I rarely write about my private life in the column. This is an exception. I went to my first graveside funeral last month, for my grandmother, Nelyphthia (“Nellie”) Clark Humphrey, 92. (“Nelyphthia” came from a fictional ancient-Greek character in a novel grandma’s mother had read.)

The bus to Tacoma is called the “Seattle Express.” It swiftly jaunted down I-5 to the downtown Tacoma transit mall. Inside the Pierce Transit info center, I overheard a clerk advise two foreign visitors to take the Seattle Express (“There’s nothing in Tacoma to see. Everything’s in Seattle”). Back outside, I paid silent respects at the former UPS Law School building–previously the Rhodes Bros. department store, where my grandmother worked for decades in the employees’ cafeteria. Grandma ranted a lot about how the Tacoma Mall had killed downtown. She was feisty and argumentative when she wanted to be, which was often. Sometimes I’d wished she wasn’t, like when she spouted common-for-her-generation tirades against blacks and Mexicans. I know you’re not supposed to talk about people’s bad parts when they’ve just gone, but she wasn’t strict about the social graces so in a way I think she’d understand.

Anyhow, two buses later I was at Captain Nemo’s restaurant on Bridgeport Way, to rendezvous with several relatives including my cousin who looks just like Marie Osmond (she’d probably appreciate the comparison, even though her religion differs from Osmond’s Mormonism). Got the typical “Todd, you’ve gained a few” remark from an aunt pretending to mistake me for my younger brother. The conversation I’d interrupted was about the differences between the moods at evangelical vs. Baptist church services. These relations on my father’s side are real Tacoma people, Caucasian non-military subtype. Theirs is a world defined by church, angel books, QVC products, RVs, movie-star gossip, and all-American food. If you really are what you eat, I come from a long line of apple pie with Cool Whip, cottage cheese, canned string beans, Tater Tots, and margarine.

A short caravan brought us to the New Tacoma Cemetery. Grandma had been declining for several years, so when I served as a pallbearer there wasn’t much to lift. I’d always seen her as old and scrawny; I was surprised to see on display a photo of her young, as full-cheeked as I, without the frown of Edwardian disapproval I’d always seen on her.

Thirty-three people gathered for the brief service, conducted by grandma’s chapter of the Eastern Star, a women’s Masonic order. Five elderly women took turns describing how grandma’s life represented each of the points on Eastern Star’s five-colored logo, each representing the virtues of a different Old Testament woman.

Afterwards, I was taken aside by two who looked far younger than their real ages and who exuded way too much life energy to be related to me. Turns out they were the daughters of my late grandfather’s sister and her husband, whom I’d known as a kid as Uncle Joe. They told me how, as kids, they’d known my parents before they were married and how much in love they seemed to be.

They also talked about their dad. Uncle Joe ran the Shell station at 3rd & Lenora that was razed circa ’72 for Belltown’s first condo tower. We visited his beautiful house in the hills above Carkeek Park every Christmas when I was little. The last time, I still remember entering into a spirited conversation with him about just what was “Platformate,” the mystery gas ingredient Shell was plugging that year. (He knew what it was, or at least gave a convincing lie.) He seemed to enjoy the chat, but afterward my dad scolded me for my untoward behavior. The cousins assured me Joe undoubtedly did enjoy the talk.

In my head, I’d always resisted the heredity-as-destiny theory. But deep down, I’d quietly feared I was fated to end up just like grandma, all bitter and grumbling about one thing or another, with little room for life’s joys. I’d make some curt remark to a waiter and then wonder if it was a sign of impending grouchhood. Then the memory of outgoing, boistrous Uncle Joe entered my life and gave me hope–until I remembered I was only related to him by marriage.

UPDATE: Looks like the fabulously unkempt Lake Union Pub has indeed hosted its last punk gigs (as well as its last straight-edge-vs.-skinhead brawls and its last vomit launch on the carpet). The Off Ramp, on the other stamped hand, may reopen any week now. New owners promise “a new tile floor to wipe you off easy” and “bathrooms that won’t make you puke.”

DON’T MEX WITH ME: Ah, for the good ol’ days when a burrito was a burrito, before the invasion of Cal-Mex trendy concepts so darned “Cal” they drop all references to the “Mex.” On lower Queen Anne alone, you can now dine on World Wrapps, Global Wraps(at Macheezmo Mouse), or Todo Wraps (the new name for selected outlets of the Todo Loco chain). A conspiracy theorist (which I’m not) might even ponder whether the new Anglicized appellation constituted some sort of capitulation to election-year hate campaigns against Hispanic immigration.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The smashing success of Altoids has caused a curiously strong surge of imitation tinned mints, a trend that’s finally reached to Tacoma. There, Brown & Haley (“…Makes ‘Em Daily!”), famous for Almond Roca and Mountain Bars, has brought out its own brand of “Extra Strength Peppermints” in its own reusable tin. They’ve got a far smoother texture than Altoids. And, unlike the originals, they contain no sugar (or beef gelatin). And the tin is just as reuseable as the Altoids tin–good for sewing notions, keys, loose change, snuff, that Visa card you’ve promised to only use in case of emergency, or your first lover’s saved toenail clippings.

CARD ME: A recent Times story says those oh-so-collectible prepaid long-distance cards, which have a face value of $5 or $10 but can rate as much as $10,000 from foolish speculators, can be twice as valuable if they’ve never been used. This is taking the ol’ “mint condition” fetish to the point of ridiculousness. The card is physically unaltered by use; all it does is bear the number of a credit account at a phone company.

FOR (ST.) PETE’S SAKE: While Seattle’s politicians (and the businessmen who own them) keep insisting the next out-of-state chain-store branch will put downtown on the proverbial map, Seattle-mania continues; now spread as far as Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fla. (whose only prior interest in Seattle was trying to take away the Mariners). The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center recently mounted a play called Nirvanov, described by author David Lee as “Chekov’s Ivanov as seen through the eyes of Kurt Cobain and Frances Farmer.” As a local viewer reports via email, “Kurt angsts while Frances lurks around stage right in a black tail coat and offers advice and commentary. There is a chorus of Seattle Grunge Vampires, a fantastic Courtney imitation, several Nirvana songs recorded by a local band, and a live bat flitting around the theater (I never figured out if it was part of the show or had just wandered in).”

NO, THE CODE: The incredible shrinking 206 area code covered all of western Washington a few years ago. Next April, if US West and GTE get their way from government regulators, only Seattle, a couple of suburbs (Shoreline, White Center) and a handful of islands (Bainbridge, Vashon, Mercer) will be in 206 anymore. Tacoma and south King County will be called with the new 253 code; Everett and the Eastside will turn into 425 country.

The meanings are endless: Eastern Washington anti-sprawl bumper stickers, which now read “Don’t 206 509,” will have to be changed to “Don’t 425 509.” EastsideWeek editor Knute Berger will get a psychological boost to his only-half-exaggerated crusade for an “Independent Republic of the Eastside.” And, of course, both KVI’s hatemongers and our own scenester snobs will delight in the official declaration of Seattle to be its own territory, cut off from the realities of life in the outside world. Me? I’ll just be happy to have further proof that if a business, store, or arena isn’t in Seattle, it isn’t in Seattle. Circuit City? Incredible Universe? Ikea? Microsoft recruiting? Stop running downtown Seattle skyline photos in your ads! You’re not even in the same area code as Seattle!

Retro-Futurism at 600 Feet:

Dining at the Needle

Eats essay for The Stranger,7/23/96

While the future the Space Needle predicted (it helped inspire the look of The Jetsons) never happened, and the age it came from passed long ago, it remains a beloved symbol of Seattle and an icon of a bygone belief in a late-industrial, pre-computer tomorrow. It’s an almost unbelievable blend of retro kitsch and eternal beauty. Except for the ’80s-vintage 100-foot-level addition (now used only for occasional banquets), its size, scale, and shape are as near as modern American architecture gets to Pythagorean perfection.

