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.”

ON A ROLE: Because of the deadline structure at The Stranger, this week’s Misc. (like Wednesday’s Christian Science Monitor) was sent to the printer before election returns came in. Therefore, we’ll just have to pretend it wasn’t happening or wasn’t worth talking about (which most citizens seemed to feel anyway).

Instead, let’s discuss the annually-weirder spectacle that is grownup Halloween, now America’s #2 shopping holiday. Is it me, or have grownup Halloween parties gotten simultaneously more elaborate and blasé? The art of costuming, of adopting temporary personas for celebration and/or awakening, is among humanity’s oldest traits. But the way middle Americans (even young, urbane middle Americans) do it is like the way middle Americans do a lot of things, half-hearted and aloof. “Square” middle Americans often keep their inner passions inhibited because they’re afraid; “hip” middle Americans often keep their passions inhibited because they’re afraid, but pretend they’re doing it because they’re too cool. The mainstreaming of fetish dance parties might have helped change that, but (at least in this town) that trend seems to have peaked. (It didn’t help that the Liquor Board’s lifestyle police have borne down hard on such events, contributing to the Catwalk’s fiscal problems.)

I don’t think the answer is to replace today’s Halloween festivities with World Beat-style “tribal” role playing events. The gods, demigods, devils, and myths of pre-industrial societies are those people’s property–in many cases, the only things colonists didn’t take from them. We have plenty of our own gods, demigods, devils, and myths to explore; including the myths propagated via popular entertainment and media. So keep going to parties as Audrey Hepburn or Capt. Janeway or Ross Perot–but don’t stop at the clothes.Become Hepburn or Janeway or Perot for one night. Explore the presence of Hepburnness, Janewayism, or Perotosity within your soul.

(For the record, the Champion’s costume store ran out of plastic breasts, couldn’t sell the formerly-popular Power Ranger costumes even at 50 percent off, and had to turn down many frustrated requests for Xena costumes (the show’s producers neglected to have any made).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #3 of the NW Sleep Guide, a newsletter for ambient-DJ music fans, contains a conceptual Brian Eno review consisting of the words “A light sharp touch refined but so ugly so merciless like the stinging rain,” repeated and rearranged to fill all the available space. Clever. (Free at Ohm Records and Wall of Sound.)

EYE ON POTATOES: The Wall St. Journal recently exposed the secret behind the “crispier French fries” now promised by Jack-in-the-Box and other chains. They’re coated with a batter made of potato starch, augmented in some formulae with wheat starch and dairy protein. It’s supposed to keep ’em warm and unsoggy up to 15 minutes, three times as long as untreated spud-segments. I tell ya, does this country have an ingenious food-tech industry or what?

IN A BIND: Organizers of the second NW Bookfest made a few improvements to the Pier 48 site but kept the site good and funky and un-Convention-Centery. It’s still the sort of event where the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor is made most literal, with authors on microphones and sellers in booths all hawking their wares. KOMO-TV weekend anchor Eric Slocum was prominently hawking his Childrens Hospital-benefit poetry book (remember, you can always donate direct instead) right next to a booth hawking political tracts about what “the globalists” don’t want you to know.

But it was a trek to find anything really interesting in the interstices between whale-poetry chapbooks, Men Are From Orion/ Women Are From the Crab Nebula homilies, and Windows 95 recovery manuals. By the time I got back out and faced the literacy volunteers with their hype for literature-as-generic-commodity, I wanted to tell ’em, “Next time you ask me to Support Books, tell me which ones.”

With KTZZ now up for sale, three of the area’s six commercial TV stations are up for grabs, thus driving down any one station’s prospective price. This is a rare moment of opportunity. Leave your suggestions on what you’d do if you owned your own channel atMisc. World HQ, www.miscmedia.com/intro.html.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WELCOME TO A late-summer sunspotted Misc., the pop-culture column that knows there’s gotta be some not-half-bad Jack Kemp/ Shawn Kemp jokes out there. If you know any, send them to clark@speakeasy.org.

UPDATES: Adobe Systems will indeed keep the former Aldus software operation in Seattle; it’s negotiating to build offices in the Quadrant Industrial Park next to the Fremont Bridge… Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, winner of this column’s no-prize last year as Seattle’s best regulation-size supermarket, won’t become an Alfalfa’s “natural” food store. It’ll become a QFC. The wonderful Food Giant sign, its nine letters blinking on and off in not-quite synchronization and with a few neon elements always out, will shine for the last time around mid-November. The store will then be redone to QFC’s standard look, floor plan, and merchandise mix. Oh well, at least Wallingford will still have the original Dick’s.

