4/91 Misc. Newsletter

ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN

“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”

ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE

We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.

CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.

STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.

A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”

THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…

STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.

TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!

SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.

MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.

OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.

LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”

NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.

VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).

SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.

PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”

‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”

PASSAGE

The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”

REPORT

The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.

I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.

Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Approbation”

2/91 Misc. Newsletter

THE REAL VIETNAM SYNDROME ISN’T ‘LOSING;’

IT’S KILLING AND DYING WHERE WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE

Don’t know about you, but here at Misc. we’re proud to live in the state where Wash. St. Univ. is studying the effect of cattle belching on global warming. My vegetarian pals will say this is proof that we shouldn’t have all these food animals. But if we have more methane gas from more cows, at least we’ll have lots of ice cream to beat the heat. (The topic you’re expecting to see is on the reverse page.)

HOMER SPENCE, 1941-1991: The guy I expected to outlive us all. America’s oldest punk rocker (due to his stint in the Telepaths). A UW poli-sci prof who had left under circumstances I never quite understood, who ended up driving cabs and, eventually, spending his last 10 years tending bar at the Virginia Inn. He remained equally passionate about new music, art, politics, world cultures, astronomy, and especially baseball. He was a focal point for Seattle’s alternative cultural “scene”. His relationships with younger women never looked strange; he wasn’t “an older man,” he was “one of us.” I last met him on New Year’s; he boasted about having lived in seven decades before turning 50 (if you mark decades with the “1” years and mark the start of life with conception, neither of which he necessarily did). He did more living in those 49 and a half years than most do in 70. That he should have a heart attack the same week as the start of war is doubly tragic; he’d have been indescribably valuable in the anti-war movement. He knew how to bring disparate people together better than just about anybody.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Theresa Morrow’s Seattle Survival Guide is the best local guidebook since the Seattle People’s Yellow Pages in 1978. It’s almost a miracle that D. Brewster’s Sasquatch Books put out something about the essentials of urban living (and not just for the Demographically Correct)…I fully support the rights of gays and of poets, though I don’t participate in either activity. The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, however, gives me at least a vision of what both these loves might emotionally be like.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: Every time I’ve ridden a Metro bus up Pine past the Bus Tunnel entrance hole, someone on a nearby seat complains openly about the huge neon art.

WHY I STILL DON’T HATE USA TODAY: ‘Twas so refreshing to read, in their In/Out list for ’91, that Seattle is Out! “…Seattle, the wilderness city (was the writer ever here?), which had a great year in 1990, now is spoiled. Everybody who could move there has. It’s time to return to real cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where the air is clean thanks to two decades of recession in their manufacturing sectors.” The following week, an interminable NY Times Sunday-magazine essays called Seattle “a Midwestern hub” that had been the hot place to move to, but is now “a victim of its own success.” (This was during the death weeks of The Other Place, Henry’s Off Broadway and Mirabeau restaurants.) What nobody accepts is that this town did not cease to be a utopia, it never was. Take our ferry system, where a captain was charged with harassing an African-American crew member and broadcasting racial insults over the public-address system. It’s just the latest shame in a century of Indian massacres, pogroms against Chinese railroad workers, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a bomb plot against a gay disco.

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: The Economist, a weekly news magazine edited in England for a readership mostly in America, had a brief item on Tacoma’s needle-exchange program among drug abusers. The sad subject matter was lightened a little by the anonymous writer’s lead, depicting Tacoma as “a smoky industrial Sparta to the high-tech Athens of Seattle.”

ANOTHER XMAS STORY: The cutest holiday TV this year was TNT’s Silent Night — a whole evening of meticulously restored silent movies. Without spoken dialogue, there’s no way to wander off to the bathroom or kitchen and still keep up. You have to pay full visual attention throughout the feature.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at a Wherehouse video rental desk): “RoboCop 2; Henry V.”

A DIFFERENT BAND OF DWARVES: Sub Pop almost had a distribution deal with Hollywood Records, the newest off-brand division of the Walt Disney Co. Instead, Hollywood’s first act will be the Party, a promoter-assembled teen dance group heavily promoted at Disneyland and on The Disney Channel.

AT LEAST IN THIS COUNTRY SHE CAN SHOW HER FACE: Producers of the movie I Am Woman will reportedly pay female lead Jamie Lee Curtis $800,000, only 40 percent of co-star Dan Aykroyd‘s fee and even less than child actor Macauley Culkin (Home Alone). What did the song of the same name say? Oh yeah, “I’m still an embryo with a long, long way to go…”

LYCRA LOVE: According to the newsletter Japan Access, Tokyo’s top designers say the 1991 trend in swimwear will be the ecology look: earth-green colors, “designs borrowed from nature, including seashell, fish and flower motifs.” The garments themselves are made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics…

LANDLESS: We’ve seen ads for nonexistent housing developments and stock sales for nonexistent companies, but the 1/7 Forbes reported perhaps the ultimate con (besides the war). An American promoter calling himself Branch Vinedresser placed Wall St. Journal ads offering to sell corporate charters and passports in a “tax-free sovereignty.” The documents are sold under the name of the “Dominion of Melchizedek,” which Vinedresser claims is a “4,000 year old ecclesiastical sovereignty” on an island off the coast of South America. The island really exists, but is fully controlled by Colombia. Vinedresser has also paid to have fictional currency and securities for his “nation” listed on international exchanges, and has promoted the sale of these securities through a network of companies in different cities, most of which are just mailbox services and phone lines with call forwarding to his California office.

Latter-Day Addendum: On 4-1-98, I received the following email:

Tzemach “Ben” David Netzer Korem, Vice President (DOM)

NOW I UNDERSTAND QUAYLE: The Times says “an outbreak of `nonsense-speak’ is sweeping Hong Kong” among working-class youngsters with little hope of escaping the 1997 Chinese takeover. (The Cantonese name for the fad is “mo lai tau,” or “you have no head.”) The paper gave only one example of nonsense-speak dialogue heard on the streets: “My sister’s going to have a baby.” “Green babies look strange.” “Green socks aren’t blue.” Sounds to me like the foundation for a code jargon, perhaps for an anti-takeover resistance movement…

WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH AMERICA: A Lava Lite is being sold at The Sharper Image, a Lava Lite with a base unit of a solid black marble-like substance. The Lava Lite is supposed to be goofy/fun, not corporate/grim. Sheesh!

FINAL VINYL: The death of records has, as predicted here, meant the loss of thousands of non-hit rock, folk, jazz, and even oldies recordings from availability. Many of the indie labels that had been getting LPs pressed in under-5,000 quantities just can’t afford to port them to CDs at such low figures. The Dead Milkmen contractually forced their record company to press a vinyl version of their latest album, but the stipulation said nothing about distributing it. The LPs are reportedly hidden in a warehouse, waiting to be melted down.

TRUE CRIME: The media went expectedly agog over a pair of killers who planted a thrash-rock CD by their victim’s corpse on Queen Anne Hill. But nobody reacted to bomb attacks at two auto parts stores by calling for the banning of spark plugs. Real thrashers never use CDs anyway, except as master copies to make 20 tapes from.

TRUER CRIME: A Spokane man was arrested after a series of residential burglaries in which the only things stolen were women’s shoes, preferably red. Over 100 such shoes, “mostly in pairs” according to the AP, were found in his home.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH: KCMU’s environmental newscast, Earth on the Air, presented (on 1/11) a woman identified as Angela, who claimed to channel thoughts from trees. The narrator said the show had become acquainted with her “when one of our members met her at a bus stop.” Angela’s message from the deciduous realm: “Mother Earth is a united, intelligent organism” whose very life is threatened by “this parasite called humanity,” and who might one day resort to catastrophic means to save herself even at our expense.

OFF THE NEWSSTAND: The Texas Dept. of Corrections banned the Feb. Texas Monthly from all state prisons, for potentially subversive content: a state highway map, which officials say might help escapees get away.

WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS MONTH: “In a world where victory is the only thing that matters, the only way to win is by risking it all.” — This Paramount ad for the video release of Days of Thunder would have only sounded as stupid as any other commercial had it not premiered during the second week of January. It could be said that a decade of pro-violence culture has led to 1/16, from joy-of-slaughter movies (approved for juvenile consumption by the make-war-not-love attitude of the Ratings Board) to the stuffing of the Pentagon budget and starvation of schools, keeping people hungry and manipulable for recruiting and propaganda purposes. The “lite wars” in Grenada and Panama and the proxy wars in Central America and Angola may have been partly to condition the public to support butt-kissing in the name of butt-kicking. (Those wars, and this one, are also tryouts for all the post-Nam weapons, the goals of the Pentagon-sponsored R&D in microcircuitry that our computers, VCRs, and import cars depend on.) Our ex-friend Saddam was reduced to offering most everything we demanded if he could only get a Mideast conference (which would have been all talk and no solution). But Bush was willing to have thousands die rather than give in on even a trivial detail. The Congressional debates contained stirring moments, but enough members finally took the stance that looked tough but was really chickening out. It was heartening to see the 30,000 or so marching on the night of 1/14 and the thousands in later events (even the ones the media refused to show, under a policy starting around 1/18 of only covering pro-war opinions); there was an indescribable sense of life and hope in even the most earnest moments. I was also heartened to see the footage of other protests from the Everett Federal Bldg. (where my father used to work) to Kent Meridian High School; to see my latest successor as UW Daily editor, Loren Skaggs, denounce the war on the Today show. After a decade of bitching on our collective barstools, opposition politics in this country have been instantly reborn (with 5 months’ hard prep work). Let’s get it right this time. And don’t be discouraged by intentionally misleading polls comparing opposition at the start of this war to that near the end of the Vietnam war. The real war is by our leaders against true democratic values, and disinformation’s only part of it.

