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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Hail the Tube of Gloom:

Toyland Roundup

Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95

Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.

My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.

Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.

Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.

If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.

Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.

More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.

The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.

But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.

Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.

Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.

Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.

The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.

If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.

There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”

There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (“Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.

But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)

TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.

IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.

ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”

HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).

`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.

ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A NON-CYNICAL MISC. WELCOME goes to the Rocket’s new owners, the Frisco-based BAM Media. I’ve heard the rumors, how the new Rocket guys wanna go after this paper’s readers and advertisers. But we can be sports about it. F’rinstance, here’s some tips for the newcomers on what not to do to succeed in Seattle:

* Don’t arrive in town in suits, impose a dress code on the office, yet claim to be “one of you” with the staff because you love ’60s classic rock.

* Don’t expect us cowtown hicks to kneel in worship before your superior Cali essences. Don’t act aggressively and pompously among Seattle bands, club owners, and advertisers, boasting how you’re gonna do everything exactly the way it’s done in San Francisco.

* Don’t replace what’s left of the Rocket style with corporate-rock PR and bland shopper-tabloid design.

* Don’t replace familiar Rocket staffers with parent-company transfers who can’t even pronounce the “a” in “Ivar’s” right (it’s theschwa sound).

Avoid these temptations and the Rocket might get fun again. Heck, stronger competition would be good for both papers.

B’SHOOT NOTES: The upgrading of musical acts this year was great, though Sweet Water (perennial also-rans of the Silver Management stable) selling out the Arena surprised me. The cops went after TchKung! for the second straight year, ‘tho the band and its audience managed to keep the officers slightly better-behaved this time. The Stranger had a stage co-sponsorship this year with Biringer Farms, for whom I spent many a boring summer day picking strawberries as a kid. At least this year there was no Lamonts Blues Stage; ’twas bemusing in the past to see bands that considered themselves first-rate, beneath the name of a store popularly known as a perpetual clearance sale.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE UPSCALE: This column and this paper have talked more about the Commons than the other money issue on next Tuesday’s ballot, the new baseball stadium. The stadium, like similar stadium tax measures across North America, is a simple matter of asking taxpayers to subsidize businesses. That’s a story as old as railroads, agribusiness price supports, and unneeded weapons systems. (In Canada they use slogans like “Partners in Progress” to promote subsidies for worthless oil scams.) But the Commons represents a twist on public pay for private gain, a twist with implications for our future.

Around 1969-70 there was a revolution in City Hall: a slate of progressives ousted a machine of tired, inbred business interests. That new regime has calcified into a replica of the regime it replaced. Politics in Seattle is now essentially the same as in D.C.; i.e., money, power, privilege and to hell with anyone who can’t offer any of them. Seattle’s political machine doesn’t even claim anymore to speak for “The Little Guy.” Seattle, steadily over the past 20 years but now accelerating rapidly, is becoming a city by, of, and for only one class. The Upscale control the politicians, even the “progressive” politicians. The Upscale control the media (cf. KIRO’s hype-laden puff piece on the Nordstrom family, promoted as “The faces behind the brand name everyone loves!”).

The Upscale loathe real cultural diversity; they accept a culture of all races and nationalities who believe and behave exactly alike, like Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World” robots. Anybody who neither belongs to the Upscale nor can be dismissed by it as “quaint local color” is beyond the pale. (Belltown condo dwellers circulated petitions some months back demanding the Vogue’s closure.) Certain non-Upscale subcultures have returned this loathing, though by and large the Upscales don’t know they’re hated. (Corporate “designer grunge” fashion was such a joke because the “Seattle scene” aesthetic was anti-fashion, specifically anti-Nordstrom.)

The Commons is essentially a scheme to create an Upscale haven a la Vancouver’s West End, anchored by a mini-Stanley Park. It’s an Upscale wet dream; it removes blocks of non-Upscale businesses for Upscale condos, stores, and dineries. And it’d remove some of those disgusting punk clubs too! They insist on making Seattle a World Class City, even if it’s ruined as a place for the rest of us to live.

NOW AT THE MISC. WORLD HQ WEBSITE (<<http://www.miscmedia.com>>): Name your favorite Power Ranger.

THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.

The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.

Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.

One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.

JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.

YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.

Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.

PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…

THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…

LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!

Welcome back to Misc., the column that’s still had it with these expensive imports by local bands. When’s one of our newfangled Seattle music millionaires gonna start a label to release the Glitterhouse acts in North America where they belong?

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

SUDSLESS: In the wake of some so-far successful shows at the Sailors Union hall on 1st, several other all-ages show sites are popping up, including Club 449 in Greenwood (the former G-Note tavern, now a “clean and sober” dance club that’s added rock Wed. nights in addition to its normal 12-stepper oriented adult DJ formats weekends) and The Black Citroen in Fremont (a beautifully rustic garage-turned-coffeehouse). The latter is only all-ages as a provisional format; it’s already applied for a liquor license. As a 21-plus venue it might pick up some of the north end live alt-music slack dropped when the University Sportsbar moved to “young country.” Elsewhere in 21-plusland, the Weathered Wall will have new owners as soon as the Liquor Board approves. The new guys plan to drop live shows in favor of something approximating the WW’s original all-DJ format.

