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EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we’ll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.
We’ve already discussed many of Paul Allen’s pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here’s a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people’s work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.
Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront’s first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the ’70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-’90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV’s ‘The Real World’ got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.
Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early ’60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in “rinky-dink” piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside (“Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn’t cash checks, the bank doesn’t make pizza.”) The restaurants’ looks were modernized in the ’80s, but even that couldn’t help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey’s sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC’s on the Seattle waterfront.
The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.
The Edgewater Inn, where you once could “Fish From Your Window,” was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair. The Edgewater first gained a “rocker hotel” reputation when the Beatles stayed there in ’65. This rep was cemented in the early ’70s as the setting of the Zappa song “Mudshark,” relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter “E” was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, “upscale” revision.
The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers’ own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that’s why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.
TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.
ELSEWHERE:
ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.
It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.
Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.
It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.
Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.
Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.
The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.
In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.
They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.
They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.
Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.
TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a few attempts to correct some commonly-believed but untrue “facts”:
THE FINE PRINT (in the masthead of the women’s bodybuilding magazine Oxygen, no relation to the women’s cable channel and website of the same name): “Oxygen reserves the right to reject any advertisement without reason.”
At last, someone strikes a blow for rational arguments in advertising!
JUNK E-MAIL OF THE WEEK: “The domain: www.miscmedia.com, is ranked #68919 out of 400118 domains in the WebsMostLinked.com database.”
Alllrigghhttt! This month, we’re gonna try to make it all the way up to #67324!
THE MAILBAG (via Nick Bauroth): “Enough with the baby-boomers already! Can’t you find something else to blame for your shortcomings? And no, yuppies and fratboys are not acceptable substitutes.”
Actually, when I criticize others it’s for the sake of criticizing others, not out of misplaced blame or jealousy or any other excuses.
And as for any “shortcomings,” they’re just about all my doing (or the doing of specific, deep-rooted, influences upon my individual personal/career development).
I come, after all, from the same age group and race/gender status, in the same metro region, as folks who’ve gone on to win Pulitzers and Emmys, get elected to public office, record triple-platinum albums, and/or threaten to permanently stifle all present and future competition in the software industry.
IN OTHER NEWS: It may be the end of the company Seattle’s landmark Smith Tower was named after.
MONDAY: Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to actor-director Paul Bartel, whose Eating Raoul remains the most true-to-life cinematic portrayal of a baby-boomer generation grown hostile to the essential life-forces and obsessed with individual lifestyle “perfection.”
THANKS TO THE WEB, annoying marketing cliches and concepts can emerge, rise, and burn out at up to ten times their previous rate.
Today’s case in point: All those “My __” sites.
How it works:
(1) Take any portal site, news site, sports-stat site, MP3-download site, online-retail site, or burlap-sack-fetish site.
(2) Fix it up to add even a tiny bit of user customization. Maybe let a user pick the background colors, or set it up to show soybean-futures prices but not flaxseed-futures prices.
(3) Congratulations! No longer have you a mere “Notarysojac.com”. You can now proudly offer “My Notarysojac.com”!
Always ones to believe in taking dumb ideas and running them further into the ground, we hereby pre-announce plans to (one of these quarters, eventually, as soon as we finish reading CGI-BIN Scripting for Dummies) revamp this site so you can create “My MISCmedia.”
MONDAY:The next Great Anti-Microsoft Hope: Is it open-source software Or is it Napster? Neither?
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.
SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:
THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.
Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.
Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.
AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!
The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.
The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.
It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.
The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.
So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.
(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)
TOMORROW: Search engine fun.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
THE HOMOGENIZATION OF URBAN AMERICA is sure not something going on just in Seattle–even though Seattleites, who typically try to maintain their collective ignorance about any other U.S. cities besides N.Y./L.A./S.F., might choose not to realize it.
The Brooklyn, N.Y. band Babe the Blue Ox has a song called “T.G.I.F.U.” about the proliferation of the same chain restaurants in town after town across the continent:
“Every city I get lost in Charlotte, Boston, even Austin Has a four-lane boulevard With the same damn grill and bar Every meal will be familiar Rest assured.”
