Kurt and Courtney and Nick

Film review, 2/17/99

Kurt and Courtney

(1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)

Hype!

(1995, dir. Doug Pray)

Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!

(1994, various directors)

By my calendar watch, we’re only seven weeks from what’s sure to be another exercise in media excess–the fifth anniversary of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

No, I don’t think Cobain was really murdered. The various conspiracy theories are too pat, too dependent on ignoring facts of the case that don’t fit the theorists’ neat little conceptions.

Besides, nobody had anything to gain from Cobain’s death, except the conspiracy theorists. Even if he were planning to quit music and leave the admitted publicity-addict Courtney Love, she would’ve gotten as much (and possibly more useful) ink as Cobain’s ex as she did as his widow.

Yet the theories continue to find an audience, among Cobain fans who still don’t want to believe their troubled idol could possibly have wanted to die.

Yet the clues are everywhere in his songs and performances. He really was a sensitive soul who sought to acquire the virtual invincability of a rocker (NOT of a “rock star”–while his music was some of the most accessible U.S. punk ever made, he never wanted what he considered the corrupt rock-star lifestyle).

But the assorted stresses of suddenly becoming a generation’s icon (and the locus of a multimillion dollar business) proved too much for him.

What survives are his music, his haunting image, and the many hangers-on and media vultures still trying to cash in, literally or figuratively, on his story.

One of the latter, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, was thwarted in his attempt to make a movie about the Cobain tragedy; neither Love nor the surviving Nirvana members would talk to him or permit the use of Nirvana’s music or video footage. Instead, Kurt and Courtney is the personal story of Broomfield’s failure to make the film he’d wanted to make. He travels around Seattle, Aberdeen, Portland, and L.A. He interviews a few of the couple’s friends and relatives, none of whom had anything bad to say about the self-deprecating Kurt or anything good to say about the monomaniacally ambitious Courtney.

A large bulk of the film’s time is spent on the professional Courtney-bashers who’ve shown up regularly in magazine stories, talk shows, and Internet newsgroups–Courtney’s very estranged father Hank Harrison, conspiracy theorist Tom Grant, and washed-up early Seattle punker Eldon “El Duce” Hoke. Hoke, whose career (such as it was) was predicated on calculated noteriety, claimed Love had offered to pay him to kill Cobain but he’d turned down the offer. Hoke died days after Broomfield filmed him; he was hit by a train while stoned out of his gourd. (He reportedly told friends he’d made up the hit-man story in a scheme to get his own name back in infamy.)

Broomfield clearly wants to contrast the ill fate of the tender, ulcerous Cobain with Love’s final re-creation of herself as a total Hollywood celebrity. But I couldn’t help seeing a more telling comparison between Cobain and Hoke. Both were self-styled bad boys; both eventually died indirectly from their drug addictions. But Hoke, bereft of much talent or imagination, sought merely to push the offensiveness envelope, and ended up a long term burnout case, living out his existence on L.A.’s far outskirts. Cobain beautifully married punk noise and pop immediacy, art and entertainment, and (as can be seen in the compilation video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!) burned out much more quickly.

Meanwhile, the definitive videocassette document of Nirvana’s era remains Doug Pray’s Hype! It contains very little Nirvana material, but puts the band in the context of its time and place better than star-obsessed folks like Broomfield ever could.

‘Life, The Movie’:

All the World’s a Multiplex

Book feature, 2/3/99

Life, The Movie:

by Neal Gabler

Knopf, $25

Seems most everybody these days hates the mass-media industry, including a lot of the folks who work in it.

Now, in Life, the Movie, we’ve got Hollywood biographer Neal Gabler complaining semi-coherently about Hollywood’s power to shape the popular zeitgeist. I’ve complained about that myself over the years. But my beef’s different from his.

I believe the six big studios (and the five big record labels, the three or four big networks, the 12 big cable-channel owners, and the similarly concentrated magazine and newspaper operators; most of which are cross-owned by a dozen or so media Goliaths) concentrate too much sway over the world’s visions, dreams, and consciousnesses.

Gabler, though, apparently has no problem with a nation (and, by extension, a world) beholden to a single set of ideas dictated by a small cultural elite. He just wants a different elite to be in charge. If anything, he thinks a society organized around mass media (and various interest groups’ need to attain publicity via mass media) istoo populist. From politics and warfare to religion and academia, from fashion and architecture to journalism and bestseller literature, any venture or idea Gabler surveys is one that has to become popular to succeed, and to become popular it has to put on the old razzle-dazzle, to gussy itself up in a narrative arc and a star system and a carefully-staged spectacle and a happy ending.

Gabler’s take will likely appeal to both liberal and conservative elitists. I suspect he’s personally on the left wing of what the webzine Salon calls “the literate overclass,” for the simple reason that Gabler, like a lot of left-elitists, is far more articulate about what he’s against than about what he’s for. He admires that sourpuss left-elitist prude Neil Postman, and he expresses wistful nostalgia for dour Puritanism with its repression of individual personality in favor of “character” (yet he disapproves of cynical politicians who preach about “character” while practicing stage-managed campaigns and market-researched platforms).

While not explicitly calling for it, Gabler seems to want a society run, well, by people like him. A more ordered, rational society, such as that fantasized by the “civil society” movement. A society where a few urban-Northeast big thinkers ponder what’s best for everybody, then face few obstacles of authority in putting their decisions into action. A society where all of us residing outside the corridors of power work hard, save our money, and solemnly tend to our own affairs. Something like what those Seattle City Council members admired so much about Singapore on their junket there a year or two back, before today’s Asian recession discredited a lot of that paternalistic-central-planning ideal.

Besides, America isn’t and never was what Gabler seems to wish it was. Hell, the human race isn’t. We’re a sensual, sensuous species. From the Noh theater of Japan to the Greek tragedies to African tribal dances to Shakespeare to carny shows to museum mega-exhibitions to porn to the Indy 500 to the fashion runways to heavy metal to Japanese magazine ads showing fantasies of American cowboys, we want and love to have our passions stirred, and marketers and publishers and preachers and politicians would be fools to not know it. And, on at least one level, Gabler seems to know it too. In his long, tedious invective over the failings of all humans less brain-centric than himself, Gabler reveals himself to be what the gays call a “drama queen.”

Ya Gotta Have Hartley

Film essay, 1/27/99

Henry Fool

(1998, dir. Hal Hartley)

At one time, Hal Hartley seemed the savior of American cinema.

Against an ’80s moviescape of loud special effects, inane violence, and “brat pack” smarminess (more about the latter in a future installment), Hartley’s low-key comedy-dramas (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and the made-for-PBS featurette Surviving Desire) were all talk. Smartly-written talk, executed by attractive, accomplished actors, who were framed in perfectly-composed shots. Talk ascribed to characters who were umpteen degrees smarter and more coherent than most film characters of their socio-economic status or age, whose problems typically involved the need to either maintain or break down the barriers between souls. Talk set in inner-ring Long Island suburbs and N.Y.C. outer-borough neighborhoods which Hartley depicted not as sterile sprawl zones but as painfully-honest-to-God small towns, where everybody knows everybody’s failings and where grudges last lifetimes.