Seattleites love the Needle so much they’ll forgive the legendary cost and mediocrity of its restaurant, almost. (You can tell a real local kid: She’ll have 100 Space Needle scale models, ball-point pens, ash trays, whiskey bottles, postcards, and posters, but has never been in the real one.)

I’m looking at a still of Elvis’s scene in the Space Needle restaurant from It Happened at the World’s Fair. The revolving, donut-shaped dining room evokes what was considered wondrous in ’62: Space Patrol uniforms on the servers, fine suits and dresses on the clientele, rich paneling on the walls, rich food on the tables.

In its 35th year, the uniforms and the decor have become more commonplace (the walls are now as grey as the view on an overcast winter day; the ceiling has that speckled-relief effect made infamous by suburban condos). The food, which always was commonplace, has remained so.

The Needle’s a product of what passes for “old money” in this young city. It’s always been a private endeavor, adjacent to but not part of the city-owned Seattle Center. It was built by mega-contractor Howard S. Wright, with backing from developer Ned Skinner and hotel tycoon Eddie Carlson. The late architect-activist Victor Steinbrueck claimed to have played a role in the design, but Wright’s discounted the extent of Steinbrueck’s participation. Both Steinbrueck and Wright claimed to have been inspired by Stuttgart’s TV tower (more explicitly cloned in Toronto’s CN Tower). For many years the restaurant was managed by Carlson’s Western International (now Westin) Hotels; the Needle itself was owned by a five-partner consortium headed by Wright and entitled (our neopagan readers will love this!) the Pentagram Corp. The operation’s now united as the Space Needle Corp.

Tom Robbins called it a phallic symbol, claiming the old Grandma’s Cookies neon sign at north Lake Union as its feminine counterpart. He was only half right. It’s tall and cylindrical, but also curvy and gracious; you rise up to penetrate it, arriving in a cornerless world of padded surfaces and comforting joys.

Upon checking in at the bottom, the efficient staff confirms your reservation and warns you how many elevator loads are ahead of you. Despite a large group from a software company waiting in line ahead of me, it was soon my turn to take the smooth 42-second ride up 600 feet to the “top house.” Quicker than you can adjust your inner ears, you’re in the stark grey topside waiting area. The excessively (but not insuffrably) perky wait staff soon seated me at a non-window table, near two middle-aged couples from Philadelphia freely expressing their giddiness at the whole top-of-the-world sensation. The whole room had the air of low-key (and, at some tables, higher-key) celebrations: Contracts signed, wedding dates set, relatives reunited, jobs and homes temporarily abandoned.

Aside from the diners’ happy talk, the only aural accompaniment to my meal came from the steady, reassuring hum of the turntable motors ever-so-slowly sending me around to view the panorama of city, sound, sky, and (since it was sunny) mountains. I couldn’t see my house (a bigger building was in the way), but everything else was laid out like a miniature movie set for Godzilla to stomp on; the Harbor Island container docks looked like a stack of grey Lego bricks.

The giant turntable has grown jittery over the years. It rumbles and vibrates beneath your feet, and staggers for a second every few minutes. The thing goes all the way around in an hour; with the efficient service and pre-prepared dishes, you can expect to be finished by the time you again spot the buildings that were in front of you when you sat down.

While the restaurant’s menu has evolved, the emphasis remains on fancy-but-not-too-fancy meals for tourists, business travelers, and locals hosting out-of-town relatives. It makes no claims to be on the cutting edge of cuisine. Aside from a fried vegetarian penne ($24.95), the dinner menu is neatly divided into “Entrees” (bigger, costlier versions of what your parents would order in a steak house on their anniversary) and “Signature Entrees” (that seafood stuff the tourists hear you’ve got to get when you’re in Seattle). Everything is soft-textured and mildly seasoned, so everyone from grandma to your finicky preteen niece can enjoy it.

My entree choice, the Chicken Parmesan ($24.95), was a huge slab of chicken, breaded and baked to you-need-no-teeth tenderness, with melted chese and a pizza-esque sauce. Not the worst of its type I’ve ever had, but nothing you couldn’t get better and/ or cheaper on Terra Firma. It came with two scoops of reconstituted mashed potatoes, carrot slices and string beans. The butter-pat foil containers and the sugar pouches carried the telltale logo of Food Services of America–the empire of that Thomas Stewart guy from Vashon, patron of right-wing politicians and subsidizer of John Carlson’s think tank.

If I were to recommend a dish to you, it’d be the prime rib ($27.95 to $31.95). The demise of Jake O’Shaugnessey’s has left a vacancy in the Lower Queen Anne vicinity for this melt-in-your-mouth delicacy. It’s cured, so it’s safely cooked even when it’s all red and fleshy on the inside. Those celebrating on a budget can settle for the smoked-salmon appetizer ($9.95).

Any good kitschy “special occasion” restaurant needs a special drink or dessert. The Needle disappointed in both areas. They were out of the take-home ceramic Needle-shaped glass that’s supposed to come with the Mai Tai-esque Space Needle Blast-Off Punch ($18). They did have the World Famous Lunar Orbiter dessert ($5.50); but once the dry-ice fog from the lower compartment of its special cup has steams away, you’ve just got a lot of ice cream covered with mini M&M’s.

You can get the drinks without the entrees, at the cocktail lounge on the non-revolving Observation Deck just above the restaurant. The view’s just as spectacular as it is from the restaurant, though you have to walk around it yourself (the outer walkway’s all fenced in nowadays, to be jump-proof). And the atmosphere’s far more festive, with cheery tourists and screaming kids running to and fro. The gift-shop merchandise is astounding. You can play with the penny-flattening machine or the coin-op telescope (not powerful enough to peer into hotel rooms). Tucked away in a corner there’s a computer kiosk normally displaying an Internet tourist-guide site, but you can follow links to the Sub Pop Mega Mart site and leave it there. And on summer Friday evenings, the amplified melodies from the Pain in the Grass concerts waft upward beautifully. I like the band Zeke normally, but it never sounded as hot as it did from 600 feet away.

MISC. HATES TO say it, but the rest of the local media were more than a bit mistaken about the hyped-up overimportance of a certain out-of-state chain restaurant opening up shop in Seattle. Now if White Castle had moved into town, that would’ve meant something.

Besides, we’ve already got a watering hole for Seattlites who love film. It’s called the Alibi Room. Instead of loudly pandering to manufactured celebrity worship (just what has B. Willis actually done to deserve this kind of Messiahdom?), this place quietly honors the art and craft of making film, with published screenplays on a shelf for browsing and many of Seattle’s growing tribe of director and cinematographer wannabes hanging out and networking. They’re even mounting a local screening series, “Films From Here.” Seldom has the divide over competing visions of America’s cultural future been more clearly shown than in the contrast between a corporately-owned shrine to prepackaged Global Entertainment and a local independent gathering place for creators.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: The Vent may be the only alternative literary zine published on that rock of antisociality known as Mercer Island. The current issue’s highlighted by “Rage,” George Fredrickson’s two-paragraph micro-essay on “how crazy it is 2 live on Mercer Isl. and b black at da same time.” Free at Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill or pay-what-you-can from 3839 80th Ave. SE, Mercer Island 98040… July’s Earshot Jazz newsletter has an important piece by new editor Peter Monaghan about DIY indie CDs and some of the pitfalls unsuspecting musicians can face when they try to become their own record producers. (Free around town or from 3429 Fremont Pl. N., #309, Seattle 98103.)

NET-WORKING: the same week I read this month’s Wired cover story on “Kids Cyber Rights,” I also found a story from last September’s Harper’s Bazaar about “Lolitas On-Line.” In the latter article, writer David Bennahum claims there’s a trend of teen females (including “Jill, a precocious 15-year-old from Seattle”) acting out sexual fantasies in online chat rooms and newsgroups. Bennahum proposes, that online sex talk isn’t necessarily a Force of Evil but can, when used responsibly, be a tool of empowerment and self-discovery; letting users explore the confusing fascinations of sexual identity safely and pseudonymously.