“Every city I get lost in
Charlotte, Boston, even Austin
Has a four-lane boulevard
With the same damn grill and bar
Every meal will be familiar
Rest assured.”
In Seattle’s downtown core, the problem’s only partly the proliferation of the likes of Planet Hollywood and Gordon Biersch, as deplorable as that in itself might be.
There’s also the more pervasive and immediate threat posed by establishments that might be individually owned but with a common (all too common) theme of upscale blandness.
It’s getting so you can’t find any grub in this town anymore. Just “cuisine.” Hummus, penne pollo, “Market Price” trout almondine, etc. etc.; served up at joints with valet parking, “celebrity” executive chefs, and appetizer prices alone that would feed a normal bloke for a month. Joints that scream about how “unique” each of them’s supposed to be, yet are really just about all alike.
Every month, one more of the few remaining real-people places in Seattle gets destroyed for some overpriced “foodie” joint and/or luxury condos. Among the currently threatened: The Jem art studios, the Greyhound station, the Bethel Temple.
Now joining the ranks of the apparently doomed: the legendary, infamous Frontier Room.
It’s a classic dive bar, of the kind they not only don’t make anymore but couldn’t if they tried. It’s a place where, for decades, old-age pensioners and crusty punk rockers have shared the enjoyment of strong drinks, noise, smoke, dark red lighting, crummy yet cozy seats, and a well-lived-in atmosphere.
Up in the front restaurant room, they serve up real food for real folk: Burgers, fresh-cut fries, real ice cream shakes, soup, chowder, sandwiches, omelettes, and blue plate specials.
But the guy who ran the place with an iron hand for seemingly ever died a few years back. His daughter’s apparently tiring of the grind. (Neither she nor anyone else associated with the place will speak on the record.)
A real estate agent’s putting the business up for sale as an ongoing concern (10-year lease, liquor license, and all). His flyer lists a monthly rent of $3700 plus a mysterious added expense listed only as “NNN” (anybody out there know what that means?).
There ought to be enough present and former Frontier Room barflies who’ve made a buck or two in music and/or software. Let’s get some of these folks together to buy the Frontier and keep it just the way it is.
Maybe we could add some menu items to increase the daytime trade, and put a newsstand or espresso machine in the currently-unused portion of the Frontier’s storefront. But nothing the place currently sells should be dropped; and none of its current patronage should be made unwelcome.
We must save this piece of our civic soul. We must keep it from becoming another “cuisine” stand.
If we don’t do this, it would be just like raising the flag of surrender to the armies of gentrification.
TOMORROW: More of this line, concerning artist space.
IN OTHER NEWS: Chief artistic lesson of HBO’s recent Porky’s trilogy marathon: Female nudity is drama; male nudity is farce.
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, the local and national sports media portrayed Ken Griffey Jr. as the Nice Guy Who Finished First, at least in individual baseball achievements.
(Unfortunately for him, baseball’s a team sport, a lot more of one than basketball. Mariners fans have long known what Cubs fans have recently learned–that a singular home-run titan doesn’t make a championship team.)
Then, during the recent contract re-negotiations, Griffey was portrayed in the local press as having always really been the Mean Guy Who Wanted His Way. (As if any true superstar player didn’t have an overriding ambition to do his best and to push those around him to do the same.)
Now, by accepting a new contract worth millions less than he would’ve gotten from the Mariners (or the Yankees or Braves) just to finish his career with his hometown (small-market) team, he’s being portrayed as the Nice Guy once again. He probably always a guy who enjoyed being nice when he could but who was also subject to stress and frustration like anyone in his hi-pressure position. He didn’t change; just the image.
My only regret,besides that of not being able to watch him break a few batting records here in town, is that Griffey’s personal “best company to work for in America” has had such sleazy owners.
No sooner was the borderline-racist Marge Schott out of the Cincinnatti Reds’ front office than insurance tycoon and financier Carl Lindner came in. Lindner’s best known nationally for his hostile takeover of Taft Broadcasting (a TV-station chain that had also owned the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and Aaron Spelling’s production company).
