5/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THE STATE PASSES A HEALTH CARE PLAN;

THE MARINERS CAN HARDLY WAIT…

Misc. (one of the few local entertainment thangs John Corbett hasn’t tried to muscle in on yet) is moderately disturbed that no review of the Empty Space‘s new Illuminati play even mentioned the Space’s old Illuminatus! play, a 1980 three-part circus of by-the-numbers blasphemy and political conspiracy theories based on the Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea comic novels; it was one of the theatre’s biggest hits at the time.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MARK WORTH, Wash. Free Press: I’ve been trying to sell out for years; it’s just that nobody’s been buying.

IT’S BEEN A WACKY couple-O-weeks here in Misc. Country USA. The Weekly “discovered” a “New Art Scene” centered around the Galleria Potatohead folks, a year after that space closed. The Cyclops Cafe storefront got stuck into an AT&T ad inviting Americans to call up their ol’ Seattle grunge pals. Had a mixed time at the Crocodile’s Stumpy Joe goodbye party: great sloppy bands, but unwisely cranked up to inner-ear-pain level; at that distortion point, even the Young Fresh Fellows sounded like a fast Tad. I found an old Artforum review of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, where the guys prance around and act silly in dresses like Bugs Bunny; the reviewer somehow called it a profound anti-homophobic statement. And, while cable-cruising one midnight, I heard a bad instrumental of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” accompanying a Male Best Body Contest.

NUMBERS RACKET DEPT.: Sorry, I can’t believe there are only approx. 1 million adult gay men in the USA, as implied in that national sex survey by our Laurelhurst friends at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute. The national gay mags claim more than that many readers (including paid circulation and the industry-standard estimates of “pass-along” copies). I’ve met guys who claim to have had more than that many guys. If there are that few gay guys, then who’s buying all the non-Nutcracker ballet tix and Judy Garland laser disks?

SUMMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL: We’re amused that Clinton and Yeltsin‘s prearranged walking path led to Vancouver’sWreck Beach, known in warmer months as the Northwest’s largest nude beach. Hope it inspired ’em toward shedding outmoded political put-ons and attaining fuller disclosure.

TUNED OUT: The Supreme Court’s using 2 Live Crew‘s Roy Orbison takeoff “Big Hairy Woman” to decide if copyright holders can ban song parodies. It won’t affect MAD (which prints only its original lyrics “to the tune of” extant songs) or Al Yancovic (who always gets OKs from the original artists). It would inhibit satirists from commenting on copyrighted or trademarked material. Imagine the Squirrels pleading for permission to trash Frampton songs!

THE MAILBAG: Stacey Levine writes, “A friend whose judgment I trust thinks Clinton is a true radical, more than he let on during the campaign. The Nation says he’s middle; another friend professes that Clinton is not at all interested in real change, backed as he was by the major oil corps.” Good question. He made his name with national party brass as part of the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the Reagan years to defend the party’s institutions (if not its ideals). Some members wrote books suggesting that Reaganism was irreversible, that the Dems could survive as an organization only by embracing GOP policies. Clinton wasn’t quite like that; he’s more in the tradition of Washington’s late Sen. Warren Magnuson, a master deal-cutter who believed in social progress thru government paternalism and economic progress thru industrial policy. Clinton’s a well-meaning compromiser who’ll only go as far as he thinks he can go. He won’t lead us out of our assorted messes; but, unlike the previous couple of guys, we might be able to lead him.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME: The Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at 2nd & Pike was the sort of “social concern” experience my old Methodist youth group would’ve gone to. You walked past real street people (studiously kept outside) to enter a cleaned-up simulation of street life. You wandered thru a maze of tight corridors, small rooms, and plywood cutouts of muggers, drug dealers, johns, cops and bureaucrats; all to a Walkman soundtrack of interviews with street people (by a Calif. art troupe), tightly edited to shock suburban innocents with near-romanticized images of urban squalor. It worked as a thrill ride, but didn’t communicate how tedious and numbing that life can be.

BIRD GOTTA FRY: The Legislature’s reclassified flightless birds (ostriches, emus, rheas) as poultry, so they can be raised for food. The AP quotes breeders as saying they “taste just like beef.” It’s appropriate that Washington starts an industry in birds that run along the ground, since one of the state’s top poultry firms is named Acme.

ON THE WALLS: Art cafés are the apparent Next Big Thing in town. By serving espresso and pastries to gawkers, Offbeat Cafe (in the old Art/Not Terminal on Westlake) hopes for a steadier income than art sales alone could give, showing artists who can’t yet carry a whole gallery themselves. Offbeat also has some live-music and DJ parties. CyberCity, a similar place in the old Arthur Murray studio and Perot campaign office on Terry, closed almost before it opened. Most ambitious of the lot: Entros, in the old Van de Kamp’s bakery near South Lake Union, a huge space with several interactive and hi-tech exhibits — and a $15 first-time cover charge. The northern Californians (natch) running the place seem to think alternative-art lovers in this town have money (hah!).

ON THE AIR: KTZZ was put into involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy by three big syndicators. It’s over debts by the station’s ex-owners, who bought some high-profile reruns and sold few ads. The current (since ’90) owners say they’re on schedule for paying back the old debts. This debt service is why the station’s even cheaper now than it was before: less off-air promotion, more televangelists and infomercials. It gets those “Prime Time Talk” shows for free (the distributor keeps some of the ad slots)….KOMO wants to buy KVI, under new FCC regulations allowing it to have two AMs in the same town again. In the Golden Age of Radio, KOMO was sister stations with KJR, broadcasting from the Terminal Sales Bldg. (now home of the Weekly and Sub Pop) and affiliated with NBC’s Red and Blue networks respectively. From the ’50s to the ’70s, the tightly-formatted KOMO and the personality-driven KVI were arch rivals for the adult-pop audience. The Ike Republicans who run KOMO will likely interfere with KVI’s current talk format (despite current contrary assurances). They might be too patrician to keep the Agnewish rants of Rush Limbaugh, KVI’s top-rated show. And they’ll surely drop KVI’s use of news from KING-TV (now corporately divorced from KING radio).

PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD: Tucci Benucch, a new restaurant in Westlake Center, is the first local outpost of Lettuce Entertain You, Ron Melman’s Chicago outfit that revolutionized food service as entertainment. Its eateries have distinctive poppy decor and decent food at almost-decent prices. Its Chi-town flagship, Ed Debevick’s, launched the fake-diner fad. It uses young actors and comics as “character” waiters and buspeople, haranguing and cutting up the willing clientele. The acts are even more intense at the LA Ed’s, where every server’s a would-be star and every customer’s a possible casting agent. Melman also has Chicago spots bearing the licensed names of local celebs (Oprah, Cubs announcer Harry Carey), and sponsored that contest where a guy won $1 million for shooting a basket from opposite court during a Bulls game. Alas, none of that action’s slated for Westlake. All we’re getting is “rustic Italian food in a country atmosphere.”

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH LA: LA Riots II: The Sequel failed to make its scheduled premiere, gravely inconveniencing the original producers (police) and distributors (news media). Back when Repo Man came out, one of my gothic-punk acquaintances described for me what was so different about it. His first sentence: “It was made in LA.” He meant that this film used the parts of LA that other LA films didn’t (and mostly still don’t). A few weeks ago, I found myself in the company of a semi-retired Hollywood bigshot. He talked about how he’s looking to move here, how “everybody (in the business) wants to get out of LA.” The LA people scattering across the western states are just re-creating the La La Land mentality in an exile made possible by faxes and FedEx. The airheads are leaving Hollywood so they can keep their worthless Hollywood culture alive, so they can stay unbothered by the issues of people other than themselves. They symbolize America’s withdrawal from social community into private hedonism. Beverly Hills is the reason South Central exists. The “Northwest Lifestyle” described in newspaper “Living” sections is usually defined according to misplaced LA priorities, as a narcissistic life of private pleasures. The yuppie dream of “Moving to the Country” (without depending on a rural economy) is just an upscale version of the suburban dream/nightmare. It reflects the abandonment of neighborhoods, cities, social services, education, health, infrastructure, etc.; all as guided by a politics that purported to celebrate the Rugged Individual but really just gave more power to the already-powerful. Reagan was the Spielberg president — and not just because both shared a nostalgia for a nonexistent past. Just as Spielberg turned the genres of sleazy fringe movies into the foundation of the modern film biz, so Reagan turned the hatemongering and quick-buck tactics of the west’s right-fringe political circles into the foundation of national government policy. Both camps trafficked in contrived sentimentality, not in real social intimacy. It’s way past time for this to end. Don’t move to the country. Stop running from your problems, America! Stay in town! Fight to make it better!

STAGES: The biggest thing to me about Ramona Quimby, now at the Moore Theatre (one of umpteen spaces Seattle Children’s Theatre’s using ’til its new building gets done) is that Beverly Cleary wrote and set the original stories in Portland. As a kid, I found that amazing. Cleary was the only author given me who wrote about a place I had been. Everyone else either wrote about a mythical Mayfield USA, the streets of NYC, or war orphans in Korea. From Cleary, I learned the importance of thinking globally/writing locally.

DEAD AIR: Manager Chris Knab still insists that his new KCMU-Lite will eventually be popular ‘cuz it’s more “professional” than Classic KCMU, even without most of the station’s experienced DJs. One volunteer who stayed, Marty Michaels, got rewarded for his loyalty by getting to host weekend public-affairs shows. In early April, after a taped segment on Jewish Holocaust survivors, Michaels told listeners they’d heard “one personal opinions about the alleged Holocaust.” He told irate callers (off the air) there was no proof that millions of Jews ever died in Nazi camps. Knab persuaded Michaels to resign; it would’ve been hypocritical to fire people for mentioning CURSE and keep Michaels. Also, anti-Semitism is one of the few offenses the UW Regents (who’ll ultimately decide KCMU’s fate) don’t easily forgive.

SKIN DEEP: Playboy had model recruiters at the UW recently. The Daily ran a series of columns and letters reiterating all the 25-year-old complaints about the mag. Most anti-Playboy arguments are as trite as the pictures themselves. Here’s some fresher criticism: There’s nothing intrinsically bad about the het-male sex drive, or about entertainments that exploit it. But the best erotic art is about passion, about the mysteries and compulsions that drive disparate humans together. Most Playboy pix, especially the centerfolds, are bland works of commercial ad-art. The models portray soulless, unlustful characters, overly “dressed” in hyperrealistic lighting and Charlie’s Angels hair, their flesh digitally retouched to look unlike any real-world biological entity. The models aren’t “degraded” in the sense most critics invoke; they’re “honored” with the same perverse reverence given to The Brand in magazine ads. These “Playmates” are made to look incapable of having any real fun. I want better.

THE OUTLAW LOOK: The Oregon Dept. of Corrections (sez Media Inc.) is doing brisk biz in felon-made jeans, Prison Blues. They’ve got no known Seattle outlet; Nordstrom had ’em for a while but stopped.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Nabisco SnackWells Devil’s Food Snack Cakes are the hit of the year, regularly selling out to diet-conscious snackers. They don’t have fewer calories than regular cookies, but they are fat-free, and in many current fad diets that’s what counts. The chocolate-covered cakes are big and chocolatey, if dry (halfway between a microwave brownie and a shrunk Ho-Ho).

`SELF’ INTEREST: I’ve heard from people who want more “personality” in the column. Some even suggested that I oughta try to be more like Hunter Thompson and make myself my own #1 topic. I never figured you cared who I was. So far it’s been a self-fulfilling assumption; when I tell people at parties or in bars that I do stuff for The Stranger, they only want to know one thing: “What’s Dan Savage really like?” I don’t do narcissism in print because I hate it when others do it. I review new novels in one of my other freelance gigs; I can usually tell when a story’s autobiographical because the dullest character gets the biggest part. I’ve seen too many young journalist-wannabes fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and turn every story into a rehash of their personal experiences — even if they have no such experiences worth reading about, even if they’re 25 and still living with their parents. Ya wanna know how long it’s been since I got laid? Didn’t think so. Gonzo journalism belongs to the unstructured narcissism of the late hippie era. I harken back not to “gonzo” but to the precision writing of pre-’50 newspapers, back when papers were more populist (and popular), when a columnist was someone with something specific to say and who seemed anxious to say it.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Gladhanding comic Ross Shafer, who started Almost Live on KING-TV in ’84 as a straight talk show with current host John Keister as a sidekick, then left in ’88 to be the final host of the Fox Late Show, has joined the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher: an infomercial for a VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials, that take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see Marsha Burns‘s exquisite photos of alternately-beautiful people at the Bellevue Art Museum thru 5/16, and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

MISSION CONTROL: Everybody’s got a mission statement these days — construction projects, gas stations, even porno mags. My mission: To challenge your mind. To awaken your imagination. And to stop talking right now.

PASSAGE

James Darren in a pseudo-profound moment in Venus in Furs (1970): “When you don’t know where you’re at, man I tell you time is like the ocean. You can’t hold onto it.”

REPORT

Still working on the big history of the Seattle scene. Thanx to those who’ve contacted me thus far. The rest of you, if you’ve got stories or mementos, write to me.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Matutinal”

4/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

GREAT! GATES GETS HITCHED

JUST AFTER I TOSS MY OLD LIST

OF COMPUTER-NERD SEX PUNS…

Misc. hopes you’ve all got your copy of the white-on-black T-shirt featuring a hypodermic needle superimposed on the Space Needle beside the slogan, ” I went to Seattle to make a score and all I got was this lousy recording contract.”

UPDATE: I recently said we should preserve Seattle as a working city and resist the huge “Seattle Commons” yuppification project. Advocates of the Cascade neighborhood, a neglected pocket of affordable housing threatened by the Commons plan, have now formed the Cascade Residents Action Group to fight the wrong kind of redevelopment (info: 624-9049 or 523-2569).

BEEHIVE VIDEO, R.I.P.: It began 15 years ago on N.E. 45th as a far-flung outlet for the Peaches record chain, housed in an ex-Ford dealership. When that chain went Chapter 11 in ’81, the local manager bought it and added a Ballard outlet. It was the last large locally-owned record store in town, and the last to stock new vinyl. The first sign of trouble came in ’87, when the Wherehouse chain opened across the street, followed by Blockbuster down near U Village. In ’90, the store stopped paying for the Peaches name and held a contest for a new name (which meant no more word-balloon signs with the “Peachy” mascot pointing to the “Gay and Bisexual Videos” shelf). In ’92, they sold the Ballard store and made the 45th outlet all-video. It bravely (foolishly?) failed to stock umpteen multiple copies of blockbuster action hits, instead keeping a large stable stock of cool obscurities. The strategy cut costs and attracted a loyal clientele, but it still wasn’t enough. On 3/22, I rented my regular Monday 2-for-1 titles and saw nothing strange, except that the sale shelf of close-out tapes was a bit fuller. The next afternoon, I went in and was abruptly told I couldn’t rent anything else: “I’m sorry, we just went out of business. We’re only taking returns.” Its loss leaves a lot of frequent-renter cards that’ll never get filled up, and leaves the central U District without a decent foreign-film store.

OUT TO DRY: The Squire Shops are in Chapter 11; many of the remaining 23 outlets are closing. Just as the ugly clothes that made ’em famous are coming back! Squire sold clothes that young mall-crawlers thought were hip. In its heyday, that meant jeans with cuffs nearly as wide as the waist. Seattle wore bellbottoms years after the rest of the country stopped. Several companies formed here to keep Seattle in clothes the national companies no longer made. That scene led to the local firms that gave the world loud sweatshirts with goofy slogans and Hypercolors; some of those firms are now on the wrong side of that fad and face money trouble themselves. (“Designer grunge” has virtually nothing to do with the local fashion biz.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Washington Free Press promises to be the hard-hitting investigative newspaper Seattle’s never really had, with the possible exception of the pre-JOA P-I. Several tabloids over the years promised this, but soon turned into lifestyle rags that just used `politics’ to define their subcultures (Community Catalyst is just as guilty of this, in its way, as the Weekly). Free Press isn’t like that. It doesn’t tell you what clothes you have to wear or what food you have to eat. It just reports the under-reported big stuff. In the April ish, that’s a huge piece about Boeing’s spotty environmental record and vigorous influence-peddling. The rest of the free monthly tab’s weaker (talk radio-style rants against Jack in the Box) but shows promise….Beyond the Cultural Dustbin is Hans and Thelma Lehmann’s personal history of highbrow art, music and dance in Seattle since 1938, when UK conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (scion of the drug empire that now owns Contac) came to lead the Seattle Symphony. He left a year later, calling Seattle “a cultural dustbin.” The book argues that we’ve come a long way since then, from the Northwest School painters of the ’50s and John Cage‘s residency at Cornish to today’s proliferation of dance and theatrical troupes. The book implies but doesn’t directly ask: We’ve got culture now, but is it art?

JESUS JONES WITHOUT THE JONES: Counter Culture is the first Christian alternative-music zine I’ve seen in Seattle since the Jesus Freak scene of the ’70s. Its cover interviewee, Tonio K., was a minor ’79 LA singer-songwriter (best-known LP: Life in the Food Chain) who’s now born-again and wants a crossover hit just like Amy Grant. The writers insist at several parts that you can still like Jesus even if you don’t like the Religious Right. It displays calls to prayer in standard cut-up punkzine design. It covers Christian grunge bands that mix “`70s funk with the anxious mind of `80s punk rock with the heart of God.” But then, punk and its descendants, even in their nihilism, held a righteous notion of good and evil, a conviction that the world should be better than it is. Bands like U2 and 10,000 Maniacs already use songs as sermons. Take out sex and drugs, add New Testament imagery, and you too could exhort the faithful at the Vineyard coffeehouse in the U District.

