Welcome to the 12th annual Misc. In/Out list, your most reliable guide to the people, places, and things coming into and away from public prominence over the following months. As always, this list predicts what will become hot and not-hot; not necessarily what’s hot or not-hot now. We are not responsible for any investment decisions which might be made on the basis of this information. Thanks to all the readers who suggested items.

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

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

Orbitz.....................Mountain Dew

Forest green...............Teal

Reno.......................The Vegas Strip

Gwyneth Patrow.............Demi Moore

Absinthe...................Ecstasy

Dick's Deluxe..............Arch Deluxe

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

DVD........................Pay-Per-View

Writing....................Literature

Lovers.....................Fighters

Tacos......................Wraps

Women with nipple rings sneering at women with implants
...........................People in leather sneering at people in fur

Georgetown.................Fremont

Hype!soundtrack............Pulp Fiction soundtrack

BSA........................Harley-Davidson

Real liberalism............Boomer hegemony

Real conservatism..........Corporate hegemony

Univision..................Fox

ADSL.......................Cable modems

Light-rail construction....Condo construction

Street nudity..............Internet porn

Lutherans..................Evangelicals

Oil painting...............Oil companies

Chubby and Tubby...........Niketown

Phone cards................Baseball cards

Ankles.....................Butts

Sojourners magazine........The 700 Club

Wallace Stevens............Charles Bukowski

Morris Minor...............Range Rover

Plymouth Prowler...........Lexus

ABL........................NFL

Replacing the Dome.........Saving the Hawks

Mensa tests................Drug tests

Danken's...................Ben & Jerry's

Orgies.....................Raves

Monorail Initiative........Anti-stadium initiative

Slot-car racing............Snowboarding

"Dee-lish"................."X-treme"

DIY Internet radio.........NPR

Silkscreens................Glass art

Banjos.....................Electric guitars

Home sweatshops............Overseas sweatshops

Old pickups................Sport utility vehicles

KIXI.......................KMTT

Donuts.....................Bagels

NW filmmaking..............NW location shooting

Drew Carey.................Robin Williams

29 Live....................Richard Lee

Juliette Brioche...........Pamela Anderson Lee

'30s revival...............'70s revival

Toques.....................Baseball caps

Carrie Akre (finally)......Alanis

Straight-edgers drinking...Vegans smoking

Shuffleboard...............Doom

Sorbonne...................Evergreen

Rebuilding cities..........Deconstructing texts

Sheryl Lee Ralph...........Whitney Houston

Chanel #5..................Patchouli

Free-love cults............Militias

Ads in high schools........Ads on web pages

Diet pills.................Ab machines

Real towns.................Subdivisions

Diner food.................Peasant food

Flaxseed...................Hemp

From: "L. Bauman"

OUT with Richard Lee (unless he can produce some evidence!) **I'm a fan of the idea behind public access TV, but can't say as there has been anything on there worth watching of late.

Oh, and IN with the 50th anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash! **don't tell any of my serious SETI friends but I am banking that New Mexico, in the new year just goes plain NUTS with this. The Stranger should send someone to cover the story.... Talk about culture.

Sampai Jumpa Lagi-

Laurie

From:rice@blarg.net

Organization: ricemag

In: Pleasant old ladies that work in blue-collar laundromats.

Out: Obnoxious twenty-somethings that work in trendy laundromats.

From: Janet & Wiley (jbuttenw@waonline.com)

Dear Clark,

I feel the collective mood of the entire city can be summed up with the

following:

Out, new stadia; In, the Kingdome!

It's ugly and troublesome, but at least its already built.

Sincerely,

Matthew Wiley.

