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I COULD SAY I now know what it was like to be a Cubs fan in ’84 or a Red Sox fan any year, but will instead just say: Damn fine ride. All possible kudos to the players, the coaches, and especially to Dave & Rick.
I’VE GOT IT: Here’s the way to make that maybe-finally-funded but yet-undesigned retractable-roof Son-of-Kingdome thang a better investment, and attract the last major-league sport we haven’t yet got: Make it the world’s first combination baseball-hockey arena! Just make the natural-turf baseball surface in a removable-tile format (that’s how they made instant natural-turf fields in some of the stadia for World Cup soccer last year). Then acquire some of those mobile bleachers like they use for Kingdome basketball. Then bring in whatever they use to make that temporary rink inside the Flag Pavilion at Xmas and stick it on top of the whatever floor’s left when the boxes of turf-tiles are trucked away for the winter. Even if we don’t get an NHL team (what with Seattle money investing in Vancouver’s team and Portland’s franchise try), truck-away turf would let the new ballpark be used as an off-season Kingdome annex for car and boat shows.
THE BROTHER ‘HOOD: Watched parts of the Million Man March on C-SPAN and CNN. The former’s unedited coverage was better, but CNN’s mix of speech segments, commercials and “analysis” brought up some of its own issues. The transitions between the sea of solemn Af-Am faces in the crowd and the pale yup models in the commercials was enough to bring home the message about America’s continuing class struggles.
CATHODE CORNER: You can now see Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the show with a guy and some robot puppets heckling bad sci-fi movies) even if you don’t live in a Viacom Cable neighborhood, thanks to KCPQ. The syndicated rerun version’s only an hour, so the movies are heavily truncated and/or split into two episodes. And so far they’re showing only films from the same repertoire of a couple dozen public domain 50’s badfilms that have circulated the cheapo-video circuit forever (probably due to trouble getting syndication rights to still-copyrighted B flicks). But at least there’s now something for Saturday stay-homes to watch at midnight that’s not the reeking undead corpse of SNL.
CONFIDENTIAL TO RYAN B.: Yes, I know Soma magazine’s a pathetic goop of “cliché generational angst” and “anti-marketing marketing.” But it’s no more so than any of those other 20-odd pretentious Frisco mags that claim to cover “The West Coast” but end up only writing about Frisco. At least the title’s appropriate, taken from a cutesy name for a “restored” ex-industrial district there but reminiscent of the mind-control drug in Brave New World. Speaking of printed effluent-for-the-affluent…
I KNOW I PROMISED to cease Weekly-bashing and stick to going after more worthy targets, but I couldn’t resist its sarcastic, classist ad depicting a glass-eyed, square-jawed, power-suited reactionary yuppie as its mythical average reader under the headline “One of the punk rock weirdos you’ll find in the Seattle Weekly/ EastsideWeek personals.”
MISC.’s TOP 6: I Should Coco, Supergrass (Capitol)… VCRs that mark recording/ playback progress in minutes and seconds, not “counter” numbers… The “Opportunities” ads in USA Today offering prepostrously unlikely franchise or multi-level-marketing schemes… Endust for Electronics (Johnson Wax)… The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine (Little, Brown & Co.)… The downscale, pulp-paper, ’60s-’70s men’s magazines sold at That’s Atomic on E. Olive (mags that relied less on sex than on faux-Spillane tuff-guy writing and garish graphics)…
MISC.’s BOTTOM 2: Internet service providers that go down for whole weekends, leaving users in acute Web Withdrawal… The slowness of America’s bookstore distribution system…
(Thanks to those who overcame the Sunday-night weather and Mariner Fever to attend my book release party and see four of the rockin’-est sets-O-tunes ever performed. The book itself (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) oughta be in more stores this week. As always, info’s on the Misc. World HQ website.)
TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.
IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.
ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”
HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).
`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.
ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”
Welcome, good buddy, to the high-rollin’ 10/4 Misc., in which we attempt to figure out the rationale behind the recent rash of beers with dog names. There’s already Red Wolf and Red Dog (one’s owned by Coors, the other by Busch, but I can’t remember which is which). Now, Seagram’s trying to get into the beer biz with something entering local test markets this week called Coyote. Dunno ’bout you, but as one who grew up in a dog-owning household, the association of yellowish-colored liquids with dogs is not an appetizing one.
WITH POPULARITY comes a wider audience not all in on the same cultural reference points. Some folks thought that recent Stranger Performance Issue cover was “kiddie porn.” (It was even banned by the Spokane post office!) It was really taken from an early-’60s lesbian-domination photo book, originally distributed in the pre-Stonewall gay underground. The brouhaha over it shows how folks “read” images based on their own suppositions. I was more shocked by a P-I front page the same week, with banner photos of glass-art renditions of what obviously were a diaphragm, a uterus and a dildo — with a headline about how the artists were “Showing Off Their Talent at Blowing.”
KNIT PICKING: I don’t think the discontinued Calvin Klein ads were “kiddie porn” either (more like deliberately antisexual sleaze, using old underground photography as another retro-pop-cult “inspiration”). However, there’s now a line of junior-size knit tops called Betty Blue. Do teenage girls wearing the tops know about the movie of the same name? Quite possibly. Do moms buying ’em for their daughters know about the movie? Maybe not.
