It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: By all means, see the Bumbershoot visual arts exhibition at Seattle Center this weekend. Edgar Leeteg’s South Seas black-velvet nudes (exquisite and sensual); the group exhibit More: A Show About American Consumption (highlighted by Ellen Forney’s lovingly-painted tribute to Pam Anderson and Anna Hurwitz’s plastic “gingerbread house” covered by baby dolls), scary oils by Alexi Kolesnikov, and a retrospective of Seattle’s greatest living painter Jacob Lawrence (I could mention how much his solid-figures-of-color style now seems like a precursor to the South Park look, but Lawrence would undoubtedly hate it if I did).
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE and I’ll say it again: Junk food (the things we eat or drink for pleasure rather than strictly for sustenance) just might be the most telling tangible artifact of a culture, especially ours.
Herewith, some links to astounding fun-food related items throughout the Net.
TOMORROW: One more how-to-save-baseball quick fix.
ELSEWHERE: As found by Anita’s LOL, some comic book covers with “perverse themes…”
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…
I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)
IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?
ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”
SOMETIMES IT’S JUST TOO EASY to make cheap laffs from the things corporations think up to entertain us supposed proles.
Here’s the easiest example yet, and possible ever: The Rainforest Cafe.
It’s a national chain, whose flagship outlet’s in Minnesota’s infamous Mall of America. Most of the other two dozen or so units are also in malls, except for one in downtown Chicago and three at Disney theme parks (where I’m sure they fit in perfectly). The circuit’s first Northwest outpost just opened in Southcenter, between Sears and Nordstrom.
Like Planet Hollywood, the Fashion Cafe, et al., it’s an “entertainment experience” first and a dining-drinking establishment second. You don’t go there for the food; you go there to sit for 45 minutes or so among the “environment,” the decorations and doodads.
In this case, the “environment” is “environmental.” It’s a plastic-and-wood fantasy of a South American rain forest (albeit one with wildlife not seen in South America, especially elephants).
In the front: the requisite merchandise shop, full of toys and T-shirts and stuffed figures, mostly with the chain’s frog mascot.
Along one wall: the lounge, specializing in soft-ice-cream cocktails and strawberry daquiris.
Between these spaces, and past the plastic elephant in which the front clerk announces “Crocodile party, your safari is about to begin,” lies the large dining room. It’s all dark-green, with a plastic “canopy” of tree leaves on the ceiling and rows of plastic fountains “raining” into rows of plastic drains along the sides.
In the front of the room is a (real) salt-water aquarium with (some real, some plastic) fish. Along one side is a (real) parrot cage. In the back is a robotic plastic elephant and a robotic plastic toucan, yelping at precise intervals. Scattered throughout the room are plastic trees and robotic “wildlife” (butterflies, apes, et al.). In the center, the ceiling sports a night sky dome, with fiber-optic twinkling stars. Once an hour or so, the lights flash during a sound-effects “thunderstorm.”
The food, you ask? Standard all-American and fusion-cuisine fare (burgers, fried chicken, flatbread pizza, pasta-and-sausage), oversized and overpriced for that “destination restaurant” feel and bedecked with such cutesy names as “Volcanic Cobb Salad,” “Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Pita,” and “Jamaica Me Crazy Chops.”
I was there with a sometime Weekly writer who couldn’t stop smirking about what he felt was the hypocrisy of meat being served at a place supposedly dedicated to preserving the rain forest. A cheap shot–the meat they serve is undoubtedly all-North-American in origin; and the acres and acres of old-growth forest being chopped down daily in Brazil is cleared for a variety of cash crops (including the wood itself), not merely for beef-grazing.
The menu’s back page boasts of how “a portion” of each Rainforest Cafe’s income gets donated to a set of unnamed organizations to preserve the environment down in the tropics. It also invites schools to write in for the company’s free enviro-education materials, which I’m sure are full of company logos. They’ll also lead school kids through the cafe itself, under the premise of “on-site guided safaris” in which the kids “learn about our Resident Parrots, aquatic life forms, species on the verge of extinction, efforts to save the rain forest, and the creation and culture of Rainforest Cafe.”