From: Karl Sponberg (sponberg@u.washington.edu)

In......................................Out

Seattle Reign!..........................Sonics

Torreafazione (sp?).....................Starbucks

Georgetown..............................Fremont

Everett Giants..........................Mariners

Cellophane Square.......................Tower Records

Twice Sold Tales........................Borders Books

SPU Falcons.............................UW Huskies

The Crest Cinema........................Any first run movie house,

........................................but esp. Cineplex Odious

Chubby & Tubby..........................Niketown

Deface the Nation.......................The McLaughlin Group

Drew Carey..............................Seinsmeld

Banjos..................................Electric guitars

Celtic dance............................The macarena

Newsradio...............................Friends

Old pickup trucks.......................Sport Utility Vehicles

Simple sentences........................Jargon

Missions................................Mission statements

Writing letters.........................the internet

Donuts..................................Bagels

Love the column!

Karl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As has been our practice since 1988, this year’s list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not necessarily what’s big now. If you believe everything already big will just keep getting bigger forever, we’ve got some Northern Exposure and Barney merchandise to sell you.

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

1/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and

the 1992 In/Out list, also published in the Seattle Times)

1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21

Welcome to a new ever-lovin’ fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture report that doesn’t follow trends and doesn’t really lead them either, but just stays out of their way.

Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero’s Books on 11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don’t think I’m going to see The Rapture…. There appear to be two Addams Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I saw. Maybe it’s like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw the critics’ edition, tell me what it was like…. This year’s best-of list by Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and never bothers to check what’s playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of 14) that didn’t show here, down significantly from previous years.

Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11 p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station’s next owner, the Providence Journal, was one of the papers that didn’t run the Doonesbury strips about Quayle’s possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them… Almost Live might go national next fall. Worldvision’s offering a syndicated weeknight version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.

Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like “Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed” and “Complex, condensed, SAM tough to build.” It had “thank you Seattle” vanity ads from Acme Iron Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the Carpet Resource Center. It’s more proof of how much easier it is to get politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing contractors, instead of uncouth artists.

Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): “What’s that up there?” “It’s a gas station.” “No, that’s a flower. Don’t you know, flowers are bee pee stations.” The real BP has a kids’ book promotion with G. Burghoff saying it’s important for children to read, so “you can become anything you want to be.” No — it’s important so America can regain a capable workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies like BP.

No “Willie” Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels. First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys who insist they’re not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN’s electronic masking made her look like Madonna’s “Blank” character in Dick Tracy. The defendant’s name is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy’s nephew but seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten Kennedys.

Ad Slogan of the Month: “It’s not your mother’s tampon.” I should hope not…

Good Buy, Baseball!: So let’s get together and buy the Mariners. Granted, it’s not as important as saving Frederick’s, but it’s still a good cause. At $100 million, it’ll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I’m reminded again of Jim Bouton’s words at the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle’s first attempt to keep a team: “Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can’t be all bad.”

Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested, presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)… The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It’s appropriate that Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).

Xmas ’91: Frederick’s save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that’s a sign of confidence to the store’s bankers remains to be seen… Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment of Hasbro’s product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle dock.

Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in hardcover.

None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, “David Ansen of Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of your seat.'” Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: “The twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone’s Movie Can’t Be Trusted.” But the last word, as always, goes to Oliver (“Fuck me, rock god!”) Stone: “I think a president was illegally killed.”

The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the Northwest is not Paradise. There’s this whole mystique that gets more exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters “turned conservative” in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women’s-choice initiative was due more to opponents’ well-funded lies than any deep anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson to the Senate, how we’re no more or less conservative than ever. It’s just getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the early ’70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: “Northwest Style: Laid Back with Dockers.”) The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our “tolerance” was more like apathy. We’re not mellow, we’re cold and sullen. The real spirit of the Northwest isn’t in aPoulsbo bed-n’-breakfast, it’s in the acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The syndrome’s worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by folks who think our State Reps are called “assemblymen.”)

Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and shrillily demand the right to destroy the few “real” spaces left.They built the S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan’s deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L’s) Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture. Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds, was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the nation’s social terrain.

Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the “rabbit ears” TV antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P. Middlemark died in ’89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, “nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all).” Sounds like my kinda guy.

‘Til our fab Feb. ish, make a ’92 resolution to petition KCTS to show The ’90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn’t count), and join us again.