‘TIL MARCH, warily note how consumer recycling is offered as the one true way to save the environment by media outlets beholden to industrial polluters, and keep working for peace.

PASSAGE

Bob Guccione Jr. in a 1986 Spin editorial: “Maybe the American Dream is like the Civil War chess set: Once you’ve bought the board you’re committed to buying the rest of the pieces.”

REPORT

Lite Lit 2: The Remake, an evening of readings (old Misc. items, fiction, essays) and vintage short films, will be held Wed., Feb. 13, 7 and 9 p.m., at the Jewl Box Theater within the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave. It’s a partial benefit for my novel publication fund, and is co-sponsored by the Belltown Film Festival. It replaces the reading planned for the beautiful snow-blessed night of 12/19, to which the film projectionist and I were the only attendees.

With the new postal rates, Misc. subscriptions rise to $7/year. (Fax subscriptions stay at $9.) Ads are $15 for spaces like the one below; $25 for that same height across the whole page. (To buy space, leave a message at 524-1967.)

WORD-O-MONTH

“Enlizement”

1/91 Misc. Newsletter

`IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT,

NOV.-DEC. 1990: 22

Welcome to the first 1991 edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t help but wonder what was the last comedy Norman Cousins saw before he died, and whether its makers are responsible for making him insufficiently lighthearted. It couldn’t possibly have been Haywire.

SNOW STORIES: For the first time since I was 8 or so, Xmas looked like the cards and ads always said it was supposed to look like. Astounding! (Of course, in those New England Colonial days, people simply understood they’d be home from Nov. thru March)…A guy on KPLU mistakenly called convergence zone a harmonic convergence…A whole mature elm on the east slope of Capitol Hill fell over and took a Honda with it…People who commute out to the suburbs took 5 hours to get back into town the night of 12/18. I went to a bus stop on Roosevelt Way at 4 p.m. and got right on a bus — a 2:20 bus — only to be unceremoniously booted off by a defeatist driver on Eastlake and Roanoke an hour later…The roof caved in at Northgate, the original shopping mall; what a symbol for reality crashing in on the nice-day artifice of modern commercial America…70 abandoned school buses were officially missing as of 12/21. Did the drivers tell the dispatcher that the dog ate them?…

THAT SINKING FEELING: Could Tugboat Annie have saved I-90? Don’t know, but I do know that even the 20-year flood spared my mom’s antique shop in downtown Snohomish (though she’ll probably retire before the next threat)…The end of the Stena Line to Victoria follows the end of the beloved Princess Margeurite (named for a Dutch princess born in exile in Canada during the war), now seized by the BC government on behalf of Stena creditors.

ARMED FOR ACTION: Will ’91’s big fashion thing be a sleeveless dress that lets you fully show off your contraceptive implants?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Before Columbus Review is a newsprint journal produced on the UW campus, involved in not just indigenous American cultures but a variety of ethnic issues…The Everett Herald wins praise (and a church-organized protest campaign) by listing gay and lesbian “marriage” ceremonies in a new Celebrations section. Makes me almost proud it was my hometown paper.

CATHODE CORNER: On the 10th anniversary of J. Lennon’s death, the Bon unveiled a commercial with cherubic tots singing his “Merry Xmas (War Is Over).” Wake me when they make a spot out of “Imagine no possessions…”…A Penn State psychologist claims some kids are genetically predisposed to become “chronic TV watchers.” I wonder if anybody’s born to become a maker or reader of silly pseudoscientific surveys?…Night Flight, once the hippest show on cable, is now syndicated (on KING 2:30-4:30 am Fri nites/Sat morns). Segments include the “poignant serial” Twin Geeks (really scenes from the infamous siamese-twin exploitation film Chained for Life).

AD VERBS: The original British Boy Scouts are selling sponsorships on merit badges and accompanying manuals. The “Hobbies” badge bears the logo of Dungeons & Dragons games; sports badges carry the trademarks of equipment and shoe companies.

Revenge or Set-Up for Conquest?: As 1/15 approaches, Newsweek says ABC hired a private spy satellite and found no evidence of a massive Iraqi buildup in or near Kuwait; you know, the buildup that was supposed to have one Iraqi soldier for every Kuwaiti.

CLIPPED WINGS: We’re extremely disappointed that Pan American Airways probably won’t exist any more, ‘cuz we won’t get to ride a Pan Am passenger space shuttle in the year 2001. (That was perhaps the first paid “product placement” in a movie, unless you count De Beers Consolidated Mines paying Ian Fleming to use the title Diamonds Are Forever for a novel that became a movie). Meanwhile, Black & Decker is suing 20th Century-Fox for cutting its product-placement scene from Die Hard 2. I’d be glad to have not been in that loser (but then, I wasn’t). Besides, the company doesn’t need any more association with murder and mayhem. In late-’70s Europe, “to Black & Decker” became a verb for applying a power drill to someone’s knees. (Don’t try this at home.)

SPROCKETS: The foreign control of Hollywood studios won’t affect the (largely horrible) state of movies, because films are already increasingly controlled by Asian and European investors. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was financed by a Hong Kong firm that normally backs regular ninja movies; Disney’s relying on a limited investment partnership based in Japan. These syndicates want films for a worldwide audience — stateless fantasy and male-violence films…The historic Ridgemont Theater is slated to be replaced by (what else?) luxury condos. To think of all the couples who fell in love during the year and a half that A Man and a Woman played there, not to mention all the divorced guys who relieved their loneliness during the year it was a porno house, when the comedy-tragedy masks on its marquee were changed so they were both smiling (mandatory, unrelieved “happiness” is an identifiable mark of sleaze). Cineplex Odious is closing the Market Theater this month, but at least one party wants to reopen it and return to alternative programming.

SIGN ON AURORA: “Olympic Ballot Theatre Presents Nutcracker.” If nobody showed up due to the snow, would the performance have been a secret ballot?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Official Seahawks caramel popcorn, only $2.95 a pound at Frederick’s.

LATE GIFT SUGGESTION: Turning the Tables, a board game created by two Seattle folks, all about waiting tables. The first player to collect $250 in tips wins. Along the way, you have to face, via instructions on the cards, unruly customers, constantly changing “menus,” broken wine glasses, and other fun facets of modern restaurant work. Another impressive local board game: Earth Alert, “the active environmental game”…Parker Bros.’ Careers for Girls game received major flack from Small Business Administration chief Susan Engeleiter. The six “careers” players can choose are Supermom, schoolteacher, rock star, fashion designer, college graduate and animal doctor. Careers in ecology, space, sports, the arts, politics, big business, farming and the movies were in previous versions of the game but dropped for the new edition. The company responded by noting that the game was developed and packaged by an all-woman team.

RE-TALES: Portland now has Nike Town, a 20,000 square foot “shoe experience”. Each line of shoes has its own “environment,” complete with background music and stereo sound effects for a particular sport or activity. The hottest new retail concept for Seattle, meanwhile, is a franchised laundry-tavern combo called Duds `n’ Suds. Cute, but nothing like Miami’s laundry/topless bar (could you wash all your clothes there?)…Pay n’ Pak is the first hardware chain to take the American Express card. I’m reminded of an old radio spot for Amex’s dying competitor Carte Blanche: “After all, why would you pay for a meal in a fine restaurant with the same card you use to have your swimming pool cleaned?”…The Dutch Oven restaurant on 3rd is gutted, now to become a Bartell’s. In its most glamorous moment, in the 1978 TV movie The Secret Life of John Chapman, Ralph Waite (Pa Walton), as a college professor slumming among the working class, walked in front of the Capitol in Washington DC, then turned a corner and ended up inexplicably on 3rd Ave., entered the Dutch Oven, got a job watching dishes, and went home with waitress Susan Anspach.

BLACK & WHITE ISSUES: Seattle photographer Mel Curtis won a $140,000 copyright case against an ad agency that used one of his pictures in a “comp” for a proposed General Dynamics corporate image ad, then substituted a new, almost-identical picture when the ad was published.

UNSUNG HERO: Martha Wash, one of the boisterous 2 Tons of Fun/Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame, turns out to have been the real singer behind songs credited to Black Box and Seduction, two svelte disco girl-groups assembled by manager-producers on the basis of looks. Ex-Seattle singer Marni Nixon (singing voice of the female leads in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The King and I, West Side Story, and other musicals) was quoted in the P-I as saying, “Voice dubbing will always be with us.” But was it really her saying that, or…?

PUNK LIVES! (SORT OF): The KOMO reactionaries discovered the evils of hardcore again, thanks to a Federal Way thrash-nostalgia band whose only provocative aspect is its name, Date Rape. Everything else about it is really tired — slam dancing, flannel shirts tied around the waist. This stuff’s older now than hippie stuff was when punk started. At least it lets KOMO condemn music by white kids, for a change. Geov Parrish, meanwhile, writes that straight-edge rock (discussed last ish) is four or five years old and “already pretty much played out.” Furthermore, Hare Krishna recruiting out of that scene started a couple of years ago but “the word is spreading and they’re getting fewer converts that way.”

RESPONSE: A postcard signed with a scrawled one-word name beginning with “A” takes issue with my claim that “sci-fi” was an OK term since 20th Century-Fox used it in a corporate ad: “Since when have the ad writers been the arbiters of taste or literacy?” I was almost ready to side with A. when across my desk at The Comics Journal came a catalog for cassettes of “filk,” listing singers whom the catalog’s readers were expected to already know. Nowhere did the brochure describe or define filk. I finally learned that it’s pop tunes with new lyrics poking ever-so-gentle fun at sci-fi movies, TV shows and books, performed by the lyricists at fan conventions. People this obsessed with excessively-serious trash art deserve any nickname I can give.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH (when, if we’re at all lucky, we’ll not be out killing people), read The Ascent of Mind by UW neurobiologist William P. Calvin, join our kudos to Charles Johnson for his National Book Award, don’t read American Psycho (more proof that literature is not necessarily the most enlightened of the arts), and stay warm.