TAB KEYS: For those of you still stuck in post-adolescent snickering, the Weekly World News is now on America Online. I doubt it’ll be a hit there. It removes the only thing I like about the paper, its typography. Besides, online distribution too effectively targets that made-to-be-laughed-at tabloid’s real target audience of fratboys and hipster wannabes, negating the effect of imagining you’re the only WWN reader who knows it’s a joke.
REBEL WITHOUT A LUNG: Hope you’re ready for New Left nostalgia, corporate-style; for here come Politix cigarettes, with a peace hand-sign and a rainbow on the pack. It’s one of several brands (along with Sedona, exploiting the Arizona new-age colony of the same name) from the pseudonymous Moonlight Tobacco Co. (really R.J. Reynolds). The NY Times business-section story about Reynolds’s latest gimmick came the same day as a front-page story about the megabux being shoveled from the cig industry into GOP campaign funds…. Elsewhere in the product world, Coca-Cola quietly dropped OK Soda from its remaining test-market regions, three months after it ceased to be sold here. Chalk it up as another failure from Portland ad whizzes Wieden & Kennedy (of Subaru “Lack of Pretense Days” and Black Star Beer infamy). W&K’s string of flops may revive the old-school ad theory that cleverness might get your agency famous within the ad biz but doesn’t move product.
E.T. STAY HOME: The AP reported “three self-styled mediums” in Sofia, Bulgaria led some 1,500 followers to an airstrip to await eight space ships. Among other things, the mediums promised the aliens would help the poor Balkan country pay its $12.9 billion foreign debt. No non-earthers showed up. Just as well; if the space people had acted like Bulgaria’s last patron state, the ol’ USSR, the financial aid would’ve been in inconvertible currency that could only be spent in its home country.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, recall the words recited by Tom Berenger as Brigham Young’s bodyguard in the cable movie Avenging Angel: “The problem with polygamy is when you have 27 wives and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you.”
Mark your calendar to attend the book release party for my hefty tome, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, Sun., 10/15 at the Crocodile. It’s 21-plus, but an all-ages reading event’s in the works for later this month. More info at the Misc. World HQ website.
Student Food:
Don’t Demand Better
Essay for the Stranger, 9/27/95
The most important rule to eating on a student’s budget: Don’t learn to expect better. While you’re (I hope) training your mind to discern ever more subtle gradients of thought, don’t train your palate to demand more than you can now afford to eat. I know microbrew drinkers who order at least one Bud (or even Schaffer) per drinking session, so they don’t lose tolerance for the cheaper grain-water. The same principle goes with solid food. You can get some gourmet restaurant entrees for the price of a CD, but too many and you’ll be miserable with what you have to eat the rest of the time. If you must eat fancy, join an ethnic-studies club that makes joint meals or take an Experimental College cooking class.
Much of what I say won’t apply to dorm residents, who face limited facilities and space for preparing their own meals. Even then, there are alternatives to the dorm cafeteria. Like an artist I know who’s not supposed to live in her work studio but does anyway, you can sneak in a mini-microwave and/or a hotplate. Even without a mini-freezer to store stuff, you can stock up on unfrozen microwave foods like Top Shelf and buy the occasional Michelena’s or Healthy Choice goodie for same-day use.
If and when you get kitchen access, such as in a rental house, a universe of modest eating opportunities awaits, including that monthly ritual of the shared household, The Costco Run! Giant sizes of everything: pre-made salad in a bag, cereal, crackers, Danish cookie tins, five-pound packs of hot dogs, and all the free samples of gourmet frozen entrees you can eat. But remember, it’s no bargain if you can’t eat it all before it spoils or you can’t stand the sight of it anymore.
More conveniently sized bargains await at dollar stores. You can’t get a complete diet there but you can stock up on pasta and sauce, canned veggies, foil-pouch juice drinks, and assorted oriental noodle products. TopRamen, Cup Noodles, Bowl Noodle, etc. have long been the choice for many who prefer to spend little time eating and no time cooking. But beware, before long you’ll confront one of food’s great mysteries: What is “Oriental Flavor”? Best answer I heard had something to do with a line in the prologue of You Only Live Twice.
You can go beyond convenience into real cooking, yet stay in budget, with the student eater’s secret weapons: Calrose rice, beans, pasta, curry, stew (I had a housemate who ate from the same ongoing stewpot all week and spent the money he saved on Glenlivet), restaurant-supply stores like Serco and Pacific Food Importers, bakery outlet stores (closest to the U: Oroweat in lower Wallingford), and knowing where the more obscure bargains are. Your first tip: the big bags of “unfortunate fortune cookies” at the House of Rice on the Ave. Good hunting, and good eating.
SPACES IN THE HEART: While watching this year’s fifth annual Belltown Inside Out, a “community” festival originally sponsored by condo developers and now increasingly run by local Scientologists, an acquaintance told me the newly-widened 2nd Ave. sidewalks were an omen that the whole neighborhood was doomed to become “another Rodeo Drive.” Dunno ’bout that; the Nordstroms, who have de facto control of retail zoning in Seattle, are getting all the new costly stores situated next to them. Indeed, the movie megaplexes planned for the Pike/ Pine corridor (30 total screens) are helping end Belltown’s mini movie row. The King has closed for probably the last time. And now it’s been announced the ugly-outside-gorgeous-inside Cinerama will close when or before the mega-cinemas open. The Cinerama was the first Seattle movie house I went to (for the minor musical Song of Norway). Only the UA’s two screens remain, as discount houses… Similarly, a belated goodbye goes to Village Lanes, closed for redevelopment into an Office Depot just as bowling becomes the hip sport of the ’90s (many of your fave Seattle musical performers are also keglers). Speaking of things hip-n’-now…
BUZZ BIN TO BARGAIN BIN?: We’ve written recently about the continued flow of big money into the book biz, disproving the common notion that nobody reads anymore. Now there’s MTV Books, out to disprove the notion that no young’ns read anymore. It’s an imprint of MTV’s fellow Viacom unit Simon & Schuster, launching with such tie-in titles as The Real Real World and Aeon Flux: The Dossier.
