UPDATE: I recently sought your proposed new uses for the Kingdome. The best came from one J. Drinkwater: “1) Fill it with water and house the sea lions from the Ballard Locks. 2) Rename it the Seattle Commons.”

SPACES IN THE HEART: Back when Seattle bands were just starting to attract out-of-town notice, the center of the town’s live-music action was a pair of clubs near Eastlake and Howell, connected by a walkway under a freeway overpass. The Off Ramp and RKCNDY weren’t posh by any means, but their drinks were strong and their PAs were loud. Newer and fancier clubs since stole their thunder. RKCNDY is closed and for sale; financing for a planned remodel apparently fell through. The Off Ramp has struggled as well. A new owner and new booker vow to keep things going; but the liquor-license transfer apparently hit a snag, and the home of Gnosh Before the Mosh is, as of this writing, also shut. Meanwhile, the all-ages music scene continues to take it on the chin. Fire marshalls suddenly halved the Pioneer Square Theater’s legal capacity the night of a show, making future shows there fiscally iffy. The Velvet Elvis almost stopped hosting concerts after a few rowdy punkboys disrupted a show in late April. Instead, the VE will continue to let indie promoters run all-ages music in the space, but has asked them to de-emphasise hardcore-punk lineups. In a final note, Park Ave. Records, lower Queen Anne’s Taj Mahal of collector vinyl, has called it quits. Its purported replacement: a branch of the Disc-Go-Round chain.

LOVE, ITALIAN STYLE: Director Bernardo Bertolucci shot his share of requisitely-picturesque Seattle scenes for his film Little Buddah. Now he’s introducing that other popular image of Seattle into his work. In the trailer for Bertolucci’s new film Stealing Beauty(no relation to Britain’s 1988 sexy-novice-priest movie Stealing Heaven), a pastoral scene in a decaying Italian farm shed is gloriously interrupted by Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler), as a teen brought to the farm against her will by her family, loudly singing and dancing to a tape of Hole’s “Rock Star.” The scene transforms a personal jeer at one particular clique (the Oly rocker-than-thous) into a universal defiance against cliquishness in general.

THE DRAWING ROOM: The Meyerson & Nowinski art gallery has instantly become the ritzy-upscale “contemporary art” emporium for Seattle. The splashy opening show gathers drawings and prints from artists of different nations and decades, collectively referred to by the gallery as “Picasso and Friends.” (It’s really no worse than TNT sticking Tom & Jerry cartoons onto a show called Bugs Bunny and Friends.)

Many of you remember Bob Blackburn Jr. as the sometime statistician and broadcast assistant to his dad, the SuperSonics’ original radio announcer. Bob Jr. also played in assorted Seattle bands (including the Colorplates) before moving to L.A. in ’89. He now works for the Westwood One satellite-radio empire, conducting celebrity interviews and organizing promotions. Last month his job led to the fulfillment of a longtime dream, the chance to meet ’50s bondage model Betty Page. As you may know, the sweet-faced, dark-haired Page posed mostly for obscure and under-the-counter publications for about 10 years, then retired to a very private existence. Only now, long after her pictures became the icons of a new mainstream-fetish cult, has she partly resurfaced, giving a few select interviews and authorizing a biography. Blackburn chatted with her for an hour and got her to autograph a picture for his friends in the Seattle sleazepunk outfit Sick & Wrong. He says Page “still looks really good” at 73, but won’t be photographed. The audio interview was mostly done, he says, “for the record.” Westwood One has no plans to air it on any of its satellite feeds, most of which aren’t carried in Seattle anyway. I think Blackburn should invite her to come work with his ex-employers. The Sonics (especially Kemp) could use someone to teach some discipline!

(Be sure to keep Sunday, June 2 open for the magnificent, marvelous, mad mad mad Misc. Tenth Anniversary Party at the Metropolis Gallery, on University St. east of 1st Ave. Details forthcoming.)

IT’S TYPOGRAPHICAL MAKEOVER WEEK here at Misc., the pop-cult column that’s ever-so-slightly confused by Tropicana orange juice’s big promotion for Apollo 13 videos. Shouldn’t the Tang people be doing this instead?

SORRY, ALL YOU CLEVER MUSIC PEOPLE: Hate to tell ya, but there’s already a band named Mad Cow Disease. It’s an indie-label industrial combo (latest import CD: Tantric Sex Disco) formed in 1990 in a mostly-rural part of England where herds were already suffering from the deadly epidemic, years before authorities discovered it could spread to humans.

AIR CHECK: Two more attempts at pirate radio operations are now underway, joining the existing FUCC collective in the few open slots on the FM band. “KXTC” (info: 587-9487) hopes to be on the air next Monday night at 89.9, for once-a-week broadcasts of dance and house music. And “Seattle Liberation Radio” (PO Box 85541, Seattle 98145), a group of some 12 local political and cultural advocates, wants to start a full-time unlicensed station to primarily transmit alternative news and talk programming under the slogan, “End Corporate Hegemony of Media.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I’ve previously mentioned Dan Halligan’s approximately-quarterly punkzine 10 Things Jesus Wants You to Know. But the new issue #13 particularly stands out, due to Katrina Hellbusch’s essay “A Friend No Longer.” In explicit, downbeat, name-naming detail, Hellbusch (a member of the local punk band Outcast) writes about passing out drunk at a party, awakening to find herself being raped by a close friend (a member of another local punk band). Never straining for exploitation or self-pity, Hellbusch vividly images a crime in which the assailant degraded himself to a subhuman state and tried to shove his victim there with him. She also begs (but doesn’t specifically ask) what this means about the punk scene–whether it’s an excuse for self-styled Bad Boys to be rowdy without rules, or whether it is (or oughta be) a closer-knit community of people who cooperate with and protect one another. Free at Fallout and Cellophane Square, among other dropoff sites, or $2 from 1407 NE 45th St., #17, Seattle 98105.