MOTORCYCLE MAMMON: Remember when Harleys were associated with Hell’s Angels instead of Young Republicans? (Given a choice, I’d feel much safer among the Hell’s Angels.) Now there’s Harley Davidson Motorclothes on 4th, selling new leather gear and assorted licensed products, including cans of the official Harley Davidson coffee (but not Harley Heavy Beer or H-D cigarettes yet). The store has a not-for-sale motorcycle in the window, but the only motorcycling-related product it sells is motor oil.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: For two decades now, the ultimate perjorative for a showy, shallow hippie was “Granolahead.” The imagery behind the insult was perfect; granola can be a high-fat, high-calorie sweetened foodstuff that still bears the image of something “good for you.” But now, the false image of granola is being stripped away, revealing the chewy oatmeal-honey-brown sugar concoction as just another great American food ingulgence. This reimaging can be partly credited to RJR Nabisco and its new Oreo Granola Bars! They taste better than they sound or look. The oatmeal and glaze blend perfectly with the crumbled-and-solidified cookie crumbs and blotches of “Creme.”

NETTING: From time to time, I’ve advocated the ideal direction for the Info Hi-Way as “many-to-many” communication, not “one-to-many” monopolized media. The pivotal breakthrough in achieving this has been announced, and it’s from none other than one of the most monopolistically-minded companies in the media biz, TCI Cable. In partnership with a company run by one of the Hearst descendents, TCI says it’s gonna offer “@ Home,” a service connecting home PCs to its cable lines and from there to the Internet and commercial online services. It won’t be available anywhere until the end of the year, and might take years to get onto your local cable hookup. But if and when it does show (and if TCI doesn’t ruin it by only offering limited Net access), it’ll be the hi-bandwidth answer to anyone’s indie-networking wet dreams, ‘cuz TCI’s PR people promise transmission rates of a megabyte in three seconds. Imagine: live one-way near-broadcast-quality video, or live two-way CD ROM-quality video and other multimedia applications. Local bulletin board systems made available by Telnet software to anyone anywhere, without extra long-distance charges. CD-quality audio downloaded at twice playback speed. And all this with content choices decided not by a few big corporations but by anybody who can get their stuff together and can hook up a “server” computer (as a sometime acquaintance of hardware hackers, I know it to be a task that can be either cheap or easy but not both).

STATE HEALTH CARE REFORM `AMENDED’: The operation was a success. The patient died.

EARLY WARNING: This year’s annual column anniversary party, Fun with Misc., will be an all-ages gathering Thurs., 6/8 at the Metropolis Gallery (downtown on University between 1st and 2nd). Details forthcoming.

As boosters of local small business, Misc. is pleased as punch that Hale’s Ales is building a new facility on Leary Way, but slightly saddened that it’s going to take over the site now occupied by one of my all-time favorite Seattle building names, the House of Hose.

DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK (seen before a body-piercing segment on the Lifetime cable fashion show Ooh La La): “Warning! The following piece contains images some viewers may find sorta gross.”

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

STUFF I GET IN THE MAIL: Each week I get PR directives that just don’t warrant a complete column item, yet are good for at least a moment’s reflection. F’r instance: Ex-KCMU manager Chris Knab now leads seminars on how to make it in the music-marketing biz. The four-week course costs $149… There’s something out for this summer called the Carol Woir Slimsuit (“The Swimsuit With A Personality”), a one-piece women’s swimsuit with a built-in corset-like thingie. Its ads say “Lose An Inch, Gain The Glamour”… C-Space, a biweekly forum/ support meeting for local S/M pursuers, is hanging up its spikes for the last time after five years. Speaking of postal submissions…

NO MILK, THANKS: I was amused when a reader sent in six pages clipped from a Cheri magazine pictorial about nude waitresses at one “Big Cups Coffeehouse.” The story claims the café’s been in business in Seattle for four years. It’s all fictional, of course (it probably wouldn’t even be legal here). Florida and Texas, though, have had a tradition of novelty nude businesses (car washes, laundromats, donut shops, pool halls); so the concept might seem plausible to some Cheri readers. Speaking of stapled Seattle sightings…

THE GOOD LOAF: Somewhat more factual than the Cheri pictorial was the May Esquire article about Seattle’s “baby boom slackers,” whitebread liberal-arts grads of the magazine’s target demographic who used to have time-consumin’ bigtime careers but now hang out at the Honey Bear Bakery, having chosen “voluntary simplicity” instead of the work-hard-spend-hard ideology long advocated by the magazine. I certainly hope the mag’s readers will realize the selectivity it used. The story notes that only 70 percent of U.S. adult males now work full-time year-round at one job; but from personal knowledge I can assure you a lot of those guys walking around in the daytime with self-DTP’d “consultant” business cards aren’t there fully by choice. Not to mention the millions who haven’t had the chance to quit a well-paying job. Speaking of the world of work…

ON THE MAKE: Was reminded three times this month of the good ol’ days of American business, the days when this country was interested in making things instead of just marketing them. The first was the Times obit for Weyerhaeuser exec Norton Clapp. The article’s lead labeled Clapp with the now-quaint rubric of “industrialist.” The second was Our World, the monthly USA Today ad supplement touting things like new concrete-fabrication plants in ex-Soviet republics. The third was when I got to play with a friend’s CD-ROM drive. Among his discs was The Time Almanac, with texts and pix from old Time magazines thru the decades. But it didn’t have the real joy of collecting old Time issues, the ads. Old Time ads from the ’40s and ’50s are wonderful evocations of a time when the Opinion Makers of most towns outside NYC were bourbon-swillin’, tweed-wearin’ managers of small and midsize manufacturing plants. The ads pushed roller bearings, conveyor belts, commercial air conditioning systems, semi rigs, axle greases, grinding wheels, and all that other cool stuff you never see around the house. I’d much rather see more ads of that type than the ads you see in today’s Time for import luxury cars and prescription hair-growth tonic. Speaking of CD-ROMS…

WINDOW PEEPING: The thing about those new X-rated videos on CD-ROM is that the images are so small and lo-res, the old adage about risking blindness via overuse might in this case actually be true.

