WE’RE ALL GONNA BE OLD ONE DAY, unless something drastic happens in the meantime. Might as well start preparing. And I don’t just mean buyin’ into no-load mutual funds or wearin’ earplugs at loud concerts or even buildin’ up the ol’ calcium intake. I mean psychologically preparing oneself to really enjoy the golden years.

Old age doesn’t have to mean sitting around with your large-print Reader’s Digest and right-wing talk radio, forever complaining about Those Kids These Days. No, millions of oldsters are out there having the time of their lives. Two high-profile documentaries at the recently-concluded Seattle International Film Festival showed widely different aspects of this.

Bingo: The Documentary, from local filmmaker John Jeffcoat, showed a more conventional side of senior shenanigans. Shot across America, Britain, and Ireland, and on a Caribbean cruise ship, it’s an hour of 50ish to 90ish ladies and gents having fun while keeping track of dozens of cards and losing small amounts of money (plus one 30ish recovering druggie who hangs out at his mom’s favorite bingo hall as a cheap, clean-and-sober way to pass the hours).

There’s also scenes from Seattle’s own Gay Bingo and an NYC nightclub with bingo nights for young clubbers. The latter’s one of the shortest scenes in the film, but it might be one of the most vital. These young adults who enthusiastically embrace an old folks’ game are asserting their membership in the continuum of life. They’re proudly eschewing the way-obsolete fallacy of generational superiority.

The Lifestyle, from David Schisgall, is just as light and frolicky about a less-common mature-folks’ scene, group-sex party houses. While swinging (or bingo, for that matter) isn’t just an oldster’s sport by any means, the filmmaker chose to emphasize groups your parents’ or grandparents’ ages, in places like Palm Springs and Orange County, CA and (yes!) Littleton, CO, talking about their fun times a-spouse-swappin’.

Besides the talk, we also get guided tours of the orgy rooms in subdivision basements, a topless fetish-fashion show at a big swingers’ convention, and a few brief scenes of naked former-hardbodies doing what women and men have been doing since before you were born. (Some young-adult audience members at the SIFF screening cringed at these shots, despite the director’s in-person pleading for them not to.)

Besides cringing, a viewer could take this all several ways. You could re-evaluate the sexual repression of your own birth family by seeing the film’s subjects as golden-years advocates of sexual liberation. You could cheer that the hypocrisy of Reagan Country is being challenged from within, however discreetly. Or you could simply dismiss it all as the actions of bourgeois hedonists who, like many other Americans, appear to be embracing the idea of sex as a leisure-time sport, no more or less personal than bingo, in order to avoid the more troublesome, reality-questioning aspects of real intimacy. (More about that latter idea in this space next week.)

But I prefer to think of it as a sign of hope, that as we all get older we’ll still get to assert the right to get it on with our fellow humans’ bodies–liver spots, upper-arm flab, and all.

I also have to admit, though, that the bingo players sure seemed to be having a lot more fun than the swingers.

Tomorrow: Why Seattle loves being the fictional headquarters of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers sequel.

MISC. WORLD, the online column that always loves cool, dark places, couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the totally not-getting-it blurb for SIFF installed at the top of some of those HotStamp postcard racks around town: “And you thought Sundance was crowded… Be sure to catch the 25th Seattle International Film Festival. The largest movie gathering in the U.S. is sure to showcase movies from Hollywood’s heavyweights to the next Quentin Tarantino.” SIFF, at its best, is about film as art (or at least film as bougeois-boomer quasi-art), not about stupid marketing-driven Hollywood hype. More about that, sorta, a few items down.

UPDATE #1: By the time you read this, The Big Book of MISC. will be printed, bound, and shipping to those of you who’ve graciously pre-ordered it. If you’re reading this early in the week, you can get a copy for your very own live and in person at our luscious MISC.-O-Rama party, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue in seedy Belltown (just north of 5th and Bell, across from the backside of the Cadillac lot). If you’re reading this after the event, you can still get a copy in person at the Pistil and M. Coy book shops, with more outlets to roll out in the next few weeks. And, of course, you can buy it directly online at this link.

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: The $25,000 Pyramid.

UPDATE #2: Mark Murphy’s back as artistic director of On the Boards. Kudos to all the OTB supporters and members of the Seattle performing-arts community who successfully got OTB’s board to reverse its initial firing of the much-loved Murphy.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: “After Dinner Nipples” mints at Urban Outfitters are described by the woman who recommended them to me as “better than the real thing.” I’d heartily disagree, but I did find these mint-chocolate drops tasty and great to lick (but not all that soft to the touch, and without the creamy center that would’ve made the gag-concept more complete).

ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: The 13th year of this little collection of odd-stuff-from-all-over called Misc. hasn’t been the luckiest. Something once read in print (or at least glimpsed at) by a third of Seattle’s adult population now has a much smaller, though steady and growing, on-screen audience.

I’m not going away, and neither is the site.

But it’s perhaps time to reconsider a few things:

(1) The online column is still based on the concept of the print Misc.–filling a more-or-less predetermined (albeit self-pre-determined) word count, at intervals corresponding to the column’s former appearance in a weekly tabloid.