So what’s a commentator to do, when faced with something this big, this brash, and this obvious?
Laugh at the too-mockable suburban families who go there? (I wound’t.)
Smirk at the very idea of this love-O-nature theme attraction, constructed with so many petrochemical components and plunked down amid the everywhere/nowhere of suburban sprawl?
Sarcastically dismiss a place that preaches responsible caring for the land while selling big-big meals and just-for-show touristy trinkets?
Earnestly denounce the treating of a real environmental crisis as the premise for neocolonial “adventure” entertainments?
Note the possible implicit racism in a vision of the rain forests that excludes any mention of their indigenous human residents?
Or just reiterate a line from South Park, “Rainforest, Schmainforest”?
Nah.
Best to let the joint speak for itself–robotic frog-chirping and all.
MONDAY: Speaking of tributes to excess, let’s look inside Safeco Field.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, has read the hereby-linked, viciously beautiful review of the movie by that much-acclaimed, recently-crashed, Time art critic Robt. Hughes (Time wouldn’t run it, so the NY Daily News picked it up).
UPDATE: The Big Book of MISC. is now in the heat of production. By the time you read this, the covers should be printed and the insides should be ready to roll. Online ordering’s now available at this link.
Actual copies of the book should be ready for the big pre-release party and annual Misc.-O-Rama, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue near Bell Street (across from the back of the Cadillac lot). There’ll be outrageous snack treats, videos, strange DJ music, games, surveys, a live demonstration, and lots lots more. Free admission; 21 and over. Be there. Aloha.
RIDDLE: What do you call the last pint of Hefeweizen that causes a yuppie to total her fancy-ass luxury car? (Answer next week.)
TIMES OF THE SIGNS: There actually is one and only one piece of signage at the Broadway and U District Taco Bell outlets that’s in Spanish–the bottom half of the front-door warning sticker boasting of the joint’s anti-robbery systems.
SAY WHAT?: US West TV spots are currently promoting Caller ID boxes as ways to avoid those annoying life interruptions from pesky telemarketing calls. Besides the commercials, can you guess one other method the company’s using to try and sell the service? That’s right.
ON THE EDGE: Hope some of you noticed the name of the apartment-redevelopment company charged (as shown on both KIRO’s and KING’s late news Wednesday) with violating even Seattle’s wimpy tenant-rights laws: “No Boundaries.” The logo on the company’s possibly-illegal notices of eviction and attempted rate-hike retaliations against protesting tenants, as seen on the newscasts, looks just like the letterhead of some sci-fi video-game company. There’s some lesson somewhere here about today’s money-and-power mentality, in which strong-arm business tactics are mistaken for acts of daring rebellion by self-worshipping hotshots who can’t stand the idea of having to do anything they don’t want to.
(“No Boundaries” also happens to be the title of a new benefit CD for Kosovo refugees, with two Pearl Jam tracks.)
ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND OTHER EXPANSIONS: An LA Times story claims the latest thing in La-La land is affluent high-school girls asking for breast implants as graduation gifts, or paying themsleves for the procedure as soon as (or even a few months before) they reach legal adulthood. The article quoted a couple of doctors who noted some women are still well within the developmental process at age 17 or even 18, but an increasing number are just so darned vain and body-conscious as to want to immediately achieve the ol’ top-heavy look.
If I were still working in the realm of “alternative” weekly urban tabloids, I’d probably be expected to sneer at these women–or, even worse, condescendingly treat them as mindless victims of the fashion industry (the same fashion industry that’s recently been enamored of unbusty petite model looks, not that the industry’s critics ever notice).