Far from imminentizing the “Death of Writing,” the new electronic media are replenishing our language with new words, phrases and genres. Among these is the “FAQ List” (for “Frequently Asked Questions”), a handy format to bring new users of bulletin boards and newsgroups up to speed. In our quest to be first to steal a good idea, here’s Part 1 of our Misc. FAQ. Part 2 follows in a week or two.

1. How do you pronounce Misc.?

Just like it’s spelled.

2. How do you spell your name, Humphreys or Humphries?

It is, and always has been, Humphrey–no “s.”

3. Is Misc. a parody of ____ (Frisco gossip columnist)?

Absolutely not. If anything, it’s a revival of the classic prewar three-dot column, still practiced by Army Archerd in Daily Variety and Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times.

4. Do you write “I Love Televison”?

No. Wm. Steven Humphrey isn’t even my relation. I’m from Olympia-via-Marysville; he’s from Alabama. My real younger brother’s studying to be a naturopath. I sometimes make him mad by eating all three of naturopathy’s forbidden foods (meat, wheat, and dairy) in front of him.

5. Does the Stranger have a beef against the Times?

Absolutely not. In fact, we’re now printed by a Times subsidiary.

6. Is there a “PC Police” at the Stranger, like the Weekly alleged? Do you all have to agree on everything you write?

Absolutely not. In fact, just last month local film scholar Steve Shaviro claimed a “Disney ideology” in which “artistic or aesthetic experiences… are supposed to be nice” was “the official American dogma.” My ol’ acquaintance Steve appears to be another victim of that academic “radical” construct that imagines U.S. society as consisting of two and only two cultures: The Mainstream (whitebread right-wingers) and The Alternative (whitebread left-wingers). Certain people, especially certain film scholars, might argue that the unique American aesthetic is really one of Camaros screaming down the open road, hot music playing in sleazy dives, and bikini babes posing for calendar pictures with power tools.

Besides, the heart of the Disney ideology isn’t in inoffensive content but in the control and planning behind that content; what the company calls “Imagineering.” Disneyland is a real-world place created from the logic of an animation producer, who used a sense of intense order to create the illusion of spontaneity–a logic perfectly suited to today’s Age of Marketing.

7. When you wrote ____, you were really just kidding right?

Absolutely not. The only time I wrote something completely facetiously was when I called for a crackdown against violence and immorality in opera music.

8. Why do people think Dave Barry’s funny?

Wish I knew. Probably it has something to do with the ingrained reflex of the ethnic joke, adapted for a baby-boomer audience. Instead of treating people of other races as subhumans, Barry gives the treatment to non-boomers, allowing his readers to still think of themselves as The Superior Generation.

9. Doesn’t it seem weird that the politicians and the news media claim everybody’s a flaming right-winger these days, but MTV and the fashion magazines are full of punk and alternative attitudes?

Absolutely not. Corporate “alternative” music, fashion, et al. is a calculated attempt to short-circuit people’s innate cravings for a culture more “real” than that associated with corporate entertainment, while still keeping these people as consumers feeding the business trough. Right-wing “empowerment” rhetoric operates exactly the same way. It persuades people they’re “rebelling” against The Establishment (bureaucrats) when it’s really getting them to suck up to the real power elite (corporations and their PACs). Disgust at politics-as-usual and at entertainment-as-usual are related and both valid. A left that worked would reach out to both frustrations.

10. But wasn’t there a headline in Fortune, “Today’s GOP to Big Business: Drop Dead”?

Yeah, but the meat of that story was that Republican leaders care more about certain businesses (western land and resource exploiters, financial speculators) than others (the Northeast industrial infrastructure). Neither side is appreciably on “our side.” The story also claims what’s really best for business is long-term economic and social stability, not the Newtzis’ scorched-earth policy. That’s a point worthy of more serious debate than I can offer here.

Welcome to the new-look Stranger. Hope you didn’t have too hard a time looking a few pages further into the paper for Misc., the pop-culture column that actually likes to be printed in smaller type (a more intimate reading experience, ya know). For newbies, this is a column of public phenomena from cult- to mass-level, along the whole personal-cultural-political-corporate continuum, in Seattle and beyond. We don’t do gossip, we don’t do gonzo, we don’t settle wagers.

COUNT YR. BLESSINGS DEPT.: Even if you’re uncomfortable with the new-look Stranger, just remember it could be worse. It could be like KIRO-TV’s old “News Outside the Box.” Worse, it could be like the new-look Sassy, a second-rate imitation of the early-’90s teen mag of the same name, now run by a different company with an all-different staff. The old Sassy was an interesting attempted compromise between real communication and the same old consumerist hype. The new Sassy is just the hype, delivered in a lame impersonation of the old mag’s breezy copy style. What’s more, the old Sassy acknowledged that teenage girls had a wide range of motivations for doing (or buying) things. In the new Sassy, everything in a girl’s life’s supposed to revolve around boys–getting them, bending them to your will, dumping them, getting new ones. (It even encourages its readers to become online-service users because “for one thing, it’s a great place to meet guys.”)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perfect Universe is an anonymous four-page zine of altered comic strips, available at Linda’s Tavern and other places. It’s an old trick to make familiar characters start talking about VD, condoms, beastiality and alcoholism. But it takes a certain snazz to make it work, and whoever redrew these strips has it. My favorite segment: the cut-up image of Andy Capp sitting silently at his barstool, in the exact same pose for seven consecutive frames.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF: Imagine my surprise when I found, in a second-hand store, a paperback of a sci-fi novel called The War With the Newts! Imagine my glee when I read the back-cover copy, calling it a “prophetic and stirring novel about man’s fatal propensity to pervert the best things of the world.” Turns out to have been the final work of Karel Capek, the brilliant Czech satirist whose play R.U.R. gave the world the term “robot.” Capek wrote Newts in 1936, two years before the Nazis asked the Western powers for the right to take over his country in exchange for a promise not to invade anywhere else.