Underlying all this is Viacom’s mistaken notion that there’s a generation out there that loves its MTV and will eat up anything bearing its name (in the trade mag Advertising Age, MTV claims to be sponsors’ gateway to “32.1 million impressionable young minds”). What there really is, as known to everyone except Viacom, is a generation that reluctantly turns to MTV for a few specialty shows and the flips to it when there’s nothing else on, but doesn’t think of it as anything more than a corporate-media compromise.
You could really see it if you were on America Online during the recent MTV Online promotion. The channel solicited comments from AOL users, some of which were retransmitted on a censor-delayed basis across the bottom of the MTV screen during select video segments. There was quite a bit of MTV bashing, in various degrees of maturity and intelligibility, in the messages posted on AOL that didn’t make the censor’s cut. What made the MTV cablewaves was generally limited to the likes of “Eddie Vedder Roolz.” Speaking of online revelations…
THEATRICS: Hope you’re not tired of Courtneymania ‘cuz it’s spreading to the theatrical world. Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), a one-woman play by Elyse Singer based on Love’s uncopyrighted Internet newsgroup messages, just ended a three-week run at NYC’s HERE performance space. Carolyn Baeumler gave what by all accounts was a dead-on impersonation of Love, writhing about the stage while reciting online posts about everything from rock-star sexism to life with and after Cobain to a recollection of the first record she ever owned (Marlo Thomas’s ode to non-gender-specific child rearing, Free to Be You and Me). She’s accompanied by a lone guitarist, offstage voices playing her online correspondents, and slides and videos of her career and life trials. A positive review comes in the online zine Addicted to Noise from Carol Mariconda, Love’s personal volunteer liaison with the newsgroupalt.fan.courtney-love. Mariconda writes, “Courtney’s intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having experienced more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively short existence, is captured by Baeumler in a powerful portrayal.”
PLUGS OF THE SHAMELESS VARIETY: My huge book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, is now at the printer and should be in stores by the start of October. A release party’s tentatively set for Sun., Oct. 15; details to follow… Still looking for your favorite local grocery store, in the convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic categories. Details on theMisc. website.
THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.
The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.
Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.
One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.
JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.
YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.
Pike St. Cinema Says Adieu:
The Last Rewind
Essay for the Stranger, 8/9/95
Adventurous filmgoers have another month or so to visit the Pike Street Cinema, Seattle’s smallest and most curious film space. In mid-September Pike Street proprietor Dennis Nyback will take his projectors, his old-time movie posters and memorabilia, and his 2,000-reel collection of film oddities to New York, where he’s certain he’ll be better appreciated. The closure marks the end of three and a half years of what Nyback boasts of as “unfunded, unadvertised, and unrepentant” exhibition.
The origins of the Pike Street actually go back to mid-1988, when Nick Vroman and Geof Spencer began the Belltown Film Festival in the Jewel Box Theater of the Rendezvous Restaurant. Vroman and Spencer rented the grand old space on Second Avenue, originally a screening room used by major film distributors, to show the kinds of movies they liked and couldn’t see anywhere else — things like obscure foreign dramas, prewar German dada shorts, and ’80s New York underground films. Despite the special-event implications of the “Festival” name, they had the space one night a week on an ongoing basis. When they began to run short of available, affordable films in their favorite genres, they opened up the Belltown Film Festival to local filmmakers, show-and-tell nights, and other concepts.
To fill other schedule holes, and to help prop up the operations side of their venture, they turned to Nyback, who’d run the Rose Bud Movie Palace in Pioneer Square from 1979 to 1981. Nyback had developed a part-time business as a mail-order dealer in old movie reels and mystery novels, supplemented by various day jobs (including at least one stint as a porno-theater projectionist). Nyback not only owned his own collection of rare prints, he corresponded with similar collectors around the country who had their own peculiarities. He also owned his own 16mm and 35mm projectors, and knew enough amateur carpentry to rebuild the Rendezvous projection room into a workable facility.
In 1989-90, Nyback gradually took more responsibility over the Belltown Film Festival. By early 1991 he was running it by himself. The festival’s programming evolved away from French and Japanese features toward programming built around Nyback’s collection — prewar jazz shorts, cartoons, and comedies; ’50s and ’60s TV commercials and movie trailers; educational and industrial shorts; ’60s music shorts originally made for Scopitone film jukeboxes; and pre-1970 stag films.
Nyback, who admits to preferring total control over his ventures instead of partnerships, broke with the Rendezvous’s owners in September 1991. He held screenings at a couple of other Belltown spaces that fall. Then at the start of 1992 he leased a storefront on the ground floor of a somewhat notorious transients’ apartment building at Pike and Boren, an area of Capitol Hill only now starting to get “upscaled.” He put his book operation, Spade and Archer (named for the Maltese Falcon detective agency) in the front room, separated by a sliding bookcase from the 50-seat screening room in back. For $600 and donated materials he created a funky yet elegant space, complete with old-time theater seats and curtains.