Lindner later sold pieces of Taft to finance his takeover of Chiquita Brands. You may recall last year Lindner quashed a Cincinnatti Enquirer investigative series into financial irregularities at the food company (previously known for its former violent role in Latin American politics). Lindner not only got the paper to stop running the results of its investigation, but it successfully redirected the national media spin on the story to the tactics of the reporters, not the funny-money dealings the reporters were investigating.
How could such a Nice Guy like Junior want so badly to work for such a meanie like Lindner?
And will this change my view of how nice Junior is or isn’t? (It won’t. Really.)
TOMORROW: Another great human space gets threatened with removal.
IN OTHER NEWS: Roger Vadim, who passed on last Thursday, directed 26 films and an assortment of French TV projects. Several of his films have endured as classic entertainments of eroticism and verve (And God Created Woman, Barbarella). Others remain as unsung treasures awaiting rediscovery (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ms. Don Juan) or period pieces of what one director once thought audiences would find sexy (Night Games, Pretty Maids All In a Row, the remake of And God Created Woman). But the headlines and the TV obits barely found time to mention his work; preferring to describe Vadim only as the ex of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Years ago, the U.S. publishers of his (now out-of-print) memoirs took the same angle, retitling the book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. One of cinema’s greatest celebrants of female beauty had attained a traditionally-female fate, becoming known only as a shadow behind the achievements of his spouses.
THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 14th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.
As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of the Double-Oughts; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some Packard Bell PCs to sell you.
(P.S.: Every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)
INSVILLE
OUTSKI
Jigglypuff
Charizard
Washington Law & Politics
Washington CEO
TrailBlazers
Knicks
‘Amateur’ Net porn
LA porn industry
Game Show Network
USA Network (still)
Casual sex
Casual Fridays
The Nation
The New Republic
Women’s football
Wrestling
Gas masks
Bandanas
Begging
IPOs
Jon Stewart
Jay Leno
Public nudity
“Chastity education”
Global warming
Rolling Stone’s “Hot Issue”
Commuter rail
Anti-transit initiative
Dot-commies (online political organizing)
Dot-coms
Good posture
Implants
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (still)
Greed
Post-Microsoft Seattle
Silicon Valley
Post-WTO Left
Corporate Right
Dalkey Archive Press
HarperCollins
Bust
Bitch
‘Love Your Dog’
‘Kill Your TV’
Artisan Entertainment
Miramax
McSweeney’s
Speak
The Donnas
TLC
Tobey Maguire
Tom Hanks
Spike Jones
Spike Jonze
Michael Moore
Mike Moore
Darren Aronofsky (Pi)
Quentin Tarantino
Finding a Kingdome implosion viewpoint
Finding a New Year’s party spot
Keeping Ken Griffey Jr.
Trading away pitching
Quitting your job
Going on Prozac
Nerdy individuality
Hip conformity
NetSlaves
Business 2.0
Drip
Lattes
Dodi
Dido
Target
Wal-Mart
Amazons
Pensive waifs
Post-corporate economic theory
Dissertations about Madonna
Electric medicine
HMOs
“Girlie” magazines
“Bloke” magazines
Graceland
Last Supper Club
Labor organizing
Hoping for stock options
Yoga
Tae Bo
Urbanizing the suburbs
Gentrifying the cities
The Powerpuff Girls
The Wild Thornberrys
New library
New football stadium
Detroit
Austin
African folk art
Mexican folk art
As the World Turns
Passions
Liquid acid (alas)
Crystal
Dyed male pubic hair
Dreadlocks
Scarification
Piercings
People who think UFOs are real
People who think wrestling’s real
Red Mill
iCon Grill
76
BP/Amoco/Arco and Exxon/Mobil
Rock/dance-music fusion
Retro disco
Peanuts retirement
Garth Brooks retirement
Maximillian Schell
Paul Schell
Breaching dams
Smashing Pumpkins
Smart Car
Sport-utes (now more than ever)
Contact
Dildonics
Orange
Blue
Public accountability
Police brutality
Georgetown
Pioneer Square
Matchless
Godsmack
Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack
Pulp Fiction soundtrack (finally)
Labor/hippie solidarity
‘Cool’ corporations
Performance art
Performance Fleece
Radical politics
‘Radical sports’
Chloe Sevigny
Kate Winslet
International Herald Tribune
Morning Seattle Times
Piroshkies
Wraps
Prague
London
Kozmo.com
Blockbuster (still)
The exchange of ideas
NASDAQ
Fatigues
Khakis
First World Music
Interscope
Gill Sans
Helvetica
Pretending to be Japanese
Pretending to be gangstas
Botany 500
Blink 182
Tanqueray
Jaegermeister
Bremerton
Duvall
Nehi
Surge
Jimmy Corrigan
Dilbert
Cross-cultural coalitions
In-group elitism
Northern Ireland peace plan
Lord of the Dance
Hard bodies
Soft money
Doing your own thing
‘Rebelliously’ doing exactly what Big Business wants
MONDAY: I’m perfectly confident there will still be electricity and computer networks, and am prepared to ring in the double-ought year with a Peanuts tribute.
