UPDATE: The Weathered Wall’s new owners are now gonna keep live music there Thurs. and Fri., and maybe add it on other weeknights later on. Anxious bands can contact the club’s new in-house booking agent, Julie Wynn (728-9398).

DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: One issue in the three-year KCMU Kontroversey was the ongoing drive to turn the station into an adjunct of KUOW. That’s become official, now that KUOW’s taking over KCMU’s administrative and fundraising operations. They’re not changing KCMU’s programming, like they tried during the World Cafe era, but the move sets up a chain of command that would allow it. They fail to understand that KCMU succeeded in the past because it was perceived as a grass-roots operation of people who loved music, not a professional institution out to draw well-heeled donors with bland “upscale” fare. It’ll be up to the next UW prez to sort it out. Let’s hope s/he understands it’s in both stations’ best interests to be separate operations with separate missions.

WISH I’D SAID THAT DEPT.: I don’t normally comment on other things in the Stranger (what do you think this is, the Vill. Voice?). But now and again there’s a piece I get additional thoughts about. Here are some recent ones:

Die Hard w/a Vengeance review (4 * 34): Don’t think it’s been mentioned in the media, but the Seattle Symphony recorded some of the background music for the film. Of course, they also did the theme to KIRO’s old News Outside the Box…

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black preview (4 * 34) The V.H. of K.B. singer is like Madonna’s good twin: lo-fi and funky, but still an image-based performance artist who only uses songs as a means to an end, and who as such can be recommended as a live (or home-video) act only. Audio-only documentation of her work is superfluous.

Bathhouses (4 * 33): I know I’m not the only lonely straight guy who’s been jealous of gays for having such an industry . Imagine, going to a place alone and getting laid on the spot, and not by a paid worker but by someone who wants it just as bad as you–the male zipless-fuck fantasy, unencumbered by feminine propriety.

Savage Love (4 * 33): What the letter writer calls “insanity” could also be interpreted as discovering his new lover’s “real” self, not her sociable front persona. If he’s having trouble finding a woman who always keeps the illusion of “sanity” most of us maintain in public, maybe he should resign himself to shallow affairs with married women who want to “bring romance back to their lives.”

The Information book review (4 * 33): Lots of people who think they have talent are jealous of the success of people they think have less talent. Almost every highbrow author-wannabe I’ve met has tried at one time to write a commercially successful work just by making something “bad enough to sell,” without knowing the formulae and disciplines involved in genre lit.

Theater calendar comment (4 * 32): Ah, “risk” in theater. The Empty Space, Bathhouse, Pioneer Square Theater (RIP) et al. have for decades boasted of their daring programming while mounting boomer-friendly wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody revues. AHA! merely follows in this venerable tradition.

COCA feature (4 * 29): Greg implied but didn’t state that bad-boy art might have seemed rebellious and “alternative” enough in the ’80s; but in the Newt era, when the John Carlsons of America drive Harleys and call themselves “rebels,” a different aesthetic may be more appropriate.

Cut & Run (4 * 29): The usual rad-feminist response to an author like ex-Portland punk singer Rene Denfield is to first accuse her of backsliding from the orthodox view of what All Women are or should be. S.P. instead accuses Denfield of the same gross overgeneralizing Denfield accuses Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin of. There’s no such thing as All Women, and certainly no such thing as All Feminists. A movement for individual self-realization can’t be (or become) a monolith.

LAST PLUG: Our ninth-anniversary reading/ performance/ video shindig, Fun With Misc., happens this Thurs., 7:30 p.m.-whenever, at the Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, downtown on University between 1st and 2nd. BYOB; clothing optional.

UPDATES: The C-Space group is dead, but another group has risen to take its place providing education and advice to the leather community: SKIN (Seattle Kink Information Network). It meets at, and can be reached in care of, the Crossroads Learning Center… I’ve now tried RealAudio (the software for receiving sound files on the Internet in real time) and it’s great. Love the lo-fi sound (akin to an international call placed thru a no-name long distance company), complete with disconcerting jump cuts at random places in some files. The software’s developers promise improved quality in future releases (though any improvement is limited as long as the data comes to you on regular phone lines), but for now it’s a miracle.

