Airframe crashes; Flying High cruises:

Of Wings and Tales

Book review for The Stranger, 4/10/97

The jetliner is Seattle’s first big contribution to the world, unless you count Gypsy Rose Lee. Both Michael Crichton’s Airframe (Knopf) and Eugene Rodgers’s Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry (Atlantic Monthly Press) are massive hardcover tomes (each weighing about a pound and a half) that build their narratives around the public fascination with this big, complicated, beautiful machine (perhaps the most complex machine ordinary folks regularly go inside of). Both also contain enough crash-related material, it’s a safe bet neither will be made into a movie that’ll ever be shown in-flight.

Chricton’s Freefall

In his latest plodding “thriller,” Airframe, Crichton (pronounced “Kryton,” same as the Red Dwarf ninny) pushes all his wearisome big formula-suspense buttons. At least here he has a reason to insert tech talk, unlike the ridiculous way it was tacked on to Disclosure in the form of improbable virtual-reality computing.

And the creator of ER manages to find a way to blast TV and modern journalism (a theme he previously addressed in a Wired essay), here in the form of a villanous taboid-TV producer.

Both the evil producer and our aircraft-company-investigator hero are females, a step probably intended to provide juicy roles for whoever’s the most bankable actresses when the movie version gets made. It also allows the final confrontation between the two to be mercifully free of the gender-war crap Crichton overused to death in Disclosure. (It might also be intended to placate readers who thought Disclosure dissed ambitious career women.)

In keeping with the Hollywood-intended plot devices, Crichton’s heroine is both the aircraft company’s chief crash investigator and its media spokesperson. In real life these jobs would be handled by two people (or two committees), but this trick lets Crichton keep the attention on one character, forever getting into bureaucratic, technical, and physical perils. (The physical threats to her, obviously intended to become movie action scenes, turn out to have little to do with the crash-investigation plot.)

Since I don’t like to spoil a good story, I’ll tell you the jumbo-jet crash our heroine investigates is due to human error, thanks to an underqualified foreign pilot. Among other things, this solution ensures the movie’s producers won’t get immediately turned away when they ask airplane companies for technical advice or factories to film in.

When Airframe becomes a movie, it may be the first such project involving both the main industries of Burbank, CA. While Boeing is now the king of civilian aerospace, much of the rest of the industry’s centered in that valley city where Lockheed and Warner Bros. both found the space for big hanger-like buildings. When Laugh-In and Johnny Carson joked about the nonglamour surrounding NBC’s studios, they referred to a landscape of squatty assembly shops, faceless engineering buildings, and vast employee parking lots–an area whose Pentagon-funded largesse helped enrich many of those anti-big-government California Republicans.

Boeing’s Highs & Lows

Flying High, the first major history of Boeing not funded or controlled by the company’s PR department, notes that California’s powerful politicians helped keep Boeing from a lot of military work after the ’60s. While military work has been a relatively small part of the boeing picture (at least until recent mergers), it’s still been big stuff, with B-52 and AWACS planes and missile components still in use. It wasn’t always this way.

As Rodgers notes, Bill Boeing was a rare breed of aviation pioneer–a businessman first, an air enthusiast only second. A mere decade after the Wrights’ history-making first flight, Boeing started building planes, not out of a fascination with flight itself but as a means to enhance his established timber fortune. Between the world wars, he built a lucrative Post Office air-mail contract into a vertically integrated company, including the future United Airlines. But after FDR’s antitrust guys forced a Boeing/ United divorce, Boeing fell way behind its L.A. rivals in supplying the nascent passenger airlines. When WWII turned planemaking into an all-military industry, Boeing’s company thrived. (Bill Boeing retired in the late ’30s; his descendents weren’t involved in the firm.)

In the early ’50s, the company made a last-ditch effort to get back into the passenger biz with the 707 (whose initial R&D was piggybacked onto work for a military transport).

In the 11 years from the first 707 to the first 747, Boeing (and the airlines it supplied) became a global institution. Then came the 1970-71 bust. Several boom-bust cycles later, the company again booms. For how long? The company, and Rodgers, see no immediate end, at least in manufacturing; on the engineering side, though, there may be enough already-designed airplanes to last the company for a decade or two.

Keeping with the company’s squaresville mindset, Rodgers gets into a little of the initial romance of flying, but not much. There’s almost nothing about passenger aviation in the propeller era, since Boeing was a minor player there. As with Crichton, Rodgers reveals only as much technology as is needed to tell his stories (i.e., why airlines preferred to buy a particular Boeing plane instead of a particular Douglas plane).

Both books almost hypnotically lead the reader into the pressurized, insulated world of their companies’ corporate cultures. Especially in Rodgers’s account, airplane-land is depicted as a near religious order, insulated by both internal politics and obscure knowledge, where outside interests (even airline customers) are treated with hands-off distance or even hostility.

Rodgers devotes one chapter to the sociocultural effects of Boeing’s presence in Seattle. Rodgers points out how Bill Boeing’s cloisered lifestyle in The Highlands, an exclusive compound north of town, influenced the almost antisocial culture of the company’s higher-ups (and of Seattle’s rich in general), forming a perennial obstacle to those who’ve tried to develop high-art and high-society institutions. He also mentions how Boeing’s “Lazy B” work culture and its periodic massive layoffs have affected the region’s economy. He could have gone further, depicting how the firm’s introverted, hyper-rational engineering mindset combined with Scandinavian reserve to form a city where excessively bland “tastefulness” became a fetish.

Boeing turned a timber-and-railroad town, barely beyond the frontier era, into the excessively moderate burg Seattle’s musicians got famous for rebelling against. Its products have helped propel the “globalization” of world culture and trade. As much as we try to ignore Boeing (and as much as it tries to ignore its community in return), it’s helped make us what we are. Eugene Rodgers’s book is a vital first step in understanding this.

TURNS OUT IT WAS EASY to lose 41 pounds (one-fifth my old weight) in 21 weeks, after years of vowing to get around to it. I knew enough about myself to know I couldn’t have a prepackaged regimen, lifestyle, or personality foisted upon me. That would have disrupted both my internal chemistry and my ingrained behavior patterns, to the point where I’d get desperate to give up.

As soon as I told some people what I was doing (I admit to having been nearly insuffrably boastful), they’d give me all sorts of detailed advice on complicated schemes and self-help-book tricks I’ve found I didn’t need: The “Chew-Chew” Diet, the Rice Diet, the Popcorn Diet, the Drinking Man’s Diet, the Reversal Diet, the Purification Diet, ab machines, daily eating schedules, Topp Fast, and even spirulina plankton.

Instead, it was just less of the same–my usual food intake, cut to a 1500 calories a day (averaged out by the week), plus a daily half-gallon of water and regular conditioning workouts. No Jenny’s Cuisine, no fat-gram counting, no simple vs. complex carbos, no Enter the Zone, and no macrobiotics.

Because I’m big on prepackaged foods, it was easy to read calories on the “Nutrition Facts” label listings. For dining out, I carried a Brand Name Calorie Counter book. I used Sweet Success diet shakes at first, but realized I could have cereal or soup or toast for the same calories.

Certain aspects of my old intake regime did wither away. Beer and I became more distant friends. I lost contact with Hostess Sno-Balls. Cookies, crackers, and chocolates remained in my life on a limited basis; at the level of maybe one chocolate-covered cherry a day.