The same urban-tribal folks who most loudly scoff at implants might themselves have tattoos, piercings, even (as a particularly exploitive KING-TV piece last Monday noted) brandings. Some of these critics might seem hypocrites on at least some level; but on another level, it’s perfectly OK to believe in the general concept of body-modification while having well-defined personal tastes about which modifications one prefers to have or to see on others.
I personally don’t viscerally care for the over-augmented look, but I can understand that certain women might wish it. A big bust projects you out and demands attention (along with the sneers from other women you can interpret as jealousy). But a large fake bust is also a shield, a kind of permanent garment keeping all others firmly away from your heart (and other vital organs).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Instant Planet isn’t just another new age tabloid. For one thing, it promises regular coverage of issues facing some of those indigenous peoples that the white new-agers love to take inspiration from. For another, it’s got some first-rate contributors, including master collage-illustrator James Koehnline and my former yoga trainer Kirby Jacobsen. Free at the usual dropoff spots, or $16/4 issues from P.O. Box 85777, Seattle 98145.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The Seattle-based New Athens Corp. has jumped on the herbal-beverage bandwagon with two odd-tasting concoctions. “Kick Start” promises to help you get “a robust, active feeling” with Gotu Kola, Ginkgo Bilboa, Guarana, Kava Kava, and ginseng, There’s also “No Worries,” a drink that’s supposed to “produce a relaxing effect that soothes and quiets your mood.” Both taste like Coke’s old OK Soda with a touch of peach flavoring. But unlike other pops marketed as all-ages treats, these have a label disclaimer: “Not intended for children under 6 or pregnant or nursing mothers.” Elsewhere in foodland…
Q BALLS: While small indie supermarkets in other neighborhoods have fallen with little more than a shrug of inevitability from area residents, the citizens of Wedgwood have rallied ’round to valiantly (and, apparently, futilely) defend Matthew’s Red Apple Market, set to close in less than two weeks after its landlord struck a deal to let the Kroger-owned QFC circuit take over the site.
At first peep, a media observer used to the recent unwritten rule that everything in Seattle had to be “unique” (in exactly the same way, of course) might not see what all the fuss is supposed to be about.
Matthew’s doesn’t have the fun neon of the old Wallingford Food Giant or the odd mix of food and variety departments of the old Holman Road Art’s Family Center (both of which were QFC bought up directly, rather than arranging for their eviction like it’s doing with Matthew’s).
Matthew’s doesn’t make a big fuss about a lot of those higher-profit-margin items and departments QFC and Larry’s lavish attention on (salad bars, hot take-out items, wine, cell phones, live lobster, “health” foods, etc. etc.)
It’s just a plain-looking, small supermarket in a slightly-run-down building, with a fried-chicken deli counter and fresh flowers and a Lotto machine.
But that’s the whole point. In a town increasingly weighted down by the expectation of pretentious “uniqueness,” and in a national retail landscape increasingly overrun by big-chain consolidations, Matthew’s is loved by its customers precisely because it’s just a good ol’ fashioned neighborhood indie grocery.
(“Red Apple,” by the way, is merely a franchised name belonging to Associated Grocers, the wholesale consortium to which Matthew’s and 200 or so other Northwest stores belong, including, at least for the time being, QFC.)
Matthew’s might not stock 17 different kinds of cilantro, but it more than makes up for that in that unstockable, uncatalogable quality known as community spirit. It’s different precisely because it’s refused to conform to the current-day standards of “uniqueness.”
The Wedgwood area’s well-stocked with well-off folks, some of whom offered to outbid QFC for the lease on the Matthew’s block. When that initially failed, the store’s supporters then offered to help Matthew’s find a new site. But usable commercial blocks are scarce in that dense residential area.
(One of the few supermarket-sized tracts in the area not currently used for retail is the Samuel Stroum Jewish Community Center, co-funded by and named for a longtime QFC exec.)
So this particular battle against the Forces of Consolidation may be lost–unless someone could design a Matthew’s-like store on a smaller real-estate footprint, a la Ken’s Markets or Trader Joe’s.