Hartley hasn’t exactly gone soft. If anything, his mid-’90s installments Amateur and Flirt showed he could carefully increase the sex-and-violence aspects of his stories without losing their human cores. But as Amerindie film became an increasingly ossified set of rules and conventions designed to get films shown at Sundance and sold to Miramax, Hartley’s shtick became one of the indie industry’s more-often-imitated formulas. (Take The Brothers McMullen or Trees Lounge. Please.)

With so many literate-loners-with-relationship-troubles-and-questionable-pasts films out there, all Hartley has to separate himself from his imitators are his skills and his storytelling genius. With his most recent entry, Henry Fool, that’s almost enough.

The plot summary, as if plot were really the important thing in a Hartley film: Henry (James Urbaniak) is your basic Hartley antihero, a smooth-talking confidence man whose simple explanations for everything include simple explanations for his own life’s failure. He boasts of being such a stupendous literary author that the world’s simply not ready for his envelope-pushing greatness. He takes in (and is taken in by) Simon Grim (Thomas Jay Ryan), a young-adult garbage man still living with his teen sister (Parker Posey) and unstable mom. Simon writes a book under Henry’s encouragement and tutoring, which is apparently awful but highly marketable. Henry’s own work, however, turns out to be apparently merely awful. Simon becomes a Gen-X literary celebrity (yes, there can be such a thing); while Henry seduces both mom and sis (leading to the former’s suicide and the latter’s shotgun wedding). Henry ends up in the dead-end working-stiff existence to which Simon originally felt resigned.

Much has been made by critics about how the audience never hears either Henry’s or Simon’s writings. It’s not really that novel. You never really saw the art-objects of desire in Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing or Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (or, for that matter, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights). Besides, what counts for Hartley isn’t the characters’ works but everybody’s (including their own) reactions to them.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1: An outfit in northern California’s selling officially-licensed Space Needle brand bottled water.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: Banners have been mounted all along the streets of the Darkest Eastside, calling on one and all to “Celebrate Redmond.”

WORKIN’ IT: A week or two back, we recounted alarming statistics in Variety claiming kids’ TV viewership was significantly down in each of the past three years. Now, other articles offer up a reason why. Not too long

ago, Those Kids Today were constantly berated as illiterate videots and Nintendo-junkies whose slacker study habits were going to be America’s downfall as a productive player on the global economic stage. Now, Time, the NY Times, and other media outlets are crying in alarm that kids as young as the first grade are being inundated beneath piles of homework so daunting nobody has time to be a kid. The NY Times account, citing a U. of Michigan study, claims in the last 17 years “homework for first- to third-graders had nearly tripled, to 123 minutes a week.”

The first caveat, naturally, is the mass-media biz might be worrying that young eyeballs are getting too captivated by mandatory attention, therefore limiting the young’uns’ ability to be marketed to.

Beyond that, another question arises–at a time when the effective application of knowledge is more nonlinear (or, rather, multilinear) than ever, when Net-based reference tools may make data acquisition as simple as using a calculator, why should we be dooming our children by force-feeding them a rigorous, narrow discipline of left-brain rote memorization? The most likely answer’s that in the ’80s, everybody was so darned worried we weren’t keeping up with those other industrialized nations in producing quantifiable test-score results. Test-score results, of course, don’t really equal knowledge; and knowledge certainly doesn’t equal wisdom–let alone economic “success.” As far as I’ve been able to figure, Japan’s schools are just as tough and soul-sapping as ever, while the nation’s economy’s gone to the dogs for reasons totally unrelated to study habits.

POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: In a recent PBS hour called We the (Rude) People, Morton Kondracke joined the chorus of those who bemoan the death of “civil society” and who blame America’s subcultural fragmentation and in-group politics and just about everything else wrong (or perceived to be wrong) with America on those darned ’60s antiwar protesters. Really, for a veteran panelist on The McLaughlin Group to claim the liberals are causing all the hatemongering is beyond ludicrousness!

THE FINE PRINT (In the closing credits of Artisan Entertainment’s video trailer to Jerry Springer: Ringmaster): “All characters and events in the preceding motion picture were entirely fictional, and nothing is intended to depict any actual participant in, or aspect of, ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ which is broadcast on television. This motion picture is not connected to ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and is not licensed from its producers.”

THE OTHER FINE PRINT (from a brochure soliciting public-art proposals for the UW Medical Center’s new Maternity and Infant Care wing): “Since not every MIC patient outcome results in a live or healthy birth, the successful artwork will respect this fact with appropriate imagery. For example, the artist may decide to omit direct references to children, babies, or reproduction.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I seem to always be praising the NW punk bible 10 Things (Jesus Wants You to Know). Its latest issue (#20) is its best yet. Besides the usual acreage of interviews and reviews, it’s got editor Dan Halligan’s tale of his Vegas wedding, a woman named Mels disappointedly relating how punks turn out to have most of the same sex hangups as other Americans, interviews with two DIY Netporn entrepreneurs, lotsa talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance repeal advocates, an art-photo by Wendy Wishbone of three goth models representing “the Three Fates of Punk: Death, Hypocrisy, Capitalism,” and Ben Weasel’s cogent analysis of how a vital, energetic subculture’s degenerated and ossified into a conformist, formulaic, commercialized “New Punk Order.” (Mightily timely reading during last week’s ESPN “Winter X Games” with all the post-Green Day noisemakers used for snowboarding sountrack tuneage.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $3 from 8315 Lake City Way NE, #192, Seattle 98115.

LOSS OF DOWN: Another Super Bowl Sunday’s on the way, and with it the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage about pro football as an institution of violence and stupidity and that perennial fall guy testosterone–even though football puts more kid through college than any other sport, even though it’s really a game of coaching and choreography as much as one of hitting and tackling, and even though it’s got enough female fans for QVC to offer NFL-logo costume jewelry trinkets. Time staff essayist Lance Morrow recently claimed, “Football, still in bad odor among thinkers, needs a fancier mystique;” then proceeded to offer up a “deconstructionist theory” of the sport–which, natch, turned out to be less a defense of the gridiron game than a spoof of PoMo egghead jargon. (“Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or ‘fakes’ or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everytyhing that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole — the game lui-meme.”)

I, however, am not afraid to stake whatever remaining highbrow street-cred I might have on the line by actually and sincerely stating my praise for the game. I’ve (largely) grown out of my sensitive-post-adolescent jock-hating phase (my above remarks about snowboarding hype notwithstanding), and have come to an honest appreciation of the Big Game played by Big Dudes, their bodies (and usually their faces) hidden beneath the group-identity of the uniform, their individual heroics interdependent upon the coordinated effort of the entire team. A game with separate offensive and defensive players, in which fully half the participants can usually do nothing but “loss prevention.” (Hmm–maybe Safeco should’ve bought the naming rights to the new football stadium instead of the new baseball stadium.)

