LOCAL NOTE: Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival ended its Sunday fare with ex-local film collector Dennis Nyback showing off some old reels of vaudeville stars. Highly appropriate, since Bumbershoot itself is like a vaudeville show exploded onto a bigger time/space canvas (four days and 17 stages). It’s a big all-you-can-eat buffet of darn near every performing- and visual-art genre, designed to pack in a huge, mongrel audience. Increasingly, those audiences are responding to the more challenging, unfamiliar entrees. Cibo Matto played to a packed KeyArena throng; and many of the “adventurous music” acts completely filled their own smaller stages. Enough to give you renewed faith in humanity. (Speaking of faith and the future….)

TWO ‘K’S, MUCHO KALE: For a recent freelance gig with Everything Holidays, I was assigned to research a short piece about Year-2000 survivalist camps.

I’d expected to find a lot of the separatist compounds out in the hills, like I’d seen when I first explored the topic last year. Folks who’d previously used rumors of the “new world order,” UN black helicopters, race war, nuclear war, the Red Scare, flouridated water, religious Armageddon, and countless other excuses to call true believers to set up a self-contained utopia of true believers, equipped with canned goods and guns.

People who now were applying the same supposed solution to a new supposed problem–the belief, nay the hope, that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00, all of the western world’s industrial, communications, and transportation infrastructure will immediately and irrepairably go Ka-blooey.

A global computer crash that would leave the cities (especially the parts where those minorities live) in ruins, the phones out of whack, the airlines grounded, the banks busted, the electrical grid down forever, and even late-model cars with computer-chip-controlled systems undriveable.

I found a few ranters of that type. But I also found several hundred more folks who claimed to believe in one-person, or one-family, survival schemes–and were, and are, ready and eager to equip such an effort, for a modest fee.

And such a cornucopia of personal-survival tools have they!

Foodstuffs dried, canned, vaccuum-sealed, dehydrated, concentrated, irradiated, flash-pasteurized, and/or ready-to-eat.

Farm tools, implements, and “Y2K seeds,” so you can grow your own food without depending on the patent-protected, non-perennial products of the big seed companies (which, of course, will go away with the rest of corporate society).

Generators, co-generators, solar panels, battery rechargers.

First-aid kits and more elaborate medical supplies, so you can fill your kids’ cavities after all the dentists get killed in the urban riots.

Radios and shortwave transceivers that run on batteries, gasoline, or wind-up springs.

And, of course, plenty of the gold and silver coins and ingots that’re bound to become the New Currency once the global monetary system evaporates.

In a way, all this leaves me hopeful.

You see, it all means many Americans aren’t really buying the Y2K Scare as the End of the World As We Know It. Instead, they’re taking it like we take so many things–as an opportunity to do our part to keep capitalism going.

The hundreds of Y2K Scare outfitters out there are preaching disaster, but they’re practicing the all-American religion of entrepreneurialism.

And so am I. When January rolls around, and our infrastructure (as predicted by most experts who aren’t selling survival gear) doesn’t crumble, I hope to have a line of cookbooks on the market, teaching folks how to make tasty near-gourmet meals out of their three-years’ supplies of freeze-dried apricots, beef jerky, and army-surplus crackers.

TOMORROW: Yet another retro-futuristic bar, plus the possible end of a private art-garden.

ELSEWHERE: Ghosts of end-of-the-world prophecies past… And what if everything had a Y2K bug, not just computers?… “In the chaos following the collapse of Western civilization, your first objectives will be to procure food, clean water, shelter, and fresh breath…”

Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be

TV essay, 5/12/99

The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.

The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.

As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.

When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.

The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.

The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.

Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).

It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.

The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).

I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).

Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.

Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.

Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.

This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40 Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.

To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).

Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.

MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:

Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.

Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.

Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”

How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…

TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…

GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.

History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.

In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.

Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.

There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.

Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)

MISC. is the column asking the musical question: Would you even want to live in the same building with the maniacally-grinning GQ models depicted in all those condo ads?

