A five-Wednesday month means an extra visit from Misc., the pop-culture column that’s just as tired of people wanting to tell it the good news about hemp as it is of people wanting to tell it the good news about Amway.

WHICH MAG D’YA READ?: New Republic cover blurb, earlier this month: “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” Atlantic Monthly cover blurb, same week: “The New Intellectuals… Suddenly They’re Back, and They’re Black.”

THE FINE PRINT (the only subtitled closing credit in the video release of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue): “We wish to thank Alfa Romeo for authorizing the scene of the accident of the Alfa 164, the dynamics of which were purely ficticious.” (The scene involved a brake-fluid leak.)

UPDATE: For those who wanted to reach the Seattle Volunteer News, plugged here a few weeks back, its address is P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107, or email SeattleVol@aol.com. Speaking of helpful zines…

`WAVE,’ GOODBYE: Fourth Wave: Disability News and Views is an outspoken and borderline-courageous local quarterly newsprint mag published by the Disabilities Research and Information Coalition with funding from the state’s Developmental Disabilities Council. Or rather, it was. For six years FW communicated directly with 23,000 statewide readers about, as editor Victoria Medgyesi noted in a last-issue editorial, “such issues as love, sex, institutions, oppression, housing, discrimination, abuse, alcohol and drugs, misuse of funds, parents with disabilities, foster care, funding inequities, education, health care reform, `mercy’ killing, and self-advocacy.” It also “questioned the agencies and organizations that deal with disability concerns by asking them the kinds of questions they ask the community-at-large: How many people with disabilities do you have on your paid staff? On your board of directors?”

Eventually, challenging the bureaucracy that fed it caught up with FW. The state canceled the last year of the mag’s funding contract, feeding the money instead to a PR campaign aimed less at fostering self-empowerment for people with physical, mental or developmental disabilities and more at getting resource listings and positive-role-model messages into the mainstream news media. This spring is the first quarter without an issue of FW.

Medgyesi says of the cutoff, “Mostly it’s an impression of keeping disabled people quiet and out of sight of most people. Most of these (media) programs have been developed to make able-bodied people feel better about how they’ve treated people with disabilities. But we looked how the system oppressed and exploited people with disabilities, how it promoted images of pity regarding them in the media. I’ve gone from `why did they cut our funding?’ to `how did we get away with that for six years?’ ” Medgyesi’s willing to correspond with people interested in starting similar ventures, c/o Whole Note Media, 911 Western, #555, Seattle 98104. Speaking of mainstream media…

THIS JUST IN: The network-switcheroo has one positive byproduct: the new KSTW news. It’s fast, info-packed, straight-no-chaser, almost free of happy-talk, little tabloid trash (aside from the requisite O.J. doses), like a local CNN Headline News instead of the drawn-out, filler-filled old KSTW news or the anchorperson-as-celebrity tedium of the other stations.

MISSING THE TRAIN: The transit vote was actually fairly encouraging. The 53 percent no vote was partly influenced by (1) natural suspicion against big public-works projects; (2) suburban rugged-individualists who mistakenly think they’re not part of the larger community; (3) the usual backlash against alternatives to driving; and (4) city-supported opposition in Everett, which got cut out of the light-rail portion of the plan in a last-minute budget cut. When the RTA resubmits the plan, preferably later this year, they should bring Scoopville back in, get out more urban votes, and work better at turning outlying residents onto the possibility of not just commuting but living without having to haul your personal ton of steel everyplace.

‘TIL NEXT WE STRAIN EYES TOGETHER, first- and second-day Stranger readers oughta consider attending the Sheryl Wiser folk gig Thursday night at the OK Hotel bar. Proceeds from Wiser’s tip jar (there’s no cover) will benefit “The Church of Lingirie,” a local ministry providing new underwear to homeless women. Nice music for a good cause, proving the ol’ slogan “Support Can Be Beautiful.

Far from imminentizing the “Death of Writing,” the new electronic media are replenishing our language with new words, phrases and genres. Among these is the “FAQ List” (for “Frequently Asked Questions”), a handy format to bring new users of bulletin boards and newsgroups up to speed. In our quest to be first to steal a good idea, here’s Part 1 of our Misc. FAQ. Part 2 follows in a week or two.

1. How do you pronounce Misc.?

Just like it’s spelled.

2. How do you spell your name, Humphreys or Humphries?

It is, and always has been, Humphrey–no “s.”

3. Is Misc. a parody of ____ (Frisco gossip columnist)?

Absolutely not. If anything, it’s a revival of the classic prewar three-dot column, still practiced by Army Archerd in Daily Variety and Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times.

4. Do you write “I Love Televison”?

No. Wm. Steven Humphrey isn’t even my relation. I’m from Olympia-via-Marysville; he’s from Alabama. My real younger brother’s studying to be a naturopath. I sometimes make him mad by eating all three of naturopathy’s forbidden foods (meat, wheat, and dairy) in front of him.

5. Does the Stranger have a beef against the Times?

Absolutely not. In fact, we’re now printed by a Times subsidiary.

6. Is there a “PC Police” at the Stranger, like the Weekly alleged? Do you all have to agree on everything you write?

Absolutely not. In fact, just last month local film scholar Steve Shaviro claimed a “Disney ideology” in which “artistic or aesthetic experiences… are supposed to be nice” was “the official American dogma.” My ol’ acquaintance Steve appears to be another victim of that academic “radical” construct that imagines U.S. society as consisting of two and only two cultures: The Mainstream (whitebread right-wingers) and The Alternative (whitebread left-wingers). Certain people, especially certain film scholars, might argue that the unique American aesthetic is really one of Camaros screaming down the open road, hot music playing in sleazy dives, and bikini babes posing for calendar pictures with power tools.

Besides, the heart of the Disney ideology isn’t in inoffensive content but in the control and planning behind that content; what the company calls “Imagineering.” Disneyland is a real-world place created from the logic of an animation producer, who used a sense of intense order to create the illusion of spontaneity–a logic perfectly suited to today’s Age of Marketing.

7. When you wrote ____, you were really just kidding right?

Absolutely not. The only time I wrote something completely facetiously was when I called for a crackdown against violence and immorality in opera music.

8. Why do people think Dave Barry’s funny?

Wish I knew. Probably it has something to do with the ingrained reflex of the ethnic joke, adapted for a baby-boomer audience. Instead of treating people of other races as subhumans, Barry gives the treatment to non-boomers, allowing his readers to still think of themselves as The Superior Generation.

9. Doesn’t it seem weird that the politicians and the news media claim everybody’s a flaming right-winger these days, but MTV and the fashion magazines are full of punk and alternative attitudes?

Absolutely not. Corporate “alternative” music, fashion, et al. is a calculated attempt to short-circuit people’s innate cravings for a culture more “real” than that associated with corporate entertainment, while still keeping these people as consumers feeding the business trough. Right-wing “empowerment” rhetoric operates exactly the same way. It persuades people they’re “rebelling” against The Establishment (bureaucrats) when it’s really getting them to suck up to the real power elite (corporations and their PACs). Disgust at politics-as-usual and at entertainment-as-usual are related and both valid. A left that worked would reach out to both frustrations.

10. But wasn’t there a headline in Fortune, “Today’s GOP to Big Business: Drop Dead”?

Yeah, but the meat of that story was that Republican leaders care more about certain businesses (western land and resource exploiters, financial speculators) than others (the Northeast industrial infrastructure). Neither side is appreciably on “our side.” The story also claims what’s really best for business is long-term economic and social stability, not the Newtzis’ scorched-earth policy. That’s a point worthy of more serious debate than I can offer here.

Welcome again to Misc., the column with only one word for Eartha Kitt’s recent Jazz Alley stint: Purr-fection!

FAT, NOT SASSY: As a civic booster, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by Fat Tuesday, the Mardi Gras for people who are just too boomer wimpy or too laid back to do a real Mardi Gras. Mind you, it’s a screwy notion for a stuck-up Protestant city to attempt a Mardi Gras in the first place (even the northern towns that pull off successful Winter Carnivals tend to be in Catholic-dominated places like Quebec and southern Germany), but the way the idea’s been executed usually hurts. I was at the 1978 Fat Tuesday, the last big nighttime-outdoor one, and it almost became for real (i.e., people getting shitfaced and fucking in public, or dressing up like all get out). Since then, it’s been tamed into a promo tool for the boomer-blues-bar circuit, and it’s been an experience not unlike a boomer blues bar on a bad night: predictable, unoriginal, yet annoying. Every place needs a real letting-go time, a healthy respectful vacation from inhibitions; many of us could use a real Lent too, but self-denial isn’t part of the consumer society’s agenda.

VANITY PLATE OF THE WEEK (on a Suzuki Samurai parked on Queen Anne): “F8L CR8.”

PIERCE-INGS: I heartily recommend voting for the big transit proposal next week. Do we need more freeway lanes? No way. Could we use a reliable regional transit system that makes it possible to live as well as commute sans private wheels? You bet. Public transit is a populist, civilizing force, bringing diverse people together as well as saving resources. I saw it when I took the transit proponents’ demonstration train. Hundreds of eager citizens young and old, sitting in adequately comfy seats and chatting happily while we rumbled speedily past the south King/north Pierce County neverland toward the wonders of Tacoma.

