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CONFIDENTIAL TO THE ICON GRILL: Sorry, but I just can’t eat in a place that’s got all that glass art on display. Though your huge back-entrance archway reading “NONE OF US” is intiguing in a mysterious/incomprehensible sorta way.
IN PORT: If the local daily papers were as interested in servicing the mass of their readers as much as in kissing up to big advertisers, they’d have hyped the Old Navy opening just like they hyped the Nordstrom opening. They could’ve run a gushing editorial like this: “There have been many milestones in the transformation of downtown Seattle into one of the country’s most vibrant city centers, and there will be more before the year is out. But no one event embodies local history, business success, and civic accomplishment as does the opening of the new downtown Old Navy. The former I. Magnin building on Pine between Sixth and Seventh has been remodeled into an elegant, easy-to-shop Old Navy. The exterior art deco facade, which dates back to 1926, has been restored and lends a familiar grace to the the city’s now-bustling retail core. On this eve of the opening of Old Navy’s fourth-largest store in the country, we offer congratulations to an out-of-state chain that has prospered for nearly half a decade.”
BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS, this moderately-priced Son-Of-Gap chain has gone from zero to 400 stores in four years as part of an aggressive corporate strategy to become, as Gap’s annual report states, “not a retailer but a portfolio of global brands.” Its heavy emphasis on brand-logo T-shirts and sweatshirts means its customers pay to be the chain’s chief ad vehicle. And its relatively understated retro-chic look not only appeals to all ages, it might prevent or delay customers from aging beyond the place. This ain’t no plunder-and-split Viking contingent; it’s a well-equipped invasion fleet out to establish permanent colonial settlements. On the other side of the brow scale…
NOTES OF WORSHIP: The old multipurpose Opera House, with its acres of steak-house red wallpaper, symbolized a peripheral town trying (too hard?) to prove it had come of age. The new symphony hall, by contrast, symbolizes a civic establishment of Nordics and WASPs out to prove they’re so already-there they don’t need to shout their world-classness, just sit and bask in their own solemn collective presence; not unlike church ladies & gents. Indeed, from the organ pipes at the back of the stage to the dark paneling on the main hall’s relentlessly-angled walls to the seat-back brass plaques each honoring a different well-heeled donor (indeed, just about everything in the place except the toilets honors some rich person or company), the joint looks a lot like a tasteful mid-’60s Protestant church such as Plymouth Congregational or University Unitarian–only built to the scale of a suburban evangelical megachurch.
I was in the joint three times during its opening month. Two of those times, I stood in line in front of middle-aged boomers saying they hoped this prominent heart-O-downtown hall would help promote symphonic music to Those Kids Today. Both these overheard parties spoke under the unquestioned assumption that all Americans born after them were, virtually by definition, headbangin’ ingorami desperately needing conversion to the secular religion of high culture. As if these oldsters’ parents hadn’t said the exact same thing when the boomers were kids. As if there weren’t orchestral scores in every old movie and lots of recent movies (a few of which were recorded by the Seattle Symphony). As if the new leading-edge music here in town weren’t neo-improv and contemporary-composer stuff heavily based on hibrow and pre-rock traditions. As if such a huge cut of our dwindling public arts funding weren’t already going to arts-education programs (aside, that is, from the money going to auditorium-construction projects). No, most kids’ musical souls don’t need saving. But it’s nice to know some oldsters at least care.
(Next week: Goodbye to the Stranger edition of Misc.)
UPDATE: A loyal reader called to report some longer Greyhound routes already do offer in-bus movies, having had to endure Parenthood on the way to Vancouver.
THE SILVERY SKIN: Didn’t see as much of Bumbershoot as in prior years (either the crowds have finally gotten to me or my ongoing diet left me too carbo-depleted to stand in hot lines). But I did find out that the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ stadium show really could produce Lindy hopping in the moshpit.
I also saw a few dozen wholesome grownups watch an hour of ’30s-’40s stripper movies (projected in an outdoor courtyard) without turning into rampaging degenerates. On a beautiful night, in a beautiful setting (right by the atomic neon art near the North Court meeting rooms), a mixed-gender audience got to witness beautiful B&W footage of beautiful women (including burlesque legend Sally Rand and someone billed on the re-release print as Marilyn Monroe, though I have my doubts) making beautiful moves in beautiful costumes of various small sizes.
After the dance shorts, the projector was stopped while various bigwigs conferred whether to show an encore segment. When they finally gave their OK, the crowd saw 10 minutes of naughty-funny XXX animations from the early ’30s (gags involved beastiality, oversized and detachable penises, and copyright-violating renditions of Krazy Kat and Bosko). As the audience strolled happily into the night, I realized the end-of-porn essay in this paper last month was right when it proclaimed a truly vital city needs a healthy element of public vice. There’s nothing like a little good clean sex to bring people together. These exhibitions like these also help prove the apparently little-known fact that people have been having sex since before you were born.
COMING HOME TO ROOST: Seattle’s affordable-housing crisis can be interpreted as a counterpart to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription for third-world economies: Enforce “austerity measures” on the masses, so a caste of financiers and speculators can have unfettered opportunities. Just as IMF shock-treatments are officially justified as being for everybody’s ultimate trickle-down benefit, Mayor Paul Schell’s proposed tax-and-zoning breaks for big condo developers are being touted as help for the thousands of citizens being priced out by the very developments Schell wants to further encourage.
Another intrepretation: When Schell became mayor, he inherited a municipal establishment that for over a decade had actively pursued a system of policies intended to prevent Seattle from becoming one of those islands of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence. We’ve had a government/ business elite devoted almost exclusively toward making Seattle’s population as upscale as possible–not by improving the lot of those already here, but by encouraging the upscale to move and stay here (and by almost criminalizing the underclass, when and where that was deemed necessary). You could see it in Rice’s caving in to Nordstrom’s every demand; in the school district’s use of busing to prop up enrollment in affluent-neighborhood schools; in the developer-friendly Urban Village and Seattle Commons schemes; and in city attorney Mark Sidran’s crackdowns against anyone too publicly black, young, or unmellow. If the pursuit of demographic purity meant other populations were discouraged (actively or passively), even when it made a joke of our professed love of “diversity,” it was considered a necessary cost.