YESTERDAY, I discussed some of the ways film production and distribution are changing.
Film exhibition is also changing.
On the commercial end, bland-box multiplexes are giving way to fancier multiscreen quasi-palaces that attempt to bring back some of the old romance of moviegoing–and to squeeze still more bucks out of moviegoers’ wallets.
On the DIY end, there’s a growing international network of specialty film festivals, alternative screening spaces, film and video schools, streaming-video websites, and (in some towns) art-film video stores.
Somewhere between these two tiers lie some dinner-and-a-movie and drinks-and-a-movie experiments. The most elaborate around here are the cafe-pub-theaters in Portland run by McMenamin’s. We’ve previously mentioned a Seattle bar, The Big Picture, that serves beer and wine along with second-run films; but that operation, so far, hasn’t become the kind of joint I’d hoped (programming tends toward either safe boomer-nostalgia favorites or projector-TV sports).
Then, shortly after the Big Picture showed up, a national franchise called Cinema Grill took over General Cinema’s Aurora III.
The new management likes to call it an “art deco” house. It’s really just an ordinary concrete-cube building, stuck at the far corner of a minor, decaying strip mall that’s lost two of its four main stores (Future Shop and QFC). It’s been swamped in attendance by the flashy Oak Tree Cinemas a mile down Aurora Avenue. (It’s almost impossible to even see the Aurora Cinemas from Aurora Avenue–it’s located well behind drivers’ sight lines, and doesn’t have a street-visible sign.)
So it was a bargain for Cinema Grill to take over the joint; and, if it fails, it won’t necessarily mean the concept wouldn’t work here at a better site.
The Cinema Grill concept’s quite simple. You pay lower-than-average admission prices to see movies (the projector-TV sports events are free). Instead of rows of seats, the three auditoria have tables. There’s just enough house lights so you can read the menus at the tables; the movies are kept loud enough that you can hear most dialogue over other patrons’ beer-enhanced chattiness. Waitresses bring your drinkables (beer, wine, cocktails, coffee, sodas) and eatables (sandwiches, burgers, hot dogs, pizza, Buffalo wings) from a kitchen built between auditoria 1 and 2.
The food might be unspectacular but filling; but the films can be a little better than average. (Playing two weeks ago: The critically-acclaimed angstfest American Beauty.)
A more conveniently-located cine-diner, with just slightly more ambitious programming both on the screens and the tables, would likely work even better.
I can see it now: Special ethnic menus for foreign films. Wedding-feast movies shown with servings of the same entrees shown on-screen.
Cinematic drink menus: Thin Man rows of martinis; Trainspotting Scotch; Under the Volcano tequila.
Movie-related food, too: Eraserhead mini-chickens; Rocky raw eggs; Cookie’s Fortune fortune cookies.
And, of course, Meaning of Life after-dinner mints.
TOMORROW: Klang and Context put the litter back into literature.
YESTERDAY, we ended a piece on the decline and fall of the thrift-store lifestyle with a couple of links to thrift-store art on the Web.
Those links, natch, lead to other links, and those links lead to other links. Enough for a whole ‘nother day’s episode.
