12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”

11/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:

LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’

IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY

Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?

AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.

UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.

GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.

This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.

Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.

However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.

GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…

HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)

Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).

THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”

BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.

BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.

The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.

FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.

TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.

PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)

MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”

THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.

KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.

GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.

The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.

ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)

I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).

The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.

It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”

PASSAGE

Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”

REPORT

You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).

Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).

With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Oogonium”

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.

WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.

WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)

WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.

BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.

JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.

RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.

NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.

THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”

CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!

BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.

Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.

I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…

X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.

THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.

EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.

But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.

Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.

So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.

Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.

DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.

Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.

ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.

The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.

FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…

BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.

Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”

Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.

DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

PASSAGE

As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:

“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”

REPORT

As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.

Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).

There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

9/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)

Generation X: The Original Poem

Here at Misc. World HQ, we’ve been trying like heck to figure out the intermediate intricacies of navigatin’ that Info Hi-Way. For a Machead like me to learn an Internet UNIX line-command interface from the online help (much of which is written for programmers and system operators, not end users) is like learning to drive by reading a transmission-repair manual.

IT’S A CRIME: Ya gotta give Clinton credit even in the face of apparent defeat. By trying to push some comprehensive health-reform, no matter how kludgy, he asked Congress to inconvenience big business, something it hasn’t done on such a general scale in maybe two decades. By even bringing up the premise that perhaps what’s good for corporate interests might not be good for the country, he’s significantly altered the boundaries of public debate at the “highest” levels of our political culture. I’m a single-payer-plan fan myself, but it was clear that there wasn’t enough common sense in Congress for that to go this time. This is an example of what I’ve been saying about the need for us “progressive” types to get into practical politics. We’ve gotta expand from just protesting things, into the comparatively boring nuts-n’-bolts of getting things done. The moneybags have a powerful voice; we need to get just as loud.

MY DAY: Yesterday afternoon I visited the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn, N.Y., and enjoyed seeing the various apartments and having the opportunity to talk with some of the people living there. Of course, the ultimate object of any housing project is to have satisfied tenants.

Our first visit was to an apartment with two bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room and bath. The young couple had two children and the wife’s mother with them. The man is a longshoreman with only intermittent days of work. The girl seemed proud and happy and she had acquired many possessions which she showed me with pride. Her mother brought out a plate of little cakes and some little glasses and poured out some homemade wine which she offered to us all. We drank to their health and happiness and we wished for them the steady job on which so much depends. Little enough to ask of life and yet often impossible to attain.

Our next family was in a larger three bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath apartment. They had four children and the man was on WPA.

Our last apartment was one of the very small one bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath type. The young couple who lived there had had the sad experience of losing their first baby, but the young woman’s mother, who was visiting her, told me what a change this new apartment made in her life.

These apartments seemed to me very well planned. All of them have eliminated unnecessary doors. The kitchen, for instance, has no door, neither has the living room. The bedroom, bathroom and one closet have doors. The other closets are recessed with curtains. The landscaping around the houses is attractive, and scattered around the project are eight small playgrounds for children. I hope that some day everyone can live in quarters which are as pleasant as this, if for no other reason than that it will cost the taxpayers less and that the next generation will be healthier.

On Friday we went to Boston to see my new grandchild. He is a sweet baby with a nicely shaped head and ears that lie flat against his head. His hair is so fair that it hardly shows. He refused to open his eyes for me, so I don’t know their color, but I surmise it’s blue. I was only allowed to see him through a glass window, so I am looking forward to seeing him next in his own home and knowing more about him. I am sure he is going to be a real person very soon.

On the whole, our family works and plays hard, but there is one member who takes his job so seriously that not even the advent of a baby curtails his working hours. Don’t think John lost one hour. I am glad of this, for there is a real obligation on every one of us these days to do our job, whatever it may be, a little better than we have done it before.

If the need comes for any of us to do a different kind of work from what we are doing at present, the call will be unmistakable. But the fact that we do our daily jobs well will make it easier for anyone who has to take our place and will make us more efficient in anything else we have to take up. Besides going on with the daily routine, keeps our feet on the ground and that is sorely needed in times like these.

Two extremes have come to me in the last few days. One was a young man who announced to me that all talk of a “fifth column” was ridiculous and that there was no such thing in the United States. This, just because he and his friends and those with whom he talked, did not happen to touch any “fifth column” activities.

On the other hand, a woman suggested that we all go out and learn to shoot and sleep with a gun beside our beds in preparation for parachute troops or riots in our neighborhoods.

Both of these attitudes are obviously silly. We want to take proper precautions but, in other ways, we want to go on with our daily life and our daily job in calm security.

RADICALS AND THE ARTS: Miss Dorothy Day, a former rough and tumble radical who became a Catholic, has written a book calledFrom Union Square to Rome, in which she asks herself if the old desire to be with the poor and mean and abandoned was not mixed with a desire to be with the dissipated.

The question has arisen in other lands, prompted by the conduct and language and the studied physical and moral frowsiness of individuals who have identified themselves with radical movements.

The arts also have served as an excuse for a dirty way of life, and some artists of this type, being incompetent painters and writers, easily persuade themselves that they could command high prices if they would compromise with their principles. They become radical painters and writers to excuse their failure to themselves and disguise it to their friends.

Greenwich Village 20 years ago was a haunt of sloppy fakers who said they desired to live their lives in their own way, unfettered by middle-class conventions — which was another way of saying that they wanted to engage in some promiscuous sleeping-around and didn’t like soap. They had read about the art and independent thinking in a dirty quarter of Paris, and for a time maintained a similar artistic and intellectual slum in New York, most of whose inhabitants overdrank and produced punk poetry and short stories and incompetent smears on canvas.

There were quite a few young corn-fed frauds of both sexes from the Middle West, putting into effect ideas of conduct and morality which they had heard talked up on the campus, but the colony in New York, as well as the one in Paris, also in included unsightly females of considerable age with small private incomes who liked to sit around nasty little joints listening to the talk and reading of the unwashed literati and squinting at distorted pictures and imagine themselves to be of the arts.

In summer groups of such people move to places in the far suburbs to go around half-naked, if not altogether nude, and the town of Westport, Conn., which did have a colony of legitimate artists, suffered from the presence of carousing counterfeits. The neighbors got an impression that art meant free love, personal filth and drunkenness, and that most writers and artists were Communists, because the incompetents are likely to condemn a system which refuses to appreciate their talents.

It was not any scientific curiosity that prompted the fad of Viennese mind-probing, but an appetite for horribly foul sex stuff and the hope of dirty people that some head-feeler would tell them that they could cure their nervousness only by spending a week-end in a cabin off somewhere away from it all with some other man’s girl or some other woman’s gentleman friend. Medical necessity might just justify conduct which otherwise would be difficult to explain, and when both members of a domestic combination were similarly troubled the doctor’s orders were likely to be regarded as law.

Radical thought and belief does not truly express itself in filthy attire and dirty fingernails, for radicals purport to be intelligent, and it is only the ignorant who have an excuse for dirt when soap and water are almost free and whiskbrooms are a dime. Nevertheless, affected frowsiness has come to be offered as evidence of advanced thought, and profane and obscene speech is sometimes offered by women as proof that they are fighting mad at the condition of the poor or the sufferings of the Spanish Communists and don’t give a damn for the opinion of the complacent respectables who wash their smug and stupid faces.

Probably it is not so much the radical ideas but offensive personalities, and on warm days an odor as of something not quite fresh, which have made most Americans suspicious of radicalism. There is also a deterrent in the apparent, though not real, requirement that to sympathise with radical ideas one must give up hygiene, become personally filthy and, as between husband and wife, each agree that the other may jump the fence whenever he or she is troubled by a dream.

YOUTH AT `DEAD END,’ WHAT’S THE CURE?: Young people — mobs of them! Laughing squads of lovely girls, husky boys, lining up for the annual graduation parade. Studies over, school days at an end, off they go. Into what? Into a world which yesterday petted and encouraged them, but is now suddenly indifferent to their need, hostile to their demands. Into an enforced idleness that wrecks their pride and enthusiasm, destroys their ambition and illusions…turns dreams into doubt, determination into despair and patriotism into an embittered sneer.

“Scarehead stuff”? No! The tragic and shameful truth. Yearly, 2,000,000 — TWO MILLION, COUNT ‘EM! — young Americans, cream of the crop in brain and brawn, leave our schools and step down and out to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Timber lands, oil wells, scenic beauty, fruit trees, livestock — cows, apples, pigs, peaches – all these precious “natural resources” the nation fights strenuously to protect and conserve — spending, willingly, billions in that struggle. Yet each year, two million young graduates and uncounted thousands of uneducated youngsters — more precious to America than all her other “natural resources” combined — are junked!

For, remember, unemployment means more than an empty pocket. It means an empty spirit… an empty spirit which breeds maggots as surely as dead flesh.

Have you seen the play Dead End? There’s as shocking a sermon-in-the-flesh as a nation ever faced. Hush…darkness…the curtain rises on such a scene, such a problem as you may find in any American city today. An east side’s “dead end” terminal at the river’s edge. Rotting tenements…crumbling warehouses…cluttered with filth, riddled with hideouts. Above the brawling, blowsy, fly-blown hell juts the hanging garden of a millionaire. Below — scuttling through the stinking darkness like a pack of rats, goes The Gang.

The Gang! All children — some of them mere babes — they paw the garbage for food, pounce like beasts on anyone they hate — anything they desire. Snickering — without a flicker of conscience — they inflict incredible torture, retail absolute depravity. Why not? Unwanted, unloved, not one of them has ever known decent pride or joy. Cut off from all life’s honorable trails, they seek adventure in the “Dead End” slime.

Are the young people themselves to blame? Have they become spoiled by the easy luxury of this Machine Age…are they “too choosey” to accept jobs which their fathers took gladly?

Or is society responsible? Should the Government, regardless of party, conserve and protect youth as it now conserves and protects its timber land, scenic beauty, livestock? Is not youth the most precious of all “natural resources” and should it not be treated accordingly?

Do you remember Henley’s magnificent rallying cry, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”? In those lines the fighting human spirit hurls its defiance at adversity. Time and again that spirit – blazing in the heart of the Youth — has swept America out of its “Dead End,” ON TO VICTORY!

I, `SPY’: Shirley was not especially astonished to learn that following a press breakfast with some of the girls from the cast of Minsky Follies that I was helping them find new lodging… Cheryl Taylor was the young lady in question and I picked up facts I hadn’t known about, like she ordinarily sings, but had to be a “Show Girl” because she had her jaw broken in an automobile accident some months back. A show girl, I find, is one who walks around “with” clothes. A Minsky “model,” on the other hand, has most of her clothes artfully removed. Glamorous Lili St. Cyr, however, is one of the “stars” along with comedian Pinky Lee… And she doesn’t exactly wear a “Mother Hubbard.” At the Orpheum.

Annie will be getting out her gun at the Aqua Theater at the behest of Greater Seattle Inc., starting July 2. Vivacious Gisele McKenzie will play the part of Annie and I might mention she’s doing one of my favorite musical comedies – Annie Get Your Gun!

The new Tiki Shop down at Leschi along Lake Washington is one to really flip over, the girls tell me. Betty Minor Evans, an old school friend of mine, and her partner have, to my knowledge, the only Seattle sop specializing in Hawaiian clothes for men and women. They went to Hawaii (how’s that for tough work?) and had things made up to their own specifications. Not the loud Aloha shirt bit, but elegant casual and cock-fashions, displayed in a tasty shop along with rare black coral and other types of jewelry and fine handmade wooden ware for the table. Betty’s off to Hawaii again this week, and I must say this sure beats doing your buying in the 7th Ave. Garment District in New York.

The Seahorse, that wonderful restaurant at Mukilteo, begs to report that it now can up the population of Mukilteo by 70 per cent every day without discommoding anyone. They’ve doubled the capacity of the restaurant and now there are two lines to the groaning smorgasbord tables. Mukilteo population — 1,000. Usual Wed. smorgasbord and dinner, at the Seahorse, about 700.

WHAT’S NUDE AT THE MOVIES?: Gamercy, Madison & Broadway. World premiere The Immoral West & How It Was Lost by producers of Erotica and Mr. Teas. Nudes & Dudes. Color, ample parking, free coffee… Guild 45th Street, 2115 N. 45th Street. Surftide 77. Hilarious parody of TV “whodunits.” Detective Bernard Bingbang seeks beauteous babe with birthmark. $500,000 color production.

FOR YOU PHOTOGRAPHERS: Hollywood Studios, 111 Stewart St., has comely models like the above posing 1-10 pm daily. Technical aid, lighting provided; camera rentals; individual or group sessions. MA 2-5555.

