 1990 Goodwill Games housed their athletes in UW dorms, but that setup might be impracticable for the Olympics for all sorts of reasons.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET (with more of your suggestions of yet-unrevived musical genres), be sure to become the first on your block to order the $229 Ken Griffey Jr. 12″ bronze statue seen in regional-ad editions of Time, and visit the new Seattle Art store on Wetern Ave.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)
MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.
His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.
WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.
THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,
LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.
Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.
It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”
MISC. WISHES A FOND ADIEU to Courtney Love, who (if you believe the British papers) is apparently leaving Seatown for good in order to further her new career as a Hollywood professional celebrity. Unlike some local print outlets, this column has prepared for the loss by building up an ample supply of non-Love-related items, and hence will not run short of supplies for at least the near future.
IN OTHER BABY-DOLL NEWS: Kelly, billed by Mattel as “Barbie’s Baby Sister,” is already showing signs of rebellion against her careerist, acquisition-obsessed sibling. Evidence: the new “Potty Training Kelly” model, shown in Saturday-morning TV ads “tinkling” into her own toddler-size toilet. Besides demystifying the mechanics of female elimination for young male cartoon viewers, the doll allows females just beyond toilet-training age to act out on an inanimate victim any traumas their own moms had imposed on them, potentially preventing deep psychological issues that might surface later in life.
CATHODE CORNER #1 (via Sherman Lovell): “Am I the only one who’s annoyed by the new KCTS VJs? All three of them are attractive, congenial sorts, but they don’t really seem to have any purpose other than to say `Wasn’t that great?’ and `Coming up is…’ If we have to have VJs on the PBS station, can’t we get Daisy Fuentes?” (Actually, they serve a third purpose: to give advertisers–oops, “underwriters”–more noticeable between-show spots to buy.)
CATHODE CORNER #2 (via Michelle Ellefson): “The KONG commercials on KING are driving me nuts… I’m just hoping (in vain, I know) this isn’t some dumb King Kong gorilla thing. The last thing this city needs is an inflatable gorilla on the Space Needle, and that’s what I see coming.” (It’s a UHF TV station out of Everett, to launch later this year after being in the works for nearly a decade. While nominally independently owned, it has some sort of joint marketing or programming arrangement with KING, just within the letter of FCC regs against one company owning two TV stations in the same metro area.)
THE BITS AND THE BYTES WERE THERE: The UW Computer Fair attracted all the usual exhibitors again this year. There were CAD/CAM graphics-software vendors, MS Windows training seminars, mouse-pad imprinters, and scads of Internet service providers. What I missed were the unusual exhibitors. After peaking earlier in the decade, the number of truly innovative or offbeat vendors at the fair has shrunk, perhaps due to the veering of PC-related business back toward corporate markets after a prior flowering of hobbyist/ home action. The most notable exception was one Tom Bourne of Bothell selling $79.95 handcrafted wood computer mice, items looking less like electronics and more like something fallen off an old Chris-Craft yacht. Bourne’s silly product name, “Li’l Woody,” doesn’t do this elegant product justice. (See for yourself at www.isomedia.com/homes/lilwoody.)
THE NAME GAME: There’s a (quite impressive) record store in Belltown called Wall of Sound. As of this week, there’s also a music-news website in Bellevue (part of Paul Allen’s Starwave organization) called www.wallofsound.com, which might get into selling records later on. Wall of Sound (the store) is now talking about possible legal action against Wall of Sound (the website). As far as I know, neither outfit ever discussed use of the name with record producer Phil Spector, credited with coining the phrase circa ’61.
TRIDENT IMPORTS, R.I.P.: Beyond the competition from out-of-state chains like Cost Plus and Pier 1, Trident was stuck with the de-romanticization of imported household goods. At one time, when most furniture, clothes and even shoes were still made in America, the first Cocktail Generation regularly sought for moderately-priced exotica to furnish its otherwise lookalike tract homes. Back then, the word “import” signified something more than mere pennies-a-day production wages. It meant affordable beauty, an unthreatening glimpse of an older and more rooted culture, even if in the form of a Tiki-god lamp fixture or a bamboo throw rug. There’s been lotsa talk about big, big development projects on Trident’s waterfront site, but you just know whatever goes in there won’t be half as much fun.
