8/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger columns and an original essay)

High Fashion and Running Naked

Welcome again to Misc., the only column made with the Miracle Substance ZR-7. This is the one and only genuine, original Misc. Accept no substitutes! Especially not “High and Low” in the Weekly. The title comes from a tacky show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on “modern art and popular culture” that treated the greatest works of illustration, cartooning, entertainment and industrial design as mere fodder to inspire “real” artists. And while B. Barcott can write a halfway-decent item, his apparent assignment is to belittle anyone doing anything interesting, in the tradition of old-fogey columnists everywhere. I’m reminded of the words of

John Lydon: “Imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”

RESULTS of our last contest, wherein we asked “What does John McCaw, Mariner investor and noted recluse, look like?”: No entries were received by the deadline. You oafs.

HOW TO KILL A SCENE: Some of the same alleged criminal elements who used to be at Jersey’s Sports Bar are said to have been outside Club Belltown, starting fights on 7/19 that culminated with gunshots fired into the air, which cops didn’t respond to for 20 minutes. Some downtown residents are advocating the restriction or even closure of music clubs. It took a lot less violence and damage to shut down the live punk scene a decade ago, a loss from which local music has only now recovered. (Jersey’s is now reopened with different DJs, few problems, few customers.)

ONE HOT SHOW: It’s sad that that old Leary Way warehouse burned before the Bathhouse Theater and On the Boards could move in, but I’m glad it burned without a cast and audience inside.

PHILM PHUN: The LA Times said Bill Gates wants to start a Seattle movie company. He denies it. Maybe he dropped the idea after observing his tax-bracket comrade John Kluge, who made a mint selling some TV stations to Murdoch and has spent a lot of it keeping Orion Pictures alive. Gates’s only movie project to date is a Microsoft Press book, Moviemakers at Work. Its authors slighted the more boring film practitioners (writers, actors) in favor of what they felt were the real movie stars — designers, editors, and especially special effects crews. While I’d love to see more movies made here, I admit that most of them are bad. The only distinguished features made here were Tugboat Annie (’33), The Slender Thread (’67), and maybe Cinderella Liberty (’73). The Fabulous Baker Boys was a doze when the Bridges Boys were on. Twice in a Lifetime got undeserved praise from critics eager to proclaim a “film for grownups at last.” I won’t talk about McQ, Harry in Your Pocket, Harry and the Hendersons, and 99 44/100% Dead (though I have a soft spot for Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and the David Jannsen-Frank Gorshin thriller Ring of Fire).

A FRIEND WRITES: “The best part of Tina Brown‘s assumption of command at The New Yorker was USA Today‘s headline: ‘Vanity Fair Editor Takes Over Fave Literary Mag.’ Second best: Everything I read about Brown talked about her own strengths and weaknesses, and didn’t just call her the `First Woman Editor.'”

THE BALD FACTS: The Hair Club for Men is now one of the top advertisers on MTV, showing middle-aged out-of-its enjoying second childhoods thanks to phony-looking hair transplants. Are 40ish geezers really watching the channel, searching to stay young? Does that mean that imitation rap slang will soon be audible in lawyers’ watering holes? Will we see Body Gloves in the Columbia Center Club? Worse things have happened (cf. every men’s fashion ad in a 1971 Playboy).

THE BARE FACTS: Political Diversities, Seattle public access cable’s first all-nude talk show, is an exercise in ego-tripping under the guise of politics. The host and his guests (to misquote B. Breathed, “pretty much an ugly all-male operation”) preach indignantly about the hemp movement (they like it) and censorship (they hate it). I agreed with most of their points, but wish they could make them more persuasively, without presuming their viewers to be idiots. The show’s backdrop wasn’t designed with close-ups in mind; the painted banner features all sorts of provocative icons, but the host’s face is right in front of a swastika. I still like the idea for the show (and have, ever since I picked up a paperback of Rex Reed‘s

Conversations in the Raw and was disappointed to find the title was just a come-on).

SINCE WE’RE NEIGHBORS DEPT.: The dreaded Port Townsend Lifestyle Police struck again, ordering Safeway to replace its regular-style sign with “old style” letters. Next thing you know, they’ll stop the store from selling Twinkies and meat.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (flashing sign at Honda of Seattle): “Nikki is awesome…single & pretty.”… At Front Street Specialty Nutrition in Issaquah: “Always lowest prices! Well, usually — O.K., O.K., at least sometimes!”