REPORT

The 28 people who attended the first Lite Lit reading 12/16 appeared to have fully enjoyed the experience (except one guy who wrote in later, suggesting I should learn to speak more like the Red Sky poets. Sorry, but monotone rants hurt my throat). I’m sure the audience at the following Wednesday’s reading would have been equally entertained, had anybody shown up. Watch for a re-schedule in February.

VISION OF HELL #2

Being trapped in the chair of a hair stylist whose radio station plays all stupid songs (Bread, America) — and who sings along.

VISION OF HELL #3

Being trapped in the only restaurant open in a small town Xmas Eve, with big-screen TVs blasting continuous NFL Films retrospectives of Super Bowls X thru XX.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pish”

INS AND OUTS FOR 1991

Our fifth annual In/Out list follows the same rules as the previous ones: We’re predicting what will become big in the next year, not declaring what’s already big now. In the past, we correctly picked Winona Ryder, Roseanne Barr, plaid, women singers, The Simpsons, pantsuits, Arsenio Hall, minor-league hockey, crystals, fax machines, Anne Rice, nose rings, and minivans.

12/90 Misc. Newsletter

MILLI VANILLA FRAUDS?

NEXT THEY’LL CLAIM ARCHIE AND JUGHEAD

DIDN’T SING THEIR SONGS!

Here at Misc., we’re holding a public wake for the 50-year-old Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge (known henceforth as Galloping Gertie II), which reached the end of its life “span” with a bang, not a whimper. Before the sinking, it had become a mile-long, 40-foot-wide construction/demolition project, strewn with a few scattered cars and Honey Buckets. It already looked like it was about to sink (something Boris S. Wart threatened but never accomplished on the J.P. Patches show). (Event info on other side.)

OUT WITH THE OLD, PLEASE!: Nostalgia is going to be the death of America. Every previous fad added something to the national heritage, for good or ill. Nostalgia only subtracts. It boils the flavor and texture away from our past, leaving a gooey syrup of vague memories. It’s getting harder and harder to find a restaurant, store, or beauty salon where the sound system plays any recent music. “Square” places play top 40 hits of 1956-69. “Hip” places play hipper music from that same era (Muddy Waters instead of the Beatles). Only in designer-jean stores can you hear songs by groups whose members are all still alive. And many of them take pride in never playing a single riff that isn’t reorganized Led Zeppelin.

ADDITIONALLY, I’m finding it harder and harder to explain to people that I’m neither (1) a nostalgist for the hippie era nor (2) a conservative. I regard hippie-era politics as a well-intentioned failure. The progressive, populist side of American leftist tradition got smothered by what we might as well call a bohemian aesthetic. There will never be a real left in this country until it stops depicting all working-class people as “the unwashed masses,” as hicks and flaming fascists. The world is not the few enlightened “Us” vs. all the ignorant “Them.” It’s all of “Us.”

NORTHERN REVOLT: The Canadian subsidiary of Popsicle Brands is under vocal attack from children from Victoria, BC (Mile 0 of the Trans-Canada Highway) to St. John’s, Newfoundland (the other Mile 0). According to the Vancouver Sun, the company promised free Nintendo cartridges to kids sending in 15,000 points’ worth of Popsicle sticks; instead, 10,000 kids got only letters of apology claiming that the company’s stock of 6,000 cartridges had been depleted and that substitute prizes would be given to everybody else sometime next year. Still, maybe the kiddie Canucks ought to be grateful to get even that; in a famous mid-’80s essay, Ontario’s ownMargaret Atwood wrote of growing up with Popsicle labels offering wonderful prizes but bearing the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Good Only in U.S.”

NO FREUDIAN COMMENTS, PLEASE: A staffer at King County Juvenile Hall reports that teenage boys inside there are signifying their gang membership by affixing Dole or Chiquita banana stickers onto their belts.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Manna Raisins & Oat Bran Flakes cereal, made in Delta, B.C. and “sprouted for life.” It’s “Certified Organic,” but (oddly, considering the name) isn’t certified kosher.

IS NOBODY INCORRUPT?: The Wall St. Journal (10/29) reports that the Doris Day Animal Fund Inc. spends 90 percent of its income on direct-mail fundraising (billed in official budget statements as “public education”).

AD VERBS: Rainier Light’s “It’s R Light” commercials are much better than the previous ad agency’s work, but they’re still hollow compared to the classic Heckler Associates spots, and for the same reason. While the Heckler ads had real fun in promoting the beer as a beverage for enjoyment, both of its successor agencies fell into the trap of selling a target audience on an image of itself, with the product merely a supporting player in the drama.

NO MORE FUR AT NORDSTROM: This is how an industry dies, when the first PR-conscious retailer proudly capitulates to public furor (and flat market shares). But fur is more than an inefficient source of outerwear; it’s one reason we’re here. The trapping of wild fur animals was the first white industry in the Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Co. and others subsidized many of the first non-military settlements in Washington Territory. They were supported by sales to the society ladies of Europe, whose essential financial contribution was totally ignored in last year’s books on women in Northwest history.

SAY IT AIN’T SO RUMOR OF THE MONTH: Is the Comet Tavern going to be upscaled?

(latter-day note: It wasn’t.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 11/14): “A story of 4 kids and how they died/`Anybody who has a teen-ager will related to this’ tale of tragedy.” Now that’s headline writing in the classic manner, almost Victorian in its cadence.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: It’s a shame that The Facts has such ugly design and typography, because some truly eloquent African-American voices may be found there. For example, hear the bitter “Life Among the Thorns” edition of F. Justina Nubay’s column “Say It With Flowers”: “I wholeheartedly believe that Thanksgiving should continue to be the only day when public spirited people ply the hungry with turkeys, pies, and other filling foods, enough to last them the entire year. Like the howling hyena, the hungry and the homeless, for the time remaining, should continue to gorge themselves on carrion and roam their jungles in wild anguish.”…At Cause is a Christian paper with a difference: A Reubenesque nude drawing on the front page, an essay titled “Party On!” saying it’s OK for Christians to “have exhilaration, ecstasy, bliss” — including being gay and/or transvestite if they wish to be so. (Editor M.F. Whealen seems to be an ex-Scientologist, from the use of certain catch phrases.)…The Oregon-based Sinsemilla Tipsmagazine folds after 10 years. Publishers blame the War on Drugs, which they claim has made people scared to sell or advertise in the mag.

CATHODE CORNER: Does the rash of inside jokes on The Simpsons (Marge’s surprise at “a Simpson on a T-shirt,” the on-air homage to Bart’s Macy parade balloon, his chalkboard message “I am not a 32-year-old woman”) mean the show has passed its peak?…A producer has paid millions for all rights to The Ed Sullivan Show; plans to release several video compilations, including the censored TV debuts by famous rockers and a tape of 50 different people doing the Twist. But will they ever include the peg-legged tap dancer, or the National Model Race Car Championship? (A licensed version of Sullivan’s most popular feature, the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, now appears in Spanish on cable’s Univision.)

KRIME KORNER: A Seattle man was fatally shot by an unlicensed Safeway security guard for allegedly pocketing a pack of cigarettes. Now will you listen to me about the dangers of smoking?… The Martinsburg, W.Va. city council plans to require panhandlers to buy $25 licenses or face jail terms. But how do you get the money to tell people you don’t have any money?

MALLED DOWN: The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $50,000 grant (with a 2/1 matching requirement) to the Rouse Co. to sponsor non-threatening art programs in shopping centers (including Westlake Center). Now we know the true priorities of new NEA head John Frohnmayer. He’s using “bringing art to the people” and corporate matching-fund requirements as ways of rewarding works acceptable to business/marketing interests.

PRESSED: Our news media, presuming us all to be beer-swilling xenophobes, devoted their attention on 11/22-23 to how nothing had really happened in the Persian Gulf lately, and only cursorily mentioned that the last major European dictator fell from power. The beginning of the end might have been foretold in an item from USA Today (11/12): “Richard Needham, British minister for Northern Ireland, apologized for calling Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a “cow” during a car-phone call to his wife. A paramilitary group in Northern Ireland picked up the call on a radio monitor and sent a recording of it to a news agency.”…What they didn’t tell you about the female, Socialist, pro-contraception Irish president is that the position is largely ceremonial, a sort of elected king. She will be less able to take political stances than when she was in the Irish senate.

SECTION BEE: The Killer Bees may finally be on our way! (Times, 11/3) It turns out that they’re not really that much more vicious to humans, but they are less tameable and they do drive out domesticated breeds.

XMAS GIFT OF THE YEAR: The Dance Aerobics game cartridge by our Redmond neighbors at Nintendo. You can vicariously experience the self-punishment and body-consciousness of aerobics without having to actually do the exercises. It’s one of only two games I’ve seen with a female lead character…. The Trivial Pursuit ’80s Edition is historically inaccurate. It’s got a question about Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, who was on from ’77 to ’80….Lynnwood’s Pacific Trading Cards is drawing national attention for itsAndy Griffith Show card set….Trump: The Game (“It’s Whether You Win”) was marked down from $39.95 to $19.90….Seattle’sGenerra has a “Men’s Collective” shirt line, for junior execs old enough to remember their student-Maoist pasts (they’re even made in the PRC!).

