Shoo be Doo or Shoo Be Don’t

Restaurant review for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey

7-30-97

Despite the demise of Johnny Rockets’ Broadway branch last winter and of Wallingford’s Beeliner Diner a few months before that, the faux-’50s pseudo-diner remains a concept whose time-that-never-was refuses to go away, even as the real diner becomes an endangered species. Even the Mar T Cafe in North Bend, beloved worldwide as the RR Diner in Twin Peaks, is succumbing. (Mar T owner Pat Cokewell retired and sold the place to a longtime associate, who announced plans to gussy up the joint with lotsa chrome and old-car paintings.)

In the Northeast, a diner is a specific type of restaurant building, often made prefab then towed to the site of business. In these parts, it’s a generic name for a good unpretentious place serving good unpretentious American food to good unpretentious Americans. Problem is, that kind of proposition doesn’t leave room for some of the elements of modern-day restaurateuring, such as cutesy decor and higher-profit-margin menu items.

So instead we get the diner-nostalgia theme restaurant. The latest Seattle example’s called Shoo Be Doo. It’s right by Seattle Center but easy to miss, in a low-foot-traffic area at 11 Roy Street, across from the again-slated-for-demolition restaurant graveyard site known as the Blob. Shoo Be Doo’s the first mainland outpost of a Hawaii-based operation, which might explain the almost numbing brightness of the place, painted in shades of pink and blue one might find on bathroom tile. Almost religious-kitsch-like iconography of Elvis and Marilyn are everywhere, including several imagined scenes implying that the two had actually met.

The food, as you might expect, is upscaled versions of regular diner food. Gourmet burgers, sandwiches, daily diner-food specials like meat loaf, salads, fries, chili. Some ice-cream-parlor stuff: huge sundaes, egg creams (those fizzy East Coast beverages involving no eggs and no cream), and $3.75 milk shakes. The ice-cream stuff and the desserts are quite good; the food’s certainly passable (if not spectacular), and portions are consistently large enough to get you looking like the later Elvis in no time.

On one of the days I was there, there were even modern-day bobbysoxers of sorts, in the form of Pacific Northwest Ballet School students, all with their hair done up in buns and dyed the same shade of brown. They gathered around the reproduction Wurlitzer juke box, sucking their Jones Sodas with straws and gossipping. While neither they nor their parents might have been around in the period being fetishized here, it’s a place for folks like them. A real diner, with its often melancholy moods and chaotic appearance, just doesn’t cut it for the family or tourist trades. Shoo Be Doo, with its carefully-arranged clutter of old movie-star photos and its clean lines of neon, is both a relatively-affordable treat and a trip to an imaginary realm where everything’s clean and mildly rebellious.

HERE AT MISC., we continue to view with bemusement the twists of fate regarding our allegedly post-print-media era. Blockbuster Music on Lower Queen Anne now has huge window posters announcing “We Now Sell Books!” Amazon.Com Books’ stock sale is a big hit, despite the outfit’s lack of profits to date. Book superstore chains haven’t yet led to increased overall book sales (certainly not compared to all the increased retail square footage now devoted to books), but they’ve shaken up a hidebound industry and just might lead to the end of the bestseller mentality (it’s already happening in the record biz, with the same sales dollars now spread among many more releases).

And by the end of this month, local TV newscasts (not counting Northwest Cable News) will drop from a total of 13 hours per weekday (including two hours of 7 Live) down to 8.5, due to the second realignment of station ownership in two years and the return of CBS shows to KIRO. The decimation of the KSTW news operation (and smaller cutbacks at KIRO) leave some 58 station employees on the unemployment rolls. I can see it now: Blow-dried reporters on the sidewalk, in trenchcoats with white spots where station-logo patches used to be, holding up signs (printed on the backs of old cue cards) reading WILL COVER CAR CRASHES FOR FOOD.

UPDATE #1: Virtual i-O, local makers of the Virtual i-Glasses video headsets discussed here a few months back, has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-image experience, but (according to a Puget Sound Biz Journal piece) the company couldn’t get the quality and reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the company’s leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology.

UPDATE #2: The coffeehouse cereal fad quietly faded like a soggy bowl of Total. The espresso corner in the U District’s Red Light clothing store’s dropped its cereal selections; the downtown Gee Whiz cafe’s cut its own golden-bowl offerings down to a few top-rated brands.

ON THE RACKS #1: We’re still trying to make sense of People magazine’s “Sexy Moms” cover last month. They’re surprised moms can have sex appeal? The mag’s editors, like many Americans, must not realize that most people who have children have had sex first. And many of them even liked it.

ON THE RACKS #2: It’s been a quasi-frustratin’ year for this lover of obscure magazines, with the demise of the YNOT and ALFI stapled-goodie emporia. At least there’s the U-Village Barnes & Noble, where you can still get British Cosmopolitan, perhaps the sluttiest mainstream commercial women’s magazine published in the English language. Sample articles include “Why Bitches Get All the Best Men” and “The Single Woman’s Guide to the Men of Europe” (the latter complete with jokes about Bratwurst and “Nor-Dicks”). But the articles are just warm-ups for the little ads in the back of the book: phone astrology lines, phone sex lines for women, and more before-and-after implant photographs than you’d ever ever expect in the same mag with workplace-equality and anti-harassment essays in the front.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Want more proof computer geeks are the new idols? Just examine the new Think! brand “Proactive Energy” bar, using the old IBM slogan for its name and a Mac screen window on its label. Makers “Ph.D–Personal Health Development,” list a website (www.thinkproducts.com) but give no FDA-required city-state address (the website lists it as in Ventura, CA). It’s your basic exercise/ diet energy-bar thang, a fudgy-mediciny goo with a thin chocolaty coating. Mixed up in there are ginkgo biloba, choline, “complex peanut protein,” vitamins, herbs, and amino acids. It claims to “enhance the performance of your mind by promoting concentration, calmness, and stamina” if you eat one with water “30 minutes before using your brain.” But you ask, does it work? This column was written on one. Can you tell any difference?