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that groaned and laffed with the rest of you during the media’s recent sheep-cloning headlines, but didn’t see any magazine use the most obvious such headline: “The Science of the Lambs.”
CATHODE CORNER UPDATE: Cox Communications will now be buying KIRO-TV instead of KSTW. Viacom made a last-minute deal to grab KSTW instead, and will shift its UPN network affiliation to channel 11; thus freeing channel 7 to again run CBS shows. Sources at both stations claim to be at best bemused, at worst befuddled, by the actions of the various out-of-state parties in this mega-transaction (including KSTW’s current owner Gaylord Entertainment and KIRO’s current owner A.H. Belo Corp., which started this by dumping KIRO so it could buy KING). All the parent companies’ PR people vow nothing but total confidence in the stations’ local managements; but the way station staffs were pushed, pulled, and kept in the dark during the wheelin’ ‘n’ dealin’, don’t be surprised if a few heads start rollin’.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Don’t know what to make of Klang (“A Nosebleed-High Journal of Literature and the Arts”), August Avo and Doug Anderson’s curious four-page litzine. The current issue (billed as “Vol. 3.14,” though I’ve never seen one before) purports to reprint an excerpt from a best-selling Russian novel; but the piece, “A Day in the Blood Line,” reads more like a smartypants American’s clever take on Russian lit, both of the classic and Soviet-era-underground varieties. (Of course, I could be wrong about this.) Free where you can find it or by email request to bf723@scn.com… 59cents (“The #1 Rock and Roll Magazine”) is an utterly charming photocopy-zine side project of the band Blue Collar. The current ish, officially #16 (though I’ve never seen a prior ish of this one, either), includes microbrew taste tests (juxtaposed with a screed warning “drinking till you puke or pass out is not rebellious”), an anti-Christian rant, and a brief rave for the Girl Scouts for removing the word “cheerful” from their pledge. Free where you can find it or from P.O. Box 19806, Seattle 98109…
ANNALS OF MERCHANDISING: Lilia’s Boutique, the fancy women’s-clothing store in Basil Vyzis’ condo tower next to the Vogue, started to hold a going-out-of-business sale. Soon after the SALE signs appeared in the windows, representatives of the real-estate company handling the building’s retail leases taped a “Notice to Comply or Vacate” paper to the store’s front door overnight. The notice told Lilia’s essentially to stop going out of business or be forced out of business. Apparently, there were terms in Lilia’s lease forbidding “distress sales” or any public acknowledgement that business conditions in the building were less than perfect. Anyhow, the dispute got quietly resolved, and Lilia’s got to continue going the way of 80 percent of new U.S. businesses.
YOU MAY ALREADY BE A FOOL!: Like many of you, I just got a bold postcard announcing I’ve become a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winner–“pending selection and notification.” The postcard alerted me to watch the mail for the “prize announcement” soon to follow. What followed, of course, was yet another entry form with its accompanying sheet of magazine-subscription stamps. While I love much of the PCH program (the stamps, the Prize Patrol commercials, the cute interactive aspect of cutting and licking and pasting the entry forms), the just barely non-fraudulant pronouncements in its pitches has always struck me as unnecessarily taking us customers as gullible saps. A Time tote bag oughta be incentive enuf, right?
Then I realized who gets PCH mailings: People who’ve subscribed to magazines the company bought mailing lists from. In other words, readers. According to hi-brow commentators like Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, the very act of reading somehow mystically imparts taste and discernment onto the reader, regardless of content. Yet PCH became a national institution by treating folks who regularly pay for the writen word as potential suckers for weaselly-constructed promises of certain wealth. In this case, I’d believe money rather than ideology, and here the money loudly cautions against blind faith in The Word without specifying which words. (More on this topic next week.)