AND NOW ABOUT LIQUOR: Never on Sunday. Bootleggers are hard to find and expensive. If you don’t have a friend with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, you’ll be dry on Sunday if you don’t stock up. Some liquor stores open from 11 am to 11 pm. Check phone book… Beer taverns can be walked in on off the street & ladies can sit at bar, but they can’t call it a bar… Cocktail lounges are tucked away behind food. You can’t let children see liquor prepared so teen agers have to eat & or dance concealed from the bar. Women can’t sit at bar, but can sit at piano, which is why we have so many “piano” bars. Liquor hours: ‘Till 2 am except Saturday, when it’s midnight. Sit still when you’re doing your drinking. I don’t think it’s the law, but it certainly is the custom not to carry your drinks in a cocktail lounge. The waitress will call you on it if you do.

SHIRLEY’S COLUMN: One of the most often-asked questions by visitors to the fair is, “where can I order good salmon?” One of the best answers to that question is “The Viceroy.” We were there for lunch the other day and were delighted to find that Henk Straatmann not only is their Maitre d’ now, but served us salmon with his practiced continental flourish. It was poached, juicy — with his wonderful Hollandaise – and a bottle of Wente Bros. Riesling. An elegantly satisfying place to dine in style — The Viceroy.

We’ll be partying about the HMS Bounty (of MGM movie fame) as this issue comes out. It’s arriving 9 days late on account of storms. No wonder they used to sail to Seattle via Honolulu in the old days! She’ll be at Shilshole Marina for a week or so for the public to sample.

Our Mr. Fecker, Mayor of Pioneer Square and one of the partners in Louie’s and the Blue Banjo, reports that attendance at Louie’s has doubled since they put the entrance on the alley, complete with peephole for doorman, “Wolfgang.” You can depart by the backdoor of the Blue Banjo, step down the dark alley to Louie’s. It all gives you a wicked “prohibition era” type feeling.

•

(LATTER-DAY NOTE: Former Stranger editor S.P. Miskowski had the novel idea of turning one entire issue of the paper into a collection of “found texts,” cut and pasted together with no overt acknowledgment of their true origins. My entry combined Eleanor Roosevelt, conservative Hearst Newspapers columnist Westbrook Pegler, some Depression-era activist whose name I’ve since forgotten, and Seattle Guide editor and Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel.)

7/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

PRAY FOR PEACE IN KOREA.

OTHERWISE, WE’D RUN OUT OF SIMPSONS EPISODES

Welcome back to the Henry Mancini memorial edition of Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that’s the only thing wilder than a Vancouver hockey riot.

UPDATES: For those who called about the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library but didn’t want to pay $495 for the professional-studio edition, a popular-price set will be out on Rhino this fall…. I wrote that KING-AM has been bleeding red ink for eons; a staff producer there writes to claim the station finally turned a modest profit last year…. A Wired article traces the currently-popular notion of “The Other,” that art- and lit-crit cliché I wrote about some months back, to French postmodern philosopher Julia Kristeva. She’s apparently the one who first thought of collapsing sociopolitical class analysis into an oversimplified two-tier model of The Dominant Order and The Other, a model that so narrowly defines society’s insiders that it allows many affluent white English majors to classify themselves as outsiders.

FEEDING FRENZIES: Our thanks to those who graciously attended our Misc. 8th Anniversary party and junk food film festival at the Pike St. Cinema. Among the beautiful old Frigidare promo films and Tony the Tiger commercials was a serious issue: Why should you care about junk food (a broad name for things people eat and drink for enjoyment, rather than sustenance)? Because it’s the sure sign of a culture. You won’t find the real Britain on Masterpiece Theatre; you’ll find it in cucumber sandwiches, room-temperature beer, and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. American junk food represents everything this nation stands for: advanced technology and efficient distribution, under the direction of clever marketing, satisfying people’s wants instead of their needs. Take the new Bubble Beeper, an orange plastic box with a pocket clasp and a metallic front label. Inside the flip-top, the 17 sticks of rather ordinary bubble gum (made by Wrigley’s off-brand division) come in wrappers decorated with LCD-style type reading I’LL CALL YOU!, CALL ME, SORRY LINE BUSY, URGENT, or SEE YOU LATER! It’s a “value-added” (costlier than it absolutely has to be) version of what’s already an entertainment food product, with no nutritional purpose. But it’s an expression of many things–our fascination with personal tech, kids’ love of gadgetry and telephony, and corporate America’s drive to commodify the accessories of gangsta rap for suburban consumption.

JOINT VENTURES: We weren’t at the Grateful Dead shows. Hard to attach counterculture street-cred to a band that has a PBS pledge-break special (complete with yuppie phone operators in tye-dye shirts) and its own merchandise show on QVC.

LAVA LITE: We’re not too worried that Mt. Rainier could blow any day, according to a recent National Research Council report. There’ll likely be enough advance warning that any blast zone could be evacuated in time. And maybe it could blow away Southcenter, or the Boeing site that replaced Longacres, so we could start land-use planning in the area over again, only doing it right this time.

`METAL’ MELTDOWN: Adams News, Seattle’s dominant magazine wholesaler, refused to carry the July Heavy Metal, whose cover depicted two robotic stormtroopers (labeled “Tom” and “Jerry”) holding an S&M babe wearing a few strands of leather and a blindfold. Stores serviced by direct-market comix distributors are getting it and some are selling out, even though it’s indistinguishable from anything in the “adult” comix mag’s tradition of gory violence mixed with leering sex.

CYBER SPACES: With the U Book Store cutting back on sales to non-UW personnel, Ballard Computer (which bought The Computer Store) is now the only full-line, all-takers Apple dealer inside the Seattle city limits. Some electronics stores carry some Apple products like the Performas, but only Ballard sells PowerMacs, hi-end laser printers, et al. If you don’t like their prices or their service, you’ll have to go to the suburbs or to mail-order.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The KIRO Radio News Fax is Seattle’s first new daily print publication in our lifetimes (not counting suburban papers). Wish I could say its content was equally momentous. It’s a five-page newsletter (the first is wasted on a cover sheet) with about two dozen brief news, sports and feature items (most shorter than this paragraph) and a few ads, phoned in free every weekday morning to any fax machine whose owner asks for it. A cute idea, but poorly executed. The items are too superficial to be interesting; you get more depth (and a lot more advertising) in a half-hour of KIRO-AM. It might’ve been better if KIRO were in charge. Instead, it’s run by an independent media firm in Bellevue; the station licenses its name and local news briefs to it. The Daily Journal of Commerce used to publish an afternoon “Newsgram” page of tightly-written financial items, distributed in downtown office towers; that was a much better example of condensed info of practical use to its readers.

STREET SEENS: Just because I oppose the Seattle Commons, don’t think I’m against all developments. I say a rousing Yes! to a symphony hall at 3rd & Union, and to moving A Contemporary Theatre into the Eagles Auditorium at 7th & Union. Next: turn the triangle between those two sites and Westlake Center into an all-night strolling and hanging-out area. Seattle needs something like Granville Mall in Vancouver, an all-hours, year-round, open-air gathering place. It’s too late to save the old movie-theater district; and our finally jump-started nightlife is scattered across a half-dozen areas, none feeding into downtown retail. But we can take advantage of real estate possibilities to put nightspots, live theaters, bowling alleys, pool halls, etc. in the Pine-Pike zone. Speaking of great hangouts…

SPACES IN THE HEART: I spent many a lonely evening at Andy’s Cafe on Broadway, home of honest food at honest prices; even got my heart broke by a waitress there. Now it’ll be an expanded version of Belltown espresso haven Septieme (“7e”). The last places to get unpretentious food on the Hill are Dick’s, the Jade Pagoda, Emil’s and IHOP. Why’s it seem that the more streets like B’way strive to become “arty” or “funky,” the less diverse or interesting they get? Speaking of homogenization…

HOPPING MAD: Redhook brewery products will be distributed by Anheuser-Busch, in the brewing equivalent of an indie record label going to bed with the majors. So much for the mystique of microbrew as a bastion of independence from the big boys (expressed in a rival microbrewer’s slogan, “Think Globally–Drink Locally”). Now when you doff a Ballard Bitter, you’ll contribute to the guys behind Spuds McKenzie, the Bud Dry “Alternative Beer” ads, and the capture of killer whales for Busch’s theme parks. (If I didn’t like the stuff I wouldn’t care this much.) Speaking of great independent foodmakers gobbled by “the majors”…

IN THE CHIPS: Tim’s Cascade Chips recently merged with Nalley’s, the Tacoma-based regional food legend, which in turn is being split up into two companies. The potato-chip operation, including Tim’s, is going to Dean Foods, while the rest of the company (chili, sloppy joes, enchiladas, mayonnaise, salad dressings, pickles, et al.) will go to Hormel. You might remember recent ads in which Nalley favorably compared its chili to Hormel’s; we probably won’t see those again. Let’s just hope the new owners don’t mess with the products too much or pay for the purchases by firing people (cf. the Oscar-winning documentary American Dream, on Hormel’s wage-slashing and union-busting). And let’s hope they keep Nalley’s Picadilly Chips, the last salt-and-vinegar potato chips left in the area now that Lay’s version is being discontinued.

(latter-day note: The Nalley/Hormel deal fell through.)

THE WORD: The arrest of Seattle Black Muslim preacher James Bess shocked me and probably other public-access fans. Bess, who allegedly shot and injured another ousted Nation of Islam leader in LA for reasons unknown at press time, was perhaps the most visible face on channel 29. While other volunteer producers found their shows shifted and bumped in the channel’s semiannual lotteries for scarce time slots, Bess always seemed to have from two to four shows every week. He entered each time-slot lottery with multiple applications under multiple program titles, to make sure he’d always stay on the air. His sermons were fiery and assertive, but he held himself with such an air of confidence and stand-up-straight persuasion that it’s hard to imagine him resorting to armed assault, a tactic of the weak and desperate.

SLIPPED DISCS?: After several years of relentless growth, are indie-rock labels overextended? Not only has C/Z cut back on its personnel, eMpTy has moved from its own office to a shared space. Label boss Blake Wright took a day job at Aldus; assistantTammy Watson took a PR job at Fantagraphics (replacing Larry “call me an Iconoclastic Visionary” Reid, now starting his own promo firm). The label reports good sales of its new Sicko CD and hopes to be back at full strength later this summer, even though its top-selling act, Gas Huffer, just signed with the larger indie Epitaph.

There are now between 20 and 75 record companies in Washington, depending on whether you count band-owned and vanity labels. Can they all survive? In theory, if you could get record buyers to support 50 20,000-copy albums instead of any one million-copy seller, you’d have a healthy indie scene.

It’s not that easy, of course; indies sell among the in-crowd fine, but still aren’t accessible by casual consumers in many areas (despite KNDD and the Insomnia and Tower 800 numbers). There are 16 stores in Seattle that sell appreciable amounts of non-major-label discs (plus seven others with limited selections), and four on the Eastside. But just try to find the Spinanes in Moses Lake (Ellensburg yes, but…). Heck, even Bellingham doesn’t have a decent indie store. There’s no quick-fix to this growth ceiling. We’re talking retail infrastructure here.

We can only hope that the underground-rock mystique stays hot long enough that a demand for the real thing filters through across the vast American landscape. That’ll require fans, zines, college and “alternative” radio, clubs, booking agents and bands to hold stronger loyalties to the indie scene, remembering that the media conglomerates are not necessarily our friends. Speaking of which….

COLD TYPE: Are major labels financing “independent” rock zines? So sez Maximum Rock n’ Roll. The self-proclaimed punk bible claims the majors are secretly investing in zines “in exchange for unspecified favors.” You can imagine what those might be–cover stories on bands the label (or “sham indie” companies controlled by the label) wants to hype. It sure explains why certain “alternative” zines have run big stories to plug bland but heavily promoted acts, movie soundtracks, and even TV tie-in discs.

VIRTUAL MATERIALISM: I’ve often felt sorry for poor little rich Barbie; just ‘cuz the character’s got a big chest people think she’s a bimbo, even when she’s a doctor or an astronaut. What she is, is an unabashed celebration of certain traditional feminine values that help drive the consumer economy. She doesn’t teach girls to be passive and dumb; she teaches them to make and spend all the money they can.

This training for life in corporate America is evident in the Barbie video games by Hi Tech Entertainment. In the Barbie game, she (you) searches for what a USA Today report calls “fashion treasures.” In Barbie Game Girl (for Game Boy, natch), you navigate “a mall maze” with Ken at the other end. And in Barbie Super Model, you’re “on a quest to become the hottest of supermodels in Aspen, New York, Hawaii and Hollywood.” There’ll soon be an interactive CD-ROM tour of Barbie and her Magical House. The makers claim they’re performing a service by getting girls interested in computers. But it won’t hurt society if one gender doesn’t get hooked on the left-brain opiate of passive-aggressively manipulating screen objects under pre-defined rules. We don’t need more female gamers, just more female programmers. Speaking of models out for money…

COME ON DOWN DEPT.: Darrington-born MC Bob Barker‘s lately called The Price Is Right “the highest-rated game show on network television”–a sly acknowledgment that it’s now the only game show on network television. But his triumph as last survivor turned sour when Dian Parkinson, the former “Barker’s Beauty” who became a Playboy model at 47, slapped him with an $8 million sexual-harrassment suit. Barker, now 70, countered that they’d had a voluntary affair in the late ’80s, at her instigation.