The book’s a satire of colonialism, racism, and global trade, among many other things. The Newts of the book are four-foot-long salamanders found on a remote South Seas island. They’re at least semi-intelligent; they can be trained to speak and to use knives, explosives and construction tools. And when given enough food and protection from predators, they breed like mad. In the story, which spans about 50 years with no true central characters, the major nations take to breeding Newts as all-purpose slave laborers for everything from manufacturing (in special shallow-water factories) to dredging and building new islands. They become an obsession for socialists, missionaries, and angered labor unions. “Exotic” songs, dances, and films are created to exploit their novelty. They’re described as perfect workers, always hard-striving and never complaining–until a billion-Newt army asserts control of the world’s seaports and announces plans to dismantle the continents, so the world can become one big Newt habitat. (R.U.R. also ends with the robots conquering the humans.)

The Newts paperback’s introduction quotes Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika writing to Capek praising “Your story of those sly, clever creatures which were first trained by man for all sorts of uses, and which finally, turning into a mob without soul or morals but with dangerous technical skill, plunge the world into ruin.” Any similarity between Capek’s disciplined, emotionless army of destruction and any similarly-named contemporary force is purely coincidental, of course.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MRS. FREELAND: My big Seattle punk-history book goes to press this month. I could still use your memorabilia. How do I reach you?

Welcome to a late-January White Sale edition of Misc., the column that knows things have gone ridiculously mainstream-commercial when Borders Books and Music has its own Incredibly Strange Music display table (complete with a Nirvana kareoke cassette) and there’s an officially-licensed Black Flag snowboard. So let’s run with the spirit of the times and have a special all-consumerist column, shall we?

AD VERBS: The highest-visibility week for new TV shows used to be the week after Labor Day. Now it’s the third and fourth weeks in January, when the established networks show off the snazzy new shows replacing last fall’s snazzy old shows. This time we also get two all-new “networks”: WB and UPN. The former has the better promo spots, the latter may have the better shows (‘tho we’ll have to wait to make judgment on Sir Mix-A-Lot’s acting skills as the titular narrator of UPN’s The Watcher).

It’s also the annual high week for commercials, specifically on Sooper Bowl Sunday. In fact, recent years have seen far more excitement for the freshly-premiered ads during the big game than for the game itself, which is usually either a rout or a dogged defensive battle. I know it’s fashionable in “hip” circles to denounce football and those who watch it. I also know why–virtually every sensitive young intellectual type in America had to survive adolescent harassment from crude jocks and/or bitchy cheerleaders, in schools that often gave more honor to touchdowns than to learning. But part of growing up is getting beyond old pains. Besides, you can’t understand this culture without understanding how American football encapsulating the essential myths and images of America. It’s a vast real estate on which violence and raw ambition are held in place by persnickity bureaucratic rules. It’s gross caricatures of masculinity, tempered on the sidelines by gross caricatures of femininity. It’s the dream, fulfilled only occasionally enough to remain tempting, of flying and running free.

CUTE MAG ALERT: Moving from male- to female-oriented consumerism, we may have seen the end of Sassy as we know it. Its publisher, N.Y.-based Lang Communications (which also owns the somewhat less consumerist Ms.) sold the trendy teen fashion-music-product guide to Petersen Publishing, the Calif. firm that puts out the somewhat less trendy Teen (as well as a bunch of car magazines). None of the old editors are going with the move. Sassy’s potential devolution into just another what-to-wear rag begs the question: Does a younger generation exist if grownup journalists aren’t around to define it to other grownup journalists?

OVERCOOKING: Moving into the local consumer scene, we must say goodbye to a longtime dinnertime friend. Yeah, the tragedy of the four firefighters was a bad thing. But I’ll also miss the Mary Pang’s foods made in that destroyed plant, which might never resume production. Pang’s frozen Chinese dinners, entrees and egg rolls (in their happy ’50s-orange boxes) were regular dietary elements for the young and underemployed. Unlike some other slacker staples, Pang’s products never wore out their welcome.

TROUBLE ON DEXTROSE AVE.: An even more universal aspect of the youth diet is changing, as Dolly Madison Bakeries wants to buy the much larger Hostess-Wonder empire. As a kid, I knew Hostess goodies as the real thing. Some kids preferred the cup cakes, some the fruit pies. Some kids liked to unroll the Ho-Hos. I myself was a sucker for the Sno-Balls–even at a tender age, there was something mysteriously appealing about two side-by-side pink hemispheres, soft and bouncy to the touch. Dolly cakes were mysterious things unavailable in this area, known only from commercials on the Charlie Brown TV specials. When the Dollys finally showed up in Washington, they tended to appear at odd convenience stores that for some reason didn’t have Hostess. Their sizes, flavors and textures were strange to a Hostess-reared palate; even the sugar-grit of the creme filling was off somehow. Now, the product lines will probably merge, with Dolly’s Zingers appearing alongside the Twinkies. Let’s just hope the new bosses keep the bright Wonder Bread neon sign in south Seattle (ironically leading you toward our town’s least whitebread neighborhood) and the mentioned-in-a-prior-column Hostess plant off Aurora, beautiful and oh-so sweet smelling, with its giant exterior intake valves labeled for sugar and corn syrup.