AUTO-EROTICA?: A home video called How A Car Is Made, currently plugged on TV ads, is sold in separate adult and children’s versions. Does the adult version show more explicit rivet scenes? Or maybe nice slow shots of a car’s steel frame descending into a paint bath, emerging moments later all dripping-damp and pink?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: It took the long, slow, painful death of Reflex before this town could get the take-no-prisoners (or grants) visual-art zine it’s needed. The new bastard-son-of-Reflex bears the highly apt title Aorta. (The name was chosen long before Jason Sprinkle’s big steel heart became the most important work by a Seattle visual artist in this decade.) EditorJim Demetre seems to have the right priorities: Northwest art, he and his contributors believe, ought to be something more original than copying the latest flavor from NY/Cal, and something more personal than the upscaled decorative crafts now dominating the local gallery market. The first issue’s highlighted by a clever piece by Cydney Gillis on how local artists were persuaded to donate their time to benefit SAM’s Chinese-textiles show, while SAM still does little on its part to support non-Chihuly local art. The only problem so far: Like Reflex, Aorta will only appear every two months, so no exhibit it reviews will still be up when the review comes out. Free around town or pay-what-you-can to 105 S. Main St., #204, Seattle 98104.

SIGN-O-TIMES (on the readerboard at the Eastlake flower shop): “Pro-Environment Bumper Stickers–Joke of the Century.”

DAUGHTER OF `DESIGNER GRUNGE’: The trumped-up media outcry over the alleged Heroin Chic look has brought atention to a new outfit called Urban Decay, which has been cleaning up on helping young women look dirty. Its cosmetics, sold with slogans such as “Burn Barbie Burn,” just might be the only products sold at both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom. Its nail polishes and lipsticks have dark un-shiny colors and come in styles named Pallor, Bruise, Frostbite, Asphyxia, and Plague. Its ads read like the work of professional ad copywriters trying to sound like slam poets (“Colors from the paint box of my life. Pallor is the sheen of my flesh.”) Founder Sandy Lerner has promoted herself everywhere from the fashion mags to the NY Times as an expert on pseudo-dirty “street” looks; even though she’s quite non-street herself (she co-founded Cisco Systems, a computer-networking giant) and her company’s based on the not-so-mean streets of Silicon Valley. But then again, fashion has always been about role-playing, and in that context “gritty reality” is just another fantasy. It might be more expedient, marketing-wise, for Lerner and company to be closer to the mall kids who wish they were on the Lower East Side than to actually be anywhere near the Lower East Side.

LET US MAKE a pledge to meet in September, and until then ponder these Ways to Praise Your Child, from a refrigerator magnet available from KSTW: “Terrific Job. Hip Hip Hurray. A+ Job. You Tried Hard. What An Imagination. Outstanding Performance. You’re A Joy. You’re A Treasure. A Big Hug. A Big Kiss. I Love You. Give Them A Big Smile.”

SEATTLE OLYMPICS IN 2008? First, let’s get our transit problems sorted out (and not with space-wasting freeway lanes, pleeze). Otherwise, the politicians proposing this (and the businessmen who own them) have one point: we’ll already have most of the physical plant the Games would need. Depending how the Seahawks situation works out, we’ll have three to five full-sized stadia in the area, plus three big arenas, four smaller arenas, a AAA baseball field, a convention center or two, a rowing facility, the swimming pool from the ’90 Goodwill Games, and UW dorms that could house a few thousand jocks. Of course, that leaves plenty of spaces to be constructed (for tennis, bicycling, horses, skeet shooting, etc.); and since there’s nothing Pro-Business Democrats love more than mega construction projects, expect more hype about the Olympic bid than you heard about the Commons (even though the Olympic bigwigs won’t decide for years).

AW, SHOOT:Ads for the film The Shot shamelessly rip off the happy-face-with-bleeding-forehead image from the ’80s cult-favorite comic book Watchmen. But don’t worry, fanboys: Watchmen will be famous as long as there’s an audience for “alternative” superheroes; The Shot may leave theaters this month, to live on in video obscurity (unless one of its actors gets famous later).