Decade-old bumper stickers used to say “Admit It Tacoma, You’re Beautiful.” Recent T-shirts for local band Seaweed admonished us to “Visualize Tacoma.” There’s no need to be so apologetic. Tacoma really is one of the most honestly attractive cities in the region (and perhaps the nation). Except for one area, it’s a human-scale city with a homey lived-in look to it. Its compact downtown was bypassed by the freeway and hence maintains much of its solid brick prewar buildings. The chain stores may be gone from downtown but there are two great “restored” theaters and an Antique Row, plus your usual array of “unique shops and restaurants” at Freighthouse Square. There’s even an elegant coffeehouse in the storefront that served as Tracey Ullman’s pizza joint in I Love You To Death. The town’s got lotsa wonderful architecture: stoic old warehouses, a music store with a rooftop piano neon sign, the ivory-white world HQ of Roman Meal bread (billed on the building as “Nature’s Nut Brown Food”), and of course the world-famous Java Jive. The one part of Tacoma that sucks, the soulless hole in its urban donut, is the Tacoma Mall area–as whatshername might say, a mall is a mall is a mall–yet even it has its particular charms, specifically one of the area’s last surviving Chuck E Cheese robotic pizza parlors.

And you can go there carless too, without waiting for permanent commuter-train service to start, six days a week on the express buses ($2 each way) run by Pierce Transit (where “Your Ride Is Our Pride”). Better still, you can transfer in T-Town to another express and end up in Indietown USA, Olympia. Too bad these express buses don’t run after 8 p.m.; it’d be great to see a show at T-Town’s Victory Club or Oly’s Capitol Theater (or for those town’s folks to see shows here), and afterward Leave the Driving to Them. But you will be able to use the bus this summer to see outdoor AAA baseball (the most “professional” ball we might get this season) at glorious ol’ Cheney Stadium.

NEXT WEEK: The first-ever Misc. Frequently Asked Questions list. Get yours in now.

Here at Misc. we’re anxiously counting down the days (25 on the day this ish comes out) until KSTW starts running CBS shows. Since That Trial will probably still be going on, the big network switch means starting March 13 you won’t see Young & Restless on channel 11 instead of not seeing it on channel 7.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Seattle Volunteer is a handy four-page newsletter run by Andrew Stewart and Laurie Roth, alerting readers to some of the myriad ways they can invest time-n’-sweat to build a better community. It offers free 50-word notices every other month for arts, AIDS, environment, health, education, and political groups that could use your help. The third issue should be out for free next week at some of the same places this paper’s at; or you can subscribe by sending a donation ($25 or more preferred) to P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107.

WHICH AD D’YA READ?: Molson Ice beer ad, 1995: “Don’t worry. Your tongue won’t stick.” Rainier Ice ad, 1994: “Warning: Keep tongue off billboard.”

NORTH OF THE BORDER: The fanning out of Hollywood bigshots across the western states continues. I’m told the most recently “discovered” homesite for frequent-flier showbiz commuters is the outer exurbs of Boise. As you’ve seen from the Little Hollywoods in New Mexico, Montana, Colorado and the San Juans, when the L.A. types show up three things tend to happen: 1) real estate prices soar so locals can’t afford to live there anymore; 2) these millionaires who proudly live half a gas tank from the closest supermarket and 100 gallons of jet fuel from their jobs start preaching to the locals about eco-consciousness; and 3) they bring in their favorite L.A. chefs to invent a “traditional regional cuisine” for the area. It’ll be fun to find out what the “traditional regional cuisine” becomes for a state whose very license plates promote “Famous Potatoes,” whose only movie-based association with dining came from Steve Martin’s cameo in The Muppet Movie, as a waiter offering “Sparkling Muscatel by Fine Wines of Idaho.”

NOT IN THE CARDS: Our Pike St. pals at Edge of the Circle Books submitted an ad to KNDD that began as follows: “Magick, Witchcraft, Paganism; words once whispered are now spoken boldly. Though they cut down the sacred groves, burned our religious texts, and tortured and killed people beyond counting for the `crime’ of witchcraft, our numbers have grown so large that they cannot stop us.” The ad that ran for one day before the station banned it after receiving 25 complaining phone calls. The Viacom-owned station (which had run other ads from the store for three years) first asked the store to submit a “less offensive” spot, then agreed to refund its money.

BEAMING: Viacom boss Sumner Redstone has spoken of one of his new acquisitions, Star Trek, as a “global branded identity.” Several analysts over the years have seen the United Federation of Planets as a metaphor for an cold-war-era American self-image, an image of the benevolent colonist bringing order and commerce while allowing at least on-paper autonomy to its “partners.” A case could now be made for the Federation reflecting Hollywood’s self image of a culture empire enveloping the universe, either smothering local arts and customs or using them to its ends. Redstone wants to have everybody on at least this planet viewing, reading and listening to the same things. This is the polar opposite of what many of the acts now on KNDD believe or originally believed.

As further example, note the Week in Rock segment on MTV (another Viacom property) about indie labels–it gave most of its camera time to those “indies” that have alliances with or are part of the Big Six record giants; it talked about the likes of Sub Pop not as patrons of marginal voices but as generators of future major-label stars; and it was peppered with ex-indie singers who unanimously assured viewers that an act could get screwed by an indie just like by a major.

Mind you, there’s plenty that Big Entertainment has given us (I’ve been heard to compare modern American politics to the ST episode with the Evil Kirk vs. the Ineffectual Kirk). But it’s time to put a new concept to work. Instead of global identities, we need to promote and empower the whole motley world at home and abroad. Make it so.

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”

11/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:

LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’

IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY

Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?

AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.

UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.

GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.

This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.

Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.

However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.

GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…

HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)

Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).

THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”

BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.

BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.

The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.

FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.

TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.

PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)

MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”

THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.

KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.

GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.

The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.

ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)

I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).

The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.

It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”

PASSAGE

Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”

REPORT

You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).

Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).

With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Oogonium”

Sexfilm:

The next last frontier of B filmmaking

Essay for the Stranger, 10/24/94

Sci-fi, horror and fantasy used to be the place to learn the craft of the simple direct narrative film, as a potential creator or simply a more informed viewer. These genres once offered bright delicious eye-and-ear candy, films that cut through the boundaries of slick production and linear narrative to speak directly to their audiences with imagery, energy and audacity.

But the days of low-budget screamfests like Basket Case, The Stuff and The Corpse Grinders now seem long gone in this age of morphing effects, video-game plots and $70 million vehicles for mass-murdering “heroes.”

Meanwhile, the “experimental” or “underground” film has been permanently corrupted by the theft of almost all its repertoire of techniques by music videos, fashion videos and even snowboarding videos.

Likewise, the formerly reviled “shockumentary” has become big business as tabloid TV.

At the other end of the sellout spectrum, the suspense thriller has turned into the USA World Premiere Movie and a host of direct-to-video films by directors imitating 0899506186 De Palma’s imitations of Hitchcock. The only suspense in most of these lame exercises is figuring out which beginning-screenwriting course the writers just came from.

Only one American commercial exploitation genre retains its power to keep re-creating its audiovisual vocabulary, to use simple easy-to-understand tools in creating unreal domains of character and behavior–tools young filmmakers can easily comprehend and copy to their own ends.

I speak, of course, of the sex film.

By stretching its range from the dingiest amateur hardcore tapes to the slickest theatrical “erotic romances,” the sex film has become an item of mass appeal (or rather of a hundred overlapping cult audiences). And not just for the lonely-guy crowd either: the trade mag Adult Video News claims the market for adult-video rentals (hardcore and softcore combined) is 47 percent female. That’s a better gender ratio than you’ll find in many more allegedly “progressive” media like alternative comix and computer online services. It’s still not big in American multiplex theaters, it’s not on American broadcast TV, and many of its subgenres can’t be found at conservative video chain stores. That means it’s still an item people have to go out of their way to get. That means it’s still made to be something people will actually want, rather than some overproduced bland effects-fest.

And because the sex film is centered in the human body and the human spirit, it can’t stray too far from human-scale storytelling. Add money to an action scene and you get noise, smoke, computer-generated effects, and a thousand dead foreigners. Add money to a bedroom scene and you simply get a better-furnished, better-lit bedroom–and maybe some better actors.

Consider the critically-snickered-at producer-director Zalman King, purveyor of “class” adequate-budget softcore (Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction, the made-for-Showtime Red Shoe Diaries series) for viewers who may still be a little timid about the genre. The typical King plot involves a shy heroine who becomes inexorably drawn toward carnal temptation. King and his colleagues (like Roger Corman, King now hires underlings to direct most of the films he produces) spend lots of screen time luring their heroines (and their viewers) from something approaching suburban consensus reality toward a semi-surrealistic universe of blue lighting, dreamlike nonlinear images, and hokey slow jazz-fusion music. In some King features there’s as much as a half hour before the first major nude scene. It’s an eon compared to King’s literary equivalent, the “steamy romance” novel, in which the heroine typically gets to have some action well before page 30. Yet this long first act cleverly lets King and his directors act as patient seducers, bringing viewers and characters alike into the scary freedoms of sensation and irrationality.

And because body doubles are so frequently and obviously used in King’s productions, you’re really seeing four people in every coupling–even kinkier if you think about it. This usually isn’t because the stars don’t have fine bodies, but because King likes to hire specialists in figure posing for the extreme close-ups, just like TV commercials hire separate hand models to pour the beer.

