As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists

Student Food:

Don’t Demand Better

Essay for the Stranger, 9/27/95

The most important rule to eating on a student’s budget: Don’t learn to expect better. While you’re (I hope) training your mind to discern ever more subtle gradients of thought, don’t train your palate to demand more than you can now afford to eat. I know microbrew drinkers who order at least one Bud (or even Schaffer) per drinking session, so they don’t lose tolerance for the cheaper grain-water. The same principle goes with solid food. You can get some gourmet restaurant entrees for the price of a CD, but too many and you’ll be miserable with what you have to eat the rest of the time. If you must eat fancy, join an ethnic-studies club that makes joint meals or take an Experimental College cooking class.

Much of what I say won’t apply to dorm residents, who face limited facilities and space for preparing their own meals. Even then, there are alternatives to the dorm cafeteria. Like an artist I know who’s not supposed to live in her work studio but does anyway, you can sneak in a mini-microwave and/or a hotplate. Even without a mini-freezer to store stuff, you can stock up on unfrozen microwave foods like Top Shelf and buy the occasional Michelena’s or Healthy Choice goodie for same-day use.

If and when you get kitchen access, such as in a rental house, a universe of modest eating opportunities awaits, including that monthly ritual of the shared household, The Costco Run! Giant sizes of everything: pre-made salad in a bag, cereal, crackers, Danish cookie tins, five-pound packs of hot dogs, and all the free samples of gourmet frozen entrees you can eat. But remember, it’s no bargain if you can’t eat it all before it spoils or you can’t stand the sight of it anymore.

More conveniently sized bargains await at dollar stores. You can’t get a complete diet there but you can stock up on pasta and sauce, canned veggies, foil-pouch juice drinks, and assorted oriental noodle products. TopRamen, Cup Noodles, Bowl Noodle, etc. have long been the choice for many who prefer to spend little time eating and no time cooking. But beware, before long you’ll confront one of food’s great mysteries: What is “Oriental Flavor”? Best answer I heard had something to do with a line in the prologue of You Only Live Twice.

You can go beyond convenience into real cooking, yet stay in budget, with the student eater’s secret weapons: Calrose rice, beans, pasta, curry, stew (I had a housemate who ate from the same ongoing stewpot all week and spent the money he saved on Glenlivet), restaurant-supply stores like Serco and Pacific Food Importers, bakery outlet stores (closest to the U: Oroweat in lower Wallingford), and knowing where the more obscure bargains are. Your first tip: the big bags of “unfortunate fortune cookies” at the House of Rice on the Ave. Good hunting, and good eating.

Following are the results of Misc.’s quest for the best grocery stores in Seattle, by weight class. While these are my personal views, thanks for all your suggestions. These listings leave out organic co-ops and gourmet delis — I wouldn’t know how to judge such places. (For the record, Central Co-op got more votes than any other hippie store.) I also wasn’t looking for wine stores with vestigial food departments (sorry, Louie’s on the Pike). Oddly, only one letter recommended anything in the Pike Place Market (DeLaurenti’s Italian deli, with its wall of capers).

CONVENIENCE STORE: Seattle has many above-average store-lets in a genre with a pretty low average, but a particular hat tip goes to the Hillcrest Deli-Mart on Capitol Hill. A former pre-supermarket-era Safeway built in the 1920s, it’s still got a complete-enough selection of packaged goods, enough fresh stuff to bide you over until your next supermarket run, and either the best or second-best fried chicken in town; all at prices that don’t excessively punish you for avoiding supermarket crowds.

SMALL SUPERMARKET: When supermarkets first appeared as a Depression-era cost-cutting novelty, they were still small enough to fit neighborhood main streets. Every neighborhood should have one, especially if it doesn’t have a larger store (Belltown, Cascade, Georgetown, etc.). Stores like Marketime in Fremont and Red Apple in Madison Park provide everything you need (unless you’re on a special diet). Or you can stock up on staple goods at a monster store and use a store like this for perishables and restocks.

The two Ken’s (Greenwood and west Queen Anne) win overall. Lori Smith writes about the Greenwood Ken’s, “Despite its garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store, where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.” Honorable mention goes to the First Hill Shop-Rite (home of my current-fave generic cereal brand, the imitation Crispix simply called Flavorite Crispy Hexagons!).

REGULAR SUPERMARKET: Getting into the realm of the major chains, there’s still something to be said for independent spirits like Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant. Robert C. Mills calls it “the center of the known universe.” Situated in the foot-traffic heart of its area, with most of its parking spaces in a side-street auxiliary lot instead of out front, it combines the meet-n’-greet ambience of a small neighborhood store with the selection and prices of a big park-n’-gorge outlet. It’s also got a hypnotic neon sign that has a different sector on the fritz every night.

SUPERSTORE: Larry’s has its spots (the wall of cereal, all the imported South American soda pops). But there’s nothing quite like Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. On a site abandoned by Fred Meyer as too small, Art’s has built an extremely site-specific collection of perimeter departments around the brightest, boldest food selection anywhere.

Elsewhere, Ann Allen recommended Stock Market on Rainier Ave., a “warehouse look” store with a cafe section occupied by just ordinary folk. (“It’s not yuppie. It’s not bland and sterile. It’s what you want a neighborhood store to be.”) Steve Rohde recommended the ineligible Monroe Fred Meyer, but the venerable hypermarket chain has a new monster outlet in Lake City. And of course nothing can compare to the Price Costco experience (where shopping may be a baffling ordeal, but it’s great for larger households, cheap party catering, and especially for free samples).

ETHNIC: Uwajimaya is the name to beat in Asian foodstuffs, but some prefer the recently-grown cluster of Vietnamese stores at 12th and Jackson. One store there, Hop Thanh, has an in-store butcher presiding over the biggest all-pork meat dept. you ever saw. In more assimilated immigrant delights, smart consumers like Leanne Beach know the discount Italian goodies at Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, open daytime hours only on 6th Ave. S. near the INS office. Beach also likes how “They write out your bill by hand, just like an old-fashioned market!”

As promised in the Stranger, here are some of the original letters full-length:

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 17:22:21 PDT

From: THAT_GUY@eor.com (THAT GUY)

Organization: The Emerald OnRamp

Subject: Food Stores

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Favorite Ethnic Food Store: DeLaurenti (featuring a wall of capers, even!)

Favorite Superstore: The new Monroe Fred Meyer (Hate the town, but store is

great for stocking up for an Eastbound road trip.)

Favorite Mid-size Supermarket: First Hill ShopRite (I feel like I’m back in

New York when I’m in that dump.)

Favorite Checker: ‘Debbie’ at the Broadway QFC (She’s quirky yet perky.)

-Steve Rohde

aka that_guy@eor.com

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:43:10 -0700

From: Hollis Nelson <hollis@speakeasy.org>

To: clark@cyberspace.com, hollis@eve.speakeasy.org

Subject: PLENTY – the coolest, most beautiful, euphoric gourmet/organic store

There is an oasis of a gourmet food store in undiscovered Madrona called

Plenty. I must admit, I am a wine purveyor at this store, (thus the wine

selection is impeccable) but I find myself drawn this store on a daily basis. I

also happen to deliver the Stranger to them because someone in distribution at

your fine publication doesn’t “do Madrona” – but that’s a whole other tangent.