But now, it’s gone far enough to price middle- and upper-middle-class folk out of Seattle–the core voter base of Seattle’s pro-corporate Democrat machine. So the insiders are reconsidering their policy of demographic cleansing, at least on the PR level. They’re talking about providing special incentives to make homes affordable to the merely well-off instead of just the really-really rich.
It’s way too little, and for the politicians it might be too late. If the “single-family neighborhood” populists who stopped the Commons and the Urban Villages spread the idea that Schell’s scheme will help only developers by encouraging more replacement of existing affordable housing by new “market rate” units, we could witness a movement that could eventually topple the municipal regime like, well, a house of cards.
The Best of Anime
Record review for The Stranger, 9/15/98
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Best of Anime
(Rhino)
Most people I know who come across Japanese animation, or anime, first see it as an alternative to American formula fantasy entertainment. It doesn’t take long before they realize anime’s just a different set of formulae. Those who stick with it do so because they happen to like those formulae, including those of the music.
Rhino’s assembled not the all-time best Japanese-animation music, but a sample of fully-competent commercial pop anthems from such films and series as Megazone 23, Gunbuster, Silent Mobius, Macross Plus, and Devil Hunter Yohko (all with female “idol singer” vocals).
Amid the action themes, two gentle, haunting ballads stand out as the disc’s best: “Beautiful Planet” (from the film Windaria) and “Voices” (from the TV series Macross Plus).
A handful of English-dubbed TV themes (Gigantor, Speed Racer, Astroboy, Sailor Moon) are tacked onto the disc’s start and end, almost as afterthoughts.
MISC. is the column asking the musical question: Would you even want to live in the same building with the maniacally-grinning GQ models depicted in all those condo ads?
UPDATE #1: Tosco, which runs gas stations under the BP brand in Washington, sez it’ll keep that name up for the time being, even though BP’s own stations in other regions will switch when BP takes over the Amoco brand. (Confused? Good.)…
UPDATE #2: QFC, having absorbed Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, is now taking over another of the top Seattle indie supermarkets, the gargantuan and lavish Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. Art’s was originally a multi-store strip mall containing both an Art’s supermarket (the last of what had been a five-store chain) and a Marketime drug-variety store. Fred Meyer bought Marketime in the ’60s, then unloaded its half of the Holman Road complex to Art’s (which kept many of the Marketime merchandise departments, making it what the French call a “hypermarket”). Now that Fred Meyer’s already bought QFC last year, it’s got the whole complex back. (Still confused? Good.)
HELD IN CHECK: Seafirst now has “Celebrate Diversity” checks, in a sort-of rainbow design–only this “diverse” colorscape is all mellow and pale. A lot like Seattle in general….
TOO CLOTHES FOR COMFORT: After a couple of weeks, I think the new Nordstrom store looks a LOT like the Forum Shops mall at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a place that doesn’t even pretend to be sublime or understated. It was made clear from the start that nothing recognizable from Frederick’s, except for the exterior facade and the thick supporting posts, would be preserved. (Even the elevator and escalator shafts were moved.) But I don’t think many expected the new store’s total in-your-face experience of New Money, all proud and boastful and coldly showoffy yet trying conspicuously to be proper. If Bloomie’s or Saks had installed such a store, everybody’d complain how indiscreetly un-Seattle it was.
MILLENNIUM BUGGY: The Year 2000 Computer Problem hysteria hasn’t spawned a new survivalist cult, as some commentators and periodicals have claimed; but it has breathed new life into existing cults. The “head for the hills with canned goods and guns and gold” folks, having missed out (so far) on predicted apocalypses (apocali?) involving nukes, race riots, U.N. “black helicopters,” oil shortages, etc. etc., now get to invoke a simple yet oft-misunderstood software-upgrade failure as their new premise to solicit converts and customers–a premise conveniently scheduled on a date steeped in religious mysteries and referenced by prophets from Nostradamus to Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Criswell.
Many of the “Y2K” doomsday scenarios promoted by the survivalists read less like knowledgeable tech writing and more like excuses to shoehorn in pre-existing survivalist dogma. Like the parts about inner cities turning into instant war zones while the rural inland west remains serene and posse-protected. Not only does this line ignore that over half the country now lives in suburbs, it ignores that major metro areas are usually the first to get upgraded civic electronics, while the countryside’s still stuck with some of the most antiquated phone and power-delivery systems–the ones most likely to not get fixed so their databases understand years that don’t start with “19.”
What the alarmists get right is how nearly everything in the modern world (air-traffic control, oil refineries, long-distance lines, Social Security, medical equipment, stock markets) is intertwined in mainframe-computer networks, the real “world wide web.”
But the Y2K problem won’t crash everything at once. It just means companies and governments that let these unprofitable but necessary system upgrades slide now have to implement them at once.
At the least it’ll mean a hit on most everybody’s financial bottom lines for the next two years; draining cash-flows and spurring various degrees of layoffs. At worst, some of the various software/ hardware fixes around the world might not be ready (or adequately tested) in time, so some databases might have to be put off-line for a few weeks and some utility and industrial-control systems might have to be switched to planned backup mechanisms. In an absolute-worst plausibility, some fixes that were thought to work won’t, causing scattered system crashes. And some stand-alone industrial machines with pre-programmed computer chips inside might hiccup; but even most of those failures should be predictable and worked around.
So don’t give in to the fear-profiteers in the canned-food and gun industries. If you want to believe in a Biblical-style apocalypse, remember the verse about how mankind “knoweth not the day nor the hour.”
(More good readin’ about this topic is in Paul Kedrosky’s recent essay at Rewired.)