HERE AT MISC. we’re trying to make sense of Nike’s reported flat sales trends, after years of huge growth. Is it the shoes? Is it the controversy over sub-subsistence pay for foreign laborers? Maybe it’s the ads that don’t try to sell any products, just the logo (not even the name!).

SIGN OF THE WEEK (one of the “Rules of Conduct” at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center): “#6. We want our guests to feel at home in the Game Center, so please practice daily hygeine and tidy up after yourself.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of the industrial-culture rag Voltage profiles three highly diverse Seattle bands–the ethereal Faith & Disease, the dark-techno Kill Switch… Klick, and the piously noisesome ¡TchKung! Even better is a piece on Project HAARP, the Army’s secret radiotransmitter base in Alaska. It’s equally skeptical of conspiracy theorists’ claims about the project and of the Pentagon’s denials. Free at the usual outlets or from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.

FLAKING OUT: Never thought I’d see it, but even the beloved institution of cereal has fallen to the horrid force that is “collectibles” speculation. Fueled by a couple of shrewd promoters trying to turn box collecting into the next big hoarding boom (to be surely followed by the inevitable bust, when foolish hoarders realize they’ll never unload their hoards for profit onto bigger fools), manufacturers have been toying with limited-run box designs, using some of the same tricks (like foil embossing) already used on comic books and sports cards. Now General Mills has come out with a Jurassic Park Crunch cereal (really Lucky Charms with dino shaped marshmallow bits), actually shouting on the box “Limited Collector’s Edition!” At least with all the BHT “added to packaging material to preserve freshness,” any unlucky box-hoarders will eventually be able to eat their losses.

GINSBERG WITHOUT TEARS: The local aging-boomer litzine Point No Point just came out with an Allen Ginsberg tribute by Stephen Thomas, who claimed “every left-of-center social movement since the ’50s is traceable back through Ginsberg’s poetic vision.” For good or ill, Thomas might be right.

In the months since his demise, I only found one obit (in The Nation) that emphasized his writing instead of just how cool a dood he was. This may be how he’d want to be remembered. He exemplified many annoying hipster trends: the incessant self-promotion, the championing of celebrity above artistry, the simplistic Hip vs. Square dichotomy, the concept of culture as something created exclusively in NY/LA/SF and merely consumed elsewhere. No wonder the folks at MTV loved him. He had the same business plan!

But there was more to Ginsberg than his carefully groomed icon-hood. There was his actual work–writings, speeches, performances. He championed not just gay rights but gay life. During the post-McCarthy nadir of American discourse, he wrote about forgotten or suppressed details of U.S. history. His pieces often lacked craftsmanship and “quality control” but oozed with exuberance, and thus at least indirectly inspired the punk/ DIY universe.

RAMPING UP: We’ll always remember the long-awaited opening of Moe’s in 1/94 as a special night. After almost two decades of playing mostly in tiny bars, rundown ballrooms, and basements, the “Seattle music scene” had a veritable palace, expensively built just for it. But all scenes change, and so it is here, with Moe’s life as a rock club ending next week. On the upside, the formerly much less palatial Off Ramp club’s about to reopen (pending those pesky Liquor Board bureaucrats) as the Sub Zero. When last written about in this space, it was announced the joint’s sale, remodeling, and reopening would take a little longer than first expected. As it turns out, a year longer. But much was done–it’s clean, and (thanx partly to an all-new floor) no longer smells of stale beer! The cafe part’s open; drinks and bands might commence any week now.

(If you attend only one column-anniversary bash this season, let it be the fantabuloso Misc.@11 party Sunday, June 8, 7:30 p.m. at Ace Studios Gallery, 619 Western Ave., Third Floor.)

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.

But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.

I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”

(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)

MISC., YOUR LOCAL non-hiking column, is downright disappointed Washington won’t impose a sports logo tax to help pay for one of Paul Allen’s construction megaprojects. It would’ve been so neat to see people “vote with their pocketbook” and not pay the extra 50 cents or so for the right symbol on their shirts, jackets, duffel bags, etc. Judges would have had to somberly decide whether a cap with Mariner-like colors and the initial “S” really was a Mariners cap. Niketown would have sold T-shirts promoting Michael Jordan only as a cartoon movie star.

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Little-noticed amid the end of Cyclops was the simultaneous demise of another Belltown eatery, the somewhat more working-class My Suzie’s (successor to the legendary Trade Winds). Its ambience could go from rough-‘n’-tumble to retro-lounge to soul-revival on successive nights. Its closure, allegedly at the pushing of the ex-Sailors Union of the Pacific building’s new owners, makes non-hoity-toity downtown gathering places an even more endangered species. How long will the remaining five or six spots of this type hold on?

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Darn, I hope us Americans can soon get to taste Wacky Vegi brand vegetables. The latest thing in England, these are bags of frozen corn, baby carrots, peas, cauliflower, specially coated with chocolate, pizza, baked-bean, and cheese & onion flavors! Their manufacturer was convinced to launch them by an anti-cancer awareness group, willing to try desperate measures to get more Brit kids to eat their veggies. (Hey, anything would be more appealing than traditional English overboiled food, right?) Speaking of grocery wonders…

IN THE BAG: By the time this comes out, QFC should’ve opened its big new store on Capitol Hill and finished branding its own identity on Wallingford’s once-feisty Food Giant. The new Capitol Hill store was originally to have been a Larry’s Market, but QFC outbid Larry’s at the last minute. (If the retail development had gone as originally planned, we would’ve had Larry just a block away from Moe!) Meanwhile, a strip-mall QFC’s under construction in the formerly rural Snohomish County environs of my childhood, bringing 24-hour, full shopping convenience to a place where a kid used to have to go two miles just to reach a gas station that sold candy bars on the side.