In the Wired piece, Jon Katz offered some similar notions. I’m particularly fond of his assertions that children “have the right to be respected,” “should not be viewed as property or as helpless to participate in decisions affecting their lives,” and “should not be branded ignorant or inadequate because their educational, cultural, or social agenda is different from that of previous generations.”

Twenty years of punk rock should have proved kids can make their own culture and don’t like being treated as idiots. Yet the Right still shamelessly uses “The Family” (always in the collective singular, as one monolithic entity) to justify all sorts of social-control mechanisms. Near-right Democrats try to muscle in on the far right’s act, using “Our Kids’ Future” to promote gentrification schemes that make family housing less affordable, while cracking down on any signs of independent youth culture (punks, skaters, cruisers) and going along with dubious “protection” schemes like V-chips and Internet censorship. And too many of yesterday’s Today Generation (like Garry Trudeau) mercilessly sneer at anyone too young to be From The Sixties. (In ’92 a Times subsidiary hired me to write for its tabloid for teens; I was laid off when its baby-boomer bosses found, to their surprise, that actual teens could indeed compose their own sentences.)

Yes, teens and preteens face a lot of problems. They always have; they always will. But they’re far more likely to get abused by daddy than by an e-mail correspondent. They’ll hear more (and more creative) cuss words in the playground than on HBO. Let’s stop stunting kids’ growth by forcing them into subhuman roles they often can’t stand. Instead, let’s treat kids as human beings, who could use a little friendly advice now and then (as could we all) but who ultimately should, and can, take responsibility for their own lives. John Barth once wrote, “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.” I’d add: Innocence excessively enforced becomes fetishization.

AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…

EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced

June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.

Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.

(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)

Misc. began on June 6, 1986 as a column in ArtsFocus, the Lincoln Arts Center’s monthly tabloid. When that paper faded in 1989, Misc. became a newsletter with as many as 1,000 free copies and 100 paid subscribers. It joined The Stranger at the paper’s ninth issue in November 1991. Last year I stopped the newsletter and started the Misc. World HQ website, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.

Over these 10 years I’ve discussed many things, loosely tied to the concept of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond.” I’ve shared a few laffs and a few tears. But I’ve had one overriding subject–the city with which I have an ongoing lover’s quarrel. Seattle’s always had more than its share of vibrant, creative people. But they’ve long struggled against a social order opposed to anything too unclean, unrich, or unquiet.

The Commons people never understood why so many have grown tired of a city government exclusively By The Upscale, Of The Upscale, and For The Upscale. The “Parks Are For Everybody” slogan was clearly a desperation move by campaigners uncomfortable with the existence of non-yuppies and the need to appeal to such proles.

In much of the US, politics is controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “conservatives.” In Seattle, it’s controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “liberals.” Other politicians pay lip service to abortion foes and censors; ours pay lip service to gay-rights advocates and environmentalists. Both sets of politicians do these to buy votes while holding to their real cause, the worship of Sacred Business.

But I also believe politics is a subset of culture. Seattle’s politics tie directly into a culture that merely pretends to value “diversity.” A culture so thoroughly whitebread, it remembers the Sixties only as a playtime for college boys. A culture descended from Anglo Protestant “progressives” in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who’d championed an elitism of educated, understated “taste” to help keep working-class German Catholics out of power.

When Misc. started, Seattle’s arts had been for seemingly ever (at least since 1973) under the thumb of an extremely conservative “liberalism” I’ve since called Mandatory Mellowness. You know, the standard of “good taste” that wouldn’t merely discourage but forbid any art more challenging than Chihuly, any music more contemporary than Kenny G, any theater more immediate than doo-wop versions of Shakespeare, any literature more urbane than whale poems, any apparel more daring than “Casual Friday” suits, or any lifestyle more “decadent” than drinking whole milk instead of 2-percent.

While this aggressively bland anti-aesthetic still rules the city’s official culture, something else arose from the underground. Punk rock remained a relevant stance in Seattle throughout the ’80s precisely because it was the best available means of rebellion against the hypocrisy of mellowness. What the media called “grunge” was and is an aesthetic of darkness, but also one of honest discourse, passionate expression, and real pleasures. It values thrift and ingenuity, not the dictates of fashion. It sees Seattle as a city for Tugboat Annie, not for Niles Crane. It loves the south Lake Union neighborhood as it is. It would rather be “unhappy” yet truly alive than succumb to the Stepford-Wifedom of “The Northwest Lifestyle.” What the media call “cocktail nation” is the expression of these values through other means, to relive the best of pre-hippie pop culture and even to make jazz a populist genre again. Indeed, the staccato, disjointed Misc. format has always been a (perhaps feeble) effort to preserve the jazz-age three-dot column of Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I era Emmett Watson–perhaps America’s greatest literary invention.

If I’ve played any tiny part in popularizing these values, the values that made Seattle and real progressivism great, then I’ve succeeded at my goal–the Highlights for Children slogan, “Fun With a Purpose.”

(Thanx and a hat tip to those who attended the Misc. 10th anniversary party and to those who helped make it plausible; including Glen Allen, the band Big Sister, BSK(T) Screenprinting, Cellophane Square, Staci Dinehart, Rebecca Frey, Joseph Givens, Laughingas Productions, Verlayne McClure, Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, Moe, Mountain Sound, the New Store, Occupied Seattle, Charlotte Quinn, Frank Randall, Jeannine Uhrich, Joseph Weaver, and a host of others.)

Belltown’s Plastic Palace Closing After Three Years:

The End of the World (Pizza)

Article for The Stranger, 5/24/96

“We’ve seen a lot of changes in this neighborhood,” Aaron Cone says while sipping a Coke outside the pizza stand he runs with his brother Adam. “It’s a different town than it was three years ago. We’ve seen a lot of friends move away, out of town or to other parts of town. Places like the Dog House and the old Last Exit are gone, places where we held some of the early meetings to plan this place.”

Adam Cone nods in agreement from a ’50s molded fiberglass chair on the sidewalk. “In a place like ours you really get to see the characters that make a neighborhood. A lot of them are gone. A lot are going. It’s strange to feel antiquated in your own back yard.”

After three years and untold thousands of slices, World Pizza departs Belltown on Friday, April 26. The closure leads directly from long-standing disputes with the Cone brothers’ landlord, the Bethel Temple evangelical church across the street. But it can also be seen as a sign of changes in the neighborhood, as condo developers eye nearly every lo-rise building in sight for elimination. “When we asked about the chance of moving into another building nearby, (the property manager) said he didn’t expect anything on that block to remain standing in a few years.”

That kind of mega-capitalism is a long way from the DIY entrepreneur spirit of the Cones, two would-be artists who’d gotten into food-service work to pay the bills but hated working for other people. Deciding to strike out on their own, they each took two jobs (including a stint making collector prints for Dale Chihuly), saving up a total of $6,000 to use in starting their own place.

In late 1992, Adam (then 23) and Aaron (then 20) found a former accountant’s office in a side-street storefront on Lenora. The rent was reasonable, and it was within a late-night stroll’s distance from the Crocodile, the Vogue, the Weathered Wall, and the future Sit & Spin.

Over the winter, the Cones slept in their pizza-stand-to-be, behind papered-over windows. By day, they built it into a mini-palace of plastic furnishings while learning from experience about the inticracies of restaurant construction and health permits. Finally, in May 1993, World Pizza premiered with the first of its five semiannual private parties. The party, and the place, were instant hits. Diana Ross and ABBA blared from a boom box. Slices were inhaled seconds after arriving from the oven. Good Italian red wine was emptied by the case. Overheated Belltowners quickly expanded the party from the cramped space into the sidewalk, drawing police complaints that eventually got back to the church landlords. Despite their spoken reservations and occasional eviction threats, the church people continued to rent the space to World Pizza on a month-to-month basis.