TO WOMB IT MAY CONCERN: First Moments is a local firm offering “videos of your child’s first moments” — ultrasound images of the fetus, to be treasured as a family heirloom; there’s blank tape at the end so you can add birth and infancy footage. Forgetting the unspoken anti-abortion implication, it makes you wonder: if you’re sick of friends’ cloying baby pix now, just wait!

OPEN MEMO TO CURSE: You’ve successfully exposed the hypocritical machinations behind KCMU-Lite and its instigators. But to restore the station as a community resource, you’ve gotta deal with the UW Board of Regents, who control the license. The current managers were turning the station into nothing but a self-serving fundraising machine, something the Regents can identify with. After fundraising, their no. 2 priority is saving face; with all the other campus scandals, they might seek the safest way out of the KCMU dilemma. Unfortunately, there are “safer” ways than restoring Classic KCMU. They could turn it into an automated classical outlet, or return it to the Communications School. You’ve gotta assert that any format change would violate the promises made in membership drives. Then, offer an olive branch. Ask your comrades, the fired DJs with the class-action suit, to back off if the Regents will let you help set up a new structure for the station, not like it’s now but not quite like before either. Tell them you don’t want to restore all of the station’s rough-hewn past. You want to build on its heritage, to more strongly serve students, alternative-music communities, and others now unserved by local radio. Even after that, you’ll have to deal with KUOW management down the hall, people who’ve asserted excessive control over KCMU and who honestly don’t get what’s wrong with institutionalized “public” radio. People who only seek the most upscale listeners. People who mistake blandness for a virtue. The announcers on NPR stations all sound like HAL 9000, for chrissakes! They oughta sound more like the booming, colorful voice who used to announce the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. They oughta reflect the glorious pomposity of orchestral and opera music, the twee affectations of chamber music, the life-affirming spirit of real jazz, instead of a yup variation on BBC English. Public radio should be by and for the public, not just by the bureaucracy for the upscale.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Ex-KCMUers Debbie Letterman and Kathy Fennessy are now spinning CDs as live “queue jockeys” for callers on hold for Microsoft’s product-support lines. While it’s a novel job that pays OK, Letterman told the Puget Sound Business Journal that she’s still tied into as restrictive a format as she faced at KCMU-Lite before she quit. “The key word is mellow:” Enya si, Ministry no.

THE URBAN TOURIST: Columbia Center sounds as strange as it looks. The climate-control hum and rushing air from elevator shafts give the 5th Ave. entrance cool noises (they’d be great for a sci-fi movie). Even weirder is the Seafirst Corridor, a passageway under 5th and Columbia from Columbia Center (where the bank execs work) to Seafirst 5th Ave. Plaza (where the back-office staff works). It’s the most surreal walkway since the United terminal at O’Hare. On the walls, plastic-covered pastel lights flash in a slow sequence of colors, while New Age music and ocean sounds enhance the creamy dreamscape. At the end, two elevators take you one flight up to the harsh utilitarian corridors of the 5th Ave. Plaza, where a security guard waits to let you back into a numbing temp job.

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: If you think Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy‘s Subaru spots are already odd, wait ’til you see the one with a dude in black jeans saying that the Impreza’s “like punk rock, only it’s a car”.

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS (via Michelle McCarthy and David Humphries): “London news has reported the NY bomb news prominently, but I think Londoners were squinting a little at the panicky New Yorkers having had their first initiation to bomb-based evacuation. Since we’ve lived here, areas as populous as Wall Street are evacuated for bomb threats close to weekly, and one actually goes off about once a month. It’s hard to imagine the US tolerating the constant shutdown and occasional destruction of its biggest cities and business districts.”

CHRISTIAN GORE AT 911: Three years ago, Gore was the uppity editor of a Detroit ‘zine about perverse film and video. Now, he’s the uppity editor of a slicked-up, mass-market Film Threat, based in Beverly Hills (at that ZIP Code) and financed by Hustler‘s Larry Flynt. Gore puts big stars on the cover (for sales) and trashes those stars inside (for credibility). He covers “B” Hollywood horror and sci-fi, and still promotes a few undergrounds. Gore promised two different nights of video treats, but the Friday and Saturday shows shared half the same material: drive-in movie trailers, Sid & Marty Krofft theme songs, banned Ren & Stimpy episodes (Gore’s cronies with the original R&S team), psychedelic computer animation. At both shows, Gore passed around cans of cheap beer and asked the audience to sit back, yell if they thought something was boring, and act like they were in his living room. I took advantage of this after he showed a student film about an “artist” who has naked women with blue paint on their bodies press up against butcher paper: “Everybody knows that’s based on a real artist, right?” Gore, incredulous: “It is?” Me: “Of course. Yves Klein! He was in the first Mondo Cane movie.” “I didn’t know that.” A guy who doesn’t know the daddy of schlockumentaries shouldn’t call himself a weird-film authority.

IT’S SQUARE TO BE HIP: I don’t just want you to question the assumptions of mainstream culture. I want you to question the assumptions of your culture, like the assumption that it’s sacred to be “hip” and profane to be “square.” The hip-vs.-square concept is the alternative culture’s unexamined legacy from the beats’ misinterpretation of jazz lingo. In the NY jazz scene, “hepcats” (derived, sez Zola Mumford, from the Senegalese word hipicat, “one who is very aware of their surroundings”) were those who played and/or listened to advanced black music (instead of the watered down Paul Whiteman versions) and who’d mastered the complex codes of social gamesmanship in Manhattan. It was a concept for a specific time/place that no longer exists. Square people these days are a lot hipper than a lot of self-proclaimed hipsters. Squares enjoy drag queens on Geraldo and buy male pinup posters. Squares buy Soundgarden CDs and watch The Simpsons. Squares grow and haul the food we eat. Squares make our cars. Squares support education and world-relief drives. As Wes “Scoop” Nisker writes in Crazy Wisdom, “the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering.” There is no superior race (not even yours). There is no superior gender or gender-role (not even yours). There is no superior culture (not even yours). The real enemies are people who think they’re hip but aren’t: The Religious Right (not a mass movement but a tightly organized minority that gets out its vote in low-turnout elections); the civic fathers/mothers who want to outlaw youth culture. (More on this below.)

IN BLOOM: When I told people I wanted to write a book about the local music scene, most said “you’d better get it out right away. Nobody will care about Seattle next month.” I don’t know if the “Seattle sound” is really the flash in the pan that so many local wags think (hoping they can go back to their familiar nihilism?). People here are so used to obscurity, when the spotlight shines they squint and wait for it to stop. But like I’ve written before, this could just be the flash that lights a lasting fire. Jonathan & Bruce shrewdly took a subgenre that’s been developing for 10 years, put a slogan on it, made it the Next Big Thing and made us its capital. But the sound they built isn’t one of those short-half-life sounds like power pop. It’s an identifiable sound, imitable yet sufficiently diverse to allow infinite variations. The dozens of “generic grunge” bands now playing opening sets at the Off Ramp could form the tourist bedrock of a permanent scene, like the “generic country” bands in small Nashville bars, bringing in the bucks and attention to support more advanced work. If we play our cards right, Seattle could become the Nashville of rock.

BUT NOT IF the forces of repression have their way, as led by our city’s “progressive” political machine. Most mayors like to kiss up to their town’s fastest growing industry, but not ours. From feminist/prohibitionists to the tepid No Nukes concert film, some of the most adamant political liberals were cultural conservatives. Norm Rice wrote the Teen Dance Ordinance as a City Councilmember; as mayor, he’s apparently behind the actions to shut down all-ages concerts and raves and the effort to seize part ownership of RKCNDY. Rice comes from the disciplinarian side of the black middle class, where adults want young people to strive hard at all times and avoid idle temptations like pop music. Rice doesn’t get that the rock scene is a hard-working, industrious bunch of people empowering themselves. He calls himself a “supporter of the arts” while clamping down against Seattle’s first indigenous artform since the ’50s Northwest School painters. He promotes Seattle as a “KidsPlace” while trying to shut young people up.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to check out the Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at the ex-Penney’s site on 2nd & Pike (where the real homeless are studiously kept outside), and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

PASSAGE

Christine Kelly in Sassy:

“While watching the inaugural balls, I realized that Hillary Clinton is the Courtney Love of politics. If the people want Kurt (Bill), they gotta take Courtney (Hillary) too. People will accuse Courtney (Hillary) of trying to break up the band with her constant meddling and poisoning influence, even though Courtney (Hillary) has her own band (office). Hillary (Courtney) said provocative things to the press about baking cookies (taking heroin). Courtney (Hillary) was on MTV with her husband. Both chicks have a cute, sassy daughter. There is one major difference: Courtney has too much taste to mix jewel tones like amethyst and royal blue while watching her husband accept an MTV award (get inaugurated).”

REPORT

Like I said somewhere here, I’m starting to write the major history of the Seattle music scene from ’76 to today. I’ll need to talk to everybody who was a major part of it (players, promoters, ‘zine editors, designers, producers, club people). Write for details. If any of you know the addresses of ex-locals who’ve left town, also write.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pecuniary”

3/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:

HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK

Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.

BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.

WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).

THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.

WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.

JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.

NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)

WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”

WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.

MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.

FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.

ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.

ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.

AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.

DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?

BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.

‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

PASSAGE

In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”

REPORT

I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)

I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000 Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Captious”

2/93 Misc. Newsletter

(Incorporating four Stranger columns)

HILLARY’S JUST GOT IN;

ALREADY HALF

THE CAREER WOMEN

IN AMERICA

HAVE FOOTBALL-HELMET HAIR!

n the remote chance that you care, here at Misc. we spent the morn of 1/20 sitting warm in our electric-heated apartment, watched the swearing-in on crystal-clear cable, and felt sorry for all the folks here in Liberalville waited so long to see a Democrat inaugurated, only to have the power knocked out. No, we won’t make tapes of all the festivities for you. Besides, you don’t want to see Barry Manilow‘s opening act on the pre-inaugural special (a potential harbinger of disappointments to come?).

THE BUZZ OF THE NATION: Note that Pepsi was a sponsor of that same TV special. Traditionally, Coke was the Democratic pop (owned by Atlanta Dixiecrats) and Pepsi was the Republican pop (owned by Wall St. investors). During WWII, FDR pushed sweetheart deals to give Coke extra sugar rations and to let it build plants wherever our troops landed. In the ’50s, Nixon deliberately staged his “kitchen debate” with Kruschev in front of a Pepsi display at a New York trade fair. In the ’80s, Pepsi’s rise in the “cola wars” (under a management full of ex-military officials) mirrored the GOP’s power surge; as the Dems compromised and struggled, Coke lost its way with New Coke and ill-advised Hollywood investments. Now, it’s Pepsi that’s going weird at one end (with dumb ideas like Crystal Pepsi) and digging in at the other (buying fast-food chains to insure a captive market for its drinks). Clinton himself claims to be a Coke loyalist.

ENGULFED II: Predictably, the old order wouldn’t go away without one last blow by the GOP sleaze masters — the unilateral restarting of a war in hopes that the new guy would have to continue it, and thus continue the military spending levels and foreign-policy arrangements tied into it. History will, I predict, conclude that practical Republicanism, like practical Communism, was a system for preserving the rights of the privileged no matter what the cost to the nation as a whole, no matter how much it contradicted its own official ideology. If we’re lucky, maybe we’re over both of them.

SEARS CATALOG, 1886-1993: I suppose there’s little purpose for the Big Book in today’s malled and Wal-Marted America. Still, when any longrunning periodical dies, it’s a loss to the national scene. The Sears book, like the Wards book created (and died) before it, was a pioneer in what us art snobs now call interactive literature. You read the words and looked at the pictures. You imagined how the furniture would look in your home, you took your own measurements. Some of you tried to figure out the mysterious demarcation between Girls, Misses and Juniors. You could use it for bad toilet paper, worse cigarette paper, and cheap anatomy lessons via the underwear section. Now the masses have to shop in person, while the elite can stay home with their L.L. Bean and Victoria’s Secret books.

CATHODE CORNER: After honing his act for several years on assorted local cable channels, Spud Goodman has blossomed into a bright little show on regular TV (if that’s what you can call KTZZ), punctuated by outstanding live local-band segments and snappy graphics. Goodman’s own act consists of rambling interview/discussions that get interrupted by the large studio cast before they can get anywhere. While he treats himself as a god (“healing” viewers from the sin of having seen Bodyguard), everyone else treats him with patronizing indifference. The studio regulars don’t let him finish a sentence. The cameras, aping either experimental filmmaker Stan Brakage or AT&T ads, turn away toward people’s hands or goofy props. The tape editor cuts in fake poetry or meaningless location footage. Either they all disdain him, or they’re protecting him from the risk of boring the home viewer….Phoenix residents can now see The Maury Povich Show dubbed into Spanish, by accessing the same “Second Audio Program” signal used with some HBO movies. What a great way to teach our li’l kids to be bilingual! Forget those cute storybooks about spunky waifs back in the Old Country. Give us the wives who’ve become best friends with their husbands’ mistresses; that’ll hold anybody’s attention.

NITE LIT: Insomniacs such as myself have found a great companion and aid toward tiredness in USA Cable’s Up All Night, which takes old drive-in sex movies and cuts out the sex, making them even duller. Book lovers deserve their turn, so I propose a new book club. Boring Books Inc. would issue special editions of the classics, condensed to skim over the exciting parts and leave in all the tedium. (They’ll also help you write book reports when you’ve only seen the movie versions.) Just imagine the possibilities! The BBIMoby Dick: Just the documentary accounts of the whaling business. The BBI Lady Chatterly’s Lover: Just the passages about the decline of England’s agrarian society. The BBI Razor’s Edge: Just the gossip about Somerset Maugham’s rich friends. The BBI Fear of Flying: Just the parts about being a lonely affluent American in Germany, waiting for her weekly dose of The New Yorker. The BBI Thomas Hardy: Everything he ever wrote.

THE FINE PRINT (from the back of the Bradford Exchange Simpsons collector’s plate): “A decorative accessory. Not to be used for food consumption. Pigments used for color may be toxic.”

`POST’ MORTEM: There used to be a U-District jewelry store owner who tried for years to ban street posters. He said they were desecrating the neighborhood, that the Ave ought to look more clean-cut, more like Bellevue. Now, the Washington Music Industry Coalition and the Northwest Area Music Alliance have announced a campaign to get clubs and bands to stop postering light poles. This would further force music promotion into paid media (like here). Admittedly, it’s wasteful to make hundreds of nondescript big-type posters aimed at passing cars, that may only attract a few dozen people to a particular gig. Still, there’s something to be said First Amendment-wise for the right to poster. And, as shown in Instant Litter, Art Chantry‘s book of local gig posters from 1977-85 (still at remainder racks), the illustrated poster aimed at pedestrians is a vital art form. Some are more creative than the advertised bands.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Wall St. Journal correction, 12/28): “A spokeswoman for News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting said the show In Living Color is part of a “long tradition of sketch comedy,” not sex comedies, as reported. The spokeswoman was misquoted in an item in Thursday’s Advertising column.” Runner-up (P-I headline, 12/29): “Sadomasochism gaining influence in dominant culture.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints finally came out a bit late for Xmas giving, but is still a quality alternative to your standard art calendars. Written and collage-illustrated (anonymously) by Talking Ravencollaborator James Koehnline, it’s a glorious celebration of the world’s free spirits and insightful thinkers, represented through 15 months’ worth of alternative “saint’s days”. February alone gives you found art and short texts about Bob Marley, Sir Thomas More, Russian anarchist Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Susan B. Anthony, Copernicus, and Tex Avery. Available at Left Bank and A.K.A. books….Ex-Wire publisher, ex-KCMU DJ and ex-Stranger music reviewer Brian Less is back in business with Urban Spelunker, another free monthly tabloid about the local scene. As is the case with many aging music scenesters moving on to new interests, Less’s new mag is just a little about bands, plus a little about experimental-highbrow music, poetry, politics, and other stuff (but why did that David Fewster piece use an old quote from me, calling for more serious Northwest fiction, as the premise for a page of coffee jokes?)…Memo to IEM: If you’re gonna run Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream tributes, don’t call yourselves a local art mag. And what do those letters stand for anyway?

PHILM PHACTS: Robert Altman’s making a film cobbled together from pieces of Raymond Carver stories — only relocated, says,USA Today, “from Carver’s Pacific Northwest to suburban southern California.” Carver was arguably the best portrayer of pre-Yup Northwest society, a world of repressed Presbyterians who sit around brooding mournfully and talking very plainly. Can you really see Carver’s world enacted by light-haired Porsche drivers among the palm trees?

WHY THE COMMONS IS A DUMB IDEA: South Lake Union is Seattle’s version of the “cheap merchandise district” depicted in Ben Katchor’s great comic, Julius Knipel, Real Estate Photographer (seen sometimes in The Stranger and collected in the book Cheap Novelties). Every thriving city needs a low-rise, low-rent district adjacent to downtown, for all the commercial activities that need to be near the center but can’t afford tower rents. We need the suppliers, distributors, and photo studios that are there now. The problem is that to civic planners, there are no old low-rise buildings — just redevelopments that haven’t happened yet. The visionaries don’t see the needs of the real city, just the fantasy of an “Emerald City.” They can’t see the beauty of the Washington Natural Gas and Pacific Lincoln-Mercury neon. They demand their “piece of the country in the heart of the city.” They can’t see the beauty that’s already there. They can’t see that urban landscapes can have their own beauty. They can’t see the city for the trees.