1/95 Misc. Newsletter

(the last newsletter edition)

(incorporating expanded versions of three Stranger columns

and one Stranger zine review)

ALL LIFE TO THE LIVING! (FRANKLIN ROSEMONT)

As it must to all zines, death comes to the newsletter version of Misc. Do not feel forlorn; I’m simply gonna concentrate on the Misc. column in the Stranger and on my book projects, including the Seattle music history coming out this spring.

Misc. started in June 1986 as a monthly column in the Lincoln Arts Association rag ArtsFocus; the current numbering system dates from that first monthly column. When that paper slowly died, I started the newsletter version (in August 1989) to keep the pop-cult chroniclin’ job going. Since November 1991, Misc. has concurrently run as a monthly newsletter and a weekly column in theStranger. Newsletter subscriptions have fallen drastically in the past year as the Stranger’s free circulation grew. It’s time to concentrate my work on the 80,000 Stranger readers instead of the 50 remaining newsletter subscribers. For now, let’s start one more big roundup of the weird and wonderful:

I DUNNO BAYOU: Winter draws nigh, and with it the seasonal yearning for warmer climes. This year, the preferred destination of many Seattlites isn’t Hawaii or Mexico but New Orleans, and not merely as a visitation site. At least two people I know, who don’t know one another, are moving there; two other friends of mine are thinking about it. As southern-tier towns go, it’s got a lot to offer. It’s perceived as a place of classic architecture, raucous partying, cool cemeteries, hot food, traditional music and weird spirituality; especially when compared to the New South stereotype of sterile suburban sprawl, sleazy developers and sleazier politics. But be prepared. I know people who’ve gone there and come back. They describe a French Quarter full of yuppies in the houses and fratboys on the streets, a political system as sleazy as any in the Sunbelt, a city totally dependent on tourism and plagued by tourist-targeting thieves. There’s a lot to be said for any town that could give us Tennessee Williams, Fats Domino and Anne Rice; just be ready to see fewer welcome mats than you might expect and more “Show Your Tits” placards.

AFTER THE SMOKE CLEARS: It’s not the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that failed this past November, it’s the conservative wing. The wimpy, submissive Lite Right tactics, the tactics of Dems from Scoop Jackson thru Jimmy Carter and beyond, utterly collapsed. Now that there’s no further purpose in preserving the careers of “moderate” Democratic officials, liberals should take over the party machinery and offer up a strong, no-compromise, no-apologies alternative to the right.

To do that, the Dems’ll have to stop playing by the Republicans’ rules. This isn’t a matter of simply infiltrating precienct committees and party organizations to force McGovernite policies onto party platform announcements. I’m talking the whole works, the big boring job.They’ve gotta rethink everything from constituency groups to organizing to fundraising to advertising. We’ve gotta flush away the stinking turd of the idea that liberalism can’t become really popular.

(This ties in with what I’ve been saying about the making of a populist left; one that will expunge the English Department elitism, and instead bring in the funky inclusiveness of the motley loveable mutt of a nation that is America.)

The Right’s ideology has divided society between the Bads who don’t support a big-money agenda (media, government, intellectuals, gays, the “counterculture”) and the Goods who do (big business, big military, big religion, developers, seniors, yuppies). The conservative Democrats divided America between the Bigs who deserved to run things (big business, big government, big construction, big labor) and the Littles who didn’t (pesky Left activists, loony Right demagogues). The post-hippie Left has, for far too long, been trapped with the narrowest goodie/baddie division of them all, between philosopher-king wannabes and those heathens who never studied for a liberal arts degree. All three of these ideologies imply the inevitability of a centralized, hierarchical system of power; they disagree over which sectors of society should have that power.

There’s another way out there, a way that favors small business over big, close communities over sprawling suburbs, new decentralized media over old centralized ones, thinking over obedience, passion over zombiedom. This is the way that could build a coalition among punks, intellectuals, immigrants, minorities, feminists, the downwardly-mobile working class, people who like a healthy environment, people who prefer real economic progress instead of pork-fed defense industries. It won’t be easy; it’ll be hard to keep all these disparate elements together. But it’s the only real way toward a post-conservative future.

FREAKS R US: Don’t have my annual Snohomish County suburbanization rant ‘cuz I stayed home this Xmas. Went back for Thanksgiving, tho, and decided then that there’s one thing you can say about going home for the holidays. It reveals that all of us are connected by fewer than six degrees of separation to at least one potential Montel Williams or Jenny Jones guest. Indeed, tabloid TV serves a vital purpose in remaking our social myths. In the past, people were intimidated into thinking they, or the people they were close to, were just about the only people around with nasty secrets That may have been especially true in places like the Northwest, where a fetishized vision of bland “normality” (the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle”) is virtually a state religion. Weirdness isn’t something that happens only to strangely-dressed people who live in “abnormal” parts of town. And no matter what people do to escape weirdness (like building ever-blander suburbs ever-further-out), it’ll always be there with ’em. “Normal” is simply a wishful fantasy. Understanding this could become one step towards the left-wing populism I’ve advocted. We Outré Artsy Types aren’t the only people who ever transgress against whitebread-Christian behavior. Everybody (almost) is doing or has done it. Need more proof? Just go to any 12-step meeting in a middlebrow neighborhood. The confessions there are enough to make the people on talk shows seem positively blasé. Artsy folks like us aren’t really rebelling against square people, only against their delusions. We’re only exhorting folks to stop hiding their weirdness and start celebrating it. As Boojie Boy said nearly two decades ago, “We’re All Devo.”