PASSAGE

Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 12/1: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of thing.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I don’t have a business checking account at this time. Please make all subscriptions payable to “Clark Humphrey.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Synecdoche”

THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92

I don’t claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That’s the logic of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what’s peaking, declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I previously predicted the rise of Estonia, ’70s music, and nose rings, as well as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.

1/91 Misc. Newsletter

`IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT,

NOV.-DEC. 1990: 22

Welcome to the first 1991 edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t help but wonder what was the last comedy Norman Cousins saw before he died, and whether its makers are responsible for making him insufficiently lighthearted. It couldn’t possibly have been Haywire.

SNOW STORIES: For the first time since I was 8 or so, Xmas looked like the cards and ads always said it was supposed to look like. Astounding! (Of course, in those New England Colonial days, people simply understood they’d be home from Nov. thru March)…A guy on KPLU mistakenly called convergence zone a harmonic convergence…A whole mature elm on the east slope of Capitol Hill fell over and took a Honda with it…People who commute out to the suburbs took 5 hours to get back into town the night of 12/18. I went to a bus stop on Roosevelt Way at 4 p.m. and got right on a bus — a 2:20 bus — only to be unceremoniously booted off by a defeatist driver on Eastlake and Roanoke an hour later…The roof caved in at Northgate, the original shopping mall; what a symbol for reality crashing in on the nice-day artifice of modern commercial America…70 abandoned school buses were officially missing as of 12/21. Did the drivers tell the dispatcher that the dog ate them?…

THAT SINKING FEELING: Could Tugboat Annie have saved I-90? Don’t know, but I do know that even the 20-year flood spared my mom’s antique shop in downtown Snohomish (though she’ll probably retire before the next threat)…The end of the Stena Line to Victoria follows the end of the beloved Princess Margeurite (named for a Dutch princess born in exile in Canada during the war), now seized by the BC government on behalf of Stena creditors.

ARMED FOR ACTION: Will ’91’s big fashion thing be a sleeveless dress that lets you fully show off your contraceptive implants?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Before Columbus Review is a newsprint journal produced on the UW campus, involved in not just indigenous American cultures but a variety of ethnic issues…The Everett Herald wins praise (and a church-organized protest campaign) by listing gay and lesbian “marriage” ceremonies in a new Celebrations section. Makes me almost proud it was my hometown paper.

CATHODE CORNER: On the 10th anniversary of J. Lennon’s death, the Bon unveiled a commercial with cherubic tots singing his “Merry Xmas (War Is Over).” Wake me when they make a spot out of “Imagine no possessions…”…A Penn State psychologist claims some kids are genetically predisposed to become “chronic TV watchers.” I wonder if anybody’s born to become a maker or reader of silly pseudoscientific surveys?…Night Flight, once the hippest show on cable, is now syndicated (on KING 2:30-4:30 am Fri nites/Sat morns). Segments include the “poignant serial” Twin Geeks (really scenes from the infamous siamese-twin exploitation film Chained for Life).

AD VERBS: The original British Boy Scouts are selling sponsorships on merit badges and accompanying manuals. The “Hobbies” badge bears the logo of Dungeons & Dragons games; sports badges carry the trademarks of equipment and shoe companies.

Revenge or Set-Up for Conquest?: As 1/15 approaches, Newsweek says ABC hired a private spy satellite and found no evidence of a massive Iraqi buildup in or near Kuwait; you know, the buildup that was supposed to have one Iraqi soldier for every Kuwaiti.

CLIPPED WINGS: We’re extremely disappointed that Pan American Airways probably won’t exist any more, ‘cuz we won’t get to ride a Pan Am passenger space shuttle in the year 2001. (That was perhaps the first paid “product placement” in a movie, unless you count De Beers Consolidated Mines paying Ian Fleming to use the title Diamonds Are Forever for a novel that became a movie). Meanwhile, Black & Decker is suing 20th Century-Fox for cutting its product-placement scene from Die Hard 2. I’d be glad to have not been in that loser (but then, I wasn’t). Besides, the company doesn’t need any more association with murder and mayhem. In late-’70s Europe, “to Black & Decker” became a verb for applying a power drill to someone’s knees. (Don’t try this at home.)