IN STORE: Borders Books held an Ally McBeal fan party and trivia competition on 8/20. Seeing this tribute to gushily pathetic “vulnerability” next to the diet and fashion books brought me a revelation: Ally isn’t a sex-object fantasy, it’s a target-marketing fantasy. An attempt at female-oriented counterprogramming opposite the male-targeted Monday Night Football and cable pro-wrestling shows, built around the most exploitive stereotypes from modern women’s-magazine articles. Of course, that’s just as antithetical to feminist precepts as any sex-object fantasy would be.
(The same store is now selling official “Windows 98 Roast” brand coffee. Sometimes it’s hard to keep my vow to never write a coffee joke in the column.)
LOOSENING UP: The week of the Clinton quasi-confession (an attempt to defuse the “family-values” demagogues’ attacks) was the same week Rupert Murdoch took over Pat Robertson’s Family Channel, turning it into Fox Family (a repository for former Fox Kids Network cartoons, plus such non-700 Club material as Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns and a Spice Girls special). The ol’ squeaky-cleanness just didn’t produce Murdoch’s desired profit rate. A potential omen to PaxNet, the UHF broadcast network to launch this week with a format even squeakier than Family used to have.
THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD: The Oldsmobile Sihlouette Premiere, a forthcoming minivan, will offer a built-in VCR and an LED video screen (out of the driver’s view). Besides wondering if the GM-installed machine will try to scramble any attempted viewing of Roger and Me, imagine the possibilities:
Some Amtrak trains, and some European intercity bus lines, already have ground-level “in-flight movies;” no reason Greyhound couldn’t do the same (or for that matter, the Green Tortoise would be the perfect venue for watching Half Baked!).
FILLING THE BILL: I’d fantasized about doing it for years, but now it’s been done: A Vancouver band has taken my all-time wannabe band name, the Special Guests. They never headline a gig, but they’ve opened for everybody! (Until this happened, I appeared to be the only person whose favorite wannabe band name wasn’t “Free Beer.”)
TAKING UP THE SLACK: I don’t read the Wall St. Journal every day, so it took an attentive reader to let me know I’d missed its 8/6/98 front-page story on the last of the slackers congregating in Seattle, where supposedly “Good Times Are Bad” for goateed Caucasians wishing to identify themselves as victims of a no-future society.
Writer Christina Duff took a rather snide attitude toward young-adult males who dared refuse to join in the WSJ-proclaimed great boom economy: “Their ranks thinning everywhere, many aging slackers are congregating in Seattle, as if circling the grunge wagons…. The slackers’ last refuge here is the Capitol Hill area, where tattooed 20-somethings walk the streets giving hugs and high-fives…. Faced with the depressing news that things aren’t as depressing anymore, some are shamed into shedding their angst.”
Of particular scorn was one D.J. Thompson, belittled for choosing to only work part-time pouring coffee while his girlfriend pursued a Real Career.
Duff’s kinder to “ex-slacker Joanne Hernon,” now “a computer consultant for law firms” with unkind words for her former fellow Linda’s barflies: “They feel they need to be on the outskirts. Keep themselves in a poor position. Blame everyone but themselves. It’s easy to make money these days.”
Duff and Hernon don’t say how it’s easier for some (such as, admittedly, pale-skinned young-adult college grads) to make money than others; or how relative prosperity can more folks the option to choose not to devote their whole lives to material pursuits or the kissing of boss-butt. (Besides, Seattle’s currently up-‘n’-coming Boho-hood isn’t the maturing Capitol Hill but Georgetown.)
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
THE 1998 MISC. MIDSUMMER READING LIST: For the second year, we’ve a pile of old and new bound verbiage (in no particular order) to recommend as mental companions while you sit in airports, on ferry docks, in the breakfast nooks of RVs, in rain-pelted tents, and wherever else you’re spending your summer leisure hours.
The Ruins, Trace Farrell. In the ’80s I was involved in “Invisible Seattle,” a group of writers who (among other exercises) fantasized about an alternate-universe Seatown with Old World traditions and grit. This is what local author Farrell’s accomplished in her hilarous parable of working-class discipline vs. New Money hedonism; set in an Old World seaport town but based on a real Seattle supper club and on Seattle’s current caste-and-culture wars.
The Incomparable Atuk, Mordecai Richler. From the Great Canadian Novelist, a 1963 fable still relevant amid today’s Paul Simonized nobel-savage stereotypes. Atuk’s a supposedly innocent native boy from the Northwest Territories who’s brought to Toronto as part of a mining company’s publicity stunt, and who quickly falls right in with the city folk’s hustling and corruption.
Machine Beauty, David Gelernter. One of these skinny essay-books everybody’s putting out today; only this one’s in hardcover. The premise is admirable (advocating simplicity and elegance in the design of industrial products and computer software), but it’d have been better if it were longer, with more examples and illustrations.
Consilience, Edward O. Wilson. Giant essay-book by biologist Wilson, who proposes all human behavior (and indeed all knowledge) can be ultimately traced to biology and physics. He puts up a solid defense, but I still disagree. To me, the world isn’t a tree with a single trunk but a forest of interdependent influences. Life is complexity; deal with it.
The Taste of a Man, Slavenka Drakulic. For “erotic horror” fans, a novel of psychosexual madness by the Croatian author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Not much laughing here; just a heroine who takes the female sex-metaphors of absorption and consumption to their logical extreme.
Self Help, Lonnie Moore. Short stories by the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, reworking women’s-magazine clichés into a far less “motivational” but more realistic worldview.
Coyote v. Acme, Ian Frazier. Light yet biting li’l funny stories like the old-old New Yorker used to run. The cast includes a cartoon lawyer, a Satanist college president, Bob Hope, Stalin, Mary Tyler Moore, and “the bank with your money on its mind.”
Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, and Terry Hong. Asia’s economies are on the ropes but Asia’s pop cultures are going strong, as shown in this breezy coffee-table intro to everything from pachinko and sumo to Jackie Chan and Akira Kurosawa.
Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey. For all haters of expensive bad movies, essays and interviews depicting Hollywood as irrepairably corrupt and inane (and offering the porn biz as an example of a slightly more honest alternative).