Some parts of the regimen were odd. Most diet books are written for women, and don’t mention the masculine predicament of awaking at 4 a.m., needing to expel a lot of that drinking water yet turgidly unable to do so.

On the other hand, those books also neglect the particularly masculine ego trip of discovering one’s thighs are no longer the most forward-reaching aspect of one’s lower anatomy.

I used nonprescription appetite-suppressant pills the first few months. They made me want and not want to eat at the same time. I also found myself losing interest in other favorite stimuli, like movies and concerts. I worried I’d become one of those bland boomers I’ve always ranted against. I pondered why those turn-of-the-century railroad moguls were so fat–maybe they had a hunger to grow, to acquire. I also pondered the words of an ex-anorexic acquaintance; she’d been reared to fear sex, to the point where she literally couldn’t stand to have anything enter her body.

During those initial weeks, I developed a running daily calorie count in the part of my brain where I’m normally obsessing about women or money. I’d weigh myself more than once a day, even more than once an hour. I’d get to worrying about “plateaus” and even about whether exercise was causing me to gain muscle faster than losing fat.

Because I’ve traditionally had the approximate metabolism of a hibernating bear, I started exercising to make sure I lost fat instead of muscle. I took a twice-weekly aerobic conditioning class at Belltown Ballet and Conditioning. Because it’s coed, it doesn’t have the kind of body-image jealousy trips I’ve seen in all-male sessions and I’m told can exist in all-female sessions. Still, the class is definitely tuff stuff, especially for the first eight to ten sessions. There are still stretching positions I simply cannot attain. But I’m getting better at it, slowly. I still can’t accomplish a chin-up, but I can do more crunches than I ever could in high school PE class.

By the end, I’d lost fat faster than my skin shrank, leaving billowy folds of empty flesh containers. I felt like that Dick Tracy villain who smuggled guns in the folds of his multiple chins.

Not that people noticed any change at first. In the difficult first few weeks, a few people volunteered they saw something different about me; but they all concluded I’d just gotten a different haircut. One old acquaintance asked if I’d switched from glasses to contacts (I’ve never worn either). My mom couldn’t even see anything different about me. Only in recent weeks have people been telling me they see any change.

One reason I did this was to look more desirable here in an “alternative” subculture where the single straight male is a decidedly surplus commodity. In his recent book Eat Fat, Richard Klein claims fat feminizes men. He notes how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra refers to Cleo’s lovers getting fat in her presence as a symbol for ceding their manhood to the Egyptian seductress.

Lesbians have zines like Fat Girl; gay men have the “bears” clique. Men who love fat women, however, are often stereotyped as manipulative “chubby chasers,” out to control low-self-esteem women. And women who love fat men? Unheard of, except in places like the North American Association for Fat Acceptance.

Besides diet advice, dating advice is another of those genres almost never directed toward males. “You Must Not Be Fat,” warns Jim Deane in one of the few such books for men, The Fine Art of Picking Up Girls (1974). Deane claims there’s no such thing as a sexy fat man. I tried to think of some but only got to Brando, the later Elvis, Pavarotti, Babe Ruth, Barry White, and rapper Heavy D. More prevalant were images of near asexuality (Buddah, the later Orson Welles), arrested childhood (Curly Howard, John Belushi, John Candy), or inhumane lords of expanse (Jabba the Hutt, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, those railroad barons).

Klein’s book notes an archaic definition of “corporation” as a bodily protruberance, such as a gut: “…Like their anatomical counterparts, these great abdomens seem to aim only at expanding, greedily incorporating and consolidating in view of increasing their volume.”

Yet Klein also claims fat’s associated today with low-income, low-self-esteem people, while thinness is the visage for the rich and glamorous. The image of financial success these days is not the personal chef but the personal trainer; while today’s companies seem as insistant as Oprah to showcase their “downsizing” into new “lean and mean” forms. Klein quotes essayist Hillel Schwartz as calling yo-yo dieting “the constant frustration of desire,” a necessary mental state for Late Capitalism to function properly in selling unneeded goods (both excess food and diet schemes).

I still support International No-Diet Days and the Fat Pride movement. What I did was for me, and is not intended as a go-thou-and-do-likewise lesson. Different people have different bodies. Others may need or want to do something else, or nothing.

As for me, now comes phase two, best described by a zombie-bite victim’s deathbed promise in Dawn of the Dead: “I’ll try not to come back.”

NFL Films’ 16mm Heroics:

The Movies of Champions

Original online essay, 1/28/97

As a U.S. Male who came of age in the ’70s, it seemed pro football was always with us, and so was its official biographer, NFL Films. In schools, at church teen retreats, on the lonely late-afternoon weekend TV slots now occupied by infomercials, NFL Films’ half-hour reels of grainy 16mm film were ubiquitous, with their pompous narration and brassy music scores.

So it’s surprising to learn that American football, a major college and high-school sport since the 1890s, was a decidedly secondary attraction as a pro sport, far less popular than baseball, until the ’60s. The pro game’s explosion had three main causes: TV coverage, the NFL-AFL merger, and the evangelizing artistry of NFL Films.

The early to mid ’60s was a golden age for sports documentaries, thanks largely to the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras with advanced lenses and film stocks. The surfing film The Endless Summer was a hit in theaters; Warren Miller’s skiing films drew roadshow crowds across the northern U.S. and in Canada. Ed Sabol, a Philadelphia businessman with no pro filmmaking experience, sent in a blind bid to shoot the official filmed record of the 1962-63 NFL championship game. The next year, Sabol sent crews to every NFL game, editing the footage into a catalog of highlight reels. By 1965 Sabol convinced the league’s team owners to buy his company and keep him in charge of it. Ed’s son Steve Sabol, who in college was both a football player and an art major, soon became the studio’s creative czar. He still is.

From the start, Steve Sabol established a house style that would sell the game and the league, albeit by using the filmmaker’s art to bend the game’s story. Football is essentially a game of coaching and planning, with squads trying to either complete or stop fully choreographed five-second plays. But Steve Sabol’s guys presented instead a game of individual heroics.

“We emphasize the struggle of a game rather than the strategy,” Sabol explained in a recent phone interview. “We portray the game as a passion. When I was a [college] player, the game was only shown from the top, from cameras in the grandstands. I wanted to show the muscles bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. There are two spheres in sport; there’s one sphere where things are measured by seconds and inches and yards, then there’s the sphere where things are measured by heart and guts.

“When we started, our goal was to create an image for the game; to show sport at its most passionate and visceral level. But at the time we were just a bunch of young guys who loved to make movies and loved pro football and wanted to communicate that love to an audience.”

The first film released under the NFL Films name, They Call It Pro Football (commissioner Pete Rozelle called it the best sports movie he’d ever seen), started with a booming intro (written by Steve) that set the stage for three decades of histronics: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown… A call. The ball is snapped and the play continues. A drama of man on man and a race against the clock. It’s precision, persistance, power. The unleashed speed of the kickoff. The whistling feet of a great runner. The reckless fury of a goal-line stand. The crowning glory of a winning touchdown. The swelling roar of the crowd… This is pro football, the sport of our time.” (These and countless later, equally momentous lines were delivered with booming stoicism by ex-Philly newscaster John Facenda, who died in 1984 from the cigarettes that had given his voice its trademark gritty rasp.)