These openings represent small steps in a chain that’s gone in 40 years from a single store on Roosevelt in ’58 (still open) to 15 stores in the mid-’70s (including five taken over when A&P retreated from its last Pacific stores) to 142 stores in Washington and California today. It’s rapidly expanded in the past decade, even as many larger chains retreated from neighborhoods and whole regions. (The once-mighty A&P name now stands over only 675 stores, down from 5,000 in the early ’60s.)

While the new store isn’t QFC’s biggest (that’s the Kmart-sized U Village behemoth), it’s still a useful 45,000-square-foot object lesson in the economics of the foodbiz. The first real supermarkets, in the ’30s, were as small as the First Hill Shop-Rite. New supermarkets kept getting built bigger and bigger ever since, in stages. QFC was relatively late at building ’em huge; in the early ’80s, it proudly advertised how convenient and easy-to-navigate its 15,000-square-foot stores were compared to the big ‘uns Safeway and Albertsons were then building in the suburbs.

Grocery retailing’s a notoriously small-profit-margin business. The profits come from volume, from higher-margin side businesses (wine, deli, in-store bakery), and from gaining the resources to muscle in on wholesaling and processing. QFC started as a Thriftway franchise, part of the Associated Grocers consortium. AG’s one reason indie supermarkets can survive in Washington; it gives individual-store owners and small chains a share in the wholesaler’s piece of the grocery dollar.

What QFC pioneered, and others like Larry’s and the Queen Anne Thriftway have since further exploited, is a “quality” store image. The idea’s that if your store’s known for “better” items and service, you can retreat a little from cutthroat price competition (i.e., charge more). From the Husky-color signs to the old Q-head cartoon mascot (designed by ex-KING weatherman Bob Cram) to the “QFC-Thru” plastic meat trays, every visible aspect of the store’s designed to say “Hey this ain’t no everyday corn-flake emporium.”

Of course, now with everybody in the biz trying to similarly fancy themselves, QFC still has to keep prices in line with the other guys, at least on the advertised staple goods. But it remains a leader in the game of wholesome-yet-upscale brand identity, a shtick most of the now-famous chain retailers from Seattle have adopted; indeed, an image the city itself has tried to impose upon us all.

MISC. REGRETS TO REPORT this will be the final weekend for Belltown’s Cyclops restaurant (around, under various names and owners, almost as long as Soundgarden was). Dinner’s served for the last time this Saturday, followed by one final Sunday brunch. The artists living in the SCUD building’s other spaces will all be out by June. Last-ditch preservation petitions notwithstanding, Harbor Properties is itchin’ to replace it with demographically-correct condos (maybe even including a few hi-ceiling models to be media-hyped as “artist housing”). Speaking of developers and their close friends…

BEYOND THE NORM: Like Soundgarden (whom he still may have never heard), retiring mayor Rice may have felt he had no further worlds to conquer at this time. He’d put himself into a political dead end, as shown in his ’96 campaign for governor. Having turned his office over to the chain stores and developers, he had no more popular support left (except from the construction unions); while no urban Democrat, no matter how “pro-business,” stood much of a chance in a statewide race last year against the forces of Hate Talk radio. The question is what we’ll get next. Various city and county insiders are jockeying for position in the next mayoral election. I worry we might end up with yet another “civil society” insider who’ll promise loyalty to “neighborhood” priorities at first, only to end up within a year, as yet another developers’ lackey. Or somebody like city attorney Mark Sidran, who probably wouldn’t hold the populist pose half that long. Speaking of poses…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Longtime Sub Pop art director Hank Trotter’s new slick-paper magazine Kutie is more than just another attempt at a cocktail-culture girlie mag. Trotter, a fan of pre-’70s pinup art who’s been planning the mag for over two years, has gone beyond nostalgia to rethink the whole men’s-mag formula. Unlike most anything else (“mainstream” “or “alternative”) out there, it treats the het-male sex drive not as evil or stupid but as an impetus to good quasi-clean fun. The photo spreads (shot by Charles Peterson, who previously took many Soundgarden pix) evoke a spirit of new-girlfriend playful discovery; a refreshing change from porn-biz ennui and supermodels’ cold smiles. Stranger fave Anna Woolverton’s got some cool writing in it too. ($7 at Fallout, Zanadu, and other fine indie-print outlets.) Speaking of manly displays…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Reader Deborah Shamoon spotted a new fad from Japan (where Soundgarden’s long been popular): “You have probably heard of that peculiarly Japanese snack food, Pocky (pronounced `pokie’). It’s a thin pretzel stick dipped in chocolate. There are many variants, in which the flavor is somehow advertised in the name: Chocolate Swirl, Strawberry Custard, etc. Well, now there is a Men’s Pocky, available at Uwajimaya. It comes in a macho green box, with the word “Men’s” in English in stark white letters on a black background. On the back it says in English, “Crispy pretzel dipped in dark chocolate for the intelligent connoisseur who enjoys the finer points in life.” It goes on to expound in Japanese about the full cocoa flavor.

“American consumers may wonder what makes this snack food particularly male. The vaguely phallic shape?… Actually, I think this is a clever marketing ploy. Japanese people generally believe only women and children like sweet food; eating candy is seen as a sign of childishness… I remember my host father announcing scornfully he didn’t care for sweets as he wolfed down box after box of Valentine’s chocolate. A semi-sweet chocolate Pocky is the solution to this problem, and by adding “Men’s” to the name, [manufacturer] Glico clearly hopes to bolster the frail egos of men who have a yearning for a chocolate-coated pretzel snack.