Just as there are innumerable ways to have sex, there are innumerable ways to represent it on the screen. Here are a few examples of how the combined allure and absurdity of on-screen sex, explicit or not, makes for entertaining and even breathtakingly weird film:

Rinse Dream (Nightdreams, Party Doll a Go Go) and Andrew Blake (House of Dreams, Secrets) are among the few would-beauteurs in the mostly boring world of hardcore video. Dream uses staccato video editing, Daliesque stage sets and just a dash of PoMo cynicism to enliven the standardized rite of the ritual fuck video. Blake, who started with “tasteful women’s erorica” for Playboy Video before moving into the hardcore side of the business, maintains a sense of ambitious visual pseudosophistication in his works, with wordless narratives that put teased-hair models through Helmut Newton-esque tableaux on their way toward the sex scenes. Blake is one of the few filmmakers who’s attempted to make explicit fuck scenes visually attractive; a Quixotic task at which I believe he fails.

The Playboy video centerfolds go further than Blake in exploring the inherent absurdity of out-of-context screen nudity. Each tape consists of a half-dozen vignettes, some more linear than others. Some show nude women doing things real-life people often do in the nude (stripping, dressing, bathing, sleeping, swimming, laying in the sun). Others show them doing things few people ever do nude (washing cars, riding jet skis, painting self-portraits, lying in empty storm drains, aerobicizing, doing modern-dance moves, holding up big globes or flags, playing pool, breaking into other people’s houses, making ice sculptures).

On the other end of the linear/ nonlinear spectrum are some videos marketed at female viewers. Each vignette in the Love Scenesseries begins with a conservatively-dressed young woman meeting a man who just happens to work as a male stripper; 15 minutes later, he’s privately showing her his hot dance moves (and his penile implants). Candida Royale, meanwhile, makes “feminine” hardcore tapes with lots of character development, lots of dialogue, almost halfway-decent acting, as few as two slow-paced sex scenes per hour, and the visible use of condoms (“except,” say the closing credits, “when the talent involved are lovers in real life”).

Royale’s work can be contrasted with generic hardcore, something that was never very good when it was in theaters (In the ’70s you could make the sleaziest crap this side of an Elks Lodge stag reel and the Frisco hype machine would call it bold and daring!). It’s gotten even duller on video.

A glut of producers has caused budgets to collapse. The average (and most are very average) video has five to eight fuck scenes strung together with the least possible dialogue, all quickly shot on local-news-quality camcorders and dubbed with cheesy synth music (it’s cheaper to hire a one-person band than to license stock music).

Yet this dismissal of all artistic pretension gives the assembly-line hardcore video a peculiarly honest quality. It doesn’t pretend to tell a real story or make any social statements (beyond crusading for its own legal right to exist). It is what it is, and claims to be nothing more.

With “pro” hardcore budgets so slight, it’s only a slight leap of lessened watchability into amateur hardcore videos. What they lack in picture quality they gain in energy. These are couples from across America, of all races and body types, who actually like one another and want to show you how much. If that’s not punk-rock moviemaking I don’t know what is.

There are many more sexfilm subgenres worth a cursory glance:

* sex-ed videos: many are more sex than ed, but the point is the illusion of education

* highbrow liberal sexfilm (Sirens, The Lover)

* The gloriously cheesy sex comedies USA shows late at night with all the sex cut out, like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips

* sex documentaries and shockumentaries

* short-form Playboy Channel stuff, most of which gets onto video before or after its cable run

* Euro sex sitcom films

* British sex farces (neither really sexy nor really funny, but a fantastic insight into the non-Masterpiece Theater side of English life)

* ’70s Euro erotic drama

* recent Euro erotic drama, from The Double Life of Veronique to the B melodramas released on video here by Private Screenings

* classic girlie film: strippers, nudists, David Friedman, and especially the king of over-the-top sex farce, Russ Meyer.

But we can’t leave without mentioning the best-distributed and worst of current sex genres, the made-for-video “erotic thriller.” At their best, they’re like mediocre USA World Premiere Movies with breasts added. At their worst, they’re the only current sex films that fulfill the radical-feminist stereotype of sex films as encouraging viewers to get off on violence against women. It’s a sick joke that Blockbuster will carry dozens of these but not a single tame centerfold video. (This may change now that Blockbuster’s part of the Viacom-Paramount-MTV-Showtime-Spelling empire.)

9/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)

Generation X: The Original Poem

Here at Misc. World HQ, we’ve been trying like heck to figure out the intermediate intricacies of navigatin’ that Info Hi-Way. For a Machead like me to learn an Internet UNIX line-command interface from the online help (much of which is written for programmers and system operators, not end users) is like learning to drive by reading a transmission-repair manual.

IT’S A CRIME: Ya gotta give Clinton credit even in the face of apparent defeat. By trying to push some comprehensive health-reform, no matter how kludgy, he asked Congress to inconvenience big business, something it hasn’t done on such a general scale in maybe two decades. By even bringing up the premise that perhaps what’s good for corporate interests might not be good for the country, he’s significantly altered the boundaries of public debate at the “highest” levels of our political culture. I’m a single-payer-plan fan myself, but it was clear that there wasn’t enough common sense in Congress for that to go this time. This is an example of what I’ve been saying about the need for us “progressive” types to get into practical politics. We’ve gotta expand from just protesting things, into the comparatively boring nuts-n’-bolts of getting things done. The moneybags have a powerful voice; we need to get just as loud.

MY DAY: Yesterday afternoon I visited the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn, N.Y., and enjoyed seeing the various apartments and having the opportunity to talk with some of the people living there. Of course, the ultimate object of any housing project is to have satisfied tenants.

Our first visit was to an apartment with two bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room and bath. The young couple had two children and the wife’s mother with them. The man is a longshoreman with only intermittent days of work. The girl seemed proud and happy and she had acquired many possessions which she showed me with pride. Her mother brought out a plate of little cakes and some little glasses and poured out some homemade wine which she offered to us all. We drank to their health and happiness and we wished for them the steady job on which so much depends. Little enough to ask of life and yet often impossible to attain.

Our next family was in a larger three bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath apartment. They had four children and the man was on WPA.

Our last apartment was one of the very small one bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath type. The young couple who lived there had had the sad experience of losing their first baby, but the young woman’s mother, who was visiting her, told me what a change this new apartment made in her life.

These apartments seemed to me very well planned. All of them have eliminated unnecessary doors. The kitchen, for instance, has no door, neither has the living room. The bedroom, bathroom and one closet have doors. The other closets are recessed with curtains. The landscaping around the houses is attractive, and scattered around the project are eight small playgrounds for children. I hope that some day everyone can live in quarters which are as pleasant as this, if for no other reason than that it will cost the taxpayers less and that the next generation will be healthier.

On Friday we went to Boston to see my new grandchild. He is a sweet baby with a nicely shaped head and ears that lie flat against his head. His hair is so fair that it hardly shows. He refused to open his eyes for me, so I don’t know their color, but I surmise it’s blue. I was only allowed to see him through a glass window, so I am looking forward to seeing him next in his own home and knowing more about him. I am sure he is going to be a real person very soon.

On the whole, our family works and plays hard, but there is one member who takes his job so seriously that not even the advent of a baby curtails his working hours. Don’t think John lost one hour. I am glad of this, for there is a real obligation on every one of us these days to do our job, whatever it may be, a little better than we have done it before.

If the need comes for any of us to do a different kind of work from what we are doing at present, the call will be unmistakable. But the fact that we do our daily jobs well will make it easier for anyone who has to take our place and will make us more efficient in anything else we have to take up. Besides going on with the daily routine, keeps our feet on the ground and that is sorely needed in times like these.

Two extremes have come to me in the last few days. One was a young man who announced to me that all talk of a “fifth column” was ridiculous and that there was no such thing in the United States. This, just because he and his friends and those with whom he talked, did not happen to touch any “fifth column” activities.

On the other hand, a woman suggested that we all go out and learn to shoot and sleep with a gun beside our beds in preparation for parachute troops or riots in our neighborhoods.

Both of these attitudes are obviously silly. We want to take proper precautions but, in other ways, we want to go on with our daily life and our daily job in calm security.

RADICALS AND THE ARTS: Miss Dorothy Day, a former rough and tumble radical who became a Catholic, has written a book calledFrom Union Square to Rome, in which she asks herself if the old desire to be with the poor and mean and abandoned was not mixed with a desire to be with the dissipated.

The question has arisen in other lands, prompted by the conduct and language and the studied physical and moral frowsiness of individuals who have identified themselves with radical movements.

The arts also have served as an excuse for a dirty way of life, and some artists of this type, being incompetent painters and writers, easily persuade themselves that they could command high prices if they would compromise with their principles. They become radical painters and writers to excuse their failure to themselves and disguise it to their friends.

Greenwich Village 20 years ago was a haunt of sloppy fakers who said they desired to live their lives in their own way, unfettered by middle-class conventions — which was another way of saying that they wanted to engage in some promiscuous sleeping-around and didn’t like soap. They had read about the art and independent thinking in a dirty quarter of Paris, and for a time maintained a similar artistic and intellectual slum in New York, most of whose inhabitants overdrank and produced punk poetry and short stories and incompetent smears on canvas.

There were quite a few young corn-fed frauds of both sexes from the Middle West, putting into effect ideas of conduct and morality which they had heard talked up on the campus, but the colony in New York, as well as the one in Paris, also in included unsightly females of considerable age with small private incomes who liked to sit around nasty little joints listening to the talk and reading of the unwashed literati and squinting at distorted pictures and imagine themselves to be of the arts.