While the parties earned no income, they instantly established World Pizza as a “scene” place, a friendly place with what Adam Cone calls “a real atmosphere.” For the first year or so, it stayed open weekends until 3 a.m. to cpature the after-the-bars business. The Cones worked seven days a week, adding hired help as they could afford to; eventually building up to a staff of nine. They even offered delivery in the neighborhood for a brief while, until Adam took an order to a Moore Hotel guest who greeted him in the nude, apparently hoping Adam was the female clerk who’d taken the phone order.

The menu was kept simple, to ensure efficient service from the compact kitchen. A meat pizza, a veggie pizza, and the house specialty, potato pizza. Whole pies made to special order. Standard soft drinks and drip coffee. Home-baked sugar cookies. Lemonheads and Red Hots candies.

Adam describes the scene at World Pizza, on a good night, as “an energy, a nervous energy.” A lot of young lovers, punkers, Vogue fetish-night patrons. A few fights. More than a few late-night patrons who’d nod off halfway through their slices. Young brides on girls’-night-out wearing penis necklaces. A few old and neo hippies who’d come in, confused by the name and perplexed when it turned out not to be a whole-earth kind of joint. A lot of what Aaron describes as “people who weren’t quite all the way there.” An old man who, informed one night the place had no anchovy pizzas, would march past it night after night screaming, “No anchovies, no pizza!” A homeless guy who always wanted half a pepperoni slice and half a lemon. A guy who’d try to sell ball-point pens or women’s coats to the customers.

When the Nu-Born Tribe clothing store vacated its Second Avenue storefront in the same building in early 1995, World Pizza finally had an opportunity to add an auxiliary dining room, to relieve the standiing-room-only conditions at peak evening hours. The Cones tore down a small section of back wall to join the two rooms. The new room became a more spacious version of the old, with room for more ’50s-style seating and fun posters. On Sundays, the windows were covered up and the room was rented out for life drawing classes.

The new room opened with the biggest World Pizza party of them all. Thirty cases of wine were consumed that night, at a rate of a bottle a minute. The church people forbade any further such parties on the premises. Worse, the extra dining space didn’t lead to enough increased business to pay for its rent. The Cones reluctantly retreated to their original room. Bethel Temple now plans to use the Second Avenue storefront for a temporary thrift store and food bank.

In retrospect, World Pizza was a basic recipe of a few well-chosen ingredients. It all added up to a place that, while never holding a live music event and never giving a damn about the Seattle media stereotypes old or new, became a perfect encapsulation of the real “Seattle scene” spirit. Lively yet steadfastly unpretentious, knowing but never smugly “ironic,” it took honest admiration in both a perfect pepperoni slice and a candy-colored plastic water fountain. It was a refuge for people who enjoyed good food and a good time at a good price.

But it was also a child of a specific place and time; a time that ended when the church decided to clear out the building, while preparing to receive offers for the underlying real estate. When the Cones return this fall from a long-delayed European summer, they say they’ll look into re-entering the restaurant biz. They own all the restaurant’s equipment and fixtures, and will keep them in storage while they evaluate their futures. But their next venture might not be in Belltown, might not be a short-order drop-in joint, and probably won’t revive the World Pizza name.

Still, as Adam Cone puts it, “it’s more of a beginning than anything else.”

“We made very close friends,” Adam adds. “I’m still going with a girl I met here in the first few weeks we were open… It seems more like a time period than a restaurant. It’s taken on more of a personal level. I had things confirmed; what’s really important, like friendship, a sense of place, having an idea and finishing it.

“And we learned how to make pizza.”

MISC. SAYS GOODBYE this week to one of its favorite conglomerates, American Home Products, maybe the biggest company you never heard of. It’s being broken up, with divisions sold off, so management can focus on its drug operations (Anacin, Advil, Dristan, and many lucrative prescription patents). Unlike the late Beatrice, AHP kept its corporate profile low while promoting its brands (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pam, Brach’s candy, Ecko kitchenware, Easy-Off, Aerowax, Black Flag) with near-monomaniacal aggression. It was be said if you didn’t have a headache before an Anacin ad, you had one after. When Procter & Gamble’s ’50s soap operas offered up Presbyterian homilies of hope and family alongside the tears and turmoil, AHP’s soaps (Love of Life, The Secret Storm) relished unabashed melodrama, the harsher the better. While AHP was never a household name, its contributions won’t be forgotten by anyone who ever dined on Beefaroni while listening to a Black Flag LP.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! (NY Times blurb, 5/6): “If television is the Elvis of communications media and the Internet is Nirvana, radio is Bach.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: From our pals in the Seattle Displacement Coalition comes Seattle’s Urban Counter-Point, a four-page tabloid chastising the city’s inaction against homelessness and its action against homeless people. It does a better job than anybody at explaining how and why Seattle’s political machine, giving lip service to “progressive” homilies while actually serving at the beck and call of big money, is “a system of establishment control that is more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright graft.” Issue #1 doesn’t propose many solutions to homelessness, but does get in some well-placed digs at public officials’ war against the poor, and promotes a public forum where more proactive policies will be debated (Mon. June 10, 6 p.m., downtown library). The paper’s free (donations accepted) from the Church Council of Greater Seattle, 4759 15th Ave. NE, Seattle 98105.

FOAMING: KIRO-TV’s feature series earlier this month about the “fake microbrew” phenomenon successfully revealed the philosophy that sets real “craft” brewers apart from not only mainstream beer, but from mainstream business in general. “Contract brewing” is the product of a notion, increasingly popular in American business, that all that matters is a product’s concept and its marketing; actually making the stuff is a technicality to be dealt with as expediently as possible. That philosophy is why ad agency Weiden & Kennedy and its stable of spookejocks earn more money from Nike than all the Third World sweatshoppers who actually make the shoes. Craft brewers, on the other hand, put great pride and/or elaborate PR into the brewing process, into being able to control and refine every step.

This lesson hasn’t been lost on Minott Wessinger, the Henry Weinhard heir who sold that company, got into the malt-liquor trade, then tried to re-enter mainstream beer in ’93 with Weiden & Kennedy’s Black Star ad campaign. Wessinger’s about to re-launch the Black Star brand, without W&K and with a new corporate identity. He’s now doing business as the Great Northern Brewing Co., and proudly advertising every aspect of his new brewhouse in Whitefish, Mont. Black Star will now be promoted as something as carefully produced as microbrews, but with a more mainstream taste.

THE SKINS GAME: Another International No-Diet Days has come and gone. This year, the week of body-acceptance forums and events followed a curious NY Times piece on high schoolers across America these days (girls and boys) refusing to undress in the shower. Apparently, if you believe the article, kids everywhere are hung up on not looking like supermodels and/or superjocks. (It doesn’t seem to get any better in the gay world–papers like the Village Voice are now full of ads with bare male chests, all completely pumped and completely hairless.) As one who is neither jock nor model, I say there’s billions of great body types out there. Standards of perfection are for machine tools, not people.

(Party games, entertainment, performance art, memories–the giant Misc. 10th Anniversary Party’s got ’em all. Sunday, June 2, 6 pm-whenever, at the Metropolis Gallery, University St. between 1st and 2nd downtown. Be there. Details at the Misc. World HQwebsite, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.)

MISC., THE COLUMN that likes to be dressed in tall, skinny type out here in the shade, welcomes the arrival of TicketMaster master Paul Allen to the Seahawks’ helm, tho’ it could mean a Kingdog might soon cost $2.75 plus a $10 convenience charge.