UPDATE #1: Tosco, which runs gas stations under the BP brand in Washington, sez it’ll keep that name up for the time being, even though BP’s own stations in other regions will switch when BP takes over the Amoco brand. (Confused? Good.)…

UPDATE #2: QFC, having absorbed Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, is now taking over another of the top Seattle indie supermarkets, the gargantuan and lavish Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. Art’s was originally a multi-store strip mall containing both an Art’s supermarket (the last of what had been a five-store chain) and a Marketime drug-variety store. Fred Meyer bought Marketime in the ’60s, then unloaded its half of the Holman Road complex to Art’s (which kept many of the Marketime merchandise departments, making it what the French call a “hypermarket”). Now that Fred Meyer’s already bought QFC last year, it’s got the whole complex back. (Still confused? Good.)

HELD IN CHECK: Seafirst now has “Celebrate Diversity” checks, in a sort-of rainbow design–only this “diverse” colorscape is all mellow and pale. A lot like Seattle in general….

TOO CLOTHES FOR COMFORT: After a couple of weeks, I think the new Nordstrom store looks a LOT like the Forum Shops mall at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, a place that doesn’t even pretend to be sublime or understated. It was made clear from the start that nothing recognizable from Frederick’s, except for the exterior facade and the thick supporting posts, would be preserved. (Even the elevator and escalator shafts were moved.) But I don’t think many expected the new store’s total in-your-face experience of New Money, all proud and boastful and coldly showoffy yet trying conspicuously to be proper. If Bloomie’s or Saks had installed such a store, everybody’d complain how indiscreetly un-Seattle it was.

MILLENNIUM BUGGY: The Year 2000 Computer Problem hysteria hasn’t spawned a new survivalist cult, as some commentators and periodicals have claimed; but it has breathed new life into existing cults. The “head for the hills with canned goods and guns and gold” folks, having missed out (so far) on predicted apocalypses (apocali?) involving nukes, race riots, U.N. “black helicopters,” oil shortages, etc. etc., now get to invoke a simple yet oft-misunderstood software-upgrade failure as their new premise to solicit converts and customers–a premise conveniently scheduled on a date steeped in religious mysteries and referenced by prophets from Nostradamus to Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Criswell.

Many of the “Y2K” doomsday scenarios promoted by the survivalists read less like knowledgeable tech writing and more like excuses to shoehorn in pre-existing survivalist dogma. Like the parts about inner cities turning into instant war zones while the rural inland west remains serene and posse-protected. Not only does this line ignore that over half the country now lives in suburbs, it ignores that major metro areas are usually the first to get upgraded civic electronics, while the countryside’s still stuck with some of the most antiquated phone and power-delivery systems–the ones most likely to not get fixed so their databases understand years that don’t start with “19.”

What the alarmists get right is how nearly everything in the modern world (air-traffic control, oil refineries, long-distance lines, Social Security, medical equipment, stock markets) is intertwined in mainframe-computer networks, the real “world wide web.”

But the Y2K problem won’t crash everything at once. It just means companies and governments that let these unprofitable but necessary system upgrades slide now have to implement them at once.

At the least it’ll mean a hit on most everybody’s financial bottom lines for the next two years; draining cash-flows and spurring various degrees of layoffs. At worst, some of the various software/ hardware fixes around the world might not be ready (or adequately tested) in time, so some databases might have to be put off-line for a few weeks and some utility and industrial-control systems might have to be switched to planned backup mechanisms. In an absolute-worst plausibility, some fixes that were thought to work won’t, causing scattered system crashes. And some stand-alone industrial machines with pre-programmed computer chips inside might hiccup; but even most of those failures should be predictable and worked around.

So don’t give in to the fear-profiteers in the canned-food and gun industries. If you want to believe in a Biblical-style apocalypse, remember the verse about how mankind “knoweth not the day nor the hour.”

(More good readin’ about this topic is in Paul Kedrosky’s recent essay at Rewired.)

MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.

ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?

INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…

WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.

They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”

Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…

SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.

At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.

So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.

Online Extras

This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.

Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.

The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.

In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.

The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”

Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.

Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.

Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)

A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.

If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.

I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.

One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”

But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”

Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.

There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.

Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.

Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.

The Info Age, Our Way:

The Road Ahead Less Traveled

Eessay for The Stranger, 5/1/96

You’ve heard lots of hype about the Information Superhighway, the Infobahn, a bright promising tomorrow coming your way out of a little wire running into your home.You may think the hype sucks.