ONE, ETC., FOR THE ROAD: Recently, at two different occasions among two different sets of people, the topic arose about whether one could bar-hop in Seattle hitting only places with numbers in their names, in numerical order. I think I’ve figured how. Some of these places are far apart so you’ll need wheels (as always, be sure to have a designated driver and always drink responsibly):

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

* Either the Two Bells (2313 4th Ave.), 2 Dagos From Texas (2601 1st Ave.), or the 211 Club (2304 2nd Ave.)

* Either the 318 Tavern (318 W Nickerson), or one of the two unrelated Triangle Taverns (1st Ave. S. or 3507 Fremont Pl. N.)

* Either the Four Mile Tavern (15215 Aurora Ave. N.), the Four B’s (4300 Leary Way NW), the Four Seas Restaurant (714 S. King St.), or the lounge at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel (1300 4th Ave.).

* Either the 5 Spot (1502 Queen Anne Ave. N.), the 5 Point (415 Cedar St.), Zak’s 5th Ave. Saloon (206 5th Ave. N.), or the Old 5th Ave. Tavern (8507 5th Ave. NE).

* Either the Six Arms (600 E. Pine St.), the Six Eleven (611 2nd Ave.), or the 6th Ave. Bar & Grill (2000 6th Ave.).

* Either Cafe Septiéme (214 Broadway E.), or the 7th Ave. Tavern (705 NW 70th St.).

* The Speakeasy Cafe (2306 2nd Ave.), home of the Internet site for Dom Cappello’s Cafe 8Ball comic.

* Either the Gay 90s (700 Pike), or the bar formerly known as The Nine (now the Family Affair, 234 Fairview Ave. N.).

That’s about it sequentially. With the end of Rosellini’s Four-10 and Six-10, the closest thing to a “10” joint is the Tenya Japanese Restaurant (936 3rd Ave.). Then you’d have to skip a couple to get to the 13 Coins.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try the Hershey’s Cookies and Creme bar (yum-my!), giggle at the new Mercedes 4 x 4 (ugg-ly!), and ponder these inscrutable words credited to Winston Churchhill: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.”

Welcome back to a foolishness-free April Misc., the column that finds amusement anywhere it can, like in that brand new post-Broadway theater in Vancouver. Only a bunch of Canadians (or others with similar ignorance of basic U.S. history facts) would call a place the Ford Theatre. So when are they gonna mount a production of Our American Cousin?

PHILM PHUN: Toast With the Gods, the indie feature by Eric MaGun and Latino Pellegrini based loosely on The Odyssey and shot here gawd-was-it-really-almost-two-years-ago?, is finally finished and premiered late last month at the New York Underground Film Festival. When will we get to see it? No word yet. Speaking of undergrounds…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Blackstockings (“For Women In the Biz”) is a small, low-key, personal newsletter aiming to raise solidarity and class-consciousness among “sex industry workers” (strippers, peep-show dancers, phone-sex callees, video models, escorts, even streetwalkers). Similar zines in other towns are run by politically-minded committees. This one’s run by one woman, a freelance stripper using the name “Morgan;” she and her contributing writers present themselves neither as society’s lurid victims nor as daring counterculture adventurers, but simply as ordinary folks doing work that’s like any work–occasionally invigorating, more often dreary. While the first issue focuses on sex workers’ personal lives (“Who’s a good dentist that doesn’t discriminate against us?”), political and legal issues inevitably appear. One item alleges that in the days before the Kingdome Home Show, police staged a sweep of street people and prostitutes in Pioneer Square–“For the women who they could not legally arrest, they poked holes in the condoms the women were carrying.” Available at Toys in Babeland or by leaving a message at 609-8201. Speaking of realities behind “glamour” businesses…

THE BIG TURN-OFF: As predicted here, the Telecommunications “Reform” Act promptly fed a massive drive to consolidate broadcasting into fewer and fewer hands. Thanks to rules enacted in the name of “greater competition,” speculators are amassing up to eight radio stations in a town. The owners of KMPS bought the biggest rival country stations, KRPM and KCIN, so they could change the stations’ formats and reduce KMPS’s competition. (KMPS’s owners also bought Seattle’s other country station, KYCW.) Viacom sold KNDD to the Philly-based Entertainment Communications, which already owns KMTT (both are already situated in the Can of Spam Building on Howell St.). No word on whether another Viacom unit, MTV, will still help devise KNDD’s ads, graphics, and web site. If all the currently-planned local radio deals go through, the Seattle Times estimates six companies will control 77 percent of the region’s listening audience. Speaking of media choices…

LIST-LESS: The Times’ highly-promoted new Sunday TV section debuted March 17 with 19 previously unlisted cable channels. But one channel was dropped from the 35 in the paper’s previous lineup–Public Access. According to spokesbot Pat Foote, Timeseditors deemed the access channel too marginal and too Seattle-specific for inclusion, even though they included several tertiary movie channels seen only on scattered suburban systems. However, an unspecified number of complaining phone calls persuaded ’em to reconsider. Access listings are back in the Times (the only print outlet they’ve ever been in) this week. Speaking of mis(sed) prints…

POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: Kudos to my fave computer user group, Mac dBUG (Macintosh Downtown Business Users Group), on its 10th anniversary. Its current newsletter (available free at the U Book Store computer dept.) has a cute word-O-warning, “Speaking of Spell-Checking,” reminding desktop publishers that even the best computer spell-check programs can’t catch real words in the wrong places. As examples, it used fractured phrases made of real words, all just one letter off from the expected words: “Share thy sod aid spool she chill,” “I switch it tires sages nice,” and “Take ham whole she fun spines.” Too bad they didn’t catch a real headline elsewhere on the same page: “What Does the Term `Bandwidth’ Means?”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, welcome Bedazzled Discs away from Pio. Sq. and into the ex-911 space on E. Pine, and eat all your chocolate Easter bunnies ears-first (otherwise ya lose all the flavor).