CORREC: Katrina Hellbusch, whose published first-person rape story was mentioned here last month, works in music promotion but isn’t in a band herself.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Grand Salami is a 12-page, slick-paper sports zine put out every Mariners homestand by Jon Wells and Mark Linn. Each ish features updated stats about the Ms and their upcoming home opponents. The next ish will have a cartoon of the editors’ choice for a new stadium–they want one built on top of the present Kingdome, with a AAA team playing in the old dome for quick player transfer. $1 at Bulldog News or outside the Dome before games, or $15/year at 328-1238. Speaking of running for home…

ON THE ROAD: Was amused by the minor brouhaha when a Seattle urban-advocacy group issued a report a few weeks back claiming you’re physically safer living in town than in suburbs, ’cause we might have a few more violent crimes but they’ve got a lot more car wrecks. The suburb-lovin’ Seattle Times found a UW traffic-engineering prof to call the study flawed. He claimed the report’s methodology was insufficiently documented, and questioned its choice of neighborhoods to compare–the gentrifying upper Queen Anne vs. the sprawling, insufficiently-roaded outskirts of Issaquah. While I can buy the validity of the prof’s hesitations, I also think the report’s premise is definitely worth further study ‘n’ thought. For too long, we’ve allowed “personal safety” to be defined by interests with a decided bias against cities and walking, for suburbs and driving. I know I personally feel more secure in almost any part of Seattle than in almost any part of Bellevue. Speaking of symbols of comfort…

THE GOLDEN BOWL: You already know I think cereal, that all-time “comfort food,” is one of America’s eight or nine greatest inventions. On those rare occasions when I neglect to eat prior to leaving home in the a.m., I always look for a place with cereal on the breakfast menu. (I’m allergic to eggs, so I have few other breakfast-out options.) I was pleased when the Gee Whiz espresso palace opened near the Weathered Wall on 5th, with a modest yet tasty selection of flakes, mini-wheats and Crunch Berries. Now I’m even more pleased ’cause the Red Light Lounge is now open at 47th & U Way (at the front of the New Store’s newest annex). In a setting of classic (and increasingly expensive) diner furnishings, it offers heaping helpings (not tiny single-serve boxes) of your choice from over 50 great cereals, in beautiful oversize bowls with beautiful oversize spoons. No cartoons to watch, but you do get to look at the latest fashion magazines while you enjoy a sugar-frosted treat those emaciated models must deny themselves. Speaking of fast food and gender roles…

WHAT’S YOUR BEEF?: At a time when Burger King and McDonald’s have simultaneous Disney promos, some burger chains are indeed trying to reach adult eaters (or at least arrested-post-adolescent eaters). An Advertising Age story reports how the Rally’s chain has a TV spot (running in about 30 percent of the country but nowhere near here) that opens with a shot of a pickup truck waiting at a traffic light. As the article relates, “A convertible pulls up with a guy driving and two beautiful babes aboard. `What’s he got that I ain’t got?’ the pickup driver says to his friend, who responds matter-of-factly, `he’s probably got a Big Buford.’ The driver stares downward in astonishment: `Look at the size of that thing!’ `We see the women in the car suggestively eating their giant Big Buford hamburgers. `You like ’em big, huh?’ the driver says to one of the women. `It’s not the size,’ she says coyly. `It’s the taste, stupid.'”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder this from the late great Erma Bombeck: “Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.”

UPDATE: Some months back I named the Wallingford Food Giant Seattle’s best full-size supermarket. Since then, the north end’s been abuzz w/rumors that the place was being sold to Alfalfa’s, the out-of-state yuppie health-food chain. Not so, insists FG management.

THE MAILBAG: I can say the most outrageous things and get no response (perhaps because, as I’ve learned, some folks just assume I’m kidding); while the slightest throwaway gag can cause the most irate responses. Like my little joke about Vancouver’s new Ford Theatre. I’ll readily accept the letter writers’ assertions that Canadians probably know more about American history than Americans know about Canadian history–or than Americans know about American history. I know enough about Canada to endorse DOA singer Joey Shithead’s campaign for the BC legislature (can’t ya see it, “The Honourable M.L.A. Shithead”?). On a related note…

CANADIAN CATHODE CORNER: Canada, especially Vancouver, is gaining awareness as the prime filming site for exploitation TV dramas. I wouldn’t be surprised if next fall Fox aired more Canadian-made prime-time hours than Canadian network CTV. I also wouldn’t be surprised if sci-fi conventions started circulating “fan fiction” stories in which the universes of all the Vancouver-filmed shows (X-Files, Strange Luck, Sliders, Profit, et al.) collided at a dimensional gateway somewhere near the Cambie St. Bridge.

REFLEX, RIP: The regional visual-art tabloid was great while it lasted, and (particularly under first editor Randy Gragg) provided frequent glimpses into the peculiar jargon of art-crit (‘tho sometimes I wished they’d run a glossary of terms). It illuminated issues surrounding the corporate/ institutional art world and the role of creative individuals therein. And it gave many artists precious review clippings. But it was never all it could be, or all its community needed. Its bimonthly schedule meant it could never recommend a show while it was still up. Its nonprofit-bureaucratic structure meant it was eternally begging for gifts from the same funding sources as the artists the paper advocated.

AD VERBS: Still recovering from its old pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads, Subaru is turning toward marketing at specific market segments. As part of this, it’ll soon run specially-designed ads in lesbian magazines, touting its autos as the perfect acoutrement to a practical, sensible Womanlove lifestyle. Meanwhile, Elvira (aka Cassandra Peterson) has quit as a Coors spokeswitch–not due to Coors’ support of right-wing causes but ’cause indie brewery Beverage International offered to market her own line of Elvira Brews. Look for the first bottles in test markets by July.

LET ‘EM GO: EastsideWeek’s new “Independent Republic of the Eastside” promotion sounds a bit like certain secessionist movements in Montana and Idaho, or at least like these pro-sprawl “new county” movements across the Cascade foothills. On the good side, the promotion (devised largely by editor Skip Berger) calls into question the “community spirit” of folks who’ve moved to the burbs precisely to avoid civic commitment, to drive from office park to mall to cul-de-sac without feeling any expressed need for “public space.” And it gives Berger a chance to question some assumptions about suburban growth by offering alternatives: “Will we become Paris, Rome, Venice, or Orange County?” (Place your own joke answer here.)

DOME SWEET DOME: What to do with the Kingdome, with no baseball in three years and possibly no football? (The NFL’s hinted at demanding a new arena in return for keeping or replacing the Seahawks.) The obvious is to keep it for auto shows and tractor pulls, and as an exhibit annex for the Convention Center. The county’s been planning this anyway.

I say, let’s go build two new stadia, with as much private money as possible. Make the football field convertible for NHL hockey; make both convertible for trade shows.

Then take the existing Kingdome, gut its current interior, and rebuild it into the living and recreation space of the future. A World’s Fair domed-city fantasy made real, or a pansexual “intentional community” utopia. Level upon level of PoMo condos around the concourses, looking onto an indoor plaza and celebration zone. The mind reels with the possibilities! (Got any fantasy Dome uses of your own? Send ’em here.)

IT’S TYPOGRAPHICAL MAKEOVER WEEK here at Misc., the pop-cult column that’s ever-so-slightly confused by Tropicana orange juice’s big promotion for Apollo 13 videos. Shouldn’t the Tang people be doing this instead?

SORRY, ALL YOU CLEVER MUSIC PEOPLE: Hate to tell ya, but there’s already a band named Mad Cow Disease. It’s an indie-label industrial combo (latest import CD: Tantric Sex Disco) formed in 1990 in a mostly-rural part of England where herds were already suffering from the deadly epidemic, years before authorities discovered it could spread to humans.

AIR CHECK: Two more attempts at pirate radio operations are now underway, joining the existing FUCC collective in the few open slots on the FM band. “KXTC” (info: 587-9487) hopes to be on the air next Monday night at 89.9, for once-a-week broadcasts of dance and house music. And “Seattle Liberation Radio” (PO Box 85541, Seattle 98145), a group of some 12 local political and cultural advocates, wants to start a full-time unlicensed station to primarily transmit alternative news and talk programming under the slogan, “End Corporate Hegemony of Media.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I’ve previously mentioned Dan Halligan’s approximately-quarterly punkzine 10 Things Jesus Wants You to Know. But the new issue #13 particularly stands out, due to Katrina Hellbusch’s essay “A Friend No Longer.” In explicit, downbeat, name-naming detail, Hellbusch (a member of the local punk band Outcast) writes about passing out drunk at a party, awakening to find herself being raped by a close friend (a member of another local punk band). Never straining for exploitation or self-pity, Hellbusch vividly images a crime in which the assailant degraded himself to a subhuman state and tried to shove his victim there with him. She also begs (but doesn’t specifically ask) what this means about the punk scene–whether it’s an excuse for self-styled Bad Boys to be rowdy without rules, or whether it is (or oughta be) a closer-knit community of people who cooperate with and protect one another. Free at Fallout and Cellophane Square, among other dropoff sites, or $2 from 1407 NE 45th St., #17, Seattle 98105.