Facenda’s voice and the stirring martial music (first assembled from stock-music selections, since the ’70s taken from a library of original orchestral tracks) accompanied footage that used every known sports-film trick and many tricks NFL Films invented. A typical segment of a film might cut from overhead shots to field shots to cutaways of anxious fans to wired-for-sound coaches’ exhortations to reverse-angle replays to super slo-mo shots made with a mammoth 600-mm telephoto lens to tackle shots pumped up with highly exaggerated sound effects.

Even the studio’s “humor” reels were rough-hewn and overblown, with Mel Blanc giving the only unfunny performances of his career by means of trying-too-hard-to-be-wacky gag voices.

As the NFL grew in prestige and popularity (if not in intellectual respect), NFL Films became an institution within an institution. Between seasons it churned out a few films on other sports, commercial and industrial films, and even a few music videos (for Slayer and Bruce Springsteen). It was supposed to make a propaganda film saluting the US military’s work in the 1991 Gulf War, but the deal fell through. And it’s been called upon to replicate its style in movies about the sport (Semi-Tough, Brian’s Song, Black Sunday,Paper Lion, Everybody’s All-American) and in last year’s Nike commercials about pee-wee football.

While the league itself is in trouble on several fronts (greedy owners, unpopular team moves), NFL Films is as big as ever. Today’s NFL Films is a 200-employee outfit in its own office complex behind a New Jersey shopping mall, with its own film labs, editing suites, soundstages, and vaults (Sabol claims the only human event more thoroughly documented on film than NFL football is World War II). It sends at least two camera people and four support staff to every game. Everything but the in-studio narration segments is still shot on film, though some editing is now done on video with telecine color correction (I prefer the more mythic look of the older films, with more grain and washed-out colors). The footage they shoot is edited into weekly shows for ESPN and HBO (coaches’ and players’ cusswords are still bleeped on the HBO shows), annual highlight reels for each team, plus several home videos a year, occasional TNT specials, and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special. The 98-piece London Symphonic Orchestra records two sessions’ worth of background music for NFL Films every year.

The NFL Films look has influenced major filmmakers; Steve Sabol loves to tell how Sam Peckinpah publicly noted “the way we used the camera at different speeds, the editing and the intensity of the violence as an influence on how he did the end of The Wild Bunch.” But the thing’s really a universe of its own. By giving heroic treatment to players whose faces can’t even be seen on TV, it’s forged an audience intimacy the real game can’t provide. As Sabol calls it, “What we are is storytellers and mythmakers.”

(Some selected NFL Films video releases: Feel the Power, Idol Makers, NFL Throwbacks, NFL Talkin’ Follies, and The NFL’s Greatest Moments.)

Patricia Rozema and Jennifer Montgomery:

All-Yin Filmmaking

Video review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 1/10/97

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing;

When Night Is Falling

(1987-1995, dir. Patricia Rozema)

When Night Is Falling is best known for tender girl-meets-girl love scenes, turning on viewers of all genders. But it shares a subtler, more important notion with Rozema’s earlier I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing–the notion of lesbians who are regular humans, shy and modest enough to crave an all-yin personal world. Rozema builds these heroines from the “friendly” stuffiness of middle-class Canada, then lovingly shelters them inside safe islands of art-world professions often associated with more arrogant personalities (a commercial gallery in Mermaids, a performance-art troupe in Night). At a time when women who wish to be “successful” are often expected to both denounce and emulate traditionally “male” behaviors, Rozema’s fantasy dramas yearn for a place (even a tiny one) where softness isn’t seen as weakness, where beauty and wisdom are valued.

Art for Teachers of Children

(1995, dir. Jennifer Montgomery)

This movie’s video release adds a prologue with some Lincoln Center film curator praising it as a real indie film, not a low-budget version of a regular Hollywood formula. Instead of wringing its topic (a teenage girl at an elite boarding school poses nude for, and offers up her virginity to, her photography teacher) for either salaciousness or for trauma, Montgomery employs stilted dialogue and deadpan acting to portray the affair as stunting the heroine’s emotional growth, leaving her prematurely jaded. Montgomery’s 16mm, b/w cinematography perfectly matches this cold mood to the photographer’s icy, sexless figure studies. It’s the first feature-lengther by Montgomery, a leader in the “women’s personal film” movement Lois Maffeo wrote about in a prior Stranger feature. She and her colleagues in this genre are creating a new media form out of something women have always done–telling their own stories.

WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.

* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.

* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.

* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.

All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.

* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)

* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.

* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).

Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?

* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”

ON A ROLE: Because of the deadline structure at The Stranger, this week’s Misc. (like Wednesday’s Christian Science Monitor) was sent to the printer before election returns came in. Therefore, we’ll just have to pretend it wasn’t happening or wasn’t worth talking about (which most citizens seemed to feel anyway).

Instead, let’s discuss the annually-weirder spectacle that is grownup Halloween, now America’s #2 shopping holiday. Is it me, or have grownup Halloween parties gotten simultaneously more elaborate and blasé? The art of costuming, of adopting temporary personas for celebration and/or awakening, is among humanity’s oldest traits. But the way middle Americans (even young, urbane middle Americans) do it is like the way middle Americans do a lot of things, half-hearted and aloof. “Square” middle Americans often keep their inner passions inhibited because they’re afraid; “hip” middle Americans often keep their passions inhibited because they’re afraid, but pretend they’re doing it because they’re too cool. The mainstreaming of fetish dance parties might have helped change that, but (at least in this town) that trend seems to have peaked. (It didn’t help that the Liquor Board’s lifestyle police have borne down hard on such events, contributing to the Catwalk’s fiscal problems.)

I don’t think the answer is to replace today’s Halloween festivities with World Beat-style “tribal” role playing events. The gods, demigods, devils, and myths of pre-industrial societies are those people’s property–in many cases, the only things colonists didn’t take from them. We have plenty of our own gods, demigods, devils, and myths to explore; including the myths propagated via popular entertainment and media. So keep going to parties as Audrey Hepburn or Capt. Janeway or Ross Perot–but don’t stop at the clothes.Become Hepburn or Janeway or Perot for one night. Explore the presence of Hepburnness, Janewayism, or Perotosity within your soul.

(For the record, the Champion’s costume store ran out of plastic breasts, couldn’t sell the formerly-popular Power Ranger costumes even at 50 percent off, and had to turn down many frustrated requests for Xena costumes (the show’s producers neglected to have any made).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #3 of the NW Sleep Guide, a newsletter for ambient-DJ music fans, contains a conceptual Brian Eno review consisting of the words “A light sharp touch refined but so ugly so merciless like the stinging rain,” repeated and rearranged to fill all the available space. Clever. (Free at Ohm Records and Wall of Sound.)

EYE ON POTATOES: The Wall St. Journal recently exposed the secret behind the “crispier French fries” now promised by Jack-in-the-Box and other chains. They’re coated with a batter made of potato starch, augmented in some formulae with wheat starch and dairy protein. It’s supposed to keep ’em warm and unsoggy up to 15 minutes, three times as long as untreated spud-segments. I tell ya, does this country have an ingenious food-tech industry or what?

IN A BIND: Organizers of the second NW Bookfest made a few improvements to the Pier 48 site but kept the site good and funky and un-Convention-Centery. It’s still the sort of event where the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor is made most literal, with authors on microphones and sellers in booths all hawking their wares. KOMO-TV weekend anchor Eric Slocum was prominently hawking his Childrens Hospital-benefit poetry book (remember, you can always donate direct instead) right next to a booth hawking political tracts about what “the globalists” don’t want you to know.