SHAMAN ON YOU: Commercial exploitation of indigenous spirituality descends to a new low as Time-Life Books offers “a free hand-carved Zuni animal fetish” with The First Americans, a coffee-table book series picturing historical artifacts and the like. The ad copy proclaims, “Hand-carved by artists of the Zuni nation, these stone fetishes are believed to house the spirits of the animals they represent….The Zuni people believe that fetishes contain a spirit force that can be of great value to the owner. They can have many uses — in Native American rituals, on the hunt, for healing, for long life, for personal protection — and are considered very powerful.” Having conquered their land and destroyed their livelihoods, Anglos now turn native people’s most intimate beliefs into corporate kitsch in the name of “tribute.”

PRESSED: My Mirror job gives me access to the periphery of the daily journalism biz. These folks seem to attend so many meetings, you wonder how they get a paper out every day. One topic at these meetings: how to appeal to younger readers. It seldom dawns on them that maybe young people aren’t reading papers ‘cuz papers are so downright hostile to people born after about ’54. In the 1/12P-I, John Marshall applied his tiresome aging-boomer-sneering-at-those-kids-today routine to examine grunge (if he’s only heard about it now, he doesn’t deserve to be an arts writer); his highest compliment is that some of it sounds just like ’60s music (gag!). The same day’s Times ran a wire story about PBS going after “the youth vote” with shows about those fresh young teenybopper idols Elton John, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon!

BODY OF EVIDENCE DEPT.: Lollipop’s is a new Eugene no-booze strip joint open only to ages 18-20. “Lots of the kids come in to play pool,” the owner told Newsweek; “they don’t even watch the girls.” Apparently the boys of Deadheadville take the name of Seattle’s Déja Vú strip chain literally: Nothing you haven’t seen before.

MONOCULTURE: The Weekly still claims to be an “alternative” paper, only its apparent idea of “alternative” is to be more conservative than the dailies. Last December it and its sister paper Eastside Week ran a long essay on “The Downside of Diversity Training.” In it, EW staffer Ted Kenney whined about the inconvenience of affluent white guys at corporate training sessions, forced to think about the concerns of non-whites and non-guys. Its research was heavy on anti-affirmative-action position papers from think tanks “associated with a free market stance.” The author’s insensitivity only proves a need for diversity training. All this from a company that to my knowledge has never had a prominent nonwhite employee (please prove me wrong on this). To the Weekly, diversity means putting white male Reagan Democrats next to white female Reagan Democrats.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! MOSHPIT!: Here’s more about Seattle Backstage, the TV show about local music discussed here in January. It’s 13 half-hours, taped at the Backstage (natch), to premiere in Feb. or March on KCPQ. UW-discovered centerfold model Angela Melini hosts feature segments; KNDD’s Norman Batley is the main host. Michael Harris, who’s co-producing the show with the Backstage’s Ed Beeson, says he’s close to a national syndication deal. Bands already taped include locals (Tiny Hat Orchestra, Mudhoney, Posies, Sadhappy) and secondary national acts (Toad the Wet Sprocket, L7, Sarah McLachlan). This show is not to be confused with the separate team, led by Doug Bray (a UCLA Film School grad) and Steve Helvey, making a feature-length documentary. Tentative title: Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest (from an early EP by Bray’s old pals the Young Fresh Fellows, who took the title from a 1962 phone co. promotional record). They’ve held special filming concerts with the Posies, Fastbacks, Chemistry Set, Love Battery, 7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Coffin Break, Hammerbox, Mono Men, Supersuckers, and Gas Huffer. Future sessions are scheduled with Tad, the Young Fresh Fellows, Girl Trouble, Seaweed, Beat Happening, Mudhoney, and Dead Moon. Bray has unnamed investors, three Super 16 film cameras with synchronized time codes, digital sound recording. What he doesn’t have yet is a distributor.

(latter-day note: Seattle Backstage never made it to the air. Pray’s film, now called Hype, was finished but still looking for a distributor as of July 1995.)

CLUB ETIQUETTE: Remember, anytime you go to see a band at a bar that’s supposed to be cool, there will be uncouth ruffians to watch out for. These people will prey on anyone they perceive as weak — harassing women, fag-bashing men, “accidentally” shoving against people in order to spill their drinks. Fortunately, these goons are easy to spot. They travel in male pairs or trios (very rarely in coed couples). They’re always the most clean-cut looking guys in the bar, with the biggest jawbones, the costliest “ordinary” haircuts, the widest game-show-host smiles. You’re safe with the people who look like freaks; it’s the suburban slummers you must never speak to. This may change, should “designer grunge” make it to the malls. But by then we’ll all be wearing something else (most of us already do). Speaking of which…

DESIGNER GRUNGE UPDATE: That “Seattle fashion” craze invented in New York has reached Europe, according to articles in the London Sunday Times and Italian Glamour. The Sunday Times piece called Seattle “almost Canadian in its boringness.” Wish I could translate what the Italians said about Kurt, Courtney, et al.; the pictures all show the NY designer ripoff product, with no local images seen. Italian Vogue, however, has had photographers really here.

IF I HAD TO DO THE SAME AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal reports that the Next Big Thing in London clubs is upscale cover bands with names like the Rolling Clones, the Scottish Sex Pistols, and an ABBA tribute named Bjorn Again. Does this mean we can finally stop aping every new UK music fad? Can we stop buying those costly air-shipped copies of Melody Maker and I-D telling us what styles we must slavishly follow in order to be properly “alternative”?

‘TIL MARCH, remember this faux pearl of insight from one of the Amy Fisher TV movies: “I love him ’cause he loves me so much. We have great sex. And he fixes my car.”

PASSAGE

AutoWeek publisher Leon Mandel, quoted on the sales surge in big pickup trucks: “Something in the American spirit likes great size and a lack of subtlety.”

REPORT

Two bad colds in one month have interrupted my regular research rounds (and made much of the rest of my life into a minor hell). God, hope I last long enough to see this health care reform jive come to pass.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Hypaethal”

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”

From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.

In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).

The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)

Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.

SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.

SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….

The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.

THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”

AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….

Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.

ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.

IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.

WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….

I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).

PASSAGE

Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”

REPORT

Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,

not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.

12/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns

and one newsletter-only essay)

THERE’S HUSKY COFFEE NOW!

JUST DON’T SERVE IT ICED.

IT DOESN’T HOLD UP UNDER COLD CONDITIONS

At Misc., we have only one response to the reported infestation of coyotes in Discovery Park: Where’s Acme when you need it?

CLARIFICATION: For those of you not up on your pop-cultural literacy, the “Woody” referred to last month wasn’t Mr. Allen but Mr. Woodpecker.

ELECTION AFTERMATH: The electorate issued a big dose of reality. A positive reality, as in waking up dazed yet refreshed, to find Patrick Duffy telling you that the past 12 years were just a bad dream. For too long, our government and its business backers lived in a fantasy, in which the declaration of one’s innate “morality” excused all immoral actions, in which the stagnating defense of old socioeconomic privilege could be sold as a “growth policy.” The denizens of this delusory Pleasure Island, long since having turned into asses, expected that with enough money (ours) and lies (theirs), they could maintain the fantasy forever. But the lies ran out quicker than the money. The sleaze machine will finally be out of the Executive Branch. No more gag rules, no more Council on Competitiveness, no more friendly dictators, no more executive orders to appease Pat Robertson. No more race-baiting or gender-baiting as official policy. Now for the boring part: establishing a long-term, active constituency for getting done what needs doing. The two drug cartels (illicit and prescription) are still bleeding the nation dry. The pro-unemployment and anti-environment lobbyists maintain their unelective offices; they and their pundit pals still brand anyone who dares oppose them as “special interests.” Think it’s OK to go back to hip apathy? Get real.

IF I’M RIGHT about this being a new era, we’re gonna need a new aesthetic to go with it. It’s not just that the Clintons and Gores don’t like harsh lyrics and other shock art, but that they don’t like the divisive concept behind them. The visions of Karen Finley and Henry Rollins are clumsily reversed clones of the GOP’s politics of hate. The Young Republicans long ago co-opted the image of the self-made rebel sneering at the petty concerns of the little people; there’s no point in alternative artists acting like that anymore. There’s still a helluva lot to be angry about, but it needs to be answered by a more inclusive kind of anger, something that goes beyond the mere vilification of enemies. Now that 62% of the voters have rejected the organized Right, it may be time for the art world to reconsider its hostility against the so-called “sap masses” and to start communicating with people about the real problems. Leftist art used to be about promoting solidarity with the working classes; it can be about that again. The post-Bush era also means there’s less value in enduring bad art just so you can smugly know that you’ve consumed something the Right would hate. What counts now is whether you like it.

BEFORE WE FORGET the campaign, let’s remember the curiosity that was Ross Perot. It wasn’t just money that got him as far as he got. It wasn’t just a bullheaded unwillingness to play by the rules (including the rule of listening to others’ ideas). It was that he played these as assets. He exploited the ’80s romance of entrepreneurism as Reagan and Bush tried but couldn’t. His contrived maverick act caught many hearts within the subcultures that the NY Times doesn’t know about: Computer bulletin board users. Talk radio listeners. Franchisees and multi-level marketers. “Couples’ erotica” video renters. Self-help readers. Family nudists. The 30 percent of the population that no longer watches prime time TV. People in 12-step groups. Upscale health food eaters. Bodybuilders. People who use powder cocaine while denouncing people who use crack. People who go to comedy clubs. People who used to read National Lampoon in high school. Members of spouse-swapping clubs. Science fiction fans. Everybody who thinks they deserve to break the rules. A savvier candidate might have turned these groups into a force to be reckoned with indeed. God help us if it happens.

APPEARANCES #1: Someone signed only Elvira says she usually likes Misc., but that my consenting attitude toward shirt-doffing G ‘n R fans “really struck out”: “Is the above aimed at women specifically? If so then you are no more `enlightened’ than the band is regarding women! Why would anybody, actually, show a lot of flesh at concerts? Or anywhere else for that matter?” I can think of a million reasons, starting with: why not? I can’t tell women what to do. And I have no monolithic attitude toward all women. Fifty-two percent of the human race can’t be all alike. If some wanna make fools of themselves at dumb corporate-rock shows, I won’t go look but I won’t condemn ’em either. And yes, I’d support male nudity in mutually supportive situations, like the Berkeley, CA student who showed up in class either bare or bottomless all semester, to the condemnation of management but the support or indifference of his fellow students.

APPEARANCES #2: The same week that Pentagon brass got all cowardly about admitting gays and lesbians, a woman wrote in the NY Times about the lack of full male skin in mainstream studio sex movies. Both probably have something to do with some men’s fear of other men’s sex (an emotion oft exploited in wartime propaganda, the ol’ keep-the-huns-off-your-wife line). As I’ve said before, writers who depict “Men” as a single collectivized psyche are wrong. Forty-eight percent of the human race can’t be all alike either. We’re isolated souls; many of us hate each other. I grew up from locker-room intimidation games long ago, and wish others could do the same. And while I’m not attracted to other guys’ parts, I don’t mind their images. I’ve seen enough male nudity in plays and foreign films to know how it can add that ever-needed human vulnerability.

APPEARANCES #3: The fashion press has certified the “Grunge Look” as the official Next Big Thing. Except that some of these designers (including Perry Ellis staffer Marc Jacobs) turn it into commercial crap, with sand-washed silk “flannel” shirts and models’ hair elaborately styled to look unkempt. Others (including Betsey Johnson) define “Seattle style” as Dee-Lite-meets-Frederick’s-of-Hollywood, with sheer tops and rainbow bell bottoms over Doc Martens. I’ve nothing philosophically against $500 see-thru dresses or butterfly pasties (see above), but authentic Seattle wear oughta be something you can wear in November without catching pneumonia. More seriously, the Seattle arts community (in music, fashion and other media) is at its best when it gets folks together, unpretentiously, to achieve honest expressions (even honest banal expressions). If the big designers reinterpret it in pretentious ways, maybe it’s just too much for corporate fashion to understand.

APPEARANCES #4: Betty Page, the reclusive ’50s S&M model whose pinup photos are reprinted in countless books, mags and trading card, who’s inspired everyone from Madonna to the Cramps’ Poison Ivy with her kinky innocence, was finally found in Calif. by Robin Leach. She describes herself now as “old and fat” and living off Social Security; some of the publishers who’ve made money off her image are volunteering to help her out, which is nice. I never was turned on by her myself; I mean, her pictures in regular clothes look like my mom did at the time.

AIRING IT OUT: At the save-KCMU rally 11/8, several people booed when a speaker mentioned the letters “NPR.” They knew that despite NPR’s several liberal political voices, in operating practice it’s become a very Reaganite institution. For one thing, it does a lousy job at serving ethnic or cultural minorities. If you’re not an upscale baby boomer, you’re not welcome. KUOW’s newsletter boasts about how it appeals almost exclusively to the well-off, the perfect consumer audience for “enhanced underwriting announcements.” Also, many under-40 listeners loathe NPR’s cloying aesthetic, its patronizing attitude toward non-yup subcultures, and its “down home” features celebrating the purity of life in all-white towns. (See the current Whole Earth Review for more details.) Also, I’m as guilty as the rest of the local alternative press in keeping quiet about KCMU’s gradual state of siege until now. I wanted to support the station too much to speak ill of it, even as great volunteer DJs got axed one by one for disobeying petty rules or playing too much of the “harsh and abrasive” music that was making Seattle famous. Just call me a listener who loved too much.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Even if there weren’t a new fad of cereal-box collecting, the Cocoa Puffs Factory box would be a collector’s item. A flap on the back unfolds into a 3-D image of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a working chute system. Put a handful of the cereal in the bin at the top, release a trap, and watch the puffs roll down the device and into your bowl. Get one to use, and one to save for your grandkids… Hershey’s Desert Bar (“special formulation for desert and tropical conditions”) is a melt-resistant chunk of chocolate mixed with egg whites for extra body, as enjoyed by the troops of ’91. It’s a substantial biting experience, less gooey and sugary than the regular bar. It’s also got the powdery-white exterior familiar to anyone who’s worked in a candy kitchen and sampled a brick of “industrial chocolate.”

NATIVE LORE: The 11/23 Times sez the number of self-designated Native Americans in Wash. grew from 58,000 to 78,000 in the last census period, a figure far higher than that of officially recognized tribal members. I knew there were phony New Age shamen running around, but I didn’t know there were so many.

AD VERBS: Howcum all these half-hour commercials are for products that you could explain in a minute, while the stuff that could use the time (like cars) still only gets regular spots?

THE FINE PRINT (on a bag of Fritos): “You may have won $10,000. No purchase necessary. Details inside.”

BEHIND THE PINE CURTAIN: Oregon’s Prop. 9, which would have officially dehumanized homosexuals, lost — but by a dangerously small margin. Its sponsor, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, plans to keep resubmitting the measure, to gain administrative control of the state Republican Party (onetime home to progressives like the late Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Wayne Morse), and to start a Washington branch.

The OCA and the Idaho Nazis are not aberrations to the recent mystique of the “laid back” Northwest. Their presence reflects the logical extreme of the myth of “getting away from it all” to a refuge populated only by “people like us.” This was one of the last parts of the continent that whites conquered. After that, we had race riots against Chinese laborers; after that, we sent our citizens of Japanese ancestry off to wartime internment camps. The “Northwest Lifestyle” ideology that coalesced in the mid-’70s promotes turning one’s back on “urban problems” (such as nonwhite people) and putting down roots in “God’s country” where everybody’s identically “nice” and wholesome. We don’t need any more of that. We need to attract people into the region who are willing to live among other people.

CATHODE CORNER: Sony’s about to bring the cyberpunk vision one step closer by introducing a Visortron “headset video screen.” The goggle-like device contains two tiny 0.7″ LCD screens, one just in front of each eye. Not only could this mean perfected of 3-D movies, it’ll let bus riders and hospital patients remove themselves even further from their immediate surroundings. Also, it’s one of the components that “virtual reality” developers have clamored for. They want to be able to rig up users with sensor gloves, feed computer animation into their eyes, and send them on journeys into computer-created “worlds” (depicted in the Neuromancer books and the forthcoming film Toys). Advocates claim it could be used for everything from simulated drug trips to sex with robots (a pitifully sterile fantasy, if you ask me). But you know it’ll end up being primarily used for military training.

STAGES: ‘Twas something really peculiar about seeing the New City production of Fever (Wallace Shawn‘s monologue piece about the limits of rich-liberal guilt trips) performed at a substitute venue: First Christian Church, usually occupied by people who don’t just go to upscale plays about poverty and suffering but actually try to do something about them. Shawn posited a world consisting only of the oppressed and the privileged (the latter including himself and, by implication, his audience). He conveniently concludes (or seems to, since he’s conveniently equivocal) that there’s little his class can do but feel sympathetic and give a little money to street people. Sorry Wally, not good enough. Next time, try to see the rest of the world, not as an artist looking for source material but as a citizen looking for a task to be done. You could start at the church and its ongoing ministry to street people.

OUR ANNUAL ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT: 24, including three colorized showings; plus three showings of Marlo Thomas’s remake It Happened at Christmas. Fortunately, the lucky few who get Summit Cable can see Rope (J. Stewart’s most morally ambiguous role) this month.

‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN in another year (with Seattle’s most accurate In/Out list), remember this holiday entertaining advice courtesy of Fay Weldon in Praxis (1978): “Never feed your family gourmet meals, because they will come to expect them.”