SPROCKETS: The foreign control of Hollywood studios won’t affect the (largely horrible) state of movies, because films are already increasingly controlled by Asian and European investors. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was financed by a Hong Kong firm that normally backs regular ninja movies; Disney’s relying on a limited investment partnership based in Japan. These syndicates want films for a worldwide audience — stateless fantasy and male-violence films…The historic Ridgemont Theater is slated to be replaced by (what else?) luxury condos. To think of all the couples who fell in love during the year and a half that A Man and a Woman played there, not to mention all the divorced guys who relieved their loneliness during the year it was a porno house, when the comedy-tragedy masks on its marquee were changed so they were both smiling (mandatory, unrelieved “happiness” is an identifiable mark of sleaze). Cineplex Odious is closing the Market Theater this month, but at least one party wants to reopen it and return to alternative programming.

SIGN ON AURORA: “Olympic Ballot Theatre Presents Nutcracker.” If nobody showed up due to the snow, would the performance have been a secret ballot?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Official Seahawks caramel popcorn, only $2.95 a pound at Frederick’s.

LATE GIFT SUGGESTION: Turning the Tables, a board game created by two Seattle folks, all about waiting tables. The first player to collect $250 in tips wins. Along the way, you have to face, via instructions on the cards, unruly customers, constantly changing “menus,” broken wine glasses, and other fun facets of modern restaurant work. Another impressive local board game: Earth Alert, “the active environmental game”…Parker Bros.’ Careers for Girls game received major flack from Small Business Administration chief Susan Engeleiter. The six “careers” players can choose are Supermom, schoolteacher, rock star, fashion designer, college graduate and animal doctor. Careers in ecology, space, sports, the arts, politics, big business, farming and the movies were in previous versions of the game but dropped for the new edition. The company responded by noting that the game was developed and packaged by an all-woman team.

RE-TALES: Portland now has Nike Town, a 20,000 square foot “shoe experience”. Each line of shoes has its own “environment,” complete with background music and stereo sound effects for a particular sport or activity. The hottest new retail concept for Seattle, meanwhile, is a franchised laundry-tavern combo called Duds `n’ Suds. Cute, but nothing like Miami’s laundry/topless bar (could you wash all your clothes there?)…Pay n’ Pak is the first hardware chain to take the American Express card. I’m reminded of an old radio spot for Amex’s dying competitor Carte Blanche: “After all, why would you pay for a meal in a fine restaurant with the same card you use to have your swimming pool cleaned?”…The Dutch Oven restaurant on 3rd is gutted, now to become a Bartell’s. In its most glamorous moment, in the 1978 TV movie The Secret Life of John Chapman, Ralph Waite (Pa Walton), as a college professor slumming among the working class, walked in front of the Capitol in Washington DC, then turned a corner and ended up inexplicably on 3rd Ave., entered the Dutch Oven, got a job watching dishes, and went home with waitress Susan Anspach.

BLACK & WHITE ISSUES: Seattle photographer Mel Curtis won a $140,000 copyright case against an ad agency that used one of his pictures in a “comp” for a proposed General Dynamics corporate image ad, then substituted a new, almost-identical picture when the ad was published.

UNSUNG HERO: Martha Wash, one of the boisterous 2 Tons of Fun/Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame, turns out to have been the real singer behind songs credited to Black Box and Seduction, two svelte disco girl-groups assembled by manager-producers on the basis of looks. Ex-Seattle singer Marni Nixon (singing voice of the female leads in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The King and I, West Side Story, and other musicals) was quoted in the P-I as saying, “Voice dubbing will always be with us.” But was it really her saying that, or…?