Behind Closed Doors, Alina Reyes. An ’80s teen-romance series, 2 Sides of Love, told its stories from the girl’s point of view on one side of the book and the boy’s on the other. Reyes (author of The Butcher and Other Erotica) applies this gimmick to more explicit sex-fantasies, putting her two protagonists through separate assorted sexcapades in assorted dreamlike settings with assorted opposite- and same-sex partners before they finally come together at the middle.
Soap Opera, Alecia Swasy. Intrigued by Richard Powers’ corporate-greed novel Gain (based on Procter & Gamble, and named for one of its detergents)? This real, unauthorized P&G history (named for the broadcast genre P&G helped invent) is even stranger.
Underworld, Don DeLillo. Mega-novel spanning four decades and about many things, principally the U.S. power shift from the northeast (symbolized by NYC’s old baseball dominance) toward the inland west (symbolized by chain-owned landfills). But with the Yankees back in dynasty mode, and financiers now overwhelmingly more influential than industry (particularly resource-based western industry), DeLillo’s march-of-history premise seems like reverse nostalgia.
The Frequency of Souls, Mary Kay Zuravleff. The best short comic novel ever written about refrigerator designers with psychic powers.
AND A READER SELECTION of sorts:
Subject: Northwest Lit Sent: 7/26/98 5:29 PM Received: 7/26/98 5:36 PM From: LSchnei781@aol.com To: clark@speakeasy.org
Clark:
Your review of the above subject completely ignored the best of the lot–Ivan Doig. Here in Fort Wayne IN where more books are read per capita than in any other city in America (there just isn’t much else to do), Mr Doig’s books enjoy a wide readership, and he is considered by many of us to be in the first rank of contemporary American writers. Lynn Schneider (LSchnei781@aol.com)
WELCOME TO A MIDSUMMER’S MISC., the pop-culture column that hereby calls for a one-year moratorium on any further motion pictures depicting the violent destruction of computer-generated replicas of New York City.
UPDATE: The Cyclops restaurant, closed last year when its building was demolished in the Belltown redevelopment mania, will be reborn later this summer as a beneficiary of that same mania. It’ll be in a part of the ex-Peneil Mission/ Operation Nightwatch building, whose new landlords wanted more potentially lucrative tenants than the perenially underfunded social-service sector could provide. Since the building’s side sports half a faded old Pepsi sign blending into half a faded Seven-Up sign (the two have long had the same local bottler, which was once based in that building), it’d only be appropriate if a mixture of the two took a place on the beverage menu…. In other real-estate news, the nearby Casbah Cinema’s turned its SIFF-month closure into an indefinite one. The beautiful screening room in an alley location without dedicated parking is still for sale. And the former U District Clothestime juniors’ clothing store is now a National Guard recruiting office (talk about your yin/yang dualities).
OVERREACTION DEPT.: The supposed “gang riot” last Saturday at the Fun Forest was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, really just either an argument or an exhibition of horseplay by a handful of rowdy teens; climaxing either with a few gunshots into the air or (more likely) firecrackers. The ensuing scramble among sweaty, crowded kids set cops scrambling into crisis mode and herding all opposite-race youths off of the grounds. Live TV reporters got all hussied-up about a Sudden Threat to Public Safety, while the kids passing by just giggled or mugged it up to the cameras–this was a big Dionysian revel that had merely gotten a bit out of hand, not the huge angry mob depicted. More telling was the scene the following late afternoon, in which teams of cops with plastic face masks and billy clubs shooed any and all groups of three or more young Af-Ams not just off the Center property but out of the larger vicinity. It’s not just the Sidran gang and the anti-affirmative-action cadre who fear blacks, particularly young blacks. The fear is ingrained in the popular image of a clean, ordered city where everybody’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Lots of real Af-Ams are just like that, of course; but lots of whites still think (consciously or sub-) that Black + Young = Gangsta. (White teens can get rowdy too, but tend not to inspire such wholesale crackdowns.) Elsewhere last weekend…
DAYS-O-FUTURE PASSED: The Mariners’ Turn Ahead the Clock Night promotion, with uniforms and stadium signage supposedly harkening forward to 2027, finally let the Nintendo people put their graphic stamp on the team they co-own, at least for a one-game gimmick. The oversize, maroon-and-black, not-tucked-in jerseys with the huge, tilted logos and the “Xtreme-sports” style lettering, accessorized with metallic-colored batting helmets and racing-stripe pants legs, harkened back to an early-’90s computer-game interpretation of cyberpunk’s retro-modernism. Of course, it was all completely antithetical to the modern-retroism of the new Mariner stadium; so no regular Ms’ uniforms will probably ever look like that. (‘Twas also fun to ponder the fake out-of-town scoreboard listings for Venus and Mercury. If you think the thin air in Denver affects the game…)
DESIGNS FOR LIVING: A bookseller of my acquaintance recently tipped me off to one of the nonsexual passages (yes, there are several) in the Kama Sutra: a list of “the sixty-four arts and sciences to be studied” by a learned man or woman. They include some universals (“singing,” “dancing,” “tattooing”), some obscure-around-these-parts cultural practices (“binding of turbans and chaplets”), and some practical matters of life in ancient India (“storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs”). Anyhow, it’s inspired me to compile 64 arts and disciplines (from the practical to the spiritual to the just plain fun) a modern person should know. As always, I’d like your suggestions, to clark@speakeasy.org. Results will appear in this space in three weeks.
(Here’s a link to the original Kama Sutra list)
(Next week: The 1998 Misc. Summer Reading List.)