IN STORE: The operators of Pin-Down Girl and Speedboat, those two nearly-adjacent Belltown hipster-clothing boutiques, have decided to no longer run two stores with such similar stuff so close. Some of Speedboat’s current stock will be consolidated at Pin-Down; the rest will be shipped to a new store the owners plan to open somewhere in California. They’re keeping the Speedboat space, and will turn it into a new business concept, as yet not officially announced.
SPIN AND MARDI: Sit & Spin’s little Mardi Gras Burlesque Revue was everything one could reasonably expect from a Carnival celebration among the infamous reservedness here in City Lite. It expressed a more sophisticated debauchery, and a more spirited approach to sexuality, than “alternative” subcultures usually endulge in.
Among the most pleasant surprises at the show was the presence of a large deaf contingent (serviced by a sign-language interpreter) at such a relatively non-saintly affair. Think about it: Blind people, in media representations, get to have the full range of human qualities (Ray Charles, Scent of a Woman, that Air Touch Cellular spokesdude), but deaf people are stereotyped as benchmarks of PC propriety (the closest thing to an exception was Ed Begley Jr.‘s womanizing character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). Even Edison and Beethoven are usually depicted as saintlier figures than they really were. Until TV closed-captioning and opera “supertitles” became widespread, the only culture thangs the hearing-impaired were welcomed into tended to be either evangelical church services or concerts by self-congratulatory folk singers. I’d always figured that putting up with such unrelenting sanctimonies could be a tougher thing to live with than deafness itself.
KIDSTAR RADIO, R.I.P.: Worthy attempt at a business model for commercial radio that didn’t depend on Arbitron’s ratings, instead using “membership” magazines and other promotional goodies to attract and keep sponsors. I’ve been writing and complaining about the suckiness of the Arbitron-controlled radio biz for over a decade. The problem has merely been exacerbated by recent government-approved station consolidations. Today’s radio biz only gives a damn about specific segments of the citizenry, ignoring preteens, people too old to be boomers, and (in this region) minorities. Teens and young adults were similarly ignored by almost all local radio throughout the ’80s, when virtually nobody who wasn’t an upscale ’60s-generation person was deemed worthy of the medium’s attention. In the universe of commercial radio (and of essentially commercial “public” radio), to be demographically incorrect by Arbitron’s standard is to not exist.
INSIDE SCOOP: Someone at the Kingdome Home Show was passing out “Save Our Shows” petitions, asking the powers-that-be to ensure room for home shows, auto shows, RV shows, etc. in any future Kingdome or replacement-stadium project. It’s only fair. The original idea behind the Dome was one structure to host different sports and different floor shows. If economics now indicate separate arenas for each game are more lucrative, there’s still a need for a place to have rotating sales booths in.
The marketplace-bazaar setup, with ailes of separately-run sales and demonstration booths, is among the world’s oldest and most widespread social institutions. More diverse and enticing than big single-operator stores, more sociable than scattered strip-mall stores, it appeals to a sense of discovery and spectacle rather than mere utilitarian acquisition. If I were county exec Ron Sims, negotiating with Paul Allen’s people about subsidies for a replacement football stadium, I’d demand an exhibition space at least as big as today’s Dome plus its overflow pavilion, with the county getting a slice of rental income from it. And I’d hustle to have that space booked year-round: Health fairs, book fairs, computer fairs, kid fairs, senior fairs, new-age fairs, arts and performance fests, carnivals, Convention Center overflow exhibits, world’s-largest-rummage-sales, etc.
FAST MONEY: Somebody tried to tell me once how computer technology was like Jeopardy!, an answer in search of a question. I replied if that was the case, then Microsoft was more like Family Feud, where the most popular answer is decreed to be correct. Whether this means Gates will be compared by posterity to the eternally gladhanding Richard Dawson (or even to the more tragic figure of Ray Combs) remains to be seen.