In retropsect, it might not have been the best possible site. People often got lost confusing address, 1108 Pike, with 1108 East Pike; either that or they confused the name “Pike Street Cinema” with the former Pike Place Cinema in the Pike Place Market. And in his first few months at the space, he didn’t even have a sign above his tiny storefront big enough to be seen by drivers heading up from downtown — just a small sandwich board outside and some posters in the window.
Additionally, Nyback had trouble drawing suburban baby boomers, many of whom told him they thought were afraid to venture into Seattle after dark: “People used to say, ‘Go to the Pike Street Cinema and get mugged.'” Nyback admits to the presence of lowlife types in the apartments above the theater and in the tavern next door, but insists none of his audience members were ever hassled by them.
But the space was cheap enough that Nyback broke even for three and a half years on an average attendance of 125 people per week.
Some of the Pike Street’s better attended programs have included a Charles Bukowski bioflick, a show of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, the underground farces of San Francisco director George Kuchar, a package of ’70s Mormon Church instructional films, a festival of old softcore sex films curated by Something Weird Video, the Seattle-made 1970 porno feature The Last Bath, Craig Baldwin’s recent Negativland profile Sonic Outlaws, and Bad Bugs Bunny (a collection of Warner Bros. cartoons no longer shown on TV due to racial caricatures).
Still, Nyback wasn’t earning a living wage from the theater. It didn’t help that “I didn’t charge enough to the people who rented out the space on off nights” for other film programs and cabaret parties. He also couldn’t afford paid advertising and didn’t want it if he could afford it, preferring low-key promotion through flyers and posters.
Yet Nyback isn’t worried about his chances in the New York entertainment scene, a scene even more reliant on high-profile promotion than Seattle’s. “New York just seems like more of a real city, where there’s word-of-mouth, where people my age (he’s in his early 40s) still go out at night.” He’s got friends back east scouting for potential sites, and hopes to be back in business before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Seattle experimental filmmaker Jon Behrens hopes to open a new screening room elsewhere in town with a similar schedule. In the past, Behrens has screened his films at the Pike Street and at 911 Media Arts (including a program held on July 29). But he says he wants to break away from what he perceives as an increasingly institutionalized atmosphere at 911, and to keep the anything-goes indie spirit of the Pike Street Cinema alive in Seattle.
Return with us now to Misc., the pop-cult column that found the cutest li’l picture book of classic poems about animals down at the Borders Books sale shelf, put out by an obscure Random House subsidiary really called Gramercy Books. Wonder what long-distance company they use?
THE BRIDE WORE BLACK: I’m fully supportive of the Gothic Singles Network, a new for-profit enterprise aiming to bring pale-skinned types together for mutual moping and potential groping. I just don’t wanna be around when they exchange rings…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Trolli Swamp Stuff is a sour-hot lollipop imported from Spain, packed in a plastic wrapper combined with a modicum of “Sour Quicksand Powder.” Nasty, just the way I like it.
PUNTERS: The Seahawks, after way-losing seasons and declining attendance, want govt. subsidies, mostly for Kingdome improvements where we’d pay the costs and the team would get the profits, or they’ll threaten to move like the Mariners. It’s not just a jock thing, it has ramifications for public policy:
X MARK(ET)S THE SPOT: There’s an Internet newsgroup called alt.society.generation-x. Someone named Jody put up a message, claiming to be flying off to speak at some marketing convention in Amsterdam about “ads that target Generation X” and wanting newsgroup readers to report their favorite spots. As you’d imagine, it led to several indignant replies (“I am not a target market!”).
But it also generated several more lighthearted responses. One went, “How about the one that asks if you were thinking about your cat’s urinary tract health? How did they guess? They must be psychic.”
Or how about: “My favorite is the son on the phone with his mom (for Unisom) and right before he says, ‘I love you too,’ in a cranky voice he says, ‘Mom? Am I going to tell you to take something that isn’t safe?’ in the most patronizing voice. I want his mom to reach through the phone and smack him.”
Another wrote, “Definitely the Australian car wax dood. That infomercial got to me. I even went around dousing people’s car hoods with lighter fuel and setting it ablaze. I should be off probation in a year or so.”
And finally, “I like the audience-reaction ones for movies. Especially the one for Die Hard with a Vengeance where they have one group of chiyx saying ‘Yipee’ and then a group of middle-aged people saying ‘kai’ and then a group of token ethnic people saying ‘yay’ and then a group of precious grade schoolers saying ‘motherfucker!'”
As for me, the ads that attract my attention (though not my wallet) include:
WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Foison”
Welcome to the Seafair Week Misc., the column that can’t wait for the annual return of the hydros. Reactionary hippies sometimes accuse me of political conservatism for daring to like the hydros. I was once asked to speak at the “Alternative to Loud Boats” poetry reading, accepted, and shocked the crowd by telling ’em how much I liked the boats. Still do. There’s something endearing about these mechanical manic-depressives that sometimes go 250 m.p.h. but more often just sputter dead in the water. They’re an unabashedly non-chic relic of pre-yup Seattle, combining three or four of the old city’s once-dominant subcultures (they were built by solemn engineers, driven by rugged pioneer types, watched by hard-drinkin’ workingfolk, and promoted by oldtime hucksters). One of my longtime fantasies, besides having my own cereal, is to have my own hydro. “Miss Misc.” would be run by one of those hard-luck indie racing teams with no spare hulls and maybe one spare engine, the kind of guys who win fans’ sympathy while the big-money Budweiser team wins the heats.