First of all, this small store is aesthetically beautiful – PCC meets

Metropolitan Home. This is due in large part to one of the owners, Rolf. Also,

not only do they have an amazing selection of specialty organic and gourmet

items, but they have Jim (former chef at Cafe Flora). He whips up the most

flavorful, dare I say yummy, unique and completely healthy meals, snacks etc.

daily. Lastly, not only do they have a beautiful enviroment, amazing selection,

and yummy food, but they have some of the nicest people due in large part to

the last of the “mod squad” owners Loree. Plenty is a must try experience – a

thousand apologies for my long windedness, but I love this place.

your biggest fan,

Hollis A. Nelson

Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 10:53:04 -0700

To: Clark@cyberspace.com

From: dsackett@newsdata.com (Daniel Sackett)

Subject: grocery markets

Upon reading your call for suggestions for the best grocery stores I felt

compelled to copy down your web site address and immediately began to

conceptualize how I could possibly communicate the sublime and gross

pleasures of shopping at Central Co-op. I once saw a documentary on Frank

Sinatra’s reign as a teen idol–the image of one panting fan saying “He’s

just so…sincere” comes to mind when I think of Central. Sure both Central

and Sinatra are sincere, but the experience is so much more. From a REAL

committment to putting out a wide, fresh and reasonably priced organic

produce selection (thanks ol’ Tom the wacky, art-crazed produce manager) to

a cornucopia of treats and staples that commercial stores pass over (yea

Rhondi!), to a staff that upon hearing the words “vegan” or “organic”

actually helps instead of staring blankly from the hollowness of their

bourgeois, status quo enslaved souls, to aesthetically soothing indirect

lighting, to cool check-out folk (Alex and the piscean guy with the wry

smile), to the occassional kitty-cat rendition of Old King Wenceslaus on the

PA, man, Central is IT. Besides, I like spending my money in a co-op instead

of feathering Joe Albertson’s corporate schemes. I believe I am what I

eat–including the experience of gathering food–and I’ve had many happy

moments shopping Central Co-op.

Date: Sat, 19 Aug 95 13:28:00 -0700

From: robert_c mills <rcmills@cac.washington.edu>

Message-Id: <9508192028.AA05447@burlap2.cac.washington.edu>

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Subject: Misc. Misc. miscellany

Food Giant – Wallingford = Center of the known universe

Non-surfing web use term = “sponging”

Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 13:16:40 -0700

From: Lisa Roosen-Runge <lrr@discovery.ca>

X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Windows; I; 16bit)

Mime-Version: 1.0

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Subject: supermarket

Here’s a suggestion – Uwajimaya (hope I spelled it correctly)

I think it should be just a supermarket, but it may fall into the ethnic

category.

It is a lot of fun – there’s a cafe, books upstairs, excellent junk food

and neat kitchen implements.

I went to the one in the “International District”, but I guess they have

other outlets as well.

I have been checking in here fairly regularly, I really appreciate you

posting your columns on the Web.

p.s. I am looking forward to the final version of your book.

From lesmith@netmedia.co.il Tue Aug 29 19:31:42 1995

Message-Id: <199508300233.CAA05166@chava.netmedia.co.il>

Date: Wed, 30 Aug 95 02:37:34 -0300

From: “Lori E. Smith” <lesmith@jer1.co.il>

X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K)

Mime-Version: 1.0

To: clark@cyberspace.com

Clark,

Re your grocery store search, I’m going to nominate Ken’s, the grocery

store at the corner of 73rd & Greenwood in that neighborhood that’s not

quite Phinney Ridge, not quite Greenwood or Greenlake and not really

Ballard either. When my family moved there in the 70s (I’m also one of

those rare Seattlites who actually have _roots_ in the city, my

great-grandfather went to the UW) Ken’s was quiet and pokey, like the

neighborhood. As it has gone uptown and yuppy so has Ken’s and you can

now get packaged sushi and all the comforts of home. But despite it’s

garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the

Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store,

where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.

Thanks for going on-line and helping to keep Seattle’s alternative

tradition alive. (One of the things I like about Seattle is that despite

the attempts of various establishments to promote Seattle’s various

environmental and civic amenities it’s the “other” side of Seattle that

always gets national press, cf the prostitutes of the boom era, the

general strike of 1919 and more recently the assorted group of drifters

from out of town who became “grunge”.)

And by the way, I like the Macintosh a lot too.

WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre’s heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens “hard chilled” (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin’ threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.)

A HEARTY GET-WELL WISH goes to art-music promoter Larry Reid. He and sometime partner Tracey Rowland were sideswiped by a car on 8/25 while driving their classic Italian scooters near Eastlake (Reid and Rowland helped run Seattle’s first scooter club in ’84). Reid hit the pavement head-first and was rushed to the hospital, where he was originally diagnosed with broken neck vertebrae. The next day an MRI scan showed just a few compressed discs. He’s home now but will have to take things easy for a while.

AD VERBS: Washington Mutual’s “Free Checking” billboard shows a checkbook with human female legs jogging at dawn. That’s not freedom, that’s rigorous discipline (which itself could be a positive metaphor for a bank, but that’s a whole other issue).

CATHODE CORNER: Harry Anderson, a member of the growing Hollywood colony out on the Puget Sound islands, wants to move production of his sitcom Dave’s World to Seattle after this upcoming season. It would be the first three-camera filmed sitcom shot outside LA since the ’50s. You can guess I don’t love the show, since I find nothing particularly amusing about the real-life Dave Barry (at least the show’s dropped the Billy Joel theme song). But after years of Florida trying to take away the Mariners (presumably over, now that it looks like Tampa’s getting an expansion team), it’d be fun to have a show set in Miami but made here.

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: Dallas kid Scott Glazer’s Page of Evil, <<http://rampages.onramp.net/~scottgl/index.htm>>, contains an almost Shavian lambaste of fantasy-novel hack Piers Anthony: “Some (fantasy) authors start with the germ of a good idea in the first book of a series and grind it down to pure crap as the books wear on…. (Anthony) has the courage and wisdom to eliminate the hard work that comes along with coming up with that good idea, instead skipping to unmitigated smegma from book one, page one…. The number of books in the Xanth series has been proven to be equinumerous with aleph-zero; in other words, infinite. This is possible because it actually takes a negative amount of time to produce a Xanth novel.”

ALL YOU’LL EVER HEAR ME SAY ABOUT WINDOWS 95: Leno really was the perfect choice to emcee the Windows hypefest in Darkest Redmond (the talk-show host who’s almost as good as Letterman but not really, shilling for the operating software that’s almost as good as the Mac OS but not really). Still, I understand why Windows 95 could be considered a significant introduction in some quarters. So many people have been suckered into using Windows, and have been so frustrated by it over the past five years or so, that the promise of a Windows version that sucks even a little less is cause for celebration among ’em…. In other MS news, the company denies its talks about pouring money into Turner Broadcasting have anything to do with Turner’s desire to raise cash for a raid on CBS. Some observers called MS’s statement a retraction worded so it could itself be retracted later.

GROCERY UPDATE: You’ve got another week to send your recommendations for Seattle’s best food stores, in the convenience, small-supermarket (under 10,000 sq. ft.), regular-supermarket, superstore (over 20,000 sq. ft.) and ethnic categories. More info is at the Misc. World HQ website. Organizers of the mass letter-writing campaign on behalf of a certain gourmet boutique in Madrona may stop now.

THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.

The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.

Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.

One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.

JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.

YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.

CLARIFICATION: When I said the branch of the Left that the local Freedom Socialist Party descended from was now the least-active aspect of the Left, I should’ve added that the FSP is a major active player in comparison to other outfits with the S-word in their names.

WHAT A CROC: Somebody opened a Crocodile Cafe in Bellevue Square. It’s not only unrelated to the Seattle Crocodile, but our Croc only found out about it when the mom of a Bellevue Croc worker called the Seattle Croc demanding to speak to her daughter. The Seattle Croc was originally to have been called the Live Bait Lounge (as listed on pre-opening posters), until owner Stephanie Dorgan (an ex-lawyer) made a trademark search and found the “Live Bait” name was already owned by some joint on the east coast.