(2) One of the column’s premises has been to passionately advocate urban life and specifically Seattle life. It started back when suburban flight was still considered an inexorable trend, and when everybody (especially Seattleites) thought Seattle was a hick town where nothing ever happenned and nothing ever would. Nowadays, even Newsweek has noted big downtown “revivals” across the country. And Seattle, whose downtown never really needed reviving, is creaking under the real burdens of the cyber-wealthy, buying up everything and making borderline-boho existences even less possible.

(3) Another recurring theme has always been to assert the worthiness of the punk-rock generation and its values. Far from defeatist or nihilistic, punks have strongly believed in community, in self-expression, in taking charge of their culture and their lives. Certain fogeys such as Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran still hate punks, but the media corporations came to love ’em. And the kids younger than me haven’t rebelled against punks and their allies the way I rebelled against aging hippies. Clueless mass-media reporters can still find goths and industrial-rockers in high schools and mistakenly believe these kids are doing something new.

(What many current white kids have done has been to ignore rock in general, turning away from the major labels’ glut of fake-Pearl-Jam bands and toward post-gangsta hiphop; which in turn has caused many young blacks to run from that and toward newer acts considered either too advanced or too lovey-dovey for the mallrats.)

(4) Punks also believe the “lowly” medium of rock ‘n’ roll music is, or can be, an art form; not via the bombast of early-’70s “art rock” but by being the best damn rock ‘n’ roll music it can be. That strident belief has fueled the column’s whole defense-of-pop-culture premise–once something few other ambitious writers attempted, but now commonplace.

In the mid-’80s, when the column first appeared in ArtsFocus (a publication mainly devoted to local fringe-theater and ethnic-dance activities), many intellectuals and art-worlders still believed there was a rigid dichotomy between “high” and “low” culture. This notion was perhaps best depicted in the 1990 “High and Low” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which purported to compare and contrast works from the two realms but which really turned into a long, desperate defense of this artificial division.

When “popular culture” was seriously talked about (in places like Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a whole department about it), it was usually treated in the post-leftist “cultural studies” manner, as a set of sociological and political phenomena to be dissected and theorized about–never as “real” art or even entertainment, never as the work of creative people who might be trying to express something.

That, of course, was the era of only three major TV networks, monopoly newspapers, and CD plants who’d only do business with the major labels. It was a time when the book business was still considered too marginal for big corporations to want to muscle in on (at least on the retail end). It was easy to still think of “popular” culture as “low” culture, as something factory-produced and best considered in industrial terms.

Things are a little different now, sorta. There’s dozens of cable channels, hundreds of book imprints, thousands of indie record labels, and scores of “alternative” weekies (though each business mentioned still has a few high-rollers at its top, struggling to stay on top via increasingly-frenetic dealmaking). Despite the current dropping-off of exhibitor interest in “indie” films (due at least partly to the glut of fake-Tarantino “hip” bloodfests from the big studios’ pseudo-indie divisions), true-indie filmers and videotapers continue to shoot and edit away.

Then there’s this World Wide Web thang. Whole books and magazines have been devoted to how the web and associated technologies are affecting marketing, shipping, TV viewing, music-listening, dating, masturbation, etc. etc. I liked to think when the web first took off, and I still like to believe, that it’s doing much more than that.

It’s vindicating the whole punk-DIY ethos. It’s helping to build real as well as virtual communities. It’s giving voices to tens of thousands of heretofore-obscure subcultures (some of whom I empathize with, some of whom I loathe; but that’s the whole point). Among these subcultures are the fan movements for popcult genres previously considered by the “cultural studies” snobs to be only liked by illiterates. I’m no longer a lone-voice-in-the-wilderness in my insistence that pop culture is real culture.

And what’s more, the web’s accellerating acceptance of the notion that art, music, literature, fashion, decor, graphics, video, and even movies need no longer be the exclusive products of the N.Y./L.A./S.F. elites.

Some elite forces realize this and are running scared (like Time and the censorous Australian parlaiment).

Other elite forces are trying to tame the Web into something safe for Conde Nast. Despite the failure of the Microsoft Network’s “shows” concept, corporate website-makers are still trying to launch online magazine sites with predictable texts and features aimed at rigidly defined demographic target audiences. I like to think web users are smarter than that.

Which gets us back to item (1), this here site’s print-legacy format. With The Big Book of MISC. now a-born, look in upcoming weeks for further changes to the miscmedia.com website. Don’t know for sure yet what they’ll be. But they’ll be designed to keep it all apace with an ever-changing, ever-Misc.-er world.

WORD OF THE WEEK: “Saturnine.”

MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, is proud to announce The Big Book of MISC. has now gone to press. Even better, online ordering is now up, at this link! The prerelease party’s Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Ave. near Bell Street in Seattle’s glorious Belltown. Be there.

FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Denny’s Diner concept, first mentioned in Misc. about a year ago, will now be phased in at all U.S. Denny’s restaurants. From the looks of the prototype restaurant out by Sea-Tac Mall, it won’t be as big a revamp as the newspaper stories promise. The one I saw looks largely like a regular ol’ Denny’s. The interior’s done up in muted greens instead of garish orange shades, with a few touches of aluminum trim. Aside from a few soda-fountain items, there’s not much on the menu that’s not on the regular Denny’s menu. And there’s a reproduction juke box playing some oldies-rock CDs, along with many “hot country” and easy-listening stars.