“We have this kind of thing in the US, with men’s hair dye, hair spray, and (recently, I have heard) nail polish. I think the idea should be expanded: How about “Brawn,” the diet cola for men? Oreos for Men? Ben & Jerry’s Muscle Man? Clearly there is an untapped market potential.” As for me, I’ll patiently wait for the chance to sip a Man’s Mai-Tai while adventuresomely perusing a Rrugged Romance by Harlequin For Him. (Hey, it could happen.)

BIG GAME HUNTING: The GameWorks video-game palace, opening this weekend, is the first in the chain to open for business, but not the first one built. There’s a full-scale working prototype on a Universal Studios soundstage, where they’ve worked out everything from electrical requirements and crowd flow to lighting and acoustics. Paying customers, though, are still the ultimate test of any business. The next GameWorks (in Vegas, where it’ll fit right in) is too far along to be radically changed by the company’s Seattle experience, but the chain’s owners (Sega, Spielberg, and Seagram’s/ MCA) will do some tweaking to the concept based on which attractions prove more popular here.

Basically, GameWorks is to your neighborhood amusement arcade what Borders is to your neighborhood tome-boutique. It’s bigger, flashier, and noisier than anything outside Nevada. You really feel inside the frenetic cathode-gaming universe. But see for yourself. There’s no cost to just look around this new building made to look like an old building had been ungraciously “restored.” An “old-timey” look is enforced throughout the place with the Rosie-the-Riveter type posters, some more obviously fake than others. In one corner there’s a mural of a ’50s-dressed couple gaping at a ’70s-era game console, above the script-lettering slogan “Remember Pong?”. There’s a corner for ’80s video games on the mezzanine, next to the Internet-terminal corner (laptop computers attached to comfy lounge chairs) and the of-course-they’d-have-one Starbucks booth. Most of the main-floor game units are have sit-in consoles and big-screen monitors; several race games are arranged in rows of eight for simultaneous competition. You’ll also find video batting-practice, air hockey, and a few Space Jam pinball games. (Sega’s signature game series, Sonic the Hedgehog, was nowhere to be seen on the preview days I was there, but I’ve since learned they’ve got one Sonic unit in now.)

The place is all ages except for the Elysian Brewpub upstairs. (A note on the pub’s menu describes the Greek myth of Elysium as a place of peace and harmony; this joint’s somewhat less tranquil.) Indeed, it’s significant as the only big place in the whole downtown redevelopment juggernaut intended for people of a post-Boomer demographic, the people who do support in-city merchants, gathering places, and public transportation. Speaking of hi-tech wonderlands…

AIRING IT OUT: After all these years, I finally got to the famous Boeing surplus store a few weeks ago. It’s well worth the trip to the daytime nightmare that is Darkest Kent’s vast miles of faceless, windowless warehousery and wide, sidewalkless arterials. Best to get there just before its 10 a.m. opening, to mingle with the mechanics and home-improvement crowd waiting for first chance at the bargains. The day I was there, alas, no airplane seats or beverage carts or 10-foot-tall landing-wheel tires could be had. But many other things were there, all dirt cheap: Sheets of aluminum. Office furniture, including drafting tables. Computers (and their parts and accessories) of varying vintages and operating systems. Drill bits. Welders’ heat-shield masks, a la Flashdance. Safety goggles. Cash registers. Huge rolls of upholstery fabrics, in those reassuring dark blue colors psychologically tested to make passengers less restless. Platforms and podiums. A bicycle with no handlebars or pedals. A huge old photo-typesetter, the kind of machine that made words like these in the pre-desktop-publishing era. Fifteen- and twenty-minute VHS tapes from the company’s in-house production studio, now erased but bearing labels announcing such former contents as Confined Space Awareness, Commitment to Integrity: The Boeing Values, and even Accident Investigation: It’s About Prevention. Speaking of accidents…

GEE, THAT’S ME!: While returning from Kent on I-5, I passed the former Sunny Jim food plant, its still-standing signs harkening back to good comfort-food memories. While Sunny Jim products hadn’t been around for several years, I could remember the labels, tastes, and even smells of its peanut butter, apple butter, jams, jellies, pancake syrup, and cut-price soda pop. I had no way to know the building (which had been artists’ studios in recent years but was now only half-occupied by city maintenance trucks) would go up in a massive fire, started accidentally by a roofer, an hour later.

TURNS OUT IT WAS EASY to lose 41 pounds (one-fifth my old weight) in 21 weeks, after years of vowing to get around to it. I knew enough about myself to know I couldn’t have a prepackaged regimen, lifestyle, or personality foisted upon me. That would have disrupted both my internal chemistry and my ingrained behavior patterns, to the point where I’d get desperate to give up.

As soon as I told some people what I was doing (I admit to having been nearly insuffrably boastful), they’d give me all sorts of detailed advice on complicated schemes and self-help-book tricks I’ve found I didn’t need: The “Chew-Chew” Diet, the Rice Diet, the Popcorn Diet, the Drinking Man’s Diet, the Reversal Diet, the Purification Diet, ab machines, daily eating schedules, Topp Fast, and even spirulina plankton.

Instead, it was just less of the same–my usual food intake, cut to a 1500 calories a day (averaged out by the week), plus a daily half-gallon of water and regular conditioning workouts. No Jenny’s Cuisine, no fat-gram counting, no simple vs. complex carbos, no Enter the Zone, and no macrobiotics.

Because I’m big on prepackaged foods, it was easy to read calories on the “Nutrition Facts” label listings. For dining out, I carried a Brand Name Calorie Counter book. I used Sweet Success diet shakes at first, but realized I could have cereal or soup or toast for the same calories.

Certain aspects of my old intake regime did wither away. Beer and I became more distant friends. I lost contact with Hostess Sno-Balls. Cookies, crackers, and chocolates remained in my life on a limited basis; at the level of maybe one chocolate-covered cherry a day.

Some parts of the regimen were odd. Most diet books are written for women, and don’t mention the masculine predicament of awaking at 4 a.m., needing to expel a lot of that drinking water yet turgidly unable to do so.