NOMENCLATURE DEPT.: While recently heading back to the safety of town from Darkest Redmond, feeling the sensations of comfort I always feel when I make it to the west side of the bridge, I tried to devise an alternative to Tricia Romano’s description of suburban dance-club goers in a recent Stranger as “tunnel people.” That’s a term used by Manhattanites to insult those who live in other NYC boroughs or Jersey. If we have to use an NYC term to describe Eastsiders, it oughta be one based on the NYC meaning of the name “Bellevue” (look it up). I suggest “floaters.” It symbolizes not only the floating bridges and certain airheaded attitudes, but also compares the suburban everywhere/nowhere experience to the old Japanese floating world, the culture of aristocrats and courtesans who traveled around in leisure, unconnected to the land surrounding them…. More suggested new terms for Net use: “schlepping,” “tangling,” “netting off,” “cavorting,” “crawling,” “gallivanting,” and my fave-of-the-week “hydroplaning.”

DIY-TV VS. THE OLD ORDER: KOMO Town Meeting host Ken Schram has never let the details get in the way of contrived moralistic posturing. Latest example: the “threat or menace?” episode about public access cable. Producers of access shows that, in Schram’s staff’s opinion, weren’t “controversial enough” didn’t get to be on the show. He ignored all the religious, political, cultural and just-plain folksy shows so he could use a few examples of body parts and bad words as an excuse to call for censoring access (i.e., reining in an alternative to corporate media like KOMO). The way he did it just proved one reason why people are increasingly looking for alternatives to corporate media. His attempted bombast was frequently attacked and occasionally deflated by a studio audience packed with media-manipulation-savvy access producers (betcha never thought you’d see Philip Craft (Political Playhouse), Donna Marie (Hot Tub TV) and the Rev. Bruce Howard in the same place at the same time!).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: AriZona iced teas, previously mentioned here, now come in bottles. The one to get is the ginseng flavor, with the most exquisite blue bottle, useful for dried-floral arrangements and as future yard-sale bricabrac.

GETTIN’ BUFFALOED: Found a flyer on orange paper on a downtown street, purportedly from the National Park Service. It warns Yellowstone visitors not to not approach park buffalo: “Many visitors have been gored by buffalo. Buffalo can weigh 2000 pounds and can sprint at 30 mph, three times faster than you can run. These animals may appear tame but are wild, unpredictable, and dangerous.” At the bottom is a line drawing of a camera-toting tourist being tossed into the air from a buffalo head-butt. Some folks I’ve shown it to think the flyer has to be a fraud done up by those Cacophany Society people or types like them. But I wouldn’t get close to a buffalo anyway.

HE’S NOT BAD, HE’S JUST DRAWN THAT WAY: An Olympia guy was arrested in Tacoma for trafficking in stolen animation cels. The fun part of the story came when the deadpan cops in a press conference monotoned in perfect lifeless Joe Friday-ese about the perpetrator and the evidence while surrounded by bright acetate paintings of Fred and Barney. The real fun part came when KING revealed that Hanna-Barbera cels legitimately released to the collector market contain a seal of authenticity, which contains a sample of Joe Barbera’s DNA!

Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.

PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…

THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…

LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!

Welcome back to Misc., the column that just can’t get into that latest filmed-in-Seattle TV show, Under One Roof. If the James Earl Jones character’s supposed to be a veteran Seattle cop, howcum he never mentions whether or not he ever worked with Frasier’s dad?

GODDESS AND MAMMON DEPT.: You may already know how self-help, “new age” counseling and personal therapy have become big business. They’re so big now, the conglomerates are circling to take it over from the entrepreneurs that started it. The publishing conglomerates have muscled in on the new-age book scene, sometimes buying up titles originally issued by independent publishers. NBC’s got a (surprisingly good) new-age talk show, The Other Side. The major record labels are purportedly looking to start imprints for meditation tapes and light-instrumental CDs. And, according to the Wall St. Journal, none other than the Walt Disney Co. is getting into the seminar/ retreat game. The Disney Institute will open next year on a previously-undeveloped part of Disney World’s 50 or so square miles. It’ll offer speakers, artists-in-residence, cooking schools, sports and recreation programs, all for $700 for a three-day stay. I dunno if they’ll have any Wiccans showing up to promote alternatives to the stereotypes of witches in cartoon features, or if they’ll ever bring in the author of The Peter Pan Syndrome.

BB CUES: Last week I mourned the demise of the Western Coffee Shop. This week I’ve happier news: The Cave Man Kitchen barbecue stand, the single greatest thing about Kent, now has a somewhat more convenient branch in an ex-Taco Bell on Lake City Way.

LIVE AIR: One of this column’s running themes over the years has been the general suckiness of modern radio broadcasting (including much “public” radio) and various attempts to overcome it (activist groups like CURSE and the zine Radio Resistors Bulletin, pirate stations, micro-power stations, the cassette-trading underground). Now I’m happy to report a potential answer to crummy radio (at least at home or work) at last: Real-time Internet audio. The package of software programs to make this possible, called RealAudio, is now in beta testing by Progressive Networks, a Pioneer Square-based startup company started by Microsoft escapee Rob Glaser. The software to record RealAudio files will cost about $100; the playback software will be free. To record or receive RealAudio you’ve gotta have a computer powerful enough to run the software; but such machines can cost less than $1200 new and much less used. (The Western Washington U. station KUGS is already live on the Net, using a software system called CU-See Me that requires a more powerful workstation and a direct Internet hookup (instead of a modem and a phone line) to receive properly.)

Initial press reports tout the RealAudio technology as a way for established broadcasters, record companies, and the like to disseminate their works or promotional materials. The company’s website includes NPR and ABC Radio newscasts, O.J. updates, and some oldtime radio comedy segments. Company PR touts out-of-town sportscasts, music promotion and on-demand traffic reports as possible future applications.

But the company’s name is indicative of the revolutionary opportunities of this invention. It can essentially turn any Internet connection into a virtual radio station, allowing AM-quality reception of radio-refused music and information from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. The firm’s core staff includes Maria Cantwell, one of the Demo Congresspeople defeated in last November’s talk-radio sleaze assault. In addition, the company’s biggest single financial patron is Mitch Kapor, the ex-Lotus Software mogul who started the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the loudest public voices for cyberspace freedom and against government eavesdropping on and censorship of computer communication.

Appropriately, the company’s World Wide Web site (http://www.realaudio.com) will soon include a page called “What’s New in Activism Online,” billed in company PR as an information and volunteer-opportunities exchange “aimed at bringing the power of the Web and the Internet to bear on social and political issues.”