COPY WRONGS: Actually found myself agreeing with something Newt the Coot said, when he championed the Internet and other “new media” for “many-to-many” communication rather than “few-to-many” corporate entertainment. Newt saw the rise of right-wing media (talk radio, religious TV, “upscale” magazines, et al.) become a counterforce to the “objective” corporate media, and thinks the new telecommunications could further strengthen his favorite voices. (Let’s not tell him his favorite media’s just the same few-to-many syndrome without the old-school bureaucratic propriety Newt mistakenly calls “liberal.” Real many-to-many communication would encourage real empowerment, not submission to the rich and the PACs.)

Anyhow, another reason Newt wants to keep the new media (the Internet, umpteen-channel cable, video dialtone, et al.) out of the claws of the established media industry’s ‘cuz the latter has been in bed with the Clinton/ Gore crowd. Of course, the media biz also loved Reagan, and any politician who supports its expansionist agenda.

One example: the way Reagan, Bush and Clinton-era FCC officials kept rewriting the broadcast rules to favor ever bigger radio-TV station ownership groups, to the point where broadcast properties are increasingly held by out-of-town financiers bent less toward serving the stations’ communities than toward speculation and empire-building.

Another example: the Clinton administration’s proposed copyright law rewrite. Clinton’s National Information Infrastructure Task Force has drafted legislation to drastically limit what folks can do with information. Among other nasty provisions, it’d trash the “First Sale Right” that lets an info buyer do whatever she wishes with the copy she bought — the right that allows the video-rental industry to exist. In addition, the “fair use” provision (allowing authors to use brief relevant quotes from copyrighted works) would be greatly restricted; devices that could undermine electronic anti-copying systems would be outlawed; and “browsing” a copyrighted work, in a store or online, would be technically illegal.

As the online service GNN NetNews quotes Univ. of Pittsburgh Prof. Pamela Samuelson, “Not since the King of England in the 16th century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books…has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” NetNews also quotes Wayne State Prof. Jessica Litman as saying the proposals would “give the copyright owner the exclusive right to control reading, viewing or listening to any work.”

The punk/DIY decentralization aesthetic isn’t just a cute idea. It’s vital if the “info age” isn’t going to be a globally-centralized thought empire. Newt, despite his rhetoric of “empowerment,” wants a thought empire controlled by the Limbaughs and Robertsons; Clinton wants one controlled by the Viacoms and Time Warners. It’s up to us to demand None Of The Above.

SCHOOL DAZE #1: Ya gotta hand it to UW Prez Wm. Gerberding. He may be retiring soon, but he’s still got a keen eye for PR. He tried to raise public sympathy against state-mandated university budget cuts by threatening to shutter the Environmental Studies department, but to no avail. But then he made another presentation in which he threatened to close the journalism school, and by golly it made just about every front page in the state. As a grad of the School of Communications, I can attest that it was (and probably is) a graveyard for a lot of outmoded ideas about what makes good media, and its only official purpose (to provide entry-level staff to local media companies) might seem moot in an age when every opening for a local proofreading job gets 100 resumés from ex-NYC managing editors, but I’d still hate to see it go.

SCHOOL DAZE #2: The Garfield High School Messenger student paper published a student poll last month on the question, “What Makes A Person A Ho?” Responses from female students included “It’s the way you carry yourself, the number of people doesn’t matter;” “A girl that sleeps with more than five people a week is a ho;” “Most girls that guys call hoes aren’t;” and “If a person is having sex with two different people during the same time period of two weeks, for example, she is a ho.” Male responses included “It depends on how easy it is to get it and how quickly they can get it;” “If a girl has sex with another girl’s boyfriend she is a ho;” and “If you don’t demand your respect and you allow yourself to be treated any kind of way, then you sleep with them anyway, you’re a ho.” When asked “Can a guy be a ho?” one male student said no, “but it is a blatant and unfair double standard.”

PINE CLEANERS: The holidays are when merchants put on their friendliest seasonal spirit. Not so for Jim “Ebenezer” Nordstrom. With all the civic-blackmail skills his family learned as ex-NFL team owners, he’s promising (after months of hedging) to move his store into the old Frederick’s building as part of Mayor Rice’s pet development scheme, but only if the city re-bisects the tiny Westlake Park and lets commuters careen down 5th & Pine again. Granted, the street isn’t used much, except as a parking strip for cop cars and a walkway between the park’s two little plazas (themselves poorly planned and expensively built).

The city’s done so many things to aid private developers downtown, and so few have worked. Westlake at least partly works, so a lot of people are understandably upset at its threatened desecration. It doesn’t take an urban-planning degree to see what really works in downtowns: Lively streets and sidewalks with something intriguing every step of the way. Vancouver’s got lively street retail along Robson (which has car traffic) and Granville (which doesn’t). What will save downtown Seattle are (1) more stores for all tastes and income levels, not just the upscale, and (2) an adventurous day-and-night street life.

Instead of making threatening demands on the city, the Nordies oughta make grand promises to help build something better than some windswept empty one-block street: a new downtown that’s a life-affirming gathering place, with all the joyous chaos that makes urban life great. Offer shoppers and pedestrians something worth giving up that block of Pine for.