One Disaster Movie
and
One Disastrous Movie
Film feature for The Stranger, 6/28/98
ON THE BEACH
(dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959)
Local oldtimers remember when Stanley Kramer lived here in the ’80s and hosted KCPQ’s Sunday-night movies. He was always trying to make a statement, but usually took every commercial break to try to meander back to his original point, usually unsuccessfully. Here, though, he makes his point early and blatantly. In Aussie novelist Nevil Shute’s story, the Yanks and Russkies have fired their nukes in 1964, destroying most of civilization. Australia wasn’t hit, but the radiation clouds are on the way; so, as Ava Gardner’s character sighs, “There isn’t time. No time to love. Nothing to remember. Nothing worth remembering.” Well, actually there’s time for Gardner to fall for U.S. submarine captain Gregory Peck, for Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins to try to keep up the townspeople’s spirits somehow, for a brass band to play one last round of “Waltzing Matilda,” and for one lingering B&W shot of Melbourne’s eventually-lifeless streets. The spookiest antinuke flick of them all (including the ’80s TV ones), precisely becuase of its lack of onscreen gore.
RENALDO AND CLARA
(dir. Bob Dylan, 1978)
After Dylan mumbled through his role in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), the Voice of a Generation apparently thought he could act–and even direct! So when he made a filmed record of his 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, he padded it out to five hours with fictionalized backstage antics, incoherent pontifications, and sub-dinner-theater acting. Dylan plays the “ambiguous” Renaldo (as described by the All-Movie Guide). His then-wife Sara plays Clara. Ronnie Hawkins and Ronee Blakely play Bob and Sara Dylan. Joan Baez plays The Woman In White. Bob Neuwirth plays The Masked Tortilla. Sam Shepard (his on-screen debut) and Harry Dean Stanton attempt to add professionalism. Dylan and Shepard share the writing credit/blame. After its box-office failure, Dylan issued a two-hour cut of just the music (including Arlo Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, and an out-of-place Roberta Flack). Neither version’s easy to find.
BEEN AWHILE SINCE MISC.’S “Local Publications of the Week” department appeared, so we’ve a healthy backlog of printed treats to review. (As this is the last week of a month, some periodicals listed here might be succeeded by newer editions by the time you read this.)
Pioneer Square Gazette. Issue #3 of this occasional business-booster tabloid is still out at some drop-off spots in the neighborhood, and includes a revealing essay by Bradley Scharf about what he considers “the wrong lessons” of neighborhood growth. Among the ideas Scharf considers to be myths in need of shattering: the notion that preserving artists’ lofts from condo-conversion is a good thing. (Free from the Pioneer Square Community Council, 157 Yesler Way, #410, Seattle 98104.)
Voltage. There’ve been industrial/goth/dark music zines here over the years, but this is easily the slickest. Issue #6 has an extensive local-music section, a review of local dystopian novelist Ron Dakron, and an extremely dark-yet-funny column of supposed suicide advice (such as picking the proper rope for your body weight). (Free plus postage from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.)
Words & Pictures. Marvel’s bankruptcy aside, there’s still an audience for action-hero comic books (and related entertainments such as action-hero novels, movies, posters, etc.) and Eric Burris’s zine is this audience’s local voice. Issue #8 features a tribute to the late Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby. (Free plus postage from P.O. Box 27784, Seattle 98125.)
Feedback. Paul Allen’s sold off of his companies this past year, so he’s got even more cash to spend on his Experience Music Project museum and this, its house organ. It’s grown from a li’l CD-sized pamphlet to a giant 24-pp. poster book, with nearly every page suitable for framing. Vol. 4 No. 1 includes pieces on Sleater-Kinney, Buck Owens’s local past, Seattle punksters the U-Men, and old punk posters. (Free from 110 110th Ave. NE, #400, Bellevue 98004-9990.)
Platform. “Edition D” of the occasional theater-insiders’ mag’s got a big feature on the art of costuming, a profile of stage photographer Chris Bennion, and a semiserious suggestion for an annual Seattle Theater Parade. (Send a big envelope and $.78 in stamps to 313 10th Ave. E. #1, Seattle 98102.)
Blackstockings. Editor Morgan Elene’s leaving the editor’s desk at this newsletter for strippers and other sex workers. Her last ish (Vol. 2 No. 8 ) is as outspoken as ever; with a semihumorous list of “The Pros and Cons of Being a Sex Worker” (more “Pros” than “Cons”) and a how-to piece on going to work for an escort service. (Free at Left Bank Books, Toys in Babeband, Pistil Books, Red & Black, and other outlets; or with postage from P.O. Box 18571, Seattle 98118.)
Black Sheep. A new leftist/ anarchist monthly with some thought behind its tirades. Issue #1 discusses Tibet, NAFTA, the Jobs With Justice campaign, Michael Moore’s film The Big One, local rallies in support of California farm workers (but with no mention of Washington farm workers), and an obscure 1919 state law (still on the books) banning anarchist or radical-labor assemblies. (Six issues for $8 from Singularity Press, 1016 NW 65th, Seattle 98117.)
Hotty. Local music promoters Julianne Anderson and Jenny Bendel’s new zine elaborates on an idea recently promoted in these pages by Kathleen Wilson–that it’s perfectly OK for a woman to enjoy rocker boys’ sex appeal. Each co-editor has control over her own half of the magazine, each presenting a sequence of four skinny doodz with well-coifed hair and snarly smiles (all photographed by Celeste Willinger). While Bendel insists the whole thing’s simply an excuse for her and Anderson to be “silly and self indulgent,” I’d say it means something more. Like the Sensitive Geek Boys Calendar discussed here in January, it dares to nonchanantly assert “sex positive” womanhood isn’t just for lesbians and dominatrices anymore. In its silly, self-indulgent way, Hotty proves it’s perfectly natural for a woman to actually like men. (Subscription info: P.O. Box 95765, Seattle 98145, or email Bfleckman@aol.com.)