ART MEETS NON-ART: Live music keeps popping up in new places. One recent Sat. nite, a clerk at the Glass Curtain porn shop on 1st was playing a saxophone on duty. His only audience: the wandering people outside and the photos of fake fun inside.

SEARCH FOR YESTERDAY: Shokus Video’s Sudsy Television is a 3-videocassette series of the true American video noir, black-and-white soap operas. Forget everything about TV being incessantly bright and snappy. These are interminably slow 15-minute shows, performed live on small, shabby sets (sometimes just furniture and prop doors in front of scrim curtains) by somber, uptight actors who stumble over half their lines but stay inside their Beckettian grimness. The infamous organ music (used on General Hospital

as late as 1978) sounds more like a restored-silent-movie soundtrack than like anything to do with modern entertainment. Even the commercials are stern: beady-eyed announcers pointing at diagrams, reiterating the values of Anacin compared to regular strength tablets. Most of the actors never went further than this, but you do see a pre-Mayberry Don Knotts and a very pre-St. Elsewhere Bonnie Bartlett.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: Margaret Thatcher‘s landed a consulting job with

Philip Morris to increase cigarette sales in developing countries. As if she hadn’t done enough to her own country…

FUTURE RULES FOR A POST-REPUBLICAN FCC: Classic R&B songs should not be used in commercials (a) for laxatives or (b) for companies that wouldn’t do business with blacks when the songs came out.

JUST PLAIN BILL: Didn’t hear much of Clinton‘s speech on 7/26 (they didn’t have speakers in every direction), but I did get handed a tract by a Korean-based fundamentalist group that predicts the Rapture for Oct. 28 (that’d make the campaign irrelevant, if it weren’t that it’s been predicted many times before, and will be many times again, especially at the turn of the millennium).

THE RACE IS ON: With Longacres on track for demolition, the big hope for horse racing may lie with Native American tribes. Following the modest new

Tulalip casino, the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes announced separate projects for tracks and huge 24-hour casinos. The Puyallup plan, which would be managed by a Vegas firm, would also have a 1,000-room hotel, mall, bowling alley and native-theme amusement park. Both plans require the state Gambling Commission’s OK, which may be tough.

‘FAMILY’ FEUD: If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, family values are their next-to-last refuge. Or, as GOP loyalist G. Will sez, “morality is the last refuge of the politically desperate.” Almost any destructive policy can be trumped up as a pean to “The Family” (as if there were only one kind anymore, and as if all families were good for the people in them). Bush/Quayle, in their total lack of contact with the real world, haven’t noticed the spectacular rise of “dysfunctional family” 12-step groups and other forces that are pointing out the basic structural faults of the nuclear-family system. “The Family” is, to millions, an image of stifling cruelty and authoritarianism — just what the Right loves.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE: Anybody who generically votes for any female candidate, no matter who she is, wasn’t living in Wash. when Dixy Lee Ray was governor. Ray was a co-founder of the Pacific Science Center and ex-head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who ran in ’76 as a Democrat (a label of convenience, to gain the party-line endorsement of our powerful senators

Magnuson and Jackson). In office, she tried to demolish environmental laws and to prop up the unprofitable Hanford nuclear industry. She amassed a massive re-election fund from timber and development interests, but lost in the ’80 primary. Today she speaks to business groups trying to quash land-use laws.

AMAZING DISCOVERIES DEPT.: Two Seattle women have invented a washable, reusable sanitary napkin. It saves trees and doesn’t use the dioxin bleaching used to make paper white. I laughed too soon when I snickered at the commercial that starts, “I’ll borrow my mother’s earrings, but my mother’s tampons?”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Seattle Mariners chewing gum is very soft (like the team), is very sweet (like the team), and has a strong aroma (like the team)…. I’m still trying to get a jar of Mango Flavor Tang, sold mainly thru Hispanic-oriented groceries in the southern tier states. It presumably tastes as much like mangoes as regular Tang tastes like oranges. I wonder if it was in the spaceship with Bill Dana, the Hungarian-born comedian who did the Mexican-dialect comedy record The Astronaut.

ON TAP AT THE KIT KAT CLUB: The gourmet pet food craze reaches a new extreme with Alpo Dairy Cat, described as a “low lactose milk for cats that have trouble digesting regular milk.” Why not go further and make sure that your cats only catch mice that eat fake cheese?