On the other hand, those books also neglect the particularly masculine ego trip of discovering one’s thighs are no longer the most forward-reaching aspect of one’s lower anatomy.

I used nonprescription appetite-suppressant pills the first few months. They made me want and not want to eat at the same time. I also found myself losing interest in other favorite stimuli, like movies and concerts. I worried I’d become one of those bland boomers I’ve always ranted against. I pondered why those turn-of-the-century railroad moguls were so fat–maybe they had a hunger to grow, to acquire. I also pondered the words of an ex-anorexic acquaintance; she’d been reared to fear sex, to the point where she literally couldn’t stand to have anything enter her body.

During those initial weeks, I developed a running daily calorie count in the part of my brain where I’m normally obsessing about women or money. I’d weigh myself more than once a day, even more than once an hour. I’d get to worrying about “plateaus” and even about whether exercise was causing me to gain muscle faster than losing fat.

Because I’ve traditionally had the approximate metabolism of a hibernating bear, I started exercising to make sure I lost fat instead of muscle. I took a twice-weekly aerobic conditioning class at Belltown Ballet and Conditioning. Because it’s coed, it doesn’t have the kind of body-image jealousy trips I’ve seen in all-male sessions and I’m told can exist in all-female sessions. Still, the class is definitely tuff stuff, especially for the first eight to ten sessions. There are still stretching positions I simply cannot attain. But I’m getting better at it, slowly. I still can’t accomplish a chin-up, but I can do more crunches than I ever could in high school PE class.

By the end, I’d lost fat faster than my skin shrank, leaving billowy folds of empty flesh containers. I felt like that Dick Tracy villain who smuggled guns in the folds of his multiple chins.

Not that people noticed any change at first. In the difficult first few weeks, a few people volunteered they saw something different about me; but they all concluded I’d just gotten a different haircut. One old acquaintance asked if I’d switched from glasses to contacts (I’ve never worn either). My mom couldn’t even see anything different about me. Only in recent weeks have people been telling me they see any change.

One reason I did this was to look more desirable here in an “alternative” subculture where the single straight male is a decidedly surplus commodity. In his recent book Eat Fat, Richard Klein claims fat feminizes men. He notes how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra refers to Cleo’s lovers getting fat in her presence as a symbol for ceding their manhood to the Egyptian seductress.

Lesbians have zines like Fat Girl; gay men have the “bears” clique. Men who love fat women, however, are often stereotyped as manipulative “chubby chasers,” out to control low-self-esteem women. And women who love fat men? Unheard of, except in places like the North American Association for Fat Acceptance.

Besides diet advice, dating advice is another of those genres almost never directed toward males. “You Must Not Be Fat,” warns Jim Deane in one of the few such books for men, The Fine Art of Picking Up Girls (1974). Deane claims there’s no such thing as a sexy fat man. I tried to think of some but only got to Brando, the later Elvis, Pavarotti, Babe Ruth, Barry White, and rapper Heavy D. More prevalant were images of near asexuality (Buddah, the later Orson Welles), arrested childhood (Curly Howard, John Belushi, John Candy), or inhumane lords of expanse (Jabba the Hutt, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, those railroad barons).

Klein’s book notes an archaic definition of “corporation” as a bodily protruberance, such as a gut: “…Like their anatomical counterparts, these great abdomens seem to aim only at expanding, greedily incorporating and consolidating in view of increasing their volume.”

Yet Klein also claims fat’s associated today with low-income, low-self-esteem people, while thinness is the visage for the rich and glamorous. The image of financial success these days is not the personal chef but the personal trainer; while today’s companies seem as insistant as Oprah to showcase their “downsizing” into new “lean and mean” forms. Klein quotes essayist Hillel Schwartz as calling yo-yo dieting “the constant frustration of desire,” a necessary mental state for Late Capitalism to function properly in selling unneeded goods (both excess food and diet schemes).

I still support International No-Diet Days and the Fat Pride movement. What I did was for me, and is not intended as a go-thou-and-do-likewise lesson. Different people have different bodies. Others may need or want to do something else, or nothing.

As for me, now comes phase two, best described by a zombie-bite victim’s deathbed promise in Dawn of the Dead: “I’ll try not to come back.”

MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…

SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…

IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.

The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.”

MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)

DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.

WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”

HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.

So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).

As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.

ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”

‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”

(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)

MISC., YOUR SEASONAL-AFFECTIVE COLUMN, couldn’t help but be cheered up by the January Playgirl cover blurb: “Odd Men Are In!” What could be duller than square jaws, pumped pecs, and steely gazes? Conversely, what could be more fun than somebody with a deft wit, a neato wardrobe of mismatched shirts and ties, and a wicked pinball wrist? (At least that’s what I’ve always tried to tell women.)

TCI IN TROUBLE: The cable behemoth’s laying off 7 percent of its workforce, ordering exec-pay cuts, considering selling subsidiaries, and scaling back upgrade plans (though its long-promised Seattle upgrade’s officially still in the works). Boss John Malone has to placate stockholders, in particular the heirs of one recently-deceased exec, to keep the company from being sold out from under him. The long-term problem: Customers are fed up with Malone’s limited line-ups, rate hikes, and dumping of popular channels for channels Malone owns a piece of. Malone’s siphoned ratepayers’ bills into acquisitions, joint ventures, and power-grab schemes, while staying put too long with aging electronics and wires. Customers are going to mini-satellite dishes today. By ’88, they may turn to phone-company-run or Net-based video systems. I wouldn’t miss Malone, but the wrong kind of takeover could bleed even more money away from service and into junk-bond debt.