The chain’s officially doing this because its research found younger eaters don’t identify with its established suburban-bland image, and thinks this way it can become perceived as slightly hipper without turning off the older crowd. Of course, Denny’s has had a bigger image problem than that in recent years. Amid allegations of racial discrimination in both employment and customer service, the company’s had to pull out all the PR-spin stops to proclaim it now welcomes everybody, and has put managers and franchisees thru sensitivity classes. So why, one might ask, is the chain re-imaging itself around nostalgia for those bad-old-days white-lower-middle-class hash houses where African Americans felt particularly unwelcome back in the day? (Remember, the first major sit-in of the civil rights movement occurred at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Elsewhere in bobbysoxer-land…

THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge (which has hosted all-ages music shows these past six years in the former home of the punk-parody musical Angry Housewives) and the Colourbox (the rock venue that stuck with local bands after bigger bars turned their emphasis to touring acts) are closing in June, due (indirectly in the former case, directly in the latter) to Pioneer Square gentrification. RKCNDY will be demolished for a hotel sometime later this year. Nothing much could’ve been done to save the Colourbox (and, anyway, the nearby Rupert’s has been serving much the same function). But the VE’s another story. Its pretty-much-all-volunteer staff has every right to feel burned out and to move on, now that its recent sold-out Annie Sprinkle performances have paid off its debts. But there should’ve been some way they could’ve passed the torch onto a fresher crew, to keep the space going as long as it still had the lease. If someone can get such a crew together to assume the space, they’d better do so soon.

(Both the Colourbox and the Velvet Elvis got front-page pictures in the P-I‘s Saturday item about the city’s tuff new anti-noise law and schemes by some city councilmembers to relax those limits in designated “entertainment zones,” a little too late to save either club.)

BESIDES A DECENT ALL-AGES SPACE and zoned relief from anti-nightlife legal putsches, what does Seattle need? That’s your next question at the luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. And we’re still seeking your nominations about which 1995-99 Seattle bands oughta be mentioned in the forthcoming update of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Elsewhere in new-addition-land…

WATCH D.T.S., GET THE D.T.s: The Casbah Cinema, that beuatifully-designed but poorly-marketed boutique theater in Belltown, has been revamped by new owners as the Big Picture. It’s now a beer-and-wine bar with a fancy-schmancy digital video projection system in the old Casbah auditorium room. The owners believe, as I wrote here some time back, that theaters shouldn’t just be for feature films and tavern TVs shouldn’t just be for sports. They plan to have a whole schedule of fun programming events, ranging from cult movies and sports to X-Files episode screenings and music-video nights. It’s also available for private parties, software-company demonstrations, anime fan-club meetings, movie-studio sneak previews, etc.

I probably will continue seeing most of my movies-on-projection-video-with-beer at 2nd Avenue Pizza, but the Big Picture’s HDTV setup is truly awesome. It’s much sharper than the analog HDTV system I saw a couple years back at the old UA Cinemas; even a basketball game (live sports are the ultimate test of digital video) looked clean and crisp. Elsewhere in visual-entertainment-land…

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: After years of the sleaze-sex mags getting closer and closer to The Act, Penthouse has finally started running apparent actual hardcore pix as of its June issue (in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy pictorial), and (along with its almost-as-explicit competitors) has faced the expected legal challenges in the expected southern and midwestern states. Either the publishers seem to think they can win the court cases and vend images of actual coitus thru mainstream magazine outlets, or the competition for wankers’ bucks has gotten so intense the publishers believe they have to do this to compete with hardcore videos, websites, CD-ROMS, etc.

The demand for explicitness in sex-entertainment has increased steadily in the three decades since hardcore films and images first went above-ground. Today, hardcore tapes can be rented in almost every non-chain video store (and can be purchased in non-chain convenience stores); while softcore tapes (other than those depressing , anti-intimacy “erotic thrillers”) are in far fewer outlets and often for sale only. Of all the new girlie mags in recent years, only Perfect 10 (and retro-zines like Kutie) appeal to a classic pin-up aesthetic instead of simply piling on as much raunch as the distribution channel will bear.

Some observers claim this trend signifies a failure of imagination, of good taste, or even of respect for women. I think it means something else–that smut consumers are, on the average, moving away from passive “pedastel” female ideals and instead prefer to fantasize about women who are active, enthusiastic participants in The Act.

Then, of course, there’s the little matter of what makes hardcore hardcore. It’s not how much you see of the women, but how much you see of the men. The triumph of hardcore means more and more straight-identifying men want to look at other men’s sex parts in action, photographed as sharply and clearly as possible. One recently-notorious subgenre, the “gangbang” video, shows its straight-male audiences dozens of male bodies surrounding just one woman.

But gangbang videos are ugly, as is hardcore in general. As I’ve previously mentioned, the hardcore anti-aesthetic literalizes the phrase “ugly as sin.” While the action scenes in Penthouse are at least competently lit and photographed, they still adhere to a formula of garish colors, contorted expressions, and grotesquely obvious implants. Historically, the formula leads out from the old days of underground smut, all dangerous and anti-propriety. Today, it leads from the porn-video industry’s ruthless combination of tiny budgets and strict requirements. But it’s also a look its target audience seems to prefer. Perhaps these men have such poor self body-images, they can only comfortably look at other men’s bodies when they’re depicted among ugly surroundings.