You’re right to be skeptical. The digital utopia promised more or less in unison by the phone companies, the cable TV companies, the online services, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, Wired magazine, and Bill Gates (all of whom get their ideas from the same handful of pro-business think tanks) is a future not appreciably better than our present, and potentially a lot costlier. While claiming to promote “empowerment,” it would merely move us from a society run by a financial elite to one run by a technological elite.

But theirs is not the only possible scenario. The Digital Age can be better, if we can wrest control of it away from the people doing the promising.

THEIR FUTURE

As late as 1994-95, the corporate techno-futurists were boasting of a future in which everyone (or at least everyone who mattered) would live through computer/video screens connected by fiber-optic lines to proprietary online networks. The owners of these online services would become America’s most powerful institutions, controlling everything from entertainment to banking and even politics.

In this future, you could look forward to choosing your morning news packaged in assorted combinations of verbal and visual output, filtered to emphasize your favorite subject areas. You could even choose your news interpreted from a variety of ideological perspectives, all the way from the far right to the near right.

Then, after you’ve downloaded Rush Limbaugh’s or Pat Robertson’s latest commentary, you could instantly contact your elected representatives to demand their support of the Limbaugh/Robertson agenda.

From there, you could log onto a commercial online services to see the latest Treasury Bill yields or a video by your favorite major-label singer. You could enter a virtual-reality chat room, where you’d control a 3-D cartoon character exchanging pleasantries with other characters (all supervised by service employees, ensuring nobody says anything they oughtn’t).

But eventually you’d have to get to work. In this future, all the important work will be done by an upscale Knowledge Class, who will all live in big isolated houses in the country or outer suburbs (since the techno-futurists believe nobody, given the choice, would ever want to live in a city). Most of the Knowledge Class would operate from home workstations, in contact with the boss via video teleconferencing. The other 80 to 90 percent of the population would be freed from the daily grind thanks to corporate downsizing; they’d get to go into business for themselves, selling products or services to the upscale class, at wages competitive with Third World labor.

Come the evening, you wouldn’t need to leave home to be entertained. Just order the latest hit violence movie on Pay Per View, available whenever you are. Hungry? E-mail for grocery delivery from the digital mall; while you’re “there,” get that blouse for tomorrow’s video-conference meeting. The kids, meanwhile, are entertaining themselves with their masturbation robot dolls or vicariously exploding other kids in virtual-reality games.

This nonexistent world already looks incredibly passé. Initial market tests show little interest in high-price, low-selection pay-per-view systems. Meanwhile, the Internet’s near-instant popularity has throttled all but the biggest online services, and those such services that remain are rapidly trying to reposition themselves as Internet gateways.

So instead we’re getting the revised pipe dream of a corporate Internet, in which the wide-open online frontier would be tamed. Data transmission might be based on a decentralized Internet protocol or something like it, but a few dozen companies would still control most of the content and most of the transactions.

ANOTHER FUTURE, AND ITS PAST

But there’s another potential future. It’s a future without major record labels, big Hollywood studios, or broadcast networks; or at least one where they’d have less power. Instead of 50 or even 500 TV channels, Internet server computers would offer tens of thousands of text, video, and audio programs–some free, some pay-per, some by subscription. Virtually anyone with something to say or show could send it to virtually anyone else.

Thousands of subcultures would thrive, none interested in lowest common denominators. Uncensored chat, bulletin boards and e-mail could spark a revolution in active, highly personal, discourse.

This re-personalization of everyday life could lead to a whole re-scaling of American society: co-operatives, barter associations, community schooling, a Babel of new political movements, religious cults, sub-genres of art and literature, cuisines and craft movements, ethnic pride groups (and, yes, a few ethnic hate groups).

These creative, energized people would tire of staying home on the keyboard. They’d find ways and reasons to gather in the flesh: cafés, theaters, musical societies, youth soccer leagues, reading clubs, performance-art troupes, sewing circles. Many would eschew the sterility of the subdivision, the isolation of the exurb, in favor of real communities.

Work and commerce would be increasingly conducted on a person-to-person level, instead of being molded to fit the long-term strategies of giant organizations. Corporations would devolve into small, focused operations doing a few things well, joining forces by short-term contracts to complete individual projects.