NEW CABINET SUGGESTIONS

• Energy: Who’s got more than Robin Williams?
• National Security Agency: Leo Buscaglia makes everybody feel more secure.
• Housing and Urban Development: Nobody’s created more housing for less money than the punk squatters.
• Human Services: Warren Beatty‘s serviced a lot of humans.
• Nat. Endowment for the Arts: Who knows more about art and endowment than the Men on Film guys?
• Defense: It’d take an army of millions to hold back Chuck D.
• Central Intelligence: Marilyn Von Savant‘s the most intelligent person I know.
• Treasury: The computer phreakers of the Legion of Doom know deeply how “virtual” (imaginary) our money system is.
• Commerce: Nobody in America knows anything about this anymore. Sell the dept. to Matsushita.
• Internal Revenue: We need someone with proven fundraising skills. Jerry Lewis could also work on increasing U.S.-European relations.
• Interior: The Mariners are great at keeping open spaces quiet and underpopulated.
• Agriculture: Orville Reddenbacher looks like he still gets up early to listen to the Farm Report.
• Veterans Affairs: The classic rock DJs know how to appeal to guys who’re still obsessed with our last wartime era.
• Labor: Jane Pauley‘s been through it a few times.
• Education: Spike Lee‘s always ready to teach a thing or two.
• Attorney General: A. Hill would be the obvious applause-getting choice, lest we forget her solid conservative stance. Otherwise, how ’bout someone who knows today’s legal frontiers, like whoever’s defending Negativland from U2’s anti-sampling suit.
• State: Let’s get someone who can bring people together and keep ’em smiling, like Mark De Carlo.
• Transportation: Who shows more love for public transit than George Carlin, the new Conductor on Shining Time Station?

PASSAGE

Ken Siman of Grove Press, on his Drew Friedman cartoon ad appearing in rags like the Village Voice:

“You don’t have to be snooty or dull or pretentious to read books.”

REPORT

After seven grueling months, I finally have a new day job as assistant editor of Mirror, a new local monthly for high school students, distributed only in the schools. If you’re a Clark completist (God knows I’m not), go to a local middle or high school starting Jan. 5. And while you’re there, consider joining a volunteer tutor or mentor program.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Noumenon”

11/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WOODY’S STILL A FILM GENIUS!

I DON’T CARE WHAT THEY SAY

ABOUT HIS AFFAIR WITH CHILLY WILLY…

Be sure to stay tuned after this issue of Misc. for our “focus group” session, where we talk to a group of undecided readers in a West Seattle living room to learn their feelings about the column’s character issues.

INDECISION ’92: Not voting is exactly the same thing as voting for Bush. No matter how much you call it a protest, officialdom will still call it apathy. I have one and only one overriding goal this Nov. 3: the defeat of the right wing sleaze machine. C-SPAN’s reruns of the Kennedy-Nixon debates revealed that campaigns once offered detailed discussions of policy minutiae; after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, Americans are so accustomed to being treated like idiots that even Perot’s stand-up routines seem comparatively refreshing. No matter how impure or insufficient, I support every politician whose election will aid in the removal from direct political power of Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Manuel Lujan, Rush Limbaugh, et al.; who’ll stand up against the funny-money financial lobbies and the junk bond peddlers, against the NRA and the drug companies, and do what it takes to stop this country from becoming a neo-Dickensian disaster zone. Maybe Clinton/Gore won’t go as far as I’d like, but it’s still better than what we’ve got now. Besides, you’ve gotta root for a prez-to-be whose wife (sez Newsweek) used to be on Sesame Street‘s board of directors. At least there’ll be one person in D.C. who knows how to add.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal sez an ’80s nostalgia theme nightclub is about to open in NYC. It’s a hopeful sign that the more wretched aspects of recent history might be past us. The question is, now that the Age of Sleaze might finally end, how will it be remembered? I fear that the ’80s could end up fetishized like the ’50s, whose most preposterous images are mistakenly perceived as the truth of American life then (or even as it had always been). For anyone reading this in the future, Reagan was not as universally popular as he claimed to be (or as his cowered opponents were too willing to believe); his economic “miracle” was a trick engineered by financial funny-money; the Religious Right was no great mass movement (Robertson’s regular viewership is half that of feel-good preacher Robt. Schuller); lots of people opposed the wasteful arms buildup and the gulf war; and violent action movies coincided with an actual decline in the moviegoing audience (the Stallone/Schwarzenegger killfests depended on a few addicts coming back repeatedly for their adrenaline fix).

PUTTING THE `HELL’ IN HELLENIC: A female UW student got partly blinded from a bottle-rocket thrown from a frat house toward a rooming house where some football players, some black, were throwing a party on the weekend before the start of fall quarter. She says the bottle came from the frat; its prez claimed at first that black players were responsible for everything, then began to back off from his assertions. (Frats are known cesspools of racism in admissions policies and behaviors, including an infamous minstrel show one year.) At one time, the Greek system was supposed to have symbolized the highest standards in scholarship and upright campus living. Now, even policewomen can’t walk Frat Row on a Saturday night without getting sexually harassed by Bluto wannabes whose rich daddies keep them out of jail. The UW administration seems unwilling to even condemn this behavior; while the city seems more interested in preventing blacks and 20-year-olds from having a place to dance. While everyone was making a fuss about making Belltown safe for the rich, a neighborhood full of the state’s young sons and daughters was allowed to become a snake pit. It was also in questionable taste for KNDD to go ahead with its “toga party” promotion the Fri. night after the tragedy.

ON THE TOWN: We seldom report about private events, but must admit that there won’t likely ever be a performance art piece as surrealistic as the Seafirst employees’ Oktoberfest. Lederhosen-clad oom-pah bands bellowing through the retail levels of the sterile Columbia Center. World-weary CPAs and perky tellers waiting in line in the Food Court area for free sausages, soft pretzels and microbrew (in specially painted steins that they got to keep).

GREAT NEW GAME: Since the Times now publishes wedding pictures only once a month, you can look through all the faces and exchange guesses about which couples have already broken up.

PAT ROBERTSON BUYS MTM ENTERPRISES: The company that once turned out some of the most progressive shows theretofore seen, now in the hands of Mr. Bigotry himself. What would Mary say?

A FRIEND WRITES: “So far, Tina Brown’s New New Yorker is like a crumbling but funky old apartment building that’s been “restored” into tacky luxury condos. All the humanizing qualities of the old format have been replaced by bland, “tasteful” flourishes. And most of the cartoons still suck (`I am a member of the legal profession, but I’m not a lawyer in the perjorative sense’); though it’s good to see Jules Feiffer joining Roz Chast as a beacon of real humor. Seattle readers should note Terrence Rafferty’s review of Last of the Mohicans: ‘(Michael) Mann gives Hawkeye rock-star hair, and precisely the right kind… a straight, stringy alternative-rocker mane (think Nirvana or Pearl Jam). This hair is exquisitely judged; greasy enough to shine with rebel integrity, yet not so disgusting that we start wondering what Hawkeye smells like.'”

MORE HAIR NEWS: Malaysian authorities have banned music videos depicting male long hair, claiming the need to “curb yellow culture” and prevent the subversion of impressionable youth. If they saw the crew-cutted boys on our Greek Row, they wouldn’t be so scared of a few tresses.

OFF THE WALLS: The best visual art show of the year so far (even surpassing fantastic photos by Patricia Ridenour and Mark Van S.) could be Dennis Evans‘s The Critique of Pure Writing at the Linda Farris Gallery. Twenty-six stunning collage installations combining old books, provocative display texts, and seductive graphics, positing a series of books containing the secrets of the universe. See the exhibit (until Nov. 15) or its commemorative book, then on Dec. 5 see the thematically and visually similar Prospero’s Books at the Neptune.

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER: Paul Allen won his bid to lease the ex-SAM Modern Art Pavillion for his proposed Jimi Hendrix memorial, over opposition by local art critic Matthew Kangas. He claims to have nothing against the Hendrix project (though he has something of a grudge against “the weight of the commercial entertainment industry”); he just wanted the building kept for fine art. It’s on the high-traffic Seattle Center grounds; it has high ceilings and perky ’60s white light; leasing it would remove it as a Bumbershoot venue. And face it, Allen can afford his own building.

STRIKING: KING’s Compton Report on 9/27 was aflutter about the need to preserve baseball from owners’ greed and waning fan interest. But the sport has a bigger problem, a bad rep among the young jocks needed to fill future rosters. The Mariners’ inability to find decent players directly results from the lack of good athletes getting into the game. It’s thought of as squaresville, the favorite sport of wimpy and/or right-wing authors, invoked by hypocritical “family values” advocates in “Get high on sports, not drugs” posters. In our anti-authoritarian society, it’s a slow game that emphasizes control and authority. In bowling, a perfect game is when everything happens. In baseball, a perfect game is when nothing happens. The sport’s best hope is for thawing U.S. relations with Cuba, bringing a new supply of great players who love the game.

FINAL MANGO TANG UPDATE: Ana Hernandez arranged for her cousin to smuggle a case of various Tang and “Frisco” brand 1-liter packets across the Mexican border; I now possess the contraband sugar/citric acid powder. The mango drink looks more orange than the Orange Tang and tastes vaguely like mangoes, but is too thin and sugar-gritty to make a convincing replica. The guava, melon, lemon and (especially) lime flavors are closer to the mark.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger has more info about “the baseball cap on the rear dashboard thing,” his topic of a previous letter: “these people one sees on the road display their goddamned baseball caps in their cars’ rear dashboards…Some tacky array of dime-a-dozen nylon mesh and foam things with a team/beer/tobacco/auto parts co. emblazoned on the H.G.W. Bush-type high-forehead brow thing”.. Thanks for the extra info; I still have no insights of my own on this…

FOR THE ACTIVE LIFE: The marketing of big-time men’s sports to female fans reaches a new level with Kimberly-Clark’s (no relation) offer for “Future Husky Fan” or “Future Cougar Fan” infantwear in exchange for Kotex proofs of purchase. Wouldn’t baby stuff make a more appropriate promotion for the Seahawks?

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE: Nearly two dozen young caucasians were arrested for assorted rowdy behavior at the G n’ R Kingdome show. And yet you never hear any community lobbyists call for a crackdown against white music or the closure of white clubs. Also, the P-I‘s Roberta Penn curiously commented that since no female fans took their tops off during the concert, it was a possible sign that “women are refusing to let their bodies be used as entertainment”. (Dome officials asked the band not to flash its regular “Show Your Tits” notice on the Diamondvision screen.) If I were her, I wouldn’t invoke Axl lovers as representative models of their gender. Besides, a voluntary revelation of natural beauty could arguably be a more wholesome entertainment than that provided by the band.

LAST DAY OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE DEPT.: Sinead O’Connor expressed her displeasure with the pope on Sat. Nite Live, to the expected condemnation of church authorities and supporters. As if an Irishwoman wouldn’t have a legit gripe against an institution that keeps divorce, contraception and abortion severely restricted there. As if anybody watching at 1 a.m. Sunday would be at Mass later that morning. Then, in her very next public appearance, she was booed off the stage at Sony Records’ all-star Dylan tribute show. So much for the open-mindedness of the ’60s generation. Also, David Letterman complained about being stuck in a meeting with network brass for three hours after he did a list of O’Connor’s “Top Ten List Complaints About the Pope.” He didn’t say that NBC censored the list after the show was taped. VCR freeze-framers report catching one stray frame of “No. 8: His Holier-Than-Thou Attitude,” which was otherwise taped over with “No. 8: The Way He Snubbed Her at the Grammys.”

AD OF THE MONTH: The promoters of a Regional Transit Project latched onto the slogan, “We’re a big region now. Maybe it’s time to act like one.” In the Nov. 18 Stranger I wrote, “Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one.” Nice that they know where to get top-notch material.

THE FINE PRINT (on the Sparkle Fun Crest Neat Squeeze package): “This product contains no sugar, like all ADA-accepted toothpastes. To prevent swallowing, children under six years of age should be supervised in the use of toothpaste.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Hydro Legends is the journal of the Hydroplane and Race Boat Museum, a work-in-progress that collects and restores the boats, engines and memorabilia of Seattle’s peculiar hometown sport. The 32-page tabloid’s chock full of wacky vignettes and history about such hydros as Savair’s Miss, Such Crust, Burien Lady, Smythe the Smoother Mover, Miss Bardahl, and the five Slo-Mo-Shuns; plus ads for commemorative hydro gold jewelry and silver ingots. Available from 1605 S. 93rd St., #E-D, Seattle 98108.

FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: At the opening ceremony before the first “true World Series” game, the Atlanta color guard brought out a Canadian flag with the maple leaf upside down. And this is the town that’s hosting the next Olympics?

SPOOKED: Two Spokane grade schools cancelled their Halloween parties this year, due in part (according to an AP story) to “complaints from parents who believe the day has satanic associations.” I believe Linus would call this the case of a very insincere pumpkin patch.

DID YOU THC WHAT I SAW?: It’s not completely true that the War on Drugs is a war on blacks. The white-dominated pot biz is also getting hit hard, with agents using infrared detectors and power-company records to seek out hidden halogen hothouses. Now they’ve got an 800 number for you to rat on those mysterious neighbors who don’t like having strangers in their basement. While I don’t do the stuff myself, I believe that with all our other problems, maybe we shouldn’t be acting like a police state over a mild sedative.

ON THE CALENDAR: Dave Barry will speak in Nov. at a Seattle Public Library benefit, with tix from $15 to $50. My advice is the same as it was for the Live Aid album: Donate direct.

ON THE STANDS: Allure cover blurb, 9/92: “Sophia Loren, The Goddess Next Door.” Vogue cover blurb, same month: “Genna Davis, The Goddess Next Door.” For an upstart little mag, Allure seems to have landed in a ritzier neighborhood.

ON THE AIR: The title of Rosie Black’s excellent report in the 10/19 Stranger, “The End of KCMU,” was more ominous than she knew at the time. KNDD/The End’s frequency was once occupied by KRAB, a pioneer listener-supported station founded in ’62 by Beat Generation legend Lorenzo Milam. It offered a highly diverse mix of programming, from big bands and Asian-language music to feminist talk shows. KNDD’s Norman Batley was one of KRAB’s volunteer DJs. But in the early ’80s, around the time KCMU turned from a broadcasting-class lab to a community station, KRAB’s management tried to “mainstream” the station’s programming, to attract a blander but larger base of donating listeners, to support new ventures like a state-of-the-art mobile recording studio. Shows with dedicated volunteers and listeners were canned or consolidated. Many old listeners stopped donating; too few new listeners replaced them. The station’s new softer focus didn’t make many new listeners love it enough to give money. Faced with mounting debts, the station sold out to commercial interests. The parent entity, the Jack Straw Foundation, continued to run the recording unit and to seek a new slot in the 88-92 FM “educational band.” It failed in attempts to take over the frequencies of KCMU and KNHC. It now runs a low-power station in Lynnwood; people tell me it runs great eclectic stuff, as good as KRAB’s peak years or better. It would presumably still like to grab the first 88-92 spot in Seattle that opens up whenever a current public station fails.

`TIL WE RETURN at the close of the year, visit the exquisite Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art in Bellevue (which isn’t displaying the new doll that wets amber liquid into a clear plastic potty), get ready for the computerized Star Trek playgrounds coming to a mall near you (or, if you can’t wait, see the Playspace at Crossroads Mall), find creative uses for those plastic bowls from all the “Raisin Nut Bran Challenge” street giveaways, and ponder the thoughts of Cindy Crawford on the supermodel stereotype: “A lot of us aren’t educated. But that doesn’t mean we’re stupid.”

PASSAGE

Charita Bauer, near the start of her 35-ish-year stint on Guiding Light: “I’ve heard it said, the more simple people are, the more complex they seem to other people, because those people are so complex that they don’t understand simplicity.”

REPORT

Not only have no job offers come in direct response to my several pleas in this space, but one guy told me that he thought it was a gag, since he just assumed that I lived off trust funds and just wrote as a hobby. Let me repeat: This newsletter is not a parody. When I say something, I mean it. Not kidding. Duh.

In brighter news, The World of Zines by Mike Gundelroy and Cari Goldberg Janice (Penguin TPB, $14) calls Misc. “a wry observer of modern life in a progressive city (Seattle) and tells us things we didn’t even know we needed to know.” Now if they’d only printed the current address with the listing…

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lambent”

10/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and four newsletter-only items)

Here Comes Moshpit Tourism!

OK OK OK, Misc. is now ready to admit that the “Seattle Sound” is dead. The evidence: not Singles, but the 9/13 travel page of the Sunday newspaper insert USA Weekend (stuffed into the Bellevue Journal-American and dozens of other papers around the country), right after the Haband ad for mail order men’s slacks. The headline: “Get Set for the Seattle Sound: Next weekend’s rockin’ movie Singles puts the limelight on this musical metropolis.” As Jim Kelton writes, “Just as Memphis has the blues, Chicago and New Orleans have Jazz, and Nashville owns country, Seattle now has its own hard-driving sound, dubbed ‘grunge rock,’ giving travelers another reason to visit the city…Visitors will find entertaining and fiercely outspoken music in nearly every corner of this sprawling city. But first-timers should note that the best spots to hear its sounds aren’t always upscale. You can take in the sights during the day, then fill the nights with the fresh Seattle sound.” The page gave prospective grunge-tourists listings of five clubs, two costly hotels (including the Meany Tower, inaccurately described as being close to many important grunge venues), the youth hostel, and two eateries: 13 Coins and the Dog House (“the ‘in’ place for musicians and music fans”).

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The article encourages tourists to come here to see live gigs by the very bands that got into making records in the mid-’80s because they couldn’t get live gigs. The music that was rejected by so many clubs for so many years might now become a boon to the state’s hospitality industry. Maybe we should just replace Seattle Center with a Grungeland theme park. Flannel-shirted costume characters could sneeringly blow Export A smoke into the eager eyes of affluent American families, on their way to enjoy hourly indoor and outdoor performances in between stops at a Jimmy the Geek house of thrills, senior citizen moshing lessons, an all-vegan food circus, bumper cars that look like beat-up Datsuns, wandering Iggy impersonators, beer-can crushing competitions, a detox clinic fantasy ride, (for the gents) a contest to become L7‘s chaste bondage slaves, and (for the ladies) an all-scrawny, all-longhair male strip show.