LIP GLOSS: The fashion mag Marie-Claire claims the Beautiful People have a new cosmetic-surgery thang: labia lifts. My first thought: Perhaps only in the age of Hustler would straight women see enough of other women’s crotches to feel jealous of them. Second, they’ve always been the one part of a woman’s exterior sexual anatomy that’s been considered strictly for sensation, not appearance (until the piercing rage went mainstream). Call me old fashioned, but I sorta like it that way. Speaking of old-style ladies…

OLD WORLD SWORDER: Xena, Warrior Princess (plugged by KIRO-TV sports guy Tony Ventrella as “a clean girl in a dirty neighborhood”) made the cover of Ms. Sure, star Lucy Lawless appeared in a lesbian film (on the compilation Women from Down Under, at Video Vertigo and elsewhere). But essentially, this alleged role model for women’s empowerment is just another Conan-in-drag role, a fantasy formula seen everywhere from Red Sonja to the UK comic Axa. The only essential difference is how, as a low-budget syndicated show that has to fill more talk between the battles, it takes time to explore how non-warrior women would fare in such a muscle-bound world. Speaking of the politics of action heroes…

CURLY CUES: I’ve been feeling guilty about watching the Three Stooges. Not about the films themselves, but about watching them on Pat Robertson’s “New Family Channel.” Promos bill it as “a division of International Family Entertainment, a publicly-owned company,” but the NY Times reports most of the stock’s still held by Robertson, his son, and organizations they control. Indeed, next week it’ll “cover” the Republican Convention via GOP-sponsored hours starring GOP-appointed commentators, promising viewers needn’t spend a second outside the closed-loop system of Right propaganda. Even if I’m not in a Nielsen household and don’t buy any product advertised, I’m patronizing an organization started to spread Robertson’s anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-choice, pro-censorship, pro-corporate agenda.

Anyhow, my guilt was relieved slightly when I remembered the Stooge films were originally made for Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, whose politics were just as Neanderthal as Robertson’s (and who required sex from actresses as a condition for employment, something Robertson’s never been accused of). Also, there’s something satisfying about catching the last seconds of Robertson’s sanctimonious 700 Club rants, followed by some of cinema’s greatest anarchists. I’m sure Robertson’s staff bought the Stooge films (which had been off TV for several years during a merchandising-rights dispute) ‘cuz they were thought to represent current right-wing entertainment tastes (lotsa violence, no sex). But they probably didn’t remember how regularly and thoroughly the Stooges demolished the pretensions of authority and conformity systems–pretensions not unlike Robertson’s. Robertson permits no rebuttals to his political stances on his cable channel, but I can imagine no more elequent rebuttal to the cultural assumptions behind his stances than these Depression-era inner-city Jews confronting WASP society.

MISC. WASN’T SURPRISED by the cops’ way-over-reaction to Subculture Joe‘s big steel heart outside Westlake Center. Authorities here and elsewhere have long shown a fear of art surpassing only a fear of love.

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA: With any luck, this will be the last Olympics to be packaged and curated for traditional network TV. The pay-per-view Triplecast in ’92 was the way it oughta be covered: Multiple channels, unedited complete live events, more field footage and less of that annoying human-interest featurizing. But they charged too much for the Triplecast, didn’t get enough buyers, and aren’t repeating it. If we’re lucky, we’ll get something like that on the Net or satellites or expanded cable (only free or at least cheaper) in time for the ’00 games.

BOTTOMS UP: First, there was that silly fad-let of snowboarding/ rave headgear resewn from boxer shorts. Now, an outfit called “Get A-Head” in Lewiston, Idaho (sister city to Clarkston, Wash.) offers Undee Shirts, women’s athletic sport tops made from men’s briefs (not pre-worn). Make your own joke here about that which you wish to hold close to your heart. I’m still pondering whether it’s another example of women appropriating masculine iconography for the sake of power (from George Eliot’s cigars to the ’80s “menswear look”). Speaking of the ol’ gender/ culture thang…

COCA LEAVES: “Seattle loves gay men but not lesbians.” That’s one of the theories given me by visual-art scenesters to explain the relative unpopularity of the Center on Contemporary Art’s first all-lesbian group exhibition, Gender, Fucked. (The opening-night party attracted “almost none of the COCA regulars,” said a COCA official.) I wouldn’t go that far, but it is true that lesbians are a minority-within-a-minority. (Just look at the proportion of lesbian to gay-male bars on Capitol Hill.) Events like the Pride Parade and all-encompassing monikers like “queer” notwithstanding, the lesbian and gay-male communities aren’t as intercommunicative as they perhaps oughta be. (Mr. Savage sez that’s a matter of men who prefer to be with men and women who prefer to be with women; I say it’s an aspect of larger forces in a society dividing into ever-smaller, more separate subcultures.)