MORE VEGETARIANS IN LEATHER: The Vancouver rockmag Discorder sez the next big thing’s “straight-edge rock,” punk-like bands (including Seattle’s Undertow) who belong to the Hare Krishna movement. Their premise: Just as punk stripped rock of impurities and distractions, so should we do with our lives.

PHILM PHIRE: Remains from the blaze at Universal Studios (soon to be owned by Panasonic) soon became a major attraction on the Universal Tour; the simulated “burning building” attraction was temporarily closed. The sale of Universal/MCA leaves Time Warner as the last major US-owned record company. It also brings Japanese money into US publishing (MCA owns Putnam, Berkley and Ace).

NOT IN STORE: You won’t get to shop this Xmas at B.N. Genius, that land of expensive electronic playthings that you’d never buy but always loved to play with in the store. Meanwhile, the end of the Northgate Woolworth leaves only the downtown store as an inexpensive source for hats, socks, and hobby supplies, not to mention the long shelf of cheesy crossword magazines. (It’s also one of the last places still selling Clark candy bars.)

PICK A PEC: The 11/24 Newsweek (the same issue with the essay that claimed that “Cynicism is alien to America”) reported that trendy LA men are now getting silicone implants to make their upper bodies look more muscular. Look dudes, this recent interest in “men reclaiming the feminine side of their natures” ought to mean taking up the smart things about womanhood; just as women’s assertiveness training generally excludes lessons in beer-swilling or sexual harassment.

WE’LL TALK AGAIN in the palindromic year of 1991 (that year which picky purists insist is the real start of the decade), when I’ll count exactly how many times you could have seen It’s A Wonderful Life this holiday season. Until then, watch the astounding South Africa Now 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCTS, try to avoid calling the NY Times crossword-help 900 line, appreciate the appropriateness of the big Marilyn Monroe mural inside the Broadway Pay ‘n Save (shouldn’t all drugstores bear the images of people who died from prescription overdoses?), read The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pray for snow, work for peace, and consider the words of Frank Zappa on unauthorized musical sampling: “It’s just so cheese-oid.”

NOTICE

Sign at the Wood Shop, Pioneer Square: “Authentic East German nutcrackers. Last chance. Buy now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

REPORT

It’s been threatened before, but now it’s really gonna happen. I’m holding two live readings this month: Sun., 12/16, at the Two Bells Tavern (10 p.m.) and Wed., 12/19, at the Rendezvous (7 and 9 p.m., with vintage educational films). Each show contains at least some different material; each is a partial benefit for my Perfect Couple novel publication fund. (The novel is still available only on Mac disks, for $6.)

Subscribers may notice a new mailing-label design. My old label program crashed (thank God and Apple I could retrieve the data with the ResEdit program).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Vituperative”

11/90 Misc. Newsletter

TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’

Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.

To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.

FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)

UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)

THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”

PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.

WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”

STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.

TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).

DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.

LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…

FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”

BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.

CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.

WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.

THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…

KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.

BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.

WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.

‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.

PASSAGE

Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”

REPORT

Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lachrymose”

LITE LIT

(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)

Page Passage

2 He was a smiling, handsome man…

8 She smiled at him.

11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…

13 …he said, and smiled at me…

14 He smiled at me.

21 …he said, and smiled…

22 She smiled at me…

27 …looked around at him and smiled.

31 He was smiling and looking at me…

34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.

37 She smiled up at me…

37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.

38 …my mother said, still smiling.

38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.

40 …and she was smiling.

40 She smiled at him.

44 She smiled and shook her head.

48 She smiled.

52 …she was smiling.

52 …and one of them smiled.

53 …my mother said, and smiled.

53 …and smiled at me.

56 …she said, and smiled at me.

63 She looked around at me and smiled.

70 …he was smiling.

72 …then she smiled at me…

72 She was smiling…

73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…

75 She smiled…

77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.

77 She smiled at me.

82 …he looked up at her and smiled…

82 She looked at me and smiled.

84 He was standing there smiling…

88 …the woman was smiling…

90 She smiled at me.

91 …smiling and fanning herself.

92 My mother smiled.

92 Warren…smiled at my mother.

93 She smiled at him.

100 My mother smiled at me.

101 She smiled at me again.

101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.

104 She smiled at me again…

110 He was standing…and smiling…

111 …my father’s clean smiling face…

120 She smiled at me…

122 She smiled at me…

123 She smiled…

131 …looked at me and smiled…

133 She looked up at me and smiled…

134 She smiled.

136 She smiled at him.

136 He was smiling.

136 And then she smiled at him again.

137 She smiled at him…

139 My father smiled at me.

143 …smiled at her.

143 …and smiled.

143 …and smiled again.

144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.

154 …and he was smiling.

170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.

10/90 Misc. Newsletter

CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!

It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.

LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)

ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.

DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.

FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.

PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.

IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.

STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.

CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)

OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.

NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?

ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.

UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.

YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.

AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”

‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.

PASSAGE

Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”

REPORT

It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.

I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Esconce”

3/90 Misc. Newsletter

Russia’s Getting A Multi-Party System!

(Wish We Had One.)

Spring, they say, is just around the corner, but you don’t have to wait any longer for Misc., the info-mosaic that wonders why you can now get a Big Mac in Moscow, but you still can’t get one in Winslow. You call that American freedom of choice? And hey, you vegetarians and epicurean snobs out there, stop scoffing long enough to consider the years of preparation McDonald’s undertook in making food ingredients in the USSR with the quality control needed for modern agribusiness. Most USSR food is still “natural” (as in less-processed), scarce and often rotting. Their system never developed efficient production and distribution; ours perverted those virtues into for-their-own-sake obsessions.

Giving Workers the Rack: I was set to write this month about the imminent closure of Nordstrom’s U-District branch (which has been there in various forms and addresses since the days of raccoon coats), but more important news came in the state’s $30-million decision in favor of employees stuck working extra hours for free. It took the pro-business but out-of-town Wall St. Journal to print the workers’ side of the labor dispute (kudos to reporter Susan C. Faludi, who uncovered not just mandatory volunteer overtime but a corporate culture of bullying, treachery, bigotry, and forced “happiness”). The local media have been as one-sided as they could get away with, taking the angle of “Bad news for Nordstrom” (Times headline, 2/16), never “good news for Nordstrom employees.” I can believe the worst stories and still understand the pro-management employees leafleting outside the stores. Some sincerely believe in the total-hustle policy; others just might be into the “defender” role familiar to analysts of dysfunctional families. What the cracks behind the mandatory Nordic smile mean to Nordstrom’s “service” reputation remains to be seen (computer magazines regularly publish columns suggesting it as a customer-relations role model to computer companies). Even more importantly, many facets of the scandal relate back to the laid back/mellow reputation of the Northwest, whose consumers madethe Big N. what it is today. Nordstrom is one of a handful of institutions that mean the Northwest to the rest of the world (along with the Nordstrom-founded Seahawks, Boeing, The Far Side, Heart, and Ramtha). What does it say when so many of us prefer to buy from a place that hires people on the basis of their conformity to the corporate “look” (a nebulous criterion that could be used against those with too-kinky hair or too-dark skin), and apparently treats them like well-dressed little Oliver and Olivia Twists?

Snow Wonder: You can tell real Seattlites by their attitude towards a big urban snowstorm. To them, it’s a source of childlike wonder and merriment. To suburbanites and Easterners, it’s a nuisance. To Southern Californians, it’s a mix of terror and shock that the weather they love to talk about to prove their “adopted native” stance can do something this big. I loved it, even if it didn’t last longer than four days. I almost got to see a Samurai turn over, live and in person!

The Fine Print (sticker affixed to the back cover of Ernie’s Postcard Book, funny-cat photos by Tony Mendoza, published by Capra Press): “The captions on the back of each postcard are unauthorized and not the work of the author.”

Local Publication of the Month: Adbusters Quarterly, a newsprint magazine on how we are all prisoners of the North American ad culture and even what we can do about it. A sort of radicalized McLuhanism, from the apparent capital of anarchist thought in the western hemisphere, Vancouver.

Modulations: The KZOK-AM frequency, long known as KJET and more recently as KQUL (which played moldie-oldies automation tapes inherited from the old KUUU), is playing new (or at least recently-recorded) music again, mass-market metal under the slogan Z-Rock. If the quintessential KJET song was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” the quintessential Z-Rock song is Guns n’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s nice that the new format also has room for local acts, though a lot of it sounds like KZOK sounded in 1979.

Cathode Corner: I’m trying to decide whether The Simpsons is the best TV show of the past 10 years or the best ever. From Bart’s different weekly chalkboard affirmations (“I will not instigate revolution”) to the gags you need a pause button to get (the nuclear-plant entrance sign, “Unauthorized Visitors Will Be Shot”), every second is packed with sharp humor and social commentary. And to think that it all comes from an ex-Olympian, Matt Groening (whose Life in Hell list of Forbidden Words for the ’90s alone qualifies him as world-class). The show’s setting, Springfield, is, of course, the name of the most famous “hick town” in Groening’s native Oregon; the nuclear plant where Homer Simpson works looks a lot like the one north of Portland on the Columbia. Am pleased to report that Bart T-shirts are being visibly displayed as far away as Federal Way, with Bart-head-shaped bubble gum due in June.

Everything’s Not Coming Up Roses: Oregon has a lot to cheer about this winter, between The Simpsons, the TrailBlazers and the OSU men’s basketball team. But there’s no pride in the governor’s race, in which incumbent Neil Goldschmit was forced out when rumors of a marital split came true (apparently we can have a divorced man in the White House but not in Salem). The rumor about the rumor claims it was started by GOP candidate Leon Frohmeyer, state attorney general and self-proclaimed environmentalist (really, say more radical eco-activists, an architect of compromise deals with logging and mining interests).