Will this ugliness change as coitus imagery goes further beyond porn-specialty stores and into your local beer-and-cigarette shop? Many cultures around the world have found beautiful ways to depict coitus via the arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Contemporary erotic photography has produced many beautiful works, but almost all of them (even Robert Mapplethorpe’s) are predicated on The Pose, not The Act. Posing involves a person or persons openly displaying their personas out toward the viewer; actual sex (if it’s any good) constitutes two people becoming all caught up in one another and themselves, ignoring the rest of the world. I’ll still prefer softcore images, even if hardcore becomes less icky-looking, for this reason. I don’t want to vicariously imagine myself in some other man’s body, feeling what that other man gets to feel; I want to imagine my (real) self in the woman’s body.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we hope to have topics less prone to too-obvious puns, embrace the warmth, question the war, and consider this by Jane Austen: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be

TV essay, 5/12/99

The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.

The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.

As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.

When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.

The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.

The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.

Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).

It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.

The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).

I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).

Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.

Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.

Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.

This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40 Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.

To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).

Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.

MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.

UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.

UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.

AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)

ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.

If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)

GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).

Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)

The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!

CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.

Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.

Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).

Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.

While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)

It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”

MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:

Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.

Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.

Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”

How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…

TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…

GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.

History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.

In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.

Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.

There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.

Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)

You’re In High School Again

Film/TV essay, 4/14/99

High school, the modern grownup theory seems to go, is most fondly remembered by those who were either too spaced out at the time (either naturally or chemically) to notice what was really going on at the time or by those who were never as popular or powerful since. That notion hasn’t stopped the making of movies and TV shows about really hot, beautiful, and fun-lovin’ teens. But, since the mid-’80s, the theory has informed a handful of productions with a sense of the underlying terrors and pressures beneath the surface of even the most “wholesome” middle-class adolescences–while giving grownup actors the chance to act all goofy and immature on screen.

These films and shows have allowed their adult stars to play faux teens who are really authors (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), undercover cops (the filmed-in-Vancouver series 21 Jump Street), mob-escapees (Hidin’ Out), or simply adult women who need to go through the ol’ teen traumas one more time as a learning experience (Peggy Sue Got Married, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Nadine’s storyline in Twin Peaks).

Now, we’ve got two of-age actresses reliving their supposed “simpler times” and finding them not all that simple. One’s a big-name star in a bigtime movie. (You can tell it’s a bigtime movie, because the closing credits list 53 actors and 54 excerpted pop songs!). The other’s a little known improv actress, co-creating and starring in a cable series that’s either a surrealistically-improbable sitcom or an over-the-top sketch extended to 13 half hours.

First, the big expensive one.

Never Been Kissed combines the Romy and Michelle theme of fixing teen-socialization mistakes after the fact with the Fast Times shtick of the undercover reporter assigned to learn what Those Kids Today are really like. Onetime Seattleite Drew Barrymore leaves little scenery unchewed as a meticulous, presumably virginalChicago Sun-Times word-wrangler who gets to live as a high school senior for one semester and do all the things she never got to do in her real teens–to drink at a kegger, to eat pot-laced cake, to dump the nerds’ clique to become one of the popular girls, and to snag a hunky English teacher for her very own. There are a few more plot complications than that, but they’re not important. What’s important is Barrymore’s incessant mugging, accompanied by syrupy string music that bellows up whenever the brief snippets of rock songs (for the all-important tie-in “soundtrack” CD and accompanying music videos) aren’t playing. It’s an inconsequential little future Showtime time-filler, despite (or because of) the Barrymore character’s insistence that it’s all a major life-and-death matter. On the other hand, if you cut some of the mild sex talk, you’d have a suitable (if too long) ABC After School Special in which our plucky heroine learns some valuable life lessons and everybody lives happily ever after.

Conversely, with a little more sex talk it might have come closer to Strangers With Candy, Comedy Central’s current attempt to build on its South Park noteriety. Billed as “The After-Hours After School Special,” it’s a vehicle for star Amy Sedaris to do the second-adolescence shtick for broad laffs. The setup: She’s a 42-year-old dropout, who’s grown a little old for her happy-go-lucky life of drinking and whoring; so she decided to go legit, move back in with what’s left of her birth family, and start all over again in school. Playing the role as a cross between Jan Brady and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous, Sedaris grins perkily as she instigates a different social faux pas (sometimes leading to a death, or worse) in each episode, trying desperately to become popular with the “normal” girls young enough to be her illegitimate daughters (of whom she just might have a few). As you might imagine from a Comedy Central series, Strangers With Candy wouldn’t have ever passed the Standards and Practices offices of the old broadcast networks. But it’s more than just un-PC. It’s genuinely funny. (Which is a lot more than can be said of a lot of would-be “outrageous” attempts at un-PC humor these days.)

Our lesson at the end of the day: Some comedies, like some schoolgirls, try too hard to fit in by aping the moves and clothes and attitudes that are supposed to make one popular. But some comedies, again like some schoolgirls, win something much more important than popularity by just being their own lovable, outlandish selves. Never Been Kissed is the prom queen who’ll soon become an obscure memory. Strangers With Candy is the one who seems the wallflower today, but everyone in future years will claim to have been her best friend.

YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.

MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.

CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…

COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…

THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.

On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.

On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.

Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.

(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)

In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.

But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.

Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.

Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.

But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)

Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.