UPDATE: Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady peep-show photos will get a display in Seattle after all. After the Seattle Art Museum said it’d show tamer images from Langley’s photo book, then chickened out, the Linda Cannon Gallery announced an uncensored Langley exhibit, opening June 4. Speaking of images and misunderstandings…
INK SLINGIN’: The Newspaper Association of America’s running ads on MTV, pleading for the kids to “Read a Newspaper Every Day.” Not that the publishers are gonna make papers any less parochial or conservative or bland; nor are they gonna stop stereotyping teenagers as dumb thugs and young adults as soulless slackers. Speaking of media and attitude problems…
ONE LAST `SEINFELD’ ITEM: The Variety Club held a “Sein-Off” benefit party at the Paramount last Thursday. You could support kids’ charities by showing your admiration for a show about total selfishness, that ’90s too-hip-to-care attitude-schmattitude so big in today’s Global Business zeitgeist. Speaking of corporate aggression…
THOTS ON THE VIDEO RELEASE OF `ANASTASIA’: Why hadn’t I realized it before? The total symmetry of a movie made under the auspices of that would-be emporer Murdoch, at a studio he built in Phoenix for anti-union purposes (AZ’s a “right-to-work” state), depicting the world of the Russian czars as a lost Golden Age–an age depicted as having been destroyed not due to a workers’ revolt, or even due to military conquerors who exploited a workers’ revolt, but by an individual villain within the aristocracy. Speaking of modern-day empires…
THE MERGE LANE: So Chrysler’s gonna let itself be bought out by Daimler-Benz, makers of Mercedes snobmobiles (and of the infinitely cooler Freightliner trucks). This means the Germans will now own the Jeep trademark, originally coined to describe the U.S. Army’s “general purpose” vehicles in WWII. However, we ought to think of this as an opportunity to wring some favors out of the company during the antitrust and SEC approval hearings. Let ’em merge, I say, if they promise to (a) bring that ultracool tiny Mercedes/Swatch Smart Car to America; (b) fire the Dodge commercial spokesdork and bring back Ricardo Montalban; (c) re-introduce some Chrysler Chlassics like the Dart Swinger and the Plymouth Duster (not to mention some of those old American Motors cars Chrysler now owns the rights to, like the AMX and the Pacer!); and (d) pay to track down, buy up, and melt down all K Cars still on the road. Speaking of the romance of industrial design…
JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Two companies are selling candies in containers that look exactly like computer mice. Candy Mouse tarts, made in Mexico by a Wrigley subsidiary, taste like SweeTarts but are shaped like pet-mouse food pellets. Web Fuel mints (“Cool Mints! Cool Sites!”), made in Holland for NYC-based World Packaging, are triangular faux-Altoids; the paper wrapping inside the aluminum box is printed with addresses of “cool” websites, including that of local kids’-computer-game firm Headbone. The Candy Mouse container looks like a two-button PC mouse and costs less than the Web Fuel box, which looks like a one-button Macintosh mouse and holds a tastier, more powerful product. (Both are at Walgreen’s.) Speaking of the march of modernity…
BIG STADIUM FALL DOWN AND GO BOOM: It’s more or less official. The homely yet homey home of Griffey and the Big Unit, of the Sonics’ 1979 championship, of Promise Keeper rallies and U2 shows and monster trucks and Boeing strike votes, will go away, almost certainly in one spectacular implosion. But when? If our area politicians had succeeded in attracting the 2000 Democratic National Convention, the Kingdome would probably have had to stay up until that August. But now that the Dems have removed Seattle from their list of convention hopefuls, the Dome can go boom whenever the exhibition facility in the south lot, between the Dome and the new baseball field, is done. Work on the exhibition hall can’t really start until the adjacent new baseball stadium’s complete, sometime around July 1999. Likely, that won’t allow for an implosion party on the big Millennial New Year’s, alas.
IT’S A POST-MAY-DAY MISC., the column that had almost gotten used to the idea of the Mariners re-becoming the hapless team of old. Then they got better again. In the next few weeks: Who knows?
SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE #15: Gus Van Sant’s directed a music video for Hanson.
RIDIN’: After the item last month about the Mercedes/Swatch Smart car (a mini-minicar to be sold only in Europe), a local outfit called Electric Vehicles Northwest wrote in to plug its new Twike machine, designed in Switzerland and to be assembled here from imported components. The sleek, three-wheeled two-seater has an 8.7-foot-long aluminum/glass bubble body, an AC motor capable of 25-40 miles between charges (at up to 52 m.p.h.), and even supplemental bike-pedal propulsion. What’s not mini is the price–$16,500.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ole is a line of fruit flavored, sweetened milk beverages; sort of an Asian style (made in Calif.) version of Strawberry Quik, but better-tasting (and in a wider variety of flavors). Just don’t mix Ole and Oly. (Though an Ole might help soothe your stomach after one too many Olys.) Available at Rite Aid and at ALFI, the convenience store across from GameWorks (for the time being).
STRAIT OUTTA COMPTON: Local TV news in Seattle, while increasingly obsesssed with “team coverage” of mayhem and disaster stories, is still slightly better here than it’s become in some other cities. One reason was KING’s Compton Report, a one-host, one-topic-per-show weekly half hour that combined intelligent reporting with slick videography and editing (while avoiding the PB-esque pomposity that’s helped make “documentary” a four-letter word among TV execs). Jim Compton himself was totally squaresville, but that was his charm. Now, though, the program’s on its way out. Compton accepted an early-retirement offer from the station. He’s not commenting on the split, but does say he’ll try to get another gig in town (acqaintances say he’s looked into starting a magazine). KING promises to replace his Sunday-evening show with another news-magazine format (look for something devised as a lead-in to Dateline NBC).
IT’S NOT JUST HERE: USA Today reported late last month on the gentrification of Chicago, with mayor Richard Daley fils presiding over the closing down of a popular sidewalk flea market and most downtown newsstands, all in the name of an upscale/bland vision of “beautification.” Daley’s next scheme: Establishing a sidewalk-restaurant row along the once-toxic Chicago River (for those few weeks a year it’s neither too cold nor too hot to spend an appreciable amount of time outside). Of course, Chi-town’s been at the upscaling game for over a decade now, replacing artists’ lofts (particularly along the aforementioned river) with condos and goofy theme restaurants, then putting up street banners proclaiming the former artists’ streets as “The Artistic Neighborhood.” Speaking of which…
EN `GARDE’: A kindly reader spotted the following graffito on a recent trip to Montreal: “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.” Actually, it’s not as cynical a notion as it might first sound. Remember, the term “avant-garde” originally meant the the vanguard of an advancing army (i.e., the shock troops). The notion, which goes counter to the more currently fashionable image of the permanently underground art world, was that the cutting-edge artists led where the rest of us followed. So it’d only be natural to extend that metaphor into formerly industrial urban neighborhoods as well as urbane aesthetic styles.