FIGHTING FOR HER HONOR?: At the Lollapalooza show in E. Washington Courtney Love allegedly punched out Bikini Kill singer and original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, one woman who wouldn’t stand up to Love’s business. This is almost too perfect to be believable: our region’s two biggest icons of strongly contradictory definitions of “A Strong Woman,” in a fight for the title of The True Righteous Rebel. It’s an exciting notion as a fantasy, but somewhat pathetic if it’s true. They oughta put aside any past personal differences and combine forces for the real battles ahead. Speaking of which…
THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUES: Meanwhile, as Love relishes her new role as Molson beer spokesmodel, another Canadian company (Pyramid Productions) is soliciting investors for a youth-market exploitation film to be called Horsey. In a fundraising announcement the film’s writer/co-producer, Kirsten Clarkson, calls it “a story that appeals to the MTV generation… `Baby Busters’ and `GenXers’ are prime multi-level consumers of small ticket items, such as movie tickets, soundtracks, comics, and other ancillary products.” Clarkson describes her script’s heroine as “a hard-core, explosive, and sexy artist, who after quitting university to become the next Van Gogh, finds herself unable to paint. Delilah drinks too much, smokes too much and fucks whoever she wants. Women or men. She falls in love with Ryland Yale, the utterly dedicated and monogamous heir to a lumber empire. Ryland sings in an underground punk band and is gleefully building up a tolerance for heroin… Tragically, Ryland starts to disappear under the layers of a heroin haze. Although she is overwhelmed by loneliness, Delilah struggles to rebuild her life.” Sound like thinly-fictionalized versions of anyone we know?
TASTY BITS: For a long time, lotsa people thought computer-age aesthetics would be all cold-n’-sterile. Then by the mid-’80s, emerging PC-related visual styles (in game software, user-group literature and digital illustration) threatened to drown us all in bad sword-and-sorcery geekdom. Now, I’m happy to report, it’s a whole new picture, especially in the homespun friendly covers of CD-ROMs by small independent developers.
There’s something promising about CD-ROMs, even the ones that suck. It’s a vital artform that can inspire this kind of generic mediocre content in identical bright-n-bouncy packaging. Just lounging in the CD-ROM section of Future Shop is a thrilling experience. If there’s shelf and catalog space for all those discs of generic clip-art, old shareware video games and swimsuit pictures, there’s gotta be a market for something really good if and when it ever arrives.
Another thought: D’ya think music CDs could be sold in 5- or 10-packs “in promotional packaging” like the grab bags of low-end CD-ROMs? With the Wall St. Journal reporting a “glut out there” in indie rock releases, maybe low-sellers could be repackaged as The Five-Foot Pack of Punk, or 1,001 Straight Edge Rants, or even Super Value Bundle of White Kids Who Think They’re George Clinton.
Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.
PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…
THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…
LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.
THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…
WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!
A happy post-7/4 greeting to all Misc. readers who, thanks to draconian govt. crackdowns against even “Safe and Sane” home fireworks, still have all their fingers. You can use those fingers of yours to pick up free postcards from the racks popping up at “hip” spots around town. The cards themselves are impeccably natty-looking, but they turn out to really be flyers inexplicably advertising L.A. hair salons. Speaking of snazzy graphics…
DESIGN FOR LEAVING: Graphic design magazines have been abuzz recently about attempts to form a “professional” association that would “accreditate” graphic designers like architects and somehow keep non-members out of top-paying markets. Besides being a monopolistic restraint-of-trade move, it’s not needed. Architects need to be accredited; a badly-designed building can fall down and hurt people. A badly-designed magazine ad can do no worse than waste its client’s money. Speaking of corporate centralization…
MY BONNIE: In today’s corporate climate, even success can lead to trouble. Case in point: the Bon Marché, the dept. store of the masses (old, anti-upscale slogan: “Where All Seattle Shops”). In 1929 it was a founding member of Allied Stores, a combine of local stores whose owners banded together for financial reasons. In the recent years of merger madness, Allied became part of Federated Dept. Stores, which did what merged companies often do: it shed pieces of itself (including the Seattle I. Magnin) and consolidated what was left into new operating groups. In the process it’s retired such classic store names as Magnin and Abraham & Strauss. Now the Tacoma News Tribune sez upper Federated management wants to replace the Bon name with another of its acquired brands, Macy’s West. Bon managers in Seattle were quick to deny the report. The L.A.-based May Co. has owned Portland’s Meier & Frank for years, but has wisely kept the M&F name. Let’s hope Federated knows enough to keep the Bon Marché appellation, derived from Paris’s original 1-stop-shopping palace of the late 19th century. Otherwise, the parent co. would surely qualify for the modern colloquial French interpretation of the phrase “bon marché” (look it up). Speaking of chain-store shenanigans…
ANOTHER DRUG WAR: The local pharmacy biz has also been consolidating, with chain operations rising and independents falling. The one constant has been regional management at most of the chains: Bartell has remained locally-owned, and the Oregon-based Pay Less absorbed the formerly Seattle-owned Pay n’ Save. That’s changing. Walgreen, the Illinois-based giant, is about to invade Seattle in a big way. Work has begun on locations in Greenwood and the Central Area; the chain’s reportedly applied with the state pharmacy board to open as many as 60 sites. Some of the new Walgreen stores reportedly will even have that onetime drugstore staple, the lunch counter (Walgreen claims to have invented the milk shake, at a Chicago luncheonette in the ’20s). Speaking of refreshments…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Hero lemon soda (available at the Hillcrest deli-mart on Cap. Hill) is a tasty tarty carbonated substance with a friendly yellow color and a cute, space-saving eight-and-a-half-ounce can. Even better, it comes from that new global junk-food mecca, Breda, Holland (hometown of that ultimate postmodern cultural icon Mentos, The Freshmaker!). Speaking of PoMo icons…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: If you enjoy Steve Shaviro’s occasional appearances in these pages, you’ll enjoy Doom Patrols, his collection of essays (he calls them “theoretical fictions” for no readily apparent reason) on PoMo heroes and heroines ranging from Kathy Acker to Bill Gates and, yes, ex-Doom Patrol comic book writer Grant Morrison. It’s even got the Dean Martin essay he first published here. Doom Patrols isn’t yet available on paper, but the entire text can be downloaded from the Web at <<http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html>>. Speaking of the Web…
UPDATE: I’m still looking for a term for Internet/World Wide Web use that isn’t “surfing.” Suggestions so far include “trolling” (found out it has a Net meaning already, a derogatory one), “waltzing,” “meandering,” “strolling,” “courting” (my favorite so far) and even “geoducking” (please!). Got anything better? Lemme know.