PUNK LIVES! (SORT OF): The KOMO reactionaries discovered the evils of hardcore again, thanks to a Federal Way thrash-nostalgia band whose only provocative aspect is its name, Date Rape. Everything else about it is really tired — slam dancing, flannel shirts tied around the waist. This stuff’s older now than hippie stuff was when punk started. At least it lets KOMO condemn music by white kids, for a change. Geov Parrish, meanwhile, writes that straight-edge rock (discussed last ish) is four or five years old and “already pretty much played out.” Furthermore, Hare Krishna recruiting out of that scene started a couple of years ago but “the word is spreading and they’re getting fewer converts that way.”

RESPONSE: A postcard signed with a scrawled one-word name beginning with “A” takes issue with my claim that “sci-fi” was an OK term since 20th Century-Fox used it in a corporate ad: “Since when have the ad writers been the arbiters of taste or literacy?” I was almost ready to side with A. when across my desk at The Comics Journal came a catalog for cassettes of “filk,” listing singers whom the catalog’s readers were expected to already know. Nowhere did the brochure describe or define filk. I finally learned that it’s pop tunes with new lyrics poking ever-so-gentle fun at sci-fi movies, TV shows and books, performed by the lyricists at fan conventions. People this obsessed with excessively-serious trash art deserve any nickname I can give.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH (when, if we’re at all lucky, we’ll not be out killing people), read The Ascent of Mind by UW neurobiologist William P. Calvin, join our kudos to Charles Johnson for his National Book Award, don’t read American Psycho (more proof that literature is not necessarily the most enlightened of the arts), and stay warm.

REPORT

The 28 people who attended the first Lite Lit reading 12/16 appeared to have fully enjoyed the experience (except one guy who wrote in later, suggesting I should learn to speak more like the Red Sky poets. Sorry, but monotone rants hurt my throat). I’m sure the audience at the following Wednesday’s reading would have been equally entertained, had anybody shown up. Watch for a re-schedule in February.

VISION OF HELL #2

Being trapped in the chair of a hair stylist whose radio station plays all stupid songs (Bread, America) — and who sings along.

VISION OF HELL #3

Being trapped in the only restaurant open in a small town Xmas Eve, with big-screen TVs blasting continuous NFL Films retrospectives of Super Bowls X thru XX.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pish”

INS AND OUTS FOR 1991

Our fifth annual In/Out list follows the same rules as the previous ones: We’re predicting what will become big in the next year, not declaring what’s already big now. In the past, we correctly picked Winona Ryder, Roseanne Barr, plaid, women singers, The Simpsons, pantsuits, Arsenio Hall, minor-league hockey, crystals, fax machines, Anne Rice, nose rings, and minivans.

1/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

WHAT’S MORE PATHETIC:

JAMES BROWN IN JAIL

OR LITTLE RICHARD ON HOLLYWOOD SQUARES?

Welcome to the first `89 edition of Misc., the column that celebrates the end of the eight-year Age of Reagan and awaits the end of the 13-year Age of Cocaine. That’s about how long American attitudes and behavior have reflected those of coke users (aggressive euphoria, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money). In what drug experts call “co-dependency,” these traits have spread to non-users, even to many who officially oppose the drug itself. It’s clearly shaped the power madness of much of the Reagan Administration. Reagan himself is a coke-addicted filmmaker’s stereotype of a statesman, a “high concept” hero. As violent as today’s coke gangs are, the big damage done by the drug is that done to our economy, culture and social fabric by business and government leaders who, often unknowingly, take the coke rush as their model for success.

This derangement is most visible in the obsessive speculation that’s captivated big business, exemplified by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Besides its recent gobbling of RJR Nabisco, KKR now controls Safeway and Fred Meyer (for a near-monopoly of the Oregon grocery biz), plus Dillingham-Foss Tug, Red Lion Inns, Motel 6, Playtex, and the onetime icon of corporate appetites, Beatrice.

International House Style: The next phase of drug-inspired behavior may be a return from effrontery to withdrawn introspection. Seattle’s Happy Face symbol and Seattle’s big sweatshirts are keystones of the Acid House style now popular in UK discos. The fad, which also involves Chicago-invented dance music and Swiss-invented LSD (or at least visuals inspired by it), should reach these shores in toned-down form this year. By then the Brits’ll be into something else.