KIRK KERKORIAN WANTS TO BUY CHRYSLER: If the notorious Las Vegas financier does for the automaker what he did for Western Airlines and MGM, expect the Big Three to become the Big Two by the end of the decade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

END-O-ERA DEPT.: As our house ads note, this is the last Stranger to look like this. Next week it’s the all-new paper: new typefaces, new headings, new art, all on a more conventional 14-inch page size (haven’t we always told you length doesn’t matter?). If you really can’t take the change, you can always get a computer and the Utopia and Futura font families, type everything in, and print it out again. Speaking of new beginnings…

LARRY’S MARKETS COMES TO QUEEN ANNE: The wall of cereal and the dozen different kinds of cilantro are nice. But in my day, you didn’t have a real supermarket opening in Western Washington unless J.P. Patches was there. Speaking of retailing traditions…

THE ENDLESS SLEEP: Don’t let the combination of “Huge Clearance” and “For Rent” signs fool you. Dreamland on Broadway is (for now) staying around, though it’s gonna be remodeled and might close temporarily. It’s the successor to the ’70s U-District Dreamland (arguably the first vintage clothing boutique in the state). In its heyday it was more than a site for used leather jackets and jeans–it was a gathering place for the nascent Seattle punk scene, like the recently-closed Time Travelers on 2nd. Dreamland owner Danny Eskanazi (a former punk record producer) also has a downtown store, Jack Hammer on 1st, but has concentrated lately on more lucrative export operations (he was one of the first in town to ship used Levi’s to Japan, now a booming biz). Speaking of the garment trade…

THE REAL SKINNY: Models Inc. has gotten media jabs for shallowness and exploitation (usually deserved). You knew they were gonna have a bulimia storyline, but the surprise was how right-on it turned out to be, involving a self-esteem-challenged woman who developed an aversion to food after being violently raped. The ex-bulimics I’ve known weren’t trying to look like Calvin Klein girls. They’d suffered from abuse (in sexual or other forms), and had developed a subconscious compulsion to not let anything into their bodies. To them, purging was the ultimate chastity, not a route to physical perfection or sexiness but a rejection of the whole physical/ sexual realm. Of course, if a show wanted to be really serious about the clothing biz, it’d mention the overseas women who actually make the garments for a buck and a half a day. Speaking of foreign power and domination…

PREMISES, PREMISES: With the Soviets gone, so is that wacky institution known as Stalinist ideology. That was an actual cabinet-level state ministry that thought up ever more elaborate excuses why anything the USSR did was in the best interests of The People. Nowadays, in Chechnya the Russians aren’t claiming to do anything more or less than quashing a regional insurrection, not defending the inevitability of world socialism from bourgeois regression. Indeed, perhaps the only place where imperial ambition hides behind a thin cloak of philosophy is here in the good ol’ US-of, where “family values” and “moral renewal” are used as the excuses for a regime that really values nothing but money and power. Speaking of politix…

SCHOOL DAZE: Four times, the Seattle School Dist. tried to get voters to OK construction bonds via traditional campaign tactics: lotsa slick bigtime media ads, fundraising dinners for bigshots, professional consultants. Four times they lost. Then they tried grass-roots person-to-person campaigning aimed at individual voters, especially minority and middle-class voters more likely to have kids in the schools. It worked. The lesson: “Progressive” politics can become popular, at least in some places, if properly explained and respectfully promoted. Speaking of patterns of communication and influence…

SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Having dissed the San Fransisco culture industry several times in the past year, I felt it was time to be honest and list some Bay Area things I actually like (in no particular order): The Residents (originally from Louisiana), the Melvins(originally from Grays Harbor County), Factsheet Five magazine (originally from upstate New York), the pre-1988 works of Jello Biafra (originally from Colorado), Vertigo, The Streets of San Francisco, Re-Search Publications, ungerground comix, computer magazines, Rice-A-Roni, Ghirardelli Flicks candies (which seem to have disappeared, alas), Roller Derby, Canyon Cinema Collective (distributor of those lovingly self-indulgent ’60s-’70s “experimental” films that all seemed to have at least one mushroom-cloud shot), Carol Doda (perhaps the last true burlesque star), and Margaret Keane (painter of doe-eyed waifs).

Welcome to a late-January White Sale edition of Misc., the column that knows things have gone ridiculously mainstream-commercial when Borders Books and Music has its own Incredibly Strange Music display table (complete with a Nirvana kareoke cassette) and there’s an officially-licensed Black Flag snowboard. So let’s run with the spirit of the times and have a special all-consumerist column, shall we?

AD VERBS: The highest-visibility week for new TV shows used to be the week after Labor Day. Now it’s the third and fourth weeks in January, when the established networks show off the snazzy new shows replacing last fall’s snazzy old shows. This time we also get two all-new “networks”: WB and UPN. The former has the better promo spots, the latter may have the better shows (‘tho we’ll have to wait to make judgment on Sir Mix-A-Lot’s acting skills as the titular narrator of UPN’s The Watcher).

It’s also the annual high week for commercials, specifically on Sooper Bowl Sunday. In fact, recent years have seen far more excitement for the freshly-premiered ads during the big game than for the game itself, which is usually either a rout or a dogged defensive battle. I know it’s fashionable in “hip” circles to denounce football and those who watch it. I also know why–virtually every sensitive young intellectual type in America had to survive adolescent harassment from crude jocks and/or bitchy cheerleaders, in schools that often gave more honor to touchdowns than to learning. But part of growing up is getting beyond old pains. Besides, you can’t understand this culture without understanding how American football encapsulating the essential myths and images of America. It’s a vast real estate on which violence and raw ambition are held in place by persnickity bureaucratic rules. It’s gross caricatures of masculinity, tempered on the sidelines by gross caricatures of femininity. It’s the dream, fulfilled only occasionally enough to remain tempting, of flying and running free.

CUTE MAG ALERT: Moving from male- to female-oriented consumerism, we may have seen the end of Sassy as we know it. Its publisher, N.Y.-based Lang Communications (which also owns the somewhat less consumerist Ms.) sold the trendy teen fashion-music-product guide to Petersen Publishing, the Calif. firm that puts out the somewhat less trendy Teen (as well as a bunch of car magazines). None of the old editors are going with the move. Sassy’s potential devolution into just another what-to-wear rag begs the question: Does a younger generation exist if grownup journalists aren’t around to define it to other grownup journalists?

OVERCOOKING: Moving into the local consumer scene, we must say goodbye to a longtime dinnertime friend. Yeah, the tragedy of the four firefighters was a bad thing. But I’ll also miss the Mary Pang’s foods made in that destroyed plant, which might never resume production. Pang’s frozen Chinese dinners, entrees and egg rolls (in their happy ’50s-orange boxes) were regular dietary elements for the young and underemployed. Unlike some other slacker staples, Pang’s products never wore out their welcome.

TROUBLE ON DEXTROSE AVE.: An even more universal aspect of the youth diet is changing, as Dolly Madison Bakeries wants to buy the much larger Hostess-Wonder empire. As a kid, I knew Hostess goodies as the real thing. Some kids preferred the cup cakes, some the fruit pies. Some kids liked to unroll the Ho-Hos. I myself was a sucker for the Sno-Balls–even at a tender age, there was something mysteriously appealing about two side-by-side pink hemispheres, soft and bouncy to the touch. Dolly cakes were mysterious things unavailable in this area, known only from commercials on the Charlie Brown TV specials. When the Dollys finally showed up in Washington, they tended to appear at odd convenience stores that for some reason didn’t have Hostess. Their sizes, flavors and textures were strange to a Hostess-reared palate; even the sugar-grit of the creme filling was off somehow. Now, the product lines will probably merge, with Dolly’s Zingers appearing alongside the Twinkies. Let’s just hope the new bosses keep the bright Wonder Bread neon sign in south Seattle (ironically leading you toward our town’s least whitebread neighborhood) and the mentioned-in-a-prior-column Hostess plant off Aurora, beautiful and oh-so sweet smelling, with its giant exterior intake valves labeled for sugar and corn syrup.

11/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:

LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’

IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Oogonium”

9/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)

Generation X: The Original Poem

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

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

The crime bill, however, deserved to die. In order to get a simple, rational ban on some deadly assault weapons and a few modest prevention programs through an NRA-coddled Congress, Clinton loaded a bulky omnibus bill with a lot of dumb and/or misguided ideas — more cops, more prisons, more prisoners, longer sentences, the death penalty for almost five dozen new crimes, including the killing of a federal egg inspector; in short, more of the same old “Git Tuff” bluster that just plain doesn’t work except to raise politicians’ and talk-radio callers’ adrenaline levels. And half those 100,000 new federally-subsidized cops are allocated for towns under 100,000 pop., and all of them go off the federal payroll in five years. Once again, they’re spending a lot of our money just to feel good about themselves.