A Life More Ordinary

film review, 4/7/99

Unmade Beds

(1998, dir. Nicholas Barker)

Ah, New York City. The singles scene. Dating. Mating. Orgasms without relationships; relationships without kids. All those beautiful people partyin’ down at the latest drum-and-bass club, or that swanky new bistro, all in the tightest, smartest new designer come-hither-wear.

Or, maybe, something a little more ordinary.

Unmade Beds, a documentary that’s already aired on Cinemax and has just arrived in U.S. theaters, presents the New York that people who look up to New York try to forget about. It’s like the more depressing episodes ofSeinfeld without the gags. It reveals some Manhattanites who are just as plain and/or pathetic as Manhattanites sometimes stereotype other Americans as being.

First-time, U.K.-bred director Nicholas Barker’s video cameras capture four heavily-accented Jewish and Italian-American N.Y.C.-ers (Brenda, Michael, Aimee, and Mikey), all well into middle age and all boasting of their supposed super street smarts. They’re all driven by the urge-to-merge, but have never found the love life they’ve sought (whether it be a wife for Michael, a harem of swinger chicks for Mikey, a trophy boyfriend for Aimee, or a sugar daddy for Brenda).

Some reviews have claimed some of the movie’s scenes were scripted. I don’t mind. These are still real people playing themselves. If a few preplanned scenes (such as the shots of the female subjects seen dressing through apartment windows) help to tell their tales, so be it. And if working with Barker on what they were going to say on-camera helped them get their messages across, fine. It may have helped them maintain their edgy attitude, to not be shown trying to think up a statement in “real time.”

But then again, it’s their well-practiced “Attitudes” that (as Barker shows but doesn’t tell) helps keep them alone.

The much-detracted last Seinfeld referred to its starring characters as “The New York Four,” and had other characters denounce them as cold-hearted mockers devoid of empathy or substance. Barker’s own New York Four (who are never seen with one another, thus accentuating their solitude among the millions) are depicted less as cold-hearted and more as hard-hearted. The closest we get to a verbal statement about what we see within these people is when somebody tells Michael during a party scene, “You’re giving off these negative vibes that make you unattractive to people.”

Otherwise, Barker lets his camera and his cast’s own (albeit sometimes pre-written) words show off their common fatal character flaw. These are characters who’ve grown up and grown old tough and sharp, who don’t take anything from anybody. There’s no room in their worlds for any of that sissy soft stuff, like sympathy or tears.

Nobody ever fucks with these people. So it’s sad, yet unsurprising, that nobody ever fucks with these people.

MISC. HAS FAIRLY GOOD local news and confusing/depressing international news to comment upon this week, but first your update about the best-of-Misc. book (titled, for the time being, The Misc. Book). Layout and proofreading are proceeding apace; a couple different potential cover designs are being worked on; distribution arrangements are being negotiated. Right now, we’re aiming for a June release. As for the reissue of the old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, that might come a month or two later. More details forthcoming. (In the meantime, please suggest which local musical acts of the past four years should be in the new edition; via email or at our plangent Misc. Talk discussion boards.

ON THE STREET: Misc. was momentarily confused by the proliferation of street posters up on E. Pike Street (pasted onto plywood construction scaffolds, not light poles) for TheStreet.com. When I showed this to someone who’d just moved here last year, she said “only in Seattle,” with its now-mythical corps of under-30 techno-rich, would bohos perusing this form of sidewalk commercial-graffiti be considered potential clients of an online stock brokerage and investment-advice site. I’m not so sure about the “only” part. If anything, Seattle has (or used to have) fewer trust-fund hipsters than the larger media towns. Now, though, with the cost of living around Capitol Hill creeping toward NYC levels, it might be getting to the point where you have to have money in order to live the antimaterialist ideology. Either that, or the posters were aimed at the upscale gay-dance-club clientele also swarming the Pike-Pine corridor these days. Speaking of which…

NOSTALGIA FOR THINGS NOT ALL THAT WORTHY OF REMEMBERING: The ARO.Space club recently promoted an ’80s-nostalgia dance night under the moniker “Star 80.” As if anybody who remembers the era would find exciting, joyous connotations from that sleazy movie (which starred Mariel Hemingway as a real-life Vancouver model-actress stalked and slain by the sicko hubby she’d left behind).

SUCH OCCASIONAL LAPSES OF TASTE ASIDE, though, the one-year anniversary of ARO.Space (in a club climate, particularly a dance-club climate, where high-budgeted spaces sometimes go under interior construction for eight months only to close after three) means something. Last week I ran into the Dutch journalist who interviewed me about the post-“grunge” aftermath last year; among other recent insights, she said she was surprised ARO.Space had apparently succeeded despite being so unlike anything in “The Seattle Scene.” I begged to differ. First of all, there’s always been an audience of inferiority-complexed hipster wannabes here who’ll rush to anything billed as an authentic copy of whatever’s hot in NY/SF. Of course, to get them to keep coming back means you have to have something they’ll actually like on a non-imitative level.