In an Internet message, a former contestant in beauty pageants he’s hosted claims his straying hands were infamous on the pageant circuit. But modem users love to wean gallows humor from the most serious issues, as in these jokes from America Online: “Would this have happened had he been spayed or neutered?” “The lawyers should have to guess the final settlement amount without going over.” “Hope he made sure he didn’t get Parkinson’s Disease.” “Overheard backstage: `Higher, higher, lower, lower–Plinko!'” And best/ worst of all: “I guess he really does like fur.” Speaking of controversial daytime celebs…

CATHODE CATHARSIS: Having meditated long and hard, I’ve decided I no longer hate Barney the Dinosaur. There are good reasons kids like the Purple One: (1) Parents hate him, so he’s a secret club for kids with none of that “sophisticated” humor that the grownups go for, going against everything boomers expect kids to like; (2) he’s purist television, a long-attention-span show on two obvious studio sets, unlike those disconcerting cut-up video shows like Sesame St. that their parents watched as kids. The show is as calming and reassuring as its star. Beneath its veneer of smarmy cheese it preaches civility and honor in an age ruled by selfishness and rudeness from gangsta rap to Rush Limbaugh, from left-wing elitists to right-wing boors. My only fear is that the Barney generation might grow up to be a reincarnation of the Victorians, who reacted against the decadence of 18th Century England by promoting extreme moralism. Either that, or they’re going to be just as irritatingly perky-bland as some of their elders. Speaking of which…

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SMUG: One thing that bugs me about San Francisco writers is that they seem to think the entire world’s just like San Francisco–an isthmus of self-styled “civilization” surrounded by vast fascistic deserts of heathen polyester-clad Sunset magazine readers. A worldview of hip liberals vs. square conservatives is impractical in Seattle, where so many of the closed-minded bourgeois squares fighting to stamp out original expression and true diversity claim to be political liberals. A square liberal loves “The Arts” but doesn’t want anything too new or harsh. Square liberals mistake Dave Barry for outré social comment, Linda Ronstadt for rock, and Chiluly for cutting-edge art. Squre liberals support Hollywood location shoots in town, but ignore indigenous local filmmaking.

Seattle politics is run by square-liberal boomers, by a Democratic machine in cahoots with high-powered attorneys and construction magnates. This machine’s progressive reputation is now cracking, as its obsessive-compulsive ideal of “A Clean City” (all-affluent, all-boomer, almost all-white) becomes more irreconcilable with reality and also with basic ideals of social decency. We’re witnessing an end to the premise that whitebread 1968 liberal arts graduates know what’s best for everybody and have everybody’s best interests at heart. With the poster law, the sitting law, the Commons plan, and the concerted drive to subsidize a bigger Nordstrom without bothering to replace Woolworth’s, it’s clear that the square-liberal boomers, and the politicians who strive for boomer appeal, aren’t always on the side of what’s best for the whole city.

MEMO TO THE MEDIA: Please stop using that dorky name “Generation X” to describe modern-day teens and young adults. Nobody likes it except stupid journalists. Generation X was a British punk band that broke up when today’s high schoolers were still in kindergarten. Speaking of which…

TONY! TONY! TONY!: The media mavens have been going agog over Tony Bennett’s well-received MTV Unplugged special last month, acting like it’s just so totally weird that a guy that old could appeal to their stupid stereotype of the younger generation. The reporters saying this are, of course, working for the same media industry that perpetually defines young people as A Market to be reached by whatever boomer-age marketers currently imagine to be Hot, Wild and Now. This approach invariably leads to such pathetic excuses for hipness as rapping cartoon animals, Details magazine, suntanned square-jawed surfer dudes in New York-designed “grunge” wear, and Marky Mark. The media business (and various related marketing businesses like restaurants) don’t get that many young adults don’t want to be force-fed patronizing simulacra of trendiness. They want things that are actually good, including things that evoke a sense of connection to some artistic tradition. That’s why the old Coke bottle’s so in now, along with vintage clothing stores, old magazines, and classic funky home furnishings. That’s why you see 20-year-olds at Dead shows, or reading Bukowski and Burroughs. That’s why great old restaurants lose all their coolness when they start trying too hard to be hip. Most recent case: The new owners of Vito’s Restaurant on First Hill trashed the place’s great old juke box full of Peggy Lee and Hank Williams for a CD player equipped with the requisite recent rock hits. Speaking of mistaken attempts to be hip…

RETURN TO THE OK CORRAL: The Coca-Cola Co. isn’t placing all its now-generation marketing bets on OK Soda. It’s also test-marketing its faux-Snapple line of fruit drinks, Fruitopia. Thsee strange-tasting sweetened beverages come in 16-ounce bottles with labels in ripoff World Beat label designs, with the flavor names “The Grape Beyond,” “Strawberry Passion Awareness,” “Citrus Consciousness” and “Fruit Integration.” At least one of the varieties uses taste-neutral pear juice to manipulate its sweetness, a trick used for years by Tree Top mixed juices. (For an independent taste of the same premise try Arizona Ice Tea and Cowboy Cocktails, made in Brooklyn, in big 24-oz. cans at the Gollywog Grocery on 1st and Blanchard.)

SOCCER TO ME: I confess I had a long couple of days and passed out on the sofa while trying to watch my first World Cup match. Still, it was great to see the entire US sports press go agog over the first American World Cup victory in 44 years, burying deep in their stories the fact that the game was won on a fluke (an opposing player mistakenly deflected the ball into his own team’s net). And it’s cool to see the games without commercial breaks, just corporate logos in the corner of the screen. Other kinds of programs oughta consider this device. Let’s see uninterrupted movies, shown in widescreen letterbox format with AT&T ads scrolling across the black bars. Or run the soaps with little logos denoting the toothpastes and hair-care products of the stars, alternating with subtitles explaining every character’s convoluted past for the benefit of new viewers. Just expect some actresses to make demands in their contracts that their big dramatic scenes not be accompanied by Massengill logos. Speaking of global broadcasting concepts…

NAFTA NASTIES: The trade papers claim Fox is going to finally start having daytime soaps, sorta. They’re contracting with the Mexican network Televisa to produce English-language versions of Televisa’s infamously sappy, 100-episode telenovelas. They’ll be made like the Spanish-language versions of early Hollywood talkies were made, with a separate cast taking over the same sets after the regular cast is done for the day. Somehow, it just won’t be the same to see these shows and know what they’re saying.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Craisins, recently given out in half-ounce bags downtown, are the Ocean Spray grower co-op’s attempt to find yet another non-winter-holiday market for the tart little red bog fruit. As the name implies they’re dried cranberries with juice added back in and pumped full o’ sugar (the leading ingredient). They look like regular raisins with red food coloring. They taste like the lumpy bits of holiday cranberry sauce.

KRISTEN PFAFF, 1967-1994: Yet another creative free spirit destroyed by the global drug cartel, an even more sinister institution than the major record labels. I’m no straight-edger but I know there’s nothing even remotely “rebellious” about getting hooked on smack. It makes you less capable of assertive action. It greatly increases your need for money while decreasing your ability to earn it. It makes you an even bigger slave to the system than you already are. Which may be one reason why neo-fascist dictators and the US “intelligence” establishment love to be part of the business of selling it to you.

‘TIL OUR NEXT VIRTUAL GATHERING, be sure to visit the new Costco on the big concrete cavity that used to be Aurora Village, and heed these prophetic words from a 1970 Esquire fashion spread about the “Pepsi Proletariat” look: “It consists of overalls, flannel shirt, and heavy work boots, the traditional accoutrements of the working class…. To adopt the Pepsi Proletariat guise is to express one of the more euphoriant pipe dreams of the counterculture: the hope that a coalition may someday be fashioned out of workers and freaks.”

PASSAGE

An anonymous Searle pharmacologist, quoted in that spiritual guide for our times, Listening to Prozac: “If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.”

REPORT

Again, thanks to the select few of you who attended our little film screening/soirée in June. Another might be held this fall; watch this space for details.

Am currently heading into the slimy depths of production on my local-music history book. I really need two things right now: (1) Pictures, including band photos, record covers/sleeves, posters, tickets, ads, and old zines; and (2) Your recommendations on which current Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia-Bellingham club bands should be in the book.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Nunatak”

2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.

THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.

CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.

EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.

GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!

SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”

DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)

MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.

CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.

YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it: Deluxe.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.

THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”

THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”

DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.

NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.

PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”

DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).

A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.

She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.

Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”

PASSAGE

Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”

REPORT

My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

12/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.

WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA

This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).

REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.

Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.

COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.

ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.

RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.

POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?

THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.

DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”

TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.

PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.

BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”

SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.

PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.

THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.

ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.

XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.

FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”

PASSAGE

Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”

REPORT

My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?

Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phenocryst”

11/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-cult report that knows something’s gone wrong again when the songs on 120 Minutes are indistinguishable from the songs on VH-1, that loved Edward Muybridge‘s ol’ stop-motion photography experiments long before thatU2 video ripped him off.

STOP THE MADNESS!: Seems hardly a week goes by without another important cool thing about Seattle dying off. Next is the giant downtown Woolworth emporium, home of Seattle’s best selections of cheesy crossword magazines, kitschy souvenir mugs, by-the-pound chocolates, home aquariums, 10-pack tube sox, photo booths, board games, and fedoras (it’s where I’ve gotten all my hats). Where will we get any of these in the future? At some small-selection pharmacy or remote mall store? Hah! The store’s not performed poorly; the company just wants to cannibalize the variety stores for their real estate, then shunt the proceeds into more Foot Locker mall outlets. Do we need more places to buy Air Jordans and fewer places to buy $9 canvas deck shoes?

BP SELLS ALL WASHINGTON ASSETS: Guess we’ll have to go back to pumping gas into the pickup instead of replenishing the petrol supply of the lorry. Pity.

GENTRIFICATION MARCHES ON: The Eastlake dock that housed the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store for decades will now be a franchise of T.G.I. Friday’s, the NY-based king of meatmarket bars.

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: It’s been a bad year for our pals in Tacoma. Their plan for a beautiful walkway from downtown to the waterfront died when Seattle talk-radio jerks branded it a waste of state funds. Then they lost the landmark ASARCO smelter smokestack, the Anti-Space Needle. Now the B&I Circus Store (one of the last independent discount stores in a region that used to be awash with Valu-Marts, Gov-Marts and Yard Birds) is bankrupt and will likely be sold to some chain, sending Ivan the gorilla to some out-of-state zoo. At least Tacoma’s greatest gift to rock in the past 25 years, Girl Trouble, isn’t breaking up as far as we know.

IN-A-NAME DEPT.: Haven’t said it before, but we’ve always been perturbed by the idea of Ortho brand contraceptives. Would you really put something in your body that had the same name as a bug poison? And do the burly truck jockeys ridin’ on Hyster brand heavy equipment know that that’s the old Greek word for a uterus?

MOREL CONCERNS: Mushroom hunters in Eastern Oregon forests have been shooting one another this year over the precious fungi. So much for the notion that the stuff makes you pacified and at one with the universe.