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD DEPT.: Again this year, there was a Belltown Inside Out promotion, celebrating the Denny Regrade as an allegedly “diverse” and even “artistic” urban village. Over the past four years the “artistic” part of the program has steadily diminished, befitting a neighborhood where most of the artists’ studios and affordable artist housing have gone to condos. Meanwhile, the J&M Cafe, longtime crawling ground of Young Republicans and other escapees from Bellevue, is moving to Belltown; adding to a circuit of “upscale” drink and/or dance joints coexisting increasingly uneasily with the artsier music and hangout spots. I’ve come to know the yuppie bars as places to avoid walking past at night if you don’t want to be fagbashed or sexually harassed by suburban snots who’ve never been told they can’t just do any damn thing they want. I’m perfectly happy to let these folks have their own scene; I just wish they had more decorum about it, befitting their alleged status in our society — i.e., I wish they’d stop pissing in my alley. (I also wish they’d leave the Frontier Room for those of us who actually like it.)

TURN OFF, TUNE OUT, DROP DEAD DEPT.: I come not to praise Woodstock nostalgia but to bury it. Yeah, Woodstock ’94 is a big crass commercial operation–but so was the original. It directly hastened the consolidation of “underground” music into the corporate rock that by 1972 or so would smother almost all true creativity in the pop/ rock field. If there was a generation defined by the event, it was one of affluent college kids who sowed their wild oats for a couple of years, called it a political act, then went into the professions they’d been studying — the Demographically Correct, the people advertisers and ad-supported media crave to the point of ignoring all others.

By telling these kids they were Rebels by consuming sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, the corporate media dissuaded many borderline hippie-wannabes from forming any real movement for cultural or political change, a movement that just might have only broken down the class, racial, and demographic divisions that boomercentric “Classic Rock” serves to maintain.

NO PLACE LIKE DOME: The local TV stations, especially KOMO, still persist in their tirades against so-called “government waste,” usually involving state or county buildings that were constructed for more money than they absolutely had to have been. Apparently, KOMO would prefer that all public works be built as cost-efficiently as the Kingdome originally was…

GROUNDING OUT: At the start of this baseball season, Misc. remarked that the sport’s biggest current problem was its association with right-wing cultural values, in all their contradictions. The strike only confirms this diagnosis. The owners (most of whom now represent Reagan-era speculative new money, as opposed to old family fortunes) aren’t so much in conflict with the players as with each other, representing different visions of conservatism; just as the post-Reagan Republican Party struggles to keep the religious ideologues and the free-market folks in one camp.

Baseball has traditionally had richer teams that could afford to get and keep the best players (like the Yankees and Red Sox) and poorer teams that couldn’t (like yesterday’s St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators). Today, there’s less of a caste split in the standings than there used to (the Royals and Indians have done well, the Mets and Dodgers haven’t) but there’s quite a split in the financial coffers. By advocating league-wide revenue sharing, the relatively poor “small market teams” (which really include bigger towns like Detroit and Montreal) want to lead corporate baseball into a paternalistic philosophy not unlike the pre-Thatcher UK Tories, based on joint investment in the future prosperity of the whole investing class. The profitable, so-called “large market teams” (which include smaller towns like Atlanta) are out to preserve the sport’s current philosophy of Reaganite rugged individualism.

This means, perhaps ironically, that the owners in New York and Boston are advocating the so-called “radical conservatism” traditionally associated with western Republicans, while the owners in Seattle and Colorado are advocating the old-boy-network spirit associated with Boston Brahmins and old-school Wall St. bankers. Without a united business philosophy, the owners can’t present a united front to the players, who are simply holding on to their own by opposing a salary cap, a move that puts them in unofficial cahoots with the rich teams.

DOWN WIT’ DA FLAVOUR: Your ob’d’nt correspondent recently spent half a week on Vancouver, the town that gave the world the smart sounds of DOA, 54/40, Skinny Puppy and k.d. lang. Now, though, thrash-fratfunk music is seriously considered by many to be the thing to put BC music back “on the map.” I stood through parts of a day-long free downtown outdoor rockfest, sponsored by a skateboard store; the skate demonstrations were astounding; but the bands mostly suffered from tiresome macho posturing. Some of them were accomplished players if you’re into that sort of thing, but I always want more.

There are still Vancouverites who try for creative sounds (including Cub and the Smugglers), but they’re hampered by a struggling club scene that’s stifled by real estate costs and liquor laws more restrictive than Washington’s (except for their 19-year legal age).

It was the week before the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, and the BC protest community was planning civil disruptions to call attention to Canada’s treatment of native peoples and the environment, England’s treatment of Ulster, et al. Official corporate sponsorships for the Games were in full force, including a billboard promising “The Best Coverage of the Games” — sponsored byShield condoms. That was next to a non-Games billboard that proclaimed, “You don’t have to abstain, just use protection” — showing a suggestive-looking hot dog and a package of Maalox. B.C. isn’t among the test markets for OK Soda but they do have the new plastic Coke bottle that looks like an old glass Coke bottle, sort of.

Anyhow, the fun and weirdness we know and love as Canada (from ketchup-flavored potato chips to the big nude virtual family that is Wreck Beach to the relatively-working community experiment of Co-Op Radio) might not be with us forever. Quebec separatists are now the official opposition party in the House of Commons; if their next referendum for provincial secession passes, the whole nation might collapse. Some folks have talked about creating a new Nation of Cascadia combining B.C., Washington and Oregon (whose motto, coined in the pre-Civil War days, is “The Union”). I’d love it if we could get their health care, gun control, strong public broadcasting, and appreciation for urban communities; just so long as we don’t have to have their high booze and gas taxes, media censorship, greasy-palm political corruption, and lack of a Bill of Rights.

PUMPED: Unocal 76 isn’t just gonna turn some service station service bays into convenience stores, but into complete fast-food-to-go kitchens. Reminds one of that mythical roadside sign, “Eat Here and Get Gas.”

DUMB AD OF THE MONTH: I’ve two questions about the current commercial, “Like a robot, I kept using the same tampon.” (1) Most humans who use those things don’t keep using the same one (unless they use those health-food-store washable sponge thingies). (2) I’ve never seen a robot that uses such products, have you? (You can imagine to yourself about The Jetsons’ Rosie or the Heavy Metal cover droids.)

STRIPPED: The worst comic strip in the daily papers in recent memory was Mallard Fillmore, billed in a P-I publicity blurb as “a conservative Doonesbury.” But Doonesbury sets its liberalism in solid character gags. Old-time conservative strips (Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Steve Canyon) anchored their politics in a holistic set of traditional cultural values, including the values of solid storytelling and fine draftsmanship. Mallard simply had an unattractively-designed, boorish duck character spout snide personal insults about the Clintons. If Models Inc. doesn’t know it’s not hip, Mallard doesn’t know it’s not funny…. It was dropped the same weekend that my trashing of it went to press.

PRESSED: The Times has lost a reported 14,000 readers since its redesign late last year, a change that turned a dull but idiosyncratic paper into a dull but bland one. Perhaps Fairview Fanny management is finally awakening to the notion that if you make your paper as boring as possible you should expect readers to be bored by it. But at least in the new design you always know where everything is: World news in the A Section, local news in the B Section, birth announcements in… you get the picture.

BOOZE NOOZE: Some legislators think it’d be a good idea to scrap the state liquor stores and let big chain stores sell the stuff. I support any move to dilute the power of the WSLCB, a truly outmoded institution whose picayune policies helped thwart any real nightlife industry here. However, I’m gonna miss the old liquor stores with their harsh lighting, no-frills shelving, surly clerks, and institutionalistic signage. Every aspect of the experience expressed a Northwest Protestant guilt trip over the evils of John Barleycorn; just like the old state rules for cocktail lounges, which had to be dark windowless dens of shame.