Here, then, is my partial list of what makes the perfect Super Bowl experience (please feel free to print this out and keep score at home):

• At least four hours of increasingly shrill yet picayune pregame “coverage.”
• The National Anthem sung by somebody who can’t hit the high notes or forgets the words.
• At least one safety.
• A missed point-after-touchdown.
• A successful really-long field goal.
• First and third quarters ending within the 10 yard line (if the teams are going to change sides at the quarter breaks, it should be as overt as possible).
• A homemade sign in the stands listing a Bible verse other than John 3:16. (My fantasy: To hold up signs displaying the verse numbers for the passages about Onan spilling his seed, or David spying on the bathing Bathsheeba, or a sequence of the verses that turn out to be “And Judas went into the potter’s field and hanged himself,” “Go thou and do likewise,” and “Whatsoever ye do, do so quickly.”)
• At least 20 increasingly shrill promos for the premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, to air “immediately following the game.”
• A marching-band rendition of a contemporary hit song not originally meant for horns. (“MMMBop,” or maybe “Cop Killer.”)
• A scoreless third quarter (so you can get to the convenience store for restocking without missing the halftime extravaganza).
• A really ridiculous touchdown-celebration dance. (Perhaps involving pirouettes.)
• A couple of wasted time outs early in the fourth quarter.
• A penalty assessed against one team for having 12 men on the field, negated by a penalty for the other team having 13 men on the field.
• A true blooper-reel moment (a player running in the wrong direction, or the inadvertant tackle of a sidelines microphone operator).
• A good Master Lock commercial.
• A dumb Pepsi commercial.
• The whole thing coming down to one last come-from-behind miracle play that either somehow succeeds or at least comes very close.
• At least one hour of anticlimactic postgame rehashing.
• A premiere premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, eventually following the postgame denouments and turning out to really suck.

NEXT WEEK: The long-delayed final results of our quest for appropriate honorees on a mythical Seattle women’s walk of fame. ‘Til then, here’s your next topic to mull over via email and our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards: What’s the most beautiful “ugly” building in town (i.e., a beautiful structure the official tastemakers would despise)?

The Ratio of ‘Alpha’ to ‘Pi’

Film review, 1/20/99

Alphaville

Home Vision Cinema

Pi

Artisan Entertainment

When I finally saw the video release of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (known on-screen, and on the video box, by the Greek letter), it was on the same day I happened to catch Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville on the Independent Film Channel. The two films turn out to be bookends of the modern information age.

Alphaville, as all good film-studies alums know, was Godard’s low-tech response to the popular fears generated by the high-tech advances of the late ’50s and early ’60s. His storyline involved hardboiled private eye Lemme Caution (Eddie Constantine) venturing to a far-off planet where one hyper-rational, central mainframe computer ran everything, and where the display of human emotion was a crime punishable by death. But it was shot on contemporary-modern locations with a small cast, off-the-rack costumes, and no special effects (the voice of the evil computer was played by a throat-cancer patient with an electronic voice-box implant). Godard’s statement against dehumanization was made with rigorously human-scale tools. Since its making, several films have referred to images or plot elements in Alphaville (from Blade Runner to Trouble In Mind to a no-budget ’80s indie called Betaville). But Pi’s the first to both do so successfully and to put a modern spin on the original film’s theme.

Like Alphaville, Pi’s shot in grainy, hi-contrast black-and-white, and utilizes lotsa extreme-close-up cutaway shots of flashing digits–its antihero Max Cohen (Sean Guillette) apparently dabbles in stock-market “day trading” to finance his lonely pursuit of mathemetical keys to the meaning of life. But where Lemme Caution seeks to reclaim human souls from the cold, inhumane hyper-rationality associated with IBM 360-era centralized computing (and visualized by stark, bureaucratic office buildings and harsh fluorescent lights), Max is the ultimate loner-male computer hacker, preferring literal “known quantities” to the chaos of humanity (as visualized by teeming NYC street scenes). Max finds relief from everyday existence’s humdrum disappointments in the burning heat of ultra-logic (literally–he’s addicted to the very intense thought processes that also aggrivate his severe migraines, which he can only partially relieve via massive prescription combos). Like some mid-’80s computer fanatics I knew, he’s devoted most of his small Manhattan apartment to a complex, personally-assembled “kludge” of a computer setup, which he’s even named (“Euclid”). To him, logic isn’t the enemy of life but the heart of its very being. He believes if he can master the ultimate mysteries of math and geometry (which, in his case, include Leonardo’s “magic rectangle,” numerological interpretations of the Hebrew Torah, and the ultimate math-mystery, the unending and unrepeating number at the heart of the circle and known by the greek letter pi), he can unlock the final mystery of–well, if he knew what it was, it probably wouldn’t torment him as much as it does.

Both films have thriller subplots to add on-screen action to their cerebreality. Lemme engages in espionage and chase scenes against the agents of Alphaville’s machine-controlled regime; Max is pursued in the subways and streets by the employees of a Wall Street financier (Pamela Hart) and by a cabal of Jewish mystics; each party seeks to exploit his way with figures for purposes only partly revealed by the film’s end.

Yet near the end, he proclaims to the mystics that they, and he, were mistaken to seek the ultimate truth in a mere number. “It’s not the number–it’s the meaning, the syntax, the spaces between the numbers.” Only after this (and the death of his only friend) does the film’s image briefly switch from stark b&w to shades of grey. Max Cohen understands the temptations of the desire for rational knowledge far better than Lemme Caution ever could, but ultimately reaches a similar conclusion in regards to logic’s frustrating limitations. Max realizes too late, it really isn’t what you know but who you know.

It should also be mentioned that Pi is a tour-de-force directoral debut blah blah blah; but more importantly, it’s a real independent film. It’s not a low-budget, “hip” version of a standard Hollywood formula. Despite the chase interludes, it’s not some commercially-released demo reel intended to show the director’s skill at orchestrating violence or mayhem. Nor is it a Sundance Festival-formula product, full of relatively-affluent WASPs standing around talking about relationships. It’s a real movie about real ideas–something rare in any age.

IT’S A DOG-DAYS-OF-WINTER MISC., the online column that couldn’t help but be bemused by the huge, handsome “Iams Sold Here” poster advertising yupscale pet foods, a poster taped to a window at the Queen Anne Larry’s Market–specifically, a window directly above the store’s cafeteria.

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The Downtown Seattle Association/Community Development Round Table clique, via one of its frequent planted front-page puff pieces in the P-I, believes the Seattle City Council doesn’t have enough big-business toadies on it? What’s wrong with this picture?

THE FINE PRINT (from the Internet service provider Xensei): “The requested URL was not found on this server. No further information is available. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And it looked so promising for a while there too.”

PUTTING-ON-AIRS DEPT.: A kindly reader did some seeking out on the FCC’s website and found some interesting license applications on file. KCMU’s applied for a power increase from 450 to 720 watts. Even more interesting–KSER, the Lynnwood-based successor to the late Seattle community station KRAB, has applied to move from 1000 to 5800 watts (will residents south of Shoreline be able to receive the station everybody in the Seattle area’s talked about but almost nobody’s heard?). And two more UHF TV channels are in the works: KHCV on channel 45 (which has been broadcasting black screens and computer graphics promising great shows any month now), and something called the African American Broadcasting Co. has filed a construction permit to start transmitting locally on channel 51.

I-KID-YOU-NOT-DEPT.: A headline in Variety announces a grim portent for our nation’s future: “Kids may be toddling away from television.” The story sadly relates, “Kids viewership is down a massive 13% so far in the fourth quarter compared with the same dime period a year ago,” across network, syndicated, and cable schedules; continuing and accellerating a two-year trend. Maybe the most recent demands that broadcast stations stick more educational content into their kidvid has worked to drive the tots away from the screen, something the anti-TV Luddites have wanted all along. Of course, it could mean the young’uns are simply switching to violent shoot-em-up video games on the Playstation instead.