THE REAL THREAT: I’m told cops are still trying to find “public safety” excuses to stop the all-ages shows at the Sailors Union hall. The SUP shows are probably the safest place to be in Belltown. The real safety problem lies on the three blocks just south of SUP. Late Fri. and Sat. nights, this is an iffy zone for single women, non-jock men, and anybody else rich bullies like to beat up on. Meanwhile, Capitol Hill continues to face gay-bashings, including a recent attack against two women outside Wildrose. Seattle is getting to be a less-safe place, and you can’t blame it on the homeless, non-whites or other “Others.” Increasingly, the threat to safe streets comes from middle- or upper-middle-class white kids, part of the “upscale” class local politicians and most local media bow down to. For the benefit of those of the suburban jock contingent who might be reading this while “slumming” in Belltown or on Broadway, a quick piece-O-advice: Despite what you might have been led to believe in recent years, intolerance, bigotry, rudeness and violence are not virtues. Bashing, harrassment and racist jokes don’t prove how daring or “politically incorrect” you are; they only prove how stupid you are. Assholes aren’t noble “rebels,” they’re just assholes. It’s not “cool” to be a creep.

INDUSTRY FOR SHOES: As you know, I love Seattle’s urban industrial areas. I love their empty streets, their old-style big low buildings, their ambience of honest hard work. I haven’t talked about one of my favorite such areas, south Ballard/Salmon Bay. The area from the Ship Canal to Leary Way is a low-key wonderland, from Mike’s Chili Tavern to the legendary recording studio (now known as John and Stu’s) where most of the early Sub Pop product was made. In between are boat shops, warehouses, lumber yards, paint factories, car-parts stores, and a couple of stray artists’ studios. But like anything real in this town, it’s targeted for “improvement.” Fred Meyer wants to build a big store near Leary & 8th NW. I like Freddy’s and would love one in Ballard, but not at the expense of an entire neighborhood. A group called SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land) wants commercial uses and their jobs preserved there; it’s asking the city to do more research on how Freddy’s would change the area. SOIL can be reached at 789-1010. Elsewhere in developmentland…

SACRIFICE: The Seattle daily papers were somewhat agog that the Legislature didn’t make the whole state subsidize a new Seattle baseball stadium. But it’s in non-King counties’ best interests not to support the Mariners. The team draws out-of-town residents’ entertainment dollars to Seattle, dollars that would otherwise be spent at home. So instead, the state will probably let the county raise an already regressive sales tax, pending a public vote, to help build a new arena whose retro architecture would bring back memories of a time when ballparks were human-scale facilities built with all-private funds. (To read arguments from new-stadium proponents, check out the unofficial Stay-dium WWW page (http://www.weber.u.washington.edu/~ayers/staydium/stayduim.html).

ONCE AGAIN, be sure to attend our next big Misc. anniversary party, Thurs., 6/8, 7:30 p.m., at the Metropolis Gallery on University between 1st and 2nd (across from the big black wind-up toy). For those planning to see SIFF’s second showing of The Year of My Japanese Cousin that night, come by afterwards.

As boosters of local small business, Misc. is pleased as punch that Hale’s Ales is building a new facility on Leary Way, but slightly saddened that it’s going to take over the site now occupied by one of my all-time favorite Seattle building names, the House of Hose.

DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK (seen before a body-piercing segment on the Lifetime cable fashion show Ooh La La): “Warning! The following piece contains images some viewers may find sorta gross.”