AD OF THE MONTH (from the Weekly): “I wish to apologize to all the people I called fat when I was selling a weight loss product. I am very sorry I offended each of you. I failed to see the essence of your being and your uniqueness. Maggie.” Runner-up (same source): “Achtung Baby! U2 can earn 3K/mo. starting in my international brokerage firm…”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Death of Rock n’ Roll, by Times freelancer Jeff Pike, is more than just a big book with all your favorite dead-rock-star vignettes. It also covers rock songs about death (especially the teen-suicide and car-crash songs of the early ’60s) and essays about “the three deaths” of rock itself (the clampdowns in the late ’50s, the wilting of flower power in the late ’60s, and punk’s supposed shattering of R&R populism in the late ’70s. I’d argue with the last point: instead of driving the final nail in rock’s coffin, punk and “alternative” music revived and codified the image of bad boys with guitars, for better or worse. Speaking of which…

AUDIO FILES: Didn’t care much for George Clark’s Stranger parody, The Whimper (too held-back and off-target), but his tape of Six Delightful Grunge Jingles is great. It’s the evil twin of Grunge Lite: Instead of making familiar tunes of bitterness more “commercial,” he makes bitter commercials. In the form of a fictional demo tape for a radio-ad production company, he introduces a band called Behavior Management that grinds out a perfect generic jam of drum thuds and guitar distortion, capped by a screeching rendition of “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” The other five jingles further explore the dichotomy between aggressive-poser music and ad happy-talk, as well as the desperation of marketers trying to latch onto any fad. Speaking of which…

DUDS (P-I headline on regional fashions): “It’s not just grungy anymore.” It never was. How many times to we have to say it: What the media call “grunge fashion” was invented by Marc Jacobs in New York, based mostly on Greenwich Village rich-kid primping. Don’t blame anybody here for it…Or maybe blame Charles Schulz. He’s got a new sweatshirt of Pigpen with the simple slogan “Original Grunge.” Speaking of which…

MORE DUDS: Nirvana agreed to have a logo sticker inserted in the new Sassy, but the band undoubtedly didn’t plan for it to be stapled in the middle of a fashion spread called “Oops, Your Bra Is Showing.” The sticker appears right in front of a monochrome shot of an outstretched butt in sheer undies. Speaking of which…

RETRO GRADES: Kudos to the Pearl Jam guys for refusing to be interviewed for that tacky, utterly point-missing Time cover story last week. First, the mag makes the most pathetic definition of “alternative rock” this side of Rolling Stone. Then, it patronizes present-day rockers as mere ’60s throwbacks without even mentioning those ’60s bands who really did influence today’s kids (MC5, Stooges, Velvets). Then, it chooses as the definitive angry young punk combo an outfit that never claimed to belong to any dissonant postpunk genre, but whose neo-blues-rock sound probably appeals to yup journalists more than the N-boys, the Overkill kids, the Pumpkins, the The, or other still-popular yet somewhat more street-level bands. But at least Time gives its clumsy sort of recognition to modern rock — unlike a 10-page rant in the new Utne Reader, that pseudo-liberal magazine that thinks the most oppressed people in the world are affluent white boomers. In it, some ex-hippie whines that there hasn’t been any good rock since (you guessed it!) the ’60s. He insists there won’t be any good rock again until those persnickety kids start obeying their elders by (you guessed it!) conforming to the blues-rock tradition. He doesn’t see that today’s post-mass-media world doesn’t need white R&B; we can get our black music from black people today. What the rest of us can make is music, art, etc. that speaks to our own life situations, no matter how rootless and disillusioning they may be, and hope the message doesn’t get too diluted in the hype. Speaking of which…

IN MOTION: In the new Wired, Paul Saffo posits that all it takes to start a cultural revolution in America is about 100 people plus overzealous press hype. That was about the number of hardcore Beats prior to the publication of On the Road (as Saffo quotes George Leonard), and about the number of real Cyberpunks in the mid-’80s. Saffo could’ve added, but didn’t, that there were maybe 100 Dadaists in 1920, or 2-300 Soundgarden and Green River fans in 1986, or about that many Riot Grrrls in early 1991. Seen in this light, a mass event like Woodstock could be viewed not as the dawn of an era as it was usually hyped, but as its close. It could also mean that we really do have to be as afraid of little hate groups as the media want us to be. Or, taken to an extreme, it could mean that any movement big enough to have its own professional magazine is already too unwieldy big to be effective. By the time the mainstream media hears about a scene, it may already be over. Speaking of which…

THE NON-SHOCK OF THE NON-NEW: Most “political” writing and art from as late as last October seems utterly dated now. One can almost look at the late ’80s-early ’90s as what all nostalgized eras are called, a simpler time. Everything seemed obvious then: “Activist” art didn’t have to bother with changing the world, only with announcing your own righteousness. All you had to do to call yourself politically active was sit and complain about Bush and other easily dehumanized targets. Because Republican rule was considered permanent, you didn’t have to bother with devising any practical agendas of your own. You could just keep making pseudo-“confrontational” art that only slammed people you safely knew wouldn’t be in your audience. Then we got a president who wants to make a better country, even if a ’50s-style Congressional coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats doesn’t want to help too much. There are detailed debates going on about not just whether but how to climb out of America’s assorted messes. You have to actually think about things these days, not just follow some “hip” line. Speaking of which…

PRESSED: Remember when the Weekly “discovered” the Italia restaurant as headquarters of “the new art scene” in town? Guess who’s on the ground floor of the paper’s new building? Speaking of which…

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: NYC politicians are supposedly giving up on their 25-year dream of razing most of Times Square for bland monolithic office towers. Actually, they still want to build the office towers, but now they’re grudgingly willing to have street-level retail in them, maybe some fast-food chains with appropriate-for-the-area loud signs. They probably wouldn’t think to have the wig shops, music stores, and other places that give the human touch to that huge district. And no more porn, of course. Speaking of which…

PRO-CREATIVITY: It’s common knowledge that the best aspects of most XXX videos are the titles based on regular movies (Fleshdance, Edward Penishands). So don’t be surprised that a Nevada company’s made Sleeping With Seattle.

CATHODE CORNER: Imitation Ren & Stimpy cartoon shows are popping up all over. They’ve got the flashy colors and gross-out gags but not the comedic or artistic excellence instilled by fired R&S creator John Kricfalusi. Nickelodeon’s new Rocko is produced by the same in-house team that’s preparing the new version of R&S, to premiere later this year. If the sorry Rocko‘s any evidence, the new R&S won’t be much. And the Ted Turner people running Hanna-Barbera have 2 Stupid Dogs, whose rehashed retro-’50s design is unsupported by flat gag plots….Meanwhile, if the makers of New Pink Panther show had to give the cat a voice, it shouldn’t have been the nasal Canadian whine of Matt Frewer. To me, the only guy living who could voice this character right would be Tony Bennett.

AUTO MANIA: Damn, I want one of those 2.5-foot-wide “commuter cars” proposed by Subaru to meet Calif.’s forthcoming tough emissions requirements. The prototype shown in the Times is bright red and about the size of an Indy car, seating one passenger behind the driver. Utterly, utterly cool.

ICY DILEMMA: I’ve been receiving reports from college towns across the country, via people on my newsletter mailing list. They’re talking about what they see as a new social coldness on campuses. Students are shutting themselves off from public displays of affection or courtship. Men and women aren’t even looking one another in the eye.

Under the new propriety it’s OK to have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you publicly treat the relationship nonchalantly, as settled down into blasé platonics; otherwise, you’re supposed to be aloof and untroubled by those pesky anti-intellectual hormones. That’s not being cool, that’s being frozen.

There are plenty of potential causes: a decade-long media campaign to instill a fear of sex (you won’t get AIDS by eye contact), ongoing ill-will between macho men and judgmental women, rising heterophobia within the boho/alternative community (reminding me of a line attributed to Robert Anton Wilson or to the book Principia Discordia about “what was once compulsory is now forbidden”).

It is possible to be a man (or a woman who loves them) and a human being. Don’t buy into one-dimensional stereotypes, mainstream or alternative flavors. You don’t lose your soul via emotional intimacy, you strengthen it. This neo-puritanism doesn’t deter abusive relationships (creeps don’t bother with intellectual dogma except when it suits them). It only reinforces the fears of smart but shy young sensitives, the very people who need relationships, who could bring more humanness into the social realm.

It’s OK to be whatever sex and sex preference you are, even if it’s an outré one. It’s not what’s in your pants that makes you good or evil, it’s what’s in your heart.

MISC. UNPLUGGED: Power outages aren’t supposed to happen to urbanites with underground wiring. They’re supposed to happen to middle-class couples out in some forlorn suburb they mistakenly think is “The Country,” where overhead wires dangle dangerously beneath wind-vulnerable tree limbs. Little did I realize (‘tho I should’ve, from friends’ experiences in the ’88 downtown outage) that all these new Regrade condo projects had been fed into the same aging WWII-era circuitry.

So, around 2 a.m. Monday morning, I glanced at the digital alarm to find it off. Everything was off, even at the seniors’ housing out the window. Only the emergency lights were on in my hallway (by 9 a.m. their batteries died, and the windowless halls became pitch black). The Sunday/Monday wee hours are radio’s traditional dead spot, so there was no news of the outage ’til KIRO-AM signed on for the morning commute. Even then, local radio stations seemed to care little for the story, even the stations that were in the blackout zone. You could go for two or three consecutive news breaks without hearing a thing about it. In the Information Age, this is a pathetic excuse for “When You Want to Know First.”

‘Twas weird to see the Space Needle enshrouded in the morning fog without even its top aircraft beacon. ‘Twas weirder to glance into the Western Ave. band studio, one of those mazes of cheaply-built sheetrock walls; too bad one of the bands based there,Candlebox, couldn’t live up to its name.

Found myself depending on the kindness of strangers, including one household where I spent one night on a couch with two hyperactive kittens shoving each other all night for the right to claw me. More frustrating were my attempts to recruit sympathy from acquaintances outside the affected area; so many “hip” folks these days are so proudly ignorant of any local news, that I had to explain what an outage was and why I had one.

As my computer/video/stereo withdrawal set in, I caught a glimpse of the pristine life of info-chastity my acquaintances were living. Its simplicity was seductive, but dull! I decided quickly that I like modern life. Heat, hot water, electric shavers, coffeemakers, toasters, dishwashers, answering machines, VCRs, and modems are good things (‘tho there was something nice about not hearing the next apartment’s bass speaker).

People in the neighborhood were serviced with a Red Cross meal van, serving up free coffee, fruit, soup, and Spam sandwiches. I spent as much time out of the house as I could, hanging out at art spaces. The evening after getting re-plugged, I was doing the Pio. Square gallery crawl and happened to run into ol’ pal Bill Rieflin, who’s drummed in a couple of famous bands but was best known here for his work with one of Seattle’s best-ever combos, the Blackouts.

Lessons? Only that big developments, even in established urban areas, entail a public price for infrastructure. City Light bet it could get away without upgrading its wiring system, and lost. The Seattle Commons plan, which would stick a population the size of Pullman into what’s now a square mile of light industry, will take a lot of public investment. The advocacy group Allied Arts wants a public vote before the city spends or rezones toward the Commons condos. They’re right. I like living downtown, and wouldn’t mind more company, but we all need a voice in whether to adopt this massive scheme.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try to figure why the state puts signs in over-21 places saying you’ve gotta be 18 to buy cigs, and hope all your troubles disappear as completely as the Canadian Conservatives.

PASSAGE

Sign outside Dr. Zipper on Fremont Ave.: “When I, Dr. Zipper, made the Zippocratic Oath, I pledged to fix zippers on PARKAS and PACKS, Heal SLEEPING BAGS and TENTS. Apply the mending touch to snaps and buckles. Restore CAMPING GEAR and SOFT LUGGAGE to useful life. Invisibly Patch Gore-Texreg. and other STORMGEAR. Restitch CLIMBING GEAR for maximum safety. Teach the MENDING ABC’s: All-One-Zipper Meshed-In-Line, All-One-Zipper Save-You-Money, New-Life-To-Outdoor-Gear Lesson. Don’t Replace! REPAIR-REPAIR-REPAIR OK!” (Cf. Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles.)

REPORT

Still seeking a publisher for my local-music history book. Thanx to all who’ve participated in it so far.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pithacoid”

10/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAIN IS.

Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.

WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”

BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.

Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.

How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.

We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.

Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.

If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.

KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.

MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.

WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.

FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.

ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.

BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.

GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?

COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.

CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.

FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.

BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”

DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.

`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.

MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.

STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).

ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.

GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.

SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.

PASSAGE

Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”

REPORT

Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.

Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Audile”

9/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

NO WEATHER JOKES! NO SLUG JOKES! NO COFFEE JOKES!

Here at Misc., the only column that wonders why ads for toilet paper consistently use images of infants (the only humans who don’t use the stuff), we feel obligated to repeat a disclaimer issued earlier this summer: A concert held in the middle of Eastern Washington with no public transportation cannot by any logical definition be called a “Seattle” show. I wouldn’t even call it an Ellensburg show.

`OTHER’ WISE: Two readers have suggested that the source of “The Other,” that now-ubiquitous term used by Reflex writers to rant about how bigoted everybody outside the Art World is, was Simone de Beauvior’s classic essay The Second Sex. She apparently used it to describe how people divide the world of their own minds and bodies (“The Self”) from everything else in the universe (“The Other”). Most of the folks using the term today intend to denounce other people’s bigotries, but inadvertently reveal their own (damning entire groups of people, defined by such totally superficial criteria as their race and gender, as incapable of sympathy toward Otherness). We need alternatives to bigotry, not just alternate forms of bigotry.

NOSTALGIA REVISITED: Pop-culture recycling is completely out of hand. With every permutation of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s re-played to death, they’re now reviving gimmicks from the ’80s that didn’t make it the first time. Seventeen brashly proclaims that thefashion trend for fall will be — ready? — “The New Romantics: Fall’s fresh style takes its cue from the romantic dandy, mixing floaty white shirts with an old English beat.” Where’s Adam Ant when we need him?

Speaking of dumb fads, did I tell ya I got a designer grunge fashion spread from a March ish of the Glasgow Sunday Post? Imagine — telling the Scots how to wear plaid.