(Current status: Matthew’s management sez it stands a good chance of winning at least a little more time in court. It’s asking friends and neighbors to keep signing the petitions and engaging in nonviolent protests, while asking customers to bear with spot shortages of stuff on some of the shelves (it held off on ordering new stock while waiting for the legal action to progress.)
WE’RE STILL LOOKING for your ideas on What This Town Needs. Suggest yours at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, check out my page in the June Seattle magazine, work for peace, and consider the words of Marshall McLuhan: “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, is proud to announce The Big Book of MISC. has now gone to press. Even better, online ordering is now up, at this link! The prerelease party’s Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Ave. near Bell Street in Seattle’s glorious Belltown. Be there.
FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Denny’s Diner concept, first mentioned in Misc. about a year ago, will now be phased in at all U.S. Denny’s restaurants. From the looks of the prototype restaurant out by Sea-Tac Mall, it won’t be as big a revamp as the newspaper stories promise. The one I saw looks largely like a regular ol’ Denny’s. The interior’s done up in muted greens instead of garish orange shades, with a few touches of aluminum trim. Aside from a few soda-fountain items, there’s not much on the menu that’s not on the regular Denny’s menu. And there’s a reproduction juke box playing some oldies-rock CDs, along with many “hot country” and easy-listening stars.
The chain’s officially doing this because its research found younger eaters don’t identify with its established suburban-bland image, and thinks this way it can become perceived as slightly hipper without turning off the older crowd. Of course, Denny’s has had a bigger image problem than that in recent years. Amid allegations of racial discrimination in both employment and customer service, the company’s had to pull out all the PR-spin stops to proclaim it now welcomes everybody, and has put managers and franchisees thru sensitivity classes. So why, one might ask, is the chain re-imaging itself around nostalgia for those bad-old-days white-lower-middle-class hash houses where African Americans felt particularly unwelcome back in the day? (Remember, the first major sit-in of the civil rights movement occurred at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Elsewhere in bobbysoxer-land…
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge (which has hosted all-ages music shows these past six years in the former home of the punk-parody musical Angry Housewives) and the Colourbox (the rock venue that stuck with local bands after bigger bars turned their emphasis to touring acts) are closing in June, due (indirectly in the former case, directly in the latter) to Pioneer Square gentrification. RKCNDY will be demolished for a hotel sometime later this year. Nothing much could’ve been done to save the Colourbox (and, anyway, the nearby Rupert’s has been serving much the same function). But the VE’s another story. Its pretty-much-all-volunteer staff has every right to feel burned out and to move on, now that its recent sold-out Annie Sprinkle performances have paid off its debts. But there should’ve been some way they could’ve passed the torch onto a fresher crew, to keep the space going as long as it still had the lease. If someone can get such a crew together to assume the space, they’d better do so soon.
(Both the Colourbox and the Velvet Elvis got front-page pictures in the P-I‘s Saturday item about the city’s tuff new anti-noise law and schemes by some city councilmembers to relax those limits in designated “entertainment zones,” a little too late to save either club.)
BESIDES A DECENT ALL-AGES SPACE and zoned relief from anti-nightlife legal putsches, what does Seattle need? That’s your next question at the luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. And we’re still seeking your nominations about which 1995-99 Seattle bands oughta be mentioned in the forthcoming update of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Elsewhere in new-addition-land…
WATCH D.T.S., GET THE D.T.s: The Casbah Cinema, that beuatifully-designed but poorly-marketed boutique theater in Belltown, has been revamped by new owners as the Big Picture. It’s now a beer-and-wine bar with a fancy-schmancy digital video projection system in the old Casbah auditorium room. The owners believe, as I wrote here some time back, that theaters shouldn’t just be for feature films and tavern TVs shouldn’t just be for sports. They plan to have a whole schedule of fun programming events, ranging from cult movies and sports to X-Files episode screenings and music-video nights. It’s also available for private parties, software-company demonstrations, anime fan-club meetings, movie-studio sneak previews, etc.