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

STUFF I GET IN THE MAIL: Each week I get PR directives that just don’t warrant a complete column item, yet are good for at least a moment’s reflection. F’r instance: Ex-KCMU manager Chris Knab now leads seminars on how to make it in the music-marketing biz. The four-week course costs $149… There’s something out for this summer called the Carol Woir Slimsuit (“The Swimsuit With A Personality”), a one-piece women’s swimsuit with a built-in corset-like thingie. Its ads say “Lose An Inch, Gain The Glamour”… C-Space, a biweekly forum/ support meeting for local S/M pursuers, is hanging up its spikes for the last time after five years. Speaking of postal submissions…

NO MILK, THANKS: I was amused when a reader sent in six pages clipped from a Cheri magazine pictorial about nude waitresses at one “Big Cups Coffeehouse.” The story claims the café’s been in business in Seattle for four years. It’s all fictional, of course (it probably wouldn’t even be legal here). Florida and Texas, though, have had a tradition of novelty nude businesses (car washes, laundromats, donut shops, pool halls); so the concept might seem plausible to some Cheri readers. Speaking of stapled Seattle sightings…

THE GOOD LOAF: Somewhat more factual than the Cheri pictorial was the May Esquire article about Seattle’s “baby boom slackers,” whitebread liberal-arts grads of the magazine’s target demographic who used to have time-consumin’ bigtime careers but now hang out at the Honey Bear Bakery, having chosen “voluntary simplicity” instead of the work-hard-spend-hard ideology long advocated by the magazine. I certainly hope the mag’s readers will realize the selectivity it used. The story notes that only 70 percent of U.S. adult males now work full-time year-round at one job; but from personal knowledge I can assure you a lot of those guys walking around in the daytime with self-DTP’d “consultant” business cards aren’t there fully by choice. Not to mention the millions who haven’t had the chance to quit a well-paying job. Speaking of the world of work…

ON THE MAKE: Was reminded three times this month of the good ol’ days of American business, the days when this country was interested in making things instead of just marketing them. The first was the Times obit for Weyerhaeuser exec Norton Clapp. The article’s lead labeled Clapp with the now-quaint rubric of “industrialist.” The second was Our World, the monthly USA Today ad supplement touting things like new concrete-fabrication plants in ex-Soviet republics. The third was when I got to play with a friend’s CD-ROM drive. Among his discs was The Time Almanac, with texts and pix from old Time magazines thru the decades. But it didn’t have the real joy of collecting old Time issues, the ads. Old Time ads from the ’40s and ’50s are wonderful evocations of a time when the Opinion Makers of most towns outside NYC were bourbon-swillin’, tweed-wearin’ managers of small and midsize manufacturing plants. The ads pushed roller bearings, conveyor belts, commercial air conditioning systems, semi rigs, axle greases, grinding wheels, and all that other cool stuff you never see around the house. I’d much rather see more ads of that type than the ads you see in today’s Time for import luxury cars and prescription hair-growth tonic. Speaking of CD-ROMS…

WINDOW PEEPING: The thing about those new X-rated videos on CD-ROM is that the images are so small and lo-res, the old adage about risking blindness via overuse might in this case actually be true.

As promised, here’s the second half of the official Misc. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List. If your question wasn’t used, you didn’t ask it frequently enough.

11. Howcum in your FAQ the questions are in italics, but in Savage Love it’s the answers that are in italics?

Dan looks better in italics than I do.

12. Why didn’t you write about that party/play/movie I saw you at?

(a) I tend not to review private events or discuss my personal life. (b, c) Either somebody else got to review it, or there wasn’t space for it that week, or it stank too bad to be worth mentioning.

13. Why didn’t you write about ___?

I probably didn’t hear about it ’til just now.

14. But you don’t really like ____ (football/beef/regular supermarkets/cold cereal/TV/ heterosexuality), do you? Don’t you have to be a redneck fascist to like that?

(a) Yes. (b) No.

15a. Isn’t the Seattle scene “over”?

If you mean a hegemonous gaggle of bands all playing the exact same “sound,” that never existed. If you mean people gathering to explore art and make statements, that’s just getting started. What made Seattle bands wasn’t a sound, but a non-Hollywood (sometimes even anti-Hollywood) attitude toward cultural production and consumption.

15b. I hate Seattle bands because I hate ____ (long hair, flannel, backward baseball caps, distortion pedals, heroin, teen angst). How can you possibly like them?