FLYING: A high-ranking exec with Northwest Airlines (America’s first all-non-smoking airline) was nabbed at the Boise airport earlier this month for holding pot. Shouldn’t he rather be working for that new commuter airline in Olympia?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Ball Park Fun Franks are microwaveable mini-wieners with their own mini-buns! Tiny li’l critters, they rank in size somewhere between Little Smokies and the fictional “Weenie Tots” on a memorable Married…With Children episode. Speaking of weenies…

WHO’S THE REAL PRICK?: If you didn’t already have a good reason to vote against Sen. Fishstick, a.k.a. Slade Gorton, a.k.a. Skeletor, here’s one. Taking a cue from Jesse Helms’s perennial NEA-bashing, Fishstick’s just introduced a bill in the Senate that would let local cable companies censor public access shows. The poster child in his attack: our ol’ pal Philip Craft and his Political Playhouse show, in which groups of left-wing merrymakers chat up about hemp, safe sex, health care, military intervention and other fun topics–occasionally uncostumed. I don’t know what attracts Fishstick toward his obsession with the privates of Craft and co-hostBoffo the Clown, but this is a clear act of political silencing, under the guise of cultural intolerance. Craft’s weekly series only sometimes shows bare penii, but always speaks out against the kind of pro-corporate, anti-environmentalist policies that Fishstick supports. Oppose his divisive vision now, while you still can.

FLOWER POWERLESS: Rob Middleton, singer for the band Flake, made the mistake of picking a few flowers early one morning at Martin Selig’s Metropolitan Plaza towers (the Can of Spam Building and Zippo Lighter Building across from Re-bar, and site of KNDD’s studios). Four cop cars showed up to nab the vandal, who was arrested for theft, trespassing and assorted other charges. Our coveter of thy neighbor’s flora spent a few hours in jail until $850 in bail was paid.

RAISING STAKES: Just in time for Spy magazine’s return to the stands comes some local news about its favorite subject. Up by my ol’ hometown of Marysville, the Tulalip Tribes are talking up an offer to jointly develop a reservation casino with gaming mogul and NY/NJ regional celebrity Donald Trump, who’s apparently rethought his previous quasi-racist remarks against reservation casinos. I hadn’t gotten along well in that town when I lived there, and wasn’t sad when it was transformed from a country town into a suburb. But I dunno about the place becoming a squeaky-clean version of sin city. And I sure dunno if I want Spy following every move of my old neighbors; tho’ Taso Lagos, the frequent Spy letter-writer from Seattle who’s now trying to sell a movie project called American Messiah (starring Keister as a movie director who says “fuck” a lot in the video trailer), might.

`X’ WORDS: Thanks to artist-critic Charles Krafft, I’ve now gotten to see the original Generation X–the book Billy Idol’s old band took its name from. It was written in 1964 by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson; the cover blurb on the US paperback promised to expose “what’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth.” It’s mostly about mods, rockers, teddies, all yourQuadrophenia types. There’s also two pages about playwright Joe Orton.

The title resulted from an ad the authors placed in a London paper, asking young people to send life stories. Responses included a poem titled Generation X, “written in the peace and tranquility of the trees and gardens of a psychiatric hospital” by “a female, age 20, suffering from depression and neurosis.” Lines include “Who am I? Who cares about me? I am me. I must suffer because I am me…Money, time, these are substitutes for real happiness. Where can I find happiness? I do not know. Perhaps I shall never know…” That original coiner of today’s most overused media catch phrase, who’d now be 50, wasn’t named.

‘TIL WE NEXT CROSS INKSTAINS, be sure to toast 20 post-Watergate years by making your own 18 and a half minute gap, write NBC to demand more episodes of Michael Moore’s mind-blowin’ TV Nation, and enter our new Misc. contest. Name the TV show (past or present, any genre) that’s least likely to be turned into a movie–then write a 50-word-or-less synopsis of a movie based on that show. Remember, there’ve already been movies based on soaps and game shows, so anything’s open. The best entry, in the sole opinion of this author, receives a new trade-paperback book of our choosing. There’ll also be a prize for the best scenario based on the title Nightly Business Report–The Movie.

PASSAGE

1955 magazine ad for Formfit girdles:

“It’s true! This local gal made good

In glamorous, clamorous Hollywood!

To wine and dine me nights, at nine,

The wolves would line for miles on Vine.

My footprints at Grauman’s Chinese?

They took my imprints to my knees!

They soon acclaimed me Miss 3-D:

Delightful, Dazzling, De-Lovely!

And what made me a thing enthralling?

My Formfit outfit. Really, dah’ling!

REPORT

My book on the real history of Seattle punk and related four-letter words should be out next March. Rewrites, pic-gathering, fact-checking, lyric-clearing and page-laying-out are about to commence bigtime. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see me out much this fall.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Mistigri”

HOW MANY OF YOU STILL WANT THE SONICS

TO GO TO THE KINGDOME NEXT SEASON?

MISC.’S TOP 22Sunday Mexican movie musicals on Univision

Suzzallo Library, UW (even with the awkward-looking new wing)

The Beano, UK comic weekly

Bedazzled Discs, 1st & Cherry

Hal Hartley movies

NRBQ

The New York Review of Books

M. Coy Books, 2nd & Pine

Salton electric coffee-cup warmers

Real Personal, CNBC cable sex talk show

Bike Toy Clock Gift, Fastbacks (Lucky Records reissue)

Daniel Clowes “Punky” wristwatches at the Sub Pop Mega Mart

Lux Espresso on 1st

The stock music in NFL Films shows on ESPN

Hi-8 camcorders

Seattle Bagel Bakery

First Hill Shop-Rite

Off-brand bottled iced tea

Carnivore, Pure Joy (PopLlama reissue)

Granta

Opium for the Masses, Jim Hogshire (Loompanics Unlimited)

Bulk foods

MISC.’S BOTTOM 19Telemarketers hawking car-insurance plans, who don’t take “But I don’t own a car” for an answer

Today’s Saturday Night Live (except for Ellen Cleghorn)

Voice-mail purgatory

Pay-per-view movies and home shopping taking over more cable channels

MTV’s rock merchandise home-shopping shows

The Paramount-Viacom merger

CDs with no names on the label side, just cute graphics that lead to misplacement

Mickey Unrapped, the Mickey Mouse rap CD

Tampon and diaper ads showing how well the things absorb the same mysterious blue liquid (they must be made for those inbred, blue-blooded folks)

KVI-AM (dubbed “KKKVI” by Jean Godden), the 24-hour-a-day version of Orwell’s “Two-Minutes Hate”

Reality Bites

Speed

PBS/KCTS’s endless promo hype for Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries

Goatees

Backward baseball caps Rock-hard breads from boutique bakeries, especially if loaded with tomato or basil

Morphing

Ice beer

Slade Gorton

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

SPECIAL EVENT!

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

4/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ATTENTION HAWKEYE: GRAB YOUR STETHOSCOPE.

THE WAR RESUMES IN 0800 HOURS

Dunno ’bout you, but here at Misc. we were excited as heck at the P-I teaser headline, “Seahawks Sign Pro Bowler,” then disappointed when the article said he wasn’t a bowling pro, just a football player who’d been in the Pro Bowl. We’re still excited that a Lynnwood company’s gonna start importing Norton motorcycles, a venerable UK brand that hasn’t been sold over here in 20 years. Some analysts claim the company’s just selling the bikes as a loss leader, and the only real profits will come from merchandising the logo. The P-I says the company’s committed to selling the bikes as well as the T-shirts and caps, and has plans to start building the things here in a few years. It’d be the first US cycle plant besides Harley since the Indian company folded in the ’50s. Imagine — being able to buy a US-built two-wheeler without buying into the Young Republican “rebel” image that now surrounds Harleys (more on that later).