The Internet’s most enthusiastic followers are the inspirational descendents of a subculture where “computer hacker” meant a highly individualistic programming ace, not a crook. They’re the people who started using university e-mail in the late ’70s, PC-based bulletin board systems in the early ’80s, the Internet in the late ’80s, and the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. As this group grew, it developed a communications aesthetic now known as “Netiquette,” an aesthetic favoring unfettered, ungated info-culture (expressed in Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s 1986 adage that “information wants to be free”).

Corporate futurists patronize these people as “early adopters of technology” whose wishes must now be abandoned so the Net can be “mainstreamed.” But the Internet doesn’t want to be “mainstreamed,” and neither do many of its users. They don’t want to be constrained by top-down ad agency, studio and network thinking–the cornerstone of American mass culture since the 1920s. They also want to talk to one another. Even on the commercial online services, whose only unique selling point is professionally-created “content,” e-mail and discussion-group messages between users account for an estimated two-thirds of time spent online.

MY LIFE AS AN EARLY ADOPTER

I’ve had the privilege to see this culture develop. I was on local bulletin board systems as early as 1983, and was co-sysop of a board from 1984-88. I wrote a hypertext novel in 1988. I watched as university e-mail systems evolved and merged with a military research network to become the Internet. I saw bulletin board systems like Robert Dinse’s Eskimo North develop the threaded message-topic systems later adapted into Internet newsgroups. Eskimo North went on to add Internet e-mail, then add Internet newsgroups with once-a-day feeds of new material, then become a professional Internet service provider with a full-time Net connection. Some BBSs fell by the wayside as their operators moved to other pursuits; others started up to take their place. New companies started up as Internet service providers; it proved not to be a simple “turnkey” moneymaking operation, and many providers died off if they charged too much and/or couldn’t keep up with user demands for faster connections and fewer busy signals.

I’ve seen online services like Prodigy and CompuServe grow from novelties to semi-major powers, then saw them shrink in relative importance as the World Wide Web became the flavor of the year.

MORE BACKTRACKING

The Web is hard to describe tersely, and most mainstream journalists don’t try too hard. Basically, it’s an Internet-based system for transmitting documents of text, graphics, and/or other media formats, with clickable links within and between documents.

It was developed over the winter of 1989-90 at a Swiss particle-physics lab by programmer Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted a simple, unified system for accessing and cross-referencing research data, one that would work on all the lab’s computers. He used the concept of clickable hypertext links (conceived of by computer visionary Ted Nelson and implemented in the mid-’80s in programs like HyperCard and SuperCard) to interconnect texts, graphics, and other document types. Berners-Lee wrote a simple hypertext programming language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), that allowed some limited text formatting.

Berners-Lee expressly wanted to move the premises of communication from one-to-many to many-to-many. In his initial proposal to CERN management Berners-Lee wrote, “Everything we have seen so far (in the telecommunications field) is information distributed by server managers to clients everywhere. A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.”

The web initially spread to other research institutions, including the UW. In early 1993 Marc Andressen, a $6.75-an-hour student programmer at a U. of Illinois computer center, devised a program called Mosaic as a “graphical front end” to the Web on Unix terminals. That fall, Mosaic came out for Mac and Windows. The following spring, after Wired and others started to hype the web, Andressen got California venture capital to start Netscape Communications, releasing its first Web browsers in October 1994.

Faster than you could download an audio clip, the culture of telecommunications changed. The corporations didn’t notice at first, or didn’t admit it. They continued to talk about the umpteen channels of HBO action hits they’d love to sell us if we’d only give them unregulated-monopoly powers and wait 5-10 years for them to figure out which kind of new wiring systems to install.

The buzzword in places like Wired last year was how the spoils in the New Media race would go to the best-marketed (not necessarily the best) infotainment “brands.” This is the thinking that got us big media mergers and the so-called Telecommunications Reform Act.

But the Web’s astounding growth shows a different paradigm. People are hungry for unfiltered artistic work, for honest discourse and forthright opinions. The web provides a glimpse of such a culture, and it leaves people hungry for more.