Power Politics: Downtown Blackout II lasted four hours, while its ’88 predecessor lasted four days. Could City Light have worked harder knowing that the thousands of Lotto players in three counties were losing their chances at becoming $6 million men and women (Lotto’s dedicated computer-phone lines are routed through downtown)? Ehh, probably not….

Tourist Trappings: Some multinational has started a mini-cruise ship, the Spirit of Puget Sound. Its ads promise “three hours of live entertainment and fabulous food” along with the usual seaside scenery. Don’t they know what the phrase “a three-hour tour” has come to mean?

Junk Food of the Month: Frozen dinners for kids. Banquet and others have devised microwave versions of all the classic kiddie meals (hot dogs, chicken, chili, etc.) with stereotyped kiddie graphics on the boxes. They’re presumably intended for the growing numbers of offspring with all-working parents, who must fend for themselves after school. Wish I had those things back when I was in that situation.

End of the ’80s Item #4: Perrier water can be bad for you!

Street of Silence: It’s sad to witness the death-by-installments of Broadway, the Aurora Village of urban business districts. Speculators would rather see buildings go empty than lower unrealistic rents. Hence, over a dozen major storefronts are now empty, from the venerable Broadway Theater to the Benneton sweater stand that replaced the cool Different Drummer bookstore. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn’t cruise there much anymore, now that he’s got a house in Kent. Only Keeg’s remains of thesix furniture stores that had made Broadway Seattle’s furniture row back when E. Pike was its auto row. (But the long-pending Dairy Queen finally opened, that venerable chain’s first in-town Seattle store since the mid-’70s.)

(latter-day note: Broadway again thrives, with indie businesses replacing downsizing chains (including an ethnic restaurant where Dairy Queen was). Aurora Village got demolished. Keeg’s closed, leaving no more furniture stores on Capitol Hill except used office furniture outlets.)

Street of Noise: The Pike Place Market authorities are all a-flutter over what they claim are semi-secret plans by the NYC speculators who may or may not own the buildings to turn the Market into a high-priced, chain-stored parody of itself. What they’re not saying is that this would only accelerate a process the Market leaders already instigated, starting with sweatshirt stores and tourist-oriented parking projects. The promotion of the Market as a sight rather than a marketplace has already affected the remaining farmers, who see Saturday after Saturday of crowded walkways full of sightseers but bereft of actual food purchasers.

Ink Inc.: Just as we declared Spy magazine “outski” for 1990, imitations began to sprout. If the real Spy’s quaint we’re-from-New-York-and-you’re-not attitude doesn’t quite get your soul afire, you can enjoy self-conscious prose, retro art and graph-chart stories inWigwag (for the Garrison Keillor audience), Forbes Publishing’s Egg (for the most emptyheaded lifestyle wannabes), and Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly, designed by Mark Michaelson (who worked on the infamous summer ’79 UW Daily with Lynda Barry, John Keister, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Mike Lukovich, and an underachieving writer who does some little newsletter about pop culture). And is it a mere coincidence that the mass media have become overtaken with chronicling the daily life of Spy’s most frequent satirical target, Donald Trump?

Hearts and Thorns: If Christmas is when everybody’s expected to be in a nuclear family, then Valentine’s Day is when every adult is expected to be in a couple. This is a reasonable if superficial conclusion from the newspapers and the self-help books. There are, at last, support groups for people who need to learn about getting out of bad relationships, but still none about getting into good ones. To admit one’s wish to share one’s life with another goes against the unisex rugged individualism of early-’90s America. To call a place a “singles’ bar” these days is to be insulting; to still be out looking is to be shut out of a lot of social activities and, despite insurance-institute reports that hetero AIDS may never take off in this country, even to be denounced as a menace to society. At least you can get candy really cheap during the following week.

My Nightmare: I dreamed of an old man with white hair whining, “Ever wonder why you can’t get your hooded robes white again after a night of cross burning? Nothing seems to get all the smoke and ash out, not even the old-fashioned real bleach with the sediment at the bottom of the jug.”… I also have dreams in which Denny Hill was never torn down, and had by now become Seattle’s most fashionable residential neighborhood.

‘Til next time, write your Senators to stop the ban against Silly String (we have only one party to spray for our country!), see Roger & Me, don’t buy from the itinerant street gang of perfume salespeople, beware of any self-proclaimed “environmental President” who came from the top of the oil industry, and heed these words of Tim O’Brien: “A real war story is never moral. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it.”

REPORT

Factsheet Five, the Publisher’s Weekly of Xerox and desktopped literature, likes MISC. “Witty and interesting, even for those of us who live clear across the continent,” sez editor Mike Gundelroy. If you like it half as much, you might consider subscribing to MISC. (with one of Fait Divers’* funny mini-posters as a free gift).

(*Say “Fay Dee Vare”)

BEACON

Philosopher Elaine Pagels, interviewed in Bill Moyers’ A World of Ideas: “Guilt involves a sense of importance in the drama. To say that one is not guilty is also to acknowledge that one is in fact quite powerless.”

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Ataraxia”

12/89 Misc. Newsletter

Seahawks Keep Losing,

Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties

Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.

MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.

TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!

THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”

PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!

BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.

STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.

HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.

INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).

BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.

SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.

`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”

VOICES

Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:

“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”

FORUM

We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Olefiant”

INS/OUTS FOR ’90

This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.

Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.

This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.

5/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

PENTAGON BRASS PREDICT

GLASNOST WILL FAIL

(THEY CAN ONLY HOPE)

Here at Misc., where we’ve always brought disparate elements together, we don’t understand this “cold fusion” fuss. As a scientific discovery, it’s far less important than the new technique to remove old tattoos with lasers.

With this installment, Misc. has graced Seattle’s more open-minded restaurants, theatres and retailers for three years. That’s longer than the Ford Administration or the original run of Star Trek! Alice Savage, who ran what was then the PR paper for the Lincoln Arts Association, said I could write anything I wanted to. As ArtsFocus has grown under Cydney Gillis into this fiercely-independent sheet, that policy’s stayed. Another policy iterated in the first edition still holds: This column does not settle wagers (not that we’ve been asked to).

Eat Your Heart Out, Updike: The Brasil restaurant on 1st showed scenes from the latest Rio samba parades as part of its Sunday-night film series. Among the 18 “schools” (each with at least 3,000 amateur performers) were several save-the-rainforest parades and one in honor of Brazilian author Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, et al.). Can you imagine giant floats, musicians, singers, children, feather-headdressed men and topless women parading for a living American writer? Brazil has serious problems, but at least it has people who actively participate in their own culture.

This participation is largely what Abbie Hoffman fought for. During his heyday and on his death, the media’ve depicted him as an ego freak, no more sincerely subversive than John Belushi. (The radicals who really were ego freaks became Republicans.) Hoffman’s `68 Demo Convention protest and his square-people-bashing at the subsequent trial might have set back support of the anti-war movement, letting Nixon and Reagan vow to protect “real Americans” from “those kooks.” Still, especially in his books, he had much to say on real democracy vs. money-power whoring and how folks must stop being easily led.

Dead Air: KJR’s resident reactionary Gary Lockwood became Millstone Billboard Man #2, standing in a giant “coffee cup” downtown for an airshift (if I only had some tomatos to throw, some ripe, young tomatos). Lockwood’s “those kids today” commercials, denouncing anything recorded since 1970 and anybody born since 1950, are just like the Mitch Miller/Lawrence Welk defenders during the so-called “classic rock” era. To think KJR was once co-owned by Danny Kaye, who worked to bring attention and respect to youth. Also on the retro beat, the speculating Floridians who bought into Seattle radio promptly sold KZOK (to KOMO) and KQUL, née KJET (to Viacom’s KBSG). I’m heartened, though, by the formation of an anti-nostalgia lobby, the National Association for the Advancement of Time. Corporate America’s obsession with 1956-69 resembles the religious “Age of Miracles” doctrine, in which great things are said to have really happened but cannot happen anymore. The only way to really preserve the spirit of the ’60s is to stay fresh, to live in what Flip Wilson called “what’s happenin’ NOW.”

Update: New Cannon Film owner Giancarlo Parretti’s bids for the New World and DeLaurentiis studios collapsed. Maybe he should’ve sent Chuck Norris to see some dissident shareholders.

Local Publications of the Month: Twistor is a “hard science fiction” book by UW prof John Cramer, in which a machine in the UW Physics Bldg. becomes the portal to a parallel universe…. Lawrence Paros’s The Erotic Tongue is back in print. The area’s foremost expert on word origins (and briefly the best columnist in the P-I) gives fascinating histories on our terms for sex and/or love.

Cathode Corner: Rude Dog, the T-shirt mascot owned by Frederick & Nelson’s David Sabey, will have his own Sat. morn cartoon on CBS this fall (produced by Marvel)…. Bombshelter Videos resurfaced on KTZZ, where even Soundgarden’s an improvement over get-rich-quick and save-your-hair “shows.”

Ad of the Month (on a 76 banner): “Our three unleaded gasolines: Cleans fuel injectors best.” Runner-up (in the N. Seattle Press): “Since 1984, Gibraltar Savings: Serving families for over 100 years.” Then there was the Ross Dress for Less clearance ad with the “Men’s” listings printed between the jumping female model’s legs.

News Item of the Month (Times, 4/22): “A letter writer suggests that car-pool lanes should be open to cars with two drivers.” Let’s hope they’re driving in the same direction.