ON THE AIR: As some of you know, I was one of the first new music DJs on KCMU, one of the first to practice what they now call the “variety format”: juxtaposing hard rock, skinny-tie new wave, reggae, R&B, and anything else that seemed to fit in. The concept still works, with one exception: the momentum of the music comes to a halt four times an hour, when the volunteer DJs are told to go to the “world beat” rotation. There’s a lot of great music around the world, but KCMU’s world-beat bin is mostly bland yuppie exotica, the P. Simon/D. Byrne unthreatening Afropop or Braziliapop that belonged more on the old KEZX. I’m not asking the station to stop playing foreign music, I’m asking it to play more diverse, more exciting foreign music. To find it; they’ll have to get on the lists of a lot of obscure record companies. But it’ll be worth it.

ON THE STREETS: A middle-aged man with short-trimmed hair and a grey suit came up to me outside a deli-market and repeatedly asked, “Do you read the newspapers? Do you read the paper regularly?” After two minutes, he asked if a minor recent news item was really published. I said it was. He walked away.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, have a gourd reading at Tribes Native and Nature Art and Tea Co. in Fremont, collect all of Mattel’s Beverly Hills 90210 dolls (almost as completely hot as the people on the show and just as good actors).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Napiform”

DOES ALPHA HYDROX FACE CREME COME FROM THE INSIDES OF COOKIES?

•

BODY CONSCIOUSNESS

One recent weekend, I saw two very different events celebrating the human body. Both promoted leisure-time lifestyles baed on distinct philosophies of life:

(a) Arena 3, a fashion show at the Mountaineers Hall on a Friday night, celebrated the body strategically hidden and revealed. Night heat in the city. Crowds of people in their best clothes and brashest attitudes. Eighteen local designers and some 100 models (mostly women, mostly young, many races) slinking down the runway, to the flash of photographers and upbeat music.

(b) The Bare Buns Fun Run, a nudist foot race at the Fraternitie Snoqualmie Nudist Camp on a Sunday morning, celebrated the body unencumbered and unadorned. Searing daylight in the suburbs, halfway up Issaquah’s Tiger Mountain. Nearly 300 people (mostly men, mostly 35ish and older, almost all white) running along 5K of steep trails, most clad only in socks and shoes. Afterwards, many runners enjoyed a leisurely afternoon at the lawn, pool and sauna.

Despite its aura of proud individualism, Arena showed off a design scene that’s become a true community of people working together to bring attention and employment into Seattle. The Seattle designers have grown to attract national (or at least NYC) notice. They’ve got a diverse set of styles that all express a fun, play-dress-up attitude.

The nudists boast of being one big family living in laid-back togetherness. But their retreatist lifestyle reflects the get-away-from-it-all philosophy behind many of America’s problems (suburban sprawl, urban neglect, alienation). Also, the road up to the camp was clogged with cars; you’ve got to guzzle lots of gas to commune with nature.

Nudists like to laugh at the hypocrisy of nudity in fashion marketing (such as the Drew Barrymore cover of Interview magazine, an Arena co-sponsor), contrasting it with their own de-emphasis of lust. They assert that by treating no body part as special or shameful, they’ve become some of the least sex-crazed people around; even though much of their literature features pictures of nubile young adults. In fact, the nudists were courteously seeing and being seen. But the scene was still much less gaze-active than a normal Green Lake Saturday; maybe because it was mostly married couples and older guys. It’s too bad more women don’t join; it might help overcome negative body image to be in a safe environment with a lot of bodies that are clearly no better or worse than yours.

Arena, on the other hand, reveled in positive body consciousness with personas that ranged from ridiculous to stunning. I can’t subjectively comment on the gay costumes (Jason Harler had a topless guy in half-unzipped pants and a feather boa; other designers had see-thru shorts above codpieces). The more straightforward men’s looks were playful and joyous. As for the women’s wear, I fell in love several times per minute. Short black dresses with short red hair (by Siren Blue). Red and black patterned cocktail dresses (Carol McClellan). A cherry-red bridal gown (Tohma). A calico dress with acres of frills (Raven). A green raincoat, doffed to reveal a backless one-piece swimsuit (Susan Hanover). Orange vinyl body suits (Direct). All modeled by people clearly at home inside their bodies.

Many of us need to break out from our social norms and make friends with our physical nature. That can mean taking off your clothes or putting on better ones. A nudist camp membership is cheaper than a designer outfit, but you don’t have to leave town to get dressed.

(Many of the clothes shown at Arena 3 are available at Fast Forward, 1918 1st Ave.; Darbury Stenderu, 2121 1st Ave.; and Basic, 111 Broadway E.)