But it was a trek to find anything really interesting in the interstices between whale-poetry chapbooks, Men Are From Orion/ Women Are From the Crab Nebula homilies, and Windows 95 recovery manuals. By the time I got back out and faced the literacy volunteers with their hype for literature-as-generic-commodity, I wanted to tell ’em, “Next time you ask me to Support Books, tell me which ones.”

With KTZZ now up for sale, three of the area’s six commercial TV stations are up for grabs, thus driving down any one station’s prospective price. This is a rare moment of opportunity. Leave your suggestions on what you’d do if you owned your own channel atMisc. World HQ, www.miscmedia.com/intro.html.

ENNUI GO AGAIN: Nov. 5’s just around the metaphorical corner, and acquaintances of mine say they can hardly wait. They’re psyched n’ primed to head out, wait patiently in line, and be the first to buy the CD Presidents of the United States of America II,which cleverly goes on sale Election Day.

As for the election itself, has any major election in my lifetime been so near and yet so not-there? I’m not talking about voter apathy or ineffectual complaints about the electoral status quo; those have always been with us. I’m talking the total slouching-through-the-motions aspect of the exercise. I’ve struggled for a metaphor for this anti-spectacle: An end-of-season football game between two going-nowhere teams? The last, fitful, sex act of a couple about to split up? The rote “excitement” of Elvis- and Marilyn-dressed waiters at some silly theme restaurant, or a cover band at a high-school prom?

Sure, in ’84 everyone recognized and dismissed Mondale for being what Dole is now–a seasoned insider who got nominated thanks to connections and fundraising prowess, but whom nobody had great fondness for as a potential Prez. But then there were other things going on (like the Booth Gardner/ John Spellman gubernatorial race). Now we’ve got uninspiring sideshows like Ellen Craswell looking all lost and confused when speaking to anyone outside her ideological clique.

I was sorta hopin’ for a final public-discourse confrontation with the Religious Right’s central tenet (how Jesus Christ Himself wants you to cede all authority and power to Big Business). Instead, Clinton and Locke did an end-run and positioned themselves as the sane choice in pro-business politicians. They’re just as receptive to the desires of big campaign contributors as the Republicans are–but without the annoying baggage of a social agenda, without dependencen on followers who just might someday get around to reading that Bible verse about not serving God and Mammon.

CATHODE CORNER #1: You’d expect MTV to go all hyped-out over Madonna’s baby. Sure enough, the day the birth was announced, the channel went to all Madonna videos, with congratulations by MTV Online users crawled across the bottom of the screen, interspersed with predictions by infomercial psychics about the kid’s future life. What at least I didn’t expect was an MTV promo ad featuring drag queens dressed up as aged versions of Madonna and Courtney Love, re-enacting a scene from the cult-film classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, complete with barbed dialogue like “Why don’t you go re-invent yourself?” Given Love’s former taste for baby-doll dressing and Madonna’s former Joan Crawford fixation, it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before.

CATHODE CORNER #2: As was predicted here, the Telecommunications “Reform” Act has led to fewer media giants controlling more outlets. The Time Warner Inc./ Turner (TWIT?) combine has put the pre-1948 Warner Bros. movies back under Warner’s library for the first time since they were sold to a TV syndicator in 1957, but it also created a content behemoth big enough to threaten Rupert Murdoch’s world-domination schemes. Murdoch’s suing to get his Fox News Channel (which stops just short of promising a right-wing spin on all stories) onto TWIT-owned cable systems in NYC, systems now running their full physical capacity of channels. Murdoch-friendly Republican there have offered to stick Fox News on a city-controlled cable channel and dump the public access shows on it now. In short, give even more to the big programmers and kill what little access non-conglomerate voices now get. Fortunately, TWIT (and Manhattan’s other cable operator, Cablevision) are refusing this “solution,” at least for now.

PAY LESS DRUGS, R.I.P.: The Pay n’ Save stores, once the flagship of the local Bean family’s retail empire, were sold to NYC speculators, who then sold them to Kmart, which merged them with the Oregon-based Pay Less, then spun off the combined chain to private investors, who merged it with California’s Thrifty Drug. Along the way the G.O. Guy, House of Values, and Gov-Mart Bazaar chains also joined the Pay Less fold. Now, these 1,007 outlets will be part of the East Coast-based Rite Aid circuit. It’s a good thing drug stores don’t have the same combination-warning labels drugs have.

With only 12 days ’till the election and no major politician talking about America’s real ongoing crisis (the upward distribution of wealth and the developing two-tier economy), it’s up to Misc. to give you the business, in this all-local-retail column:

BOARD MEETING: Responding to my call for suggested new uses for the ex-REI building on Capitol Hill, reader Blaine Dollard writes: “Always thought it would make a great skatepark! Take the elevator up and start your run up in the Sale Attic, total acid drop or a few banks to get down the stairs, then get mass speed down that ramp leading from the shoes towards Pike and maybe a big bowl or snake run through the Gore-Tex zone. I think it would meet zoning laws too! Now just put an empty swimming pool or two in the basement and the neighborhood could be swimming with more skaters than ever. Wouldn’t hurt [nearby board shop] Cresent’s business either!” In other clever concepts…

FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Papa Murphy’s Take & Bake Pizza chain now displays a small “Food Stamps” logo in the upper right corner of one of its TV commercials. It’s a subtle reminder that as a deli store and not a restaurant, ye who are unemployed and/or underclass can go there as an occasional break from ramen. In other sales pitches…

SCENT PACKING: I have it on good evidence that the Cologne Cult is back in town. You remember them–the evangelistically fired-up, glassy-eyed young gals n’ guys who’d enter offices and other workplaces, somehow sneak past receptionists and other gatekeepers, and hawk inexpensive designer-imposter colognes to the workers (sometimes claiming they were the real brand name products). I don’t know where they’re from, where they go when they’re not here, or how they stay in business, since none of the myriad stories I’ve heard about ’em has ever mentioned a successful sale. In other discount goods…

THE BEST INTENTIONS: Best Products is closing its last 13 Washington stores. These include the final remnants of the former locally-owned Jafco chain and catalog, which supplied moderately-priced jewelry, sporting goods, home furnishings (including foam sofa-beds), and stereo gear to two generations of Northwesterners. I can still remember the day one of my high-school teachers showed off her brand new engagement ring (from a fellow teacher) in class. Just weeks later, I happened to find that exact ring in the Jafco catalog; giving me direct evidence that education was perhaps not the most lucrative of professions. In other closings…

THE LAST REWIND: Backtrack Records and Video, the Ravenna-based dean of local mondo-movie rental houses, is closing as of this Saturday. Owner John Black (one of this paper’s very first advertisers) has sold all his remaining inventory to Bedazzled Discson Capitol Hill, which should have Backtrack’s rental videos available again in a few weeks. Black and his original partner, attorney Fred Hopkins, started by selling used LPs, then added a modest but well-curated sci-fi/horror VHS selection in the early years of the video boom. (Today’s mammoth Scarecrow Video store began as a subleased shelf within Backtrack.) They helped sponsor a film series I curated in 1986-87, as part of their commitment to keeping the flame of cult cinema alive. They produced a public-access movie-review show (still occasionally rerun) and were involved in making a handful of amateur, shot-on-video creature features (one, Rock n’ Roll Mobster Girls, included early appearances by Jim Rose and Hole drummer Patty Schemel). Best wishes on all future endeavors. In other hipness artifacts…

THE COOL JERK: If you grew up around here, you probably recall snide remarks about the Bon Marche’s teen boutique, The Cube–remarks typically predicated on the fact that a “cube” is essentially a square, only multiplied. Now they’ve taken that to heart with this fall’s Geek Chic display. It’s complete with velour dresses, lime-green sweaters, fluorescent-orange fake-fur coats, and black PVC skirts. My favorite fashion analyst describes it as “the same doubleknit blahs you see on the Evening Magazine guy, only with a new name tacked on to make you think it’s not the same thing they’ve been selling you for four years.”