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN SWELL: ‘Twas amusing a couple weeks back to find the Times discovering the danger of school textbooks so simplified and “dumbed down” that they’re fatally boring, losing more students by blandness than older texts might have lost by difficulty. I can believe it. I was certainly bored by most of the textbooks I had to read, and the Times report says they’ve gotten even easier/ dumber since then. From my two tenures working with public-school students (in 1983 and 1992-93), I’ve seen ’em to be, on the whole, much smarter and more naturally curious than most adults give ’em credit for. (Of course, I could say the same thing about readers of redesigned, simplified afternoon newspapers.) Speaking of textual achievements or lack of same…

POACHED POLITICS: Thanks to reader Bill Abelson, I’ve been re-introduced to egg, the 1990-91 fashion/ entertainment mag published by the country-club nerd known then as “Malcolm S. Forbes Jr.” and now as ex-presidential candidate Steve Forbes. He didn’t write or directly edit much of it, and Malcolm Sr. apparently had a bigger say than Steve in developing its concept; but it was Steve’s name atop the masthead and his money it lost. It was part of a rash of coffee table mags that appeared and disappeared almost in unison (remember Wigwag?). The page shape is a perfect square, giving a hint about the attitudes inside. The thing reeks of rich brats “slumming” in downtown NYC, laughing at the proles in dive bars and thrift stores when they’re not worshipping celebrities and ogling designer cleavage. It exemplifies Baffler editor Tom Frank‘s notion that “counterculture” or “avant garde” attitudes bear little significant difference from the “bold,” “rule-breaking” aggression of modern Global Business, that there’s nothing inherently “radical” about “hipness.”

Still, it’s vaguely encouraging to have seen a Republican candidate with evidenced knowledge of, and some level of fondness for, the contemporary arts and entertainment world. No major presidential prospect of either party since JFK has been allowed by his handlers to reveal awareness of any but the blandest current artists or performers. Speaking of politics & culture…

THE ART OF SANCTIMONY: So construction magnate/financier/Seattle Weekly co-owner Bagley Wright‘s giving a mess o’ money to this town’s “major arts institutions,” plus smaller annual gifts to individual painters or sculptors. In a town whose rich people mostly try to keep their names out of the papers, Wright’s largesse prompted editorial writers to pull out, as if from a word-processing program’s glossary file, every leftover piece of hype from the last govt.-arts-funding squabble about how the symphony and opera and museum benefit everyone, not just the institutions’ attendees, due to the uplifting air of culturedness provided just by having these institutions around.

I believe there really are positive impacts of a cultural scene on surrounding community; but they come only with the leap from cultural consumption to production. Any town with a few affluent residents and/or tourists can have an orchestra mounting all-Brahms nights and summer Pops Concerts, a theater performing the classics or last year’s NYC hits, a museum welcoming whatever touring exhibits it can pay the insurance for, and a dance troupe with an annual Nutcracker. Maybe it’s my writer bias, but I really believe a town becomes a community of higher-level discourse only when its “arts” priorities grow from film festivals to filmmakers, from symphonic “cover bands” to composers and improvisors, from performing theaters to producing theaters to creating theaters. Seattle’s getting there, thanks mostly to folks working apart from, or on the periphery of, the major arts institutions. Speaking of local cultural production…

CATHODE CORNER: Spud Goodman is on the road back to televisual presence, if not fame, over six months after being ceremoniously dropped by KTZZ. Goodman, his cast of fictional relatives, and a stripped-down crew are shooting 13 half-hour talk-spoof episodes for The Set, a Fox-owned cable channel seen nowhere in western Washington. Goodman’s new producer, Scott Piel, sez they’ll try to get Goodman’s brand of deadpan anti-schtick schtick picked up by a local broadcast station, at least for monthly specials. If that doesn’t pan out, they’ll at least try to hold public episode-screening parties somewhere.

WELCOME BACK to your Ides-O-March Misc., the pop-culture column that amusedly notes the first wedding of the age of media mergers, in which the widow of the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review married the retired publisher of the NY Times. Who said you can’t get far in the journalism biz these days?

UPDATE #1: The state legislature’s regular session expired with hundreds of conservative-social-agenda bills allowed to die. Among these was the Senate bill to drive strip clubs out of business via over-regulation, discussed here two weeks back. House members apparently felt the bill wouldn’t survive club operators’ lawsuits. Also gone, for this year at least, are bills to ban gay marriages, require parental consent for high-school HIV education, etc. Most of these proposals (except the anti-stripping bill) were introduced by Religious Right-friendly House Republicans but blocked by Senate Democrats. The Repo men hope to capture both chambers this November. You oughta work to try and stop that.

UPDATE #2: I asked you a few weeks back to suggest Disneyland character mascots for what might become the Anaheim Ex-Seahawks. Choices included Scrooge McDuck (natch), Jafar, and Cruella DeVil. My favorite was from the reader who, commenting on recent Seahawk seasons, recommended Sleepy.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: The guy who played Henry Blake on the M*A*S*H TV show and the guy who played Blake in the movie died within days of one another. Talk about becoming one with your role!

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK (seen in the Stranger for the Backstage, 3/6): “Maria McKee: A Punk Edith Piaf.” Don’t bait me here, guys. The real Piaf was punker than you, me, or McKee will ever be. Ever heard her version of Lieber & Stoller’s “Black Leather Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”? Didn’t think so.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The P!pe is a tabloid run by ex-International Examiner staffer Soyon Im, who sez he wants “to debunk the myth that anything cool with Asian Americans is happening down in San Francisco or L.A.” It also helps debunk the squaresville reputation of King County’s large Asian American community. Issue #1 packs eight pages with stuff about Indian dance music, Japanese power pop, Korean fashions, “Pan-Asian” restaurants, Chinese-American comix, Vietnamese travelogue photos, Taiwanese interracial relationships, and old Japanese erotic art. There’s even a sex-advice column (where’d they get that concept?) by “Soybean Milkchick,” assuring readers there’s nothing deficient about Asian-American manhood. (In other words, don’t feel bad if you don’t look like the guys in that old Japanese erotic art.) At Pistil Books and elsewhere.

ONE TOO MANY?: Cocktail Nation hype has hit overdrive, less than two years after the first Combustible Edison record (albeit 15 years after Throbbing Gristle did its homage to Martin Denny). A glance at the “Cocktail Mania” display at Borders Music shows how nearly every record label with old middle-of-the-road instrumentals in its vaults is repackaging that material as something hip n’ ironic. And a local indie TV producer’s currently trying to launch a weekly entertainment-talk show called Atomic Lounge. Don’t be surprised if reproduction smoking jackets show up this fall in the Tiger Shop.