I probably will continue seeing most of my movies-on-projection-video-with-beer at 2nd Avenue Pizza, but the Big Picture’s HDTV setup is truly awesome. It’s much sharper than the analog HDTV system I saw a couple years back at the old UA Cinemas; even a basketball game (live sports are the ultimate test of digital video) looked clean and crisp. Elsewhere in visual-entertainment-land…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: After years of the sleaze-sex mags getting closer and closer to The Act, Penthouse has finally started running apparent actual hardcore pix as of its June issue (in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy pictorial), and (along with its almost-as-explicit competitors) has faced the expected legal challenges in the expected southern and midwestern states. Either the publishers seem to think they can win the court cases and vend images of actual coitus thru mainstream magazine outlets, or the competition for wankers’ bucks has gotten so intense the publishers believe they have to do this to compete with hardcore videos, websites, CD-ROMS, etc.
The demand for explicitness in sex-entertainment has increased steadily in the three decades since hardcore films and images first went above-ground. Today, hardcore tapes can be rented in almost every non-chain video store (and can be purchased in non-chain convenience stores); while softcore tapes (other than those depressing , anti-intimacy “erotic thrillers”) are in far fewer outlets and often for sale only. Of all the new girlie mags in recent years, only Perfect 10 (and retro-zines like Kutie) appeal to a classic pin-up aesthetic instead of simply piling on as much raunch as the distribution channel will bear.
Some observers claim this trend signifies a failure of imagination, of good taste, or even of respect for women. I think it means something else–that smut consumers are, on the average, moving away from passive “pedastel” female ideals and instead prefer to fantasize about women who are active, enthusiastic participants in The Act.
Then, of course, there’s the little matter of what makes hardcore hardcore. It’s not how much you see of the women, but how much you see of the men. The triumph of hardcore means more and more straight-identifying men want to look at other men’s sex parts in action, photographed as sharply and clearly as possible. One recently-notorious subgenre, the “gangbang” video, shows its straight-male audiences dozens of male bodies surrounding just one woman.
But gangbang videos are ugly, as is hardcore in general. As I’ve previously mentioned, the hardcore anti-aesthetic literalizes the phrase “ugly as sin.” While the action scenes in Penthouse are at least competently lit and photographed, they still adhere to a formula of garish colors, contorted expressions, and grotesquely obvious implants. Historically, the formula leads out from the old days of underground smut, all dangerous and anti-propriety. Today, it leads from the porn-video industry’s ruthless combination of tiny budgets and strict requirements. But it’s also a look its target audience seems to prefer. Perhaps these men have such poor self body-images, they can only comfortably look at other men’s bodies when they’re depicted among ugly surroundings.
Will this ugliness change as coitus imagery goes further beyond porn-specialty stores and into your local beer-and-cigarette shop? Many cultures around the world have found beautiful ways to depict coitus via the arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Contemporary erotic photography has produced many beautiful works, but almost all of them (even Robert Mapplethorpe’s) are predicated on The Pose, not The Act. Posing involves a person or persons openly displaying their personas out toward the viewer; actual sex (if it’s any good) constitutes two people becoming all caught up in one another and themselves, ignoring the rest of the world. I’ll still prefer softcore images, even if hardcore becomes less icky-looking, for this reason. I don’t want to vicariously imagine myself in some other man’s body, feeling what that other man gets to feel; I want to imagine my (real) self in the woman’s body.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we hope to have topics less prone to too-obvious puns, embrace the warmth, question the war, and consider this by Jane Austen: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).
AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.
AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).
SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…
SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)
But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…
BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”
Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.
Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.
Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.
So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?
THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.
UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…
BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…
FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.
OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:
Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).
As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.
And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:
(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)
OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.
IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)
GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.
Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!
GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book
Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality
technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.
It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:
ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).
THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.
THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).
EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?
MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…
A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”
Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:
Speaking of public service sloganeering…
CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.
THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?
THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).
ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.
(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)
WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)
KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.
THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.
Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.
Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.
WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:
Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)
MISC. is the column asking the musical question: Would you even want to live in the same building with the maniacally-grinning GQ models depicted in all those condo ads?
UPDATE #1: Tosco, which runs gas stations under the BP brand in Washington, sez it’ll keep that name up for the time being, even though BP’s own stations in other regions will switch when BP takes over the Amoco brand. (Confused? Good.)…
UPDATE #2: QFC, having absorbed Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, is now taking over another of the top Seattle indie supermarkets, the gargantuan and lavish Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. Art’s was originally a multi-store strip mall containing both an Art’s supermarket (the last of what had been a five-store chain) and a Marketime drug-variety store. Fred Meyer bought Marketime in the ’60s, then unloaded its half of the Holman Road complex to Art’s (which kept many of the Marketime merchandise departments, making it what the French call a “hypermarket”). Now that Fred Meyer’s already bought QFC last year, it’s got the whole complex back. (Still confused? Good.)
HELD IN CHECK: Seafirst now has “Celebrate Diversity” checks, in a sort-of rainbow design–only this “diverse” colorscape is all mellow and pale. A lot like Seattle in general….
TOO CLOTHES FOR COMFORT: After a couple of weeks, I think the new Nordstrom store looks a LOT like the Forum Shops mall at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a place that doesn’t even pretend to be sublime or understated. It was made clear from the start that nothing recognizable from Frederick’s, except for the exterior facade and the thick supporting posts, would be preserved. (Even the elevator and escalator shafts were moved.) But I don’t think many expected the new store’s total in-your-face experience of New Money, all proud and boastful and coldly showoffy yet trying conspicuously to be proper. If Bloomie’s or Saks had installed such a store, everybody’d complain how indiscreetly un-Seattle it was.
MILLENNIUM BUGGY: The Year 2000 Computer Problem hysteria hasn’t spawned a new survivalist cult, as some commentators and periodicals have claimed; but it has breathed new life into existing cults. The “head for the hills with canned goods and guns and gold” folks, having missed out (so far) on predicted apocalypses (apocali?) involving nukes, race riots, U.N. “black helicopters,” oil shortages, etc. etc., now get to invoke a simple yet oft-misunderstood software-upgrade failure as their new premise to solicit converts and customers–a premise conveniently scheduled on a date steeped in religious mysteries and referenced by prophets from Nostradamus to Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Criswell.
Many of the “Y2K” doomsday scenarios promoted by the survivalists read less like knowledgeable tech writing and more like excuses to shoehorn in pre-existing survivalist dogma. Like the parts about inner cities turning into instant war zones while the rural inland west remains serene and posse-protected. Not only does this line ignore that over half the country now lives in suburbs, it ignores that major metro areas are usually the first to get upgraded civic electronics, while the countryside’s still stuck with some of the most antiquated phone and power-delivery systems–the ones most likely to not get fixed so their databases understand years that don’t start with “19.”
What the alarmists get right is how nearly everything in the modern world (air-traffic control, oil refineries, long-distance lines, Social Security, medical equipment, stock markets) is intertwined in mainframe-computer networks, the real “world wide web.”
But the Y2K problem won’t crash everything at once. It just means companies and governments that let these unprofitable but necessary system upgrades slide now have to implement them at once.
At the least it’ll mean a hit on most everybody’s financial bottom lines for the next two years; draining cash-flows and spurring various degrees of layoffs. At worst, some of the various software/ hardware fixes around the world might not be ready (or adequately tested) in time, so some databases might have to be put off-line for a few weeks and some utility and industrial-control systems might have to be switched to planned backup mechanisms. In an absolute-worst plausibility, some fixes that were thought to work won’t, causing scattered system crashes. And some stand-alone industrial machines with pre-programmed computer chips inside might hiccup; but even most of those failures should be predictable and worked around.