XMAS XTRAVAGANZA: Again this year, the gift industry’s outdone itself. Among the wackiest ideas is LifeClock Corp.’s Timisis, a digital clock embedded in a fake-granite desktop pyramid paperweight. Besides offering the current time and “Motivational Messages Every Minute,” the top readout line lets you “watch the hours, minutes and seconds counting down until your next vacation, until you must meet your sales quota, until your retirement, OR… The rest of your statistical lifetime!”

Also for the grownups are the Marilyn Monroe Collector’s Dolls, with six costumes but no tiny bottles of sleeping pills, and theScarlett Barbie-Rhett Ken series. Kid stuff’s hit a creative lull this year, as violence-genre video games and Power Rangers character products grab most of the cash and glory. One glorious exception: Zolo, a plastic doll-building set sort of like Mr. Potato Head, only with cool modern-art shapes and colors so you can build anything from a Dr. Seuss-like creature to a Calder-like mobile. Also worth noting are the pocket computer notebooks for kids, including the all-pink girls’ model My Diary (at last, something to draw young girls into computing!).

Haven’t get gotten around to trying the CNN board game, in which you take the role of your favorite TV correspondent trotting the globe in search of breaking news (I can imagine all the drag-queen-theater people playing it and all of them wanting to be Elsa Klensch).

SPINNIN’ THE BLACK CIRCLE: For every image of the corporate takeover of “independent” music (including Time Warner taking 49 percent ownership Sub Pop for a rumored $20 million), there are also signs of hope for the real thing. The NY Times reported that indie record labels (including pseudo-indies like Caroline and Seed) have gained a few points of market share in the past two years, to between 16 and 20 percent of the overall record market. That figure includes genres like country and classical where the majors completely dominate. (The indies’ share is undoubtedly higher in rock, rap, dance, and ethnic music.) And Pearl Jam‘s vinyl first-edition release of Vitalogy became a boon to the specialty stores that still stock the black flat things. Speaking of sonic artifacts…

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Skeleteens beverages from L.A. capture the PoMo generation spirit in ways the OK Soda people couldn’t even dream about. There are five varieties — Love Potion No. 69 (lemon-berry), The Drink (lemon-cola), DOA (vaguely Mountain Dew-ish), Brain Wash (a tart carbonated herbal tea), and Black Lemonade. All are sold in bottles only, in bars and cafes only for now, at hefty microbeer prices. All have cute-skeleton graphics and cute slogans on the labels (Love Potion “Helps to Keep Your Heart On;” Brain Wash “Relieves the Garbage They’ve Been Dumping In Your Mind”). All have plenty of caffeine, ginger and ginseng for a kick stronger than Jolt Cola or many espresso drinks (don’t drink more than one at a sitting if you’ve got a heart condition). Other ingredients in one or more of the flavors include jalapeno, ginko leaf, skull cap, ma hung, mad dog weed, jasmine, dill weed, and capsicum. Brain Drain has a tourquoise color that sticks to your lips and tongue (and other digestive organs and their byproducts). They’re so system-altering in their undiluted state, I’m scared to imagine them as mixers…

Some of you may recall Wrigley’s 1981 bubble-gum novelty in the shape of a tiny LP, packaged in tiny reproductions of Boston and Journey cover art. Now there’s CD’s Digital Gum, from Zeeb’s Enterprises in Ft. Worth, a five-inch slab of gum in a CD jewel box, complete with fake cover art. The six flavors include “ZZ Pop” and “Saltin’ Pep-O-Mint.” If you chew it backwards, do you get secret Satanic messages?

KNOW THE CODE: With the new year will come the new 360 area code, comprising two non-contiguous areas of western Washington: from Marysville north (including the San Juans) and from Olympia south (including the Olympic Peninsula). It could be interpreted as a symbol of growing isolation between the Seattle area and the rest of the state, as exploited in Republican political campaigns. It also means the Oly music-scene people finally get symbolic confirmation of their self-image as the capital of their own little world.

STARRY EYES (UW astrophysicist Dr. Bruce H. Margon in the 11/29 NY Times): “It’s a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can’t find 90 percent of the universe.” Maybe it’s under the sofa, or tucked away forgotten in a mini-storage unit. Maybe it’s in another dimension, the place missing socks go. I hope we don’t find a way into that dimension if it’s there, ‘cuz ya know the first thing that happens is that unlucky dimension will get zoned for all Earth’s prisons, waste-treatment plants and landfills.

AFTER DARK, MY SWEET: Caffé Minnies, that just-slightly-overpriced all-night diner on 1st & Denny, has just opened a second 24-hrs. outlet on Broadway, in the space where Cafe Ceilo had replaced one of the dopiest restaurant concepts in Seattle history, the fern bar Boondocks Sundeckers and Greenthumbs (home of the silly-pretentious “Established 1973” sign). ‘Bout time the Hill had an all-night spot (besides IHOP and the Taco Bell walk-up). In other grubbery news, the Hurricane Cafe has indeed become a “scene” place, though not necessarily a scene I’d wanna get very far into. The Puppy Club, the other son-of-the-Dog House, is shaking out into an experience as solid but plain as its food. Worse, it closes at 10 (Sundays at 6!).

HOW CHEESY: There was this recent newspaper ad with the headline “No Cheese Please” and the logo of a wedge of cheddar inside a slash circle. Local oldsters might remember those as the name and logo of a 1981-82 Seattle power-pop band, The ad had nothing to do with the band, but instead offered a mysterious, undefined “personal care kit” called The Ark, packaged by Survivor Industries Inc. and sold at warehouse stores and gun shops. The ad didn’t explain what a “personal care kit” was but hyped it as a gift-giver’s alternative to cheeseballs and fruitcakes.