ONE, ETC., FOR THE ROAD: Recently, at two different occasions among two different sets of people, the topic arose about whether one could bar-hop in Seattle hitting only places with numbers in their names, in numerical order. I think I’ve figured how. Some of these places are far apart so you’ll need wheels (as always, be sure to have a designated driver and always drink responsibly):

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

* Either the Two Bells (2313 4th Ave.), 2 Dagos From Texas (2601 1st Ave.), or the 211 Club (2304 2nd Ave.)

* Either the 318 Tavern (318 W Nickerson), or one of the two unrelated Triangle Taverns (1st Ave. S. or 3507 Fremont Pl. N.)

* Either the Four Mile Tavern (15215 Aurora Ave. N.), the Four B’s (4300 Leary Way NW), the Four Seas Restaurant (714 S. King St.), or the lounge at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel (1300 4th Ave.).

* Either the 5 Spot (1502 Queen Anne Ave. N.), the 5 Point (415 Cedar St.), Zak’s 5th Ave. Saloon (206 5th Ave. N.), or the Old 5th Ave. Tavern (8507 5th Ave. NE).

* Either the Six Arms (600 E. Pine St.), the Six Eleven (611 2nd Ave.), or the 6th Ave. Bar & Grill (2000 6th Ave.).

* Either Cafe Septiéme (214 Broadway E.), or the 7th Ave. Tavern (705 NW 70th St.).

* The Speakeasy Cafe (2306 2nd Ave.), home of the Internet site for Dom Cappello’s Cafe 8Ball comic.

* Either the Gay 90s (700 Pike), or the bar formerly known as The Nine (now the Family Affair, 234 Fairview Ave. N.).

That’s about it sequentially. With the end of Rosellini’s Four-10 and Six-10, the closest thing to a “10” joint is the Tenya Japanese Restaurant (936 3rd Ave.). Then you’d have to skip a couple to get to the 13 Coins.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try the Hershey’s Cookies and Creme bar (yum-my!), giggle at the new Mercedes 4 x 4 (ugg-ly!), and ponder these inscrutable words credited to Winston Churchhill: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.”

Numbness and Ennui at Sea-Tac:

With the Mainliners at Airport Nation

Article for The Stranger, 3/22/96

Don’t go to Sea-Tac on I-5. All you get to see is that weird flashing time-and-temperature sign bearing the airport’s name about half a mile from the place, making you think you’re closer to your destination than you really are.

Instead, take 4th Ave. S., E. Marginal Way, and Pacific Highway S. It’s a route fully lined with the homey, rugged beauty that is Industrial America; warehouses, the original Costco, used-car lots, gun shops, a McDonald’s with a kiddie playland inside, strip joints (including the county’s only current male strippers), a church, a cemetary, a Larry’s Market, and a bowling alley.

Then you suddenly enter a world of big bland motor hotels, rental-car lots, and squatty black-glass office buildings. You have arrived at a destination only peripherally connected to Seattle or Puget Sound. Just as an embassy is legally the “soil” of its sponsoring nation, every major airport is a node of Airport Nation.

Some people work in Airport Nation. Some people merely visit Airport Nation–the tourists, family travelers and others who make an increasing part of the flying populace. And some unfortunates live in it–the business travelers, the itinerant scholars, those who go from airport to plane to airport to plane, staying at airport hotels, gathering in airport convention halls, and seldom getting to visit the cities or towns the airports purportedly service. USA Today was created to be the “hometown” paper for Airport Nation; its biggest sales come from discounted bulk copies sold to airlines and hotels.

Much has been written about how jet travel has helped make the world smaller. Not too much has been written about how it’s imposed its own order on the world. Some of the professors who live in Airport Nation, at least part of the year, will yammer endlessly about how TV or fast food is to blame for the blanding-down of society, but air travel, and the numbing aesthetic surrounding it, may play a far greater yet unsung role in the homogenization of America.

And much of that aesthetic, I’m sorry to say, is our own Nor’wester creation. Boeing, its engineers, its designers, and the consultants it shares with the airlines have all spent the past four decades selling their service as something safe, convenient, and pleasant. They’ve done everything to try and get folks to forget they’re stuck in a small chair inside a big aluminum tube for hours on end. From the interior color schemes to the sound of the air-recirculation units, every aspect of the in-flight experience exists to lull people into a passive, semi-hypnotic state. They can’t really control the screaming baby in front of you or the jabbering sorority girls in back of you, but they try.

The airport aesthetic is an extension of the in-flight aesthetic. The air is as quiet and lifeless as can be engineered. Aside from PA announcements, you hear little but real Muzak, mellow adult-contemporary music, or whooshy silence (with one exception, which we’ll get to). It not only muffles the energy of all those people going all those places, it extends the airline trance state as long as possible. Those who go straight from the terminal into courtesy vans sending them directly to the airport hotels may never fully leave the trance state.

The airport aesthetic also helps ease the shock of ending a day in a different sector of Earth than the one you awoke in. Airport terminals look essentially alike. Airport restaurants, hotels, and convention facilities look even more alike. It can take the souvenir stands to tell you where you’re at. At Sea-Tac, the souvenirs range from the ridiculous at the regular gift stands (chocolate slugs, “Sleepless in Seattle” coffee mugs (still), totem pole pencil sharpeners, Space Needle ring-toss snow domes) to the ridiculously “sublime” at the highbrow shops (relentlessly “casual” earth-tone clothes, the ubiquitous glass art).

The outer public spaces at Sea-Tac are all so big and tall and wide and out of human scale. Black everywhere. Not the black of punk or of Johnny Cash, but the black of Nixon’s suits, the black intended to make pudgy businessmen feel powerful in their selflessness.

The oversized corridors are decorated mostly with the big, offensively “inoffensive” work that gives public art such a bad name. (The closest thing to an exception: the comic-strip mural promoting recycling, with our pal Mark Zingarelli trying valiantly to breathe life into a tired detective-parody script burdened with lame latté jokes.)

And don’t bother looking for stimulating creativity in the rotating art-exhibit area either; it’s all Pilchuck Glass. Fortunately, the glass is right next to the non-denominational “Meditation Lounge,” where you can pray for the strength to walk back past it without going mad.

Once past the demarcation of the outer and inner public areas by the metal detectors, the carefully established lull is broken by banks of TV monitors situated right at the gates where people can’t escape, all blaring the CNN Airport Network. Five-minute segments of news briefs and canned features. Ads for domestic cars, tires, and razors. In another sign of the changing airline market there’s quite a lack of businessman-oriented advertising anywhere on the airport premises, compared to the past. The most notable exception comes hourly on the monitors, when CNN Airport is interrupted by an airport-sponsored fake news report about the future of Sea-Tac, in which a half dozen well-dressed white people offer sound bites in unanimous support of the controversial proposed third runway.

The restaurants and most of the retail spaces are run by one company, Host International. This arrangement not only adds to the sameness of everything, it adds to the prices; every meal and trinket includes an unspecified surcharge to defray Host International’s lease fees.

In keeping with the post-deregulation “democratization” of air travel and the “lean n’ mean” spirit of modern business, much of the available food is of the fast variety, served in harshly fluorescent-lit cafeteria settings, including abbreviated Taco Bell and Pizza Hut menus.