PASSAGE (German director Ulli Lommel, interviewed in Ian Grey’s Hollywood-expose book Sex, Stupidity, and Greed): “Americans are caught up in this American Dream, yet at the same time, in order to service that dream, they have to constantly deny what people are really like, what they really want…. You really like to do something but you don’t tell anybody because you hate yourself so much for doing it so you have to persecute everybody for doing what you are doing.”
> ON THE LINE: Jack Whisner, a transit planner for King County, left a phone message claiming Misc. was wrong to describe planned north-Seattle bus changes as favoring commuters instead of the voluntarily carless. He asserts the proposals are really meant to increase cross-town routes, so more people can ride from one neighborhood to another without having to transfer downtown. However, I’ve still got reservations about the scheme. Since the county wants to shovel most new-service bucks toward the ‘burbs, some new in-town routes may start as weekday-only, daytime-only services, and some existing routes some folk have become accustomed to might be cut back or even dropped. Public hearings and comments on the scheme are now being taken; call 684-1162 for details.
THE MAILBAG: Our item a couple weeks back, seeking a replacement term for the ’80s relic “yuppie,” engendered this email response from Bryan Alexander of Louisiana: “Liking your emphasis on their aging, how about `boomer geezers’? Returning to the acronym, how about `ayuppies’ (aging young urban etc.) or `dyuppies’ (decrepit etc.), which raise both senesence and the victims’ delusions of perpetual youth? The former is a more Southern pronounciation, the latter nearly Slavic.” Jesse Walker, meanwhile, takes umbrage at a throwaway line in the original column item which claimed the young adult bourgeoisie didn’t share its elders’ taste for bland pop songs. Walker felt I was wrong to “put Bonnie Raitt on the same level as James Taylor. And what about the revived popularity of the uber-bland Elton John?” John, of course, never really went away, at least not from Lite FM stations. A more serious challenge to my remark might involve the younger Lite FM stars (F. Apple, S. Crow, et al.).
SWANKOSITY: The Pampas Club opening was like a scene out of the 1990 debutante movie Metropolitan, with exquisitely-dressed rich kids of a type I’d not previously known to exist here, all in the former site of the raucous My Suzie’s and Hawaiian-kitsch Trade Winds. It reminds me of a scene in the memoir of a Depression-era UK left activist. After living through nearly three decades of mass deprivation due to the depression, the war, and Europe’s lengthy postwar slump, he was shocked and astonished to find teenagers running around the streets of late-’50s London with the cash to spend on clothes and music and partyin’.
One side effect: The new Belltown wine-‘n’-dine clientele is, on the whole, much better-behaved in public than the Bud Light-chugging fratbar crowd more common in the neighborhood two or three years ago.
Another side effect: The ex-Sailors Union building where Pampas, El Goucho, and the (separately owned) Casbah Cinema are is right across from Operation Nightwatch, where homeless folk line up for shelter-bed tix. What used to be called “limo liberals” climb out of pug-ugly Mercedes SUVs, only to witness the less-than-formally dressed standing and arguing and cussing in line. While few affluent persons feel personally responsible for an economy that creates a few “winners” and a lot of others, maybe the sight will at least give some “winners” a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God humility. In other economix thots…
BUBBLE BURSTING?: Many of Seattle’s art-world and “alternative” denizens like to think they’re not part of the planes-and-software boom economy. But we’re all affected. I’m writing here soon about some of the writers and artists with day jobs at Microsoft. There are also plenty of actors, playwrights, cartoonists, photographers, illustrators, videographers, graphic designers, and audio engineers toiling away at assorted high-tech outfits on both sides of the lake, and at these companies’ subcontractors and spinoff firms. With the ripple effect of these bucks passing among retailers, landlords, etc., the commercial underpinnings of local alt-culture haven’t been higher.
So are its potential commercial underminings. As the Stranger‘s already mentioned, there’s a housing crisis threatening the fiscal well-being of most anybody who’s not rich. When housing prices go up, they seldom go back down. So if the Asian economic slump ravages Boeing and agribusiness exports, and if fears of a coming market saturation in the computer biz come true, even more of us will be scrambling for the remaining affordable abodes.
WHEN `REAL’ ISN’T: I’d long ago defined porn as fantasies for purposes of masturbation, and early-’90s cyberporn as fantasies about masturbation. Sex robots, “dildonics,” virtual reality glasses, dream machines, holograms–whatever you call the schticks in cyberporn fiction, they’re still mere get-off gadgets, means to avoid the sacred confusion that is interpersonal contact.
So it’s not surprising to hear all the hype surrounding a California (natch) company called Real Doll, promising a partial fulfillment of one common cyberporn schtick. For $5,000 or so they’ll custom-build a full-size plastic version of your dream woman (they say they’re thinking of adding a male-doll line later). They promise the look and feel of real flesh, hair, and bone-muscle structure, in a variety of heights, bust sizes, and skin and hair colors. The pictures I’ve seen of the products look like the more grotesquely hyperreal creations of some NYC hotshot shock artist in the Jeff Koons tradition. The more “realistic” these things get, the less they rely on the imagination and the more aware you are that you’re staring not at a fellow biological creature but at a hunk of lifeless petrochemicals. Cyber-freaks might be turned on by that, but I’d just find it icky.