`STREET’ IMPROVEMENTS: Sesame St. was looking a little tattered in its 28th year. Once PBS’s ratings powerhouse and a merchandising gold mine, its disjointed mix of humans, Muppets, cartoons, animal films, and committee-written lesson plans has declined in viewership and grownup attention. As more of commercial TV took on Sesame’s frenetic flash, PBS found kids taking refuge in the decidedly steadier Barney and Magic School Bus. The show’s production company, Children’s Television Workshop, has taken cash from toy royalties to buy ads on the commercial networks, hoping to alert viewers that Sesame’s still on the map.

So it was a happy surprise for CTW when Rosie O’Donnell used a plush figure of Elmo, a relatively recent Sesame Muppet character, as a mascot on her talk show. O’Donnell’s endorsement brought parental attention to what had become Sesame’s most popular character. A vibrating “Tickle Me” Elmo doll is the hit toy of an Xmas season otherwise dominated by recycled older properties (Mario, Bugs, Dalmatians). A wide-mouthed, not-unbearably cute, everykid character created from a generic Muppet design, Elmo signifies kids embracing the defiantly innocent side of kidness, rejecting violent fantasy and smartass “attitude.” Now I know where the K Records listeners of tomorrow are coming from.

DOWN, ON THE FARM: Big agribusiness outfits in Calif. are suing for the right to not contribute to government-mandated marketing campaigns (the California Raisins, “Got Milk?”, California Summer Fruits). In an AP report, one plaintiff complained the slurping and chewing sounds in a Summer Fruits commercial were too sexually suggestive. Another said the mandate reeked of socialism. (Actually, it reeks of mercantilism, the belief that government’s highest duty is to enrich business.) I say government oughta quit the raisin biz. If these huge factory farmers wanna be foolish enough to kill some of the most clever and effective ads around today, let ’em.

WHITHER THE KINGDOME?: It’s not the echoing fan noise that made it such a good home for our teams. It’s the way its homeliness, its blatant architectural mediocrity, complemented the lovable-loser status of the Seahawks and pre-Griffey Mariners. Its concrete cheapness symbolized an ex-frontier town wanting to become a Big League City but unwilling or unable to do it right. Paul Allen sez he won’t buy the Hawks if they’re stuck in an aging, luxury-boxless Dome. The new M’s owners said the same. Besides the economic considerations, I think both parties were uncomfortable with an overcast-grey box whose un-gussy-uppable look of thrift contradicted today’s mania for yupscale pretension. Dunno ’bout you, but I’ll miss the humble giant hamburger bun if Allen gets the county to tear it down.

WE’LL MEET AGAIN on Boxing Day (my fave Canadian holiday!) with the annual Misc. In/Out list. ‘Til then, keep in mind my favorite aphorism from Rudolph, a line which has become my life’s motto: “Even among misfits you’re misfits!”

AS LONGTIME MISC. READERS know, I love snow in Seattle. That pre-Thanksgivin’ white surprise we had was a perfect example. It kept Eastsiders out of town while blessing urban denizens with a two-day-duration Wonderland of brightly altered vistas. Its glistening blanket offered a temporary respite from our normal Seasonal Affective Disorder-inducing grayout conditions. It created an instant holiday, a Jubilee interrupting the routines of work and school and shopping. It turned everyday life into an adventure, from Counterbalance snowboarding to parking-lot snowball fights. Yes, I know it was a horror for the homeless, but we oughta be taking better care of our brethern year-round anyway.

CATHODE CORNER: As you assuredly all know, Frasier contains enough Seattle inaccuracies to make a drinking game. (“Finish your glass if Niles pronounces Oregon “arra-gone.”) But even that didn’t prepare me for seeing John Mahoney, who plays Dad on the show, miss the following answer on Jeopardy!: “This Seattle-based coffee chain takes its name from the first mate in Moby Dick.” Speaking of local landmarks…

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH THE AVE: No merchant-sponsored rent-a-thugs harassing the street kids will improve the currently sorry state of U District retail. The District’s problems go back a decade, to when Ave landlords decided to jack up rents in one big hike. Longtime indie businesses were replaced by chains. Some of those, like Crown Books and Godfather’s Pizza, then bugged out of their leases at first opportunity). Other stores spent so much on rent, they cut back on interior improvements, merchandise, personnel, etc. Meanwhile, the long-slumbering U Village blossomed into a shopping theme park for the Volvo set. The Ave has risen and fallen several times before. It can rise again. But strong-arm tactics won’t do it; indeed, they’d just make the street’s young-adult target market feel unwelcome. Speaking of questionable neighborhood “renewals”…

WANTON-DESTRUCTION DEPT.: The end of Belltown’s 11-year artist-housing experiment SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers, named years before the Gulf War) and its downstairs eatery neighbor Cyclops had been rumored for over a year. Now it’s official, with MUP boards announcing plans to raze the lo-rise for condos. Cyclops’ owners are already looking for a new restaurant site, perhaps in Fremont. As for the much-photographed golden Jell-O molds gracing the SCUD exterior these past five years, no fate has been announced. I’d have ’em auctioned off to benefit new artist housing (and I mean real artist housing, not the millionaire penthouses sometimes promoted under that term). Speaking of goodbyes…

`PANDEMONIUM,’ 1992-96: Most of what I’ll miss about the idiosyncratic music monthly had already disappeared from its pages in recent months: The schmooze-free gossip column, the Tacoma-centric features, the odd columns like “Town of the Month.” ‘Twas sad to see the tabloid’s “Final Print Issue” carry a Seattle instead of a Tacoma mailing address. Seattle Square, a budding commercial Web company, has bought the Pandemonium name and will now use it for music review and interview pages on its site. Speaking of what’s-in-a-name…

INTO THE DRINK: In the spirit of Husky Cola (that early-’90s fundraising soda for UW athletics) comes Keiko Draft Root Beer, from Newport, OR. Every can bears the image of America’s most famous killer whale, who starred in the two Free Willy films and now lives in a rehab tank at Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium. An unspecified “portion of the proceeds” from the pop has been pledged to the foundation paying for Keiko’s veterinary treatment. I’ve only seen the stuff in regular, not diet, so if you consume too much you could become, you know… There’s also Keiko Brand coffee, but I’m still holding to my no-coffee-jokes policy.