The same Variety issue (12/21-1/3) also contained the trade magazine’s annual “International Locations Supplement” (containing absolutely no mention of any Washington location work but plenty of Vancouver stuff). It’s a document of either frustration or misplaced commercial ambition that all these cities, states, and countries are investing heavy amounts of public and/or private investment, not into making their own films but simply into providing scenery and/or cheap labor for Hollywood.

GAME THEORY: At a time when Hollywood rules the popcult globe, but Hollywood’s increasingly under foreign investment capital, The Price is Right has been running an opening banner “Made In the USA.” The show’s still churned out in LA, but it’s now owned by the British media conglomerate Pearson (owners of Penguin Books and a lot of other stuff), which acquired what’s left of Goodson-Todman Productions in order to strengthen its position as the global leader in administering foreign remake rights to new and old game show concepts. Indeed, it claims to either produce, co-produce, or control the rights to half the game shows now airing around the world, from the French version of The $25,000 Pyramid to the Australian version of Sale of the Century to the British version of Family Feud (retitled Family Fortunes). It’s even offering international remake rights to The Honeymooners (“Le Pow! Le Zoom! Dans la lune!”)

PHILM PHUN: The Faculty, that dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-space-aliens movie, is being hyped with an MTV video featuring the voice (and, for just a couple of seconds, the image) of erstwhile Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley (who’s otherwise still in his self-imposed hiatus from the stresses of the music biz), covering the Pink Floyd chestnut “Another Brick in the Wall.” The coincidence (well, maybe not a coincidence if Staley knows his local-film history): The onetime supergroup that recorded the track’s credited as Class of ’99. Very close to Class of 1999, the title of a dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-robots movie filmed ten years ago at Seattle’s old, now reopened, Lincoln High.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dinosaur Creamy Coolers are fruity drinks made with ultra-pasteurized milk, corn syrup, flavorings, a slight tinge of carbonation, and wild colors-not-found-in-nature. The label lists flavors by colors, just like Jell-O afficianados: “Red (cherry), orgnage (orange), blue (tropical punch), green (lime).” And it all comes in a little plastic miniature sports bottle, which you have to cut or rip open at the head of the built-in flexible straw. Made in California but sold at Uwajimaya.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jet City Maven is a feisty, independent free tabloid for the near-north-end neighborhoods of Seattle (Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, et al.), run by former North Seattle Press participants Clayton and Susan Park. Besides remiscinces by old North Central Outlook cofounder Stan Stapp, it’s got the usual business briefs, community-planning updates, neighborhood-vs.-developer articles, and arts-and-entertainment notices (by local journeyman musician Jason Trachtenburg). However, I’m personally a bit perturbed by the front-page editorial in its Jan. issue. The story involved Civic Light Opera musicians seeking union representation against management’s wishes, even while the company mounts a show (Rags) about old-timey working-folks’ struggles in 1900s NYC. Nick Slepko’s commentary on this not only is accurately summed up by its Newtesque headline, “BIG Labor takes on small community theater,” but goes on to Cold War-nostalgiac Red-baiting by gleefully describing picketers outside the show as including “UW Socialist Workers Party diehards outside blocking the theater.” I’ve worked for big employers and small employers, and trust me: workers at small outfits need a living wage and basic rights as much as workers at big outfits, and may require representation to attain ’em. (Free each month at drop-off sites in the targeted neighborhoods; by subscription from 12345 30th Ave. NE, Suite HI, Seattle 98125.)

DOUBLE DRIBBLES: The evening before the NBA’s belated return was announced, I witnessed Seattle Reign Appreciation Day at the Seattle Center House. The center floor of the cavernous old National Guard armory was full of mourning and love-festing fans–teenage girls, moms and daughters, dads and daughters, hand-holding lesbian couples, and more than a few gents like me who simply love the grace of the female form in action. To the corporate sports world, ABL pro women’s basketball may have been just another short-lived, underfunded wannabe league like the ones I mentioned two weeks ago (WFL, USFL, NASL, WHL, ABA, Liberty Basketball Association, several indoor-soccer attempts, Arena Football). But to the 500 or so at Reign Appreciation Day, and the two or three thousand regular gamegoers they represented, the ABL represented something different–a dream (albeit a commercially-exploited dream) that girls could one day be valued not merely for their bodies (as objects of desire) but for their bodies (as machines of active achievement), in an organization that understood the street-level, populist aspect of women’s-sports fandom and didn’t try to treat it as a junior version of all that’s icky about corporate sport.

(Meanwhile, a few pamphleteers at Reign Appreciation Day wanted to spread the news about some adamant fans in San Jose, CA who want to rescue the ABL by recruiting a few thousand of the league’s loyal followers to put up at least $1,000 each to collectively buy and resuscitate the league.)

The morning after that celebratory wake for this now-deferred dream, the NBA owners (purveyors of the ABL-killing, corporate-as-all-heck WNBA) ended their player lockout (the sorriest demonstration of what’s wrong with corporate sport since, maybe, 1995). As many of you know, the Sonics are owned by local billboard czar Barry Ackerley; for almost a year, the team’s dedicated Ackerley billboard site outside its practice gym facing Aurora Ave. has borne a message encouraging fan noise: “Your voice will come back. Eventually.” During the lockout, it seemed like a desperate promise that games would again be played one of these months (or years). Now, though, maybe it could be a rallying cry to encourage all the frustrated fans to raise their own voices against corporate sport’s increasingly pathetic edifice.

BE SURE TO ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS for our still-hypothetical Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame by email to clark@speakeasy.org, or at our very own Misc. Talk discussion boards. Results will be announced in this space next week. Until then, see Elizabeth, pray for snow, and consider the potential application of these words from Samuel Butler to the current D.C. tragicomedy: “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”

IT’S A RELATIVELY POST-HANGOVER MISC., the column that looked for streetside strangeness at the full-moon New Year’s and found lots (unfortunately, none of it printable without violating either libel laws or personal discretion.)

ST. PETER TO NORMAN FELL: “Come and knock on our door…”

COFFEE PRESS: Starbucks is starting an in-store magazine. But Seattle writers and editors need not apply–or rather, they’ll need to apply to NYC. The yet-untitled quarterly, due out in May, is being produced by Time Warner’s “custom publishing” unit under contract to the espresso chain. An NY Daily News report claims it will be “modeled on The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, with contributions from both established and emerging writers and photographers.” If it’s anything like the chain’s in-store brochures (or CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir Pour Your Heart Into It ), you can expect material that’s nice, laid-back, mellow, and ultimately forgettable.

MARKET EXPOSURE: Seattle’s own cybersmut magnate Seth Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group has become notorious for its sex websites (the official Penthouse magazine site; the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee hardcore video). But now, with the commercial skin-pic trade apparently plateauing, IEG’s expanding into new e-commerce realms. Some of these expansions are a little further from the company’s original shtick (an online casino, a home-mortgage buying-guide); some are a little closer. One of the latter’s a nude stock-trading site, sexquotes.com (“the mage-merger between high finance and high society”), mixing business news and stock prices with small but free pinup pix. You can choose the gender, explicitness level, and general physique type of your temporary beloveds, who appear on the left side of the screen; you can also choose up to 20 stock and mutual-fund prices to scroll across the right side. It’s free, with plenty of ads for Warshavsky’s other sites. One of those other sites is ready to show you how Net-porn starlets are made–www.onlinesurgery.com!