So herewith, some fun eye-openin’ viz-art sites for ‘ya.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A-Rod’s 40-40 Crunch, exploiting Mariners baseball star Alex Rodrieguez, is one of a whole line of regional sports-star cereals being put out by NYC-based Famous Fixins, “Producer of Celebrity Food Products.” It’s meant for box collectors, but the frosted flakes inside the box are quite good in their own right. They’re thicker and coarser than the Kellogg’s variety, and somewhat less sweet. (Now, if I could only get the company to put out “Frosted MISCberry Crunch” with my own picture on the box….)
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried at the end of this sports brief is potential great news–the just-maybe return of everybody’s favorite basketball benchwarmer, the immortal Steve Scheffler!
TOMORROW: How to make a book called Faster even faster: Just read the review.
AS WE SAY every year on this date, welcome to the 10/4 MISCmedia, good buddy.
CLASSIC DINER FOOD (and I don’t mean the gussied-up simulacrum known in the yupscale-restaurant biz as “comfort food”) has been on a minor revival of interest lately.
The diner’s become a symbol for urban-civility advocates, to whom it symbolizes a pre-suburban-sprawl era of social interaction and neighborhood unity.
(Of course, “neighborhood unity” back then often included overt racism. Indeed, one of the turning points in the civil-rights movement was a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in the South that had refused to serve black customers.)
Denny’s, trying to overcome its own reputation for racially-motivated preferences in service, is busily converting its old Cali-coffee-shop style restaurants into “Denny’s Diners,” with mostly the same menu but aluminum-sheet walls and other retro furnishings. It’s intended to raise a whiff of nostalgia for the classic East Coast diners, indie eateries built from prefab metal buildings resembling the diner cars of old passenger trains.
Out here in the alleged God’s Country, we never really had such diners. We had plenty of fine-‘n’-unpretentious eatin’ joints servin’ up meat loaf, burgers, big pies, and malts (most famously, the former Mar T Cafe in North Bend, a.k.a. Twin Peaks’ “RR Diner”). But not the diner-car diners.
Now, one such old diner-car diner building is operating, in the otherwise massively-upscaled sprawl-spot known as Bainbridge Island (where lawyers who think they’re poets move to $2-million “cabins”).
The Blue Water Diner, subject of simultaneous puff-pieces in the P-I and the Weekly last month, is the labor-O-love of one Al Packard, 50. It’s adjacent to his slightly older business, Packard’s Garage (a real quick-lube place, situated in a modern-construction imitation of an old-time grease palace).
A leisurely 10-minute walk from the ferry dock, the Blue Water Diner offers classic, decent (and decently priced) all-American meals and desserts, served up in a rigorously restored 1948 Fodero diner. They cheat a little bit, sticking the kitchen and restrooms in a new wood-frame addition. So it’s not as space-thrifty as an old diner, but you still get the beauty of a classic American industrial-architecture form, now looking shinier and slicker than it ever did–and servicing a slightly different social aesthetic.
What had been a factory-produced, standardized unit, built to be trucked to turnpike stops and street corners where pretty much the same menu items would be served pretty much the same way, now stands as an independent, individualistic mark of defiance against both chain-restaurant sameness and cuisine-restaurant pretentiousness.
Meanwhile, back in the heart-O-the-city, Linda’s, the five-year-old neoclassic tavern on East Pine, faced a dilemma. Despite the supposed decline of the “cocktail nation” fad, the beer-and-wine-only joint was losing young-adult customers to places with the harder stuff (including Linda’s sister-concerns, the Capitol Club and the Cha Cha Lounge). This state slightly liberalized its lounge regulations several years back, but a joint offering the hard stuff still has to also offer meals.
Fortunately, the Linda’s crew chose to match its down-home decor with down-home grub, a.k.a. diner food. I’ve had five entrees there in the three weeks since it opened its kitchen, and they were all damn good. Burgers, sammiches, steak, fish ‘n’ chips, mac ‘n’ cheese, hearty soups and chili (veggie if you insist), cheddar fries, onion rings, root-beer floats, and weekend breakfasts. All hale, hearty, and satisfying.
And no hummus in sight!
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s the first gay bank! (I’ll let you think up the “night depository” and “substantial penalty for early withdrawal” jokes for yourselves….)
TOMORROW: Stick a fork in the thrift-store lifestyle. It’s done.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