Additionally (here’s where the scenesters’ theorizing comes in), lesbian artists have a PR problem. They’ve been stereotyped as humorless self-righteousness addicts. Gay-male art, the typing goes, are perceived to be outrageous and fantastical and fun even when it’s about the direst of topics; while lesbian art’s expected to be forever dour, judgemental and hostile to outsiders, even when it’s about desire and love. All it takes to disprove this is to look at some of the diverse works being made by lesbian artists in our own region alone, from the hypnotic choreography of Pat Graney to the wonderful cartooning of Ellen Forney to the universal rage and joy in Team Dresch’s music. These artists and others (including those at the COCA show) prove lesbians aren’t all the same, as the existence of lesbians proves women aren’t all the same.

OUT OF LINE: Politicians in Seatle and Tacoma, ever eager to find new ways to get you and me to support subsidies to business, want to impose a modem tax on all online communication. Tacoma’s scheme, which is further along than Seattle’s, would tax all data streams in, to, or from the city at 6 percent of monthly revenues plus an annual fee. The money would be taken from online providers no matter where they’re located, no matter how little of their business goes through Tacoma’s city limits. This is bad, for reasons beyond simple cyber-Libertarianism. The scheme’s logistically impossible; and taxing locally-based services simply invites ’em to move to a lower-tax city or state. Better to keep taxing online use indirectly, via the phone (and in the future, cable) lines they run on.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, enjoy the hydros (always faster, louder, and more fun than any dumb ol’ dreem-teem) and ponder the unexpected meanings of the online mission statement from arka.com: “This purpose of this server is to give free-thinking authors a place to put their web pages without fear of content.”

AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…

EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced

June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.

Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.

(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)

WELCOME AGAIN one and all to Misc., the pop-culture column still anxious to try those Olestra potato chips with the chemically-engineered fake fat. If any out-of-town readers live in the chips’ test markets, could you send some over here? Thanx.

UPDATE: Looks like the brick-and-concrete light-industrial building that housed RKCNDY, that recently-closed rock n’ roll purgatory, may soon house the Matt Talbot Day Center, a Catholic Community Services drop-in ministry attending to drug-addicted or otherwise troubled teens. The lease hasn’t been finalized and could still fall through (like the deal last winter to buy the club and keep it operating). I’ll let you generate your own forces-of-redemption-take-over-din-of-iniquity remarks; you might even consider it the Big Guy’s smirking revenge for Moe taking up business in an ex-Salvation Army rehab center.

AD VERBS: Not too long ago, advertisers loved to claim their products would help you attract a sex partner. Now, masturbation metaphors are the rage. First, there was the shampoo that promised women a veritable scalp orgasm. In a more recent spot, a phone-sex worker emotes gushingly about the Pay Day candy bar’s sensuous qualities. And a still-small but growing trend of advertising for women sneaks in references to that self-satisfaction aid, hardcore porn, like the Revlon lipstick promoted as “SuperseXXXy.” If you believe the conspiracy-theory thinking in zines like Adbusters Quarterly (I don’t), you might theorize how the marketeers want to exploit people’s natural drives by redirecting those drives away from the nature-intended craving for intimacy with another human soul and toward sexual identification with the Product itself. Certainly the ad where a woman fantasizes (apparently during intercourse) about how she’d rather be driving a Mercedes could be so interpreted.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical-labor outfit that earlier this century tried to forge “One Big Union of All the Workers,” still exists. The Real Deal: Labor’s Side of Things is its regional monthly zine, edited by Mark Manning. It offers a little labor history (in the May ish, an essay on the Spokane IWW’s fight to overturn 1909 laws banning public speech in the Lilac City). But most of it’s of the present day, documenting workers’ struggles and conditions here and in other parts of the world. At a time when much self-styled “radical” literature either ignores or sneers at working-class Americans, Manning refreshingly extols not just sympathy for but solidarity and common cause with wage slaves everywhere. One flaw: The back-page article chiding downtown business interests for opposing hygiene centers for the homeless starts picking on one particular businessman without explaining why. (Pay-what-you-can to PO Box 20752, Seattle 98102.)