CATHODE CORNER#1: Viacom management may have killed KSTW’s local-news operation, but at least they’ve let the station maintain one of its traditions–the annual alkie movie on, or shortly after, the hangover-strewn Jan. 1. In years past, the station’s assauged the suffering viewers with Under the Volcano, When A Man Loves a Woman, and more. This Jan. 2 (the night of Jan. 1 was, unfortunately, taken up by Viacom’s dumb UPN shows): Clean and Sober.

CATHODE CORNER #2, or BANDWIDTH ENVY:A couple months or so ago, the feisty indie Summit Cablevision finally added a bunch of the cable channels viewers have been pleading for for two years or more. Most TCI customers elsewhere in Seattle (as well as viewers stuck with similarly outmoded cable systems across the country) are still wondering what all these supposedly great channels with these supposedly great shows are really like. Herewith, a few glimpses:

• Win Ben Stein’s Money (Comedy Central) is easily the best non-kiddie game show ever made for cable. After years of badly-structured, badly-timed, badly-designed, and badly-lit shows like Loves Me, Loves Me Not, a cable channel’s finally figured out what makes a great game show great–it’s a pure televisual experience, involving the audience in a well-planned ritual of fun. WBSM is also that rarity, a “hard quiz” show with truly tough questions.

  I just wished I could feel a little less guilty about finding such screen-magnetism and loveability in a host whom you know as the monotoned droner from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, and Clear Eyes commercials, but who in “real” life is a former Nixon lawyer who writes virulently anti-choice, pro-impeachment screeds for Rabid Right journals such as the American Spectator–and who keeps a home-away-from-Hollywood at the infamous compound collection that is Sandpoint, Idaho.

• One Reel Wonders (Turner Classic Movies) exhumes some of the live-action short subjects that thrilled and/or bored movie-theater audiences in the ’30s and ’40s, and which have generally remained unseen ever since.

  Besides finally giving lifelong Looney Tunes fans an at-last reference to the original sources of many cartoon running gags (Technicolor travelogues ending “as the sun sinks slowly in the west,” etc.), they fill in a vital hole in any film buff’s historical knowledge. And any aspiring filmmaker (or storyteller) could learn a thing or two about how these shorts told complete stories in seven to 10 minutes.

• ESPN2 has recently devoted its 10 am (PST) hour most weekdays to reruns of its past Fitness America Pageant shows. These were originally conceived as a cross between aerobics and bodybuilding, skewed toward audiences (and advertisers) scared off by the masculine-looking figures popularly associated with women’s muscle meets.

  So instead of weightlifting and other tests of pure strength, each contestant performs two minutes of Flashdance-esque athletic dancing, then returns to the stage for a short swimsuit-modeling stroll. The swimsuits (and the dance costumes) are often of the bare-bunned variety; and the dances often display a vigorous eroticism that would probably be particularly popular among western-states men (it’s in our blood to admire a woman who’s no dainty waif, but who instead looks like she probably could’ve survived a frontier winter in the years before rural electrificaiton).

  But don’t for a second think the show’s “male oriented”–the ads are all for women’s vitamin supplements, women’s workout gear, and Stayfree. This is intended for a woman who likes to admire other women’s bodies, but who’d slug you in the stomach if you accused her of maybe, just maybe, having closet lesbian desires.

  Also of note: During set changes beetween segments, an announcer narrates short taped clips of past champions, most of whom are described as now working as “fitness celebrities.” Our fame-ridden culture’s gone so far, we not only have people who are famous merely for “being famous,” we have obscure people who make a living for merely “being famous” among relatively small subcultures–lingirie models, motorcycle-magazine centerfolds, pro wrestling’s “managers” and other outside-the-ring costars, CNN “expert commentators,” “celebrity greeters” at Vegas casinos, and, yes, Internet-based commentators.

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Cartoon Network) started out as the “hip,” grownup-oriented spot on a channel usually devoted to relentlessly exhuming old Hanna-Barbera and Kids’ WB shows.

  But the producers and writers have gotten further and further afield from the original talk-show-spoof concept over each of the show’s five seasons (CN often pairs a new and an old 15-minute episode in the same time block). It’s now the ultimate metashow, deconstructing not just cliché host-guest banter and backstage politics (the stuff of so many, many other self-parody shows from Conan to Shandling) but the very narrative structures of TV and of commercial entertainment in general.

  The show sometimes plays so fast and furious with viewer expectations, one can leave it fully forgetting how clean it is. (Its self-imposed rating is the squeaky TV-Y7.) Two or more generations have grown up equating avant-garde artistic styles with risqué subject matter (an assumption spread in part by CN’s sister channel HBO). But one of the most innovative Hollywood films of the’60s, Head, was rated G. Maya Deren’s experiments in filmic form and storytelling could have passed the old Hollywood Production Code; Satyajit Ray’s exquisite films all passed India’s even-tougher censorship.

  I’m not saying artists, filmmakers, or TV producers should be prohibited from creatively using what used to be called “blue” material. I am saying they shouldn’t feel they have to, either. Space Ghost can thoroughly alter your notions about well-made comedy while still being funny, and without a single poop joke.

• Star Trek: The Sci-Fi Channel Special Edition presented its presenters with a time-management dilemma. Sci-Fi execs wanted to promote this as the most faithful rerunning in decades of the old Kirk-and-Spock episodes, but they weren’t about to give up the extra minutes of commercials their channel (and most ad-bearing cable channels, except Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) stick into their reruns. Network shows of Star Trek‘s day usually ran up to 51 minutes of show per hour. Sci-Fi usually cuts that to as little as 43 minutes.

  The answer: Stretch the shows into an hour and a half! That way, they could add even more commercials, promos, etc. To pad the remaining time, Shatner and Nimoy have been propped up to offer ponderous behind-the-scenes commentaries. (Q: Just how do they manage to speak in segments totalling 10 to 13 minutes about the making of even the minor, budget-balancing episodes? A: Very patiently.)

  Most viewers I know claim they tape the shows and fast-forward past the ads and extraneous material. But I like the new segments, for the sheer unadorned Shatnerity of them.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, consider these seasonally-appropriate words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches fifty, and a fool if he doesn’t drink afterward.”

Uncensored and Eager:

Miso Horny

Original online essay, 12/16/98

My Fair Masseuse (Kitty Media)

1996 (U.S. release 1998), dir. Naruo Kuzukawa/Akita Shoten

Japan, as many of you know, is a society with plenty of sexual hangups and contradictions–much like America’s, but with just enough differences to seem exotic. The country of floor-length, figure-hiding kimonos is also the country of delicate, yet often extremely explicit, “floating world” prints. Japan’s animated films, TV shows, and direct-to-video productions have expressed these contradictions at least as well as any of the country’s other contemporary art forms.