So don’t give in to the fear-profiteers in the canned-food and gun industries. If you want to believe in a Biblical-style apocalypse, remember the verse about how mankind “knoweth not the day nor the hour.”
(More good readin’ about this topic is in Paul Kedrosky’s recent essay at Rewired.)
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
STORE #1: I love lists, so I love how the silly Random House/ Modern Library “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” list has inspired so many folks to attempt better (more ambitious, more diverse, funnier) lit-guides. One such effort’s being compiled at the Twice Sold Tales used-book chain. Get your recommendations (up to 20) to Twice Sold’s Broadway & John store by Sunday. They’ve gotta be originally written in English and originally published since 1900; any list including Richard Bach or Bridges of Madison County will be thrown out.
STORE #2: The huge new Safeway at 15th & John opened a week before the region’s long-dominant food chain (begun by Boise’s prominent Skaggs family; now owned by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; but never owned (despite the rumors) by the Mormon Church), lost its spot as America’s #1 food vendor to the merged Albertson’s and American Stores (both with Skaggs family members in their origins). The new Safeway outlet easily matches the new Broadway QFC (now owned by Fred Meyer, which was formerly owned by KKR) in size, opulence, and ready-to-eat goodies.
Why has supermarket square footage on the hill more than doubled in the past ten years (including Central Co-op’s big new branch soon coming to 16th & Madison), when its population’s increased by much less? There’s relatively fewer kids in the area, for one thing (big folks eat more; big folks without dependents can often spend more). Big stores bring more customers past the lucrative side departments (pharmacy, video, photo, floral). And, as we mentioned when the new QFC opened, supermarkets are trying to take back business from restaurants with delis, salad bars, and convenience foods.
There’s also a semi-intentional side effect: Monstrous stores, with wide aisles and gargantuan shopping carts, bring back some of the wonder that grocery-shopping trips meant when you were a kid, mesmerized by the bounty of goodies and the old Safeway yin/yang-esque logo. Just don’t do wheelies with the carts, OK?
STORE #3, OR JUST WHAT’S A BRASS PLUM, ANYWAY?: To me, the new Nordstrom store’s opening will be the final true end of Frederick & Nelson; I’ve been able to half-pretend the grande dame of Seattle retailing was still around, I just hadn’t shopped in it for six years. It’s also (as of yesterday) the end for the old downtown Nordstrom. I’ll miss that awkward amalgam of three buildings, with the front-and-back-doored elevators, the unpretentiously-pretentious all-lower-case signage, the cramped awkward floor spaces (which suited Nordy’s then-novel “collection of boutiques” concept better than any open-plan mall space could)–a place where, no matter what year’s fashions were on the hangers, the style year was always 1974.
The Stranger’s previously criticized Nordy’s sweetheart deals with the city over the new store, its parking garage, and its reopening of Pine. But let’s remember what else this company’s wrought, for good and/or ill. The downtown Nordy’s as we’ve known it opened when lots of downtown office towers were going up. Instead of the affluent-yet-careerless women F&N targeted, Nordy’s targeted office people (particularly women) who’d begun seeing themselves not as sedate corporate drones but energetic corporate warriors. (Not exactly a feminist ideologue’s vision of empowerment, but still a change.) It told the country our far corner indeed had a fashion sense (an early Forbes article mockingly called the store “Bloomie’s in the Boonies”)–and an entrepreneurial sense. Nordy’s helped perfect the workforce-as-cult model of employee relations now associated with the likes of Microsoft. Like its dressing-for-success clientele, its staffers were encouraged (or hounded or pressured) to give their all to the company and then some.
Even as its catalogs and its out-of-state stores spread an image of the Northwest as a land of carefree outdoor leisure, its practices instilled a vigorous (or obsessive or oppressive) work ethic now common at “growth oriented companies” here and elsewhere.
A piece on Microsoft’s Slate last year suggested companies like MS and Starbucks had to have copied N.Y. or L.A. styles of institutional aggression; such drive couldn’t possibly be indigenous to our countrified region. Nordy’s proved it could be and is.