MISC. WELCOMES VALUE VILLAGE to E. Pike. The beloved for-profit thrift store plans to take part of REI’s current space next year, despite opposition from advocates of the Dictatorship of the Upscale, who apparently don’t like any stores folks like us can actually shop at.
KAMPUS KAPERS: Since the UW’s new prez is from Chapel Hill, that media-appointed Next Seattle®, let’s hope he understands the value to a town of a thriving music scene and of a college radio station that supports it. Maybe we should’ve demanded a better deal: get this guy and the Archers of Loaf, in trade for an ex-Fastbacks drummer and two singer-songwriters to be named later.
INFO HIGHWAYMEN: The “Telecommunications Reform” bill passed by the Senate, and now in the House, is a bad idea wrapped inside a worse idea. Most Internet users are aware of the “Communications Decency” amendment inside the bill, co-sponsored by our Sen. Fishstick (Gorton), an unconstitutional and unenforceable move to censor online discourse. The main part of the bill poses a greater threat. It essentially lets the huge media conglomerates grab an even bigger share of the airwaves and cablewaves than they’ve already got, and would let cable companies gouge consumers all they want. You’re not likely to hear much against it in the corporate media, so it’ll be up to you to spread the word to your U.S. Rep. and the White House that we don’t want this.
CLEANING OUT: Another venerable American pop-art form is on the skids. The open-ended daytime soap opera has been damaged by sleaze talk, OJ coverage, fewer stay-home moms, and the networks’ declining clout with affiliates. Guiding Light, the oldest ongoing dramatic production in the world, is rumored to be on or near the chopping block. ABC’s pulling the plug on Loving, its half-hour rest home for former All My Children actors (and Emergency! legend Randolph Mantooth). Current Loving storylines wrap up by November, when some of the younger characters get transferred to a New York-set successor show, LOV NYC, to star Morgan Fairchild. The new show’s said to be a fast-paced Melrose-ish romp involving allegedly Beautiful People and their troubles at being so darn young, affluent and in-demand. Sounds like desperation time at the nets. No wonder they want the feds to give them more power. They can’t compete in the changing media universe without it.
PRESS RELEASE OF THE WEEK (from Warner Bros., 6/16): “Please note the following correction to your Batman Forever press kit: The Batsuit Wrangler’s correct name is Day Murch.”
PLAYERS: Went on a recent press junket to Nintendo in Darkest Redmond, with six writers from desperate-to-be-hip mags like P.O.V. and Bikini. After two days of hearing these guys shout n’ schmooze about their life with rock stars and expense accounts, I finally understand why those magazines are the way they are. They’re tied in to industries that exist by persuading people to gamble (“invest”) their money into projects based on little more than promises that this is going to be HOT HOT HOT. These mags aren’t trying to be any generation’s “voice” but to expidite a flow of hyper-hype from advertisers and publicists to a nonexistant typical demographic consumer.
The tour itself wasn’t much; saw Nintendo’s big clean warehouse and its help-line operators, but the company’s wares are still made overseas and mostly designed either in Japan or by outside developers. Nintendo of America’s basically a marketing operation, hampered by the parent company’s lack of new hardware–it won’t have a 64-bit game machine ’til next spring. For now, they’ve got two main interim plans to make up lost market share: (1) new software like the Mortal Kombat clone Killer Instinct that pushes the graphic limits of current Super Nintendo hardware (and stretches the company’s former policies against graphic violence), and (2) Virtual Boy, a battery-operated game machine with a 3-D video headset. The latter might actually be fun: the graphics are mind-bending and not excessively “realistic;” the spacey 3-D effect really works. It’d at least make a great hardware platform for ambient-rave animations and New Age self-hypnosis programs.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Eleemosynary”
First, thanks to the 27 people who came to my low-key party and video show two weeks back. A lot’s happened since then and I didn’t have a regular column last week, so please bear with an even speedier routine than normal.