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: Because he’s just a commontator.

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT FOR XMAS: Your suggestions for the year-end Misc. In/Out list. Send ’em to clark@speakeasy.org. ‘Til then, consider these words by ex-Philly restaurant critic Jim Quinn: “Never eat in a restaurant where the menu is larger than the table, the pepper mill larger than your date, and the baked potato larger than your steak.”

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, but MISC. is a bit leery about this week’s touring performances of The Wizard of Oz on Ice. When the witch melts, do they freeze over her remains before they resume skating? If they don’t, how do they finish the show?

UPDATE: Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant has indeed been taken over by QFC, but the only visible change so far is on the employee name tags. The signs, labels, bags, and product mix won’t change until the building’s remodeled and expanded in January. The big FOOD GIANT neon sign will then be replaced by an as-identical-as-feasible sign to read WALLINGFORD, if QFC can get the legal OK to exceed modern sign codes… Just a block away, an ex-Arco mini-mart has switched franchisors and now pumps Shell gas. Those who’ve wanted to protest Shell’s ties to the Nigerian dictatorship now have a place in Seattle to not get gas at. (The store’s independently owned, so you can still get your Hostess Sno-Balls there.)

SUDS ON THE SOUND: If the WALLINGFORD sign gets built, it’ll add to the parallels between Seattle and All My Children. We already have two businesses deliberately named after fictional businesses on the soap (Glamorama and Cortland Computer), plus institutions coincidentally sharing names with AMC characters (Chandler’s Cove restaurant, the band TAD). As longtime viewers know, when AMC dumps a character without killing them, they often get shipped to Seattle. A book by Dan Wakefield about the show’s early years had a passage noticing this and explaining how Seattle, with its nice-n’-civil rep, was the perfect place to send ex-Pine Valleyans. He didn’t add how Seattle, like Pine Valley, is sometimes referred to as a quiet little town but is filling up with morally-ambivalent entrepreneurs and weird criminals, while its old-money institutions remain in a few incestuous hands. If a soap had a family with as many political and media tie-ins as our ’80s Royer-James family, it’d be called a hokey plot device. Certainly the three new books about KING-TV reveal founder Dorothy Bullitt as a matriarch just as lively and outspoken as AMC crone Phoebe Wallingford (if less snooty).

WAVES: Broadcast demagogue Mike Siegel, fired from KVI for refusing to let trifles like the facts get in the way of his bullying, resurfaced a couple months back on Everett station KRKO, once the Top 40 station I grew up to. Back then, its slogan was “The Happiest Sound Around.” It could now be called “The Angriest Sound Around,” but instead is using the rubric “Talk Too Hot for Seattle.” I could say “they can have him,” but that would be not caring… KVI’s sister station KOMO-AM, longtime bastion of Ike-esque literate civility, now hawks its news-talk format with TV spots looking like KNDD rejects. Rave-flyer color splotches and snowboard-logo bleeding type exhort listeners to “Get Connected” and “Go Global.” It’s like seeing a golden-years relative suddenly sporting sideburns and driving a Miata; scary yet poignantly sad.

THERE GO THE BRIDES: In an economy move few years back, the Seattle Times stopped running free wedding pictures on Sundays, moving them to a once-a-month section in the lower-circulation weekday paper. That section, The Registry, will appear for the last time next month; to make the last installment, your ceremony has to be before Dec. 1. Because the section had a one- to two-month backlog, readers could amuse themselves by guessing which of the happy couples had already split up. After Dec. 2, if you want your nuptials remembered on newsprint, you’ll have to buy an ad.

SQUARE, INDEED: The demographic cleansing of Seattle continues with the Sam Israel estate’s plans to tear down the building now known as the Pioneer Square Theater (now we know why they refused to bring it up to code) for offices and the conversion of several other Pio. Square structures into “market rate” (read: only upscale boomers need apply) housing. The boomer-centric local media just adore the scheme, of course; just like they adored the Israels’ previously-announced plans to evict Fantasy (un)Ltd. for yet another blandly “unique” retail complex. It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressingly familiar.

With only 12 days ’till the election and no major politician talking about America’s real ongoing crisis (the upward distribution of wealth and the developing two-tier economy), it’s up to Misc. to give you the business, in this all-local-retail column:

BOARD MEETING: Responding to my call for suggested new uses for the ex-REI building on Capitol Hill, reader Blaine Dollard writes: “Always thought it would make a great skatepark! Take the elevator up and start your run up in the Sale Attic, total acid drop or a few banks to get down the stairs, then get mass speed down that ramp leading from the shoes towards Pike and maybe a big bowl or snake run through the Gore-Tex zone. I think it would meet zoning laws too! Now just put an empty swimming pool or two in the basement and the neighborhood could be swimming with more skaters than ever. Wouldn’t hurt [nearby board shop] Cresent’s business either!” In other clever concepts…

FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Papa Murphy’s Take & Bake Pizza chain now displays a small “Food Stamps” logo in the upper right corner of one of its TV commercials. It’s a subtle reminder that as a deli store and not a restaurant, ye who are unemployed and/or underclass can go there as an occasional break from ramen. In other sales pitches…

SCENT PACKING: I have it on good evidence that the Cologne Cult is back in town. You remember them–the evangelistically fired-up, glassy-eyed young gals n’ guys who’d enter offices and other workplaces, somehow sneak past receptionists and other gatekeepers, and hawk inexpensive designer-imposter colognes to the workers (sometimes claiming they were the real brand name products). I don’t know where they’re from, where they go when they’re not here, or how they stay in business, since none of the myriad stories I’ve heard about ’em has ever mentioned a successful sale. In other discount goods…