In summer groups of such people move to places in the far suburbs to go around half-naked, if not altogether nude, and the town of Westport, Conn., which did have a colony of legitimate artists, suffered from the presence of carousing counterfeits. The neighbors got an impression that art meant free love, personal filth and drunkenness, and that most writers and artists were Communists, because the incompetents are likely to condemn a system which refuses to appreciate their talents.

It was not any scientific curiosity that prompted the fad of Viennese mind-probing, but an appetite for horribly foul sex stuff and the hope of dirty people that some head-feeler would tell them that they could cure their nervousness only by spending a week-end in a cabin off somewhere away from it all with some other man’s girl or some other woman’s gentleman friend. Medical necessity might just justify conduct which otherwise would be difficult to explain, and when both members of a domestic combination were similarly troubled the doctor’s orders were likely to be regarded as law.

Radical thought and belief does not truly express itself in filthy attire and dirty fingernails, for radicals purport to be intelligent, and it is only the ignorant who have an excuse for dirt when soap and water are almost free and whiskbrooms are a dime. Nevertheless, affected frowsiness has come to be offered as evidence of advanced thought, and profane and obscene speech is sometimes offered by women as proof that they are fighting mad at the condition of the poor or the sufferings of the Spanish Communists and don’t give a damn for the opinion of the complacent respectables who wash their smug and stupid faces.

Probably it is not so much the radical ideas but offensive personalities, and on warm days an odor as of something not quite fresh, which have made most Americans suspicious of radicalism. There is also a deterrent in the apparent, though not real, requirement that to sympathise with radical ideas one must give up hygiene, become personally filthy and, as between husband and wife, each agree that the other may jump the fence whenever he or she is troubled by a dream.

YOUTH AT `DEAD END,’ WHAT’S THE CURE?: Young people — mobs of them! Laughing squads of lovely girls, husky boys, lining up for the annual graduation parade. Studies over, school days at an end, off they go. Into what? Into a world which yesterday petted and encouraged them, but is now suddenly indifferent to their need, hostile to their demands. Into an enforced idleness that wrecks their pride and enthusiasm, destroys their ambition and illusions…turns dreams into doubt, determination into despair and patriotism into an embittered sneer.

“Scarehead stuff”? No! The tragic and shameful truth. Yearly, 2,000,000 — TWO MILLION, COUNT ‘EM! — young Americans, cream of the crop in brain and brawn, leave our schools and step down and out to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Timber lands, oil wells, scenic beauty, fruit trees, livestock — cows, apples, pigs, peaches – all these precious “natural resources” the nation fights strenuously to protect and conserve — spending, willingly, billions in that struggle. Yet each year, two million young graduates and uncounted thousands of uneducated youngsters — more precious to America than all her other “natural resources” combined — are junked!

For, remember, unemployment means more than an empty pocket. It means an empty spirit… an empty spirit which breeds maggots as surely as dead flesh.

Have you seen the play Dead End? There’s as shocking a sermon-in-the-flesh as a nation ever faced. Hush…darkness…the curtain rises on such a scene, such a problem as you may find in any American city today. An east side’s “dead end” terminal at the river’s edge. Rotting tenements…crumbling warehouses…cluttered with filth, riddled with hideouts. Above the brawling, blowsy, fly-blown hell juts the hanging garden of a millionaire. Below — scuttling through the stinking darkness like a pack of rats, goes The Gang.

The Gang! All children — some of them mere babes — they paw the garbage for food, pounce like beasts on anyone they hate — anything they desire. Snickering — without a flicker of conscience — they inflict incredible torture, retail absolute depravity. Why not? Unwanted, unloved, not one of them has ever known decent pride or joy. Cut off from all life’s honorable trails, they seek adventure in the “Dead End” slime.

Are the young people themselves to blame? Have they become spoiled by the easy luxury of this Machine Age…are they “too choosey” to accept jobs which their fathers took gladly?

Or is society responsible? Should the Government, regardless of party, conserve and protect youth as it now conserves and protects its timber land, scenic beauty, livestock? Is not youth the most precious of all “natural resources” and should it not be treated accordingly?

Do you remember Henley’s magnificent rallying cry, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”? In those lines the fighting human spirit hurls its defiance at adversity. Time and again that spirit – blazing in the heart of the Youth — has swept America out of its “Dead End,” ON TO VICTORY!

I, `SPY’: Shirley was not especially astonished to learn that following a press breakfast with some of the girls from the cast of Minsky Follies that I was helping them find new lodging… Cheryl Taylor was the young lady in question and I picked up facts I hadn’t known about, like she ordinarily sings, but had to be a “Show Girl” because she had her jaw broken in an automobile accident some months back. A show girl, I find, is one who walks around “with” clothes. A Minsky “model,” on the other hand, has most of her clothes artfully removed. Glamorous Lili St. Cyr, however, is one of the “stars” along with comedian Pinky Lee… And she doesn’t exactly wear a “Mother Hubbard.” At the Orpheum.

Annie will be getting out her gun at the Aqua Theater at the behest of Greater Seattle Inc., starting July 2. Vivacious Gisele McKenzie will play the part of Annie and I might mention she’s doing one of my favorite musical comedies – Annie Get Your Gun!

The new Tiki Shop down at Leschi along Lake Washington is one to really flip over, the girls tell me. Betty Minor Evans, an old school friend of mine, and her partner have, to my knowledge, the only Seattle sop specializing in Hawaiian clothes for men and women. They went to Hawaii (how’s that for tough work?) and had things made up to their own specifications. Not the loud Aloha shirt bit, but elegant casual and cock-fashions, displayed in a tasty shop along with rare black coral and other types of jewelry and fine handmade wooden ware for the table. Betty’s off to Hawaii again this week, and I must say this sure beats doing your buying in the 7th Ave. Garment District in New York.

The Seahorse, that wonderful restaurant at Mukilteo, begs to report that it now can up the population of Mukilteo by 70 per cent every day without discommoding anyone. They’ve doubled the capacity of the restaurant and now there are two lines to the groaning smorgasbord tables. Mukilteo population — 1,000. Usual Wed. smorgasbord and dinner, at the Seahorse, about 700.

WHAT’S NUDE AT THE MOVIES?: Gamercy, Madison & Broadway. World premiere The Immoral West & How It Was Lost by producers of Erotica and Mr. Teas. Nudes & Dudes. Color, ample parking, free coffee… Guild 45th Street, 2115 N. 45th Street. Surftide 77. Hilarious parody of TV “whodunits.” Detective Bernard Bingbang seeks beauteous babe with birthmark. $500,000 color production.

FOR YOU PHOTOGRAPHERS: Hollywood Studios, 111 Stewart St., has comely models like the above posing 1-10 pm daily. Technical aid, lighting provided; camera rentals; individual or group sessions. MA 2-5555.

AND NOW ABOUT LIQUOR: Never on Sunday. Bootleggers are hard to find and expensive. If you don’t have a friend with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, you’ll be dry on Sunday if you don’t stock up. Some liquor stores open from 11 am to 11 pm. Check phone book… Beer taverns can be walked in on off the street & ladies can sit at bar, but they can’t call it a bar… Cocktail lounges are tucked away behind food. You can’t let children see liquor prepared so teen agers have to eat & or dance concealed from the bar. Women can’t sit at bar, but can sit at piano, which is why we have so many “piano” bars. Liquor hours: ‘Till 2 am except Saturday, when it’s midnight. Sit still when you’re doing your drinking. I don’t think it’s the law, but it certainly is the custom not to carry your drinks in a cocktail lounge. The waitress will call you on it if you do.

SHIRLEY’S COLUMN: One of the most often-asked questions by visitors to the fair is, “where can I order good salmon?” One of the best answers to that question is “The Viceroy.” We were there for lunch the other day and were delighted to find that Henk Straatmann not only is their Maitre d’ now, but served us salmon with his practiced continental flourish. It was poached, juicy — with his wonderful Hollandaise – and a bottle of Wente Bros. Riesling. An elegantly satisfying place to dine in style — The Viceroy.

We’ll be partying about the HMS Bounty (of MGM movie fame) as this issue comes out. It’s arriving 9 days late on account of storms. No wonder they used to sail to Seattle via Honolulu in the old days! She’ll be at Shilshole Marina for a week or so for the public to sample.

Our Mr. Fecker, Mayor of Pioneer Square and one of the partners in Louie’s and the Blue Banjo, reports that attendance at Louie’s has doubled since they put the entrance on the alley, complete with peephole for doorman, “Wolfgang.” You can depart by the backdoor of the Blue Banjo, step down the dark alley to Louie’s. It all gives you a wicked “prohibition era” type feeling.

•

(LATTER-DAY NOTE: Former Stranger editor S.P. Miskowski had the novel idea of turning one entire issue of the paper into a collection of “found texts,” cut and pasted together with no overt acknowledgment of their true origins. My entry combined Eleanor Roosevelt, conservative Hearst Newspapers columnist Westbrook Pegler, some Depression-era activist whose name I’ve since forgotten, and Seattle Guide editor and Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel.)

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

Welcome back to Misc., your friendly roadside diner along the Info Hi-Way, the kind with the big neon sign facing the road that just says EAT. This edition is dedicated to Jim Althoff, one of the last local talk-radio hosts to dare to be smart instead of sleazy. He and wife Andee Beck (formerly the region’s smartest TV critic) are off to do a show in Milwaukee. We’ll miss ’em. (More on Althoff’s ex-station later.)

DEPT. OF CLARIFICATION: I don’t normally write about my personal life, but half the stuff written about me in the 5/11 Weekly isn’t true. If you need to know which half, send a SASE.