And even worse, some UW-licensed sweatshirt company’s got a “Grunge Puppy” design: a UW Husky looking like it’s high on something, in torn jeans, Docs and an open flannel shirt over a T-shirt reading “Eat, Sleep, Party.” Looks as horrid as it reads.

MUST TO AVOID: Under no circumstances should you pay money for The Seattle Style Guide, a self-published handbook for new residents. The author lives in Bellevue (the first sign of knowing nothing about Seattle), he refers to certain obnoxious yuppie bars as hangouts for the “artistic crowd,” he calls Kenny G Seattle’s proudest contribution to music, and he suggests you learn to appreciate grunge by playing a little Pearl Jam in between your Eagles records.

CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE DEPT.: KCPQ’s got this ad chiding all the recent turmoil, firings and resignations in local TV news departments, and offering its own nightly information alternatives – A Current Affair and Inside Edition!

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Teen Fag is a little zine of stories and art not exclusively for teens or fags. Its main selling point is a review of the final Seattle show by G.G. Allin, NY’s self-proclaimed “violent and obscene rock performer,” who died weeks later. There’s also an extensive piece on Naughty Bits cartoonist Roberta Gregory. Available at Sound Affects Records on E. John (home of the sign, “Hey boys and girls: Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work”)….

Also available there is Sixth Form, a stapled Xeroxreg. zine with a thickly laminated cover, devoted to the (or should I say “thee”) gothic side of things. Issue #2 documents the heretofore undocumented Seattle/Salt Lake City band connection, apparently based on the ethereal/dreamscape bands Faith and Disease, Mary Throwing Stones and Ursula Tree. The zine celebrates a tight little clique of black-shawled explorers down there in Zion. Local coverage includes Diamond Fist Werny, Self Help Seminar, and a brief piece on Common Language‘s forthcoming British CD. (Hey, Common-ers: You’re one of the greatest bands around, but import-only releases by American alternative bands sucked 13 years ago. They still suck today. Same goes for the Walkabouts: Please get your stuff out at the affordable price, even if it’s on a label the size of eMpTy.)

DEAD AIR: It’s been a while since we talked of the KCMU Konflict. The CURSE/UW lawsuit is somewhere in the digestive tract of litigation. It’s been almost a year since station management imposed authoritarian controls and bland programming. Their official reason was to keep increasing station ratings and revenues. Even by those dubious measures, they’re an utter failure. So why would they apparently rather see the station die than admit they made a mistake?

It’s becoming clear that money isn’t what they’re after. The mess now seems to really be after the one thing all good UW administrators crave above all other desires: administrative turf. In the “nonprofit” equivalent of a corporate takeover, the honchos at KUOW down the hall wanted to assert control over KCMU, to turn it from a volunteer community station to a paid-staff institution that would suck up to wealthy listeners and corporate donors in the established NPR manner. They sincerely don’t understand that KCMU thrived as a very different station, with a different audience and a different operating philosophy. If they really want to make KCMU strong again, they should gentlemanly step aside and let it be run by the people who know how to run it right, the ex-volunteers who built it.

CLICHESTOPPERS NOTEBOOK: The only thing more lame nowadays than calling your band “grunge” is to call it “not grunge.” I’ve been reading the latter label applied in the last month to everything from the cowgirl-kitsch Ranch Romance to local rappers to a compilation record of frat-party bands (see below). As early as 1990, stupid national rockzines labeled 90 percent of Seattle bands as “not your typical Seattle band.” Don’t tell me what you’re not, tell me what you are.

NOTES: Just when you thought music meant something again, the forces of mindless entertainment prepare to counterattack. I’ve seen what promoters and managers are offering as the Next Big Thing, and it ain’t pretty: white funk bands. Jocks and fratboys from Portland, Boise and elsewhere, in backward caps and butt-cleavage jeans, waving attempted guesses of gang hand signals. These guys reinterpret Funkadelic and Run-DMC the way George Thorogood reinterpreted the blues, into one-dimensional macho posturing. The sounds associated by mainstream America (rightly or wrongly) with drug dealers are being revamped into the property of drug buyers. Actually, some of it’s stupid-cute, as long as you don’t take these guys as seriously as they take themselves. Few onstage sights are sillier than accountants’ sons hunching their backs and shouting “Yo!” And as for the authenticity issue, ya gotta figure that your average ex-high school football player has probably had more black friends than your average ex-conservatory jazz player.

CAN’T YOU SMELL THAT SMELL?: One of the few pleasures of my current unemployment (you thought this column was a full-time job or something?) is living without fear of the dreaded cologne cult cornering me at my desk. At most every office I’ve worked in, even spaces separated from the public by two layers of reception desks, I’d invariably get confronted this time of year by blank-eyed young adult males demanding that I buy their cheesy impostor colognes or cheesier framed prints of floral arrangements. I don’t know who they are or where they come from. I haven’t been able to stop any of them long enough to ask.

CULTURE CLUB: With something of a budget finally passed and health-care reform a while away, the right-wing Gridlock Machine has been backtracking for targets. Among the “scandals” recently recycled on talk radio and in pundit magazines is that all-purpose nemesis, the National Endowment for the Arts. They’re giving the same ol’ blah-blah about Our Tax Dollars and flaky artist types who mock all that is pure and proper. The real scandal about American arts funding isn’t that taxpayers are supporting too much “controversial” art but too little.

A couple of people who say “fuck” on stage notwithstanding, most NEA money subsidizes formula entertainment for the rich. It’s just as bad on the local level. Washington’s reputation as an artistic center is overrated and based more on consumption than production. We rank well in the bottom half of states in terms of public arts support. And a lot of that money goes either to bland sculptures by out-of-state artists, to “major performing institutions,” or to “support services” (buildings and bureaucrats); while the citizens who make images/films/texts, particularly of the non-touristy or non-upscale kind, scrape by as always.

The rich should pay for their own lifestyles, either directly or thru corporate support. I don’t wanna see any bassoonists lose their jobs in today’s economy, but if the symphony and the Rep are gonna get public money, it should be for public stuff: free or discounted shows, in-school appearances, etc. Since we’re always gonna have inadequate arts funding, what we can spend should emphasize investment in new works, works that might or might not find a big audience, works that might or might not even be good (experiments must be allowed to fail).

NEWS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE NEWS: About 10 Seafair parade drunks headed to Broadway near midnight 7/30, presumably to fag-bash (baseball bats in hand), but were rounded up by a herd of police and State Patrol cars sent up the hill from the parade site.

COP OUT?: Twist Weekly claims to be the real reason Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons resigned. The gay tabloid ran some articles about Paul Grady, an openly gay police sergeant who resigned in May. He said it due to harassment by fellow officers; but only Twistreported Grady’s claim that Fitzsimons specifically allowed and even encouraged the harassment. More damaging, Twist claims Fitzsimons’s homophobic attitude was a front — that the chief privately made moves on Grady and other male officers, and that he once tried to pick up a teenage restaurant busboy. Local mainstream media (except for KVI talk host Mike Siegel) pooh-poohed or hush-hushed the allegations, and treated Fitzsimons’s sudden resignation as the ordinary retirement of a great public servant. (Seattle Weekly did mention it, including Fitzsimons’s denials of all charges). If true, it’s another tragedy of the Closet — of someone trapped between his true self and a career that made him deny it, only to hurt himself and others. In any case, Fitzsimons still leaves a questionable legacy: the harassment of gay officers, overzealous tactics against young and/or black people, the still-in-the-works Weed and Seed paramilitary-occupation plan.

POST(ER) IMPRESSIONISM: Somebody (not me) put up street posters along Broadway and U Way, to harass my ex-employerFantagraphics Books. Around an old teenage photo of co-owner Kim Thompson (misspelled as “Thomson”) and rows of dollar signs, the poster invites people to work there and “earn up to $500 a week. Summer may be hot, but the heat is on!” Apparently, the office was inundated by calls from Ave rats seeking big bucks at the comix publisher. The hoax was probably instigated by one of those firees. The same person may have been responsible for a press release claiming Fantagraphics star Peter Bagge (Hate) was leaving to start his own comix company; the phone number on the press release belongs to a Bellevue dry cleaner.

PHILM PHUN: If you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing some stupid movie star favorably describing their stupid movie as “like a roller coaster ride,” sometimes using old Disneyland lingo as “an E Ticket ride.” For that matter, a lot of films these days are being turnedinto theme park rides, usually cheesy and expensive ones. I say, if we’re going to have theme park attractions based on movies, let’s have ’em based on good movies: The Murnau Sunrise streetcar, the Magnificent Ambersons sleigh ride, the Lover Model A (on a fake colonial-Saigon street), the Women on the Verge taxi, the (adult-scale) Battleship Potemkin baby carriage, the Detour hitchhiking experience, the Lift elevator ride, the Women in Love male wrestling show…the list is endless. And concession stands: Under the Volcano bar drinks, Merchant-Ivory cucumber sandwiches, Repo Man plates of shrimp, Prospero’s Books wedding feasts. Let’s have licensed merchandise from good movies, too: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! bath toys, When the Wind Blows fallout detectors…

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: I know this department used to appear a lot more often in the past than it does now, but that’s because fewer great new junk foods are being developed these days. One reason: the consumer-products conglomerates, like the media conglomerates, are fading. The recession’s led consumers toward store-brand products, while the breakup of the mass media leave fewer resources to build new brands. (Procter & Gamble, once TV’s biggest advertiser, whose daytime dramas inspired the term “soap opera,” is laying off an eighth of its workforce due to permanent downsizing.) But General Mills is giving it one more go by launching Fingos, billed as “the cereal you eat with your fingers.” They’re actually like little cinnamon-graham or oat crackers, and quite habit-forming indeed. They’re also a great on-the-run alternative to gooey breakfast bars.

DYING WORDS: Two separate parties have sent me copies of These EXIT Times, an 8-pp. zine distributed at the Oregon Country Fair by a small group called VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; the acronym refers to “vehemence”). Business interests sometimes accuse environmentalists of being anti-people; these folks really are. They want the human race to agree to die off without reproducing, so “the earth can recover.” They don’t want you to kill yourself, just to leave no progeny. I don’t see how they can expect ideology to overcome standard-equipment biological instinct. Besides, why preserve the land for future generations if there won’t be any? (Remember Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt, who said it was OK to exhaust the Earth because the Rapture was coming soon?)

ON THAT INSPIRATIONAL NOTE, be sure to visit the years-in-the-making Toaster Museum inside the Wonderful World of Art studio-gallery, refurbish your home for cheap with durable, utilitarian items from office furniture surplus stores (dumping the working tools of all those laid-off bank employees), and heed these words of Bret Maverick: “My pappy always said to never cry over spilt milk. It could’ve been whiskey.”

PASSAGE

Robert Anton Wilson from Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (published in 1992, already badly dated): “In an accelerating, fast-evolving universe, whoever does not change moves backward relatively. Did you ever notice that takes only 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative, without changing a single idea?”

REPORT

Still looking for people to talk to for my history of the Seattle music scene. I especially need to talk to people who’ve been involved with local music since the mid-’80s, not just from the early punk days. So write me, OK?

Also, I’m thinking of an alternative tourist guide to Seattle, showing the joints everybody who comes here wants to see but regular tourist guides don’t mention (the Off Ramp, Jimi’s grave, et al.). Depending on space, it may also have a few cheap eating/drinking/shopping/staying places. What do you think should be in it? (Don’t nominate only your own business.)

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lenticular”

THE REAL MESSAGE OF `EDUCATIONAL’ CARTOONS:

YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH SHODDY WORK

IF IT MEETS BUREAUCRATIC REQUIREMENTS

8/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger columns)

AREN’T YOU GLAD BUDWEISER’S GOT BRANCH PLANTS?

Here at Misc., where we can’t help but repeat what you all must have thought about Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts (i.e., surely he could have picked better), we think the next Brit blue-eyed soul singer, Mercer Island blues babe, or frat-boy funk band that pretends to be black should have to earn it. Get thrown out of Denny’s, get hassled by cops just for standing outside, get rejected for jobs and mortgages for no good reason, see your band blackballed from almost every venue and rental hall in town while blue-eyed party boys imitate your music at showcase clubs every week. Only then you could boast about how much soul you’ve got.

UPDATE: Remember when we talked about the old Seattle band that had a logo instead of a written name and a yelp instead of a spoken name? They’ve re-formed! Look for ’em in the club listings any week now, printed as “Aiieee!” or something similar.

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: During the Stranger‘s recent off week, some folks with access to DTP and too much time on their hands created a 12-pp. spoof, the Whimper. It’s OK and sorta funny, ‘cept for the “Miscue” column. I’ve been spoofed two or three times now, and nobody’s gotten it right. Keep trying.