Politix: Veteran ad man David Stern, whose mom’s on the county council, is running for mayor. His best qualification is having invented the Happy Face, the quintessential politician’s stance. (It’s also become a symbol of neo-psychedelia, ironically since he made it to give Univ. Fed. Savings a wholesome family image in contrast to the image of the U-District in `69)…. Let’s try to get this straight: Our state’s Tom Foley’ll be House Speaker if Jim Wright has to quit over moneymaking schemes, including his wife’s unspecified work for our state’s Pacific Institute (the success-seminar outfit whose payroll also includes Emmett Watson and legend-in-his-own-mind DJ Bob Hardwick). It’s almost as juicy as the discovery of a real Texas oilman named J.R. Ewing, implicated in the Iran-Contra cash flow. After involving so many guys with cartoon names (Casper, Poindexter, Felix), it’s fitting the scandal include other parts of the American mythos.

Junk Food of the Month: White Castle Frozen Burgers. After following the elaborate heating instructions (involving foil and paper towels), you get something that looks and vaguely tastes like the food at an East Coast restaurant chain of undeserved reputation…. WSU’s launching a “distinguished professorship in fast food management,” underwritten by Taco Bell.

‘Til June, wear lotsa Parfum Bic, visit the Speakeasy café on Roosevelt (latter-day note: No relation to the later Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown), and try to be patient during the remaining 14 months ’til the Goodwill Games.

11/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

DATE OF FIRST STORE XMAS DISPLAY

SIGHTED THIS YEAR: 9/20

begin our November Misc., here’s a no-prize trivia quiz: Name the only major Seattle-based bank that hasn’t changed name or ownership since ’81. Answer below.

I’m writing this, and some of you’ll read it, before 11/8. If you consider yourself a progressive but don’t vote, you’re doing just what the Right hopes you’ll do. In any case, this was last big TV election. As viewership declines and diffuses, media campaigns’ll give way to grass-roots politics, a return neither party’s ready for. The society’s already changing (perhaps not as quickly as I’d like) from that mythical Great Unwashed to a more diverse, active populace. You see it in Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega topping the charts, in a peacetime peak in campus activism, in cultural events outdrawing sports at the box office (though sports still get more beer money). Politicians don’t see it, nor do polls weighted to emphasize “likely voters” (to demographically match ’84 Reaganites).

My Kinda Town: Was recently in that mecca for all column lovers, Chicago, a town with many Seattle ties despite the wresting of Seattle’s Westin and Frederick & Nelson from their old Chicago owners. Generra, Union Bay, Shah Safari, Egghead Software, Starbucks and Eddie Bauer (in a store right under the elevated-train tracks) are strongly represented there. Their baseball teams lose as often as the M’s, but at least they (especially the Cubs) still know to put on a great show.

Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Mini-Muffins, spongy little mouthfuls in six muffiny flavors including blueberry. They’re even microwaveable (but not the foil bag they come in). Their slogan: “Tradition You Can Taste.” Some of their ingredients: Guar gum, xanthan gum, sodium stearol lactylate, sorbitan monostearate and calcium acetate.

Cathode Corner: Sure missed Jim McKay during the Olympics. If Dick Clark could have shows on all three networks at once, couldn’t McKay be on two?… Despite Ted Turner’s rush to colorize his cinematic booty (partly to gain new copyrights on the films, which start going public-domain in 15 years), his TNT channel shows how beautiful black-and-white can be with the best prints. Tugboat Annie, the only golden-age feature made in Seattle, is stupendous in crisp 35mm.

Dead Air: For the record, KJET was sold to out-of-staters and promptly replaced by the area’s sixth oldies station. DJ Jim Keller’s still on the payroll, researching the potential of new music via “pay radio” (envisioned in the ’50s by my idol, comic Stan Freberg) using cable or FM sideband frequencies a la Muzak. Backlash sez management mercilessly killed it by suddenly ordering a switch to the station’s infamous tape system, preventing on-air goodbyes. The real blame goes to the GOP-controlled FCC, for letting stations be bought and sold for pure speculation and run with no commitment to anything except a quick buck.

Mobil 1, Washington 0: There’ll be no more Mobil gas stations in the Northwest as of next year, ending a history going back to the General and Gilmore (builder of Washington’s oldest refinery) brands, bought up by Mobil back in the ’50s. I guess we didn’t watchMasterpiece Theater enough. Old Pegasus will still fly, however, on classic signs at the General Petroleum Museum on E. Pine and an Edmonds antique store.

For better or worse (probably, I reluctantly say, for better), Seattle changed forever the day Westlake Center opened. It’s architecturally flawed (and the big sign on the top level has got to go), but has a few nice stores and is a great gathering place. The mall, more “intimate” than suburban malls (less non-revenue-producing corridor space), was stuffed w/manic shoppers the first days; the only calm people were the Living Mannequins. In the 12 days the mall was open but Pine St. wasn’t, people got to the mall and other shops just fine, thank you. There’s no proven reason to let cars back on that block.

News Items of the Month: BrightStar Technologies of Bellevue’s selling computer software with “the next step toward true artificial intelligence.” Accept no imitations… KPLU reported a “multiple car semi accident” on 10/21. Does that mean somebody might have meant to crash?… Fame, a new mag started by ex-Interview staffers, touts sheer and see-thru fashion as the return of a classic style. Unlike the miniskirt, nobody’s likely to turn this classic into a business suit.

Local Publications of the Month: Woodsmen of the West, a 1908 Canadian novel just now released stateside by Seattle’s Fjord Press, is a lively tale of logging, shipping and drinking on the B.C. coast…. Inside Chess, a biweekly from local grandmaster Yassar Seirawan, is the biggest attempt in years at an independent U.S. chess journal. For those with at least a moderate interest in the game’s inner workings.

The Plane Truth?: Uncredited, unsubstantiated claims in the press posit that sick Boeing workers may just be stricken by “mass hysteria” and not by the admittedly-harmful chemicals they work with. I thought we were past the time when managements could just plant the company line into papers.

Frame-Ups: The best things at the Pacific Northwest Art Expo were in the WWU booth: instructor Tom Schlotterback’s small surrealist oils. “Woman Menaced by Rodent” and “Genuine Candy-Striped Jesus Christ” looked even greater than they sound.

Which Came First?: Univ. Way now has restaurants called China First and New China First. (They could have called the new space China Second, but that ‘d be a throwback to the old Two-China Policy.)

Fatty Deposits: Rainier Bank should’ve changed its name back to National Bank of Commerce; instead it’s another variation on “California Carpetbagger Bank of Washington.” I had a temp job on the 13th floor ( they dared to have one) of the Rainier Tower, in the international dep’t. (closed by the Calif. owners). This job was during the big ’85 snow; female employees who couldn’t get home that night were put up in a hotel and given X-large Seahawk T-shirts for sleepwear. (Trivia answer: Washington Mutual.)

‘Til December, send in your suggestions for our In-Out list, don’t buy Adidas cologne (advertised as “The Essence of Sports”), pay homage at G. Washington’s stained-glass portrait at UW Health Sciences (with “What, Me Worry?” inscribed in Latin at the architect’s orders) and heed the words of novelist Judith Krantz: “Dan Quayle is the sort of man who, if he were in a Theodore Dreiser novel, would get the girl pregnant, take her out in a rowboat and throw her overboard.”

10/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

SOON YOU CAN SEE JAPAN

(LAND OF COMPANY-RUN UNIONS)

VIA CONTINENTAL

(AIRLINE OF NO UNIONS)

Here at Misc., we must apologize for the lateness of the last issue, stuck in a Belltown computer during the blackout. I can assure you I had the gag comparing Quayle to Pat Sajak days before Johnny Carson did.

The blackout is the top Seattle news story so far this year. The daily papers did an awful job of covering it, giving relatively scant coverage and not really discussing the havoc it played on people’s lives until Day 3. It was over a week before they mentioned the construction crew that started it, though the crew had been visible days before the outage. In the tales of survival dept., the Virginia Inn stayed open with beer served from picnic coolers, constantly re-iced (signs pleaded with customers to be nice to the staff). KJET played four hours of blackout-related songs on Day 2: “Electricity,” “Power to the People,” “The Power and the Passion,” and tunes by the Power Station and the Power Mowers (but not the Blackouts). On the night the juice came back, the Ralph’s Grocery readerboard was ready with “I SAID BUD LIGHT.”

Junk Food of the Month: Langendorf Creme-Filled Carrot Cakes. Now you can enjoy the guilt trip of junk food and the martyrdom trip of health food in the same bite.

Local Publication of the Month: Lifeline America!, a slick national mag from local ad legend Jerauld Douglas Miller. Its tabloidesque graphics and stories cover survival with & life without painful addictions (booze, drugs, food binges, boyfriends). Best part: the cover photo of Liz Taylor’s unretouched face, showing just how much she’s gone through. Worst part: endorsing Ed Meese’s Gestapo tactics against small-time drug users, fueling their own victim self-images while diverting funds away from treatment….The Daily Journal of Commerce now has its own “A&E” section, only with them it’s not Arts & Entertainment but Architecture & Engineering (natch).

Invisible Red Ink: The Soviet Union’s admitted it falsified maps for decades. Military installations were whited out, Moscow streets rearranged, and entire towns moved or obliterated. Our own govt. threatened for years to blow the Russkies off the map, only to find they’ve been doing it themselves.

Tourist Trappings: At Seattle Center, Westlake and the waterfront (no, Mr. Royer, I won’t call it “Harborfront,” a euphemism newly deployed to gussie up its image as everything BUT a real harbor), the future of the city is being debated: Will residents’ taxes be used to make Seattle more liveable or more visitable? In each case, City Hall has chosen to subsidize tourism while vital local needs are put aside (or held hostage). Gore Vidal once wrote a story about Disney buying all of England as a huge theme park, with residents expected to live in costume as milkmaids and other “colorful characters.” It could essentially happen here, as it essentially has to parts of California and New Mexico. Let’s build a better town, but a better real town.