KISS THE PICTURES! LICK THE PRINT! CHEW THE STAPLES!: After a seeming lull period, local zines and periodicals are again popping up. Here are a few that have slipped by lately:

* How to Tell If You’re Dead, by Michelle Beaudry and Lord Carrett: There are worse illustrated-joke books out there, but this at least qualifies for dishonorable mention. “You’re Dead If… Minnie Pearl’s price tag is on her toe.” ($6 from Laffbooks, 6201 15th Ave. NW, Seattle 98107.)

* The Movie Marquee. Somebody tries to start a self-published mainstream movie-review zine just about every year. This one’s from local freelancer Doug Thomas. It’s little better or worse than any of its ilk, desperately seeking artistic or at least financial significance the action thrillers made by the studios it wants to advertise. ($15/6 issues from 3015 NW Market St., #B115, Seattle 98107.)

* Replicant: A Journal of Seattle Area Industrial & Darkwave Musings. Small, personal, infrequent newsletter for Goth and industrial-dance music lovers. Recent issues have featured DJ Webb’s series “Name Calling,” offering handy intros about the confusing genres and sub-genres in recent dance music. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 48213, Seattle 98148.)

* ReAct: Practical Strategies for Ending Violence. Py Bateman ran the Alternatives to Fear self-defense school for umpteen years; her new monthly newsletter goes beyond the specific tactics of her classes, into larger issues of personal safety, power, and fear. In issue #3 she breaks with her profession’s traditions by including one story about a male assailee. ($25/year from P.O. Box 23316, Seattle 98102.)

* No Apologies: The Best of Real Change Poets, 1994-1996. I’ve never claimed to be a qualified judge of modern-day poetry, but this is the Real Thing with a capital RT. It’s not grad students sympathizing with (or slumming among) down-and-outers, it’s down-and-outers talking for themselves, with pride, anger, humor, wistfulness, nostalgia, and not a speck of malaise. The highlight is Dr. Wes Browning’s memoir “Art in Balance,” about (among other things) meeting Betty White at a USO show. ($6.95 from Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle 98121.)

* Code: The Creative Culture Magazine. For some reason, this is the first issue I’ve seen yet it claims to be #5. It’s supposed to be the “Work Issue,” but at least half the 44 pages (on heavy-slick paper) seems to be about the personal life of the staff, particularly editor Lou Maxon. Squint past the sub-Ray Gun typography (hint: Adobe Courier is not a suitable magazine text face), and you read about how Maxon left the NYC rat race to end up working at a trauma center (presumably Harborview’s) while noblely struggling to get his friends’ names into print. You also get a lot of house ads, scattered around plugs for other people’s zines. ($3 plus postage from 2400 Westlake Ave. N., #21, Seattle 98109.)

* Steelhead: The Handbook of the Next Northwest. As ambitious as Code and more serious. Its 48 densely-packed pages are mostly devoted to cultural regionalism, to taking a hard look at the world directly around you and networking with like minds nearby; even though its second-longest piece is a semi-fiction story set entirely in California. I also don’t get the editors’ obsession with that dumb fashion mag George. Still, at least an attempt to ask some big questions about the Big-Big-Big Picture. ($3.95 from 4505 University Way NE, #420, Seattle 98105.)

* Slant. Issue #7 of the out-of-state zine that publishes more Seattle writers and artists than some local zines is about travel, foreign and domestic. The gargantuan newsprint rag includes words and/or pix by locals Charles Peterson (photos from Vietnam), Jan Gregor, Tom Kipp, Andy Cohen, Tim Midgett, Keith Bearden, and Leslie Talmadge Woodward, plus a visit to James Acord’s atomic art in Richland by Toronto writer Brian Freer. It’s free at Urban Outfitters (which publishes it), but if you subscribe you get a darling mailing label with the defiant slogan, “We Are Not An Alternative Publication.” ($4.50/3 issues from 1809 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19103.)

LET US RETURN to Misc., the pop-culture column that’s indifferent about the threatened Federal ban on goofy cigarette brand merchandising like Marlboro Gear, Camel Cash, and the near-ubiquitous Your Basic Hat. Wearing or carrying that stuff’s a walking admission of subservience to a chemical god, disguised (as so many human weaknesses are) as bravado. Speaking of personal appearance…

BEAUTY VS. COMMERCE: The Portland paper Willamette Week reports many employers in that town are altering their dress codes to regulate employees with nose and lip rings. An exec with the espresso chain Coffee People was quoted as saying his company allows up to “three earrings per ear and a nose stud,” but forbids nose rings. Starbucks baristas in the Rose City may wear up to two earrings per ear but no face rings, no tattoos, and no “unnatural” hair colors. Dunno ’bout you, but I like to be served by someone who shows she knows there’s more important things than serving me. Speaking of trendy looks…

UPDATE: Got a bottle of Orbitz pop thanks to the guys at Throw Software, who’d smuggled three bottles from NYC. It’s made by a Vancouver company (Clearly Canadian) whose US HQ’s in Kent, but it’s only sold so far in the Northeast. It’s more beautiful than I imagined–a clear, uncarbonated, slightly-more-syrupy-than-usual concoction with caviar-sized red, yellow, or orange gummy globules in perfect suspension, neither floating nor sinking. It uses Clearly Canadian’s regular bottle shape, which is already sufficiently Lava Lamp-esque for the visual effect. As for the taste, reader Jeannine Arlette (who also got hers in NY) sez it’s “less icky tasting than the dessert black-rice-pudding, but just a little… The little neon `flavor bitz’ lodge in the gag part of your throat as you swallow, and, they have no flavor except possibly under some very loose definition where texture is considered a flavor.” Speaking of beverages…

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of an ad offering video-rental “happy hours,” complete with cocktail-nation cartoon imagery): “Rain City Video does not condone the use of alcoholic beverages with some movies.” What? Without a few good highballs or mint-liqueur martinis in your system, what’s the point of watching something like Leaving Las Vegas, Barfly, Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? Certainly the Thin Man films nearly demand six martinis. Speaking of film and morals…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in his paper The Final Call, recently blasted the producers of Independence Day.He claims they knowingly stole and corrupted a 1965 prophecy by his predecessor, Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, that a fleet of space ships will one day descend from their “Mother Plane,” secretly built by Africans in 1929 and currently hidden in high orbit, to destroy white America. (This is the source of the “mother ship” imagery George Clinton sanitizes for mainstream consumption.) Farrakhan claims all the world’s political and media leaders know about the Mother Plane but have never admitted it, except to slander it in a movie. (Farrakhan’s also displeased that the UFO-blasting hero in Independence Day is so openly Jewish.)

Many of you first became acquainted with the advanced mysteries of the Nation of Islam at the Million Man March, when Farrakhan preached about conspiracies revealed by magic numbers. A nonbeliever might find it strange, but it’s no stranger than tenets followed by Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, and New-Agers.