The media “grunge” stereotype became so precise that no local band came close to completely fitting it. The only thing all Seattle bands have in common is that they all now boast that they’re “Notgrunge.”

16a. How much do you really like the Northwest?

Mostly I think of my region like the big sister I never had, the kind of gal all the guys in school are in love with. I adore her dearly but I still feel the need to shout out, “She’s not the goddess already! She used to throw spitwads at me!”

16b. You must have loved growing up out in the country. You want to move back there, right?

Absolutely not. I was bored to tears as a kid; the place has a few more things to do now, but it’s also turned into big ugly houses as far as the eye can see. The “Back to Eden” fantasy is one of the chief things wrong with America. “Moving to the country” is simply the intellectually-acceptable version of suburban sprawl.

17. Why do college professors still obsess about Madonna, years after everyone else has stopped?

Shh. Let’s not tell them there’s been other music in the past 10 years, or that these days “a woman in charge of her music” means one who can write songs and/or play an instrument.

18. Now that the dream of economic empowerment thru entrepreneurism is available to more and more Americans, aren’t liberals obsolete?

Absolutely not. A forest that’s been clearcut by 20 small companies is just as dead as one that’s been clearcut by one big company; small business can shaft employees and customers just like big ones–heck, those old slave plantations would now be classified as “family farms.” The basic tenet of liberalism, as I see it, is that the business of America isn’t just business. We need to care for our people and our land, not just our bottom lines. Indeed, in an evolving economy we have to pay extra attention to non-material values.

Still, a decentralized, small-biz economy is the best hope for urban neighborhoods (make your own opportunities, don’t depend on big employers or big government), minority rights, free speech, and renewed creativity (though boho types will need another philosophical basis when there’s no more “Mainstream” to rebel against). However, change can work for people or against them. We’ve seen change done wrong in the ex-Socialist countries, as pensioners and working families get the shaft to make their countries more inviting to global financiers. Can we do better? Only if we treat this transitional time with truly moral concern, not with the piousfaux-morality of the right.

19. What were Yogi and Boo-Boo doing in the same bed all winter?

You’ll have to ask Dan that one.

Polyamory: One plus one plus…

Feature article for the Stranger, 1/27/95

The concept of nonmonogomous, consensual, structured relationships is an old idea. From King David’s harem and the Mahabharata’s princess with five husbands to the early Mormons to turn-of-the-century free-love communities, people have looked for workable alternatives to monogamy and cheating.

People exploring nonmonogamy these days use a lot of different terms to describe their lifestyles, including “polyfidelity” and “polyamory”. The two words are more-or-less interchangeable, though the former is more likely to be used by people who consider their current multi-partner setups more or less stable and who aren’t taking or looking for other mates.

I had a long, boistrous chat with 14 “polys” I met through a computer bulletin board. They came from a variety of backgrounds, although the plurality were middle-aged hippies who hadn’t stopped questioning society’s norms. There were heteros, lesbians, gays, and a few bi males. (One man said he got into the poly world because he’d fallen in love with a woman but didn’t want to give up men.) They were currently and/or formerly in a variety of nontraditional partnerships–triads, quads, “Vs” (one person who sleeps with two other people who don’t sleep with each other). Some were in closed relationships; some had “primary” partners plus other lovers.

They met me after their regular Polyfidelity Potluck, where they’d dined with fellow polys (and people interested in becoming polys) and discussed issues relating to their lifestyle. Some of them also meet regularly for group massage and hot-tub parties. Some were raising children, conceived with present or previous partners.

(Everybody here is identified by a fake name unless otherwise noted. Some of them say that in their particular workplaces or social situations, it’s easier to come out as gay or bisexual than as having multiple lovers.)

How they got into it

Several said they’d found their way into the poly life after unsatisfying experiences with impersonal promiscuity, either on their own or in the swinger underground. That lifestyle delivered sexual variety but left the spirit very unfulfilled. George, one of the over-40s in the group, said, “What I found in this community was a way to fall in love again. I spent 15 years after my divorce fucking my brains out, keeping loving relationships at arms length.”