PAT-APHYSICS: Buchanan’s proving to be more than just another lifetime DC political/ media insider pretending to be an “outsider.” His (momentary?) campaign success signals the first significant crack in the GOP’s 16-year ruling coalition of fundamentalists and corporations (something I’ve been predicting or at least desiring for some time). About a quarter of the things he says (the parts about the plight of the downsized and the ripoff that is “free” trade) make more sense than what the other Republicans say. It’s just the other three quarters of the things he says are so freakish (the tirades against gays, feminists, immigrants, pro-choice advocates, and other humans guilty only of not belonging to his target demographic). If there’s hope, it’s that Buchanan’s polls rose after he started downplaying the hatefest talk and emphasizing the anti-corporate talk. Why’s the only candidate to challenge the sanctity of big money also the biggest bigot and bully? Why don’t any national-level Democrats speak against the corporate power-grab like Pat does?

MISC. DOESN’T BELIEVE everything’s cyclical, but still finds it cute when something that goes around comes around again. F’rinstance, local mainstream retailers seem again interested in exploiting the popularity of the local music scene. Why just last week, the E. Madison Shop-Rite had its neon sign altered, either deliberately or by accident, to read 1ST HILL FOO CENTER.

INDECISION ’96: Drat. Now I won’t get to recycle old druggie jokes about “a really bad Gramm.”

LEGISLATURE WANTS TO BAN STRIP CLUBS: When lap dancing is outlawed, only outlaws will wear buttfloss. But seriously, our elected guardians of hypocrisy are out to kill, via punitive over-regulation, one of the state’s growth industries, employing as many as 500 performing artists in King County alone, many of whom support other artistic endeavors with their earnings. (Old joke once told to me: “What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice.”)

Yes, these can be sleazy joints, drawing big bucks by preying on human loneliness. Yes, in a more perfect world these clubs’ workforce would have more fulfilling employment and their clientele would have more fulfilling sex lives instead of costly fantasies. Yes, no organized political faction is willing to defend them (‘cept maybe some sanctity-of-the-entrepreneur Liberterians). But if we let the state’s sultans of sanctimony outlaw something just ’cause they think it’s icky, there’s a lot of gay, lesbian, S/M and other stuff they’d love to ban next.

REELING: You’ve heard about the Oscar nominations representing a surprising triumph for “independent” cinema. I’m not so sure. Just as the global entertainment giants have created and/ or bought pseudo-indie record labels, so have they taken charge of “independent” cinema. The Independents magazine given out at 7 Gables theaters lists the following participating sponsor/ distributors: Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Films, Fine Line Features (owned by Turner Broadcasting, along with New Line and Castle Rock; all soon to be folded into Time Warner), Miramax (Disney), and Gramercy (PolyGram).

Seven Gables’ parent firm, the Samuel Goldwyn Co., just became a sister company to Orion, which at its peak was considered a “mini-major” but is indie enough for my purposes here. And there are a few other real indies still out there, including Jodie Foster’s Egg Films. But between buying up the domestic little guys and crowding out foreign producers, the Hollywood majors (half now non-US owned) are on their way to monopolizing everything on big screens everywhere in the world. Speaking of silenced voices…

THE OTHER SIDE: This paper’s reported how ethnic-rights and environmental activists in Nigeria have faced arrest, torture, and execution. The Nigerian govt. defended itself in a slick eight-page ad supplement running only in African-American papers (includingThe Skanner here). In the same quaintly stilted 3rd World PR prose style seen in the USA Today ad section Our World, the supplement extols the west African nation as a land of “Investment Opportunities” and “Investment Incentives,” whose rulers are “Truly Peace Makers and Peace Keepers.” The center spread insists the country’s military junta’s still on “The Road to Democracy” (“Only those detractors who deliberately persist in a negative view of Nigerians and their efforts fail to take account of all that Nigerians have achieved in a short time”).

The junta’s execution of opposition leader Ken Saro-Wiwa is discussed on the back page, in a “Letter to the Editor” by Af-Am conservative Rev. Maurice Dawkins: “The Nigerians are learning the hard way that the majority media and the international liberal left network is a dangerous foe.” Dawkins denounces Saro-Wiwa as “a terrorist determined to overthrow the government” and his anti-junta movement as “a group of bandits;” justifies the crackdown against his movement under “the right of a soverign nation to conduct business and maintain law and order within its borders,” and accuses the junta’s western critics of holding “a racist double standard, depicted by misinformation and disinformation.” In short, the persecutors are re-imaged as the persecuted–a classic Limbaughan doublespeak technique.

PASSAGE (British-Israeli-American social critic Eli Khamarov in Surviving on Planet Reebok): ” People are inherently good. Bad people are created by other bad people; their survival is guaranteed because of their safety in numbers.”

CATHODE CORNER: After a little under two months on the air, the NorthWest Cable News channel can politely be termed on a “shakedown cruise”. What oughta be a brisk, informative roundup of regional happennings is instead a clumsy repackaging of footage from the four King Broadcasting stations. The same stories are rerun hour after hour, often with only the weather updated. I won’t talk about the evening sports guy, a comedian-wannabe who spends more time on unfunny gags than on the games. Still, it’s intriguing to hear about economic conditions in Spokane (lousy) and last month’s Oregon Senate race (wacky). I remember the semipro beginnings of CNN and ESPN, so I’ll let NWCN grow into its role. Others, like TCI customers who lost CBC for NWCN, might not be as charitable. I do sorta like how they insist on spelling “NorthWest” with software-marketing style “intercaps;” it’s a way of proclaiming your media market as a virtual nation, like when the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland.” Speaking of media institutions…

FALLLING FLAT: The most inadvertantly fascinating part of last month’s PBS Fight Over Citizen Kane documentary was Wm. Randolph Hearst’s creaky newsreel sermon against FDR’s increases to upper-bracket income taxes. It reminded me a lot of Steve Forbes’s flat tax nonsense. Both publishers’ tactics use populist rhetoric to promote the self-interests of the wealthy, particularly those with significant inherited wealth such as themselves. The comparisons go beyond there. Forbes and Hearst are/ were party-lovin’ men-about-town known to hobnob with movie stars. Hearst’s papers provided a self-contained information system, in which no voice too far from his own worldview got heard or respected. Forbes’s magazines haven’t gone that far, but the right-media universe of talk radio, televangelists and opinion magazines (whose support the GOP candidates are courting) fulfill Hearst’s formula better than the old man could have imagined.