1991 NOSTALGIA: I’d forgotten, as many of you likely forgot, that no Democrat gets nominated for President without the support of pundits and interest groups that demand a business-as-usual foreign policy. By starting Gulf War Lite, the Pentagon’s acting just like the Irish and Mideast vigilante armies that answer opponents’ isolated acts of mindless terror with their own. The week before the missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ, the new Wired had a short article claiming tomorrow’s warfare would be “infrastructure war”: precision raids against electronic and information targets. Maybe Wired really is the magazine o’ the future it claims to be.

LACTOSE INTOLERANCE: Tower Records Pulse! sez Danken’s licensed “Strawberries and Pearl Jam” ice cream won’t come back from its limited production engagement, partly ‘cuz some band members are anti-dairy vegans. One potential successor: “Nirvanilla.”

THE SAME OLD SAW: KIRO’s running a half-hour infomercial paid by the timber industry. Washington Private Forest Report, hosted by ex-KIRO anchorman Jim Harriott, is a self-congratulatory paean for timber management’s current environmental practices, with edited remarks by corporate, governmental, tribal and environmental “leaders” who all back the industry line about “a balanced solution” between ecological and commercial needs (i.e., letting the big companies cut all they can get away with). The show only discusses practices on company-owned lands, without directly mentioning the dispute over clearcutting old growth on Forest Service lands, though its “trust us” message is clearly meant to apply to public as well as private lands. Shows like this reduce issue politics to the level of campaign politics: the side with money gets to say anything in the media at any time; the side without money only gets a few words in real newscasts, edited by station employees and “balanced” with words from the moneyed side.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Zealot claims to be Seattle’s first-ever motorcycle zine (there’ve been bicycle and scooter zines), by and for the local rider community (more intelligent, and more co-ed, than old biker stereotypes suggest). A glance at the staff box reveals the street integrity here: 14 people listing the bikes they personally ride, plus one business manager who admits to having a Toyota Corolla. Within the free tabloid are bike photos, hot bike comix, repair tips, race reviews, and Dana Payne’s essay on the differences between riders and non-riders: “They look at us and see lemmings, chattering happily down the road to destruction. We look back at them and see the eyes of rabbits, of guinea pigs. Soft. Dewy. Fearful.” And not a single precious Young Republican Harley in the whole paper….When Adam Woog wrote his book about local inventors, I said it was the kind of book I should have written. His and Harriet Baskas’s new Atomic Marbles & Branding Irons is a book I have tried to write (the backing never came through). It’s a guide to “museums, collections and roadside attractions in Washington and Oregon.” You get all about the General Petroleum Museum on Capitol Hill, Dick and Jane’s Art Spot in Ellensburg, the Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle, the Advertising Museum in Portland, and the “world’s largest hairball” at Oregon’s Mount Angel Abbey (but not Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere). Recommended.

MAD RAGS: You can now get the most realistic G-word-wear from one of the authentic sources used by the original musical creators. Yes, the Salvation Army store on 4th Ave. S. has opened an “Alternative Gear” boutique, complete with 15-percent discount flyers for “ripped flannel.” (G-word insiders prefer Value Village or Goodwill.) Meanwhile, USA Today (which boasts to advertisers that, “compared with the general population,” its readers are “23 percent more likely to dance/go dancing”) ran a pic of a truly stupid designer-G-word teen couple taken from the JC Penney Back To School ’93 collection. Maybe if the chain likes the Seattle urban look so much now, it’ll think about having a store in town again.

LOVE’S LABOURS: We now know that several weeks back, Kurt was arrested and went to jail for three hours on a domestic-violence rap, before being released without charges. Cops say they went to his place on a neighbor’s noise complaint. There,Courtney supposedly said they’d argued about his gun-buying binge and their busted $300 juicer; they supposedly shoved each other, he supposedly dragged her to the floor and choked her. (So much for juiceheads being laid-back.) She insisted to the P-I that it was all a big misunderstanding, that they’d argued but not physically fought, that he’s still a great guy and an ardent feminist. She echoed these remarks at the Hole gig at the Off Ramp: “This is a song about domestic violence, not! I don’t mean to joke about it, I know it’s a serious issue and shit…” The show itself was one of those gigs where the band valiantly keeps efficiently chopping away throughout the frontperson’s half-drunken stumblings (she gave up on guitar playing in the middle of a couple of songs). In short, a definitive sloppy old-fashioned punk show. Perfect.

THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer title on the public-access show H.A.R.D. TV (Hardbody Alternative Rock Digest)): “All bands on this show sound 500% better live. This audio is the worst (and we know it).”

WHERE AMERICA SHOPPED: It’s one thing for Sears to kill its catalog, but to remove the candy counter at its 1st Ave. flagship (its oldest surviving U.S. store) is unforgivable. That little stand between the first-floor escalators was the heart and soul of the place. They might as well stop selling DieHards.

PHILM PHACTS: Free Willy is a new mid-budget “family film” about a boy who helps a lonely killer whale escape a nasty, fictional “Great Northwest Water Park.” Execs from Sea World, the Anheuser-Busch-owned theme park chain with 18 performing killer whales (all named Shamu), have reportedly been to the San Juans, hobnobbing with area whale experts to help assemble their anti-Willy PR campaign. They’re telling you that captive orcas have great lives and are treated fine, that no Willys need ever be freed….I got to see a few scenes from Sleepless in Seattle some months back, and the finished film is every bit as stupid as those scenes cracked it up to be. Yo, Hollywood: We’re not all rich boomer airheads here.

NOTES: The Chamber of Commerce’s idea of Seattle music, Kenny G, will play the Coliseum in Sept. with Peabo Bryson. He’s the male half of most of those sappy love-song duets at the end of dumb blockbuster films (new catch phrase: “The movie ain’t over `til Peabo sings”). He oughta have a giant screen behind him showing closing credits through his entire set.

GRAFFITO OF THE MONTH (outside B. Dalton Books on 1st): “Read less. Live more.”

THE NOAM-MOBILE: Congrats to all of you for making Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media one of the biggest documentary hits in a long time, even though I don’t agree with much of it. Chomsky treats the mass media as one monolithic, unstoppable force exercising mind control over all America (except for himself and his East Coast intellectual pals). He can’t, or won’t, notice how tentative that hold really is. People who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming. Compare the faux-ironic, “air quotes” speech patterns of MTV viewers with the blind-faith naiveté of tube-loathing neohippies. A typical TV viewer takes nothing by faith, treats everything with (excess?) skepticism. A typical nonviewer is ready to believe almost anything, as long as it’s told in the proper “alternative” lingo by recognizably “alternative” faces. The Robertson right, the Perot moderate-right, and the Chomsky left all hate the commercial mass media. Everybody’s a “rebel” these days, and the press is one of the few universally recognized symbols of what everybody’s rebelling against. Newspaper circulation is flat, and ad revenues have plummeted. (Ratings and ad revenues for TV news are also down.) Most people are already aware that their local newspaper is beholden to its town’s business and political bigshots. It doesn’t take listening to three hours of Chomsky to figure out that national and Eastern-regional media might be similarly beholden to the NY/DC bigwigs. The New York Times is, after all, the Cadillac of American newspapers: it’s bigger, and it’s got more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.

Just as leftist economists talk as if the world’s economy was still based on heavy industry, so do media critics like Chomsky still “analyze” an American media comprised only of three networks, two wire services, two weekly news mags, five opinion mags, and two or three big Eastern papers. Can Noam adapt to a media, and a nation, that are becoming more decentralized and diffuse (but perhaps no more “progressive”)? Stay tuned.

RE-PRESSED: At least Chomsky does sometimes get around to telling you his worldview, instead of just dissing other media worldviews. That’s the problem with most leftist “media analysis,” especially the syndicated “Media Beat” columnists in the Saturday Seattle Times. Those two guys give only a shadow of the “reality” they claim exists. They keep telling us that the papers aren’t telling the whole truth about some issue, but they expend little or no space telling us what their idea of the “true story” is. I wanna throttle those guys and dare ’em: “Yeah yeah, I know these other people aren’t telling me the whole story; so why won’t you tell it to me already?”

NOT MY GENERATION: The Weekly still treats rich baby boomers as the only people (besides political-corporate bigshots) it wants to talk about. Its preview of summer music festivals treated tame boomer nostalgia music as a refreshing novelty, not the reactionary albatross that’s helped keep original music off bigger stages for two decades. The same issue had Walt Crowley with one of those puff pieces about how great it was to be young 25 years ago (ostensibly a review of a book about old underground papers, like the one he used to edit). Like most such articles, it depicted a Sixties America populated only by middle-class college boys. Unlike most, he didn’t treat it as a gone-forever “age of miracles.” Instead, he wished young’uns would follow the path set by elders like himself, without saying how. It’d be unwise to do everything like it was done then. Hippies made a lot of mistakes: they appropriated Black Power slogans while doing little to integrate their own world; they abrogated 50 years of leftist heritage by stereotyping all working-class people as redneck fascists. We’ve gotta learn from that time, including its mistakes, to do better. Don’t live in the Sixties, be radical now.

MIA ZAPATA, 1965-1993: In the past three years I’ve said goodbye in print to six members of the local music/arts scenes, some I’d known personally and some only through their work. They all died needlessly and too soon. This may be the most senseless death of them all. Zapata, a poet, painter and singer-lyricist for the Gits, was found strangled in an alley near 25th and S. Washington, an hour and a half after she left a small get-together at the Comet, honoring the one-year anniversary of her friend Stefanie Sargent’s fatal overdose. Zapata died a week before she was to have recorded vocals for the Gits’ second CD. I knew her only as a presence on a stage, a dynamic presence delivering some powerful and fun tunes, a voice rooted in the early notion of punk rock as a statement of positive defiance, not just a lowbrow lifestyle.

Some 300 friends of Zapata and the band attended a wake at the Weathered Wall, which included the surviving Gits and friends playing her songs one last time (the band won’t continue without her) on a stage filled with candles and yellow roses. Some people ask me how Seattle bands can be so strident and negative, contradicting the official image of Seattle as heaven on earth. I tell those people to look around themselves: There’s a madness here, subtlely different from the madness in the nation at large. Due partly to our western boomtown heritage and surviving Greed Decade attitudes, far too many people here believe they have the right to do anything they want, to whomever they want. Seattle’s “nice” image is at best a cover-up, at worst an emotional repression. Beneath the enforced attitude of passivity sometimes called “the Northwest lifestyle,” you’ll find a barely-contained force of sheer terror. There’s no running away from it; you’ll still find that terror in the white-flight suburbs and the hippie-flight countryside. Don’t move out, stay and reclaim the public space. Do that and we can help fulfill the pledge shouted by the people at her wake, “Viva Zapata!” (A reward fund is being formed to help find her killer, in cooperation with King County Crime Stoppers. Any info that might lead to Zapata’s killer can be given anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 343-2020.)

‘TIL WE MAKE A PLEDGE to meet in September, be sure to see the digitized Snow White, be courteous to foreign Seattle Sound tourists, and ponder this thought from Night of the Living Dead master George A. Romero: “People are operating on many levels of insanity only clear to themselves.”

PASSAGE Chris Stigliano in the Sharon, PA zine Black to Comm: America’s Only Rockism Magazine:

“Don’t you miss the days you could turn on your fave UHF station and watch any of the Nick at Nite programs without the computer animation and with those great car salesman ads? Me too….You can pay upwards of $30 a month to see ’em presented in a yuppie/disco manner that ultimately insults them (and you), but ain’t television supposed to be free and not controlled by spoiled brat cokeheads with little understanding of what we (as noncorruptable, wild rock & roll reactionaries) are?”

REPORT

Almost finished with the first draft of my book chronicling the Seattle music scene since 1976. All you who’ve been holding back on offering your stories and reminiscences: Drop me a line already. All you who have offered, but haven’t heard back from me yet: Be patient a week or two longer.

I’m thinking of offering official Misc. T-shirts, stickers and the like. Any favorite slogans you’d like?

WORD-O-MONTH

“Orphic”

7/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Demographic Cleansing

Misc. thanks all who went to our big variety spectacular last month at the Two Bells. If you didn’t, future speaking engagements may be in store, possibly broadcast. I’ll forgive you; you were probably preoccupied anxiously waiting for the new-look Seattle Times (more on that later).

END-O-ERA DEPT.: A tired old sitcom about a bunch of maintenance drunks leaves TV after 11 years and gets the biggest hype campaign this side of the end of Communism. Dave leaves the same network after 12 years and doesn’t even get an ad in TV Guide. One word says it all: Weasels.

MEMO TO LOWRY’S HANDLERS: You’ve gotta reach out to the people of the state. Explain that the Right’s no-new-taxes/slash-all-spending/just-don’t-ask-us-how line is a crock. Remind folks that the interests that scream the loudest about slashing spending are the ones that lobby the hardest for breaks or subsidies for themselves. Point out that this “We The People” petition is really backed by big-bucks lobbies that like the health-care and transportation messes the way they are, that’ll do anything to stop real reform. Remind folks that we need roads and schools and colleges (not to mention prison guards for all the throw-away-the-key sentencing laws), and we’ve gotta get health care and public transit into shape or the state’s fiscal health will just get worse. To build a better future, ya gotta invest. Even rugged-individualist Eastern Wash. was settled by government aid (railroad land grants, dams, irrigation, farm price supports, Hanford).