George, 50, has had “lovers who were significantly younger than I. It wasn’t like we were bonded in some perverse monogamous way. They weren’t going to be caring for me when I was 80 or anything.”

Carol had been in a longterm relationship with Mark, when she began to have affairs in secret. “He found out. We went to a polyfidelity workshop. I was amazed by the integrity, the quality of the people I’ve found. It seemed like a workable model. It’s forced us to be honest in a way I’d never dreamed we could be.”

Mark, Carol’s lover, said he found people in the poly subculture seemed to be “much more vulnerable and open. That’s helped me relax a lot.”

Kathy and her lover had been involved in the swinger subculture. “There was a lot of free sex, but a taboo on being lovers.” She longed to share hearts with more than one person, not just orgasms. She said she’s found this in the poly subculture. “I never felt much jealousy, any reason any relationship should do away with any other relationship.”

Gina originally was “with a partner, sort of by chance monogomous. He was getting restless, concerned about being stuck in a relationship. He broached the subject of being with other people. I said, `It sounds like fun. Sure. Now what do we do?’ Nothing happened for a while. We answered ads in Fantasies (a swinger magazine). They were swinger or cruiser types, just in it for sex. It didn’t work out. But from one step after another, we found a community. This community, this family, is very important to me.”

The community

Scott came to the meeting with his female lover; both have spouses. “This is a community of people who understand open sexuality, the possibilities of nonmonogamy. They can pull together in understanding, better than a monogamous group can. My wife wanted to leave me 10 years ago. Our lovers came to us; they offered consolation and love in a non-judgemental way. They gave us the support to stay together.

“I haven’t been in a committed relationship, because I didn’t want the baggage of coupledom. The group gave me a new vision of coupledom: of giving each relationship its full potential, the full open range of what each particular relationship has.”

Melanie, Scott’s lover, was one of the founders of the potlucks. She said she was initally surprised at the degree of bisexual affection she found when she joined the polyfi community, even among the men. “Sexuality among the same sex is always there. You won’t do it with someone of the same sex necessarily, but when you remove the artificial barriers to it, it all opens up.”

George believes some people are destined to be in love with more than one person at a time. “Most cupids have a few bows and arrows; some have submachine guns.” George also differentiates between the poly subculture, with its emphasis on safe sex and mutual support, and unthinking promiscuity. “What we’re doing has some basic tenets; honesty and consensuality especially. Adultery is a part of monogamy. What we’re doing is different from that. People in this group are interested in sexuality and expanding it. We push the boundaries of sex, the whole gradation between shaking hands and fucking one’s brains out.”

How they work it out

Gene, one of the younger potluck members at age 29, came to the group interview with his lover and her three children. His wife was out of town that week. “We agreed to this when we got married over 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s unreasonable to assume that one person would be your be-all and end-all for the rest of your life.”

Still, he noted that “you trade one set of problems for another when you’re willing to let your partner look at other people naked and want to touch them.”

Janet agreed that with a consensual poly life you get rid of the dishonesty that comes with cheating, as well as the frustrations that come with unrequited desires, but you still have to deal with the natural jealousy. “You shouldn’t expect the jealousy to ever go away, but you learn to live with it.”

Scott has “a primary partner who has a wife; but her wife doesn’t do boys.” He said every nonmonogamous relationship sets up its own boundaries: “Just about everyone’s negotiated their comfort level with their partners.”

Another problem, and the main reason everyone in the interview wanted fake names, was outside intolerance. “We get targeted by the religious right just like any other sexual minority,” Scott added. “We sometimes call it `dysphilia,’ the inability to love or the fear of love.”

Outside intolerance is especially tough when partners in an open or multiple relationship are raising children; neighbors, school officials, and government agencies have been known to interfere in nontraditional households with kids. Marianne, 42, has been in one nonmonogamous relationship or another her whole adult life. She believes children can get more care and attention in non-nuclear families. “Groups are a wonderful way to raise children. Children really benefit when there are more adults around.”