But Host International has maintained one refuge for those preferring a more leisurely style of dining. The Carvery is a classic ’50s-style executive steakhouse, completely preserved in its unmodernized state, from the scarlet-velvet walls to the fake British heraldry to the fake fireplace. Cocktails are available, despite the prominent wine list on every table; bourbon-on-the-rocks is recommended. The Carvery’s only concession to modernity is the presence of a few “Healthy Choice” options on the scarlet menu. The Carvery is a surviving remnant of an earlier age in jet travel: an age of stable airlines charging regulated fares, of male sales execs and three-martini politicians in comfy seats sharing naughty remarks about pert stewardesses while watching in-flight movies from real 16mm projectors, of the original Cocktail Culture. Today, The Carvery’s big windows overlook the taxiways of Horizon Air, a low-fare, short-haul, no-meals, express commuter line.

The other big throwback to the days of flying past is the Museum of Flight Store, an extension of and promo for the partly-Boeing-backed museum at Boeing Field. The store offers fun and educational memorabilia of air travel, from nostalgic Pan Am 747 model kits to exquisite reproduction wood propellers to freeze-dried Astronaut Food ice cream. There are even refrigerator magnets with old United Airlines logos promoting its early transcontinental routes as “Coast to Coast Mainliners.”

Back when that slogan was coined, shortly after United was spun off from Boeing, flying was a novelty and an adventure. United still used Mainliner as the name of its inflight magazine into the mid-’60s, when three-martini flying was nearing its peak and “mainlining” gained a new meaning here on Earth. Today, more and more of us are mainlining on the drug-like state of tripping through Airport Nation. And while jet travel, like some other drugs, has lost some of the exclusive cachet it once held, it still holds an ability to entrance and seduce its users, some of whom never quite escape its grip.

The route to Sea-Tac described at the top of this story is that taken by Metro routes 174 and 184. The express route 194 uses I-5, as do the $7.50 Grey Line Airporter (626-6088), leaving throughout the day from downtown Seattle hotels, and the Shuttle Express (622-1424), which will pick you up from most anywhere in town. And while airfares are now deregulated, taxi fares from downtown to Sea-Tac are standardized at $30 a carload.

CATHODE CORNER: After a little under two months on the air, the NorthWest Cable News channel can politely be termed on a “shakedown cruise”. What oughta be a brisk, informative roundup of regional happennings is instead a clumsy repackaging of footage from the four King Broadcasting stations. The same stories are rerun hour after hour, often with only the weather updated. I won’t talk about the evening sports guy, a comedian-wannabe who spends more time on unfunny gags than on the games. Still, it’s intriguing to hear about economic conditions in Spokane (lousy) and last month’s Oregon Senate race (wacky). I remember the semipro beginnings of CNN and ESPN, so I’ll let NWCN grow into its role. Others, like TCI customers who lost CBC for NWCN, might not be as charitable. I do sorta like how they insist on spelling “NorthWest” with software-marketing style “intercaps;” it’s a way of proclaiming your media market as a virtual nation, like when the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland.” Speaking of media institutions…

FALLLING FLAT: The most inadvertantly fascinating part of last month’s PBS Fight Over Citizen Kane documentary was Wm. Randolph Hearst’s creaky newsreel sermon against FDR’s increases to upper-bracket income taxes. It reminded me a lot of Steve Forbes’s flat tax nonsense. Both publishers’ tactics use populist rhetoric to promote the self-interests of the wealthy, particularly those with significant inherited wealth such as themselves. The comparisons go beyond there. Forbes and Hearst are/ were party-lovin’ men-about-town known to hobnob with movie stars. Hearst’s papers provided a self-contained information system, in which no voice too far from his own worldview got heard or respected. Forbes’s magazines haven’t gone that far, but the right-media universe of talk radio, televangelists and opinion magazines (whose support the GOP candidates are courting) fulfill Hearst’s formula better than the old man could have imagined.

(If anyone saved a copy of Forbes’s short-lived entertainment-fashion mag Egg, I’d love to borrow it. It could potentially be a hoot.)

THE MATS: Once the media consolidation bill (the one Net censorship was tacked onto) was signed, the Disney/ ABC and Time Warner/ Turner Broadcasting merger plans went “on” again. The latter deal was protested in an NY Times ad: “Attention TBS Stockholders: Does Ted Turner have a personal vendetta against the World Wrestling Federation? Time Warner Beware!” Turner’s properties happen to include a rival faux-sport circuit, World Championship Wrestling. WCW scored a coup a couple years back when it signed Hulk Hogan, formerly WWF’s #1 star. I’m foggy on the details, but I believe there was tangled legal wrangling before Hogan was freed to use his stage name (which WWF had trademarked) on WCW shows. Methinks the WWF guys take their stage bombast too seriously.

ROOM AT THE TOP?: The gentrification of upper Queen Anne has gone into overdrive. On one block alone a hobby shop, a café, a bakery, a state liquor store, and a pharmacy have perished to make room for as many as seven espresso emporia and two bagel stands. And you know a neighborhood’s gone out of our hands when San Franciscans open ridiculously sublime restaurant/ nightclubs there (Paragon). Queen Anne News writer Robin Hamilton’s taking it in stride. Writing about a co-marketing arrangement between Starbucks and its new QA neighbor Noah’s Bagels, Hamilton shows her knowledge of Jewish lore in explaining how “Noah’s will play Ruth to Starbucks’ Naomi.”

PLAYING MONOPOLY: A fight for the hearts and minds of America’s youth ended with Mattel withdrawing its $5.2 billion hostile-takeover bid for Hasbro (which went on its own acquisition spree a few years back and owns Playskool, Romper Room, Selchow & Righter, and Milton Bradley). Re-create the excitement at home with your handy Barbie vs. GI Joe land war playset… Meanwhile, Hasbro’s lawyers keep upping demands for reparations against a Seattle-based adult website for using the name “candyland.com,” claiming it could be confused with the Candy Land game. If I wanted a porno-pun on a board game, it wouldn’t be that. Maybe Chutes & Ladders, or Go to the Head of the Class…

Food for Thought on Cannibal Movies:

Bite Me

Film essay for The Stranger, 1/31/96

In the horror and horror-farce genres, vampirism is widely considered much cooler than cannibalism. Cannibals are messy and dismember their prey. Vampires simply exchange bodily fluids, in the process converting their prey into new members of the vampire species.

Yet in real life, vampirism is at best a matter of legend and historical conjecture. Cannibalism, on the other limb, is a well-documented practice of historic and indigenous societies around the world. Yes, devouring one’s own species violates the cardinal rule of the food chain; but people have gotten around that through the familiar-to-this-day shtick of declaring enemy tribes to be something less than human. Indeed, in some ancient communities consuming the flesh of a vanquished enemy warrior was/is said to give your warriors the strength or magic the enemy had.

Over the years, many directors have understood the shock potential of cannibalism as one of the cruelest one-on-one crimes imaginable, a crime that robs its perpetrators of their last claim to membership in their own species. In the docudrama Alive (1993) and the PBS documentary The Donner Party (1991), groups of people are trapped in the wilderness and must save their lives by eating their dead comrades, keeping their own bodies alive but destroying their souls. In Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), the eating of human flesh is the only violent act the Thief can’t bring himself to commit.

Let’s examine some of the film formulae that have incorporated cannibalism. Note that I don’t count films like Little Shop of Horrors,Lair of the White Worm, or the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man;” the victims in those stories are eaten but by non-human creatures.

Sociological drama. The native cannibal-warrior tradition was, of course, exploited and spoofed in countless Hollywood adventure features as recently as Conan the Barbarian (1982). It’s also the theme of what I feel is the best cannibal movie ever made, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971; just now on video). Set in the early years of Brazil’s colonization as seen through Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s modern anti-colonial eyes, it’s the comic tragedy of a French sailor who gets captured by an Amazon tribe. He’s given a wife and lives as one of the villagers until the next ritual feast, when he’s scheduled to be communally devoured. He learns the local language and tries to sell himself as a shaman of European war magic (gunpowder), but all efforts to convince the tribe he’s worth more to them alive than dead prove futile. The “fleshy” aspect of the story is enhanced by the fact that everybody’s nude (including, after the first half hour, the Frenchman).