Besides, the premise of an apocalypse from the skies is as old as War of the Worlds. Several sects have predicted violent or benign spaceship-based takeovers over the years; the Church of the Sub-Genius parodied it in its tracts claiming that “Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet.” And compared to real-life crimes against blacks (like the recent report in the mainstream press that CIA-connected crooks jump-started the crack industry, and the resulting gang violence, in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras), and Farrakhan’s charges seem relatively mild and almost plausible.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder these thoughts of Courtney Love on smells, from a 1993 issue of Mademoiselle: “All boys love Chanel No. 5 because it reminds them of their moms when they got dressed up.”

SEATTLE OLYMPICS IN 2008? First, let’s get our transit problems sorted out (and not with space-wasting freeway lanes, pleeze). Otherwise, the politicians proposing this (and the businessmen who own them) have one point: we’ll already have most of the physical plant the Games would need. Depending how the Seahawks situation works out, we’ll have three to five full-sized stadia in the area, plus three big arenas, four smaller arenas, a AAA baseball field, a convention center or two, a rowing facility, the swimming pool from the ’90 Goodwill Games, and UW dorms that could house a few thousand jocks. Of course, that leaves plenty of spaces to be constructed (for tennis, bicycling, horses, skeet shooting, etc.); and since there’s nothing Pro-Business Democrats love more than mega construction projects, expect more hype about the Olympic bid than you heard about the Commons (even though the Olympic bigwigs won’t decide for years).

AW, SHOOT:Ads for the film The Shot shamelessly rip off the happy-face-with-bleeding-forehead image from the ’80s cult-favorite comic book Watchmen. But don’t worry, fanboys: Watchmen will be famous as long as there’s an audience for “alternative” superheroes; The Shot may leave theaters this month, to live on in video obscurity (unless one of its actors gets famous later).

LIP GLOSS: The fashion mag Marie-Claire claims the Beautiful People have a new cosmetic-surgery thang: labia lifts. My first thought: Perhaps only in the age of Hustler would straight women see enough of other women’s crotches to feel jealous of them. Second, they’ve always been the one part of a woman’s exterior sexual anatomy that’s been considered strictly for sensation, not appearance (until the piercing rage went mainstream). Call me old fashioned, but I sorta like it that way. Speaking of old-style ladies…

OLD WORLD SWORDER: Xena, Warrior Princess (plugged by KIRO-TV sports guy Tony Ventrella as “a clean girl in a dirty neighborhood”) made the cover of Ms. Sure, star Lucy Lawless appeared in a lesbian film (on the compilation Women from Down Under, at Video Vertigo and elsewhere). But essentially, this alleged role model for women’s empowerment is just another Conan-in-drag role, a fantasy formula seen everywhere from Red Sonja to the UK comic Axa. The only essential difference is how, as a low-budget syndicated show that has to fill more talk between the battles, it takes time to explore how non-warrior women would fare in such a muscle-bound world. Speaking of the politics of action heroes…

CURLY CUES: I’ve been feeling guilty about watching the Three Stooges. Not about the films themselves, but about watching them on Pat Robertson’s “New Family Channel.” Promos bill it as “a division of International Family Entertainment, a publicly-owned company,” but the NY Times reports most of the stock’s still held by Robertson, his son, and organizations they control. Indeed, next week it’ll “cover” the Republican Convention via GOP-sponsored hours starring GOP-appointed commentators, promising viewers needn’t spend a second outside the closed-loop system of Right propaganda. Even if I’m not in a Nielsen household and don’t buy any product advertised, I’m patronizing an organization started to spread Robertson’s anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-choice, pro-censorship, pro-corporate agenda.

Anyhow, my guilt was relieved slightly when I remembered the Stooge films were originally made for Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, whose politics were just as Neanderthal as Robertson’s (and who required sex from actresses as a condition for employment, something Robertson’s never been accused of). Also, there’s something satisfying about catching the last seconds of Robertson’s sanctimonious 700 Club rants, followed by some of cinema’s greatest anarchists. I’m sure Robertson’s staff bought the Stooge films (which had been off TV for several years during a merchandising-rights dispute) ‘cuz they were thought to represent current right-wing entertainment tastes (lotsa violence, no sex). But they probably didn’t remember how regularly and thoroughly the Stooges demolished the pretensions of authority and conformity systems–pretensions not unlike Robertson’s. Robertson permits no rebuttals to his political stances on his cable channel, but I can imagine no more elequent rebuttal to the cultural assumptions behind his stances than these Depression-era inner-city Jews confronting WASP society.

Retro-Futurism at 600 Feet:

Dining at the Needle

Eats essay for The Stranger,7/23/96

While the future the Space Needle predicted (it helped inspire the look of The Jetsons) never happened, and the age it came from passed long ago, it remains a beloved symbol of Seattle and an icon of a bygone belief in a late-industrial, pre-computer tomorrow. It’s an almost unbelievable blend of retro kitsch and eternal beauty. Except for the ’80s-vintage 100-foot-level addition (now used only for occasional banquets), its size, scale, and shape are as near as modern American architecture gets to Pythagorean perfection.

Seattleites love the Needle so much they’ll forgive the legendary cost and mediocrity of its restaurant, almost. (You can tell a real local kid: She’ll have 100 Space Needle scale models, ball-point pens, ash trays, whiskey bottles, postcards, and posters, but has never been in the real one.)

I’m looking at a still of Elvis’s scene in the Space Needle restaurant from It Happened at the World’s Fair. The revolving, donut-shaped dining room evokes what was considered wondrous in ’62: Space Patrol uniforms on the servers, fine suits and dresses on the clientele, rich paneling on the walls, rich food on the tables.

In its 35th year, the uniforms and the decor have become more commonplace (the walls are now as grey as the view on an overcast winter day; the ceiling has that speckled-relief effect made infamous by suburban condos). The food, which always was commonplace, has remained so.

The Needle’s a product of what passes for “old money” in this young city. It’s always been a private endeavor, adjacent to but not part of the city-owned Seattle Center. It was built by mega-contractor Howard S. Wright, with backing from developer Ned Skinner and hotel tycoon Eddie Carlson. The late architect-activist Victor Steinbrueck claimed to have played a role in the design, but Wright’s discounted the extent of Steinbrueck’s participation. Both Steinbrueck and Wright claimed to have been inspired by Stuttgart’s TV tower (more explicitly cloned in Toronto’s CN Tower). For many years the restaurant was managed by Carlson’s Western International (now Westin) Hotels; the Needle itself was owned by a five-partner consortium headed by Wright and entitled (our neopagan readers will love this!) the Pentagram Corp. The operation’s now united as the Space Needle Corp.

Tom Robbins called it a phallic symbol, claiming the old Grandma’s Cookies neon sign at north Lake Union as its feminine counterpart. He was only half right. It’s tall and cylindrical, but also curvy and gracious; you rise up to penetrate it, arriving in a cornerless world of padded surfaces and comforting joys.

Upon checking in at the bottom, the efficient staff confirms your reservation and warns you how many elevator loads are ahead of you. Despite a large group from a software company waiting in line ahead of me, it was soon my turn to take the smooth 42-second ride up 600 feet to the “top house.” Quicker than you can adjust your inner ears, you’re in the stark grey topside waiting area. The excessively (but not insuffrably) perky wait staff soon seated me at a non-window table, near two middle-aged couples from Philadelphia freely expressing their giddiness at the whole top-of-the-world sensation. The whole room had the air of low-key (and, at some tables, higher-key) celebrations: Contracts signed, wedding dates set, relatives reunited, jobs and homes temporarily abandoned.