MISC. MUST BELATEDLY mourn the passing of Vox Populi Gallery, for nearly three years the town’s best locale for exciting, fun, provocative, and just plain rockin’ painting, photography, and comic art. Writer Grant Alden, who co-founded the gallery with Carl Carlson, has been living out of town working magazine jobs the past several months. Alden decided in mid-January to cash in his interests and leave the art-selling biz entirely. Seattle still needs a space like VP.
TUBE TIES: The pending sale of KSTW to Atlanta’s Cox company means for the first time since the Bullitt sisters sold KING, we’ll have a woman-owned TV station. The Cox sisters of Atlanta were listed in Parade as among the world’s 20 richest women, up with the likes of Queen Elizabeth. The Cox heiresses’ managers built a small southern newspaper chain into a media mini-giant, from the Auto Trader magazines to film producers Rysher Entertainment. Their Atlanta monopoly daily has given my ex-UW colleague, editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovitch, a prominent and relatively censor-free forum. By selling channel 11, Gaylord Entertainment‘s giving a clear no-confidence vote in CBS’s drive to avoid permanent also-ran status. It’s a vote I hadn’t expected, since Gaylord and Westinghouse (CBS’s new owners) are partners in the Nashville Network. (Westinghouse was recently rumored to be considering buying Gaylord, with or without KSTW.)
IN A HAZE: I’m still thinking about the pathetic spectacle that was the Jimi Hendrix statue dedication late last month, in front of Audio Environments Inc.‘s Broadway offices. It’s an extremely hideous artifact, made with less artistry than seen on a Franklin Mint collector’s plate. Some folks saw irony in the statue being commissioned and totally funded by AEI, a background-music company. I didn’t see that as much as I saw it as yet another instance of white boomers fetishizing the guy as an icon for their notions of the black man as sexy savage. I’m positive Hendrix, an intelligent and innovative artist who seemed to be slumming in rock for the money, would’ve eventually spurned that image and settled into a prog-jazz career (maybe finding a jazz-rock melange that would’ve prevented the development of fusion). We must also remember he left Seattle at 18 and only performed here again as a touring act. From all accounts, he found the Seattle of his day a town with neither the racial openness nor the artistic opportunities he needed. For local boomers to keep enshrining him as the city’s pride n’ joy is something he’d probably have had a heck of a time getting comfortable with.
PRESENT TENSE: After years of wanting to, I finally got in this year to the Seattle Gift Show, a trade show for retailers and wholesalers of less-than-necessary merchandise. It was just as great as I’d imagined–a gigantic bazaar, taking up the whole Convention Center and two Seattle Center buildings to boot; full of booths hawking the widest array of stuff. There were acres of “country craft” baskets, Husky sweatshirts, “Over The Hill” bras designed to droop, small-penis-joke greeting cards, Absolutely Fabulous fridge magnets, cocoa mix from an outfit called Pure Decadence, landmarks-of-hockey-map jigsaw puzzles, Alaska souvenir pennants, men’s-restroom plastic miniatures (complete with digitized flushing sounds when you press a button), bonsai mini-fountains, angel statues, Prozac/ happy-face T-shirts, Russian dolls, Men of Africa calendars, and more. One booth offered the perfect bachelor-pad accessory, the Moon Lamp (a milky-white large plastic globe emanating spots of pastel light). An Issaquah outfit called Loveable Chocolates offered chocolate and white-chocolate novelty gifts in assorted shapes, even as a set of dentures (“We sell a lot to dentists,” the woman at the booth claimed).
But the item that might most interest some Stranger readers is Magnetic Jewelry, from the Gravity Free Factory (an NYC-founded outfit with a new Seattle office). It’s a line of stud, crystal, and spike-shaped face jewelry giving the appearance of piercing with no holes, thanks to a second magnetized piece of metal you wear on the other side of your ear, lip, or nostril. (No other applicable body parts were mentioned in the brochure or at the booth.)
WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.
* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.
* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.
* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.
All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.
* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)
* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.
* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).
Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?
* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”