That’s the place’s genius: It seems alien, not at all like “The Seattle Scene,” yet it fits right in. The Nordic-cool furnishings, the MS “new money” feel, the sleek blandness, the polite aloofness of the place, all complement the current and the classic Seattle-bourgeois zeitgeist. They complement different aspects of that zeitgeist than the grungers did, but then again the grungers were, at least on one level, rebelling against the affluent, self-satisfied mindset ARO.Space gloriously celebrates. I wrote when the place opened that, on one level, it looked like the product of gay men trying to assimillate into regular upper-middle-class society. I’ve since realized it’s more like the product of gay men taking their rightful place among the taste-definers of regular upper-middle-class society.

It’s taken time, a long time, for me to accept this, but modern-day affluent Seattle really is a lot more like the fictional universe of TV’s Frasier than I’ve ever wanted to admit. Its cold aloofness can seem to outsiders as arrogance, though it’s really due more to emotional repression. It wallows in superficial benchmarks of “good taste,” often involving gourmet dining and starchy social propriety. It believes in stark, spare design, complete with pastel shades not found in nature. It defines itself by its consumer choices (even the “anti-consumerists” and the “downshifters”). And while it’s proud as heck of its town, it’s afraid to try to do its own thing. So a place that promises the hottest, beat-iest imported dance-music fads, in seemingly bold yet ultimately retro-modern surroundings, is more comfortably, reassuringly “Seattle style” than it might seem.

(Its owners should’ve been expected from the start to know this. ARO.Space’s owners are part of the informal clique of local hip-capitalists whose various members, in various combinations and partnerships, have various stakes in Tasty Shows, Sweet Mother Records, Linda’s, the Capitol Club, the Baltic Room, Bimbo’s Bitchen Burrito Kitchen and Cha Cha Lounge, Rudy’s Barber Shops, and the soon-to-open Ace Hotel.)

This also means (not as ironically as it might seem) that the dance-music scene isn’t as un-Seattle as its biggest local fans might wish it to be. Passive-aggressive consumption of imported sounds, looks, and attitudes is as endemic to Seattle as it is to any city in the “other 48” states. In an age of corporate-media consolidation, nothing’s more timely (or less “alternative”) than “live” entertainment that’s all “in the can” (or on CDs and 12-inch vinyl records), whose only human components (the DJ/curators) are themselves often NY/Calif. fly-ins. What would be out of place in this particular aspect of Seattle would be to develop dance musicians, DJs, and audiences who were less afraid of trying to create their own sounds.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WAR: That’s how it seemed this week. The town was collectively bored by the Sonics’ irregular performance during the NBA’s irregular regular season, and indeed generally blase; as the long dreary winter refused to completely go away. The Fringe Festival had come and gone, leaving the small-time theatrical promoters exhausted and burned-out. Downtown, more excitement came from a high speed chase on Friday (cop cars had followed a carful of bank robbers all the way from Shoreline to the GameWorks block) than from the now-familiar ritual of antiwar protests. It just might be that Clinton’s lite-right Pentagon-coddling has finally succeeded in silencing the pacifist left and the isolationist right (or, rather, cowering them into a stance of hopelessness to change the situation).

This means this president (and probably the next one) will get to use the last-remaining-superpower-blah-blah-blah not to “fight two major wars simultaneously” (the Pentagon planners’ latest excuse for ever-escalating weapons budgets) but to push around any little regime anywhere, within carnage-levels the domestic opinion polls say the U.S. voting public will tacitly accept, and when and where it’s deemed strategically valuable to do so. It’s true the Serb regime’s despotic and genocidal.

It’s also true the Kosovo war is essentially a war of secession, like the U.S. Revolutionary and Civil wars (and Chechnya, Bangladesh, Tibet, East Timor, Eritrea, and other wars in which the White House either stayed out or supported the existing regimes). So, after a decade of Serbs and their vassals and ex-vassals fighting and killing and retaliating with too-little-too-late U.S./UN/NATO involvement, why bomb Belgrade now? Maybe becuase it’s politically feasible now. Maybe because the realpolitik gamers decided to take down one of Europe’s last vestiges of Soviet-style rule. Maybe because the realpolitik guys felt they needed to support a Muslim-dominated self-rule movement for a change, after verbally or physically bashing Islamic fundamentalists in so many other lands. And maybe because our leaders could somehow identify with the Kosovars’ plight to an extent they couldn’t with the Timorese or the Eritreans.

But now that the bombs have fallen, the situation can’t help but keep getting stickier and bloodier and more intractable. The bombing strafes might be promoted as clean, modern warfare minimizing potential U.S. casualties, but war’s never as clean in real life as it seems on paper (or in role-playing games).

UNTIL NEXT TIME, when we hope there’ll be happier news to report, ponder these thoughts from Aldous Huxley: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards..”

MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?

THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.

UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…

BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…

FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.

OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:

• Blaine Stare: “The Hostess factory on Dexter/Aurora. Love the neon hearts; like to see the embossed heart on the side as we zoom down 99 and enjoy looking through the windows at the treats as they go by on their assembly line. That dusted donut smell too–yum. Do you remember the Lynda Barry cartoon about the little boy who got lost there on a tour and was raised in the ways of the ding dongs and donuts? It was so sad.”
• Anne Silberman: “I’ve always thought the Columbia Tower was graceful and lovely. Even though it is a little ominous with all of that black glass.”
• Sabrina: “While Georgetown has some wonderful-beautifully-ugly buildings, there is alot to be found in the area just SE of Ballard, all the shipbuilders warehouse structure things. Down Leary Way, there is that supremely cool old-tacky-neon sign fetish house. Then just west of that, along the Burke-Gilman trail it’s a lonely stretch of railroad track with the huge industrial buildings and haunting noises that come from swinging two tons of steel into a pile. Oh–here’s another one–there is a cool and spooky statuary next to the Uneeda car place in Fremont. That’s cool… Of course, I would be devastated if we ever lost Hat-n-Boots in G-town. What about that building, it’s like where Western becomes 15th, if you’re heading north, it’s on the left side and the sign says something like `K-6 MATH BOOKS’ and `LIVE LADYBUGS.’ I always dug that even though I have no idea what the story is there. I like that building across the street with `Bedrock’ painted on it. Here’s an ugly beaute that is the best place to see a movie in the entire world–The Grand Illusion–Now I am totally bummed that they `remodeled’ the cafe. That was a suckorama idea. Please–Please don’t destroy the groovy gothic theatre area by `remodeling.’ UGH!!!!”

Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).

As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.

And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:

• Mike’s Tavern and Chili House at the north end of the Ballard Bridge.
• The Streamline Tavern on lower Queen Anne.
• The apartment building above the Lava Lounge on 2nd Avenue south of Bell.
• The pair of ’60s-modern apartment structures at the east end of Market Street in Ballard, one of which bears the friendly name “Steve’s Apartments.”
• The whole row of warehouses on 1st Avenue South between the Kingdome and Sears, culminating in the gorgeous old furniture barn now known as National Furniture (it was formerly the Corner of Bargains). Let’s hope the development mania resulting from Safeco Field’s appearance doesn’t decimate them all.

(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)

OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.

THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)

SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.

SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)

AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.

BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)

THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”

SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.

For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).

Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:

• Violence.
• Hip violence.
• Los Angeles.
• Fictional characters talking directly at the camera.
• Wacky misadventures surrounding the making of an independent movie.
• Manhattan.
• People standing around talking about their relationship problems and their going-nowhere lives.
• Beverly Hills.
• A sensitive, young, aspiring novelist/screenwriter (of any gender).
• Racist or other insult jokes excused under the rubric of daring political incorrectness.
• San Francisco.
• An “all-star soundtrack CD” of tunes inappropriate to the film or only heard for 10 seconds or less or only during the closing credits.
• Hokey new-agey music (a la Smoke Signals).
• Inappropriate product placements.
• Stories about the (black, native-American, South African, Burmese, etc.) ethnic struggle but starring a white hero/heroine whose own struggle turns out to be either getting back to civilization or arresting a white villain.
• Characters who spend more screen time walking to and from cars than doing anything else (a shtick those direct-to-video “thrillers” stole from the late TV producer Quinn Martin’s detective shows).
• Beautiful women who only end up getting killed.
• Blandly “beautiful” people who all wear the same ghastly designer clothes, work at the same Brutalist-design lo-rise office buildings, and live in identically “luxurious” houses.
• Murder mysteries in which the callous slaughter of human life is treated as the pretext for light enterainment.
• Stories where all women are Completely Good and all men are Completely Bad.
• Irresistably seductive Psycho Bitches From Hell.
• Really grim future worlds where muscle men and waif models are on the run from bloody puppet monsters that look vaguely like placentas.
• Really grim future worlds where everything’s exactly like it is today, only more extremely so.
• (Hetero) sex depicted as equaling death.
• Vancouver pretending to be Seattle.

You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.

‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”

On Your Marx

Original online film essay, 3/10/99

I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).

Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).

According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.

The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).

But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.

The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)

The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)

And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)

In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.

MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”

MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)

Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).

All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.

It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.

In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)

WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.

This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)

(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)

The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:

• Thea Foss, matron of a regional tugboat and shipping dynasty and inspiration for the beloved ’30s film heroine Tugboat Annie.
• Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth and prominent waterfront figure until her death in 1896.
• Gypsy Rose Lee, all-time undisputed monarch of burlesque, who combined a great body (and the willingness to show much of it off), a sharp wit, and an instinct for publicity.
• Gracie Hansen, nice middle-aged lady hired as hostess for the Seattle World’s Fair’s burlesque show; ahead of her time in announcing through her presence that nice girls enjoyed sex.
• Frances Farmer, actor and Depression-era socialist sympathizer, who probably would’ve been blacklisted from the movies in the late ’40s even if she hadn’t been put away by her equally strong-willed mother.
• Dyan Cannon, who went from a quiet West Seattle childhood to marrying and divorcing Cary Grant, among other accomplishments.
• Pat Suzuki, Broadway’s first Asian-American star.
• Carol Channing, singer-belter whose performances can not only be heard but seen from the third balcony.
• Ernestine Anderson andMarilee Rush, vocalists-living legends.
• Amy Denio and Lori Goldston, instrumental geniuses who continue to prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean singing magazine-cover icons.
• The women in the rock scene: The assorted members and ex-members of Seven Year Bitch,Kill Sibyl,Maxi Badd Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Mavis Piggott, Violent Green, etc. etc.; and such frontwomen and soloists as Kim Warnick, Laura Love, Anisa Romero,Lisa Orth,Shannon Fuchness, Dara Rosenwasser, etc. etc. They continue to collectively prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean out-machoing the men.
• The women behind the rock scene: Caroline Davenport, Stephanie Dorgan, J.A. Anderson, Lori LeFavor, Kate Becker, Trish Timmers, Kerri Harrop, Susan Silver, Candice Pedersen, Barbara Dollarhide, etc. etc. The level-headed facilitators who keep the chaos possible.
• Mia Zapata, Kristen Pfaff, and Stefanie Sergeant, who, if nothing else, proved there’s nothing romantic at all about rockers dying too young.
• Jini Dellaccio, Etiquette Records cover photographer; visualizor of the finely-honed edge of pop and noise behind the Sonics’ and Wailers’ garage classics.
• Imogen Cunningham, maker of photographic art at a time when many art-snobs still disdained the idea that such a thing could exist.
• Lori Larsen, first lady of the Seattle theater circuit and an unsung force in forging the art-as-fun aesthetic still seen today at places like the Annex.
• 33 Fainting Steps and Pat Graney, dancer/choreographers helping modern dance find new ways to tell stories and express particular aspects of particular human conditions.
• Anne Gerber, art collector-patron responsible for helping support and publicize the ’50s “Northwest School” painters.
• Guendolen Pletscheff, fashion collector and advocate of the community-building institution known as high society, something few others here really bothered with in her day.
• Nellie Cornish, founder of Cornish College. (So when are they gonna start a football team, the Game Hens?)
• Kay Greathouse, longtime Frye Musuem empress and defender of visual traditionalism (as jazz teachers know, you need to know the rules before you can properly break ’em).
• Ruby Chow, restaurateur, politician, and early patron of Bruce Lee.
• Chow’s sister Mary Pang, whose frozen-food plant was the unfortunate target of a son’s misplaced sympathy.
• Ethel Mars, co-founder of a family candy dynasty still Snickering along today (and name-inspiration for its Las Vegas-based upscale division, “Ethel M”).
• Linda Tenney and Sunny Kobe Cook, frontline soldiers in the battles to preserve locally-owned retail and locally-produced advertising.
• Mary Ann Boyer (“Madame Damnable”), Seattle’s first madam; she and her successors kept Seattle going as a weekend destination for outlying lumberjacks while the town’s “legitimate” early economy went through massive ups and downs.
• Anna Louise Strong, organizer-publicist of the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
• Hazel Wolf, 100-esque year old environmental activist and thorn in the side of the likes of…
• Dixy Lee Ray, Pacific Science Center cofounder and one-term governor; elequently advocated a number of political-economic theories I completely disagreed with.
• Barbara Hedges, UW athletic director; repeatedly makes bold moves which defy the wishes of the influential football “boosters.”
• Patty Murray, successful soccer-mom icon and less-successful Senator.
• Bertha K. Landes, America’s first female big-city mayor.
• Elizabeth Montgomery (Julesberg), creator of the Dick and Jane books; envisioned a very Seattle quiet-bourgeois fantasy universe.
• Nicola Griffith, scifi writer (Slow River); envisions a different, but still very Seattle, fantasy universe.
• Rebecca Welles, K.K. Beck, J.A. Jance, Ann Rule, and Jayne Ann Krentz, masters of mass-market storytelling.
• Stacey Levine and Rebecca Brown, pioneers of Po-Mo (or is it Neo-Mo or Avant-Pop?) storytelling techniques.
• Lynda Barry, chronicler of the inner dysfunctional child within most of us.
• J.Z. “Ramtha” Knight, propagator of a revisionist “ancient warrior” mythology that allowed rich people to feel a little less guilty.
• Mary McCarthy, author, satirist, and chronicler of the futility of intellectualism.
• Sandy Hill; Good Morning America’s sucked ever since it fired her.
• Ruth “Wunda Wunda” Prins, early local kids’-TV hostess and curator of a potted-flower puppet known alternately as Wilting Willie or Stand-Up Willie (you never knew, when she watered it each day, which he would become).
• Mary Kay LeTourneau, romantic rebel. So what if the rest of the world doesn’t understand?

(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)

OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?

IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)

GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.

Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!

GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book

Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality

technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.

It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:

• I must persuade a gaggle of stoned-out neohippies and ravers to leave a burning building.
• I must get somewhere NOW. But all along the street, I’m hounded by adamant people demanding things from me. “You! Three blocks away! Tell me the time, NOW!” “Where’s Third Avenue from here?” “Hold it, kid! You’re not going anywhere until you tell me the capital of Nebraska!”
• I’m dying from a heart attack on the sidewalk, surrounded by dozens of people who just stand around laughing.
• I’m dying of starvation, and meet a long series of people with plenty of food on hand who simply tell me I should be glad I’m not at risk for any of the long-term health problems related to obesity.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a really bad comedy club.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a video store with a thousand copies of each Meg Ryan movie and no copies of anything else.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a recording studio where a bearded recording engineer makes me eternally listen to the same Steely Dan song while he enthusiastically explains the technical brilliance behind its recording and mixing.
• I’ve been spending decades happily in the afterlife of my choice, until a descendant posthumously prays my way, against my will, into the Mormon Heaven.
• I impatiently wait for my guru to tell me the ultimate meaning of life. But it turns out to be just like one of Richard Pryor’s early appearances on Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas–a seemingly-endless, carefully detailed set up for a single punch line, that’s completely bleeped out. Only instead of silence followed by howls of laughter, I hear silence followed by gasps of realization among all the other disciples in the audience.

ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”