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE?: The city wanted to collect 3% admissions tax on the “suggested donation at the door” for the Two Bells Tavern’s Chicken Soup Brigade musical benefit. On Sept. 23, city official Dale Tiffany sided with the tavern and withdrew the tax bill, noting in a letter that “you made a quite persuasive case”…. Meanwhile, COCA ran afoul of the police dept.’s crusade to shut down all-ages musical events. Its non-alcoholic rave party was shut down in August over a few creative interpretations of technical ordinances and the infamous “Teen Dance Ordinance,” a law ramrodded through the city council a few years back intended to ban all-ages events under the guise of regulating them.

ON DISPLAY: I saw COCA’s Native American political art exhibit, which uses images of pre-Columbian daily life as symbols of defiance, in the context of what if our entire way of life were similarly suppressed. After thinking some more about it, I couldn’t think of many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture that that weren’t already symbols of our past conquests. What music do we have that isn’t Black- or immigrant-rooted? What fashions have we got that aren’t based on street or folk dress? Through ethnic art (often designed for white consumption) and its equivalents in literature and music, armchair lefties like me get to anoint ourselves with the vicarious righteousness of pretending to be what some white ideologists call “The Other.” It’s a change from most American cultural experiences, which are typically fantasies of conquering something or someone. The only American genres to discuss what being conquered might feel like are science fiction and Red-baiting propaganda, usually as a pretext for heroic action. But imagine: What if our entire way of life was suppressed as North America’s indigenous cultures were? What practices would be kept underground? What pieces of everyday life that you take for granted would turn into symbols of rebellion? What things that you care about would be turned into jokes and stereotypes by the conquerors?

CAN’T I GET LIBERATED TOO?: The (Ero) Writes/Rights panel at Bumbershoot was mostly the usual inconclusive porn-vs.-erotica debate. But one woman made a good point about “censorship of the spirit and the intellect,” something too many of us do to ourselves. The alternative literary scene would attract more people if it weren’t always so grim and staid, if it expressed the whole range of human thoughts and feelings in our big wide world. In many ways, small press literature is the most aesthetically conservative art form this side of barbershop quartet singing (and a hell of a lot less fun). You’re not gonna get young people involved in advanced prose if it offers nothing more than Montana travelogues and ’60s nostalgia. I long for a literature of compassion, of participation. A good place to start is erotica, by its nature a genre that mustn’t be self-centered. Like Jae Carrlson and Kirby Olson in Reflex, I believe the answer to bad porn is better porn, that gleefully celebrates human connection in all its varieties.

OTHER B-SHOOT NOTES: Loved Book-It, the troupe that dramatizes short stories verbatim. Much more literate than most of the “literary” events….

Missed They Might Be Giants, who filled up the Opera House an hour and a half before they went on. In the line, two suburban kids joked about how this show should’ve been in the Coliseum instead of Queen Latifah (this year’s token non-’60s black act), because “nobody’s going to shoot anybody at this show.” I wished to hell I’d had a Walkman so I could’ve made them listen to TMBG’s song “Your Racist Friend.” The Latifah show was, by all accounts, a sedate affair full of perky White Negro wannabes….

The $25 Quick Access Pass was an elitist scam, going against B-Shoot’s one-big-crowd tradition, and should not be repeated….

Michelle Shocked had a great line at the Interview Stage comparing most rock music to “a blackface minstrel show” without the makeup — affluent whites acting out a simplistic persona of blacks as sexy savages….

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THIS GUY: I can’t wait for the Jimi Hendrix museum to open, even if it doesn’t display the uncensored Are You Experienced? cover art or Suzie Plastercaster‘s famous life-cast of his masculinity. Well-heeled local backers are looking at at least two potential sites, including the ex-Seattle Art Museum annex in Seattle Center. The guy deserves a proper public memorial. (KZOK tried a few years ago to get a memorial in a city park, but the Parks Dept. wouldn’t go along; the station settled for a pile of “hot rocks” at the African savannah exhibit of the zoo.) Besides, these days it’d be good to remind people of a guy who joined the Army just to get out of Seattle, his only hope of making it in music.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger writes, “Perhaps you might be able to enlighten us as to what exactly is the deal with this baseball cap display on the rear dashboard thing?” Would you please be more specific? What are these items, and what do you wish to learn about them?

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Husky Dawgs, in bright wrappers bearing official UW football logos, are really repackaged Canadian Jumbo Hot Dogs (the expiration date sticker says both “Meilleur Avant” and “Best Before”). As all good Seattle barflies know about Jumbos, they’re hearty if underseasoned tube steaks that can be steamed, boiled, or grilled, and are virtually impervious to decay even after rotating under a heat lamp all day….

As my budget and diet allow, I’m planning to try all of the faux Frangos being offered around town: Nordstrom Best Mints, Ala Bons, Boehm’s Encore, Seattle Chocolate Co.’s Milt Chocolate, etc. The Times sez that Nordstrom uses a higher grade of chocolate, no salt and no tropical oils. The Seattle Chocolate Co. makes the Nordstrom candy (mint flavor only), and also makes its own brand with a slightly different recipe (in three flavors). Ala Bons, the first faux Frango, are smaller and flatter, not as fully whipped. Boehms, in gold foil boxes, only have six ounces for $6.95 (Frangos and most of the imitators have eight ounces)…

MANGO TANG UPDATE: Mark Campos claims to have tried the stuff, obtained from relatives through an Oregon food warehouse outlet. “The mad chemists at the Tang labs were nowhere hear a mango flavor consensus…no matter how much I stirred, a majority of the stuff marched to the bottom of the glass and stayed there. Also, it’s the most unappealingly colored stuff. Like Mountain Dew, it should not be put into clear glasses for consumption.”

1-900-FAILURE: Megaquest, the Queen Anne-based parent company of some 50 phone talk services (many, but not all, sex-related) in a half-dozen countries, is close to bankruptcy, after earning a net income of $14 million in 1990. According to a great story in the Sept. 4 Puget Sound Business Journal, original partners Arthur Joel Eisenberg and Betsy Superfon (apparently her real name) are battling in court over control of the companies, whose revenues have tumbled as government agencies and phone companies crack down against the rights of those unimaginative Americans who can’t even abuse themselves without coaching.

AD OF THE MONTH (newspaper ad for Nationwide Warehouse and Storage Furniture): “The Chastity 4-Piece Bedroom Set, $198.” Runner-up: the Wm. Diericx Co.’s radio ad for office supplies, selling paper shredders endorsed by Fawn Hall.

“DIS” INFORMATION: Still still more proof that hip-hop culture can’t be successfully whitened comes from the Suzuki 4 x 4’s fall ad campaign, “Fear of a Flat Planet” (a notably lame exploitation of Public Enemy‘s Fear of a Black Planet).

A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE: The Florida state tourism dept. rushed out some newspaper ads insisting that their state was still open for business. The state had to produce the ads at their own Tallahassee office, because it couldn’t complete a phone call to its Miami ad agency.

CATHODE CORNER: Alert home satellite dish owners know about the supplemental feeds of network football games, with the field pictures and sound but no announcers or commercials. I saw part of a Seahawks game this way; you can tell all the important aspects of the game, and don’t have to hear any dumb anecdotes.

DUDS: One piece of good news in the Generra bankruptcy came in a Times story noting that the company, like many in the sportswear biz, is starting to get clothes made in the U.S., after years of only using overseas sweatshops where workers make as little as $1.03 a day. Seems that it takes too long to ship stuff from over there. By the time a fad item gets here, the fad can be over.

“DON’T WALK” THIS WAY: Bellevue officials are promising to make their town “more pedestrian friendly” — by beefing up citations against people walking against the Don’t Walk lights. If they really wanted to help walkers, they’d change the lights on some intersections that allow walking for only three seconds every three minutes, so you have to jaywalk to get anywhere on time.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Tiny, King of the Roadside Vendors is an affectionate tribute by Sharon Graves Hall to her late brother, Richard “Tiny” Graves, the girthy and jovial operator of Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere (one of Washington’s few authentic “roadside attractions”, with ad signs attracting tourists along U.S. highways throughout the west). For just $12.95, the book’s more fun than a case of Aplets and Cotlets….

Meet Me at the Center is Seattle Center’s authorized history, written by ex-Times guy Don Duncan. It’s chock full of World’s Fair camp images (which I can’t ever get enough of). It’s also essential reading for all of you who don’t know what Seattle was like in the era prior to Starbucks and PCC, when a small remote city was trying desperately to join the “jet set” its machines had made possible….

Journeys of the Muse is a 12-page quarterly newsletter by Pamela Reno of Naches, Yakima County. Topics include “The power of thought to influence the sun: A turning point for humanity?”

FUN WITH WORDS: Husbands and Wives stands a chance of becoming the biggest audience-participation movie since Rocky Horror. Here’s how it works: go with all your feminist friends, and hiss whenever Woody says something that turns out to have been eerily lifelike… Another great new cussing site is the downtown library, specifically at the terminals of the new computer card catalog. On any given afternoon you may find retired schoolmarms, Mormon ancestor-researchers and valedictorian wannabes struggling to cope with the confusing software and the mistake-ridden data, talking back to the VDT’s with words not found in the bowdlerized dictionaries.

INDECISION ’92: A requiem is in order for failed gubernatorial primary candidate “You Must Be” Joe King. He’s actually been a pretty good state House speaker, fighting to keep the Wm. Spafford murals up in the Capitol and to support a lot of good legislation. But for his first statewide campaign, he let image consultants package him as something just this side of a Reagan Democrat; an unlikely recipe for success this year….

Campaign commercials used to feature a big red “NO!” crashing down on the face of the sponsoring candidate’s opponent. This time, at least one candidate used “NOT!” instead.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, pick up some great bargains at Blowout Video on 1st (the video equivalent of a remainder book outlet) and the Evergreen State Store in the Center House (your one-stop tourist trinket shop), watch the Japanese soap The 101st Proposal Sat. mornings on KTZZ, and heed the words of Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the cartoon character): “Fear and I were born twins.”

PASSAGE

John Kricfalusi, the cartoonist-director-actor who made Ren & Stimpy into the cult sensation of the year (and just got fired for his trouble by Viacom bureaucrats), quoted in Film Threat before his dismissal: “Everybody’s ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody’s nose. Look in — who’s the big actress today? Look inside her nose and then think about porkin’ her.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Funambulist”

STOP THIS WEATHER CHITCHAT ALREADY.

WE’VE GOT ABOUT THE DULLEST WEATHER IN THE WORLD.

9/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?

TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,

A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …

Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?

CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.

APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.

ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”

PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.

MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.

IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)

STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.

MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.

ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.

A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.

TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)

MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.

DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?

RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.

`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).

He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.

SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.

Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.

The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.

Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.

PASSAGE

Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Crenellated”

8/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger columns and an original essay)

High Fashion and Running Naked

Welcome again to Misc., the only column made with the Miracle Substance ZR-7. This is the one and only genuine, original Misc. Accept no substitutes! Especially not “High and Low” in the Weekly. The title comes from a tacky show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on “modern art and popular culture” that treated the greatest works of illustration, cartooning, entertainment and industrial design as mere fodder to inspire “real” artists. And while B. Barcott can write a halfway-decent item, his apparent assignment is to belittle anyone doing anything interesting, in the tradition of old-fogey columnists everywhere. I’m reminded of the words of

John Lydon: “Imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”

RESULTS of our last contest, wherein we asked “What does John McCaw, Mariner investor and noted recluse, look like?”: No entries were received by the deadline. You oafs.

HOW TO KILL A SCENE: Some of the same alleged criminal elements who used to be at Jersey’s Sports Bar are said to have been outside Club Belltown, starting fights on 7/19 that culminated with gunshots fired into the air, which cops didn’t respond to for 20 minutes. Some downtown residents are advocating the restriction or even closure of music clubs. It took a lot less violence and damage to shut down the live punk scene a decade ago, a loss from which local music has only now recovered. (Jersey’s is now reopened with different DJs, few problems, few customers.)

ONE HOT SHOW: It’s sad that that old Leary Way warehouse burned before the Bathhouse Theater and On the Boards could move in, but I’m glad it burned without a cast and audience inside.

PHILM PHUN: The LA Times said Bill Gates wants to start a Seattle movie company. He denies it. Maybe he dropped the idea after observing his tax-bracket comrade John Kluge, who made a mint selling some TV stations to Murdoch and has spent a lot of it keeping Orion Pictures alive. Gates’s only movie project to date is a Microsoft Press book, Moviemakers at Work. Its authors slighted the more boring film practitioners (writers, actors) in favor of what they felt were the real movie stars — designers, editors, and especially special effects crews. While I’d love to see more movies made here, I admit that most of them are bad. The only distinguished features made here were Tugboat Annie (’33), The Slender Thread (’67), and maybe Cinderella Liberty (’73). The Fabulous Baker Boys was a doze when the Bridges Boys were on. Twice in a Lifetime got undeserved praise from critics eager to proclaim a “film for grownups at last.” I won’t talk about McQ, Harry in Your Pocket, Harry and the Hendersons, and 99 44/100% Dead (though I have a soft spot for Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and the David Jannsen-Frank Gorshin thriller Ring of Fire).

A FRIEND WRITES: “The best part of Tina Brown‘s assumption of command at The New Yorker was USA Today‘s headline: ‘Vanity Fair Editor Takes Over Fave Literary Mag.’ Second best: Everything I read about Brown talked about her own strengths and weaknesses, and didn’t just call her the `First Woman Editor.'”

THE BALD FACTS: The Hair Club for Men is now one of the top advertisers on MTV, showing middle-aged out-of-its enjoying second childhoods thanks to phony-looking hair transplants. Are 40ish geezers really watching the channel, searching to stay young? Does that mean that imitation rap slang will soon be audible in lawyers’ watering holes? Will we see Body Gloves in the Columbia Center Club? Worse things have happened (cf. every men’s fashion ad in a 1971 Playboy).

THE BARE FACTS: Political Diversities, Seattle public access cable’s first all-nude talk show, is an exercise in ego-tripping under the guise of politics. The host and his guests (to misquote B. Breathed, “pretty much an ugly all-male operation”) preach indignantly about the hemp movement (they like it) and censorship (they hate it). I agreed with most of their points, but wish they could make them more persuasively, without presuming their viewers to be idiots. The show’s backdrop wasn’t designed with close-ups in mind; the painted banner features all sorts of provocative icons, but the host’s face is right in front of a swastika. I still like the idea for the show (and have, ever since I picked up a paperback of Rex Reed‘s

Conversations in the Raw and was disappointed to find the title was just a come-on).

SINCE WE’RE NEIGHBORS DEPT.: The dreaded Port Townsend Lifestyle Police struck again, ordering Safeway to replace its regular-style sign with “old style” letters. Next thing you know, they’ll stop the store from selling Twinkies and meat.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (flashing sign at Honda of Seattle): “Nikki is awesome…single & pretty.”… At Front Street Specialty Nutrition in Issaquah: “Always lowest prices! Well, usually — O.K., O.K., at least sometimes!”

ART MEETS NON-ART: Live music keeps popping up in new places. One recent Sat. nite, a clerk at the Glass Curtain porn shop on 1st was playing a saxophone on duty. His only audience: the wandering people outside and the photos of fake fun inside.

SEARCH FOR YESTERDAY: Shokus Video’s Sudsy Television is a 3-videocassette series of the true American video noir, black-and-white soap operas. Forget everything about TV being incessantly bright and snappy. These are interminably slow 15-minute shows, performed live on small, shabby sets (sometimes just furniture and prop doors in front of scrim curtains) by somber, uptight actors who stumble over half their lines but stay inside their Beckettian grimness. The infamous organ music (used on General Hospital

as late as 1978) sounds more like a restored-silent-movie soundtrack than like anything to do with modern entertainment. Even the commercials are stern: beady-eyed announcers pointing at diagrams, reiterating the values of Anacin compared to regular strength tablets. Most of the actors never went further than this, but you do see a pre-Mayberry Don Knotts and a very pre-St. Elsewhere Bonnie Bartlett.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: Margaret Thatcher‘s landed a consulting job with

Philip Morris to increase cigarette sales in developing countries. As if she hadn’t done enough to her own country…

FUTURE RULES FOR A POST-REPUBLICAN FCC: Classic R&B songs should not be used in commercials (a) for laxatives or (b) for companies that wouldn’t do business with blacks when the songs came out.

JUST PLAIN BILL: Didn’t hear much of Clinton‘s speech on 7/26 (they didn’t have speakers in every direction), but I did get handed a tract by a Korean-based fundamentalist group that predicts the Rapture for Oct. 28 (that’d make the campaign irrelevant, if it weren’t that it’s been predicted many times before, and will be many times again, especially at the turn of the millennium).

THE RACE IS ON: With Longacres on track for demolition, the big hope for horse racing may lie with Native American tribes. Following the modest new

Tulalip casino, the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes announced separate projects for tracks and huge 24-hour casinos. The Puyallup plan, which would be managed by a Vegas firm, would also have a 1,000-room hotel, mall, bowling alley and native-theme amusement park. Both plans require the state Gambling Commission’s OK, which may be tough.