One woman’s story

After two “triads,” Marianne fell in love with a UW researcher four years ago. “He hadn’t done multiple relationships before. He said `Let’s be open to it in the future.’ Then in grad school, he began studying with a woman. We all became friends.

“Then we got a national newsletter about multiples. He was reading it, came to bed, and said he’d like a `secondary’ relationship with this woman. We finally figured out the thing that would be most comfortable for me is that they’d see each other every Wednesday. It wasn’t strict, but it was a framework. We tried a threesome once, but she was uncomfortable with it. That relationship went on for over a year. She went on to other things. It just faded. We’re still open to other intimate relationships in our life. He again has a woman he sees once a week. I don’t think they’re sexual and I don’t care.”

Differences of interest

Professional counselor Kathy Severson (her real name) recently advertised in the Stranger Bulletin Board for a nonmonogamy discussion group she wanted to start. She got 26 responses from men and only one from a woman. She placed a similar ad in the Lesbian Resource Center’s paper and got no responses. Severson, herself a participant in a lesbian poly relationship, believes women (gay or straight) are more hesitant than men (gay or straight) about expressing a desire for multiple partnerships–even though women can be about as likely as men to cheat on their lovers. “My perception is that gay men have an easier time accepting nonmonogamy; while lesbians resist the idea. It’s more how we’re socialized as men and as women.”

Severson says she’s sometimes “astounded” by some people’s lack of curiosity about alternate relationships. “It threatens what they’re doing. You talk about it and they give you this stony-faced look. Lifelong monogamy is an ideal some people don’t want to give up, even people who’ve come out as lesbians and gays….The nuclear family model has been so destructive. It isolates people. The ownership issue in monogamy still needs to be questioned, the notion that `I own your body.’ We want to control, to define everything, including our most intimate relationships. There’s all that angst going on, with all the divorces and unhappy couples out there, but when you suggest alternatives you get such resistance….We have knowledge of how to live without fear, scarcity or ownership. But here we are, bound in structures and contracts that bind us. To heal that dichotomy is the challenge.”

In her work, Severson has found two main ways people come into non-couples. “There are some people who discover nonmonogamy consciously, on their own or with a partner, try to consciously come to a new way to relate. The other group are those like me who almost accidentally find our way into questioning the dominant relationship structures. I fell in love two years ago with a woman who had another lover. Since then, nonmonogamy has been my group and counseling focus for about two years.”

One of her favorite aspects of nonmonogamy is its opportunity for what counselors like to call `personal growth.’ “Each relationship calls forth different aspects of your being. If we are secure enough to say `I know I’m special to you,’ why set up road blocks to people’s energies?”

Still, Severson is the first to admit a nonmonogamous life creates as many challenges as opportunities. “It’s about being completely present to whoever I’m with. There are questions of time, space, and energy when you’re trying to be a real intimate partner with even one person, let alone two. If you bring a level of consciousness to a relationship, it’ll do well.”

Resources

The Polyfidelity Potluck is held every other month on Capitol Hill. Some of the people who go to the potlucks also go to a bimonthly workshop studying about ZEEG, an “intentional community” in Germany where open relationships are regularly practiced.

For more info on either group call the BiNet voice mail line, 728-4533. They also recommend the newsletter Loving More or the bookPolyamory: The New Love Without Limits by Deborah Annapol. And there’s an Internet newsgroup, alt.polyamory, where issues such as these are discussed in sometimes-excrutiating detail. Severson can be reached for group or individual counseling at 233-8538.

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.

WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.

WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)

WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.

BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.

JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.

RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.

NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.

THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”

CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!

BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.

Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.

I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…

X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.

THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.

EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.

But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.

Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.

So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.

Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.

DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.

Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.

ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.

The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.

FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…

BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.

Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”

Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.

DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

PASSAGE

As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:

“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”

REPORT

As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.

Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).

There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

SPECIAL EVENT!

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

4/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ATTENTION HAWKEYE: GRAB YOUR STETHOSCOPE.

THE WAR RESUMES IN 0800 HOURS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Querulous”