WELCOME TO A MIDSUMMER’S MISC., the pop-culture column that hereby calls for a one-year moratorium on any further motion pictures depicting the violent destruction of computer-generated replicas of New York City.
UPDATE: The Cyclops restaurant, closed last year when its building was demolished in the Belltown redevelopment mania, will be reborn later this summer as a beneficiary of that same mania. It’ll be in a part of the ex-Peneil Mission/ Operation Nightwatch building, whose new landlords wanted more potentially lucrative tenants than the perenially underfunded social-service sector could provide. Since the building’s side sports half a faded old Pepsi sign blending into half a faded Seven-Up sign (the two have long had the same local bottler, which was once based in that building), it’d only be appropriate if a mixture of the two took a place on the beverage menu…. In other real-estate news, the nearby Casbah Cinema’s turned its SIFF-month closure into an indefinite one. The beautiful screening room in an alley location without dedicated parking is still for sale. And the former U District Clothestime juniors’ clothing store is now a National Guard recruiting office (talk about your yin/yang dualities).
OVERREACTION DEPT.: The supposed “gang riot” last Saturday at the Fun Forest was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, really just either an argument or an exhibition of horseplay by a handful of rowdy teens; climaxing either with a few gunshots into the air or (more likely) firecrackers. The ensuing scramble among sweaty, crowded kids set cops scrambling into crisis mode and herding all opposite-race youths off of the grounds. Live TV reporters got all hussied-up about a Sudden Threat to Public Safety, while the kids passing by just giggled or mugged it up to the cameras–this was a big Dionysian revel that had merely gotten a bit out of hand, not the huge angry mob depicted. More telling was the scene the following late afternoon, in which teams of cops with plastic face masks and billy clubs shooed any and all groups of three or more young Af-Ams not just off the Center property but out of the larger vicinity. It’s not just the Sidran gang and the anti-affirmative-action cadre who fear blacks, particularly young blacks. The fear is ingrained in the popular image of a clean, ordered city where everybody’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Lots of real Af-Ams are just like that, of course; but lots of whites still think (consciously or sub-) that Black + Young = Gangsta. (White teens can get rowdy too, but tend not to inspire such wholesale crackdowns.) Elsewhere last weekend…
DAYS-O-FUTURE PASSED: The Mariners’ Turn Ahead the Clock Night promotion, with uniforms and stadium signage supposedly harkening forward to 2027, finally let the Nintendo people put their graphic stamp on the team they co-own, at least for a one-game gimmick. The oversize, maroon-and-black, not-tucked-in jerseys with the huge, tilted logos and the “Xtreme-sports” style lettering, accessorized with metallic-colored batting helmets and racing-stripe pants legs, harkened back to an early-’90s computer-game interpretation of cyberpunk’s retro-modernism. Of course, it was all completely antithetical to the modern-retroism of the new Mariner stadium; so no regular Ms’ uniforms will probably ever look like that. (‘Twas also fun to ponder the fake out-of-town scoreboard listings for Venus and Mercury. If you think the thin air in Denver affects the game…)
DESIGNS FOR LIVING: A bookseller of my acquaintance recently tipped me off to one of the nonsexual passages (yes, there are several) in the Kama Sutra: a list of “the sixty-four arts and sciences to be studied” by a learned man or woman. They include some universals (“singing,” “dancing,” “tattooing”), some obscure-around-these-parts cultural practices (“binding of turbans and chaplets”), and some practical matters of life in ancient India (“storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs”). Anyhow, it’s inspired me to compile 64 arts and disciplines (from the practical to the spiritual to the just plain fun) a modern person should know. As always, I’d like your suggestions, to clark@speakeasy.org. Results will appear in this space in three weeks.
(Here’s a link to the original Kama Sutra list)
(Next week: The 1998 Misc. Summer Reading List.)