ONE LAST OLYMPIC MOMENT: It’s almost too bad the ’98 winter games won’t happen in Salt Lake City, whose bid was topped by the Japanese. I’d have loved to have seen Charles Kuralt & co. give their patented human-interest feature stories on the quaint customs and folklore of those cute lovable li’l Mormons.

ICE DREAM: If you saw the Good Morning America segment with the woman from the Tonya Harding Fan Club, expressing the group’s continued support for the skater at the enforced end of her amateur career, here’s its address: 4632 SE Oxbow Parkway, Gresham, OR 97080-8967. You can join at several levels (adult $10, senior/fixed income $5, children’s “Tots for Tonya” memberships $1). You’ll get a newsletter, bumper sticker, photo button, and a chance to buy autographed pix, “Team Tonya” T-shirts with the logo of an ice skate with a Portland Rose on it, “No Comment” sweatshirts, “IUPG” (Innocent Until Proven Guilty) buttons, and two cassette singles: “It’s Tonya’s Turn” (described in the club catalog as a “dreamy melodic ballad”) and “Fire On Ice” (“Peppy, upbeat lyrics and melody proclaiming Tonya’s skating abilities”). Hey — ya gotta support a figure skater whose name sounds the same as Patty Hearst‘s alias!

FOR BETTER OR VERSE: The Seattle Small Press Poetry Review has been running a reader poll. Among the questions, “Do you think poetry readings have an effect on the audiences’ writing? Good or bad?” Replies include this from Dan Raphael: “Yes, people are influenced by what they hear. Unfortunately a lot of what they hear is personal, un-crafted and indulgent. Hey, we all need places to unload but I don’t want to burden poetry with my sad songs.”

LIVE AIR: So KING-FM’s gonna be donated to the symphony, the opera and the Corporate Council for the Arts. That may remove one of the main complaints about it — that, as one of the world’s few commercial classical stations, it stuck to orchestral favorites and seldom explored the wider range of highbrow tunes. Now, it’ll be part of the nonprofit arts community’s promotional work, and presumably will be used to expose audiences to a full range of serious stuff — or at least the full range of what the symphony and opera are staging this year. The move will also aid KUOW in its plans to phase out its remaining classical hours, toward a more ratings-oriented talk format. The Bullitt sisters are still pondering what to do with the less financially-successful KING-AM. My $.02 worth: Turn it into a community station. Or if not that one, get a community-radio group together, persuade one of the multi-station groups in town to donate another underutilized 1000-1600 AM frequency, and let it rip with unbridled free speech, ungentrified music, ethnic shows, etc.

ALDUS CORP., R.I.P.: There will still be software under the Aldus name, and its code might be written in Seattle, but it’ll be conceived, guided and controlled by Adobe in California. This is more than the potential loss of a few hundred jobs. Aldus was a rule-breaker in the software biz. It was born in Pioneer Square and stayed there, rejecting developers’ offers to move it off to a sterile suburban fort like all the other software giants. Its flagship product, PageMaker, wasn’t some yuppie number-cruncher but a tool of empowerment that brought professional typography and layout into the hands of any civilian with $5 to $8 for an hour at the copy center.

As PageMaker and its sister products gathered more and more professional features, they became almost as expensive as some of the computers they ran on; but Aldus remembered its DIY roots and acquired the popular-priced program Personal Press. When the history of the street-level media revolution is written, the Aldus name will be up there proudly, in 32-point bold condensed.

CATHODE CORNER: NW colleges have never been sources of Florida migrations, but in recent years we’ve seen what we’ve missed with MTV’s Spring Break Weekend, showcasing that annual rite of thousands of East Coast rich kids getting drunk and stupid together. The “highlight” of each year’s coverage was a coed beauty contest that skipped talent or poise segments and went straight to the skin. But this year, a new (female) producer imposed a new dress code: no more undersized trunks and thong bikinis, just baggy surfer shorts and modest two-pieces. Between this and Beavis and Butt-head, the channel is definitely moving its exploitation recipe toward less sex and more violence (just the formula the Reagan-Bush guys would have approved of).

UNDER THE COVERS: As a fervent lover of bookstores, both big-n’-diverse and small-n’-specific (I don’t mess with Mr. In Between), I anxiously await the opening of Borders Books and Music on 4th Ave. downtown, right near Waldenbooks on 5th and Brentano’s in Westlake Center. Just don’t expect any big neighborhood rivalries among them. All three chains are owned by K mart.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Controlled Divisiveness: The Rise and Fault of the Compact Disc is Alex Kostelnik’s self-published tract commemorating the 11th anniversary of the CD’s introduction, packaged in a CD jewel box. Kostelnik uses the CD as a symbol for everything that’s wrong with the music biz — corporate consolidation, bland overproduced product, repressive tactics like anti-home taping campaigns. (He includes a sticker, amending the anti-taping logo to read “Sony Corporation Is Killing Music — And It’s Legal.” Available for $3 at the New Store…. Splice is a new local movie-review zine run by Tacoma’s Michelle McDaniel and Rich Bowen, operating under a simple slogan: “Movies Suck.” Bowen invokes a line popularly attributed to sci-fi guy Theodore Sturgeonthat “90 percent of everything is crap,” then goes on to differentiate between non-crap (Psycho, Casablanca, 2001), good crap (Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster), and bad crap (Calendar Girl). It offers subscriptions, but since the first issue just came out a few weeks ago and has a crossed-out October cover date, you might not want to trust ’em with cash in advance… The first months of newWeekly editor Knute Berger‘s regime have shown a significant turnaround for a paper that seemed doomed to follow its cherished upscale-boomer generation into the grave (or the suburbs, whichever comes first). It’s doing things it’s never done before — publishing significant stories by nonwhite writers, running more serious cover stories, cutting back on the psychobabble and the advertiser-oriented lifestyle fluff. Last week’s piece on City Attorney Mark Sidrin astutely noted that his various harassment campaigns against nightlife, minorities, and the poor, in lieu of a real anti-crime program, might be less effective at making the city safer than at appeasing the prejudices of the “Emerald City” boomers, whose worldview the old Weekly would have never questioned. Speaking of which…

KARMA CORN: If the new age people are right when they claim that your fate in life is primarily determined by how positive or negative your attitude is, then perhaps the state’s latest welfare reform craze is doomed from the get-go. The current public-assistance system is a network of embarrassment, frustrating procedures and cumbersome eligibility requirements, a surefire way to get people to feel dejected and hopeless about their futures. So of course, some of our legislators want to make the requirements even more picayune, the bureaucracy even harsher, to deliberately turn the system into a kind of psychic punishment for the sin of being poor. By the theory of karma, that’s no way to turn depressed, hounded paupers into confident, assertive citizens.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists among you might claim that that’s just what politicians want — to keep poor people feeling helpless, so they won’t think about rising up to challenge the status quo. The same conspiracy arguers might claim that the current cry for a “War on Crime” throws money into an ever-bigger prison system expressly to turn amateur criminals into professional criminals, thus keeping the crime rate up, thus maintaining the perceived need for a police state that would gnaw away against personal rights. I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been around long enough to see social systems (legal, bureaucratic, corporate, et al.) get sidetracked by traditional procedures and end up working against their ostensible original goals. It should be clear by now that we need an assistance system that encourages self-respect and initiative, and a justice system that teaches and encourages non-violent behavior. That is, it might be clear if we weren’t living under government-by-talk-radio. The real goal of our welfare system is to let politicians and affluent voters feel like they’re getting tough on those bad ol’ good-for-nothings. In this sense, we’re already spending our tax money to make people feel good about themselves, but we’re doing it in the wrong way for the wrong beneficiaries.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Food and beverage producers have vastly multiplied their assortments of brands in recent years, trying to exploit the subcultural fragmentation of American society (more about that next week maybe). In one clever example, a small brewery deep in the Iowa grain belt proudly offers Pink Triangle Beer, sold exclusively in gay bars and marketed as the gay-friendly brew gays should choose to show their support for their scene. I don’t know if the active yeast cultures used to make it have that special “gay gene” some speculative researchers think might exist; nor do I know if it has what professional beverage critics sometimes call a “fruity quality”…. Tim Zagat, regional stringer for the foodservice trade mag Restaurants & Institutions, claims the Next Big Thing in Northwest restaurants will be Tofu Chateaubriand! I can’t even imagine what that would be. Whatever it is it sounds disgusting, so of course I want to try it. If anybody’s really serving this, please let me know.

DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: The city should support punk culture, instead of continuing to harass it. Seattle’s government and mainstream media still believe in the sentiments uttered by KIRO’s Lou Guzzo back in 1986, supporting the infamous Teen Dance Ordinance. In one of the most reactionary utterances ever made on local airwaves, Guzzo essentially called punks worthless losers; if teenagers were bored, he said they ought to take up hiking or skiing — in other words, consumer leisure pursuits that wouldn’t lead to questioning the established sociopolitical order.

Punks believe in living in big cities. They believe in creativity. They believe in making their own world, in making up their own minds. Punks believe in downtown shopping, public transportation, and public gathering places. Punks seem like nihilists to many outsiders, but really believe in actively working for a better world. In the developing information age, they’re pioneers in info-entrepreneurism. They make their own records, they book their own gigs, they paint their own posters, they publish their own zines — a collection of skills that seem like marginal pursuits to most people over 40, but which will be vital to the key industries of the 21st century. Punks aren’t hopeless dropout ne’er-do-wells. They’ve created one of the Seattle area’s four or five top export industries. They’ve helped make us a world-class arts center, with a reputation as a focal point for aspiring enthusiastic creative types from all over. Speaking of which…

OVER-THE-COUNTERCULTURE: You sometimes hear about old radical groups that got infiltrated by FBI informers. In some accounts, the plants prodded the groups into illegal acts or spurring internal dissentions. But I wonder if they ever got subliminal messages into those old light shows, implanting time-release instructions to the freaks: “By 1971 you will get hooked on pot, move to the country, and care only about yourselves.”

When I was in college in the early ’80s, some of the most personally complacent and artistically reactionary people were the ones who also wouldn’t stop bragging about how open-minded they were in The Sixties. When I was on KCMU I closed my DJ shift with the tagline, “Rock on — never mellow out.” I didn’t want my listeners to turn into self-obsessed fogeys intolerant of anything that didn’t conform to their increasingly narrow worldview.

Now, hardly a week goes by that I don’t meet somebody 10 years younger than me emulating everything that frustrated me about the people 10 years older than me. Here in the Geraldo era I meet young adults who still find something “rebellious” about Hunter Thompson, that professional self-aggrandizer who presaged today’s reporter-as-celebrity hype. I’ve read Terence McKenna essays that criticize “linear Western Civilization” as if it still existed. And it’s not just 40-year-olds anymore who mistake “What a long strange trip it’s been” for a profound statement.

I’m even getting young people treating me with the same stereotypes old people used on me — like the stereotype that anybody who doesn’t adhere to a “leftist lifestyle” must be a political conservative. I’ve heard food co-op purists condemn all supermarket shoppers or all TV viewers as fascist rednecks; the argument reminds me of the Fundamentalists of my hometown who avowed that the Mormons would go to Hell because of their incorrect doctrine.

That’s a perfect attitude for moralistic posturing, but a lousy way to build a progressive political movement. To see why, let’s examine some unexamined presumptions going back to the Beat Generation.

The button-down conformity of the ’50s was not the way society had always been. Some WWII-generation intellectuals saw ’50s culture being created, and rebelled against it. Their central premise, as watered down and reinterpreted over the years, was that all of America could be neatly divided into two groups: Hipsters (enlightened intellectuals and artists, plus those whom the intellectuals and artists chose to romanticize) and Squares (everybody else). Tom Lehrer lampooned these pretensions in his song “The Folk Song Army” (“We’re the Folk Song Army, and every one of us cares. We hate repression, injustice and war — unlike the rest of you squares!”).

The hippies took this premise to its logical extreme, and in doing so tore the American left apart from the working class it once claimed to champion. By stereotyping all non-hippies as fascists and rednecks, they wrote off the potential support base for any real populist uprising. They sometimes claimed to be the voice of The People, but their definition of The People got narrower every year. Spiro Agnew got away with calling leftists “effete snobs” because leftists allowed themselves to be perceived as a self-serving elite.

By the early ’70s, black activists started charging that the counterculture didn’t even care about minorities anymore, only about white middle-class women and white middle-class gays. More recently, minority leaders have questioned the environmental movement’s priorities, asserting that toxic waste sites in ethnic neighborhoods are at least as important as hiking trails.

Today, BMW drivers call themselves “rebels” and beer commercials promise to make you “Different From The Rest.” There is no “mass culture” to rebel against anymore. Society’s been fragmented into demographic and subcultural mini-states, influenced by specialty advertising concepts and demographic target marketing. The “counterculture” is now just another market niche; organic foods in this store, ethnic foods in the next. If you tout yourself as somehow “apart” from Big Bad America on the basis of what you eat or what you wear or what age group you are, you’re still letting the segmented-consumer metaphor define you.

To be truly “political” would be to forge alliances with people beyond your own subculture, to reach out across our fragmented society, to build coalitions and exert influence to help make a better world. We don’t need to tear the fabric of society apart; big business already did it. We need to figure how to sew it back together.

QUESTIONABLE PR TACTIC OF THE MONTH: Marshall at YNOT Magazines wants people to “help” City Councilmember Jane Noland’s drive against street posters: “Go take a flier off your local pole, any one you find visually stimulating is fine. Then fax it to her so she knows the effort you have exerted to her cause. Then do it again. Do it til the cows come home. Do it ’til they leave on spring break and come home again but whatever you do just keep faxing her updates of your efforts. Maybe even make a flier about this and tack ’em up all over. Boy wouldn’t that be swell!” I can’t endorse this; I thought we were trying to prove we can be responsible people who don’t deserve to be treated as non-citizens in the name of that official state religion of Seattle, Mandatory Mellowness.

‘TIL THE NEXT TIME your fingers pick up our ink, and call for your copy of the complete Hanna-Barbera sound effects library, on four CDs from somewhere in Canada (800-387-3030).

PASSAGE

Stanford “industrial psychologist” Dr. James Keenan, in a 1967 speech to Muzak executives quoted in Joseph Lanza’s book Elevator Music: “Muzak helps human communities because it is a non-verbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village…. Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it massifies symbolism in which not few, but all, can participate.”

REPORT

Printout copies of the rough draft to my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are still available for a limited time for $10 plus $2 postage. Be among the first to learn what really happened to make Seatown the capital of rock revivalism.

As you can tell, this is the first issue of the new, expanded, larger-than-it-once-was Misc. newsletter thang. It’s a vehicle for some non-Stranger material, for some of my unpublished short fiction and humor pieces, and for some future experiments in form and design. The price also increases with this issue, to $12. Current subscribers will receive two issues for every three they’re still owed at the old price, rounded up in their favor.

Ads are again being accepted for this letter of fun: $25 for a business card-sized spot on the back, $20 for the same-sized spot inside. Show your support for Seattle’s original home of fast-food-for-thought.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Querulous”