Aside from the diners’ happy talk, the only aural accompaniment to my meal came from the steady, reassuring hum of the turntable motors ever-so-slowly sending me around to view the panorama of city, sound, sky, and (since it was sunny) mountains. I couldn’t see my house (a bigger building was in the way), but everything else was laid out like a miniature movie set for Godzilla to stomp on; the Harbor Island container docks looked like a stack of grey Lego bricks.

The giant turntable has grown jittery over the years. It rumbles and vibrates beneath your feet, and staggers for a second every few minutes. The thing goes all the way around in an hour; with the efficient service and pre-prepared dishes, you can expect to be finished by the time you again spot the buildings that were in front of you when you sat down.

While the restaurant’s menu has evolved, the emphasis remains on fancy-but-not-too-fancy meals for tourists, business travelers, and locals hosting out-of-town relatives. It makes no claims to be on the cutting edge of cuisine. Aside from a fried vegetarian penne ($24.95), the dinner menu is neatly divided into “Entrees” (bigger, costlier versions of what your parents would order in a steak house on their anniversary) and “Signature Entrees” (that seafood stuff the tourists hear you’ve got to get when you’re in Seattle). Everything is soft-textured and mildly seasoned, so everyone from grandma to your finicky preteen niece can enjoy it.

My entree choice, the Chicken Parmesan ($24.95), was a huge slab of chicken, breaded and baked to you-need-no-teeth tenderness, with melted chese and a pizza-esque sauce. Not the worst of its type I’ve ever had, but nothing you couldn’t get better and/ or cheaper on Terra Firma. It came with two scoops of reconstituted mashed potatoes, carrot slices and string beans. The butter-pat foil containers and the sugar pouches carried the telltale logo of Food Services of America–the empire of that Thomas Stewart guy from Vashon, patron of right-wing politicians and subsidizer of John Carlson’s think tank.

If I were to recommend a dish to you, it’d be the prime rib ($27.95 to $31.95). The demise of Jake O’Shaugnessey’s has left a vacancy in the Lower Queen Anne vicinity for this melt-in-your-mouth delicacy. It’s cured, so it’s safely cooked even when it’s all red and fleshy on the inside. Those celebrating on a budget can settle for the smoked-salmon appetizer ($9.95).

Any good kitschy “special occasion” restaurant needs a special drink or dessert. The Needle disappointed in both areas. They were out of the take-home ceramic Needle-shaped glass that’s supposed to come with the Mai Tai-esque Space Needle Blast-Off Punch ($18). They did have the World Famous Lunar Orbiter dessert ($5.50); but once the dry-ice fog from the lower compartment of its special cup has steams away, you’ve just got a lot of ice cream covered with mini M&M’s.

You can get the drinks without the entrees, at the cocktail lounge on the non-revolving Observation Deck just above the restaurant. The view’s just as spectacular as it is from the restaurant, though you have to walk around it yourself (the outer walkway’s all fenced in nowadays, to be jump-proof). And the atmosphere’s far more festive, with cheery tourists and screaming kids running to and fro. The gift-shop merchandise is astounding. You can play with the penny-flattening machine or the coin-op telescope (not powerful enough to peer into hotel rooms). Tucked away in a corner there’s a computer kiosk normally displaying an Internet tourist-guide site, but you can follow links to the Sub Pop Mega Mart site and leave it there. And on summer Friday evenings, the amplified melodies from the Pain in the Grass concerts waft upward beautifully. I like the band Zeke normally, but it never sounded as hot as it did from 600 feet away.

MISC. HATES TO say it, but the rest of the local media were more than a bit mistaken about the hyped-up overimportance of a certain out-of-state chain restaurant opening up shop in Seattle. Now if White Castle had moved into town, that would’ve meant something.

Besides, we’ve already got a watering hole for Seattlites who love film. It’s called the Alibi Room. Instead of loudly pandering to manufactured celebrity worship (just what has B. Willis actually done to deserve this kind of Messiahdom?), this place quietly honors the art and craft of making film, with published screenplays on a shelf for browsing and many of Seattle’s growing tribe of director and cinematographer wannabes hanging out and networking. They’re even mounting a local screening series, “Films From Here.” Seldom has the divide over competing visions of America’s cultural future been more clearly shown than in the contrast between a corporately-owned shrine to prepackaged Global Entertainment and a local independent gathering place for creators.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: The Vent may be the only alternative literary zine published on that rock of antisociality known as Mercer Island. The current issue’s highlighted by “Rage,” George Fredrickson’s two-paragraph micro-essay on “how crazy it is 2 live on Mercer Isl. and b black at da same time.” Free at Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill or pay-what-you-can from 3839 80th Ave. SE, Mercer Island 98040… July’s Earshot Jazz newsletter has an important piece by new editor Peter Monaghan about DIY indie CDs and some of the pitfalls unsuspecting musicians can face when they try to become their own record producers. (Free around town or from 3429 Fremont Pl. N., #309, Seattle 98103.)

NET-WORKING: the same week I read this month’s Wired cover story on “Kids Cyber Rights,” I also found a story from last September’s Harper’s Bazaar about “Lolitas On-Line.” In the latter article, writer David Bennahum claims there’s a trend of teen females (including “Jill, a precocious 15-year-old from Seattle”) acting out sexual fantasies in online chat rooms and newsgroups. Bennahum proposes, that online sex talk isn’t necessarily a Force of Evil but can, when used responsibly, be a tool of empowerment and self-discovery; letting users explore the confusing fascinations of sexual identity safely and pseudonymously.

In the Wired piece, Jon Katz offered some similar notions. I’m particularly fond of his assertions that children “have the right to be respected,” “should not be viewed as property or as helpless to participate in decisions affecting their lives,” and “should not be branded ignorant or inadequate because their educational, cultural, or social agenda is different from that of previous generations.”

Twenty years of punk rock should have proved kids can make their own culture and don’t like being treated as idiots. Yet the Right still shamelessly uses “The Family” (always in the collective singular, as one monolithic entity) to justify all sorts of social-control mechanisms. Near-right Democrats try to muscle in on the far right’s act, using “Our Kids’ Future” to promote gentrification schemes that make family housing less affordable, while cracking down on any signs of independent youth culture (punks, skaters, cruisers) and going along with dubious “protection” schemes like V-chips and Internet censorship. And too many of yesterday’s Today Generation (like Garry Trudeau) mercilessly sneer at anyone too young to be From The Sixties. (In ’92 a Times subsidiary hired me to write for its tabloid for teens; I was laid off when its baby-boomer bosses found, to their surprise, that actual teens could indeed compose their own sentences.)

Yes, teens and preteens face a lot of problems. They always have; they always will. But they’re far more likely to get abused by daddy than by an e-mail correspondent. They’ll hear more (and more creative) cuss words in the playground than on HBO. Let’s stop stunting kids’ growth by forcing them into subhuman roles they often can’t stand. Instead, let’s treat kids as human beings, who could use a little friendly advice now and then (as could we all) but who ultimately should, and can, take responsibility for their own lives. John Barth once wrote, “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.” I’d add: Innocence excessively enforced becomes fetishization.