Everything Old Is Neo Again: The next big early-’70s comeback, besides solar energy, could be conceptual art. Our sources count three new Manhattan galleries devoted to various hybrids of visuals, video, performance, and such. Interest in early conceptual, performance, and especially video art is rising. It’d be a great time to screen the early video-art tapes donated to the Seattle Public Library a decade ago, except nobody seems to know where they are now.

The Secret Word Is Love: We normally don’t print sex gossip, but couldn’t resist the rumor that ex-Rocket art director Helene Silverman is to wed cartoonist/Pee-Wee’s Playhouse designer Gary Panter. Silverman’s now at NY’s architecture-design magMetropolis; we can only hope she’ll spread the Panter influence to real-life buildings.

Phast Phashion: Fashion magazines are getting thicker than the models pictured within them. Re-use your copies of Vogue and Elle as inexpensive workout weights…. The “Reeboks Let U.B.U.” campaign could pleasantly remind one of Pere Ubu (the play and/or the band)…. Urban “street” imagery is all over this fall’s ads for suburban-only clothing chains, from J.C. Penney to Lamont’s. If they think inner cities are so cool, why won’t they have stores in ’em?

Loco Biz: Fred Meyer may be a little late in its “We Support Northwest Firms” promotion. There are fewer and fewer of them to support, now with the Seahawks and Seven Gables Theaters going to Calif. clutches (as noted by John Marshall in the San Simeon, Calif.-owned P-I).

Philm Phacts: Home-video bucks for new independent films are drying up. Reason: the big studios are pressuring video stores to stock more and more copies of fewer and fewer films…. Will the UK firm that bought Technicolor stick a “u” into its name?

Headlines of the Month: “Japan’s big boost for state” (P-I, 9/10); “Little yen for NW: Japanese investments going elsewhere in U.S.” (Times, 9/11).

Music Notes: Billboard now has a Modern Rock chart every week. The first #1 is Siouxsie and the Banshees, the last original UK punk band in operation to this day…. The NY Daily News’ recent worst-songs-of-all-time poll is much like the one I did in ’81 (latter day note: that was done for the UW Daily), down to the #1 entry: “You’re Having My Baby.”

Bods vs. Beers: The grand old Rainbow Tavern is now a no-booze “showgirls” establishment. It’s nice that some guys are finding drug-free entertainment, but from a hetero-male standpoint it’s disadvantageous that we’re getting more places to look at women, but fewer places to meet them. (Most of the picketers outside it, claiming it demeans women, were men, mainly regulars from the nearby Blue Moon. Imagine Blue Moon people calling someplace else sleazy!)

To close, be sure to see the 911 Homes for Art and the two non-911 Jardin des Refusées homes, hear the new locally-backed remake of Orson Welles’ radio War of the Worlds, read Pete Hamill’s piece in the Sept. Cosmo on the “Awful ’80s,” and fight for all the park space at Westlake we can still get.

12/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Cheer Our UW in the
Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl

INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.

FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.

UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)

ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.

CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.

ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.

MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.

CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).

11/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

To comply with the water shortage, your favorite column, Misc., has made its wit even drier this month.

Earlier this year, I predicted a ’70s revival. While wide ties, brown polyester and dope jokes aren’t back, we have seen the return of some of the decade’s worst musical acts (Boston, Fleetwood Mac), plus video games, environmental activism, whale-mania, and economic stag-flation. And with water supplies so low, electricity cutbacks can’t be far off.

One great thing from the ’70s we’re losing is the classic Starbucks Coffee mermaid. The chain’s new logo, previewed in flyers for its first out-of-state store (in Chicago), not only covers up the mermaid’s bust but makes her look like the “international-style” symbol of some Swiss bank or Danish tractor company.

Meanwhile, that late-’70s relic John Lydon and his latest incarnation of Public Image Ltd. have a very slick song called “Seattle,” full of lines about barricades and how “What goes up/Must come down/On unfamiliar/Playing ground.” The video, full of shots of fish and construction cranes, was all shot in London; I’ve played it 10 times and still can’t fully discern what inspired Lydon about Seattle, which he last visited two PiL lineups ago. Still, no local angle can hide the fact that Lydon, who’s now as old as the hippies were when he was slagging them as a Sex Pistol, is becoming the sort of rock dinosaur he’d denounced.

The prospects for the ’70s revival, however, may be dimmed by another decade seemingly anxious to come back — the ’30s. We’ve already got homeless legions and a plunging stock market; now comes a new twist on that nutty ’30s sport of flagpole sitting. Actor William Weir plans to continue living in a tiny room built onto a Millstone Coffee billboard at 45th and Roosevelt until Nov. 12, for a total of 32 days. “I feel like a Woodland Park Zoo exhibit,” he told the UW Daily. A Northwest Harvest collection truck is parked under the billboard…. In other ads, Alaska Airlines had two Gold Lion awards in the Cannes Goods commercials festival recently seen at the Neptune…. Joanne Woodward’s appearing, but not speaking, in Audi ads. Here’s what she might say: “My husband Paul puts his life on the line when he gets in his race car. Now I can experience that same thrill every day.”

The most telling moment at The Transit Project performance piece came at the end. I stayed at the start-finish bus stop, waiting for a real bus to take me home. The rest of the audience all left by car. For all I know, perhaps nobody at any of the performances had ever ridden a Metro bus before. They’re missing a lot of real-life drama, much more interesting than the Yuppie angst of The Transit Project, though not as well choreographed.

Local publication of the month: An anonymous flyer posted on light poles around town. For a title, it has a graphic symbol that looks like computer-punchcard lettering in Arabic. #6 has an essay on “The Freedom to Give Away Freedom,” a chart comparing gorilla and human cranial cavities, an Einstein quote, four brief poems, drawings of goddesses and half a dozen other items — all on one legal-size page.

Pioneer Square’s bicycle police unit’s gained major press attention lately. Nobody’s mentioned that Seattle didn’t have the idea first. On an early Letterman show, Harry Shearer did a skit showing still photos he claimed were from a pilot for a bicycle-cop TV show. Shearer on his bike was shown aiming a gun at some bad guys, “but of course we can’t shoot them because we’d fall off the bikes from the recoil.”

An independent convenience store in town recently displayed a life-size cardboard stand-up display of a slickly made-up woman in a low-cut evening gown. Anyone with real taste, she asserts, will treat her to a bottle of Thunderbird — one of the horrible fortified wines the county may soon ban. The idea that any Thunderbird drinker could still have enough self-control left to accurately put on eyebrow pencil is just its most obvious improbability.

Imagine the gall of the developers who announced a 150-acre theme park (similar to California’s Knott’s Berry Farm) to be built near LaConner, perhaps the only place in the state besides Port Townsend where a promoter of such a thing’s likely to get thrown into an acid-filled hot tub.

Philm Phun: William Arnold said the Union St. locations used for House of Games should be declared an historic landmark. He’s a bit late; the buildings are all slated for demolition or fatal remodeling…. Have you ever met anybody in Seattle who talks like the people inA Year in the Life?…. Vital film series to attend include Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern at SAM, A (Samuel) Fuller Frenzy at the Phinney Neighborhood Center, and 911’s Open Screening of local films and videos the second Monday night of each month at the New City Theater.

As you ponder the mixed messages of the Honda Spree scooter seen on Queen Anne with a “no-55” sticker (it can’t go faster than 30), be sure to watch Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures Sat. morns (the first consistently good thing Ralph Bakshi’s ever made), see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle at the Seattle Children’s Theater, don’t buy cheap stocks just because the certificates make elegant wallpaper, and return here next time.

11/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

Welcome again to Misc., the regional pop-culture column with the same non-aspirin pain reliever as the prescription brand Motrin.

The astounding playoff and World Series performances by ex-Mariners Dave Henderson and Spike Owen, now in Boston, prove there really has been some Big League Stuff in the Kingdome, if not in the team owner’s box.

Twenty-four percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans got their fortunes in entertainment or publishing. You’ll notice the name printed at the top of this column was not on that list.

The long nightmare is over: Expo 86 closed. Even with almost as many visitors as there are Canadians, the thing still lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Canadian dollars, but it’s still a lot). The deficit will be paid from BC lottery revenues which normally support charities.

Speaking of what BC politicians call “megaprojects,” seen (or better yet driven under) the Convention Center yet? That thing’s a monster! It’s already totally out of scale with the surrounding First Hill neighborhood, just a few months into its four-year construction cycle. It’s fun looking now as a Paul Bunyan-sized Erector set, but once it gets walls it’ll be a horrible monolith — at least until the graffiti artists get to it, we can only hope.

HUGE STOREWIDE SALE DEPT.: Frederick & Nelson is now under local management and I’m sure they’ll do well, particularly if they follow these few suggestions: bring back the fabric and pet departments, the lending library, the Men’s Grill, and especially the Paul Bunyan Room. The big Paul & Babe mural and the serpentine counter may need to be rebuilt from scratch, but it’ll be worth it….

The Bon may be bought by a Canadian company. If it happens, don’t expect the name to ever revert to The Bon Marche. The original name, borrowed from a Paris store, originally means “good buy,” but in colloquial French has come to mean “cheap” in the demeaning sense — not the best image to promote to the French-literate Canadians who drive to Seattle to shop….

The Heart of Pay n’ Save, that great section with discount imported trinkets of all sizes, colors and uses, has been dropped by that chain’s new out-of-state owners. They concluded shoppers here aren’t as bargain-driven as elsewhere. Much of the “Heart” merchandise will remain in the stores — but at higher prices….