PRICELESS-ADVICE DEPT.: One side effect of writing for an increasingly popular alterna-paper is mainstream journalists treating you, perhaps foolishly, as an expert on Those Darn Kids. An AP writer called from Portland late last month, preparing a story on theChurch of Kurt Cobain opening down there and wanting my sound-bite-length comments. I said Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role of Rock Star, and would undoubtedly reject veneration as some demigod prophet of Gen X. As I interpret his work, he longed for a world without gods or at least without leaders and followers, a world where folks create their own cultures and work out their own ideas. From first glance, these lessons seem to be lost on the church’s founder, Jim Dillon, who told the P-I his 12-member congregation “pays homage to this alienated tribe and to the man who they have called `saint.'” But then again, if Jesus’ words can be interpreted in as many different ways as they are, it’s only natural to expect Cobain’s sometimes expressionistic word imagery to become similarly reread or misread.

‘TIL NEXT WE SHARE INKSTAINS, ponder these words of Indian movie star Madhuri Dixit, quoted by interviewer “Bitchybee” in the magazine Cineblitz: “Work is worship. Play is a waste of time. Night clubs, parties socializing saps your energy and gets you nothing, but unwanted notices from snoopy gossip journalists. Avoid the night spots and dark circles. It’s even helpful in avoiding pimples.”

Misc. began on June 6, 1986 as a column in ArtsFocus, the Lincoln Arts Center’s monthly tabloid. When that paper faded in 1989, Misc. became a newsletter with as many as 1,000 free copies and 100 paid subscribers. It joined The Stranger at the paper’s ninth issue in November 1991. Last year I stopped the newsletter and started the Misc. World HQ website, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.

Over these 10 years I’ve discussed many things, loosely tied to the concept of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond.” I’ve shared a few laffs and a few tears. But I’ve had one overriding subject–the city with which I have an ongoing lover’s quarrel. Seattle’s always had more than its share of vibrant, creative people. But they’ve long struggled against a social order opposed to anything too unclean, unrich, or unquiet.

The Commons people never understood why so many have grown tired of a city government exclusively By The Upscale, Of The Upscale, and For The Upscale. The “Parks Are For Everybody” slogan was clearly a desperation move by campaigners uncomfortable with the existence of non-yuppies and the need to appeal to such proles.

In much of the US, politics is controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “conservatives.” In Seattle, it’s controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “liberals.” Other politicians pay lip service to abortion foes and censors; ours pay lip service to gay-rights advocates and environmentalists. Both sets of politicians do these to buy votes while holding to their real cause, the worship of Sacred Business.

But I also believe politics is a subset of culture. Seattle’s politics tie directly into a culture that merely pretends to value “diversity.” A culture so thoroughly whitebread, it remembers the Sixties only as a playtime for college boys. A culture descended from Anglo Protestant “progressives” in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who’d championed an elitism of educated, understated “taste” to help keep working-class German Catholics out of power.

When Misc. started, Seattle’s arts had been for seemingly ever (at least since 1973) under the thumb of an extremely conservative “liberalism” I’ve since called Mandatory Mellowness. You know, the standard of “good taste” that wouldn’t merely discourage but forbid any art more challenging than Chihuly, any music more contemporary than Kenny G, any theater more immediate than doo-wop versions of Shakespeare, any literature more urbane than whale poems, any apparel more daring than “Casual Friday” suits, or any lifestyle more “decadent” than drinking whole milk instead of 2-percent.

While this aggressively bland anti-aesthetic still rules the city’s official culture, something else arose from the underground. Punk rock remained a relevant stance in Seattle throughout the ’80s precisely because it was the best available means of rebellion against the hypocrisy of mellowness. What the media called “grunge” was and is an aesthetic of darkness, but also one of honest discourse, passionate expression, and real pleasures. It values thrift and ingenuity, not the dictates of fashion. It sees Seattle as a city for Tugboat Annie, not for Niles Crane. It loves the south Lake Union neighborhood as it is. It would rather be “unhappy” yet truly alive than succumb to the Stepford-Wifedom of “The Northwest Lifestyle.” What the media call “cocktail nation” is the expression of these values through other means, to relive the best of pre-hippie pop culture and even to make jazz a populist genre again. Indeed, the staccato, disjointed Misc. format has always been a (perhaps feeble) effort to preserve the jazz-age three-dot column of Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I era Emmett Watson–perhaps America’s greatest literary invention.

If I’ve played any tiny part in popularizing these values, the values that made Seattle and real progressivism great, then I’ve succeeded at my goal–the Highlights for Children slogan, “Fun With a Purpose.”