UPDATES: The pirate radio station Free Radio Seattle has had equipment problems and isn’t on the air yet, but now plans a 90-minute inaugural broadcast for midnight June 4, somewhere near 88 FM…. The people who left Month magazine and tried to start a copycat free mag called Monthly have subtly changed their name to Northwest Monthly to avoid confusion with what a Monthly editorial called “a junior high rag.” They’re also putting out Bean: An Idea Cafe, a literary/poetry zine with reviews of only old-hippie-acceptable music (folk, jazz, blues). (One corec: Month and Monthly‘s common ancestor, Face II Face, was originally sold for $2 a copy; it later became a freebie.)

REMINDER TO THE MEDIA: When Bob Hardwick, Seattle’s leading middle-of-the-road radio personality for 30 years, tragically shot himself a year or two back, you didn’t see any dorky commentators claiming the suicide proved that all middle-aged Sinatra fans were pathetic losers.

FADE AWAY NOT: In the first weeks after the Cobain tragedy, I heard several locals privately refer to it as the closing chapter in the “Seattle scene” mania. Does it really mean “the party’s over” locally? Ever since Mudhoney first appeared on the cover of Melody Maker almost six years ago, some people here have expected (and even hoped) that the bigtime music-biz would quickly tire of Seattle and everyone could go back to playing just for one another. It hasn’t happened yet, despite the concerted efforts of the media to shoehorn all Seattle bands into one stereotyped fad, and then to declare that fad over. Face it: The corporate entertainment establishment’s scared of people outside NY/LA making their own culture, refusing to be good passive consumers.

Seattle rock isn’t one singular sound, but it does represent an attitude of DIY production and distribution, of creating things you really like that communicate directly with audiences because they really like it. Just how well this formula worked was proved by the immensity with which Cobain’s death shocked and saddened people. The tragic loss of a singular artist and the end of Seattle’s premier band threw everybody for a big harsh wallop and made everything seem a whole hell of a lot less fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that the NW has two dozen other major-label bands at last count. There are as many as 50 other world-class indie acts in Washington and Oregon, playing a wide variety of sounds, plus hundreds of fascinating/fun/dull/bombastic club acts.

I’ve found that California people used to like Seattle when it was thought of as little more than a good market for Calif.-made culture product (LA films and fashions, SF rock bands and authors), a friendly rival to the LA aerospace-defense industry, and a middle-aged-hippie retirement home with good pot and lotsa magic ‘shrooms ripe for the pickin’. But somewhere along the line, us Nordic hicks started getting uppity; some of us thought we could create some of our own culture for a change. Maybe it was these Seattle rock bands and theater troupes that got the southwesterners to notice our new attitude; maybe it was when the pivot point of the PC biz moved from Palo Alto to Redmond.

In any event, I’ve seen a lot of attempts by Calif. writers and commentators to put us northern yahoos back in our place. The corporate culture industry of LA and the bohemian culture industry of SF both have a vested stake in preventing the movement of DIY empowerment that Seattle represents. All the rock-journalism hype about “Looking for the Next Seattle” was based on trying to promote the image that Seattle had just been a place where a few good bands were ready to be absorbed into the media machine, and that any other town might have similarly-exploitable talent. They’re not willing to admit out loud that Seattle and the other local scenes represent a threat to corporate rock’s very existence, that we want to replace the media machine with what that NY-centrist Patti Smith called “the age when everybody creates.”

PHILM PHACTS: Movies based on TV series have one basic flaw: A TV series isn’t a story. It’s a concept, a set of characters, running shticks and situations; more like a role-playing game manual than a story. A movie script is a sequence of events with a set beginning and end. Once a TV-based movie has established the characters and running gags or dramatic elements of the series, it finds itself with nothing to do and an hour of screen time to fill. The Fugitive avoided this problem by stringing together the initial premise and conclusion of the original series with some Steadicam chase scenes, avoiding the plot elements that made up most of the series episodes. Maverick, The Flintstones, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Beverly Hillbillies, et al. haven’t solved this.

THEIR MONEY: Let’s set the story straight about that ubiquitous right-wing bogeyperson, the infamous “added costs” that prevent businesses from pricing products and services at the cheapest price. Anything beyond the cheapest possible cost of making and shipping a product is “added cost.” Yes, that includes the standard old talk-radio nemeses of taxes and environmental regulations, plus the new talk-radio nemeses of employee health insurance; but it also included mob payoffs, excessive executive salaries and perks, advertising, lawyers, bank fees, lobbying, donations to the symphony, losses on bad real-estate investments, etc. Any Gucci-clad executive who whines that health care for his workers would be an excessive “added cost” oughta be willing to give up half his salary. If the conservatives had their way, we’d all be dying of TB caused by unsafe living conditions so the privileged could have even more privileges.

HARD BARGAINS: The Nordstrom family apparently learned a lot from its former ownership of the Seahawks about wringing forth public subsidies for private business. Nordstrom now allegedly won’t move its downtown store into the old Frederick’s building unless the city gives it big tax breaks, the state builds a bigger convention center, and the feds change rules to encourage cruise ships to dock here. (Store officials don’t call this a list of absolute “demands,” just suggested steps to improve the “business climate.”) If all this doesn’t happen, according to a meeting between corporate and government officials leaked to the P-I, the Nordies hint at threatening to diminish their current downtown store and to move their corporate offices to Oregon or California. Not quite the image of selfless customer service, eh? Speaking of businesses that demand your support…

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE DEPT.: I’ve already harped about the self-serving hypocrisy of vegetarians who smoke, but this is a life-n’-death issue so I’ll continue with another argument: If you’re such a rebel bohemian, why do you give up your money and your body to the tobacco industry, one of the most reactionary and anti-humanistic forces on the planet today? And don’t think you’re avoiding the campaign coffers of Jesse Helms if you buy that brand that’s falsely billed as Native American-made (it really isn’t; it only advertises to be “true to the Native American tradition,” whatever that means). That’s just a smaller company within the same huge legal drug cartel that’s gotten federal subsidies to keep making products that kill when properly used. Now the US cig industry’s responding to declining domestic sales by seeking new people overseas to enslave, like women in China. Speaking of legal drugs…

THE FINE PRINT: The Rainier Ice bottle prominently displays the product’s bountiful alcohol content twice, but you have to look to find out that you only get 10 oz. of the stuff, instead of the standard 12. Speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

THE EDGE OF WETNESS: In a desperate attempt to rebuild its still scandal-damaged US market, Perrier‘s launching four designer bottles with pseudo-art-deco designs by what its PR calls four “artists of the future” — really professional ad artists. This attempt to start a collectible craze ruins what had been the finest bottle design in its market segment, and doesn’t disguise the fact that what’s inside is still filtered H2O plus CO2, just like the cheaper domestic stuff. Still speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN RECYCLABLE ALUMINUM: The Coca-Cola Co. has made the most brazen attempt yet at reaching the young PoMo sensibility. OK (billed as “A Carbonated ‘Beverage’ “) is an orange-lemon-lime-cola melange with caffeine and a dark-pinkish color, test-marketed here and in eight other towns. It tastes and looks like that stuff you made as a kid by squirting a little from every 7-11 Big Gulp nozzle into the same cup. It’s got a set of package designs by ex-Seattle cartoon legend Charles Burns and another with the monochrome ennui of Eightball cartoonist Dan Clowes, who got $7,000 for the rights to existing panels of his art. According to Time, the brand is the product of two years of research into youthful attitudes, including data from MIT’s “Global Teenager” project, and is meant to sell to skeptical kids here and worldwide (one possible reason for the non-sequitur texts on the packages, which read like Japanese English ad copy.) The whole marketing campaign’s the work of Weiden & Kennedy, the infamous Portland ad agency that gave us Nike, Black Star beer, and the Subaru commercial with the line “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car.” Speaking of Rose City media products…

PUTTING THE X IN PDX: Several parties have tried to create a heterosex mag for the now generation. But Bikini is too steeped in snowboarding graphics, and Future Sex is too slopped in the anti-human dispassion of cybersex (masturbating with robots being the fantasy of male computer nerds who grew up with too few girls and too many issues of Heavy Metal; if traditional porn is fantasizing for purposes of masturbation, cybersex is fantasizing about masturbation).

It took a low-budget effort from Portland, the double-entendre-titled X Magazine, to come at least close to doing it right. It’s nicely printed on non-slick paper, with type you can actually read. The 42 photos (most in that “arty” black and white) include visual and verbal depictions of young women and men who like one another and themselves–the “alternative” press’s only current sexual taboo, the taboo against inter-gender friendship. The most erotic pic, for me, is on the contents page, with a friendly female face glancing playfully-knowingly toward the staff list. There’s also a spread of a passionate couple stripping out of grunge fashions (you don’t see whether the guy’s hair is his longest feature), some not-too-dumb poetry, an actually-funny spoof of the Tonya Harding media feeding frenzy, and a nice profile of Miss Red Flowers, Portland co-ed rock band that (like Seattle’s Sick and Wrong) has sometimes gone naked on stage. The only downsides: a dumb woman-in-bondage photo (illustrating a man-in-bondage fiction piece) and a puff piece on this moment’s worst corporate “alternative” band, Paw. Available at Bulldog News and Fantasy (Un)ltd. Speaking of sexy printed matter…

NEW MONEY: The feds are talking about redesigning our paper currency, starting with the smugglers’-favorite $100 bill. About time. We’ve got some of the least inviting-looking money in the world. Why should the Canadian buck be worth less but look so much more colorful? Hey, let’s have commemorative bills, just like stamps — money with a thin and fat Elvis, a thin and fat Jim Morrison, or a fat and thin Oprah.