Three of the U District’s best stores and one of Broadway’s have been replaced this year by candy-colored sweatshirt stands. Can the horror be stopped before it devours us all?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Market Tab. This photocopied sheet contains gossip, items of interest around town and pithy comments, much like another writing product I know of.

LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cheese sticks at the Gourmet Thrift Shop. Each fresh batch is made with a food processor full of real cheeses. Like everything at the quaint little shop in the old Rubato Record space on Broadway, it’s amazingly good and amazingly cheap. Now if they’d only stop playing that same Steely Dan tape over and over….

In other junk food news, the Dr Pepper Co. just bought the 7 Up Co. Upon hearing the news, I used a can of each product and one drinking glass to determine just how well the companies will merge. Results: a definite clash of corporate cultures.

FILM CLIPS: Jumpin’ Jack Flash isn’t a big hit; audiences are comparing Penny Marshall unfavorably to the three other directors in her immediate family. I still may see it, ‘cuz Whoopi Goldberg’s bank-telecommunications job in it is the same job I used to have. Never got involved w/any spies or killers like she does, ‘tho….

Children of a Lesser God raises some interesting questions. Will Hollywood ever find another starring role for hearing-impaired star Marlee Matlin? And the special subtitled screenings for the hearing impaired are nice, but why don’t studios make similar prints for other domestic films? Deaf people are interested in other things than just deafness, ya know.

Foreign films come with subtitles, of course, like the ones shown by The Cinematheque, which I associate-direct, at the University Cinemas on 55th and U Way. This month a new Cinematheque series begins weekends at noon, with (non-subtitled) horror, cult, comedy and other specialty films. Like the foreign films, these are for the viewer who wants an active, adventuresome film experience.

EARLY WARNING: A local theater company is planning a musical based on a certain very popular cartoon property. High-level rights negotiations are underway between the theater’s fearless leaders and a Mr. Big in LA.

Industrial art takes on a new meaning as construction begins on 6th Ave. S. for a new office-warehouse for the Frye Art Museum. How the Industrial District’s loft photographers, painters and video artists will react to the pastoral oils and watercolors moving in is anyone’s guess.

We all know the local literary scene generally won’t accept anything too far removed from free-verse nature poetry, the written equivalent of a Frye painting. Other writers give me flack for not hating technology (writing this on Lincoln Arts’ word processor instead of in longhand, watching TV). Our local Luddite authors, however, have a ways to catch up to the reactionary behavior of a Chicago group, Writers Without Phones.

There’s one piece of electronics I do despise: The compact disc. They don’t give you big cover art or colorful labels. You can’t make a scratch mix with them. They sound sterile, flat, too clean for any of the music that made this country great: Hot jazz, swing, bebop, bluegrass, gospel, folk, blues, R&B, country, and their mongrel child rock n’ roll. What’s worse is that the record biz is realigning itself to favor the high-priced spread. Already Motown has dropped 82 oldies albums, which henceforth will be sold only on CD. Those records, like most good non-classical music made since 1950, owe their original existence to the low cost and mass market created by cheap vinyl discs. If CDs take over, all you’ll get is slick, bland product (like the current Motown roster). CDs suck real big.

CATHODE CORNER: Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the undisputed Best Show on TV this year, is now on at 9 a.m. Saturdays, despite what the papers say. Don’t miss it, or the rest of the day people will scream when you inadvertently say the Secret Word and you won’t know why.

Maybe I’ll see you at the next Ballard Market Singles Night. If not, keep stroking your miniature replicas of Waiting for the Interurban until next month. We’re in touch, so you keep in touch.

9/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

Hello again, pop culture fans. Welcome to episode 3 of Misc., the column that asks just how lucky we are to live in an era when we can get gas with “High Tech Techroline.”

This has been a summer of torn streets, noisy construction, disappearing bus stops and other hassles, many of which will be with us for the next four years. The good news is by that time, the only people left downtown will be those of us who demand urban life. Life may soon become a lot less overcrowded for those who refuse to go to Bellevue. Sadly, we’re losing Chapter 2 Books in the University District to that Nowhereland to the east, and are in danger of even losing the Pacific Science Center. This threat to Seattle’s cultural life must be stopped. You wanna have to tell your kids someday that they can’t pitch pennies into the fountains or get their hair raised in the static-electricity exhibit without spending an hour on the bridges? The only arches that belong in Bellevue are golden.

(By the way, the widow and daughter of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc have started a California peace group, Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament. With nuclear weapons, they must have finally found something to crusade against that’s worse than their food.)

Passionately urban life does seem to be catching on in Seattle as a permanent thing. Broadway this summer has been a wonderland of all different kinds of people making all different kinds of scenes. At Dick’s alone you can find some 200 people being sociable at 1:30 a.m. Whenever anybody in Seattle has this much fun, somebody has tried to outlaw it. Already business interests are demanding something be “done” about this “problem” — which is really the best thing that has happened to Seattle since the saving of the Market. Any real city has spontaneous street scenes — gatherings of ordinary people who may not have a destination in mind when they take to the streets, but have an invigorating time getting there. Not everybody who stands on a sidewalk and talks to friends is a criminal; we should be glad the attempts to make Broadway a district for yuppies and only yuppies has gloriously failed. Now if they can only tear up those nauseatingly-cute footsteps…

THINGS I DID THIS SUMMER: Saw the University Book Store remainder sale and was pleased to find How To Sell What You Write marked down to $1.49. Noticed the resemblance between International News’s brightly colored, slogan laden clothes and those of the 1900s comic strip star, The Yellow Kid. Discovered Seattle’s ultimate food store, other than the Pike Place Market: Marketime Foods in Fremont. Was captivated by Cisterna Magna, an exquisite dance/visual performance at Belltown’s Galleria Potatohead. Concluded that any movie, fashion style, entertainer or politician advertised as “hot” is probably going to be dreadful.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Heritage Music Review. Longtime area piano player/disc jockey Doug Bright uses a Braille word processor to make this knowledgeable guide to old rock, R&B and jazz performers of the region and nation. Available in regular print at Elliot Bay Books and other select sources.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bubble gum cards that didn’t make it. The Sports Stop in the Center House basement has cards for entertainment properties that outstayed their welcome (Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper) or never caught on at all (the Dune andSupergirl films). The cards are collector’s items; the gum’s undoubtedly stale, though.

Our last column had a snide remark about an SRO theater. I don’t really hate SRO. About a decade ago, when smart people were briefly being courted as audiences by major motion pictures, SRO was considered the “Establishment” of area theaters. Lately though, SRO has shown itself capable of the finest in theater architecture (though the pink and gray on the Uptown has got to go) and concession food. They continue to subsidize KJET, the closest thing we have to a progressive commercial radio station, and in 1970 tried to save the Seattle Pilots baseball team. Now, this heritage is threatened by a takeover attempt from Paramount Pictures. It might be seen as Paramount’s revenge on Washington state; it was our native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the famous “U.S. vs. Paramount” decision forcing the big five studios to sell the theater chains though which they controlled the entire industry. With today’s federal antitrust regulators (who could more rightly be called protrust), the big distributors are itching for their old monopoly powers back. The remnants of the original Paramount theater chain (not including the Seattle Paramount) are now owned by Coca-Cola, which also owns the Columbia and Embassy studios and half of Tri-Star. Other alliances are underway. If you think the movies this past year have been pitiful, just wait until the big studios control so many theaters they can lock out independent films.

When that time comes, we’ll all have to go to VCRs to see anything interesting. Already you can check out an amazing variety of stuff, including a series of tapes called Video Romance. One store has them in the Adult section even though they’ve no sex, nudity or cussing, and are in fact far tamer than the evening soaps. What they’ve got are impossibly innocent (especially for their glamorous professions) women meeting and taming tall men who have wavy hair and vague accents. All this plus cheap productions (we never see the exotic locales in which the stories are set, only living rooms), syrupy music, bad acting and “Your Host, Louis Jourdan” and you’ve got more real entertainment than in the entire collected works of Michael J. Fox.

Another recently viewed tape: Urgh! A Music War, 1981 concert footage of some 35 bands gathered under the awkward, inaccurate label “new wave.” Only one of them was big at the time (the police, who helped finance the film). Others became stars (the Go-Gos, UB40, Devo), had solid cult followings (Magazine, Steel Pulse, XTC), or met deserved obscurity (Athletico Spizz 80, Splodgenessabounds). I found myself viewing the proceedings as nostalgia for my own generation, and seeing how, even while many of the best bands never had a major hit, the attitudes they represented have become quite pervasive in American society — in butchered form, of course. A lot of the worst aspects of punk/new wave (shallow imagery, aggressive hype, destructiveness to self and others as romanticism, bigotry as nostalgia, shamelessness, lousy manners, celebrations of stupidity) have become everyday aspects of modern business, government and lifestyles. Even agriculture has gone punk: It’s dependent on drugs and panhandling, lives fast, dies young and leaves a good-looking corpse.

Home video’s an even bigger happening in the Asian American community. The wonderful variety stores of the International District all have amazing tape boxes promising music, farce, soap opera, horror, kinky sex, and serious drama, as well as the martial arts you’d expect (often more than one genre in the same production). While you might not want to buy a membership for unsubtitled tapes in a language you don’t speak, the stores will usually have a video playing while you buy some of their fine foods, clothes, jewelry, toys and housewares. Treat yourself to a view of another culture’s pop culture.

We close this edition with a call for entries in the first Misc. Helga Lookalike Contest. The Northwest is abundant with the stoic Nordic romantic look now associated with painter Andrew Wyeth’s mystery woman, as seen in both Time and Newsweek. Send a picture of yourself in any appropriate costume to Misc. c/o Lincoln Arts Center, 66 Bell St., Seattle. All ages and races welcome; bonus points will be awarded for the best floral headband.