(If anyone saved a copy of Forbes’s short-lived entertainment-fashion mag Egg, I’d love to borrow it. It could potentially be a hoot.)

THE MATS: Once the media consolidation bill (the one Net censorship was tacked onto) was signed, the Disney/ ABC and Time Warner/ Turner Broadcasting merger plans went “on” again. The latter deal was protested in an NY Times ad: “Attention TBS Stockholders: Does Ted Turner have a personal vendetta against the World Wrestling Federation? Time Warner Beware!” Turner’s properties happen to include a rival faux-sport circuit, World Championship Wrestling. WCW scored a coup a couple years back when it signed Hulk Hogan, formerly WWF’s #1 star. I’m foggy on the details, but I believe there was tangled legal wrangling before Hogan was freed to use his stage name (which WWF had trademarked) on WCW shows. Methinks the WWF guys take their stage bombast too seriously.

ROOM AT THE TOP?: The gentrification of upper Queen Anne has gone into overdrive. On one block alone a hobby shop, a café, a bakery, a state liquor store, and a pharmacy have perished to make room for as many as seven espresso emporia and two bagel stands. And you know a neighborhood’s gone out of our hands when San Franciscans open ridiculously sublime restaurant/ nightclubs there (Paragon). Queen Anne News writer Robin Hamilton’s taking it in stride. Writing about a co-marketing arrangement between Starbucks and its new QA neighbor Noah’s Bagels, Hamilton shows her knowledge of Jewish lore in explaining how “Noah’s will play Ruth to Starbucks’ Naomi.”

PLAYING MONOPOLY: A fight for the hearts and minds of America’s youth ended with Mattel withdrawing its $5.2 billion hostile-takeover bid for Hasbro (which went on its own acquisition spree a few years back and owns Playskool, Romper Room, Selchow & Righter, and Milton Bradley). Re-create the excitement at home with your handy Barbie vs. GI Joe land war playset… Meanwhile, Hasbro’s lawyers keep upping demands for reparations against a Seattle-based adult website for using the name “candyland.com,” claiming it could be confused with the Candy Land game. If I wanted a porno-pun on a board game, it wouldn’t be that. Maybe Chutes & Ladders, or Go to the Head of the Class…

Food for Thought on Cannibal Movies:

Bite Me

Film essay for The Stranger, 1/31/96

In the horror and horror-farce genres, vampirism is widely considered much cooler than cannibalism. Cannibals are messy and dismember their prey. Vampires simply exchange bodily fluids, in the process converting their prey into new members of the vampire species.

Yet in real life, vampirism is at best a matter of legend and historical conjecture. Cannibalism, on the other limb, is a well-documented practice of historic and indigenous societies around the world. Yes, devouring one’s own species violates the cardinal rule of the food chain; but people have gotten around that through the familiar-to-this-day shtick of declaring enemy tribes to be something less than human. Indeed, in some ancient communities consuming the flesh of a vanquished enemy warrior was/is said to give your warriors the strength or magic the enemy had.

Over the years, many directors have understood the shock potential of cannibalism as one of the cruelest one-on-one crimes imaginable, a crime that robs its perpetrators of their last claim to membership in their own species. In the docudrama Alive (1993) and the PBS documentary The Donner Party (1991), groups of people are trapped in the wilderness and must save their lives by eating their dead comrades, keeping their own bodies alive but destroying their souls. In Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), the eating of human flesh is the only violent act the Thief can’t bring himself to commit.

Let’s examine some of the film formulae that have incorporated cannibalism. Note that I don’t count films like Little Shop of Horrors,Lair of the White Worm, or the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man;” the victims in those stories are eaten but by non-human creatures.

Sociological drama. The native cannibal-warrior tradition was, of course, exploited and spoofed in countless Hollywood adventure features as recently as Conan the Barbarian (1982). It’s also the theme of what I feel is the best cannibal movie ever made, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971; just now on video). Set in the early years of Brazil’s colonization as seen through Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s modern anti-colonial eyes, it’s the comic tragedy of a French sailor who gets captured by an Amazon tribe. He’s given a wife and lives as one of the villagers until the next ritual feast, when he’s scheduled to be communally devoured. He learns the local language and tries to sell himself as a shaman of European war magic (gunpowder), but all efforts to convince the tribe he’s worth more to them alive than dead prove futile. The “fleshy” aspect of the story is enhanced by the fact that everybody’s nude (including, after the first half hour, the Frenchman).

Thomas Harris’s character Hannibal Lecter is partly a return to the warrior notion of cannibalism. In Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its lesser-known predecessor Manhunter (1986), Hannibal is a rogue warrior without a tribe. He gnaws on his still-living prey (a quite inefficient way to kill) not for sustenance but to uncage the animalistic spirit that makes him capable of his crimes.

In a different modernization of the warrior-cannibal theme, the middle-class revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front in Godard’s satire Weekend (1967) took the then-emerging hippie notion of “going native” to its logical extreme. Proclaiming that “the horror of the state can only be answered by horror,” these terrorist wannabes proclaim their return to a “natural,” anti-industrial way of life by dining on captured bourgeois picnickers.

Big-budget exploitation. Richard Fleischer should’ve been happy to live off the Betty Boop merchandising he inherited from his dad Max. Instead, he became a hack director of grim action films. When Fleischer fils adapted Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green (1973), he decided the book’s way-overpopulated world wasn’t grim enough. So he added cannibalism. In the novel, “Soylent Green” is a foodstuff made of soybeans and lentils. In the movie, as grim detective Charlton Heston discovers, it’s secretly made from reprocessed humans. Why’s it a secret? Imagine the shock when you tell your vegan friend about the beef gelatin in the Altoid she’s sucking, and multiply it by 40 million irritable 21st Century New Yorkers.