(The next Fraternitie Snoqualmie public event is “Nudestock” in mid-August. Tickets will be available through KISW radio; for info call 392-NUDE. Nude & Natural magazine, sold at better newsstands, covers issues related to the nudist philosophy.)

6/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating five Stranger columns)

QUAYLE SHOULDN’T PICK ON CANDICE BERGEN.

SHE GREW UP LEARNING HOW TO ARGUE WITH A DUMMY

We at Misc. bemusedly note the spectacular rise of Perot as the candidate of bus commuters, computer bulletin board users, and talk radio callers. He appeals to their sense of independence, of freedom from the petty rules of governance. The GOP has long appealed to the frontier mentality of people living outside the old social structures, especially in the west. But when times got tough, the Repos retreated to their old-money, old-power base, leaving the Mad-As-Hell crowd to seek a new champion. But Perot’s not beholden to special interest groups, he is one. He ran a bureaucratized company with a Safeco-like dress code, courted politicians of both parties for sweetheart contracts, and sponsored dubious foreign adventures on behalf of right-fringe causes. (His name is a soundalike to moralistic fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault, whose version of Red Riding Hood was an uppity female who paid for her unladylike curiosity by becoming wolf chow.)

PAY ‘N SAVE, 1947-1992: Washington’s dominant drug chain for four decades grew from a single outlet at 4th & Pike to over 120 outlets. It was the flagship of the Bean family’s retail empire, which at various times included Tradewell, Rhodes of Seattle, Ernst, Malmo, Lamonts, Sportsland, Sportswest, Schuck’s, Bi-Mart, Price Savers, The Bean Pod, and Pizza Haven. The Beans were known for their Mormon paternalism, particularly in their generous employee benefits — which made the company ripe for a hostile takeover and dismemberment in 1984. Shorn of its sister chains, Pay ‘n Save lost its focus and market share. Now, the stores will be absorbed by Pay Less, a much less classy operation started in the ’20s by the Skaggs family (also involved in the founding of Safeway and Albertson’s). By the ’60s the Pay Less logo was divided among three completely separate companies: one in Oregon and Washington; one in California; and a four-store chain in Tacoma. The northern and southern Pay Lesses were both bought by K mart a few years back; they remained somewhat gaudy places, while P ‘n S was getting glitzy in past years. P ‘n S stores will now change to PL’s garish pastels. But the P ‘n S headquarters staff will be thrown out. A similar front-office closing is rumored for for Seven Gables Theaters, which will now be run directly from LA by the parent company, Samuel Goldwyn. As we’ve seen with banks, fewer people will be able to authorize local charitable or arts donations. Fewer firms will be able to respond to local market needs.

ICONO-GRAPHICS: CNN’s Showbiz Today lists the weekly Neilsen ratings against a graphic of TV antennas rising from urban rowhouses. A cable channel offering nostalgia for the pre-cable days…

CORRECTION (Times, 5/12): “To keep cats away from indoor herb and vegetable plants, sprinkle leaves with red cayenne pepper. An article in the home/real estate section on Sunday listed another spice.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Journal of Northwest Music is Bruce Blood and Chris Carlson’s catalog of discs (real and compact) by area bands from the Dynamics up to the Melvins. It’s also got an interview with jazz guitarist Larry Coryell (an ex-UW Daily writer just like me), on his early days in Seattle rock, circa ’61 (“the kind of music the local bands were playing for the kids was a higher, more sophisticated type of R&B than they might be getting in other regions”).

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT: In endorsing the destruction of most spotted owl habitat in Washington, Bush gave final proof of his total submission to big bucks. The owl is an indicator species whose disappearance signals the decline of an ecosystem. To move a few birds away as an excuse to level that ecosystem is the most cynical action that could be taken. Few jobs will be saved by clearcutting at an already too-high level. Timber workers are out of work because of log exports, mill automation, corporate consolidation, and excess cutting from past years that’s left too little old growth left and not enough tree-farm stands to replace them.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at the Christopher Paul Bollen print gallery on 3rd): “Hi. Popcorn, candy, children and pets are most WELCOME in this gallery. If you break it, no big deal. No shoes, no shirt? Goodness, it must be sunny. COME ON IN.”