SEATTLE SEEN: Hype, the Seattle music documentary director Doug Pray’s been making for two years, is now in an 83-minute rough cut. I saw a video of this cut and can only say it’s awesome and awe-inspiring, the one movie to finally get the story right. Pray and his partners still don’t have a distributor for the flick and it’s a shame. Let’s hope it sees release soon. Besides correcting what the national media got wrong about local bands, it includes some of the only performance footage of Mia Zapata. The fact that Pray didn’t sell this footage to tabloid TV after her slaying shows this is one scene biographer with some rare integrity. At a time when Cobain exploitation T-shirts have made it into the Spencer Gifts catalog, a film that treats Seattle musicians as creative artists rather than celebrities and treats the Fastbacks with as much importance as Soundgarden is a film that has to get out.
THE NEXT THREAT: Haven’t been able to prove the authenticity of the letter that’s been faxed around town, credited to be from the anti-gay-rights Citizens Alliance of Washington and “encouraging” CAW members and supporters to turn out and disrupt this Sunday’s Gay Pride parade on Broadway. However, there’s no harm in telling you all to turn out to support the basic civil rights and human dignity CAW wants to deny.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 6/4): “Boating Accidents Swell.” I happen to think they’re rather tragic, myself…
GOING FLAT: It’s the end of OK Soda, at least in this area, after one year of failing to become the drink of choice for the generation that doesn’t like products crassly aimed at it. I couldn’t find anybody at Coca-Cola World HQ in Atlanta who could say whether the vaguely orangey substance is being kept in any of the other test markets. As always, discontinued products disappear last from the smaller indie convenience stores, in case you want a six-pack to sell to a can collector.
IT’S THE PITTS: While you wait patiently for the Speakeasy Cafe, Seattle’s second Internet-terminal espresso house, to open, go see the new Cafe Zasu (named for ’30s comic actress Zasu Pitts) at the old Swan space in Pio. Square. Longtime local artist Alan Lande had a part in making the interior, which looks sufficiently Deco-revival without trying too hard to be “period authentic” or overly precious. My personal favorite local lounge-revival act, Julie Cascioppo, is there Thursday nites. It’s run by Sunny Speidel and connected to her existing Doc Maynard’s bar next door (she promises to upgrade the quality of acts at Doc’s starting later this summer). But to help pay for her new venture, Speidel quietly closed down another of the businesses she inherited from her legendary dad Bill, the 70-year-old tourist weekly Seattle Guide. Long before “alternative newspapers” were even a gleam in Norman Mailer’s eye, SG made a comfortable place for itself specializing in weekly entertainment listings, including things like burlesque theaters the daily papers didn’t always accept ads for. But in recent years, SG‘s main distribution turf, hotels, was muscled in on by chain-franchise publications, whose exclusive deals got SG kicked out of some locations. While SG hadn’t had a high local profile for some time, I’m still sad at any long-running periodical going the way of the Oregon Journal and the Seattle Star.
IT’S ABOUT YOU-KNOW-WHAT: Someone from L.A.’s been dropping flyers around town selling $19.95 mail-order booklets on how to build your own time machine. I don’t know if she invented these plans herself or if somebody just came back in time and told her.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, please write in with your suggestions for a non-California-centric metaphor for Internet and World Wide Web use. Decentralized, post-Hollywood media should have a post-Hollywood name. Besides, around here “surfing” is something done only out at Westport by a few rugged loners in full wetsuits.
UPDATE: The Weathered Wall’s new owners are now gonna keep live music there Thurs. and Fri., and maybe add it on other weeknights later on. Anxious bands can contact the club’s new in-house booking agent, Julie Wynn (728-9398).
DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: One issue in the three-year KCMU Kontroversey was the ongoing drive to turn the station into an adjunct of KUOW. That’s become official, now that KUOW’s taking over KCMU’s administrative and fundraising operations. They’re not changing KCMU’s programming, like they tried during the World Cafe era, but the move sets up a chain of command that would allow it. They fail to understand that KCMU succeeded in the past because it was perceived as a grass-roots operation of people who loved music, not a professional institution out to draw well-heeled donors with bland “upscale” fare. It’ll be up to the next UW prez to sort it out. Let’s hope s/he understands it’s in both stations’ best interests to be separate operations with separate missions.
WISH I’D SAID THAT DEPT.: I don’t normally comment on other things in the Stranger (what do you think this is, the Vill. Voice?). But now and again there’s a piece I get additional thoughts about. Here are some recent ones:
Die Hard w/a Vengeance review (4 * 34): Don’t think it’s been mentioned in the media, but the Seattle Symphony recorded some of the background music for the film. Of course, they also did the theme to KIRO’s old News Outside the Box…
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black preview (4 * 34) The V.H. of K.B. singer is like Madonna’s good twin: lo-fi and funky, but still an image-based performance artist who only uses songs as a means to an end, and who as such can be recommended as a live (or home-video) act only. Audio-only documentation of her work is superfluous.
Bathhouses (4 * 33): I know I’m not the only lonely straight guy who’s been jealous of gays for having such an industry . Imagine, going to a place alone and getting laid on the spot, and not by a paid worker but by someone who wants it just as bad as you–the male zipless-fuck fantasy, unencumbered by feminine propriety.