TURNING A PAGE: The new Barnes & Noble book superstore in an old bowling alley (one of Bellevue’s few truly beautiful buildings) proves that the intellectual-elitist myth is wrong: people do read books these days, in increasing numbers. If they didn’t, corporate empires like B&N owner K mart wouldn’t build monster outlets like this. It’s what all these folks are reading that we can still argue about.

TURNING ANOTHER PAGE: Book sales boomed in recent years, but newspaper circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth. The Times is particularly frustrated, with suburban papers whopping it on its outer turf. In response, the paper’s built a Bothell printing plant and launched a massive redesign. Launched after two years of committee meetings, focus groups and “pagination” consultants, the new-look Times is a mix of elements from the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, SF Examiner, Oregonian, Tacoma News Tribune and many other papers. Most redesigned papers adopt huge type sizes that let ’em fill the same space with fewer reporters; the Times redesign is relatively modest about this, losing only 5 to 10 percent of its verbage per column inch (more is lost to goofy new features like the Page 2 blurbs). It’s like the remodel at the paper’s biggest remaining advertiser, the Bon. The paper, like the store, was an old workhorse not noted for flashy looks, suddenly given a “return to elegance” that it’d never had. The new Times is just more “tastefully” dull than the old.

BUMMER OF THE MONTH: The Nowogroski Insurance Agency closed its old office across from Safeco Tower in the U-District, and moved out somewhere by Northgate. It wouldn’t concern us, except the storefront office (an ex-A&P store) still bore the name of one of the operations that had been merged into it: the James M. Cain Insurance Agency. I always wanted to take out a life policy there, just so I could ask if they had a double indemnity clause.

THEY LOVE US IN EUROPE: Posh Italians think we’re “the ultimate frontier of the American look, costume and sound.” It says so in “Il Futuro Arriva de Seattle” (the future comes from Seattle), a 15-page spread in the Euro-style mag Max. There’s no NYC “designer grunge” wear (indeed, almost no women) in the Seattle spread, shot by photog Loca Trovato in January. You do get bike cops, fish tossers, the Smith Tower, the singles apartment house, Bruce Lee’s grave, Waiting for the Interurban, Bulldog News, the Waterfront Streetcar, and a mention of Bernardo Bertolucci filming Little Buddha here. The mag describes grunge (“Uno Stile, Una Musica”) as “expanding like an oil spill on the world scene,” local clubs as teeming with record producers ready to sign a band on the spot, and Seattle as a “laboratory for tomorrow…where the human dimension lives together with the future of technology, avant-garde urban planning and respect for nature.” They’ve got shots of the Sub Pop guys, Nirvana, Mother Love Bone, current club bands Dumt and Spoonbender, the Off Ramp, the Crocodile, the Vogue men’s room (looking unusually clean), the Colourbox and the Paramount, plus the fraudulent NY Times “Grunge Glossary” (Max doesn’t know it’s fake), a wacky sidebar on Madonna’s attempt to sign a grunge band (Candlebox, not Hole) for her label, and Chris Cornell complaining about the overcommercialization of the scene. And this allegedly common benediction: “It’s not rare, frequenting the Seattle clubs, to speak with anyone and hear the response: `Grunge will be you’ or `Grunge will belong to you.'” (Thanx to Tom Orr of Twist Weekly for translating help.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: XLR8R is the free monthly tab for local rave, techno and dance music lovers. Issue #2 includes an update on the rave-harassment issue, from the point of view of a promoter who’s managed to meet every bureaucratic hurdle and hold successful shows at the West Seattle rehearsal building Nirvana uses. He even reported getting a personal inspection and OK from asst. mayor Donna James (who’s married to the brother of the ex-wife of the brother of the previous mayor — all four of whom are present or former local TV personalities).

MORE SPACE EXPLORATION: The Showbox lives! — sorta. The legendary 1st Ave. ballroom that was Seattle’s grandest punk palace, then became a branch of the Improv comedy chain, has DJ/rave dance nights on Mondays. The Odd Fellows Temple also lives again with 18-and-over shows Fri. nights. The new promoters claim to have worked out all police and fire regs; we’ll see if the city tries to censor it again. And somebody named Troy is inviting bands to submit demos for a new all-ages series; call 285-0385 Mon. and Tue. afternoons for info.

THE FINE PRINT (from Cyborgasm, producer Lise Talae’s CD of surround-sound sex scenes): “Cyborgasm is a 3D audio fantasy anthology. The activities presented here have been created using sonic rendering and digital simulation. Cyborgasm should not be taken as an endorsement of these activities.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside the Off Ramp): “We don’t care if you smoke, snort, sniff, or shoot. Just don’t do it in here.” Runner-up (in the window of the Salvation Army service center on E. Pike, adjacent to a liquor-license notice): “The Salvation Army is moving. The liquor license is being sought by the future owners of the building. The Salvation Army has nothing to do with this.”

(latter-day note: The building in question became Moe, perhaps Seattle’s finest alt-rock club and one of my fave hangouts. The one relic from the space’s Salvation Army days is a long inside sign with the slogan “Self Denial Will Prove Your Love to God.” The current occupants stuck a big MOE sticker over “God.”)

`OTHER’ WISE: Where did this now-ubiquitous term “The Other” come from anyway, and why do all these white het male art critics use it to complain about white het males? I know there was an NY underground rag long ago called The East Village Other, but they presumably got the term from somebody else. The critics invoking it (including most everyone at Reflex) imply that there are only two classes in American society: the class of all the people they don’t like (called either The Patriarchy or The New World Order) and the class of all the people they like (The Other); the critics analyze all artworks accordingly. Shoehorning art into oversimplistic ideology is just silly, and sheds no insight onto either art or politics. In the ’70s, academic leftists claimed that Everything Is Political. I’m starting to believe Everything Is Aesthetic. Besides, anybody who thinks there are only two cultures in the U.S. isn’t looking very hard.

CATHODE CORNER: Local actor Patrick-Alden Moore wants to produce a weekly TV sitcom in Seattle. It’d be an all-local production: not just location shooting but local writers, actors, and crews. He’s writing a pilot script, which he hopes to film with money from some of those Hollywood bigshots with Puget Sound island homes. He envisions a lighthearted soap-parody like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Soap, though not too weird or too sexy (“I want this to be something everyone can enjoy,” he says, adding that he thinks The Simpsons is too racy for kids). His written premise involves psychiatry jokes and ethnic jokes (an Hispanic bartender learning Yiddish). Don’t look for any local references: the title, City, is the only name the show’s town will have. Casting isn’t final yet, but he says he’d like to get the unlikely teaming of Ichabod Caine (country DJ and born-again Christian) and Peggy Platt (empress of local standup comedy and outspoken pro-choicer).

WHAT’S (NOT) IN A NAME?: So Prince wants to no longer be referred to by name, just by his abstract pseudo-zodiac logo. It’s been done. There was a Seattle band in ’81 that had no written name, just a symbol of two interlocking diamonds with wings on each side and a graph line inside. Unlike the Prince symbol, this outfit did have a spoken name: a guttural shriek. And there’s still the famous local illustrator/tattoo designer, known by the logo of a triangle-slash.

DEMOGRAPHIC CLEANSING: Sometimes it seems that yuppies don’t want to coexist with anybody, that they want to take over a place, shove everybody else out, then appropriate the evictees’ cultural heritage. The downtown “cleanup” campaign can be seen as a plan to remove the young and/or poor from public areas. The Belltown “anti-crime” campaign is a system for harassing black kids who stand around quietly, while ignoring far rowdier white kids nearby. But now comes the second draft of the Seattle Commons Plan. The rich suburbanites behind the plan now insist they want to keep the same number of low-income housing units in the South Lake Union/Cascade area (not necessarily in the same buildings), though most of the planned net increase in housing stock would be luxury or “market-rate” (upper-middle-class). They’re even talking about keeping the Lincoln-Mercury building (without the great neon). But nowhere in the 126-page report is there a mention of the neighborhood’s funky lo-rise character, its half-dozen or more rehearsal studios, its photo studios, or its other current values to the city. Low-rent, high-ceiling districts are as precious an urban resource as jogging trails, and have just as much right to exist.

I ORDER YOU TO RELAX!: You probably missed out on Lighten Up America Day on 6/22, devised by Portland corporate-motivation speaker C.W. Metcalf (no relation to “Convoy” singer C.W. McCall). He thinks Americans are too darn depressed these days (I can’t imagine why). Metcalf wants us to think brighter thoughts, to let more light into our hearts. Speaking of which…

CHURCH WINDOWS: Some members of St. Mark’s Cathedral want glass artist Dale Chihuly to design the Episcopal landmark’s still-unfinished interior. I’d always thought of the Episcopalians/Anglicans as a religion of grandeur and spectacle. Chihuly, who sells prosaic decorative bowls to Microsoft millionaires, would be all wrong for that (‘tho I like his idea to freeze neon lights inside theTacoma Dome hockey surface). His passionless work would be more appropriate to my alma mater denomination, the Methodists. Speaking of which…

THE GOOD NEWS: Those who miss the activist calendar in Community Catalyst should check out The Source, the monthly “Ecumenical Newspaper” of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Even for non-churchgoers, it’s a great resource for events along the social-concern wing of mainline Protestantism. Last month’s topics include the Dalai Lama’s visit, Hiroshima memorials, the survival of faith in a hi-tech age, the Ste. Michelle wine boycott, helping the homeless, Cuban friendship advocates, and a big section about gay rights vs. right-wing disinformation campaigns. Speaking of which…

DEAD AIR: The talk radio goon squad, predictably, is at the forefront of pro-gridlock politics. The demagogues and their TV-pundit pals fancy themselves as Scarlet Pimpernels, valiantly rescuing helpless aristocrats from the pinko insurrection. They’re really more like old Soviet state ideologists, using twisted logic to find “moral” or “economic” justifications for preserving the status quo of power and privilege. They’ve got Clinton in retreat, forcing compromises on any issue that can be oversimplified into a faux crusade. The White House ought to capture the moral high ground. Hillary‘s trying, with her remarks about a “politics of meaning” to fight the “sleeping sickness of the soul” caused by a dehumanizing society. (It’s paraphrased from ex-UW campus radical Michael Lerner, who now runs the Jewish social-philosophy mag Tikkun.) The pundits and talk-radio guys (I hate to call ’em “hosts,” a term that implies gentility) scoffed: How dare a politician be sincere about social leadership, instead of using it as an excuse for hate-mongering? How dare anyone talk about spirituality who doesn’t belong to the former state religion of Robertsonism? Mrs. C.’s going where Mr. C.’s backed off, toward disarming the Right by exposing its corporate hypocrisies. Speaking of which…

BOXING BOUT: Buying CDs in jewel boxes, from stores that don’t supply those wasteful cardboard longboxes? Think you’re saving the Earth? Think again, after you pass the Precision Sound warehouse on Republican St. east of Westlake. On a rainless day you’ll see a crew of dudes & dudettes out on the loading dock, tearing off longboxes and tossing them into a Dumpster. Sure they’re all recycled, but it’s still a waste to make ’em in the first place. Any record co. that puts environmental hype in its inserts ought to offer jewel box-only CDs. Besides, longboxes were the last bastion of big cover art; you should have the option of getting ’em. They will be collectibles. Speaking of which…

CANNED HEAT: Some folks claim to have found syringes in diet-pop cans. It’s really either a hoax or a tampering, but I can’t help fantasizing about a company doing it as a stunt to become the Choice of a New Generation, Seattle-style. (Imagine the alternative-rock-star endorsement possibilities!) Note that officials insist any contaminant chemicals would never survive in a Pepsi can (should our kids drink stuff that strong?) Also note that KIRO handed the commentary spot about the soda scandal to its longtime resident shrink, Dr. Pepper Schwartz (no relation).

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: In an item cut from a column back in February, I pondered future developments in watered-down “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the Betsey Johnson fashion show at Benham Studio (one “designer grunge” maker who’s actually been here!), get your official Jurassic Park dino-dolls with built-in, take-apart flesh wounds (just don’t bother with the movie, an overblown mix of WestWorld and Godzilla on Monster Island), and ponder this headline from British Vogue: “If Georgia O’Keefe were alive today, she’d be modeling in Gap ads.”

PASSAGE

Louis M. Haber in a Washington Post Op-Ed essay, defending Barney the Dinosaur:

“Is this incredible hostility toward Barney just a reflection of societal prejudice against idealistic and cheerful people who are often discounted as simpletons? Against males who are not afraid to reveal a delicate and sensitive persona and to display gentle mannerisms?…Are you so hard-boiled as to be unable to accept anyone who accepts everyone? So cynical as to think of those who are undauntingly optimistic as obsequious?”