Thomas Harris’s character Hannibal Lecter is partly a return to the warrior notion of cannibalism. In Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its lesser-known predecessor Manhunter (1986), Hannibal is a rogue warrior without a tribe. He gnaws on his still-living prey (a quite inefficient way to kill) not for sustenance but to uncage the animalistic spirit that makes him capable of his crimes.

In a different modernization of the warrior-cannibal theme, the middle-class revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front in Godard’s satire Weekend (1967) took the then-emerging hippie notion of “going native” to its logical extreme. Proclaiming that “the horror of the state can only be answered by horror,” these terrorist wannabes proclaim their return to a “natural,” anti-industrial way of life by dining on captured bourgeois picnickers.

Big-budget exploitation. Richard Fleischer should’ve been happy to live off the Betty Boop merchandising he inherited from his dad Max. Instead, he became a hack director of grim action films. When Fleischer fils adapted Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green (1973), he decided the book’s way-overpopulated world wasn’t grim enough. So he added cannibalism. In the novel, “Soylent Green” is a foodstuff made of soybeans and lentils. In the movie, as grim detective Charlton Heston discovers, it’s secretly made from reprocessed humans. Why’s it a secret? Imagine the shock when you tell your vegan friend about the beef gelatin in the Altoid she’s sucking, and multiply it by 40 million irritable 21st Century New Yorkers.

Low-budget exploitation. In a trend starting in 1963 and peaking around 1973-74, cheapo-horror makers found cannibalism a good excuse for gore effects the big studios wouldn’t dare. Herschell Gordon Lewis has said that he turned from directing nudies to gore movies like Blood Feast (1963) and The Undertaker and his Pals (1967) as a marketable genre the big studios wouldn’t muscle in on. After Lewis left films for a more “legitimate” career in direct-mail marketing, his legacy was continued in Deranged, Red Meat, Cannibals in the Streets, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Shriek of the Mutilated, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (a.k.a. Terror on the Menu), and a score of direct-to-video shockers.

Foreigners got into the game too, like Jess Franco (White Cannibal Queen) and Joe D’Amato (Grim Reaper). Even Peter Cushing, in his pre- Star Wars career lull, chased after a people-eating killer in The Ghoul (1975).

From within this cycle of trashy flesh-feast films came the cannibal zombies of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968; followed by two sequels and one remake). Romero’s filmmaking skills (and sense of dark humor) set his work several notches above most others. He also gave a purpose to his gore. His speechless, pathetic killers are essentially grosser versions of vampires, gnawing on the still-living less to feed than to infect, to convert them to the zombie way. In a twist on the food-chain paradigm, the zombies enlarge their species by dining on ours. Romero’s cannibal lore was parodied in the Return of the Living Dead series, but his own films contain enough sick gags to make any spoofs superfluous.

Comedy and satire. Indeed, people-meat has often been treated for high and low humor. Some films use cannibalism for non-nutritive guffaws and sick sight gags, such as in the Rory Calhoun/ Wolfman Jack vehicle Motel Hell (1980).

But it can also be used for fun with a purpose, to reveal human nature by depicting inhuman acts. In Parents (1989), people-eating is a metaphor for the messy realities hidden behind ’50s suburban “family values.” In Eating Raoul (1982), it’s the logical extreme of an emerging yuppie class proclaiming itself a superior species to (and hence higher in the food chain than) those crude unsophisticate masses.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (1979) was based on a British legend (filmed as straight horror by UK horror master Tod Slaughter in 1936). Sondheim turned a story of deviance into a celebration of survival, with his downtrodden, disenfranchised London street people learning to literally “eat the rich.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s elegant Delicatessen (1993) posits a post-apocalyptic future similar to Sweeney Todd‘s Victorian past, but without the class consciousness. Without class solidarity the survivors have to settle for small-group solidarity, with anyone from outside the delicatessen and its upstairs apartments treated literally as fair “game.” Made during the rise of the global financier-led Right and after the fall of socialism, it posits a future where only love and laughter can free us from the futility of rugged individualism. That’s a warning one can really sink one’s teeth into.

MISC.’S GOTTA HAND IT to a guy we usually like to discredit, Ollie Stone. Imagine–getting accused of tarnishing the memory of Richard Nixon!

GAME THEORY: Like other segments of fantasy/ fanboy culture, video games have either failed to attract a significant female following or never tried too hard. Some would see say it proves girls are too smart for such idiocy; others would rant about inequity and girls being prevented from growing up to become fighter pilots. Still others see an opportunity, like American Laser Games, a shoot-’em-up game firm now expanding with the Her Interactive line.

Dunno, ‘tho, about Her’s first title, McKenzie & Co. In it, according to a Variety review, you take the role of one of two “practically-perfect teenage girls,” a gymnast/ cheerleader or an aspiring actress. (“McKenzie” is the nickname of the Geo Tracker the girls take to The Mall.) Your task: “Try to get cozy with one of four dreamy guys when you’re not shopping, gossiping, trying on tons of new clothes, or putting on makeup.” In one segment, your character tries to arrange a prom date but faces turmoil “when your dream date asks you to go out with him at the same time you promised to help your grandmother do volunteer work at a hospital.” You also have to deal with “non-beautiful people like Wenda Wencke, a fish-rights activist who declares `Free the Fish’ and carries a dead carp which she hugs like a teddy bear.” It comes on five CD-ROMs (one for the main game, one for each of four dream dates) and also includes an audio CD, a mini-lipstick, and a discount coupon for two more dreamy-guy disks.

I’ve never claimed anything was wrong with beauty, or with safe fantasy outlets for nascent heterosexual stirrings. But this game glorifies the very type of “popular girl” everybody in my high school loathed. I may not have ever been “dreamy” but I’d have rather hung out with the fish girl than one of these stuck-ups.

VIRGINIA’S DARE: Belltown’s venerable Virginia Inn has evolved from a workingman’s bar in the ’70s to an art bar in the ’80s to a lawyers’ bar in the ’90s, adding deli sandwiches and going smoke-free along the way. Last month it evolved again, becoming probably Washington’s first free-standing full cocktail lounge since Prohibition. It’s all thanks to a little-publicized liberalization of the state liquor laws last summer. Full-liquor-service joints still have to offer food under the revised law, but they don’t have to maintain separate restaurant rooms or uphold the old minimum ratio of food to booze sales.

The old law was installed at the behest of big steak-house operators with major political connections (one of whom, Al Rosellini, became a two-term Democratic governor). It served to stifle creative nightlife as well as smaller restaurants. But changing tastes toward lighter eats and lighter drinks reduced the sirloin-and-Scotch lobby’s power. The new law comes just in time for nightspots to try and exploit the Cocktail Nation craze. It’s already allowed places like Moe’s, the Off Ramp, and the Easy concentrate on music and beverages instead of striving to push up food volume. I just hope the VI continues to use beer glasses in its annual glass-painting benefit for the Pike Place Market Foundation. It’s harder to get elaborate designs on a shot glass.

DROP THAT METAPHOR DEPT. (Bastyr Naturopathic Univ. trustee Merrily Manthey, quoted in that big 1/3 NY Times story on the King County Council’s project to start a subsidized alternative-health center): “This clinic we’re trying to set up here will be the Starbucks of the health care world.” Will it offer red-and-black designer colostomy bags, or Holiday Blend prescriptions? Will it dispense spitcups in regular and grande sizes? (I know it won’t serve lattes; the standard naturopathic diet forbids dairy products, along with meat and wheat.) More seriously, will it become a brand name known for adequate but unexceptional work within standardized bland surroundings?

Could be worse, metaphorwise. I recall the unfortunate street-poster slogan used in the mid-’80s by Capitol Hill’s otherwise admirable Aradia Women’s Health Center: “Are you tired of the sterile environment of a doctor’s office?”