Savage Love (4 * 33): What the letter writer calls “insanity” could also be interpreted as discovering his new lover’s “real” self, not her sociable front persona. If he’s having trouble finding a woman who always keeps the illusion of “sanity” most of us maintain in public, maybe he should resign himself to shallow affairs with married women who want to “bring romance back to their lives.”
The Information book review (4 * 33): Lots of people who think they have talent are jealous of the success of people they think have less talent. Almost every highbrow author-wannabe I’ve met has tried at one time to write a commercially successful work just by making something “bad enough to sell,” without knowing the formulae and disciplines involved in genre lit.
Theater calendar comment (4 * 32): Ah, “risk” in theater. The Empty Space, Bathhouse, Pioneer Square Theater (RIP) et al. have for decades boasted of their daring programming while mounting boomer-friendly wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody revues. AHA! merely follows in this venerable tradition.
COCA feature (4 * 29): Greg implied but didn’t state that bad-boy art might have seemed rebellious and “alternative” enough in the ’80s; but in the Newt era, when the John Carlsons of America drive Harleys and call themselves “rebels,” a different aesthetic may be more appropriate.
Cut & Run (4 * 29): The usual rad-feminist response to an author like ex-Portland punk singer Rene Denfield is to first accuse her of backsliding from the orthodox view of what All Women are or should be. S.P. instead accuses Denfield of the same gross overgeneralizing Denfield accuses Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin of. There’s no such thing as All Women, and certainly no such thing as All Feminists. A movement for individual self-realization can’t be (or become) a monolith.
LAST PLUG: Our ninth-anniversary reading/ performance/ video shindig, Fun With Misc., happens this Thurs., 7:30 p.m.-whenever, at the Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, downtown on University between 1st and 2nd. BYOB; clothing optional.
We start this Misc. on a sad note with the passing of another of my favorite places in the whole world, the Western Coffee Shop in the Maritime Bldg. on Western and Marion. It closed so suddenly (around mid-March), it appeared posthumously in the P-I’s Final Four tourist guide. It was a legendary hole-in-the-wall with some of this town’s best sandwiches, omelets, hash browns, beefy chili, espresso shakes, and coffee; served in a cramped, cozy room with classic diner tableware and loving cowboy-camp decor.
SEAGRAM’S BUYING MCA/UNIVERSAL: If you’ve read books like Hit Men, you know both companies have shady pasts. Seagram’s Bronfman family was allegedly involved in Prohibition booze-smuggling from Canada to the U.S.; MCA, prior to its last ownership by Matsushita/ Panasonic, was one of the most Mob-connected companies in Hollywood. But that’s history; what counts in modern mergers is that boardroom buzzword “synergy”–using both companies’ assents toward joint goals. Since MCA owns the pre-1948 Paramount films as well as the Universal library, will we see stills of Mae West and W.C. Fields endorsing Crown Royal? Or maybe they’ll use computer graphics to insert V.O. bottles into Marlene Dietrich’s saloon scenes in Destry Rides Again. (This also marks the first time since the ’60s that a major North American movie studio and record label has been Canadian owned.)
FOOLS AND THEIR MONEY: The Dallas zine The Met ran a cover story earlier this month about two Texan young-adult guys who claimed to be the real Beavis and Butt-head. In the story, they argue that they’d been graphic design students studying under creator Mike Judge’s wife; that they’d told her and Judge wild tales of their high-school prankster days; that Judge turned that into the toons you hate to love; and that they now want millions from Judge and MTV plus half of B&B’s merchandising income. Halfway down the final jump page of the long story, the Met writer stated, so quickly you had to read carefully to see it, that the whole article was an April Fool’s hoax.
ON LINE: In the first half of this century, serialized novels (usually forgettable romances and mysteries) were a staple of newspaper feature pages. Now, the popular computer service America Online’s bringing that tradition back. Under the overall rubric Parallel Lives, the service now offers three ongoing text-with-illustration stories. Each offers a new 1,000-word chapter each week (each has four chapters so far). The most promising is A Boy and His Dog, not the Harlan Ellison story that became a 1975 Don Johnson film but a rather grim tale of a lonely kid in a dying industrial town harassed by someone who might be his estranged dad. The other stories involve the upscale NYC singles scene and interracial family values in Hollywood. They’re located in the Arts and Leisure section of AOL’s “@Times” area.
OFF LINE: Remember last year, at or about this time, when we worried that Ballard Computer was taking over the local retail computer market? Look at it now: Hemmed in by out-of-state superstore chains, unable to expand big or fast enough to compete against them, it closed two of six stores. The others are stocked with “returnables” like software, but the computers themselves are as thinly-stocked as the last days of F&N. They say all will be fine once their new Canadian investors get on line. ‘Til then, amazing bargains on remaining display stock can be had.
OFF THE RACKS: The Rocket Cobain exploitation issue was banned at Sub Pop’s offices and its Mega Mart store, as authorized by label co-honcho Jonathan Poneman. Meanwhile, compare the Times columnists’ cruel remarks about Cobain at the time of his death to the fawning “tribute” Pat McDonald gave him last week, and also to the much more sympathetic treatment the paper’s given to someone else facing internal emotional issues, Sonics player Kendall Gill.
GROWTH INDUSTRIES: The P-I now runs those penile enlargement ads on the stock-market pages as well as the sport section. You can insert your own snide comment about noise-makin’, foot-stompin’ jocks or Beemer-drivin’, cell-phone-yappin’ capitalist hustlers acting that way to compensate for other deficiencies.