AD OF THE MONTH: (huge boldface slogan on a brochure for Ultra Meditation tapes from Zygon of Issaquah): “In 28 Minutes You’ll Be Meditating Like a Zen Monk!”… We’re always mesmerized by the Horizon Shuttle billboards with the digital clocks flashing in half-hour increments every second, bearing the slogan “Nonstop Non-stops to Portland.” As I recall, Delta was the first to run billboards proclaiming, “Fly Non-Stop to Portland.” Every flight from Sea-Tac to Portland is non-stop. There’s no place for a commercial-class plane to stop, except an emergency landing at McChord AFB.

CATHODE CORNER: When Sony took over Columbia Pictures, it inherited rights to the Merv Griffin and Chuck Barris game shows. Now, it plans the latest specialized cable network, The Game Show Channel. (What’s next: The Soap Channel? The Blooper Channel? The Station Break Channel?)

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: The much-touted Milky Way II bar has the solid, chalky taste of the original Milky Way imitator, Milk Shake. The 25-percent calorie reduction comes from Caprenin, “a reduced calorie fat made from natural sources”… Get ready to welcome back that fond relic of the ’80s, New Coke, rechristened “Coke II.” It’s being test-marketed in Spokane, and may go national this fall…. People call me a cynic but I’m not. When I shop for a soft drink I look for Minute Maid Orange Soda because I enjoy the bizarre combination of syllables of that mystery ingredient, “glycerol ester of wood rosin.” I enjoy the slippery thickness it gives to the beverage, making a glass of flavored water feel like something juicier.

THE MAILBAG: The anonymous editor of something called Eye on Nirvana: A Report on Nirvana and Nothing Else writes in part that I shouldn’t scoff at Rolling Stone‘s comparison of Seattle to Liverpool; since we’re “becoming one of the power centers of the alternative music scene”, I could only oppose publicity for the town if I were living “in fear daily of having our little pan of heavenly mazurkas sliced into even thinner pieces and distributed to even more `outsiders.'” Yes, I used to scoff at outsiders. But the people coming here now are making real contributions to our community. They’re moving here to be part of something. People used to come here to avoid social involvement. That horrible “Emerald City” slogan, adopted by the Convention and Visitors Bureau in ’82, typified a post-hippie generation wanting to get away from it all to a dreamland where nothing ever happens. So many people wanted their own nature oasis that they destroyed a lot of nature so they could have their big ugly estate houses. We don’t need that. We do need all the people we can get to make great cultural stuff, to make a better community.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1 (NY Times “Surfacing” brief, 5/14): “Test Tube Pets: Today, leopards by artificial insemination. Tomorrow, sperm banks for cats.”

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: In the unauthorized bio Hard Drive, an ex-girlfriend of Bill Gates describes him as “a combination of Einstein, Woody Allen, and John Cougar Mellencamp.”

THE FINE PRINT (from Cakes Men Like, Benjamin Darling’s book of photostatted pages from old food-company recipe brochures): “The recipes in this book are the product of an earlier era, and the publisher cannot guarantee their reproducability or palatability for contemporary readers.”

LATEX LESSON: Without straying too far into Mr. Savage’s topic range, Misc. wants to briefly note how the ex-“new morality” generation just doesn’t understand the cultural implications of safe sex. They think that anybody having sex must be having it the way it was had in the ’60s, either as strict monogamy or undisciplined licentiousness. They don’t get that with today’s much more assertive women, relations would naturally be more protection-conscious even without STDs to worry about. Contraception alone would be taken more seriously. Women taking more charge, even in short-term relationships, invariably means more discipline (I don’t mean S&M but simply more thought and planning). That attitude shows in the elaborate visions of club fashions, in dance music that’s all about energy and control instead of “letting it all hang out”.

WIRED: Pat Robertson tried, then gave up trying, to buy what remains of United Press International, the news service that reported the end of World War I a couple days prematurely in 1918 and hasn’t had editors’ full respect since. It’s no longer carried by many papers, including the Times. (It’s still a big supplier of news bulletins to computer information services.) Anyone who’s seen a 700 Club “news” segment knows that Robertson’s idea of news is more like sports reporting, cheering his heroes (Reagan, Helmes, Israel, the Pentagon) and hissing his villains (abortion-rights supporters, peaceniks, artists, the First Amendment, rock music, unions, environmentalists, anybody to the left of Franco). The UPI name may live a while longer, but any remaining credibility it had is shot.