MORE IMAGINATIVE PLAY equipment might be found at Seattle Surgical Repair, 10726 Aurora N. The location (right next to the cemetery) might not be the most tasteful site for a dealer in used medical equipment, but the tiny building’s crammed full of goodies. Examination tables! Speculums! Knee-reflex hammers! Stethoscopes! Gurneys! (Old car and motorcycle parts, too.) Just play safe when you’re playing doctor, and don’t perform any actual procedures that should be left to qualified personnel.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Li’l Hassan’s Bleeding Head is Marcus Surrealius’s eight-page take on the sort of gentle new-agey satire pioneered by the likes of, say, the Church of the SubGenius. Issue #3 includes a cover tribute of sorts to Nico and Yoko Ono, a scrambled analysis of Huckleberry Finn, and an “Ebonic Hail Mary” that reads just like the fake-Black-dialect Bible passages I was once forced to listen to in my old liberal-Methodist youth group. Even better are the little slogans here and there (“Neachy is pietzsche”). Free at the usual dropoff spots, or online at www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/4475…. Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan’s quarterly True Northwest is my kinda regional-history zine. Why, right on page 2 there’s a reprinted old ad for the late, lamented Pay ‘n Save stores! Further inside are a big retrospective of Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, an interview with Seattle Pilots/ Portland TrailBlazers announcer Bill Schonely, and references to the Elephant Car Wash, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, TV’s Here Come the Brides, Spokane’s Bing Crosby memorabilia collection, Jimi Hendrix’s days playing guitar with Tommy Chong in Vancouver (the closest to Seattle Hendrix lived in his whole adult life), and much much more. $3.50 from P.O. Box 22, Olympia 98507; or online at www.olywa.net/truenw/.
CROSS-CUTTING: The editors of True Northwest previously wrote Seattle on Film, a fun little book chronicling locally-shot movies from the years before the sight of a car on screen with Washington plates automatically meant “filmed in Vancouver.” Is it fair for our neighbors to the north to have The X-Files and Millennium while we’re stuck with a certain cheeky cable show amply discussed in recent Strangers? Since this is the start of baseball season, a trade metaphor springs to mind. We should try to acquire at least one B.C.-filmed show in exchange for the aforementioned cable production. Since that wouldn’t quite be an equal exchange, we’ll have to throw more in the pot. Maybe some tanker trucks of cheap U.S. gasoline, a couple of 10-year-old rock bands, and a cartoonist to be named later. If we can’t get a spooky sci-fi series, maybe we could at least deal for other Canuck assets like decent health insurance or adequate arts funding.
PASSAGE (pianist-author Charles Rosen in the March Harper’s): “A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.”
NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (NY Times, 3/4): “Jockey is introducing an advertising campaign intended to imbue the once-hidebound underwear company with a hipper image, particularly among younger shoppers.” Just what’s so bad about a “hidebound underwear company?” What other kind of underwear is there? Runner-up item (KIRO Radio News Fax, 3/5): “A Longview-area man plans a rally at the state Capitol to protest Indian hunting in the Mount St. Helens National Monument.” I thought we were over that despicable era of Western history.
GIRLY SHOWS: In recent weeks, the P-I Lifestyle section’s run two wire service stories, headlined “A New Heyday for Teens” and “Teenage Girl Power at the Box Office.” Of course, their idea of “girl power” is strictly limited to purchasing power, not political power or even the power to make films instead of just watching them. Still, that’s at least something. Some music historians claim we should credit teen-female fans for “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. In other over-the-counterculture news…
QUEER NATION, INDEED: By now you’ve probably seen print ads for Triangle Broadcasting, “America’s First Gay Broadcasting Network” (unless you count American Movie Classics). The L.A.-based company just opened its second branch operation here (the first is in Philly). It runs low-power transmitters out of Bremerton (1490 on the AM dial) and Tacoma, plus a three-person sales office in Pioneer Square. All the programming’s beamed by satellite from Calif. They plan to include lotsa Seattle-based events listings and talk-show guests, but that’ll diminish as more network-owned stations start up around the country. The debut lineup’s mostly talk, with some dance-music hours at night. One host is described as “the queer Rush Limbaugh;” there’s also a Dr. Laura-like tuff-advice lady and a wacky-wacky morning dude. The company’s PR literature’s light on discussing station content, but big on praising gays and lesbians the way corporate America likes to hear people praised–as upscale, upscale, upscale! I suppose it’s progress or something like it if queers can now be depicted as not only non-threatening but as a key economic sector. But to effectively reach all those double-upper-income-no-kids households, they’ll have to grow into something beyond gay/ lesbian topics tacked onto regular dumb ol’ talk radio formulae piped in from out-of-state. Let’s hope they do. Speaking of gay listening habits…
INSERT OLD HOLYFIELD `EAR’ PUNS HERE: If lesbians hear more like men, howcum there’s not a male-appeal equivalent to Ferron? (Jewel doesn’t count.) On a more practical level, imagine if a special tuning fork or whistle could be developed, producing a sound only lesbians (and men) could hear. Single lesbians could find one another in any crowd, avoiding those straight women who think it’s hip to pretend to be bi. (And, if affirmed by further research, this could give further credence to something I’ve long believed-lesbians and straight men have more in common than the more bigoted members of both camps will admit.) Speaking of gender roles…
BYTE OF SEATTLE: Employment fairs can be glum occasions, with self-esteem-challenged jobless folk solemnly filling out application forms whilst getting sermonized about good grooming and interview skills. A far brighter milieu was offered at the Northwest High Tech Career Expo at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Dozens of firms, from Microsoft and H-P down to temp agencies and software-catalog companies, even outfits not primarily tech-oriented like Starbucks and PACCAR trucks; all with flashy booths and smiling flunkies eager to take resumes and business cards–at least from applicants with enough years of the right experience. (Safeco even offered to help train folks without hardcore computer experience to learn to program in COBOL). And you didn’t even have to be a short-listable candidate to pick up some of the freebies at the booths. More candy than Halloween. Sports bottles. Key chains, compasses, letter openers. Pens and pencils of most every variety. Luscious photo postcards (from digital stock-photo agency Photodisc). Sponges. Soap-bubble kits. Plastic mini footballs and baseballs (from Starwave). And the wackiest of all: Official Boeing-logo Hackey Sack balls! (Bet they bounce great off those tall hangar walls.)