By legal censorship restrictions, and by a system of genre formulae pretty much set in stone by the early ’80s, anime works could display explicit violence (the louder and more explosive the better), but had to depict sex only without showing male genitalia or female pubic hair. This meant lower-hairless damsels could be grotesquely raped by the squid-like tentacles of outer-space monsters or underground demon creatures (the subgenre containing these scenes is known among fans as “Hentai” (perversions), but could only engage in loving relations with other humans via discreet “camera angles.”

One less-violent anime sub-genre has traditionally managed to make up for what little it couldn’t show by applying exaggerated cartoon techniques to the time-honored tradition of sex farce. Young adults (and some apparent teens) engage in somewhat exaggerated versions of typical sex and relationship problems (somewhat complicated when some of the females are disguised angels eager for a taste of earthly pleasures, and some of the males develop instant pants-bulges bigger than their skulls). Semi-realistically drawn faces morph into hyper-cartoony caricatures when confronted with lust, embarrassment, or any mixture of the two.

But with My Fair Masseuse (which apparently isn’t the first video to show it all, just the first I’d learned about), these visual elements are accompanied by delicately drawn lower organs engaged in full-motion versions of sex acts not unlike those depicted in those old-time Japanese prints.

The gender-depiction issues in the video, perhaps to some of your dismay, are similar to some of those in the prints, which often involved noblemen cavorting with courtesans. Here, our heroine Moko is a former nurse who’s decided she’d rather carry out a “life of service” as a high-class prostitute, who strips out of something as close as copyright allows to an old Playboy Club bunny costume.

The plot’s paean to modern gender mores comes in Moko’s repeated assertions that she’s nobody’s victim, but rather an assertive career woman who loves her work (even with fat, old clients). In the last of the video’s three episode segments, she tries learning to role-play with her clients as a demure, innocent waif, only to find neither she nor they really like it that way–so she returns to energetically jumping atop her man-of-the-hour and draining all the yang right out of him.

Of course, this could be seen as a pivotal distinction between old and new favored attitudes toward work in many professions, in many parts of the world. It’s certainly a distinction Japan’s facing in its forced transition from its paternalistic, quasi-feudal old business culture to today’s go-go global entrepreneurial culture. Submissively acquiescing to your job like an old-time courtesan (i.e., quietly admitting you’d rather be doing something else) is the new taboo of Global Business. Rather, more and more of us are expected to eagerly, passionately, put everything we’ve got into–well, you know…

WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….

WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).

WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?

WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.

WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.

WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.

THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.

LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….

Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)

SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”

THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”

HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?

NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.

As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:

“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”

A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:

“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.

“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”

Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.

I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’

YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”

NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.

ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.

BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…

NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.

PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.

Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.

In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.

END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.

One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.

The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.

And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)

Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.

Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?

As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.

Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.

My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.

IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.

YOUR EVER-HOPEFUL MISC. would really, really like to believe Newt is really gone for good, even though it knows he’s probably just repositioning himself for the 2000 presidential run. (More material tangentally related to this toward the column’s end.)

THE MAILBAG: Thanks to all who responded to our request for new pro-sex public-service slogans, designed to encourage teens and young adults to get off the streets and on each other. While no snappy slogans were suggested, one reader did propose a TV commercial with two gal-pals chatting at the water cooler: “How do you manage to feel so fresh and positive in the morning?” “Simple: I don’t leave the house without some sex.” Or, alternately, a print ad could feature the big face of a sensitive-looking young man staring out from the magazine page to say at one time, a man was expected to take care of a woman, to provide for her material needs. Nowadays, such traditional roles are increasingly passé. But still one important way you can help a woman achieve her goals in life. Share some sex with her, today. Not only will she feel better–but so will you.” At the bottom of the page would go a common-sense disclaimer, similar to that used by liquor advertisers, to the effect that those who enjoy sex best enjoy it responsibly.

PHILM PHUN: The Big Chill is actually going to be re-released in theaters, giving late-’90s audiences a chance to relive the alleged good old days of early-’80s nostalgia for the late ’60s. I say, forget the original movie (even though it was, and is, a depressingly-accurate depiction of the original Seattle Weekly target audience). Instead, why not remake it? The new Big Chill-Out could depict a circle of aging late-’80s punks who whiningly long for the good old days of simplistic heroes and villains, bond in the tribal solidarity of smug self-righteousness, and enjoy the timeless tuneage of Killing Joke (while sneering at those Hanson-listening kids these days).

GOIN’ SOUTH?: The Portland tabloid Willamette Week ran an essay package two or three weeks back, on the topic “Seattle Envy.” For those whose only notion about either Portland or Seattle is they’re not New York, the essays provide a valuable intro to the real differences between the two towns, only 185 miles away and nearly identical in size (though Seattle’s greater metro area has almost a million more folks than Portland’s). All six writers (four current Seattleites, two Portlanders) agree Portland’s older, smugger, and more civic-minded, while Seattle’s brasher, louder, and more globally aware. That leaves them to disagree on which they prefer….

• Intro-story writer Kris Hargis claims, “for all its charms, Portland has always seemed a bit burdened by what you could call a Napoleon complex. `So we’re little, so what?’ we say. `We can still kick your town’s butt on social services, city planning and parks’–all the things Seattle forgot about in its quest to become a Goliath of global commerce.”
• Seattle author Robert Clark: “Portland’s calculated attractiveness and livability exist at the cost of some of the spontaneity and un-selfconsciousness that has distinguished Seattle and lent it a certain funky charm…. I simply don’t find it as warmhearted a place as Seattle. But Seattle is changing–and not, I fear, for the better…. Our previous and current mayoral administrations have a rube-like fear that Seattle is not a `world-class’ city and are unable to resist the blandishments of developers who promise to put our backwater town into the same league as, say, Houston or Branson, Mo.”
• Seattle Weekly music writer Jackie McCarthy believes “Portland is like a Spinanes record: smart, sincere, comforting, underappreciated. Seattle, on the other hand, is a lot like Mudhoney’s music: Cool, sarcastic, insular, overrated.”
• Seattle website drudge Chip Giller relates how “Portland is, to many, a more intense place, a more real place, than Seattle. In Portland, mean is meaner, clean is cleaner, hip is hipper.” He quotes one ex-Portlander, “The rain is more depressing. The sun is brighter. If you were a songwriter, your songs would sound better in Portland.” But another tells him Portland “is Disneyland. Everybody’s white and happy.”
• Portland State grad student Lizzy Caston: “Seattle has manic-depressive fluctuations between being a nouveau riche rock star and a used-up junkie lying in the gutter underneath the Alaska Way Viaduct. Portland is the creative writer on Prozac–often brilliant, sometimes smug and antisocial, but convinced of its own intellectual superiority.”
• And Seattle freelancer Kristy Ojala takes a cautionary view to the subject: “The differences between the two cities are hinged on small details, not life-altering differences. It’s like a pointless high-school rivalry (`Our team can kick your team’s ass!’), where thickheaded generalizations serve as absolutes. We’re both stuck with software companies and rain and the coffee/lumberjack stereotype.”

Now if you ask me, the differences are at the same time more blatant and more subtle than Willamette Week’s crew suggests. The subtle ones come from Portland’s stronger sense of “society,” the kind of community-spirit that means both public-transit systems and beauty pageants get taken a lot more seriously there than here, where traditionally more folks headed to out-of-town recreations on the weekends. The blatant ones come from one prime source, Boeing. Without Boeing, Portland was free to build its economic base on timber, shipping, and insurance. With Boeing, Seattle came to see itself as a player on the world stage. Also with Boeing, Seattle gained a civic hierarchy built around the dual elites of gladhanding deal-makers and obsessive-compulsive engineers, hierarchies which would eventually find their ultimate meeting point at Microsoft. (Though Nike proves Portlanders can easily match Seattleites in the ruthless pursuit of profits and market share at any cost.)