UPDATE: The Portland paper Willamette Week sez that town’s “Church of Kurt Cobain” was just a fraudulant publicity stunt. As opposed to the real publicity stunt we thought it was.

SONICS POSTMORTEM: No matter what happens to the team in future years, we’ll always have Games Four and Five to savor. For four glorious days, the whole city (save a few droller-than-thou alternative conformists) believed. Imagine–a team of great players could beat a team of spokesmodels! Like the Seattle music scene (to which the Sonics have consistently made closer overtures than any other local sports team), the Sonic victories celebrated talent, diligence, and cooperation instead of celebrity, arrogance, and corporate hype. How appropriate that it happen two weeks before the opening of Planet Hollywood, that chain restaurant expressly devoted to corporate celebrity hype, and which staged a PR stunt with professional hypemeister Cindy Crawford telling us if we were smart we’d root against our own team. Can you say, “Not quite the way to make new friends for your business”? Speaking of athletes striving for respect…

THE DEAD POOL: At its Olympics debut in ’84, synchronized swimming was often derided as a summer-games answer to ice dancing, less a sport than an excuse to show half-dressed women. Since then, the sport’s tried to shake that image and earn respect. In the biggest effort yet, the French national team crafted a routine inspired by the Nazi Holocaust. The choreographed playlet premiered at the European Cup finals in May and was planned for the Atlanta Olympics. To Schindler’s List soundtrack music, swimmers goose-stepped into the pool, then switched identities to impersonate women victims being taken to the ovens. But in early June, the country’s sports ministry ordered the team to drop all Holocaust allusions from the routine. Time quoted a dismayed team official, “The program was created to denounce not only the Holocaust in particular, but all forms of racism and intolerance that we see rising.” I say the routine’s well within postmodern performance art, and should be allowed; especially with the ex-Olympic city of Sarajevo only starting to rebuild from a half-decade of attempted genocide. Speaking of dances with a message…

BYE BYE BRAZIL: We’ve past reported on the ever-reaching tentacles of global corporate entertainment, even while American fans increasingly search for untainted pockets of “world beat” and other ethnic arts to bring home. Now, I must sadly report Mickey Mouse’s planned debut at next February’s Rio Carnaval parade. Samba school Academicos da Rocinha will get to use giant models of the Disney characters to celebrate 25 years of the Disney World theme park–as long as the parade’s 2,000-or-so women dancers all keep their tops on. “That was my first condition and thank goodness they agreed,” a Disney marketing official told Variety. In the same article, troupe president Izamilton Goes dismissed suggestions the cover-up would detract from the spectacle: “Inside all of us there remains something of a child and we all loved Disney.”

It’s not that Carnaval would be “cheapened” by Disneyfication. It’s been kitsch for decades. But it’s been its own indigenous brand of kitsch. It incorporates sex not as seamy exploitation but as joyous celebration. The dancers are often poor women who sew their own sequined costumes and arrange their own choreography, who bare their bodies proudly to an audience of men, children, and other women. They enjoy being admired as carnal beings after a year stuck in the wife-mother-laborer roles the Disney people are more comfortable with. Anyhow, the other 18 or so samba schools aren’t bound by Disney’s dictates. And the TV network that largely subsidizes the parades wanted to ban nudity a few years ago, hoping to increase foreign TV-video sales, but the samba schools said no. Speaking of broadcast empires…

BEHIND THE SCREEN: MSNBC, the forthcoming Microsoft-NBC cable news channel we won’t get to see for some months after its July launch, is now going to build new studios in New Jersey (with state-government aid), scuttling earlier plans to share space with NBC’s existing CNBC. Darn. CNBC could use some news people in its building, or at least somebody who could tell the channel’s talk-show hosts the O.J. Simpson trial is over.

WELCOME AGAIN one and all to Misc., the pop-culture column still anxious to try those Olestra potato chips with the chemically-engineered fake fat. If any out-of-town readers live in the chips’ test markets, could you send some over here? Thanx.

UPDATE: Looks like the brick-and-concrete light-industrial building that housed RKCNDY, that recently-closed rock n’ roll purgatory, may soon house the Matt Talbot Day Center, a Catholic Community Services drop-in ministry attending to drug-addicted or otherwise troubled teens. The lease hasn’t been finalized and could still fall through (like the deal last winter to buy the club and keep it operating). I’ll let you generate your own forces-of-redemption-take-over-din-of-iniquity remarks; you might even consider it the Big Guy’s smirking revenge for Moe taking up business in an ex-Salvation Army rehab center.

AD VERBS: Not too long ago, advertisers loved to claim their products would help you attract a sex partner. Now, masturbation metaphors are the rage. First, there was the shampoo that promised women a veritable scalp orgasm. In a more recent spot, a phone-sex worker emotes gushingly about the Pay Day candy bar’s sensuous qualities. And a still-small but growing trend of advertising for women sneaks in references to that self-satisfaction aid, hardcore porn, like the Revlon lipstick promoted as “SuperseXXXy.” If you believe the conspiracy-theory thinking in zines like Adbusters Quarterly (I don’t), you might theorize how the marketeers want to exploit people’s natural drives by redirecting those drives away from the nature-intended craving for intimacy with another human soul and toward sexual identification with the Product itself. Certainly the ad where a woman fantasizes (apparently during intercourse) about how she’d rather be driving a Mercedes could be so interpreted.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical-labor outfit that earlier this century tried to forge “One Big Union of All the Workers,” still exists. The Real Deal: Labor’s Side of Things is its regional monthly zine, edited by Mark Manning. It offers a little labor history (in the May ish, an essay on the Spokane IWW’s fight to overturn 1909 laws banning public speech in the Lilac City). But most of it’s of the present day, documenting workers’ struggles and conditions here and in other parts of the world. At a time when much self-styled “radical” literature either ignores or sneers at working-class Americans, Manning refreshingly extols not just sympathy for but solidarity and common cause with wage slaves everywhere. One flaw: The back-page article chiding downtown business interests for opposing hygiene centers for the homeless starts picking on one particular businessman without explaining why. (Pay-what-you-can to PO Box 20752, Seattle 98102.)

PRICELESS-ADVICE DEPT.: One side effect of writing for an increasingly popular alterna-paper is mainstream journalists treating you, perhaps foolishly, as an expert on Those Darn Kids. An AP writer called from Portland late last month, preparing a story on theChurch of Kurt Cobain opening down there and wanting my sound-bite-length comments. I said Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role of Rock Star, and would undoubtedly reject veneration as some demigod prophet of Gen X. As I interpret his work, he longed for a world without gods or at least without leaders and followers, a world where folks create their own cultures and work out their own ideas. From first glance, these lessons seem to be lost on the church’s founder, Jim Dillon, who told the P-I his 12-member congregation “pays homage to this alienated tribe and to the man who they have called `saint.'” But then again, if Jesus’ words can be interpreted in as many different ways as they are, it’s only natural to expect Cobain’s sometimes expressionistic word imagery to become similarly reread or misread.

‘TIL NEXT WE SHARE INKSTAINS, ponder these words of Indian movie star Madhuri Dixit, quoted by interviewer “Bitchybee” in the magazine Cineblitz: “Work is worship. Play is a waste of time. Night clubs, parties socializing saps your energy and gets you nothing, but unwanted notices from snoopy gossip journalists. Avoid the night spots and dark circles. It’s even helpful in avoiding pimples.”