It turns out to be a box of survival gear (up to three days’ worth of preserved food and water plus a blanket). This could arguably be useful for those who spend time out in (or driving thru) the mountains or other places where the power supply’s subject to the whim of seasonal windstorms. While the ads don’t mention that or any other suggested use, they subtlely identify with the apocalypse/ mountain man ideology. Not exactly a peace-on-Earth-good-will-n’-brotherhood kinda feeling.

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET IN THE PAGES OF THE STRANGER, look for word of our big Misc.-O-Rama live event Fri., Jan. 20 at 911 Media Arts, and check out these words found on a bumper sticker on a Honda: “Preserve Farmland. Live In Town.”

PASSAGE

A lovely parting gift from paintmeister David Hockney: “Always live in the ugliest house on the street. Then you don’t have to look at it.”

REPORT

Every current subscriber with at least three issues remaining will get a free copy of my book, now retitled Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, when it comes out (current ETA: April).

Those who still want to get the column in the mail can subscribe to the Stranger: $19.95 for 12 months or $11.95 for six months within Washington state, $49.95 for 12 months or $29.95 for six months out of state. Don’t write to me but to Stranger Subscriptions, 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 1225, Seattle 98122-3934. Yes, it’s a lot more than the final Misc. sub rate of $12/year, but you get tons more stuff, including my own slightly troubled crossword puzzle, music reviews by me and others, disturbing cartoons, political commentary, and other people’s columns that I don’t always agree with.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Altricial”

ZINES I NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

I used to cover zines regularly in Misc.,

but I’ve gotten so verbose at other topics that the zine reviews got sidetracked.

For now, here’s a roundup of self-made publications I’ve seen.

Mad Love: The Courtney Papers (no longer available): Billed on the cover as “posts from America Online left by, presumably, Courtney Love.” At least some of the entries are really hers; some might be hoaxes. On one level, these 17 electronic missives could be seen as the creatively-spelled, quasi-venomous rantings of a person with a past reputation for egotism and flakiness (like many music-scene types), someone who’s burned her share of bridges, particularly with her estranged father and with much of the Olympia rock community. But on another level, they’re the public soul-stripping of a survivor, facing the twin shocks of sudden widowhood and public scorn and slowly getting her shit back together with the tools available to her, chiefly the gift of sarcastic wit.

22 Fires (Chris Becker, 4200 Pasadena Pl. NE #2, Seattle 98105): A 12-page half-legal-size zine, with listings/ reviews of 49 Washington-based zines, plus a cassette sampler of local bands (including one of my faves, Laundry). Issue #2 should be out soon; if it’s as good as #1, it’ll be an invaluable resource for regional self-publishers. Highly recommended.

Radio Resistor’s Bulletin ($1 from P.O. Box 3038, Bellingham 98227-3038): An outgrowth of the battle to keep community-access programming on Western Washington U. station KUGS, this newsletter covers efforts to promote and defend true noncommercial and community broadcasting across the country. Learn how battles against NPR/ Corp. for Public Broadcasting bureaucratic types are popping up all over, not just at KCMU. Issue #6 reviews the book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, Rocket co-founder Bob McChesney’s revisionist history of the so-called “Golden Age of Radio” detailing how a potentially powerful tool for public education and enlightenment was quickly monopolized by the purveyors of Amos n’ Andy.

10 Things Jesus Wants You To Know ($1.58 from Dann Halligan, 1407 NE 45th St. #17, Seattle 98105): It comes out regularly, it’s big, and it’s chock full of indie-rawk bands from here and elsewhere (#8 had Chaos UK, Unsane, and NOFX). Halligan’s editorials provide concise arguments for the indie-purist party line. Christine Sieversen, who sometimes writes for the Stranger, also sometimes writes for these folks.

Feminist Baseball ($3 from Jeff Smith, P.O. Box 9609, Seattle 98109): Smith was Mark Arm’s partner in the fondly recalled teen-punk band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. Now he’s involved in a couple of small labels, Box Dog and Cher Doll, and puts out this tightly-packed collection of articles and over 250 record reviews. Issue #13 features an interview with Richard Lee, the guy who goes on public access Wednesday nights to claim Cobain and Kirsten Pfaff were murdered (accusations based on seemingly minor discrepancies in the coroner’s and media’s accounts of the deaths).

Thorozine ($2 from Mark M., P.O. Box 4134, Seattle 98104-0134): Well-scanned photos (a zine rarity) accompany profiles of punk & noise bands (#6 includes Portrait of Poverty, Fitz of Depression, and North American Bison). No relation to out-of-town zine Thor-A-Zine.

Farm Pulp ($2 from Gregory Hischak, 217 N. 70th St., Seattle 98117-4845): Twenty issues old; still the slickest zine in town. Beautiful manipulated Xerox and collage art; fascinating surrealist fiction.

Point No Point: A Blue Moon Reader (free from Blue Moon Tavern, 712 NE 45th St., Seattle 98105): Maybe the only “alternative” literary zine to ever have a (real, paid) full-page PR ad from Boeing (editor Patrick McRoberts has a day job at a PR agency). A mostly-male, mostly-old-hippie crew contributes solid if sometimes bland fiction, poetry and essays. Highlight: Charles Mudede’s story “Crepuscule With Clarity,” fast-paced and action-packed.