DEAD AIR REVISITED: Irv Pollack is the kind of feisty senior citizen you might hear calling talk radio, unafraid to call the host on a grievously wrong point. When KING-AM was put up for sale, Pollack wanted to buy it, to make it America’s first for-profit community station. He had no experience in broadcast management (tho’ he was a former KCMU news volunteer) and no capital to invest, but he hoped the Bullitt sisters, who were selling the station to endow their environmental foundation, would give him the time to assemble a deal by raising funds from the likes of Robert Redford, Ben & Jerry’s, the Working Assets long-distance service, and author Paul Hawken. But neither time nor money were on the side of Pollack’s quixotic quest. Within weeks, KIRO agreed to pay $2.5 million for the station, which has lost money as long as anyone can remember. This kind of artificial price is only possible because the Feds now let big station groups to own up to four stations in a town. This policy reduces competition, stifles a diversity of voices, and helps nobody but the owners. Speaking of lost opportunities…

SPACES IN THE HEART: Tugs Belmont is now a non-gay bar called Beatnix, with a pool table and jazz and spoken-word shows. Thus ends a tradition that goes back to the original Tugs Belltown (1979-89), a less exclusively-gay disco than Tugs Belmont was. It was also, on weeknights, the first above-ground punk/new wave dance club in town. When Tugs #1 was evicted by its landlord for redevelopment, the Tugs people took over the space that had been Squid Row (1986-90), a gloriously stinky and dank live-music club that hosted a variety of sounds but was best known as one of the chief sites where a few people developed the beer-sodden growls that the outside world still mistakenly thinks all Seattle bands sound like. Both Tugs incarnations had their troubles with a Liquor Board that couldn’t appreciate gay erotic images or queer-positive performance art. Tugs #2 was slapped with a week’s suspension due to a recent underwear party. The owner, who according to inside reports was getting tired of keeping the joint afloat, decided to close it instead….

Also now closed is Belltown’s last lowbrow watering hole: the notorious tavern on 2nd, north of the Crocodile, that hadn’t had an outside sign for several years but was officially known as Hawaii West (I know we’re east of Hawaii; the name referred to a previous Hawaii Tavern in another part of town). As the last place of its type in the area to not get upscaled (besides the Rendezvous), it was a refuge of barflies who’d been 86’d or made unwelcome everywhere else….

And while nobody was looking (or rather, because nobody was showing), the Vogue quietly dropped its last live-music nights in favor of an all-DJ format. Now, nobody’s new band will be able to play the little stage where Nirvana made one of its first Seattle shows, that had hosted Seattle’s best & brightest since 1980 (as WREX). It now seems like a lifetime ago, but before 1990 the Vogue’s Tues. and Wed. night shows were some of the most important showcases a local band could get, back when the only other places to play were the Central and the Ditto (which were only open weekends) and the Rainbow (which had “new music nights” early in the week). Speaking of musical memories…

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 1: During most of my adult life, “Classic Rock” meant 1956-71 hits only. Then came the ’70s Preservation Society, Rhino Records’ Have A Nice Day CD compilations, the movie Dazed and Confused, ’70s dance parties in some cities, revival bands like the Gin Blossoms, and (most importantly, biz-wise) the aging of ’70s teens into the advertiser-preferred demographic brackets. ’70s-nostalgia radio formats have hit the airwaves in over 20 cities. Barry Ackerly’s turned the old K-Lite into KJR-FM, playing some of the hits heard on KJR-AM during that station’s Emporer Smith/Norm Gergory silver age (which followed its Lan Roberts/Pat O’Day golden age). The emphasis is on whitebread corporate-rockers (Eagles, Springsteen, Jackson Browne), not on the era’s wacky AM hits (as chronicled in Barry Scott‘s new book We Had Joy, We Had Fun), certainly not on late-decade punk, and not even on the decade’s great R&B-pop (much of it recorded by ex-Philly soul producer Thom Bell at what’s now Heart’s Bad Animals studio, then owned by KJR’s parent company). For that you’ll have to catch this season’s two ’70s-soul nostalgia movies or catch Spike Lee’s current Nike ads. The ’70s-nostalgia format just regurgitates the stupidity that the early punks rebelled against. What’s scarier is that it means corporate ’80s nostalgia will eventually appear. I can guess how horrid that’s gonna be: They’ll claim we all really were in love with Reagan and Rambo, just like corporate ’60s nostalgia claims that everybody alive back then was a white liberal-arts student.

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 2: A quarter-century ago, self-styled “visionaries” among the downtown business elite proposed radical solutions to two “blighted” areas of Seattle. They wanted to turn Pioneer Square into one big parking area, and to replace either all or most of the Pike Place Market with offices and condo towers. The pro-development forces (which included the local dailies and the mayor’s office) dismissed the people who lived or worked in those districts as bums, marginal types and hippie-dippies who were impeding the way of sacred Progress. Fortunately, the hippie-dippies et al. prevailed. Watch for similar arguments to be made against Commons opponents.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (meticulously painted on the facade of Sam’s Super Burger, 26th & Union): “No trespassing. No loitering. I don’t come to your place and sell my burgers, so don’t you come to my place and sell your drugs.”

COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES, RIP: Jack Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor turned hard-headed entrepreneur, who took over a calculator company in the mid-’70s and brought out one of the very first PCs, the Commodore PET. Clever low-cost engineering and lowball pricing helped make the PET’s successors, the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the first computers of many an early-’80s hacker-dude. In ’85, as the industry was consolidating (and just before Tramiel was ousted from his own company), the firm brought out the Amiga, a mid-level home machine with a proprietary operating system and one unique component — standard NTSC video input/output. The Amiga failed as a home machine but found a niche market among audio and video mavens, especially after the NewTek company brought out the Video Toaster add-on circuit board in 1990, which enabled budding TV-hackers to perform pro-level video editing and effects for less than the price of a big-screen monitor. The Amiga finally had a “killer app,” a third-party application that drove hardware sales. But it wasn’t enough, and now Commodore is being liquidated. No word yet what’ll happen to the Amiga or its loyal users.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Don’t be mistaken, newcomers: Eggheads are not larger versions of Cadbury Creme Eggs. They’re really miniaturized Mountain Bars (have a Northwest native tell you what those are). Just remember for now, “Brown & Haley Makes ‘Em Daily!”… Orville Reddenbacher’s microwave popcorn now comes in “Artificial Movie Theater Butter Flavor.” Actually, it tastes better than the popcorn you get in artificial movie theaters…. Ginseng-flavored chewing gum, a staple of Asian groceries, has been hyped in the new-age press as an alleged aphrodisiac. Something called Gum Tech International has responded with Love Gum (for “the woman with a healthy attitude” and “the man who wants peak performance”), Chiclets-like nuggets with just a touch of ginseng powder. The primary flavor? What else: cherry…. And be sure to attend our junk food film festival and Misc. 8th Anniversary party, 8pm Wednesday 6/8 at the Pike St. Cinema (all ages this time), 1108 Pike St. at Boren Ave., just east of the freeway.

WHERE THEY BE NOW: I finally tracked down ex-local performing artist Tomata du Plenty in Miami, where he makes paintings at a studio in Little Haiti and tends bar in the Design District. He looked back fondly at his wild days in Ze Whiz Kidz (Seattle’s first gay theater troupe, and font of the homespun-camp-cabaret influence in local theater to this day) and the Tupperwares/Screamers (one of Seattle’s first punk bands). He was saddened to hear that fellow ex-Screamer Dave Gulbransen (aka Rio de Janeiro) had closed his family’s business, the Dog House.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be the first on your block to get FutureTech’s new disposable 3-D still camera, root for the Vancouver Canucksin the NHL hockey finals, and heed these words from Calvin Trillin‘s classic tome Alice, Let’s Eat: “Never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still.”

PASSAGE

Some more words-O-wit from that “self published aphorist” (zine publisher) of ’20s Vienna, Karl Kraus: “I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which other people don’t hear either.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Celebrate the 8th anniversary of this little literary serial and the launch of my next endeavor (see next item) with the MISC@8 party and Junk Food Film Fest, Wednesday, 6/8, 8 pm, at the cozy Pike St. Cinema (1108 Pike & Boren, just east of I-5 and the Convention Center).

My book on the history of the Seattle punk scene, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, will be published early next year by Feral House, the Portland cult-faves who brought you the anthology Apocalypse Culture and the Ed. Wood Jr. bio Nightmare of Ecstasy. I’m selling off my remaining stock of photocopy rough drafts. Get yours now, or wait for the real book.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

3/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHEN POSTERS ARE OUTLAWED,

ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE STAPLE GUNS!

Here at Misc. world HQ, we celebrated yet another lonely-guy Valentine’s Day by scarfin’ down those Brach’s Sour Hearts candies.

UPDATE: Patrick Purdy says I shouldn’t have been so harsh a few months back about the hand-carved Zuni fetishes offered as promotional trinkets by Time-Life Books: “They’re (the tribe) developing a cottage industry for themselves so that they may upgrade their standard of living without having to leave their home. The fetish carvings have proved so successful that they’ve opened a few fancy galleries…That they must have signed a fairly lucrative contract with Time/Life is not a matter for despair, but for congratulations.”