A LOVELY MAT FINISH: The Monday after Newt resigned and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota, I tried to watch the competing pro wrestling shows on cable. No longer the pseudo-sport for dummies, wrestling’s now a pair of complex soap-opera plot threads that no first-time viewer can even hope to sort out. These threads play out all year long on the basic-cable shows (one of which, WWF Monday Night Raw Is War, will hold a cablecast from the Tacoma Dome on Dec. 14); leading to climaxes not during Neilsen ratings sweeps weeks but on separate pay-per-view events. On some shows (the World Wrestling Federation has four hours a week on USA; the Time Warner-owned World Championship Wrestling has seven weekly hours split between Time Warner’s TNT and TBS channels), the shouting and the theatrics drag on far longer than the action.

The theatrics, the action, and the characterizations are all far more “X-treme” than during rasslin’s last heyday when Ventura pretended to hate Hulk Hogan. The matches themselves now bear only a miniscule resemblance to real (high school, college, and Olympic) wrestling, and have more in common with that banned-in-every-state gorefest known as “ultimate fighting” (tactics include kickboxing, bare-knuckles boxing, and explicit crotch-grabbing).

The combatants’ grandiose personas and rhetorical bombast certainly have a lot in common with Newt’s now-disgraced system of governance by blowhardedness–except wrestlers, unlike Republicans (and particularly Republican talk-radio hosts) are always ready to directly confront their foes, instead of staying safely within one-sided environments. In this regard, Ventura (as the first candidate from Ross Perot’s Reform Party to make it to a high office) may actually prove more effective than Perot himself would have.

And then there’s the strange case of WWF proprietor Vincent McMahon Jr. A few years ago he presented himself to the world as the underdog of faux-sports titans, a third-generation family businessman (with a son he was grooming to eventually take over from him) struggling to compete against the conglomerate-backed WCW. These days, he’s taken on the TV persona of a corrupt corporate overlord, taking personal sides in the matches he telecasts to favor the baddest of the bad guys. (He even designates his favorites as “corporate champions”!) At one time, rasslin’ villains bore the colors of Russians and Iranians. Now, they’ve captured changes in the popular imagination and re-emerged as the toadies of Big Business. McMahon, who’s perfectly willing to be hated by his audiences as long as they keep watching, has caught onto a shift in the public zeitgeist, before WCW’s sister company Time magazine discovered corporate welfare. He could’ve taught ol’ Newt about this, if either had cared. (Does Ventura know about this shift? Most likely.)

TO CLOSE, take the Kalakala tour, and enjoy the next 10 weeks’ worth of long nights and short days (like you’ve got an alternative).

(Still seeking your pro-sex ad slogans (not one-to-one pickup lines). Send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org.)

MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).

THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.

THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).

EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?

MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…

A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”

Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:

• “Sex–it’s not just for gays and lesbians anymore.”
• “Sex-positive attitudes–now men can have them too.”
• “Don’t drink and drive–stay home and have some sex.”
• “Sex–it does a body good.”
• “Sex–Just Do It.”
• “Eat less, lick more.”

Speaking of public service sloganeering…

CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.

THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)

THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?

THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).

ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.

(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)

SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”

As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.

Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.

HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.

Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.

My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.

My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.

In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.

So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…

PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)

As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!

At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!

STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.

(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.

WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)

KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.

THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.

Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.

Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.

WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:

• A citywide monorail line. It’s being worked on.
• Repeal of the Teen Dance Ordinance. It’s being worked on.
• A sign in the library: “This is not a convenience store.”
• A community radio station. A collective called Free Seattle Radio is currently raising money to start another pirate FM operation. But what I’m talking about is a real station, licensed and above-ground, with just enough resources to cover the issues, arts, and voices that make the city.

  Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”

• A theater festival for the troupes and directors too big for the Seattle Fringe Fest (which is fringier than most other North American fringe festivals).
• A good Scottish pub (not Irish or English).
• Better bus service, particularly between neighborhoods (like Magnolia) and non-downtown workplace districts (like Elliott Avenue).
• Rent control or something like it. A reader named Dee writes, “I’ve heard enough horror stories and I feel Seattle is going in the same direction as San Francisco with the big money moving in, and people of low to moderate incomes becoming further displaced. My one hope is Seattle has strong working class roots with a bit of a socialist heart. I think enough educated people will become pissed off enough to make the noise which will lead to better changes.”
• A local, live hip-hop showcase club. For that, we might need–

• A city attorney who’s not a stooge for gentrification. Sure lotsa people hate the classist, possibly racist policies of Mark Sidran, but nobody even ran against him the last election.
• Saner liquor laws. The Washington Liquor Control Board was born in post-Prohibition times when the more “upstanding” elements of local society were worried at the threat of the wild-west saloon culture coming back. To this day, the liquor bureaucracy believes its mission to be keeping a tight lid on what adults can and cannot do on licensed premises while consuming legal drugs. A healthy urban society needs a strong nightlife industry; while the liquor bureaucrats are less restrictive in some aspects than they used to be, they’ve a ways to go toward abetting this the way other “regulatory” departments help the industries they lord over.
• A movie theater with booze. The truly-vast McMenamin’s brewpub empire in Portland has a couple of these. Up here, General Cinemas is planning to convert its low-profile multiplex at 130th & Aurora to a movie theater with food, but no word yet on a liquor license. Before Paul Allen bought the Cinerama theater downtown, another bidder on the property wanted to turn it into a viewing-‘n’-sipping establishment. The Rendezvous restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater has hosted many film screenings with full booze service. Some think there must be a Washington liquor regulation against booze and movies, but that appears to be not the case. Besides, if you can have sports bars with multiple big-screen TVs, you oughta be able to have a bar with a movie screen.
• A real winter bacchanale, not the tame bar-promotion event Fat Tuesday quickly became. Something with real joie de vivre. For that matter, our all-too-fair city could use a little less prudery overall. Scrap that ten-year “temporary” moratorium on new strip joints, so we could get one of those nice “gentleman’s clubs” your girlfriend’s not ashamed of you going to. Establish at least one public clothing-optional beach in the county. Even legalize (or at least decriminalize) prostitution, and make it a co-ed biz (old widows and middle-aged divorcees need love too, ya know).
• A bowling alley in or near downtown. Maybe one could go in part of the yet-unleased old Nordstrom complex, or in the Convention Center expansion (as a leisure amenity for tourists and locals alike).
• More spirit and less “attitude.”
• More democracy and less demographics.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)

WELCOME BACK TO THE ONE-&-ONLY ONLINE MISC., the pop-culture column that was as startled as you to find a full-color, almost full-page, atatomically-correct (more or less), side-view computer illustration of a male lower torso on the Lifestyles page of the 10/19 P-I. It was there, natch, for a long story encouraging prostate-cancer tests. But hey, if it takes the “educational” justification of a deadly disease to help demystify and de-demonize the Staff of Life, so be it.