YOU THOUGHT THE SIMPSONS WERE TOO MERCHANDISED: The Channel 9 Store in Rainier Square is one of a series of boutiques run by PBS stations. They sell books, soundtrack CDs, videos, toys and assorted doodads inspired by your favorite “noncommercial” shows. No MacNiel/Lehrer salt and pepper shakers, yet…

OFFICE HUMOR TURNS PRO: The Wall St. Journal sez a New Jersey branch of Seattle’s Red Robin restaurant chain has comedy shows in its bar, and is getting local companies to sponsor employee entrants in a Corporate Laugh-Off. Do you tell your cruelest boss jokes to win, or not tell them and keep your job?

FOR YOUR TRAVEL PLANS: Seattle-area McDonald’s are sporting paper tray liners with a cartoon map of all its 25 outlets in Alaska. It shows a Coke straw-sipping salmon, a French fry-eating moose, and burger bags delivered by float plane, snowmobile, and in an eagle’s talons. However, the lifelong Dog House fan in me can’t help but be offended by the headline on the liner, “All Roads Lead to McDonald’s” — a ripoff of the “All Roads Lead to the Dog House” placemats.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, voice your opposition to those who want to ban musicians and street vendors from Broadway, and heed the words of local artist Joanne Branch in her recent show at Art/Not Terminal: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, at least for a little while.”

PASSAGE

Hugh Hefner’s editorial in the first Playboy (1953), on why his would be one of the few men’s mags of the day not about hunting or fishing: “We plan to spend most of our time inside. We like our apartment.”

BIG EVENT!

The sixth birthday of Misc., and the 35th birthday of your correspondent, will be celebrated Mon., 6/8, at the Queen City Film Festival Dream Theater, 1108 Pike St. (Enter thru the mystery bookshop.) Bring stuff to celebrate with. There’ll be readings, short films, and audience participation.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amanuensis”

IN THE STREETS

The Weekly, in one of its best reportages ever, noted that the 4/30 mixed-race window-busting spree downtown was smaller than fight scenes at two Rainier Valley dances last year that the white media ignored. As you know, the following night’s mob scene was mostly white guys, led by U-District anarchists who wanted a riot of their own. They’re the successors to the punks I knew in the early ’80s, whose idea of creativity was to imitate the latest LA fad. But like the second wave of most subcultures, today’s circle-A guys are more orthodox and serious than their forbearers. They may think they were formenting revolution in solidarity with blacks, but (with the help of irresponsible media who exaggerated the threat) they just made white Seattle more afraid of African Americans, who will now be collectively blamed for the anarchists’ work. Most of the busted windows, except for the Bon and a 7-11, were at youth- or hip-oriented stores, including a sneaker outlet, blue jean boutiques, the Broadway Jack in the Box and Kinko’s Copies. Most were independent businesses that could least afford the damage and the panic-driven loss of clientele; none had anything to do with the Rodney King verdict. The nightclubs that weekend were shut or mostly empty; the anarchists directly threatened a youth culture that’s taken 10 tough years to build. To the people who stayed home, I say: Two isolated sprees of highly visible property damage must not kill the scene. If anything, we need more people out at night, making positive contact with one another.

BACK SOUTH, who’s to blame for the conditions that sparked the rage? Every CEO who moves jobs to the suburbs, the Sunbelt or overseas. Every politician who ignores lower working class people or treats them as something to protect “decent people” against. Every baby-boomer who treats minorities as sexy savages, not as human beings. Every yuppie customer of drug dealers. Every bank that “invests” in funny-money schemes instead of in its own community. A tax system that insures that only rich suburbs get the best schools.

I HOPE THIS IS THE END OF LA LA LAND, of the disgusting mythical SoCal of Fleetwood Mac and Tommy Lasorda, limos and liposuction. Of celebrities who’d rather care for the rainforest than for their own city. Of violence movies celebrating “cops who break all the rules”. Long before this, when people tried to turn me on to the latest “alternative scene” in LA, I told them that LA is what everything else in the world is an alternative to. If LA’s so hip, how come it gave us Nixon and Reagan? Calif. wasn’t just home to those old student rebels, it was home to most of the things they were rebelling against. Then, the more violent faction of the white New Left accomplished little except to serve its own ego trips, drive working-class whites into the law-&-order Right, and destroy any hopes for a real broad-based movement to actually help people. Few “relevant” white songwriters mentioned racism except as a pretext for peace-n’-love sentiments. One song that did address the issue was Frank Zappa‘s “Trouble Coming Every Day,” from the now-reissued Freak Out! album. In biting monotonic couplets that predate rap, Zappa describes watching the 1965 Watts riots through the then-new gimmick of live TV helicopters. At one point he shouts, “I’m not black but there are times when I wish I could say I’m not white.”