ONE OF THE FEW negative aspects of this gig is that people come up at parties and demand that I be angry for them on cue. They seemingly expect me to always have some shoulder chip, some fresh beef ground daily. But as Johnny-one-note expectations go, it’s easier than if people asked me to be funny for them on cue, ‘cuz I can always fall back on being angry about being expected to be angry.

MY $.02: As some of you know, Misc. is at least partly an homage to the great prewar columnists. The only similar columnists in modern dailies are Army Archard in Daily Variety, Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times, and of course our hero Larry King in USA Today. Just for fun, let’s start out with some Kingisms: “When it comes to great ear-poppin’ tunes, you just can’t do better than Built to Spill… To this pair-O-eyeballs, nobody wrote page-turners like that past master Donald Barthelme… Has anybody ever made that Mock Apple Pie from the recipe on the Ritz cracker box?… As that local sage Dick Balch used to say, if you can’t trust your car dealer, who can you trust?… New name to watch: Combustible Edison. Hip enough for the kids, and parents like ’em too! They’re gonna be big; trust me.”

THIN ICE: The “media-beat” analysts on C-SPAN and in NY opinion journals are predictably aghast over Tonyamania. The commentators seem to think all newspapers used to be like some idealized memory of the pre-1974 NY Times, that only in today’s dark times would papers put scandal and sleaze on their front pages. Not so. Newspapers always were as exploitive as they are now, only they used to be a lot better at it. The old Hearst papers or the old NY Daily News would’ve done a much hotter job on it than today’s wimpy rags.

THINNER ICE: As the nation awaited the Nancy/Tonya faceoff, it faced the usual abundance of commercials and sponsor-ID announcements. Again, as in previous Games, some advertisers were able to boast that they were “proud sponsors of the U.S. Olympic Team,” while other companies, that had opened their wallets to nothing Olympic-related beyond their own commercials, tried to fudge their commitment to Our Kids by plugging themselves as “a proud sponsor of CBS’s coverage of our Olympic heroes.”

CIVIC VALUES: So the Dog House restaurant is now Closed 24 Hours a Day. Woolworth’s is an empty palace of bargains. And the city government talks only about attracting more rich people’s retail. Between the Commons, the poster ban, and the big downtown development proposals, Seattle threatens to become a city by the upscale, of the upscale, for the upscale and to hell with everyone else. Hey Norm: How ’bout getting some stores the rest of us can afford to shop at? Support the plan to put a Marshall’s discount clothier in the Magnin spot. Next, we need a Freddy’s where Woolworth was, and an all-nite restaurant on 7th where you can get a good $6 pork-chops-and-mashed-potatoes dinner. Planet Hollywood? Who needs it! (Also note: KCTS’s Dog House closing-party special was technically well-done but suffered from that upscale-media disease, smug boomer condescension; much of the narration could be rewritten into “Look, Muffy: Ordinary people! Let’s gawk!”).

MISC. RULES FOR LIFE: another exciting ennui-filled column, how ’bout some Misc. rules for life: Don’t trust anybody who nevvuhwatches teh-levision. Don’t trust anybody who calls a car “an investment.” Don’t trust anybody who only talks about how “hot” a movie or a band is, not about how good it is. Don’t buy diet pills from an infomercial with the fine print “No Orders Accepted From Iowa.” Don’t buy anything advertised by white guys in Dockers dancing to James Brown‘s “I Feel Good.” And don’t move into a former slaughterhouse or brothel that’s been “restored to its original elegance.”

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.: A few weeks ago, KING reported that the state’s highest youth suicide rate was on the Eastside. I could believe it, after having gone for a job interview in the heart of darkest Redmond. Once-lovely farmland, ploughed under and paved over with winding roads to nowhere, abutted by finished and unfinished cheap poured-concrete lo-rise office park buildings, some with gaudy entrances tacked onto their otherwise hyperbland facades, all recessed from the road by moats of parking and/or dirt where grass will eventually be. No “public space,” no pedestrians, just people working in isolated cubicles writing software that presumes that we’ll all someday be working in isolated cubicles. A sterile landscape of silent dread that only author J.G. Ballard or filmmaker Atom Egoyan could properly fictionalize.

HOUSE MUSIC: Tuff times have hit C/Z Records, the scrappy li’l label with perhaps the strongest current stable of Northwest bands. Honcho Daniel House rushed five CDs into the Xmas season, but his distributor RED (half-owned by Sony) only sold 200 units in December (after subtracting returns from stores). He’s putting three employees on two-month layoffs (“We need that time to get back on our feet”). House’s right-hand-dude Tim Cook is one of the casualties; he says he might look for permanent work elsewhere, having had managerial differences with House lately, but doesn’t have anything specific to announce yet.

House still plans a slate of 10 albums this year (down from 14 in ’93), including most of his top acts (7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Treepeople, Alcohol Funnycar, Dirt Fishermen, Engine Kid), the just-out In the West by new signees Silkworm, and a women-in-rock collection. He’s also negotiating for a retrospective of Seattle’s top new-wave-era band, the legendary Blackouts.

An indie-label purist might use this case to claim that labels don’t necessarily get top service from pseudo-indie distributors with major-label backing like RED (or Caroline, with whom Sub Pop parted ways, citing similar frustrations). (House has been negotiating for some sort of major-label alliance with Sony; nothing’s been signed yet.) The real problem’s more complicated than just big guysvs. little guys. Distribution remains the weak link of the music biz (and of the print biz, but that’s another tale). There are only so many slots in store bins (even at the 1,500 or so new-music specialty stores). Getting a new act into those stores, and promoting it to customers once it’s there, remains a pseudo-science. Articles in Musician and Wired look forward to proposed in-store downloading stations, where you could special-order any recording and get it transmitted onto a CD while you wait.

The major labels, natch, don’t want any part of a technology that might threaten their market share. Music-by-info-highway would be great for oldies and classics, and would destroy the fetish-object aspect of record collecting (thankfully), but wouldn’t solve the promotion issue. I can get umpteen thousand books from The Reader’s Catalog, but somebody still has to tell me why I need any particular one.

(latter-day note: By the end of 1994, most of C/Z’s remaining bands either broke up or went to other labels. House moved the company into his basement.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/10): “In the best of Peter Medak’s films, irreverence is something of a sacred cow.”

HARDWARE WARS: This home-store fight is getting out of hand. You’ve got Ernst promising to undercut Eagle, HomeBase vowing to undersell Price Costco. Now Home Depot has taken the battle to the next level. It’s established its own bridal registry. Now you can make sure cousin Mindy doesn’t get 24 identical Skilsaws.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: When the Washington Free Press first came out, I said it was a feisty little rag that had the potential to be better. With the latest issue, it’s approaching that potential: a great piece on Boeing workers getting sick from icky production chemicals, with the company dismissing the complaints as some sort of mass hysteria, plus a well-argued essay warning against “job blackmail” — companies’ threatening to take their jobs elsewhere unless governments scrap those pesky environmental laws. Speaking of which…

DEMO DERBY: A couple of readers have asked me to stop constructively-criticizing the failings of “progressive” types, player and just stick to slamming Republicans. I still do that when appropriate; but our president, governor, mayor, most of our state Congressional delegation and most of our city council are Democrats who at least profess to some degree of progressive ideals. It’s important to note when they stray from or compromise these ideals in the name of “creating a climate for business” or whatever; and when the popularly-accepted definition of “progressive” thought might not be the best way to solve our problems. That’s why I sometimes question some of the unquestioned premises behind urban-bohemian ideology, premises that some other publications have taken as Gospel truth. Speaking of which…

SPY, 1986-1994: Gee, maybe the Reagan Era really is over. The magazine’s entire humor was predicated on opposing the Reaganites while accepting the Reaganites’ terms of debate. Spy completely bought into the notion that the Right held a monopoly on political/social popularity, that the only people not enthralled to the GOP were a few big-city artist types. Spy reveled in its self-righteous posturing, in its concept of lower Manhattan as the lone outpost of wit and civility amidst a nation of heathen predators.

If Reagan and Bush invoked a romanticized social past where authority was seldom questioned and resources existed to be exploited, Spy invoked a romanticized cultural past where New York was the only place that mattered. Both notions are now more widely seen as the ancient relics they are. Readers turned away from a magazine that kept rehashing the same tired gag formats attacking movie stars and local NY celebrities as if they were worth the attention. The last Spy editor, Nat. Lampoon vet Tony Hendra, announced a new-look magazine that would take a fresher, funnier look at postmodern America, but the money ran out before he could implement the new format.

(latter-day note: Spy returned later in 1994, with mostly the same format as before.)

AD VERBS: Dewar’s Scotch has a magazine ad with an Alice Cooper/Peter Criss lookalike, complete with boa constrictor as scarf. The headline: “Your tastes in music have changed. Your taste in drinks should too.” Yeah, I know just what they’re saying: When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate acts like that. Now I do.

THE INFORMER: KCTS has been running “public service” spots from the King County Police, asking folks to keep their eyes on their neighbors and report any activity that might be potentially drug-related — visitors at odd hours, darkened windows, et al. Somebody on a computer bulletin board called the spot “Gestapo TV” and wants anyone who doesn’t like it to tell the station they won’t give it money. I won’t go that far, but I will use the case to note that in the nascent Information Age, not all information’s gonna be shared freely or used benevolently.