STAGES: The Seattle Repertory Theatre now has a managing director named Benjamin Moore. So far, no scheduled productions of Paint Your Wagon.

AD OF THE WEEK (on the Stranger Bulletin Board page): “Lesbian Guitar Teacher.” Hmm, an instructor in the heretofore-underappreciated art of the Lesbian Guitar: I could go for the cheap anatomical-reference jokes every guitar student’s heard or said at one time, but instead will ponder “Lesbian Guitar” as a specific musical form. Could it be the ever-so-earnest acoustic fret-squeakin’ of Holly Near or Ferron? The somewhat more humanistic, yet still stolid, chord-thumpin’ of Phranc? The electrified “Torch and Twang” of early k.d. lang?

It’s the curse-in-disguise of all these women (and others of their various ilks) that they’re known first as statement-makers, second as stage presences, third as singers, and almost not at all as instrument-players. This neglect of the role of music in female-singer-songwriter-ing is at least partly responsible for the near-total lack of female instrumentalists on both Lilith Fair package tours. It dogged Bikini Kill throughout their career; it took that band’s co-leader Kathleen Hanna to start a whole new concept with a whole different instrumentation (Julie Ruin) for some critics to even notice that she’d been a darned-good musician all this time. (Lesbian-led bands that have gotten at least partial critical notice for their actual playing, such as Team Dresch, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Elsewhere in tune-land…

CLOSING TIME?: An NY Times story (10/15) discussed the precipitous decline of commercial rock as a music-biz force, noting sales charts now dominated by rap and rap/R&B hybrid acts. One quoted industry expert said “the Seattle bands” had been rock’s last best hope, but Nirvana ended and Pearl Jam got lost in its politics and the whole Rock Reformation got sidetracked. I’d put the blame on the suckiness of chain-run rock radio and MTV, which have bled the patient (themselves) to near-death with their repitition, selection of awful bland-rock acts, and stupidity. Of course, the suckiness of corporate rock radio (and of corporate rock promotion in general) is one of the things the Seattle bands had been trying to rebel against. Speaking of getting lost in politics…

BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK (seen in Belltown): “Chris Cornell for Mayor.” Actually, why not? If business success is the only prerequesite for a political career, Cornell sure counts. He and his Soundgarden bandmates started an enterprise from scratch, which grew steadily into a multimillion-buck operation that helped put Seattle on the music-biz map. (He’s even begun to assert a political worldview, having participated in that joint petition to Al Gore on behalf of old-growth forest preservation.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Steve Mandich’s Heinous #5 (the first issue in three years) is a professionally-written, DIY-printed mini-size zine, bound with strings of old audio-cassette tape. Topics include the Seattle Pilots (our ill-fated first MLB team), ’70s self-made celebrity The Human Fly, women’s motorcycle-jumping champ Debbie Lawler, rock records about Evel Knievel, and a Bob Newhart career retrospective for a change-O-pace. ($2 from P.O. Box 12065, Seattle 98102, or by email request to smandich@teleport.com.)

EX-LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Not only is commercial film production in Washington at an even lower ebb this year than last, but even MovieMaker, the slick magazine about indie filmmaking, suddenly moved from Seattle to L.A. over the summer. Does that mean no remaining hope for true indie (i.e., totally non-L.A.) filmmaking?

SCREEN PATTERNS: Actually, the reasons for the repertory program’s move to the Egyptian have little to do with the filmgoing tastes of college students and more with Landmark (née Seven Gables) Theaters’ schemes. 7G started repertory movies in Seattle at the Moore, which was where the Seattle International Film Festival also had started. Then Landmark came to town and bought the Neptune in the U District, driving 7G out of the repertory side of the biz until Landmark bought 7G. From there, Landmark decided to use the Neptune for hi-profile new releases, shunting the rep films to the smaller Varsity. Now it’s repositioning the Egyptian as the “Year Round Film Festival” theater.

(Still no word, by the way, about Landmark’s corporate fate. Last we heard, its current owner, financier John Kluge (who made a fortune selling five TV stations to Rupert Murdoch and promptly lost much of that fortune in Orion Pictures) had put the chain up for sale.) Meanwhile, Seattle’s other ex-locally-owned theater chain, the onetime Sterling Recreation Organization circuit now part of Cineplex Odeon, quietly had a change of management in recent months. CO’s now jointly owned by Sony and Seagram (whose respective studio units, Columbia and Universal, were the only major Golden Age Hollywood studios that hadn’t been connected to theater chains back in the ’40s).

MATERIAL BOY: Last week, I asked for your suggestions on new career moves I, your long-underemployed author, could take. A few of you didn’t quite get the “career” part of it (such as those who thought I should start a cable-access show or other unpaid stuff). Other responses generally fell into a few main categories, among them the following:

• 1. “Just write the same column but not about Seattle.” Easily the most common response. But not as easy as it sounds. Having observed the modest syndication success of Savage Love (one of only a half-dozen successful syndicated columns ever in “alternative” weeklies), I can appreciate the conceptual work required for one. I can’t just offer these papers an unlocal version of my regular commentary work, nor could I hook ’em on something their own staffs can produce (movie reviews, etc.). Besides, part of the whole point of this particular column concept is that it’s from one particular place at one particular time, even when it discusses the products of the far-off entertainment conglomerates. No, the Misc. shtick wouldn’t adapt well to the everywhere/nowhere of the national media universe. I’d have to start from scratch with a whole new column concept. (Which isn’t to say that I can’t or won’t.)
• 2. “Become a national magazine freelance writer.” There are prospects more depressing than the freelance life as lauded in old Writer’s Digest magazines (sitting in one’s home-office, sending the same “sure-fire” article proposals out to everybody from Grit to Cracked while cross-referencing all their rejections on index cards), but I can’t think of many right now.
• 3. “Chuck it all and go live (someplace warm) (in the country) (in NY/LA).” No; this little corner of Canadian-style propriety inside the U.S. (without Canada’s quaint accents or gun control or universal health care) is and will be my home. I could use some more travel, though. Anybody wanna fund my Searchin’-4-America book?
• 4. “Forget writing as a means of income, and take on a real career.” Thought about this one a lot, and still do. I’ve sent out lotsa resumes, attended the last High-Tech Career Expo, and scour the want ads for new exciting opportunities. Some of these pursuits (or at least fantasies about them) might lead to adventures or misadventures I’ll mention in future weeks. Imagine following me along as a taxi driver, meat cutter, stripper at bachelorette parties, legal assistant, or house painter.
• 5. “Go into business for yourself.” I am, to the extent I can afford to. This site may become more commercialized and more elaborate. The long-promised Best of Misc. book could appear as early as Xmas. There might be other assorted ventures as well. I’m already designing the T-shirts and looking at your-own-brand-on-the-box cereal makers. So while the global economy might be iffy, I’ll do everything possible to make Misc. World a more vibrant, economically robust place. Unless, of course, I win at Quinto one of these weeks.

TO CLOSE, some words-O-wisdom from the recently-deceased former TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Amory: “`Action-packed’ means the boys can’t act but the girls are stacked.”

(Our next reader quiz: What does Seattle need? The full essay and invite will appear in next week’s column, but you can send in your ideas now to clark@speakeasy.org.)