Low-budget exploitation. In a trend starting in 1963 and peaking around 1973-74, cheapo-horror makers found cannibalism a good excuse for gore effects the big studios wouldn’t dare. Herschell Gordon Lewis has said that he turned from directing nudies to gore movies like Blood Feast (1963) and The Undertaker and his Pals (1967) as a marketable genre the big studios wouldn’t muscle in on. After Lewis left films for a more “legitimate” career in direct-mail marketing, his legacy was continued in Deranged, Red Meat, Cannibals in the Streets, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Shriek of the Mutilated, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (a.k.a. Terror on the Menu), and a score of direct-to-video shockers.

Foreigners got into the game too, like Jess Franco (White Cannibal Queen) and Joe D’Amato (Grim Reaper). Even Peter Cushing, in his pre- Star Wars career lull, chased after a people-eating killer in The Ghoul (1975).

From within this cycle of trashy flesh-feast films came the cannibal zombies of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968; followed by two sequels and one remake). Romero’s filmmaking skills (and sense of dark humor) set his work several notches above most others. He also gave a purpose to his gore. His speechless, pathetic killers are essentially grosser versions of vampires, gnawing on the still-living less to feed than to infect, to convert them to the zombie way. In a twist on the food-chain paradigm, the zombies enlarge their species by dining on ours. Romero’s cannibal lore was parodied in the Return of the Living Dead series, but his own films contain enough sick gags to make any spoofs superfluous.

Comedy and satire. Indeed, people-meat has often been treated for high and low humor. Some films use cannibalism for non-nutritive guffaws and sick sight gags, such as in the Rory Calhoun/ Wolfman Jack vehicle Motel Hell (1980).

But it can also be used for fun with a purpose, to reveal human nature by depicting inhuman acts. In Parents (1989), people-eating is a metaphor for the messy realities hidden behind ’50s suburban “family values.” In Eating Raoul (1982), it’s the logical extreme of an emerging yuppie class proclaiming itself a superior species to (and hence higher in the food chain than) those crude unsophisticate masses.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (1979) was based on a British legend (filmed as straight horror by UK horror master Tod Slaughter in 1936). Sondheim turned a story of deviance into a celebration of survival, with his downtrodden, disenfranchised London street people learning to literally “eat the rich.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s elegant Delicatessen (1993) posits a post-apocalyptic future similar to Sweeney Todd‘s Victorian past, but without the class consciousness. Without class solidarity the survivors have to settle for small-group solidarity, with anyone from outside the delicatessen and its upstairs apartments treated literally as fair “game.” Made during the rise of the global financier-led Right and after the fall of socialism, it posits a future where only love and laughter can free us from the futility of rugged individualism. That’s a warning one can really sink one’s teeth into.

MISC.’S GOTTA HAND IT to a guy we usually like to discredit, Ollie Stone. Imagine–getting accused of tarnishing the memory of Richard Nixon!

GAME THEORY: Like other segments of fantasy/ fanboy culture, video games have either failed to attract a significant female following or never tried too hard. Some would see say it proves girls are too smart for such idiocy; others would rant about inequity and girls being prevented from growing up to become fighter pilots. Still others see an opportunity, like American Laser Games, a shoot-’em-up game firm now expanding with the Her Interactive line.

Dunno, ‘tho, about Her’s first title, McKenzie & Co. In it, according to a Variety review, you take the role of one of two “practically-perfect teenage girls,” a gymnast/ cheerleader or an aspiring actress. (“McKenzie” is the nickname of the Geo Tracker the girls take to The Mall.) Your task: “Try to get cozy with one of four dreamy guys when you’re not shopping, gossiping, trying on tons of new clothes, or putting on makeup.” In one segment, your character tries to arrange a prom date but faces turmoil “when your dream date asks you to go out with him at the same time you promised to help your grandmother do volunteer work at a hospital.” You also have to deal with “non-beautiful people like Wenda Wencke, a fish-rights activist who declares `Free the Fish’ and carries a dead carp which she hugs like a teddy bear.” It comes on five CD-ROMs (one for the main game, one for each of four dream dates) and also includes an audio CD, a mini-lipstick, and a discount coupon for two more dreamy-guy disks.

I’ve never claimed anything was wrong with beauty, or with safe fantasy outlets for nascent heterosexual stirrings. But this game glorifies the very type of “popular girl” everybody in my high school loathed. I may not have ever been “dreamy” but I’d have rather hung out with the fish girl than one of these stuck-ups.

VIRGINIA’S DARE: Belltown’s venerable Virginia Inn has evolved from a workingman’s bar in the ’70s to an art bar in the ’80s to a lawyers’ bar in the ’90s, adding deli sandwiches and going smoke-free along the way. Last month it evolved again, becoming probably Washington’s first free-standing full cocktail lounge since Prohibition. It’s all thanks to a little-publicized liberalization of the state liquor laws last summer. Full-liquor-service joints still have to offer food under the revised law, but they don’t have to maintain separate restaurant rooms or uphold the old minimum ratio of food to booze sales.

The old law was installed at the behest of big steak-house operators with major political connections (one of whom, Al Rosellini, became a two-term Democratic governor). It served to stifle creative nightlife as well as smaller restaurants. But changing tastes toward lighter eats and lighter drinks reduced the sirloin-and-Scotch lobby’s power. The new law comes just in time for nightspots to try and exploit the Cocktail Nation craze. It’s already allowed places like Moe’s, the Off Ramp, and the Easy concentrate on music and beverages instead of striving to push up food volume. I just hope the VI continues to use beer glasses in its annual glass-painting benefit for the Pike Place Market Foundation. It’s harder to get elaborate designs on a shot glass.

DROP THAT METAPHOR DEPT. (Bastyr Naturopathic Univ. trustee Merrily Manthey, quoted in that big 1/3 NY Times story on the King County Council’s project to start a subsidized alternative-health center): “This clinic we’re trying to set up here will be the Starbucks of the health care world.” Will it offer red-and-black designer colostomy bags, or Holiday Blend prescriptions? Will it dispense spitcups in regular and grande sizes? (I know it won’t serve lattes; the standard naturopathic diet forbids dairy products, along with meat and wheat.) More seriously, will it become a brand name known for adequate but unexceptional work within standardized bland surroundings?