‘FAMILY’ FEUD: If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, family values are their next-to-last refuge. Or, as GOP loyalist G. Will sez, “morality is the last refuge of the politically desperate.” Almost any destructive policy can be trumped up as a pean to “The Family” (as if there were only one kind anymore, and as if all families were good for the people in them). Bush/Quayle, in their total lack of contact with the real world, haven’t noticed the spectacular rise of “dysfunctional family” 12-step groups and other forces that are pointing out the basic structural faults of the nuclear-family system. “The Family” is, to millions, an image of stifling cruelty and authoritarianism — just what the Right loves.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE: Anybody who generically votes for any female candidate, no matter who she is, wasn’t living in Wash. when Dixy Lee Ray was governor. Ray was a co-founder of the Pacific Science Center and ex-head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who ran in ’76 as a Democrat (a label of convenience, to gain the party-line endorsement of our powerful senators

Magnuson and Jackson). In office, she tried to demolish environmental laws and to prop up the unprofitable Hanford nuclear industry. She amassed a massive re-election fund from timber and development interests, but lost in the ’80 primary. Today she speaks to business groups trying to quash land-use laws.

AMAZING DISCOVERIES DEPT.: Two Seattle women have invented a washable, reusable sanitary napkin. It saves trees and doesn’t use the dioxin bleaching used to make paper white. I laughed too soon when I snickered at the commercial that starts, “I’ll borrow my mother’s earrings, but my mother’s tampons?”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Seattle Mariners chewing gum is very soft (like the team), is very sweet (like the team), and has a strong aroma (like the team)…. I’m still trying to get a jar of Mango Flavor Tang, sold mainly thru Hispanic-oriented groceries in the southern tier states. It presumably tastes as much like mangoes as regular Tang tastes like oranges. I wonder if it was in the spaceship with Bill Dana, the Hungarian-born comedian who did the Mexican-dialect comedy record The Astronaut.

ON TAP AT THE KIT KAT CLUB: The gourmet pet food craze reaches a new extreme with Alpo Dairy Cat, described as a “low lactose milk for cats that have trouble digesting regular milk.” Why not go further and make sure that your cats only catch mice that eat fake cheese?

ON THE AIR: As some of you know, I was one of the first new music DJs on KCMU, one of the first to practice what they now call the “variety format”: juxtaposing hard rock, skinny-tie new wave, reggae, R&B, and anything else that seemed to fit in. The concept still works, with one exception: the momentum of the music comes to a halt four times an hour, when the volunteer DJs are told to go to the “world beat” rotation. There’s a lot of great music around the world, but KCMU’s world-beat bin is mostly bland yuppie exotica, the P. Simon/D. Byrne unthreatening Afropop or Braziliapop that belonged more on the old KEZX. I’m not asking the station to stop playing foreign music, I’m asking it to play more diverse, more exciting foreign music. To find it; they’ll have to get on the lists of a lot of obscure record companies. But it’ll be worth it.

ON THE STREETS: A middle-aged man with short-trimmed hair and a grey suit came up to me outside a deli-market and repeatedly asked, “Do you read the newspapers? Do you read the paper regularly?” After two minutes, he asked if a minor recent news item was really published. I said it was. He walked away.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, have a gourd reading at Tribes Native and Nature Art and Tea Co. in Fremont, collect all of Mattel’s Beverly Hills 90210 dolls (almost as completely hot as the people on the show and just as good actors).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Napiform”

DOES ALPHA HYDROX FACE CREME COME FROM THE INSIDES OF COOKIES?

•

BODY CONSCIOUSNESS

One recent weekend, I saw two very different events celebrating the human body. Both promoted leisure-time lifestyles baed on distinct philosophies of life:

(a) Arena 3, a fashion show at the Mountaineers Hall on a Friday night, celebrated the body strategically hidden and revealed. Night heat in the city. Crowds of people in their best clothes and brashest attitudes. Eighteen local designers and some 100 models (mostly women, mostly young, many races) slinking down the runway, to the flash of photographers and upbeat music.

(b) The Bare Buns Fun Run, a nudist foot race at the Fraternitie Snoqualmie Nudist Camp on a Sunday morning, celebrated the body unencumbered and unadorned. Searing daylight in the suburbs, halfway up Issaquah’s Tiger Mountain. Nearly 300 people (mostly men, mostly 35ish and older, almost all white) running along 5K of steep trails, most clad only in socks and shoes. Afterwards, many runners enjoyed a leisurely afternoon at the lawn, pool and sauna.

Despite its aura of proud individualism, Arena showed off a design scene that’s become a true community of people working together to bring attention and employment into Seattle. The Seattle designers have grown to attract national (or at least NYC) notice. They’ve got a diverse set of styles that all express a fun, play-dress-up attitude.

The nudists boast of being one big family living in laid-back togetherness. But their retreatist lifestyle reflects the get-away-from-it-all philosophy behind many of America’s problems (suburban sprawl, urban neglect, alienation). Also, the road up to the camp was clogged with cars; you’ve got to guzzle lots of gas to commune with nature.

Nudists like to laugh at the hypocrisy of nudity in fashion marketing (such as the Drew Barrymore cover of Interview magazine, an Arena co-sponsor), contrasting it with their own de-emphasis of lust. They assert that by treating no body part as special or shameful, they’ve become some of the least sex-crazed people around; even though much of their literature features pictures of nubile young adults. In fact, the nudists were courteously seeing and being seen. But the scene was still much less gaze-active than a normal Green Lake Saturday; maybe because it was mostly married couples and older guys. It’s too bad more women don’t join; it might help overcome negative body image to be in a safe environment with a lot of bodies that are clearly no better or worse than yours.

Arena, on the other hand, reveled in positive body consciousness with personas that ranged from ridiculous to stunning. I can’t subjectively comment on the gay costumes (Jason Harler had a topless guy in half-unzipped pants and a feather boa; other designers had see-thru shorts above codpieces). The more straightforward men’s looks were playful and joyous. As for the women’s wear, I fell in love several times per minute. Short black dresses with short red hair (by Siren Blue). Red and black patterned cocktail dresses (Carol McClellan). A cherry-red bridal gown (Tohma). A calico dress with acres of frills (Raven). A green raincoat, doffed to reveal a backless one-piece swimsuit (Susan Hanover). Orange vinyl body suits (Direct). All modeled by people clearly at home inside their bodies.

Many of us need to break out from our social norms and make friends with our physical nature. That can mean taking off your clothes or putting on better ones. A nudist camp membership is cheaper than a designer outfit, but you don’t have to leave town to get dressed.

(Many of the clothes shown at Arena 3 are available at Fast Forward, 1918 1st Ave.; Darbury Stenderu, 2121 1st Ave.; and Basic, 111 Broadway E.)

(The next Fraternitie Snoqualmie public event is “Nudestock” in mid-August. Tickets will be available through KISW radio; for info call 392-NUDE. Nude & Natural magazine, sold at better newsstands, covers issues related to the nudist philosophy.)

7/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Is John McCaw Batman?

A warm, warm greeting to another distinctively cool edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t decide which is sillier: calling Hollywood producers “cultural elitists” or calling them “cultural”.

HOT WEATHER DRESSING: Misc. still wears its baseball caps with the brim in front, the way Abner Doubleday intended. Besides, you can tell when a fashion trend has outworn its welcome when they start making custom caps with frat-house letters printed only on the back.

IN YOUR EAR: Last week, Misc. showed several people the Times picture of a half-dozen acupuncture needles stuck into a heroin addict’s ear to reduce his dependency; only ear-pierced women gasped “Gross” at the sight. The therapy combines the popular trend of body piercing with a sadly “hip” form of self-destruction (Seven Year Bitch guitarist Stefanie Ann Sargent died of an apparent overdose on 6/27; many other local musicians are said to use heroin). Trendy rockers are bound to imitate the look for fashion’s sake. I only hope people will take the real acupuncture or otherwise try to clean up. Remember: hard drugs are a tool of people in power to silence opposing voices.

PHILM PHUN: Here in the town that was among the first in the U.S. to discover the Dutch and Australian new waves, Hong Kong movies are the certified Next Big Thing. They just can’t churn out Chinese Ghost Story installments or vicious/spectacular gangster films fast enough. “But what,” you ask, “is gonna happen to these filmmakers in ’97, when Beijing’s butchers take over the colony?” Many of Hong Kong’s production companies, along with the crime syndicates that allegedly provide financing as well as subject matter for some films, have begun their own 5-Year Plans by setting up offices in Vancouver. Just think: we’ll have a genuine full-time Northwest feature industry, and Canada will finally make movies that don’t look like Hollywood on a discount.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Muttmatchers’ Messenger is a bimonthly photo-ad tabloid promoting “Companion Animals for Adoption.” Photos of forlorn cats and dogs appear, accompanied by a description and phone number. Some are part of display ads, “sponsored in the interest of animal welfare” by Realtors, insurance agents, lawyers, a garage, and a clinical psychologist.

NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1970-1992?: “The Humor Magazine for Adults” was more like a college paper’s April Fool edition, only with good writers and great artists. It was a true rebel without a cause. Its purpose was not to make you smile but to stare you down. Born as the student protest movement passed its peak, its only message was its own sense of self-righteous superiority to the world. No wonder original co-editor P.J. O’Rourke emerged as a right-winger, and Belushi’s character in the NL movie Animal House became a senator. Like the teen/college generation that grew up with it (mine), its only sacred cow was the Almighty Ego Trip. Some people insist that it used to be funny, before its original staff dispersed to Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. I wouldn’t give it that much credit (though it did nourish the career of a few great cartoonists, including Seattle’s own Sherry Flenniken and her droll Trots and Bonnie). The magazine’s officially on “a six month hiatus” (its NYC office is closed and it hasn’t published since February). It may not come back. But its spirit lives on, in thousands of rude stand-up comics.

SPURTS: Still no hope for NHL hockey here, but the Canadian Football League‘s considering its own southern invasion. It’s being courted by Portland, which had a team in the short-lived World Football League. See if they can live with a 110-yard, three-down game where scores of 57-36 are common. Heck, it’d still be better than either Oregon college team. Just make sure it doesn’t get an Indian-motif team name, ‘cuz the Portland paper won’t print it.

STUFF YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE HEARD: Over half of the 18,000-ish arrests after the LA riots were against Hispanics; the sweep has given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a chance to ship hundreds of immigrants back to Mexico and Central America, while others languish for failure to pay exorbitant bail (sez the Nation).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ralston Purina’s Batman Returns cereal is far better than the cereal made for the first Batman film (I didn’t like the first movie much either). The new cereal contains the following “fun-shaped” marshmallow pieces: “White bats, purple Penguin hats, tan Batmobiles, blue cat heads.”

CATHODE CORNER: The Seattle City Council is thinking about taking over the local cable TV franchises as a city-owned company. Do we really want politicians deciding whether we’d get to keep MTV, let alone the Playboy Channel?

FOLLOWING FASHIONS LIKE CATTLE: The San Angelo, TX Standard-Times (it’s called that even during Daylight Savings) reports that “the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo adopted new market steer regulations calling for animals to have no more than one-fourth inch of hair any place on their body, besides the tail switch.” Reporter Jeanne Serio quotes a show official: “The sculpting of long hair has become so intense in junior market steer shows that we have lost sight of the original intent of this competition, to teach young people responsibility, knowledge about the care and raising of animals, and skills in choosing and raising market animals with proper body structure and conformation.” I say if long hair is good enough for the entire male student population at Evergreen, it’s good enough for other neutered beasts.

PRESSED: Ever wonder if newspaper headline writers actually read the articles? A 6/24 USA Today cover blurb went, “Book Buying in Dumps: Are We Doomed?” The article itself noted that “spending on adult consumer books increased 10.7% between 1985 and 1990″ and kids’ book sales were even higher. (The story didn’t mention that newspaper circulation in that era was flat and network TV viewership dropped.)

HAD TO HAPPEN SOMETIME: The Beatniks are a new-music cover band, giving totally straight copies of your favorite R.E.M., Violent Femmes and Nirvana songs in between the more typical stale Beatle tunes. It brings to mind an idea: how about some smart promoter forming multiple “Sounds of Seattle” cover bands, all assembled from scratch, to perform your grunge-rock favorites in every Sheraton dance lounge in America.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #1: When I ask folks why don’t they like Clinton, they offer vague allusions about an unattractive personality or a simple “isn’t it obvious?” His groomers are working to give him this image. He’s being handled the way Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were, by party leaders who believe America will elect a “lite right” candidate who doesn’t bash conservatives too much and says as little as possible about non-suburban issues, all for the mythical “Bubba” vote in the south (where Jacksontook seven states in the ’88 primaries). Party leaders ignore the concrete examples that this approach will never work. Clinton’s the “beneficiary” of a primary system in which Demo fundraisers anoint the candidate most likely to run a consultant-controlled campaign — and most likely to lose the election.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #2: Winds-o-change are a-blowin’, and coffeehouse leftists may worry about the threat of actually attaining a voice that people might listen to. No problem! Just use these handy steps to let the right wing win every time: Don’t vote. Don’t run for office or support anyone who does. Never try to respectfully persuade new people to your views. Call everyone who doesn’t already agree with you a redneck, a fascist, or both. Keep using that strident us-vs.-them rhetoric that worked so well in the ’60s to turn people away from progressive causes. Shun modern media and communications, so the right can monopolize them. Do this and you can keep complaining about the world without ever having to do anything.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (handwritten flyer on downtown light poles): “Public Information Notice. If you are in a high plant pollen area, it is a good idea if you properly wrap your vegetable scraps, bread scraps and meat fat, vegetable oil-soaked paper towels-rags and tie the top of the bag securely. Wrap your cigarette, tobacco scraps separately, making sure that they are not ignited before you dispose of it. If you have meat that is `bad’ or milk that has soured, wrap it in two plastic bags and tie the top or seal it and then put it in a paper bag, writing on the paper bag `Bad Meat’ before you dispose of it, so that if anyone does look through the garbage they will not construe it as something healthily eatable. If you go to a park or a bench, instead of putting your cigarette out in the dirt or sand, bring a container along with you that is metal, like a small canister or cough drop box, and make sure that the tobacco and/or tobacco filter is no longer ignited before your dispose of it. If you wash your garbage containers on a regular basis, it will make your environment healthier also. Please try to do these things, for it will lessen the possibility of infection for yourself and others in the area. It will lessen the chance of food poisoning and may also reduce the amount of emergency intake at hospitals. Thank you for your cooperation.”… Handwritten note with a Sylvester sticker, taped to a garbage can at 3rd & Blanchard: “In our area, look for a solid wall of windows that can’t be opened by guests. The Rabbit.”

TABLED: I remain perplexed by this phony “Northwest cuisine”. In the P-I, Stouffer Madison Hotel chef Rene Pax insisted that “Seattle food means fresh food and the best of the fresh produce.” If there really is a culinary tradition here, it would have to take into account our short growing season (the freshness obsession comes from LA-trained chefs used to year-round growing) and our frontier heritage, particularly of the days before highways or rural electrification. Truly traditional NW foods would be those with brief seasons (cherries), or are made to keep (evaporated milk was invented here). A cuisine that reflects the character of the local populace (as opposed to laid-back fantasies) would stay modest and unpretentious, at least fun. Nothing gaudy or cutesy. An honest smoked salmon, adequate white wine, plain tossed salad, and the quiet elegance of an Almond Roca dessert.

WAITING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: The authorities made their second move to silence the Seattle music scene (after banning Pearl Jam from Gasworks) by shutting down the funk nights at Jersey’s Sports Bar. It must be noted that Jersey’s mostly-black crowd was, on the whole, no more or less rowdy than the white suburban crowd at local yup meatmarkets.

TRUE CRIME: I’ve had two reports of skinheads bashing homeless people outside the New Hope Mission next door to 911 Media Arts on the night of 5/2. Apparently, the skins claim to be Army men, despite their swastika tattoos and designer boots. They repeatedly kicked and beat men sleeping under the I-5 overpass to the point of major internal injuries. Despite frequent emergency calls, the attacks were unresponded to by cops too busy standing watch over Westlake Center.

VIBES: My Pleasure vibrators may be the first women’s product endorsed by porn queens (“Personally Chosen by the Girls Who Know Them Best”). According to a blurb on the box by one Ginger Lynn, “I like a vibe that’s of exceptionally high quality, and with variable speed control. Because I like sexual control. And I am quality.” What if sex stars as role models catch on? Would beauty standards come to be based on what men seem to like (instead of what women think men like)? Would women reshape themselves toward plump torsos with fat silicone lips and catatonic eyes? Would they imitate porn “acting” by slurring their words and staring blankly into space?

BET ON IT: The new Tulalip Reservation casino was described by a spokesperson on KUOW as “a touch of Las Vegas with a Northwest Indian motif.” What’s that, a Thunderbird totem stitched on the back of a silk jacket?

HYPOCRISY ON PARADE: Rupert Murdoch fired Fox TV executive Stephen Chao, at a Murdoch-convened symposium at an Aspen, Colo. hotel on “the threat to democratic capitalism posed by modern culture”, filled with the usual conservative media-bashers. Chao gave a routine anti-censorship speech at the meeting, claiming violence was more obscene than sex or nudity. On cue, a man in a hotel uniform revealed himself to be a male stripper hired by Chao; he stood nude for 30 seconds before the shocked panelists (including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney his wife, Nat’l Endowment for the Humanities head Lynne Cheney) while Chao talked about how people have to get over their hangups about the human body. Murdoch, who made his first fortune with the toplessPage Three Girls in his UK tabloids, called Chao’s spectacle “a tremendous misjudgment” and sacked him on the spot.

THE REAL CULTURAL ELITISTS: The state Republican convention, as dominated by the religious right and at least tolerated by top GOP officeholders, condemned abortion rights, homosexuality, divorce, sex education, foreign aid, the UN, arts funding, civil service, and the teaching of non-western cultures. It also denounced “channeling, values clarification, relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, yoga, Eastern religious practices, or similar ideas.” My yoga teacher might call that sort of bigotry a fiery ball of negative energy, that impassions people but can also engulf them. Meanwhile, some Nevada Republicans officially denounced that over-publicized Elvis stamp as glorifying “a habitual drug user.”