(Thanx and a hat tip to those who attended the Misc. 10th anniversary party and to those who helped make it plausible; including Glen Allen, the band Big Sister, BSK(T) Screenprinting, Cellophane Square, Staci Dinehart, Rebecca Frey, Joseph Givens, Laughingas Productions, Verlayne McClure, Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, Moe, Mountain Sound, the New Store, Occupied Seattle, Charlotte Quinn, Frank Randall, Jeannine Uhrich, Joseph Weaver, and a host of others.)

Misc. was naturally bemused by the Newsweek hype piece about a Seattle only faintly resembling any real-world town, a town whose supposed biggest celebrity is New Republic/CNN Crossfire vet Michael Kinsley, esconced in Redmond to start Microsoft’s pay-per-read website Slate (presumably not named for Fred Flintstone’s boss). But we’re even more perplexed at what Kinsley told the Times a few weeks back, that Slate readers shouldn’t expect “a left wing magazine.” As if anyone familiar with his Reagan-Democrat views ever would.

A FASHIONABLE FORM OF CANCER: Tobacco companies are paying “hip” bars to sell their cigarettes. R.J. Reynolds paid Kid Mohair to exclusively sell Camels. Moonlight Tobacco (RJR’s “hipster” alias company) struck a deal (exact terms not publicized) to have its brands be the only cancer sticks sold at Moe, whose upstairs room has been renamed the Moonlight Lounge. (Both parties claim the room’s naming is a coincidence, not part of the deal.) At the opening party for the Moonlight Lounge, two Moonlight Tobacco PR drones walked around giving out long cigarette holders, wearing military-style jackets with the name patch NICK (as in -otine). Since nightclubs can be perennially on the edge of solvency, even a modest “promotional allowance” plus free ash trays is too good for many owners to resist. Speaking of club ups n’ downs…

OFF RAMP UPDATE: Here’s what we know about the glorious Eastlake dive where so much local music history was made and so much cheap Oregon gin was swilled. The old owners ran out of cash and agreed to turn the place over to new owners. But there was a snag in the liquor-license transfer process, so the place shut down at the end of April. The wannabe new management’s still trying to execute the financing and paperwork to reopen the home of “Gnosh Before the Mosh” soon.

But a revived Off Ramp will face the same problems other clubs now face. The explosion in touring indie bands these past two years has drawn audiences away from regularly-gigging local acts, whose once-steady appeal had brought a small degree of stability to the club circuit. Clubs have added an array of DJ nights, geared to draw specific sets of regular patrons, but that market’s spread increasingly thin by competition. We’re also coming on five years since the Seattle music eruption hit big; the original Mudhoney and Fallouts audiences are aging beyond the prime club-hopping years. Maybe a new Off Ramp management can figure a new recipe for sucess, one that can help the scene as a whole. Speaking of the “maturation” of indie-rock…

STOCK IT TO ME: Stock-music production companies are now coming out with “alternative rock” production music for use in commercials, TV shows, low-budget films, industrial films, video games, porn, etc. The Minnesota-based HyperClips company offers “Alterna,” a package of 40 “alternative rock and dance tracks. Give your project an edge with these grungy and atmospheric pieces. With all the moodiness and aggression that the Alternative styles have to offer, with everything from mellow acoustic grooves to hardcore distorted jams.” The Fresh Music Library, meanwhile, claims its “Alternative Rock” CD features “production values heard on today’s college and alternative rock radio stations… These themes evoke U2, Nirvana, R.E.M., the Smithereens and others. Exactly the disc for youthful energy.” Speaking of commercialism…

AD VERBS: You may have seen the cutesy ad for Seattle’s Westin Hotels, with a jealous-sounding female narrator accompanying butt shots of a stud: “Broke his neck to get the job, then broke the corporate sales record. Even broke the corporate no-jeans rule. Who’s he sleeping with?” The closing: “Choose your travel partner wisely.” Never before (to my knowledge) has a major hostelry chain so brazenly teased at the aura of naughtiness that’s always surrounded the industry.

(You’ve four days to rearrange your schedule, obtain the swankiest outfit, and leave room in your diet for the splendiforous Misc.Tenth Anniversary Party, 7 pm-whenever Sunday, June 2 at the Metropolis Gallery, downtown on University St. between 1st and 2nd. Odd video, fine food and beverage, games, entertainment, and fine memories will be had by all. More on the Misc. World HQ site, <http://www.miscmedia.com>. Be there. Aloha.)