Could be worse, metaphorwise. I recall the unfortunate street-poster slogan used in the mid-’80s by Capitol Hill’s otherwise admirable Aradia Women’s Health Center: “Are you tired of the sterile environment of a doctor’s office?”

MISC. WAS BAFFLED by a notice on the Internet search site Yahoo! promising a link to a British nudist camp for transvestites. How can you be undressed and cross-dressed at the same time? Did the queens just wear wigs, and high heels? But on reading the “Garden of Eden” site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/R_Brett3/), the explanation was simple. By summer it’s a normal nonerotic family nudist camp. (As the site says, “Our club is widely recognised as being the in place to go for a fun time holiday.”) But during the miserable Welsh winter, it holds weekends for fully-cross-dressed closeted queens to express their lifestyles away from the general populace. You have three seconds to fantasize about Robert Morley types or the bluebloods from the movie Scandal sharing high tea in frilly lace things.

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a “No Food/Drink” sign outside a video arcade on University Way): “Thank You For Your Coordination.”

CATHODE CORNER: Wm. Bennett, the Bush Administration drone we’ve previously dissed for his dissing of trash TV, plans to turn his heavy-handed pieties into a cartoon show, Adventures from the World of Virtues. It’ll air on PBS, which Bennett had previously denounced as a waste of tax bucks. If I had kids I’d rather let ’em watch Melrose Place.

BACK INTO THE DRINK: Your fave bar or coffeehouse might soon stock the Canadian-made Jones Soda, the latest attempt at a Gen-X pop sold at microbeer prices (and distributed by microbeer jobbers). It’s got five fruity flavors, each with a different level of carbonation, dressed in as many as 56 different label photos including a pierced navel, a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a skateboard, barstools, an OPEN sign, a black fedora, and a Corvette logo. If you ignore the desperate-to-be-hip marketing the pop itself’s not bad, especially the cherry flavor.

DEAD AIR REDUX?: I do have nice things to say about the Weekly sometimes. F’rinstance, their Mike Romano got KUOW/KCMU boss Wayne Roth to quasi-confirm a rumor I’d published a couple months back, that Roth was considering killing KCMU and using the frequency for a classical format aimed at the affluent audiences corporate sponsors (oops, “underwriters”) love. (Roth’s office issued a statement claiming his Weekly statement only expressed speculation, not a firm policy decision.) There’s nothing wrong with KCMU’s programming or finances that can’t be traced to Roth’s mistaken belief that the station is, or should be, his personal bureaucratic turf. Public broadcasting, when it’s really public, isn’t a private business and shouldn’t be run as one. It’s a trust between a dedicated programming team and a closely-involved community of listeners.

CLUB ME: F’r another instance, a Weekly brief last month casually revealed the mysterious “Erik Shirley” lurking behind the scenes at Moe’s was the son of Jon Shirley, prominent ex-Microsoft/ Radio Shack exec, who in turn has a bit of investment in the joint. I can’t imagine a Radio Shack vet caring about music, ‘cept those cool ol’ stereo-separation LPs. Besides, if Moe’s was led by somebody who knew tech, they wouldn’t have entrusted their first live Internet concert (with the Presidents on 12/31) to Spry/CompuServe and Xing StreamWorks, the outfits behind the Paramount’s Cyberian Rhapsody fiasco.

MISC.’S TOP 7: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, dir. Nelson Periera dos Santos (New Yorker Video), the greatest all-nude Amazon cannibalism comedy ever made… The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, dir. Dave Borthwick (Manga Entertainment Video)… Safeway coupon books… Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford (Faber & Faber)… The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, Jeff Kisseloff (Viking)… Blue Raspberry Squeeze Pop, the candy that looks like a tube of Prell… Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (BBC/ Discovery Channel miniseries)…

MISC.’S BOTTOM 6: Watch This! (KING-TV)… AJ’s Time Travelers (KTZZ)… CompuServe’s Usenet censorship (one more reason to switch to an indie Internet provider)… Double-cross-platform software (stuff that’s promoted as running on different operating systems but really only works on Windows)…The NBA’s attempt to shut unofficial fan websites… Betting on the Bud Bowl (it’s pre-scripted! You could be betting with the film editor’s cousin).

MISC. CAN HARDLY WAIT to try foam dancing, the latest craze from Spain. It landed on these shores at Miami trendspots, and is now showing up at a nightclub in (of all places) the Tri-Cities. It uses a modified artificial-snow machine to blow foamy bubbles all over and above the dance floor. Reminds me of the bubble-shower scene from Revenge of the Cheerleaders, only clothed.

FARE GAME: Some of you might have been confused when you called a cab to get home from the 1/1 festivities and a different cab showed up. Broadway Cab, the prompt and reasonably courteous taxi line whose car-side boasts of LOWEST RATES were generally true, has been folded into Puget Sound Dispatch, parent company of the larger (and costlier) Graytop Cab and Yellow Cab of Seattle. Most of Broadway’s cabs are being repainted Graytop’s colors and will charge Graytop’s higher rates; however, as Graytop rep David Gordon sez, “A limited number of Broadways will continue to operate as Broadways,” at the lower rate. Also, a dozen or so of Graytop’s current driver-operators are reportedly planning to launch their own independent service, Red Top.

IRIS OUT: The past Xmas season was the last for the Whole Toon Catalog, Seattle’s nationally renowned mail-order video sales outlet for all things animated. Some observers blame Whole Toon’s demise on its downtown retail store, which closed earlier this year after failing to generate enough sales to meet its high rent. But beyond that, Whole Toon had to deal with the consolidation of the video biz under Blockbuster and other big chains–many of which targeted the sell-thru kidvid market as a prime growth center. But what we’re losing with Whole Toon isn’t just another place to order the next direct-to-video Lion King sequel. We’re losing the one place where serious animation buffs could get every cartoon video in print (and hundreds of out-of-print rarities), from silent Felix the Cat classics to Baby Huey laserdiscs–plus French-language books about Tex Avery and the only reference book to ever print the names of the anonymous producers behind Underdog.