THE BEST INTENTIONS: Best Products is closing its last 13 Washington stores. These include the final remnants of the former locally-owned Jafco chain and catalog, which supplied moderately-priced jewelry, sporting goods, home furnishings (including foam sofa-beds), and stereo gear to two generations of Northwesterners. I can still remember the day one of my high-school teachers showed off her brand new engagement ring (from a fellow teacher) in class. Just weeks later, I happened to find that exact ring in the Jafco catalog; giving me direct evidence that education was perhaps not the most lucrative of professions. In other closings…

THE LAST REWIND: Backtrack Records and Video, the Ravenna-based dean of local mondo-movie rental houses, is closing as of this Saturday. Owner John Black (one of this paper’s very first advertisers) has sold all his remaining inventory to Bedazzled Discson Capitol Hill, which should have Backtrack’s rental videos available again in a few weeks. Black and his original partner, attorney Fred Hopkins, started by selling used LPs, then added a modest but well-curated sci-fi/horror VHS selection in the early years of the video boom. (Today’s mammoth Scarecrow Video store began as a subleased shelf within Backtrack.) They helped sponsor a film series I curated in 1986-87, as part of their commitment to keeping the flame of cult cinema alive. They produced a public-access movie-review show (still occasionally rerun) and were involved in making a handful of amateur, shot-on-video creature features (one, Rock n’ Roll Mobster Girls, included early appearances by Jim Rose and Hole drummer Patty Schemel). Best wishes on all future endeavors. In other hipness artifacts…

THE COOL JERK: If you grew up around here, you probably recall snide remarks about the Bon Marche’s teen boutique, The Cube–remarks typically predicated on the fact that a “cube” is essentially a square, only multiplied. Now they’ve taken that to heart with this fall’s Geek Chic display. It’s complete with velour dresses, lime-green sweaters, fluorescent-orange fake-fur coats, and black PVC skirts. My favorite fashion analyst describes it as “the same doubleknit blahs you see on the Evening Magazine guy, only with a new name tacked on to make you think it’s not the same thing they’ve been selling you for four years.”

WELCOME TO A late-summer sunspotted Misc., the pop-culture column that knows there’s gotta be some not-half-bad Jack Kemp/ Shawn Kemp jokes out there. If you know any, send them to clark@speakeasy.org.

UPDATES: Adobe Systems will indeed keep the former Aldus software operation in Seattle; it’s negotiating to build offices in the Quadrant Industrial Park next to the Fremont Bridge… Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, winner of this column’s no-prize last year as Seattle’s best regulation-size supermarket, won’t become an Alfalfa’s “natural” food store. It’ll become a QFC. The wonderful Food Giant sign, its nine letters blinking on and off in not-quite synchronization and with a few neon elements always out, will shine for the last time around mid-November. The store will then be redone to QFC’s standard look, floor plan, and merchandise mix. Oh well, at least Wallingford will still have the original Dick’s.

AUTO-EROTICA?: A home video called How A Car Is Made, currently plugged on TV ads, is sold in separate adult and children’s versions. Does the adult version show more explicit rivet scenes? Or maybe nice slow shots of a car’s steel frame descending into a paint bath, emerging moments later all dripping-damp and pink?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: It took the long, slow, painful death of Reflex before this town could get the take-no-prisoners (or grants) visual-art zine it’s needed. The new bastard-son-of-Reflex bears the highly apt title Aorta. (The name was chosen long before Jason Sprinkle’s big steel heart became the most important work by a Seattle visual artist in this decade.) EditorJim Demetre seems to have the right priorities: Northwest art, he and his contributors believe, ought to be something more original than copying the latest flavor from NY/Cal, and something more personal than the upscaled decorative crafts now dominating the local gallery market. The first issue’s highlighted by a clever piece by Cydney Gillis on how local artists were persuaded to donate their time to benefit SAM’s Chinese-textiles show, while SAM still does little on its part to support non-Chihuly local art. The only problem so far: Like Reflex, Aorta will only appear every two months, so no exhibit it reviews will still be up when the review comes out. Free around town or pay-what-you-can to 105 S. Main St., #204, Seattle 98104.

SIGN-O-TIMES (on the readerboard at the Eastlake flower shop): “Pro-Environment Bumper Stickers–Joke of the Century.”

DAUGHTER OF `DESIGNER GRUNGE’: The trumped-up media outcry over the alleged Heroin Chic look has brought atention to a new outfit called Urban Decay, which has been cleaning up on helping young women look dirty. Its cosmetics, sold with slogans such as “Burn Barbie Burn,” just might be the only products sold at both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom. Its nail polishes and lipsticks have dark un-shiny colors and come in styles named Pallor, Bruise, Frostbite, Asphyxia, and Plague. Its ads read like the work of professional ad copywriters trying to sound like slam poets (“Colors from the paint box of my life. Pallor is the sheen of my flesh.”) Founder Sandy Lerner has promoted herself everywhere from the fashion mags to the NY Times as an expert on pseudo-dirty “street” looks; even though she’s quite non-street herself (she co-founded Cisco Systems, a computer-networking giant) and her company’s based on the not-so-mean streets of Silicon Valley. But then again, fashion has always been about role-playing, and in that context “gritty reality” is just another fantasy. It might be more expedient, marketing-wise, for Lerner and company to be closer to the mall kids who wish they were on the Lower East Side than to actually be anywhere near the Lower East Side.

LET US MAKE a pledge to meet in September, and until then ponder these Ways to Praise Your Child, from a refrigerator magnet available from KSTW: “Terrific Job. Hip Hip Hurray. A+ Job. You Tried Hard. What An Imagination. Outstanding Performance. You’re A Joy. You’re A Treasure. A Big Hug. A Big Kiss. I Love You. Give Them A Big Smile.”