THE ROAD TO BANDWIDTH

The content of a post-mass-media culture is here already, or will readily get here. The means to distribute quality audio, video, graphics, and formatted text on the Internet, one- and two-way, exist. But existing modems take forever to receive them. Right now, conventional phone-line modems (which translate data into analog audio signals and back) run no faster than 28.8 kilobits per second. Experts used to claim higher bandwidth would require all-new wiring to every home and business; and that phone and/or cable companies needed an “incentive” to lay this wiring by getting to monopolize the content sent thru it. That was the original justification for the pre-World Wide Web vision of an Information Superhighway of hit movies and home shopping. But the Net community hasn’t been clamoring for a hundred channels of Van Damme movies, but for high-speed transmission from anywhere to anywhere.

The only way now to get anything faster to your home is to plead with US West to sell you an ISDN line. ISDN is technologically and bureaucratically cumbersome, and costly–US West charges $60 a month for a basic package; it’s applied to the state to triple that rate. For that you get up to 128 kilobits per second, a rate barely fast enough to get tiny, lo-res video at Max Headroom frame speeds.

One potential ISDN rival is TCI’s scheme for cable modems. Most neighborhoods are already wired for cable TV, and those cable lines can potentially send digital data much faster than analog phone lines can. TCI said it would start testing its system in California by now, but has pushed that back to later this year. If it works out as currently planned, your cable system would also become your Internet provider (eliminating all the independent phone-based providers) and a subscription-based content provider too.

Meanwhile, Lucent Paradyne (one of the companies being spun off from AT&T) is pushing a scheme called ADSL to fit ultrafast data through regular phone lines refitted with new all-digital modems at each end, as long as you’re within 2-3 miles from your phone exchange office (good news for us in-towners, tuff luck to the exurbanites). It’s potentially cheaper than ISDN and offers far greater speeds (as much as 6,000 kilobits per second). US West and GTE are just starting ADSL test installations, both in other states. US West tentatively plans to eventually offer ADSL as part of its “Interprise” service package, also supplanting the role now provided by indie Internet providers.

There’s another drawback: Like the Hotel California, ADSL and cable modems are programmed to receive. ADSL only lets you transmit at the speed as ISDN; cable modem users might have to use a regular phone modem to send data out. At worst, this will mean a continued role for independent Internet service providers, as operators of high-speed uplink lines connected to hard drives where “publishers” of music, movies and digi-zines would make their works available.

A third scheme for cheap broadband could eliminate even that obstacle. Apple Computer’s asked the FCC to allocate a chunk of the airwaves for two-way wireless data. Potential uses for these frequencies include two-way digital radio units sending and getting data at up to 24,000 kilobits a second.

OTHER OBSTACLES

If bandwidth were the only obstacle toward my ideal networked nation, I’d have little to worry about. But there are other obstacles. One is the corporate-culture status quo. It’s invested a lot toward its vision of a global business cadre dictating the world’s entertainment, cuisine, behavior, politics, and even religion. It’ll maneuver and hustle to preserve the one-to-many communication model into the digital age. (Note TCI’s logo, depicting a satellite beaming its one-way wares to all the Earth.)

Another obstacle is the Net-censorship movement in this and other countries. The futility and unconstitutionality of Net censorship won’t stop politicians from trying to impose it. If we’re lucky, the battle over censorship could lead to a breakdown of relations between the religious right and the political right (the latter opposing it on the principle of unfettered trade). In time, I believe many people who care about religious beliefs will find their causes better served by the Internet’s wide-open exchange of ideas than by cowtowing to politicians who exploit religion to buy votes and promote authority.

CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIALS

I suspect so many people wanted to own Netscape stock not because of expected profits (they’re not likely to have any for some time) but because they wanted to own a piece of the Web, in a sense of being connected with that amorphous non-thing that’s starting to change the world and could mean the end of media as we know them.

There’ll still be daily papers and broadcast TV, just as there’s still radio. But the change that’s coming will be more profound than the change TV brought to radio. We’re talking information and art, not marketing and entertainment. We’re talking about what the DIY punk rockers were talking about: Cultural expressions people actively relate to, not just time-wasters.