CATHODE CORNER: In a welcome surprise, MTV’s 120 Minutes played the new Sage video, albeit deep into the show’s 1-2 a.m. hour. Too bad the show’s latest clue-deficient host, Lewis Largent, had to introduce the clip with that now-chichéd line, “They’re from Seattle, but don’t get any preconceptions; they’re not grunge.” Aargh! The next person who thinks all local bands are alike, please tell me just what Flop, Mix-A-Lot, Amy Denio, Alice in Chains and Sister Psychic have in common.

The media turned “grunge” into a stereotype so exact that no band really matched it; then they used that to dismiss our diverse music as if the stereotype were true. Largent’s seemingly well-intended statement really perpetuated the false myth. He oughta say, “Yes there are lots of bands in the NW, lots of different bands, and here’s another.”…In a more positive homage, an episode of NBC’s off-again Homicide included murder-suspect characters named Layne Staley and Crist Novoselic.

SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (on Safeway Mrs. Wright’s Sesame Cheddar Snack Crackers): “Baked For Your Enjoyment!” Ever see a snack baked for your seething frustration? If you find one, let me know.

THE FINE PRINT (fortune cookie-like slip of paper inside a Sears CD player): “Warning: Protection Rubber must be removed before using.” Unless you’re playing one of those sounds-of-lovemaking CDs. Speaking of which…

LOSS-OF-ERECTIONS DEPT.: Leno joked that after the MLK Day Quake, LA had become “a community united behind one shared goal: to move to Seattle.” A week later, an AP article noted that many LA porn-video companies were in heavily quake-hit buildings. Some outfits might move rather than rebuild among the So.Cal. radical right. One unidentified exec said, “Our people will find another place where the climate is more liberal, and the ground more stable. Someplace up north maybe, like Seattle.”

We’re not all that quake-safe ourselves (if you believe the mass-media scare stories). And any hetero (or sex-positive-gay) hardcore producers would face our PC censorship advocates, who can be as obstinate and closed-minded as any Fundamentalists. But we’ve got a strong community of trained video technicians (with the Art Institute supplying more every year), and hundreds of underemployed actor-dancer-model types who don’t have to worry about tan lines. It’ll be even more fun if the producers apply for the tax breaks politicians usually love to offer to relocating companies.

(latter-day note: I’m now told there are already at least two hardcore adult-video producers regularly shooting in Seattle. I don’t have any names to refer you to. They haven’t provided much of an economic boost to the local production community, since they use small crews and maintain their own in-house post-production units.)

MOUTHS-O-BABES (overheard gleeful shriek of an 8-year-old girl on a bus, passing the Bon’s Chihuly window promoting ArtFair ’94): “See mom, I told you! Big cereal bowls!”

SHRINKING VISION: Seattle’s “public art” establishment has long been known for its private privileges. Jurors pick friends and/or lovers for top grants, organizations tailor project specs to favor their favorite artists, programs are publicized just before (or even after) their deadlines. Now comes word that the visual-art programs in this year’s Bumbershoot festival will be awarded by invitation only; tho’ if you’ve got an idea for something, you can send in an informal suggestion and maybe they’ll look at it. We’re going in the wrong direction, folks. We need arts people whose top loyalty is to art, not to specific artists. We need truly open processes, where a total unknown can come out of left field and bowl people over with a spectacular idea. We need to encourage art that blows minds, not art that kisses butts. (If it’s any consolation, one of the exhibits will be culled from the city’s “Portable Works Collection,” one program that does sometimes buy from non-insiders.)

MY SOAP BOX: When an ad agency designed the Tide box in the ’50s, it never knew that its concentric patterns would look just like the computer-animated psychedelic visuals of the ’90s. The orange box has become an icon of rave graphics. It’s on countless techno-party flyers. Portland’s Sweaty Nipples used it on a CD label; a Seattle band was going to use it before the Nipples used it first. I’m told that the brain can perceive the circles as moving in and out at the same time, making the image a “mandala” that can send the mind into another world. I’m also told that the orange circles look great under blacklight, and that Liquid Tide makes a great medium for making black-light paintings that can’t be seen in normal light (the “bleach substitute” ingredient contains a fluorescent dye). What’s next: acid-trip costumes based on the playing-card guy on the ol’ White King box?

‘TIL WE NEXT CROSS INK STAINS, recall these words of Wm. Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

PASSAGE

Gregory Hischak in the new issue of the lovely local zine Farm Pulp: “The planet is an unstable being. Little earthquakes rumble up and down our coast. The earth has a lot of bottled up stress…pent up aggression. The earth really needs to get out more. Spend more time in the woods. Feed the ducks. The planet needs to stop operating on that second shift mentality.”

SPECIAL OFFER

Uncorrected, autographed proof copies of my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are now available for a $10 donation plus $2 postage from the address below. Be among the first to get a piece of local cultural history! Tell your friends.

Either next month or the month after, this newsletter thang’s gonna get twice as big: a whopping 4 pp. of ennui and unwarranted assumptions clogging your first-class mail the last Friday of each month, including weird fiction and non-Stranger material. Larger print not guaranteed. New sub rates will be announced then; current subs will be adjusted accordingly.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Cathexis”

2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.

THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.

CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.

EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.

GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!

SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”

DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)

MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.

CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.

YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it: Deluxe.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.

THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”

THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”

DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.

NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.

PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”

DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).

A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.

She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.

Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”

PASSAGE

Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”

REPORT

My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”

The Gaul of Them

Film essay for the Stranger, 1/10/94

I’d always figured the French Ministry of Culture to be an institution of bureaucratic nepotism, taking the taxes from laid-off Citroen assembly workers to subsidize incomprehensible books by irrelevant semioticians (“How many angels can dance on the head of a text?”) and “art” films chock full of social criticism and softcore sex (admittedly, two of my favorite genres). You know, Eurosocialism at its finest — bleeding the workers to support the bourgeois.

But I’ve got more respect for the Ministry of Culture now that it’s stared down the Hollywood monster and held to its demand to keep “free trade” from gutting the European film industry.

Before I proceed, some background. You know how all those movie people clamored to contribute to Clinton’s presidential campaign? It was more than just your everyday liberal-celebrity primping. The entertainment industry is an economic force, and saw a chance to make friends and peddle influence. In return, the new administration has supported or accepted every move toward big-media consolidation and domination. Broadcasters can buy more and more stations; networks can again control the syndication rights to their shows; cable operators and phone companies and movie studios can plan huge megamergers without a peep of antitrust interference.

And Hollywood got the White House to push its cause at the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Teriff) negotiations. At one point the US delegation threatened to let the deadline for the 1993 round of GATT talks expire, killing agreements on dozens of other trade issues, if France wouldn’t agree to stop using movie-ticket taxes to subsidize its domestic filmmakers.

This was just the sort of thing that leftists like Noam Chomsky warned against during the NAFTA debate: Big corporations using “free trade” as a justification for interfering in domestic policies, short-circuiting democracy.

The French officials had screwed over their farmers in other trade talks, but held their ground on the culture issue. The issue of French film support was set aside for discussion at a later date.

It was a great triumph over Hollywood’s pathetic longtime flack Jack Valenti, whose incessant whining about the poor helpless media conglomerates got lamer every time he spoke (“We’ve got 60 percent of your country’s box office; we demand the rest”). After he lost the fight, Valenti apparently realized the bad PR he’d gotten as a Goliath figure trying to push around the Eurofilm Davids. Valenti wrote to the NY Times that his industry group hadn’t really wanted the breaks it’d lobbied for. He now claimed Hollywood only really wanted a piece of any European taxes on blank videocassettes, revenues earmarked for the Euro film industry as a compensation against home taping. The studios (and the major record labels) have lobbied for similar taxes in the US. I think blank-tape taxes are unfair to begin with; they feed cash from indie video producers and home-movie makers toward the bigger boys. They’d be more unfair if they made overseas governments funnel cash toward US media empires.

Vice President Gore was in LA on the 11th. He spoke to a convention of media and telecommunications giants, with guest appearances by Lily Tomlin and Nancy Sinatra. He assured the throng that the administration would keep hounding the pesky Europeans to provide US “information providors” with “full access” to these “major world markets.” He added that as an ol’ Nashville guy he was proud that “you can turn on a radio almost anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before you hear American music.” To Gore, and to most of the people at the convention, music and film and video are Product, and those who resist the Hollywood (or the Nashville) cartel are mere nuisances meddling in the natural flow of commerce.

Some of us think differently. We think music, film and video are, or should be, vehicles for communicating ideas and emotions. We want to break the stranglehold of The American Entertainment Business on the world’s (including America’s) expressions and dreams. The stand-up comics are wrong: today’s big cultural rivalry isn’t NY vs. LA, it’s NY and LA (and Tokyo) vs. the rest of the world. We need more Chantal Akermans and Almadovars, and could live with fewer John Hugheses and even fewer George Lucases. Even a bad Euro movie (and I’ve seen plenty) is a better viewing experience than your average A-budgeted B-movie from the Hollywood stimulus-response factories.

There will be many similar battles in the years to come, as the entertainment conglomerates maneuver to subdue the economic and technological trends that threaten to make them obsolete.

So raise a Brie and a glass of fine wine in saluting the Ministry of Culture, preferably in front of a (now French-owned) RCA VCR running Camille Claudel.

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

12/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.

WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA

This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).

REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.

Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.

COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.

ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.

RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.

POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?

THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.

DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”

TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.

PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.

BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”

SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.

PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.

THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.

ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.

XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.

FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”

PASSAGE

Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”

REPORT

My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?

Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phenocryst”