REPORT

My book on the history of alternative culture in Seattle still doesn’t have a publisher (they’re throwing away the investment opportunity of a lifetime), but it’s attracting attention from here to Montreal (I’ve been interviewed for the CBC French channel about what Seattle kids really wear).

A broadcast Misc. is still in the works; more info when it happens. I’m also working on other marketing ideas (T-shirts, stickers, posters, a 900 line). If you’ve got an idea you think might work, drop me a line.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Penuriousness”

FIRST, LOCAL BANDS GET BIG. NOW, THE M’S ARE CONTENDERS.

I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

6/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT:

‘CHEERS’ AND JAKE O’SHAUGHNESSEY’S ARE STILL DEAD!

We’re still childless here at Misc. World HQ, despite Mom’s best efforts to fix us up with a nice Christian girl, so we could only watch from aside the conversations in downtown cafés on Take Our Daughters to Work Day: “Just think, little Allie, someday you’ll get to be a frustrated wage slave just like mommy!”

UPDATES: Last time, we commented on the fad for every business to have a “mission statement.” The cool new Xerox art/literary zine Hel’s Kitchen has one of its own: “Mission Statement: Missions were built in California to obliterate the native customs and spread colonization…. We hate them”…. Owners of the Cyclops Café are threatening to sue the N.W. Ayer ad agency over the AT&T commercial inviting Americans to call their grungy pals back in Seattle. Cyclops claims that Ayer offered $100 to shoot still photos inside the joint for an hour, claiming they’d just be used in a stock-photo collection; instead, they spent three hours and not only included the café’s storefront but made it the ad’s key image.

THE TRAGEDY CONTINUES: Greg Ragan, who wrote and performed with the seminal Seattle punk band The Feelings, died 5/1. Friends say he’d gotten a good job and was getting his life together at the time, after getting over his years-long heroin habit. Alas, it had already weakened his system for good.

LESSER BUMMER #1: The King County Library’s closing its Seattle film desk. Several years ago, the city library donated its film collection to the county, under the condition that they remain accessible to city residents. But now, to borrow a 16mm film (or one of the county library’s wide assortment of videos), you have to phone in an order and pick it up days later at an out-of-town library branch (closest: off of 175th & Aurora). If you think this petty budget-cutting move is wrong, write the King County Library System (300 8th Ave. N., Seattle 98109) and the King County Council (King County Courthouse, Seattle 98104).

LESSER BUMMER #2: The Corner of Bargains, the big old rustic barn full of furniture across from Sears on 1st, is closing. That great stoic claptrap of a building, packed to the walls with garish overstuffed sofas and gargantuan brass lamps, is the vision of American commerce at its finest. At least Sir Plus is still in the neighborhood.

HERE WE ARE NOW: Grunge tourism is back, maybe bigger than last summer. I talked to an advance woman for a BBC crew, about to descend on the city for a youth-travel documentary series. She called the paper to ask: Where are the grunge hangouts? What’s the grunge radio station? How did grunge get started? Are any of the current grunge stars under 30 years of age (except for Nirvana, most of the first-tier noisemakers are near or beyond that mark)?

LOSING IT: If we still don’t have a Grungeland theme park, how ’bout somebody putting out a Grunge Aerobics video? I can imagine it now: a formation of tall guys flailing their long hair about during the opening warmups, using Sheaf Stout bottles instead of hand weights, before hitting the floor for the tummy exercises that give you the ever-popular emaciated junkie physique without having to do the drugs. At the end, the moshers could give nutritional advice (“don’t stage dive 15 minutes after eating”) or even sell their own food products (Mosh Mush, the perfect post-hangover breakfast). The dancers could compare their weight-loss results at the end to determine who’s “the biggest Loser.” Just if you produce such a tape, I want credit….In an item cut from the February issue, I pondered even more future developments in watered-down corporate “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a new designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

TRAFFIC TO THE JAM: If you’re going to Lollapalooza at the Gorge at George, don’t try to “gorge” your conscience at the environmental booths up front; 20,000 people in 10,000 cars, 140 mi. each way, ain’t exactly living lightly.

A REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENT: The Weekly‘s fanning the flames of “tax revolt” every chance it gets (as many as three redundant articles per issue), gleefully predicting political genocide if Lowry and Clinton don’t cave in to big business and the rich. As publisher David Brewster’s followed his target audience away from its last vestigial connections to The Sixties, he’s followed a classic behavioral shift among publishers, once described by New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson: a young Turk vows to be the Voice of the People, but winds up on the golf course with the Chamber of Commerce and slowly sees things their way. In the Reagan-Bush era, Brewster and his readers could ostensibly oppose (while benefiting from) Reaganomics. Now that the yups are asked to pay their fair share, Brewster’s ready to follow (or lead?) them rightward.

STREET STORIES: While the Weekly set upon its campaign to decimate government services, the daily papers launched a campaign for more government aid to their business friends, by trumping up an “instant crisis” about the downtown retail “atmosphere.” The papers, wholly recycling the Downtown Seattle Assn. line, apparently want downtown to be as sterile and monocultural as the malls, hinting that cops should remove the homeless (to where??) so the sidewalks can look nicer. The anticlimax came with a full-pageTimes story full of crime-scare tactics, while reluctantly admitting in a sidebar item that most downtown crime categories are down this year (after peaking in ’85). Downtown retail’s real problems are (1) a continuing national downturn in consumer spending, partly due to the long-term consolidation of personal wealth towards the wealthiest; (2) the decline of the dept. store biz, of which Frederick’s and I. Magnin were the weakest local players; and (3) layoffs at banks and other offices, bringing fewer commuters downtown. Locking up the panhandlers and chasing out the skate teens won’t solve any of that. I’ve lived down here nearly 2 years; sure, I’d like to see fewer suffering people on the sidewalks, but the real way to do that is to try and alleviate their suffering, not to corral ’em into some other neighborhood. We need a war on poverty, not another war against the poor. And skateboarders don’t hurt anyone, they just speed up wear-&-tear on Westlake Park facilities. I say let ’em skate. Rebuild the park platforms and pottery to withstand skate wheels, and turn the kids into a tourist attraction.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES DEPT.: We can’t figure out why anyone would buy a correspondence course to escape a dead-end career, based on the recommendation of Sally Struthers.

PC PARADE: Tacoma’s News Tribune ran a front-page photo of Sea-Tac Mall guards chasing two teen boys out of the mall for wearing blue bandannas, which immediately branded them in the eyes of mall staff as gang members. In the photo, the guards are black and the supposed gangbangers are clearly white (tho’ their faces are partly obscured by the camera angle, a standard practice in news photos of underage suspects).

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The current quarterly Bulletin of the Seattle-based National Campaign for Freedom of Expression features a whiff of 1992 nostalgia: mug shots of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan altered with X-Ray Spex for proper ridicule by us sophisticates. The articles are thankfully more lucid. NY scholar William Strickland calls for a permanent, populist, holistic left coalition. Another article notes that city officials in Auburn and Spokane have been trying to censor nudity in public art works, using laws intended to fight sexual harassment. In both towns, the challenged works are by female artists…. Tacoma’s finally got a more-or-less stable music scene and some newsprint zines to go with it. Pandemonium and its arch-rival Smutch are chock full of relatively un-stupid band interviews, reviews, scene reports from Club Tacoma and the Red Roof Pub, opinions on everything from hate crimes to youth politics, and dance and art profiles; all in a refreshingly attitude-free attitude…. Back here, Hype published its last free-tabloid issue in April, but vows to return as a slick-cover mag around July.

YOU SEND ME: Times art critic Dolores Tarzan Ament (no apparent relation to Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament) was all mistaken in her piece trashing City Voice, the public art project/opinion survey now in the mail to 10,000 city homes. Ament mustn’t know about the postmodern traditions of mail art (decorous postcards, stamps, and other mailable matter) and appropriation (turning commercial communication forms inside out). City Voice, funded by Seattle City Light and devised by three local artists (Alan Pruzan, Helen Slade, and Galleria Potatohead vet/Weekly cover boy Bill Moore), takes the fun graphics and interactive tear-and-paste aspects of Highlights for Children and Publisher’s Clearing House mailings, to ask citizens to write in about their lives and ideas. What could be a more appropriate public art project than one that not only asks the public’s response, but invites the public to participate in the creative process?

AD OF THE WEEK (bus billboard for Washington Egg Producers): “Fake is OK, for a sorority girl.” The sales reference is to egg substitutes vs. the real stuff, but what’s the joke reference: fake eyelashes? Bustlines? Orgasms? Personalities?

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Nordstrom’s annual meeting featured a slick video presentation of the “shopping system of the future,” interactive video. Scenes shown on the TV news depict a smug yuppie housewife watching TV, ordering windows around on the screen thanks to never-gonna-happen voice-activation commands. More fantastic, the “personal shopper” talking to the housewife in an inset window was none other than ex-Let’s Make a Deal hostess Carol Merrill!

IN STORE: By now, many of you have seen the new Broadway Safeway, a veritable mini-Larry’s Market with big diagonal aisles and interior neon signs. The remodel emphasizes a deli, a pharmacy, a flower stand and other higher-profit items around the walls, but less shelf space for lower-profit packaged foods in the middle of the floor. Once the staid, sea-green monarch of western supermarketing, the chain’s been decimated by leveraged-buyout debt. It’s closed stores (and left some metro areas altogether) and looked for ways to squeeze more profit out of its remaining stores. The fancy signs, over a 10-year lifespan of a remodel, don’t really add much to the price of a pound of cheese; that comes from getting you to buy that cheese on a ready-made pizza.

IN THE OFF-ING: Contrary to the Regrade Dispatch, no-booze strip joints can be relatively harmless neighborhood additions. What goes on inside may disgust some of you; but, unlike bars, they release their clientele onto the streets not only sober but utterly depressed.

SEATTLE COMMUNITY CATALYST, 1990-93: Are local lefties are so disorganized, they can’t even support a little tabloid with a joint monthly calendar? A more practical analysis (and leftists like nothin’ better than analysis!) would say it’s hard to create a united left just by publishing a newspaper; especially here, where it’s hard to get people to care for causes beyond their own neighborhoods, their own hiking trails, their own ideology trips, etc. Maybe the Catalyst‘s ambitions were too small. It was a paper for people who already believed in the things it covered. It wanted people in one leftist clique to pay more attention to the other cliques. Maybe the next attempt at a political paper should try to evangelize people who aren’t in any cliques yet, to promote new ideas at a wider audience.

CATHODE CORNER: KTZZ’s televising KIRO-AM’s morning news from 5 to 7 a.m., turning Seattle’s slickest radio show into its clumsiest TV show. It’s shot on two robot-controlled cameras mounted above the announcers — great views of bald spots. During remotes and taped segments, we see still graphics or the announcers fumbling with papers. During KIRO’s live commercials, KTZZ plays stock music while showing Bill Yeend continuing to talk. Because KTZZ doesn’t have the rights to CBS Radio material, it runs long stretches of public-service ads at least twice an hour. It’s a great antidote to the slick, empty TV morning shows (including KIRO-TV’s own First in the Morning News). It also points out just how little news KIRO-AM news has.

LIVE AIR: The one station that plays the bands outsiders think all Seattle bands sound like is KZOK-AM. The ex-KJET mostly rebroadcasts the Z-Rock network from Dallas, but ex-KCMU “Brain Pain” king Jeff Gilbert goes live afternoons with the hard stuff — especially on Friday’s local-music hours, cranking up new Sweet Water and Grin right after old AC/DC. And remember, it’s the station with the Million Dollar Guarantee: “Pay us a million dollars, and we’ll play any damn song you want.”

CIVIX LESSON: While the City of Seattle keeps trying to prevent all-ages rock concerts, the City of Redmond puts on its own. Nightlife, a program of the Redmond parks dept., regularly sells out its alternate-Saturday-night shows at the Redmond and Bellevue YMCAs with almost no publicity. The bands are mostly Eastside teen groups, plus a few big and semi-big names (the Posies, D.C.’sFugazi). There’s no reason it can’t be done on this side of the lake, except that the Blue Meanies in high places wouldn’t have it.

`TIL NEXT WE MEET, ponder this from the recently-deceased western author Wallace Stegner: “The west does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long. The west is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it. The west as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The west is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

PASSAGE

From “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by the suicide-at-30 Robert E. Howard: “Let me live deep while I live: let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, and the mad exultation of battle…I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Our annual Misc. anniversary party’s happening Sunday, June 6 at the Two Bells Tavern, 2321 4th Ave., 8:30 p.m. Readings, multimedia, previews of our book on the history of the Seattle underground scene, audience participation games, and much, much more. Attend, or don’t lie to your grandchildren and say you went.

REPORT

Your loyal reporter is once again without a day job. All ideas, suggestions, and offers (paid positions only) will be considered.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Simsum”