It won’t be a utopia. Some censorship advocates have sincere reasons for fearing a wide-open Net. It now provides voices for unpopular ideas and unpopular sexualities. It’ll eventually provide voices for every conceivable point of view, including perhaps a million Limbaughs and Robertsons as well as a few thousand Jesse Jacksons. Without mass news media to impose a semi-official version of “the truth,” what’s real and what’s important could depend on who you choose to believe.

On a less political level, an open Net will lead to a lot of bad art and media (you think you’re tired of rave graphics and sword-and-sorcery imagery now?). It could collapse the economies of scale that make major motion pictures possible (look what happened to porn movies when shot-on-video took over).

And it could increase the factionalization of America, as the artifice of “mainstream society” withers to leave thousands of warring subcultures. As we’ve seen in Africa and the Balkans, there’s a side to “tribal consciousness” you don’t hear about in New Age fantasies. And what will “alternative” folks do when there’s no more mainstream to rebel against?

Yet it can also become Patti Smith’s “age when everybody creates.” Imagine the potentials. Then go fulfill some of them.

(The Seattle Community Network, a bulletin board and web site operated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, has started a “Market Place” group to bring independent Internet service providers together and to “protect the grass roots nature of the Internet.” To get involved contact Doug Tooley, P.O. Box 85084 Seattle, WA 98145, or e-mail dltooley@scn.org.)

SIDEBAR: FOR WHOM THE CHIMES TOLL

As I’ve said before, I’m no conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d ponder the following:

1) Microsoft enters into “strategic alliances” with NBC (a couple of high-profile Bill Gates-Tom Brokaw interviews, Leno plugging Windows 95, and a planned jointly-owned online news service to be called MSNBC). Brokaw even became the UW’s first out-of-town commencement speaker in years–not because the UW was the alma mater of Brokaw’s late predecessor Chet Huntley but because Gates reportedly asked him to come.

2) The Internet has gotten in the way of both companies’ plans. MS doesn’t own the Net or the software that runs it. Companies like Sun Microsystems claim with the right Net connection, many users could do all their computing on a $500 terminal device instead of a full PC, a setup that could render MS software obsolete.

3) NBC, meanwhile, sees TV viewership on a long-term decline, and (here’s where the theory starts) perceives a threat not just from online usage but from the Internet aesthetic, encouraging many-to-many communication and close community/ subculture ties instead of submission to Big Media.

4) MS first tried to extend its rule of software into the online biz with the Microsoft Network. But paid-access services like MSN are getting swamped as more and more users prefer the Internet, where no head office decides what you’ll get to see. The surviving online services are trying to reposition themselves as Internet access points. But the MSNBC service is planned to reinforce MSN’s position as a provider of exclusive “professional” content.

5) The biggest threat to the Internet as a free, uncentralized medium is the “Communications Decency Act,” championed by retiring Sen. James Exon. Passed as an amendment to a bill to let broadcasters and phone companies consolidate ever-larger empires, the act (if upheld in court) would stick it hard to any Internet server, service provider or content producer who uploads anything a Utah prosecutor might declare “indecent.” It thus threatens everything online except the precensored content of online services. Exon’s original inspiration? An exaggerated, sensationalized “cyberporn” segment on (yep!) Dateline NBC.

The theory breaks down after this point. Gates has issued statements opposing Net censorship; MS and MSN are among the plaintiffs in the court case trying to overturn the Communications Decency Act. And NBC, particularly the Brokaw show, has lately gone out of its way to praise Web-based enterprises including Netscape.

9/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?

TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,

A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …

Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?

CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.

APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.

ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”

PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.

MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.

IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)

STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.

MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.

ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.

A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.

TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)

MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.

DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?

RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.

`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).

He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.

SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.

Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.

The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.

Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.

PASSAGE

Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Crenellated”

4/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Why Men Don’t Get Madonna

We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).

Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.

Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?

Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.

The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”

Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).

Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.

Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.

Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.

Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…

Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.

Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).

Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.

License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…

The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”

‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”

PASSAGE

Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”

READER SURVEY

What if Jesus were alive now, in his teens, training to re-enter public life at the turn of the millennium? What’d he be doing? Where’d he live? Send replies to the address below; results next month.

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WORD-O-MONTH

“Orthogonal”

10/90 Misc. Newsletter

CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!

It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.

LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)

ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.

DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.

FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.

PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.

IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.

STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.

CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)

OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.

NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?

ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.

UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.

YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.

AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”

‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.

PASSAGE

Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”

REPORT

It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.

I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Esconce”

5/90 Misc. Newsletter

NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT

FOR TEARING DOWN

THE MUSIC BOX THEATER

Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).

Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.

Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.

As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.

Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”

Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.

Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.

Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.

The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”

Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.

Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.

Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).

News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.

Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.

Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”

Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.

‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”

PASSAGE

One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”

REPORT

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CALL TO ACTION

ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Syncretize”

2/90 Misc. Newsletter

LATIN DEBATE: IS THIS YEAR “MCMXC” OR “MCMLXL”?

Return with us now to Misc., the monthly information source that hopes one day to earn the phrase a Wall St. Journal headline (1/16) gave to Boeing’s Pentagon spy, “Loyal to Seattle to the End.”

More Than Meets the Eye?: We love to study the mysteries of the world, the unexplained phenomena that some discount as mere coincidence. One such mystery occurred with Ranger Charlie, the jovial host of KSTW’s morning cartoons for the past year. Sometime in December, he disappeared from the screen, leaving his puppet raccoon friend Roscoe in charge. Finally, in January, Roscoe again had Ranger Charlie to banter with — only the beloved ranger had become shorter, younger, and female. Now, that’s something you don’t see in cartoons, not even on The Transformers.

The Fine Print (from a P-I ad insert): “Safeway’s 1/4-inch trim is trimmed to 1/4-inch external fat excluding natural depressions in the contour of the underlying meat.”

The Not-So-Fine Print: A Crown Books in-store poster touts a discount dictionary as the “best in it’s class.” Never buy a dictionary from people who can’t spell. The book in question is a reprint of the ’83 version (since supplanted) of theRandom House Dictionary, inherited via a series of Random House subsidiaries by “Portland House, New York,” successor to the Oregon computer-book house dilithium press.

Local Publication of the Month: The Way of the Lover, a self-help book of sorts by West Vancouver, B.C. spiritualist Robert Agustus Masters. You might not immediately buy into the mythological or meditative content, but you’ve gotta love such chapter titles as “Releasing Sex (and Everything Else) from the Obligation to Make Us Feel Better.”… The Weekly-ization of the local press continues, as local media hype Hawaii tourism this winter as never before. The Times andWashington magazine even ran “editorial” sections trying to find local-angle stories about a place thousands of miles away…. Caverns, a “collaborative novel” by Ken Kesey’s Univ. of Oregon writing class, is a plain piece of commercial storytelling, recommended only for those interested in how it was made (like me) and Kesey completists (unlike me).

Cathode Corner: KING’s first ads after the flood-day (1/9) 11 pm news were two of those awful Infiniti spots wherein you don’t see the car, just a lot of water; followed by a spot with the opening line “drowning in a sea of high bills?”…. Ted Turner, who expects to lose millions on the Seattle Goodwill Games, tried to make a little of it back by colorizing Jailhouse Rock, a film made in ’57 (well into the Eastmancolor era) with a major star, at a time when the only major black and white films were done deliberately that way…. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was almost set in Seattle, instead of Minneapolis. According to a new book about the show, its producers felt that a show filmed before a live audience would need to be set in a town where people spent lots of their time in small indoor rooms. (As you recall, MTM went on in ’70, a year before All in the Family and after several years of sitcoms with outdoor scenes and canned laughter.) As the show coalesced, they decided Minnesota was more indoorsy than Seattle. Instead of Hüsker Du remaking the MTM theme (by old Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis), it could’ve been Capping Day or even Pure Joy.

A Classic Tragedy: Cable’s American Movie Classics channel seldom lives up to its name (most of its flicks are dated Don Ameche vehicles); but on 1/14 it ran one of the weirdest pieces of video ever shot: the Frances Farmer episode of This Is Your Life. The 1958 live telecast, made at the start of Farmer’s return to public life after her lobotomy, shows the Seattle-born actress staring into space while greasy-haired host Ralph Edwards (who also created Truth or Consequences) rattled off a summary of her sad life story. During her turns to speak, she looked offstage (possibly to a prompter). In an elegant but slurred voice, she slowly explained that “I did not believe and still do not believe that I was truly ill.” At the end, she was rewarded for her bravery with a new Edsel.

Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Lite! Thicker snack cakes, slightly less sweet, for “grown-ups.” Most of the reduction in calories is due to a reduction in size from the regular Hostess product…. Burger King announced new oat bran buns for its burgers, just before the gov’t. announced that the oat bran craze had been based on exaggerated claims…. Chateau Ste. Michelle has brought out a special bottling of ’86 Chenin Blanc to honor the UW’s 125th Anniversary. It would have been a more appropriate tribute if it had been a wine more UW people drink: cheap Chablis in a box. But then again, this grad can’t imagine what a UW frat was doing with a sheep during induction week, except perhaps to show it off as a role model.

Praying for a Space: Chicago’s Catholics are faced with declining attendance and a priest shortage, but one downtown parish is investing in a new church building, to be financed by a 20-story parking garage to be built above the sanctuary. They’re just following the lead of my childhood denomination: Chicago Methodists already have a downtown church-office tower and a neighborhood church with a Fotomat booth in its front yard.

The Severed Arm of the Law: A North Carolina firm’s selling a “lawyer doll,” the heads and limbs of which are attached with Velcro for easy mangling, apparently to place curses on lawyers for the other side of your case. Or, you could leave it headless to resemble your own attorney. Such quasi-voodoo rituals didn’t help Noriega, but who says they won’t work for you?

Reach Out and Severely Inconvenience Someone: The AT&T system crash, in which about half of the long-distance network simply refused to put calls through, shows that even the ex-Ma Bell is no longer a paragon of American technological supremacy. The big glitch was blamed on faulty software; just the admission they’d like to make while AT&T’s computer unit tries to wrestle control of its UNIX computer system software back from various licensees.

What’s With Utne These Days?: Utne Reader, the bimonthly digest of the alternative press, now has its very own Publishers’ Clearing House stamp, right between Stamps and Time. When you win your $10 million in the sweepstakes, you can read how to put the dough into socially responsible investments.

Those Phunny Phoreigners: This sign in a Northwest Trek-style wildlife park in Nara, Japan, is noted in the book Gems of Japanized English by Miranda Kendrick: “CAUTION: Everybody: Take care of Hind! It is the season Fawn is born about this time. It may be case if you approach him, his mother deer being full of maternal love gives you a kick by her forefeet.”

We’re Only In It for the Freedom: The first U.S. private citizen to meet with new Czech president Vaclav Havel wasn’t an industrialist or banker but Frank Zappa. Havel, it turns out, is a longtime Zappa fan; during his years as a banned playwright, he let banned musicians, such as the Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe, record tapes in his country house. Zappa may use his friendship with this anti-authoritarian hero to bolster his fight against rock censorship. Zappa would probably be upset by managers of the new Yakima domed arena, who wouldn’t let the B-52s bring the Greenpeace info booth the band has had outside every tour date. The arena bosses claimed it would “set a bad precedent.”

Tomorrow Ain’t What It Usta Be: The Futurist magazine has published some wild ‘n’ wacky predictions for the ’90s. Among them: Flight from the Greenhouse Effect may make Canada more populous than the U.S. Cash money will become illegal for all but very small transactions. Computers with automatic language translation and voice synthesis will enable people to speak in one language that listeners will hear translated into another language. Computer chips will be in everything from houses to clothing. Household robots may be as common as refrigerators. Almost one-fourth of the world’s population will be Moslem. Self-propelled, computerized lawn mowers will be able to “see” where the grass needs to be cut and to avoid trees. Remember, these may be the same seers who said we’d now have home helicopters but not home computers.

‘Til March, you might as well abandon the Sonics this year and root for the Seattle-owned Portland TrailBlazers, thank the nondenominational dieties that there will be no Robert Fulghum sitcom (which would have starred John Denver), and review these words by author/educator John Gardner: “More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.”

PASSAGE

Julio Cortazar in the “Love 77” chapter of A Certain Lucas (1979):

“And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, they comb their hair, they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.”

OFFER

Tell your friends about Misc., the one piece of monthly first-class mail they’ll be glad to get. New subscribers will receive the humorous essay “God as I Understand Him” and first word on future Fait Divers products (the computer novel The Perfect Couple, special mini-posters).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Descry”