EYES WITHOUT A FACE: It’s nice that the Mariners are finally a local team again. But why won’t team investor and car-phone tycoon John McCaw appear in public? When the papers ran pictures of the other new owners, they put a blank box above his name. At press conferences, he sent a lawyer to speak for him. Is he ashamed to show his face with the hapless M’s? Will he show up in the owners’ box with a New Orleans ‘Aints paper bag on his head? What if he’s a mystery man, who can’t appear in public lest someone discern his crimefighting secret identity? We invite you to send in (a) a picture of what you think he looks like, or (b) a written explanation of his seclusion. Accuracy doesn’t count, since we don’t know what he looks like either. Stranger employees and people who’ve seen McCaw are ineligible. Results will be published here in three weeks.

ROBERT E. LEE HARDWICK, 1931-1992: Before what we now call “talk radio” took off here, he ran a chat show with a few records. He was adamant that non-rock radio needn’t mean “middle of the road.” He ruled Seattle radio (adult division) from the late ’50s to 1980, when new KVI management decided his postwar-jazz sensibility was an anachronism. He spent a decade wandering from station to station, supported in some years only by commercial endorsements. Sponsors loved his straightforward, no-nonsense persona; station managers hated it, because it contradicted the hype and hustle of modern radio. He was a Scotch-on-the-rocks guy in a wine-cooler world. Two months after losing his last gig (on KING-AM), he drove into the Cascades and blew his brains out. The KING-TV newscast that announced his death had one of his commercials (for Honda dealers).

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to go to the Seattle Hits exhibit of local pop culture at the Museum of History and Industry (including the gallant return of Bobo the stuffed gorilla), visit the exquisite Collector’s Doll Store on 35th and Northlake, and ponder this Cynthia Tucker commentary from the Times: “Successive tides of human progress have rolled back slavery, the subjugation of women, and more recently the oppression of communism.” About time we stopped oppressing communism, don’t you agree?

PASSAGE

A Tri-Cities community college student’s guide to life from Shampoo Planet, the forthcoming new novel by Generation X author Douglas Coupland: “Flippant people ask stupid questions and expect answers. Secrets divulged under flippant circumstances aren’t valued. People don’t value other people’s secrets, period. That’s why I keep my secrets to myself.”

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is supposed to finally come out on disk this summer. Contact Eastgate Systems Inc., (800) 562-1638.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Adumbration”

EVERY VEGETARIAN I KNOW SMOKES THE HIGHEST-TAR CIGARETTES AVAILABLE.

ARE THEY TRYING TO GET EXTRA PROTEIN OR WHAT?

5/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

SAM KINISON & BENNY HILL

ARE NOW PLAYING AN ETERNAL POKER GAME

IN HEAVEN’S CHEAPEST BACHELOR PAD

At Misc., we’re prouder than heck that Rolling Stone declared Seattle the “New Liverpool”. This must mean we’re a decaying western seaport, far from its country’s power centers, inhabited by roughhousing gay sailors with an incomprehensible accent. Or, to quote UK statesman Benjamin Disraeli, “I am deeply sorry for the unkind things I said about Liverpool. I had not seen Leeds at the time.” Meanwhile, I was in Fremont’s spectacular Glamorama when KCMU played Weird Al Yankovic‘s Smells Like Nirvana. A customer spoke up: “These don’t sound like the original lyrics.”

Cathode Corner: The Almost Live syndication plan is apparently dead, according to Variety. Worldvision (the backer of Twin Peaks, who had enough foreign sales to pay half the costs of keeping that show alive but didn’t have the credit to borrow the rest) failed to sell AL to enough stations. Instead, a rerun package will air on Comedy Central, a cable channel seen here only half the day, only on Viacom systems. Worldvision’s now trying to sell new AL shows to ABC… I get Summit Cable, which has a few channels TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings offer shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Astaire-Rogers tribute dancers (just like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred!), many torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out to a recorded music track in front of a silent 40-piece orchestra. Afterwards, they were promptly shooed offstage by the bald, tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao, Hammer, Ciao”…

Events I Heard About Too Late: “Nude Trek: The World’s First Nudist Star Trek Convention” was held in January at the Sultan naturist camp. Events included video screenings, games, skits, role playing, a hot tub and sauna. Perhaps fortunately, James “Scotty” Doohan was not scheduled to appear.

A Three-Hour Hobby: One David Goehner of PO Box 66, Dryden, WA 98821 is offering “the first collectible figures ever” from Gilligan’s Island. You can get a 9″ vinyl figure of Gilligan or the Skipper on an “island stand” for $15 or both for $26, or 4″ figures of the two characters for a total of $8. No coconut-shell telephones or pieces of the true S.S. Minnow.

Surreal Estate: For Rent magazine has a front-page ad inviting people to come live at Walden Pond, “A home that the heart never leaves…Sense the peace of living by the pond…In this fast-paced world of hustle and bustle, it’s nice to know that there is someplace where you can enjoy the peace and comfort of easy living.” It turns out to be a south Everett condo on a man-made lake. The “luxurious 1, 2, & 3 bedroom homes” offer designer fireplaces, covered parking, free aerobics classes, an exercise room, tanning salon, pool, sauna, video lounge, and gym. “And it’s only minutes from work, school, Boeing, Everett Mall, and all major conveniences.” By the way, if you still believe you must move to a country town, look for the three most prominent main-street storefronts. If they’re all real estate offices, drive back. The place is already lost to future suburban sprawl.

Those Phunny Phoreigners (Reuters, 2/19): “French master chef Paul Bocuse is suing McDonald’s for $5 million to $7 million over an advertisement in the fast food firm’s Dutch outlets showing his assistant dreaming of Big Mac hamburgers while working in his kitchen. The advertising agency says it did not realize Bocuse and his assistant were among the chefs in the photo, although Bocuse’s name was on their aprons”….Meanwhile, EuroDisney attracts scoffers from the French culture gods. Right-wing pampleteer Jean Cau calls it “a cultural Chernobyl.” Ex-Socialist government spokesperson Max Gallo: “Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are to culture what fast food is to gastronomy.”

Something Fishy: No concept is too lame to be imitated, not even Ted Turner’s “environmental superhero” Captain Planet. Gorton’s Fish Sticks has inagurated its own cartoon commercial hero, Captain Gorton, who thwarts small-time polluters and keeps the seas safe for seafood. Maybe he could teach a lesson to founding-family heir Slade Gorton, well-known enemy of environmental legislation.

Local Boy Makes Waves: Ex-KIRO news director John Lippman was severely dissed in the LA Times after he “tabloidized” the news at his new home, KCBS-TV. The station’s run a sex-slaves “exposé” and a promo spot using the song “Riders on the Storm” with explicit footage of a drowning boy.

Local Publication of the Month: Northwest Photo Network is a bimonthly tabloid for pro photographers. It’s got an ad warning photographers not to sell their copyrights to clip-art services, a photographer writing about how hard it can be to find the right model for a shoot (while would-be models still get defrauded into costly, worthless “trainings”). And an anonymous article cries that the Seattle Commons proposal, which would clear dozens of blocks northeast of downtown for a huge park, would eradicate over a dozen photo studios and suppliers. Objects of beauty (or at least of commercial appeal) are made in buildings the Commons activists call eyesores… Memo to Art Rag and Community Catylist: Weekly World News spoofs are so lame.

Junk Foods of the Month: Smoked salmon cream cheese spread is fast becoming the toast/bagel topping of choice among newcomers desperate to fit in with the “traditional Northwest lifestyle.” Don’t tell them the stuff was just recently invented. It’s at Still Life in Fremont, Cafe Counter Intelligence in the Market, and elsewhere… People presume me to be a cynic or a kidder but I’m not. When I shop for a soft drink I look for Minute Maid Orange Soda because I enjoy the bizarre combination of syllables of that mystery ingredient, “glycerol ester of wood rosin.” I enjoy the slippery thickness it gives to the beverage, making a glass of flavored water feel like something juicier.

Magazine Ad of the Month: “Does he sleep with you? Does he get jealous? Does he wake you up in the morning? Does he nibble at your ear?… Amoré. Isn’t he worth it? (The product is a cat food.)

Sam Walton, 1918-1992: The king of discount wasn’t known here. Even in the states Wal-Mart’s in, it’s not big in the metro areas where media people live. Thus the press was shocked in the ’80s to see it become the #1 retailer. Its stores were so big, in towns so small, that they destroyed thousands of Main Street merchants across the southern-tier states. Walton aided the ’80s consolidation of wealth from the many to the few, and naturally became a favorite Reagan-Bush insider. But just as shoppers are re-learning the value of selection and service, so are they getting upset at our Wal-Mart government (with its Neiman-Marcus military). Postmodern America is the discount society: a land of slipshod engineering, lousy quality, few real choices, and service that’s not “efficient” as much as nonexistent. The tax-cutters are wrong to think that discount taxes will ever bring prosperity. We’ve already got the lowest overall tax rates in the industrial world; it shows in our inadequate civilian services (education, health, arts, infrastructure). Countries that still respect the value of public investment are whipping us in the world marketplace (or are at least doing less poorly).

Icono-Graphics: CNN’s Showbiz Today lists the weekly Neilsen ratings against a graphic of TV antennas rising from urban rowhouses. A cable channel offering nostalgia for the pre-cable days…

Found Object: An Enumclaw used-book store turned up Daughters of Genius, an 1890s-era biography of famous women of its day (the Brontes, George Sand, Flo. Nightengale, Harriet Beecher Stowe). The intro said it was natural that, as long as the human race was predicated on war and conquest, masculine values would prevail; but that with a more civilized society dawning, women were making themselves known “in most of the professions and all of the arts.” The book erred in timing: war and its values remained, yet the emergence of prominent women progressed incrementally anyway.

Fashion Update: Hypercolor sweatshirts, declared “Outski” here in January, fell even faster than I thought; so much so that Generrais laying off a quarter of its staff. Sorry guys: I never meant to have that much influence.

How Long Was It?: I remember being 12, sneaking into the living room after bedtime (I was already an insomniac!), turning on the Zenith at the lowest volume to catch Johnny Carson from New York: always fresh and energetic, having a blast with his well-groomed guests. By the time I got the occasional OK to stay up late, Carson moved to LA and became a soft, predictable doppleganger of his former self. Friends ask why I don’t move to California; that’s one reason. I don’t want what happened to him (or to numerous once-great musicians who lost it in LA) to happen to me.

‘Til June, check out the Wizard of A-Z gift shop on Market St. in gorgeous Ballard, and recall these words from Gregory Hischak’s odd local zine Farm Pulp: “So let us love and eat and mulch, there isn’t any other obvious reason to be here.”

PASSAGE

From Hal Hartley’s exquisite TV movie Surviving Desire: “The trouble with us Americans is we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.”

SPECIAL EVENT

I’ll be on the Laura Lee talk radio show on KVI (570 AM), Sat., 5/9/92, at the raucous hour of 1 a.m. Skip the end of Sat. Nite Live, get home early from pub-crawling, or set your radio alarm to awaken you for a special treat. I will be taking your calls.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Panegyrics”

•

POST-EASTER SPECIAL

A few weeks ago, we asked your responses to the premise, “What if Jesus were alive today, in his teens, preparing to return to public life at the dawn of the new millennium?” Excerpts follow.

JILLIANN SIMS AND LEIGH DUNHAM: “Jesus would be one of the fine, upstanding citizens we lovingly call `Ave Rats.’ He would hand impressionable, young students fliers proclaiming, `Love thy neighbor (but not too much, and safely please)’.”

BRENDA MARTIN: “The Catholic churches would hunt him down and have him killed for security reasons.”

BRUCE LONG: “The whereabouts of the adolescent Jesus: Someplace blessed with a bumper crop of second chances.”

MUSTAFA PATWA: “Jesus is indeed alive and well. He is currently preparing for public life in the early 21st century by playing Doogie Howser, America’s favorite teenage doctor, on the show of the same name.”

BOB ARMSTRONG: “He’d be an illegal immigrant in east LA who got turned onto computers by a white nerd at his high school, and will soon make a raid on the interlocking banking computer network, shifting funds around to more appropriate accounts. He’s Catholic, but hasn’t been seen around the church in some time.”

SID MILLER: “Jesus is probably a sophomore at a high school east of Lake Washington. Real trendy haircut with shaved sides and a pigtail/rattail down the back. Wants his own TV show or his own band. Doesn’t have the gumption to practice his guitar — too busy with skateboard. Hopes grungy skateboard buddies will piss-off Mary, who is preoccupied with telling all who will listen that Joseph has `run off’. She recently blurted out, `He’s not really your father.’ Jesus has been talking with his buddies about how `cool’ it would be to set a wino on fire. Bought gun for $25 from acquaintance and brings it to parties. Wants a car so he can go cruising. Mother of his child will turn 16 three weeks before baby is due.”

ORAN WALKER: “Jesus would be the son of a working-class family; the father a professional craftsman, possibly union. The mother would be a secretary in a Catholic church. He had his pick of schools and ended up at a small college not far from New York City, where he spends his holidays and weekends, to the chagrin of his mother. She knows he doesn’t attend church and hangs out on the Lower East Side with God knows what socially marginal types, most likely Hispanics and Queers. She doesn’t know that he has been fucking around with his friends, both boys and girls, since he passed the age of accountability five or six years ago. `Safer sex’ has been more than a catch phrase with Jesus, since he realized early that sexual contact is such a complicating factor in the lives of both participants…He is making above-average grades, especially in ecology policy courses. He has written two essays on the need for global awareness and human charity among the earth’s peoples and probably will expand his ideas into his master’s thesis, but it’s early yet. He has been assured that he’ll live to a grand old age — unless he gets those messianic ideas again.”

9/91 Misc. Newsletter

Bug-Proof Pantyhose

Welcome back to an autumnally-seasoned edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that’s fond of noting that in the Robt. Venturi design with its vertical relief stripes, the name SEATTLE ART MUSEUM appears to be spelled with dollar signs.

THE RED SQUARES: On Mon., 8/19, I wrote in my ongoing computer file, “There are moments in the life of the world that make it tough to be a humor writer, even a world-weary, cynical humor writer.” Then the attempt at bringing back eight men’s sorry vision of the “good old days” disappeared faster than the stock at a Russian butcher, and I could retain my generally hopeful worldview about democratic progress in all countries except mine. I also reaffirmed how much I can hate public radio sometimes: call me a traditionalist, but world-crisis bulletins shouldn’t be combined with easy-listening background music (I refuse to call that Windham Hill-style music they use “jazz”).

A MOVING EXPERIENCE: Within weeks of the Weekly “discovering” my neighborhood, my landlord raised the rent significantly. Don’t let this happen to you! Took the increase as an opportunity to move (for only the second time in seven years; more desperate finances made me run from the upscalers eight times from ’81 to ’84). I will miss parts of the Broadway neighborhood, but will not miss the BMW car alarms malfunctioning at all hours or the ceiling that became a giant loudspeaker for the upstairs apt.’s stereo.

FILM TITLE OF THE MONTH: Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking.

FRAMED IN PUPPETLAND: The hoopla over Pee-wee, and all the child psychologists talking about how to tell your kids the sad news, is pathetic. The poor idol of millions hasn’t even been convicted yet. You’ve got to remember this was in south Fla., home of the 2-Live-Crew-busters, where there may have been official pressure to track down a white celebrity to harass in order to maintain a pretense of impartiality. Actually, it turns out that the arresting officer was part of a three-man squad assigned solely to make arrests for the most victimless sex act of all. (It’s such a Pee-wee sort of activity, too; self-possessive, compulsive, fantasy-possessed). For the record, he was watching straight porno films; a semiotics book a couple years back noted that the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters are based on common gay-camp personas.

WILD IN THE STREETS: KING and KIRO dumped Sat. AM cartoons for news (and local commercials). Now, when there’s violence on Sat. morning TV, the victims won’t be alive in the next scene. Both newscasts are heavily supplemented with filler satellite footage from other stations around the country. The stations chose just the right week to start their Sat. morn news, the morning after the traditional biggest Fri. night of brawl of the year. The Seafair riots are wimpy compared to riots in other cities for more substantial celebrations such as winning a Super Bowl, but our minor street brawls and our hydro-drunks keep the old rowdy Seattle spirit alive despite the annual proclamation that Seafair has, at last, become a “true family event.” The expectedly strident pre-parade anti-war rally was met by a Christian country-rock band sponsored by KMPS, singing “I love A-Mair-i-Kuh / I love the U-S-A” (with a military snare-drum riff) and shouting afterwards, “You know the line, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.” The TV stations, also expectedly, allowed no significant time for the protesters to tell why they were there and plenty of time for officials to insist how everybody besides a few foul-mouths is in total unquestioning obedience to our national authorities.

CATHODE CORNER: Employees of Telemation, once Seattle’s biggest video production facility, spray-painted the outside of the building the Fri. night after the company was shut down by its out-of-state buyer, the Home Shopping Network. By early Mon. morning, all offending statements (including the blacking-out of the parent company’s name) were whitewashed over….

On 8/15, KING discovered a Northwest angle to the latest Royal scandal: Di’s petite 2-piece bathing suit (that made the cover of every UK tabloid) was designed by Oregon’s Jantzen. (In The Mouse on the Moon, the film sequel to The Mouse That Roared, a BBC announcer proclaimed a British connection to the Grand Fenwick space program in the form of the astronauts’ wristwatch.)