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: According to the state Attorney General’s dept., the Zygon Learning Machine (a cassette player combined with opaque goggles that flash hypnotic light patterns into your eyes) not only doesn’t meet its claims as a subconscious brain-reprogramming device, it often doesn’t even mechanically operate properly. But if you can find a working one, it does make a good drug-free enhancement to ambient-techno listening.

I almost got a job at Zygon writing scripts for Learning Machine tapes. Its office was in Redmond’s most sterile office-park zone, near the Northern Exposurestudio (appropriate for the New Age fantasyland nature of Zygon’s claims). Hypnotic learning tapes have been a staple of the New Age industry for years; I’ve seen cassettes promising to help you do everything from find your soulmate to build your vocabulary or increase your bowling score. I’m naturally skeptical of anything that asks me to stop thinking and just receive mental reprogramming, but thousands of folks are willing to at least experiment with the things. Thus, I wouldn’t sick the state on Zygon over the Learning Machine’s basic claims. But I can support going after the machine’s mechanical frailties and Zygon’s selling tactics (including “electronic junk mail” messages sent to thousands of Internet users).

PREVIEWS OF COMING TRANSACTIONS: Expect a new owner for Seven Gables Theaters as soon as the end of the month. Seattle’s king of respectable multiplexes has been a pawn in a sequence of acquisitions over the past years, finally ending up in the hands of indie-film mogul Sam Goldwyn Jr.Goldwyn’s unsuccessful attempts at producing higher-budgeted films, along with the decline of his American Gladiators TV franchise, have led him to put various assets up for sale. John Kluge, the showbiz speculator who sold five TV stations to Fox and has used the proceeds to prop up what’s left of Orion Pictures, wants to buy everything Goldwyn’s got, including Seven Gables. Since Kluge also owns the old American International film library, maybe we should demand that if the sale goes through they should run weekly midnight screenings of Beach Blanket Bingo or The She Creature.

As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists

All Hail the Tube of Gloom:

Toyland Roundup

Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95

Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.

My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.

Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.

Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.

If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.

Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.

More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.

The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.

But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.

Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.

Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.

Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.

The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.

If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.

There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”

There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (“Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.

But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.

At Misc. we know some things are just too creepy to turn away from. That was the case when some folks working late in a CapHill building looked ou the window and saw a film crew re-creating the Mia Zapata abduction for Unsolved Mysteries. Under banks of lights, an actress in vaguely punkish clothes kept getting into a passing car, take after gruesome take.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Can’t get it here, but Semtex is the hottest new soda pop in Prague. It’s named after one of the old Czechoslovakia’s most notorious exports–a plastic explosive popular with various terror and organized-crime outfits the world over. An NY Times story sez the chemical factory that made the now-banned explosive is suing. The soda people say they adopted the name ’cause it inspires “a feeling of activity and motion.” That’s probably the same reasoning behind Royal Crown Cola’s new fake Mountain Dew, Kick (“Warning: Contains stuff you don’t even want to know about!”).

BRETHREN AND CISTERN: For unknown reasons, the wife of sometime Stranger writer Bryan Clark was put on the mailing list for Your Church magazine (“Helping You with the Business of Ministry”). It’s a Protestant Sharper Image Catalog, by the publishers ofChristianity Today but with no theological content. Just blurbs and ads for nifty products: Office-cubicle walls “repurposed” to house Sunday School groups, vinyl siding, fiberglass baptism pools, choir robes, bulk quantities of communion wafers, candle holders, electronic organs (“the way Sunday should sound”), clear plastic pulpits (“where no visual barriers exist between you and your congregation”), new and used pews, shatterproof fake stained glass windows, kitchen supplies (“Equipping the Saints in a practical way”), computer software to keep track of membership and fundraising, even entire prefab church building sections. Coolest of all are the electronic music boxes, “digital carillons” (by a company called Quasimodo Bells) and “digital hymnals” (“Instantly plays thousands of hymns, choruses, praise music, children’s songs, wedding music, and gospel favorites”). Our lesson: Even the heirs of Calvinist austerity can’t help but be eternally fascinated by that most basic of human desires, the Quest for Cool Stuff.

`R’ GANG: Entertainment Weekly’s piece on the recent box-office failure of several “sex” movies only pointed out how unsexy those anti-erotic, un-thrilling “erotic thrillers” and equally grim exercises like Showgirls really were. Don’t worry: Sex still sells, these movies just weren’t selling it. They were trying to sell fear and/or hatred of sex; but hundreds of direct-to-video Basic Instinct ripoffs wore out the concept.

TELE-KINETICS: When the new-age talk show The Other Side was suddenly, quietly canceled last month, NBC was left with only three hours of daytime programming. Ratings for the show, which took an almost-rational look at “psychic phenomena, ESP, ghosts, alternative healing, and more,” were never great. Replacing original host Dr. Will Miller (the preacher/ psychologist/ comedian from old Nick at Nite promos) with a perky Entertainment Tonight droid only made things worse. You can make your own joke here about the show’s fans still being able to contact it psychically. Speaking of daytime TV personalities…

THE NEVERENDING STORY: I’ve avoided O.J. Simpson in this column, but now note that the recently retired daytime personality’s looking to start a new life in the face of ostracism by former L.A. acquaintances and hangouts. The Philadelphia Weekly reports his representatives are looking into potential homes for him in Philly’s ritzy Main Line suburbs. Imagine–the figure who nearly put the soaps out of business, moving to the real-life Pine Valley.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perv, a new local monthly gay paper, is a lot like what the Misc. newsletter would have become if I’d kept it going. It’s one big sheet of paper in Stranger’s old paper size but sideways, crammed with gossip, jokes and comix. Of course, I’ve never written about the gay-male bar scene and Perv writes about little else. Still, you don’t have to be gay yourself to realize the way-serious Seattle Gay News can’t be the only possible gay viewpoint in town. And I do like Perv’s comment on how “if every fashion show in town is fetish, then fetish isn’t much of an alternative anymore, is it?”

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)