MODULATIONS: KNDD (“The End”), the new “cutting edge” format on the old KRAB-KGMI frequency, is like Old Wave Night at the Romper Room. Instead of the greatest hits of Phil Collins, they play the greatest hits of U2. Their last format was for folks whose musical tastes stop at 1970; this is for folks whose tastes stopped in ’87. (At least they play Thrill Kill Kult in light rotation.)

TRUE CRIME: A Montana fugitive was spotted on 8/1 by his old warden when they inadvertently met at an Ms game. In any previous year he’d never have had to worry about anybody finding him there.

HOBSON’S CHOICE ’92: Rebecca Boren and Joel Connelly are reportedly feuding over who’ll get to cover the ’92 US Senate race for the P-I. On KCTS panel shows, Connelly has shown to be fond of possible Republican candidate Rod Chandler and unfond of possible Democratic candidate Mike Lowry.

AD VERBS: NutriSystem’s running flashy ads pointing with pride to an endorsement by Healthline magazine. Weight Watchers announced it was promised the same endorsement, but refused to pay the magazine for favorable coverage.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH: The NY Times piece (8/6) on minor Florida theme parks: ones you might not know (Flea World, the Elvis Presley Museum, Gatorland, and “Xanadu, Home of the Future”), are in the works (the Transcendental Meditation park “Maharishi Veda Land” planned by magician/TM devotee Doug Henning), the USSR/US friendship park Peristroika Palace), and ones that never made it. The latter included Bible World, Western Fun World, Hurricane World (“a glorified wind tunnel that could transport tourists into the eye of a storm”), Little England (“a grandiose re-creation of an ancient British village,” sounding like an old G. Vidal story about Disney buying all of England), and Winter Wonderlando (“skiing in central Florida. Great name. Lousy concept”).

Runner-up: The 8/1 Wall St. Journal report that “Kanebo Ltd. in Osaka plans to test US markets this year for pantyhose embedded with microcapsules that moisturize while the wearer walks. It sells scented pantyhose in Japan, where it just introduced insect-repellent hose.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH: The Ballard law office storefront “Mullavey, Prout, Grenley, Foe and Lawless.”

AGIT PROPS: The Downtown Seattle Assn. call for censorship against one of the In/Public sets of artist’s aphorisms, echoing a woefully ignorant and arrogant P-I editorial calling the project “not art but arrogance,” is itself an arrogant act.Bold verbal statements are indeed an artform. They have been so at least since the 10 Commandments were etched in stone. The postmod incarnation of this art takes the boldness of current T-shirt/bumpersticker philosophy and turns it around so it challenges, instead of reinforces, the consumer culture (perhaps the real reason the retailers hate it). It demands the right to not be “cheerful” or “colorful,” as a merchant spokesperson described his idea of good art. In an allegedly image-drenched era, it affirms the power of the written word. It has it limits, though, as evidenced by theGuerrilla Girls posters at the Greg Kucera Gallery. The GGs really to nothing to help female and minority visual artists; they just point out that nobody else in the mainstream art elite does. It could also be argued that declaring all female artists to be one class or even one genre, regardless of what any of them does, only keeps the artists’ own voices stifled.

A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THE GUERRILLA GIRLS WOULDN’T LIKE: A new bio claims Time-Life heiress Claire Booth Luce, archetypal career woman and wielder of unprecedented power in politics and publishing, obtained a great deal of her influence by sleeping with politicians, editors other than her husband, generals, theatrical producers, etc. A first reaction might be that she’s betrayed, from beyond the grave as it were, the millions of women who came after her fighting for a similar degree of influence on the basis of merit alone. But if she hadn’t done what she did, would there have been as much opportunity for those who followed her? (Probably.) Will today’s women live without her for a role model? (Undoubtedly; the Republicanism she espoused is the nemesis of current feminists.)

STOP THE PRESSES: At least three Misc. readers have been sending me clips from that awful Dave Barry, the “humor” columnist whose one-note theme is “Yeah, so I’m an affluent, dull white guy, so what?” Once, humorists had fun getting involved with the exciting parts of their cultures (jazz, early movies, wild fashion) and sneering at the dull and complacent. Nowadays, dorks like Barry and R. Baker take pride in their geezerdom and sneer at anything or anybody with real character. They pander to the whitebread suburban mentality of most newspaper editors, who keep making papers duller and more irrelevant while blaming the resulting circulation losses on public apathy.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Misc. subscriber James Koehnline is planning a World’s Columbian Jubilee Calendar of Saints, to celebrate the 500th anniv. of Columbus by proclaiming an end to “the Work and War Machine.” Koehnline is looking for names of cool people for saint’s days on the calendar (“no living persons, no Popes, no heads of state”). For info send $1 to Koehnline, Box 85777, Seattle 98145-1777.

CHAINED: QFC wouldn’t display the Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, claiming the image of a woman with child wasn’t “family oriented” enough (!), unfit to belong in the same store with the beer and cigarettes they sell every day (or on the same periodical racks with tabloids, serial-killer paperbacks, and rich-bitch novels).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH (from the Wall St. Journal, 8/13): “Calgene Inc. wants federal regulators to declare its genetically engineered tomato officially ‘food’…. The tomato, named the Flavr Savr, includes a gene that blocks the production of an enzyme that causes them to soften and rot.”…

Calif. now has a snack food sales tax, and is trying to figure what’s junk and what’s untaxed “real” food. On which side would you put fructose-laden “energy bars”?

THE NAKED TRUTH: The long articles in the Times and the Weekly about table dancing clubs sold sex more sneakily than the more honest commerce of the clubs themselves. The sleaziness of the clubs’ operators, as described in the articles, seems little worse than that of some mainstream entertainment promoters I’ve known and/or read about. Nude dancing can be seen as a metaphor for our entire consumer culture (all tease, no fulfillment); the sadness that pervades those places, beneath a screaming air of mandatory “happiness,” betrays a deprivation of true connectedness in such a culture.

‘TIL OCTOBER presumably finds us much cooler, celebrate the 10th anniv. of KCMU (it’s actually longer; Robin Dolan and I were playing new music there in 11/80), and heed the wisdom of Gracie Allen in The Big Broadcast (1932): “If I died I’d like to come back as an oyster, so I’d only have to be good from September to April.”

PASSAGE

Restroom sign at a Frisco coffeehouse: “In a society that replaces adventure with mandatory fun, the only convenient adventure left is drinking good coffee.”

REPORT

Please note the new address below for subs, orders for my novel The Perfect Couple on Mac disks ($10), and other correspondence. I’m still soliciting suggestions or investors toward turning this into a self-supporting enterprise.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Terpsichorea”

WHY ARE MOST JAZZ FESTIVALS HELD IN ALL-WHITE TOWNS?

7/91 Misc. Newsletter

DOES ANYBODY REALLY CARE ABOUT

JULIA & KIEFER NOT GETTING MARRIED? REALLY?

Misc. is back, the pop-culture newsletter that can still remember when we all used to scoff at the USSR’s idea of fun — tanks and missiles on parade, “honoring” those who obeyed orders fighting to prop up dictatorial puppet regimes.

DOWN THE PIKE: Three food booths in the Pike Place Market were gutted in late May for one huge eating table with only four chairs, one of which broke the first morning. This is not how they’re going to raise revenues to buy out the New York investors and pay off both sides’ immense legal bills.

REQUIEM FOR AN ECCENTRIC: Vic Meyers, who died in late May, was one of the true northwest characters, a jazz musician who got elected to the normally meaningless post of lieutenant governor on a joke campaign and managed to keep getting re-elected on the privileges of incumbency, much to the disgust of the real politicians. One such pol was Gov. John Langlie, who felt trapped in the state during his two terms, unable to fly to the other Washington for lobbying work out of fear that Meyers would become temporary acting governor, call a special session of the Legislature and issue who knows what disorderly executive orders. Finally Langlie got a chance when Meyers was himself off on a fishing trip; until Meyers heard Langlie was gone, and Langlie heard Meyers was rushing back to Olympia. Langlie hurriedly chartered a plane to fly him back west in the middle of the night, landing in Spokane just minutes before Meyers showed up at the state capitol to call the special session he was no longer authorized to call.

DOG DAZE: The UK is trying to eradicate all pit bulls from its soil, as a probable preliminary step toward exterminating soccer hooligans and perhaps even, if they’re lucky, the unspeakable foods they make out of the variety meats.

CLOTHES HOARSE: A national fashion trade magazine noted the increasing prominence of Seattle menswear designers, but the Times tried to stick a nonexistent spin onto the story by noting that these designers “show no Seattle influence” — by which the paper means they don’t have prints of outdoorsy scenes, but instead show a variety of influences from around the world. What rubbish! Seattle is, if you haven’t noticed (and a lot of reporters haven’t), a real city, an international trade center and home of the machines that made the Jet Set possible. A fashion style that mixes the best of America, Canada, Europe and particularly urban Asia could be about as distinctly Seattle as you’re likely to get.

SHOE BIZ: How appropriate that a cache of Nike shoes, lost at sea a year ago, would wash ashore along the Oregon coast the day before the Portland TrailBlazers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Almost poetic, no?

CATCHING `EM WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN: Seattle’s American Passage Media Corp., a company that began selling term paper “guides” and now handles various ad ventures, wants to put up ads in high-school locker rooms. Called “GymnBoards,” they’d be like Whittle Communications’ ad posters in doctor and dentist offices, a little bit of consumer info surrounded by slick ad messages. (Whittle, originator of the sponsored classroom newscast Channel One, is under fire from mainstream media reporters who don’t want ad dollars to cease subsidizing reporters’ salaries) Too many teens are already almost fatally self-conscious, without having diet, food, or grooming products confronting them while nude.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Johnny’s Fine Foods of Tacoma has launched a line of salad dressings with offbeat names: Jamaica Mistake, Honey! You’re Terrific!, Garlic: The Final Frontier, Poppy Love, Great Caesar, and Gorby Light: A Kinder, Gentler Russian. (The back label of the latter sez, “…unleashes the flavor of good Russian and eliminates those harsh old overtones…”)

GOOD NEWS!: The Clark bar is being saved, by Pittsburgh financier Michael P. Carlow. He bought the venerable candy from Leaf Inc. of Illinois, which had basically let it slide before announcing plans to sell or scrap it.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #6: On-Your-Tie Cookies are no more. Neither are Uncle Billy’s Pasta Chips, Frutta di Terra dried tomato products, or seven other companies listed in the 1989 membership list of the Specialty Foods Group of Washington. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 other local specialty-food companies are struggling to survive.

FROZEN FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Whatever happened to the New World Order, anyway? This term was used only once by Bush as a justification for the war, but has remained as a catch phrase used by Leftists for every dishonorable aspect of Reagan-Bush foreign policy. T-shirts proclaim that it’s really an “Old World Odor;” bumper stickers insert swastikas between every word. I don’t know what the band New Order thinks of it all.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH, PART 2: According to the authors of the new book The Day America Told the Truth (a survey of moral/ethical attitudes by region), the quintessential Northwest personality might be that of bad ol’ Leland Palmer. According to James Patterson and Peter Kim, roughly one in four Northwesterners is a clinical sociopath, four times the national average. “Pac Rim [their name for a “moral region” of the Northwest and northern Calif.] respondents were much less likely to have strongly developed consciences than were individuals in any other area…Coupled with the observation that Pac Rimmers are the regional respondents least likely to present themselves to others as they really are, it seems that David Lynch may be onto something”…By the way, I still believe Twin Peaks has been 32 of TV’s best hours ever. It taught me how to write Northwest fiction that has imagination and wonder, that doesn’t reek of godawful God’s-country pretentiousness. The show’s “failure” only proved that ambitious genre-splitters may not be meant to be ongoing series, especially when erratically scheduled and poorly advertised. Lynch is now working up a feature; my choice would be a string of TV movies.

MORE ON SEATTLE TODAY: The old-clips final episode claimed the show had been on for 17 years, but it was really 40 years old (even older than I said last issue). I still have the TV and T-shirt I won on it on separate occasions in the mid-’70s. Under that name as well as TeleScope, The Noon Look, Good Company, and Northwest Today, it formed a part of the daily rhythm of the city that will be missed, even if the show itself had become stale (the same old fashion tips, the same old recipes, the same old touring psychics, the same old itinerant book-pluggers).

HOME TOWN NEWS: A Marysville woman got stung in a supermarket by a scorpion stuck onto the sticker of a Del Monte banana. In a lawsuit, she’s blaming the store for a miscarriage she had weeks later.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Weekly “Clarification,” 5/2): “In a Discovery item last week, Kit Hughes was quoted as saying that before she used Aqua Mirabilis Bath Salts she was a `shallow person.’ Hughes was a shower person. In a different story in the same issue, Jim Bailey was quoted as describing Lori Larsen (Tales of Larsen) as `wild and horny.’ What Bailey said was corny.”

ADS OF THE MONTH: I was slipped a newspaper ad promoting a shopping-mall appearance by Gerardo, the Latin Rapper. But the ad to the left of that won gets this month’s honors. It’s for Lovers Package (“Try One On for Sighs”) a chain store offering “Wonderfulwedding things meant to be seen,” including “lingerie, cards, games, bachelor & bachelorette party prizes.” Half the small ad consists of a photo of a model in gartered stockings, bra, panties, and a wedding veil. Reminds me of the old nudist-camp-wedding joke, where you can always tell who the best man is… Sears ran an ad for an electronics sale that showed dozens of dazed customers wandering into the mall, carrying out big-name products at “shocking” prices. What’s delicious about it is that the whole commercial makes no sense if you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead. In a similar old-movie reference, a Brut as has Kelly LeBrock discussing the “Essence of Man.” That was also the name of a device in Barbarella, in which the women of the corrupt sky city smoked from water pipes connected to a male prisoner in a water-filled glass cage. (By the way, a G-rated cartoon version of Barbarella has been optioned for TV series development.)

THE DRUG BUG: The Tobacco Institute, a venture of the big cigarette companies, offers free booklets entitled Tobacco: Helping Youths Say No. Hmm: an industry acknowledging that its product should be kept away from kids. Or is it? Not having read the book, I imagine it might be like all that counterproductive anti-drug propaganda of the past 25 years. You know, where the only “role models” of non-users are obnoxious jocks and hopeless squares…

BODY LANGUAGE: Pat Graney’s dance performance eloquently succeeded in contrasting healthy, natural sensuality with the clumsy, contrived “sexiness” of modern life as exemplified in that symbol of everything ex-hippie women despise, high heel shoes, at one point compared by Graney dancer Tasha Cook to Chinese foot-binding. (That many younger women have found a source of power in black dresses and uncomfy shoes is dismissed in the course of the piece, with the dancers eventually shucking off their im-ped-iments of needless discipline.) One must also mention the last of Graney’s four segments, in which she and her six other female dancers crawled across the floor nude (mostly with spines arched out to the audience). That this was accompanied by Mideval-inspired music (by Rachel Warwick) did not seem the least bit sacrilegious. Indeed (in a twist on liberal orthodoxy), Graney implied that old religious-based cultures held more respect for both body and spirit than current secular society.

TROUBLE IN FANTASYLAND?: French culture mavens, the Chicago Tribune reports, are predictably miffed at the rising upon their shores of Euro Disneyland: “A cultural Chernobyl” and “a black stain on the soul of France.” One of the American construction supervisors was quoted, “I know there were good political reasons for building it in France, but I wish they’d picked a country where the work ethic is a little more highly developed, like Germany.”

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #7: Working Women magazine lists the two hottest careers for 1991 grads as bankruptcy attorney and “outplacement specialist” — counseling the newly-unemployed.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (it was told in the Smithsonian last year; I just found it now): Before Muzak moved its HQ to Seattle, three-quarters of its 4,000-selection library had been recorded by a Czechoslovakia radio orchestra. The old owners liked its price and tolerated its admittedly odd musical flavor. It’s being steadily replaced by new tunes recorded mostly by synthesizers and “electronically enhanced” quartets. You have to wonder, though: what if Commies were hiding secret subliminal messages that got into offices and factories across America, messages like “Lower your productivity” or “Let America become a second-rate industrial power”?

CLEANING UP: Toronto entrepreneurs have brought one of Playboy’s most common and inexplicable images to life by starting the first commercial topless car wash. It’s apparently all legal (there is no contact with the customer’s body, only with the customer’s car). Perhaps this proves what Toronto’s own Marshall MacLuhan used to say about a car being essentially modern man’s new outer skin or something like that.

‘TIL AUGUST, when we might have warmth, visit Jersey’s Sports Club on 7th (a “sports bar” where people actually play sports inside instead of just watching them on TV), and resist the turning of Seafair into even more of a pro-war spectacle than it already is.

PASSAGE

One of the lines of the pathetically insufferable couple in the KBSG commercial, describing how only the sappy pop music of their childhoods saved their marriage: “We almost broke up over the wallpaper.”

REPORT

Following the “Misc.@5” anniversary show, I’ll probably hold another reading in August, as part of a COCA series. More in the next issue.

Kim Thompson insists that Mariel Hemingway’s line at the end of Manhattan was “NOT everybody gets corrupted;” somewhat diff. from my quote last time. All I can say is it ain’t the way I heard it.

Subscriptions are $7/yr., prepaid; fax subs are $9/yr.

My hypertext novel The Perfect Couple is available in photocopy-galley form for $10 prepaid.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Comogonic”

6/91 Misc. Newsletter

(fifth anniversary)

THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!

MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.

AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.

EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)

BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).

TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.

TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.

WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.

CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…

GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.

DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.

(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)

THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.

THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)

THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.

STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…

MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?

OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.

NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.

`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.

PASSAGE

From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”

EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′

The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Exsanguinate”