Brought to You by the Letter “X”: Roscoe Orman, the kindly Gordon on Sesame Street, has celebrated the show’s 20th year by settling on child support for a viewer he helped create in Oregon in 1985. Some who grew up with the show may gasp at the thought of Orman and his therapist lover singing “Which of These Things Belong Together,” but I knew there was another side to him since the time he challenged the “exclusive” terms of his contract by moonlighting as a pimp on All My Children.

From Pawn to Queen: This was the first American Xmas for Elena Akhmilovskaya, now settled in Seattle after suddenly marrying US National Team captain John Donaldson. You’ll find our fair city far different from Moscow. Here, jeans are plentiful and chess players rare. And please go to more restaurants than just the Last Exit.

Cathode Corner: Filming PBS’ Ramona in Toronto destroys the thing I loved most as a kid about Beverly Cleary’s books: that unlike anything else in kid-lit, they took place in a land I’d actually been to (Oregon)…. The new baseball TV deal means more $$ to the owners, fewer games to the viewers (12 instead of 30). More games’ll be on cable, but at what price? At least we might have to see fewer racist Joe Piscopo commercials.

Stamp Act: The US Postal Service is retouching a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, removing a bare nipple from the goddess of Liberty. Maybe we could use a revolution of our own.

Local Publications of the Month: ‘Twas a big season for local nonfiction (Boz, Knox, Robert Fulgham). I was more impressed by a well-made if kitschy fantasy, Frederick & Nelson’s Freddy Bear’s Favorite Christmas, a combined book-music box with text by our ol’ buddy Gretchen Lauber… Portland’s Northwest Computer News has started a Washington edition to compete with Puget Sound Computer User. The first News is full of cracks at User for reprinting a lot of material from its Minnesota parent paper…. The Real Comet Press plans to start a quarterly anthology of local comix, to be sold nationally.

Update: Last Jan., I told of changes in my hometown of Marysville. Now it’s a whole different place. Half the downtown’s been razed for a mall. The north side of town has two huge discount stores and a full compliment of middlebrow chain stores. Running between the two retail areas is a bus made up to look like a trolley (talk about a Neighborhood of Make-Believe). The countryside’s almost all gone from farming to tract houses. There’s even an indoor movie house (all we had was the Thunderbird Drive-In, still there). Still, some aspects of the old mill-town lifestyle remain: the video stores have such titles as Cut Your Own Deer At Home.

`Til our fab Feb. edition, visit the CT&T Gift Shop in Wallingford, admire the McDonald’s-sponsored hologram cover on National Geographic’s centennial edition (an issue all about our threatened Earth, not discussing the danger from foam boxes or razing forests for beef grazing), and ponder whether Shelley was predicting oldies radio when he wrote, “The world is weary of the past/Oh, might it die or rest at last.”

INS & OUTS FOR ’89

As always, this list might not reflect what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the year. This is not a substitute for professional tarot reading.

1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?

Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.

XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.

FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.

CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.

MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).

ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.

JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.

CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.

CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.

SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.

CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.

INS AND OUTS FOR ’88

2/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Hi again sports fans, and welcome to the compressed short-month edition of Misc., the regional pop-culture column that had Shirley MacLaine’s baby in a previous life.

The passenger ferry is, as of this writing, in deep trouble. Seems would-be riders never know if the boat’s going to be in the water or in the shop on any given day. Officials say they can’t effectively test the service’s appeal without, you guessed it, a second boat to run when the first one doesn’t have its act together. Maybe we could also get a spare set of ferry officials.

The NY Times sez it’s OK in DC social circles again to call yourself a liberal, even to admit that you liked Carter. Social concern isn’t as gauche as back in the early ’80s, when the Reaganites had everybody thoroughly intimidated. Perhaps, just perhaps mind you, this is another sign of the nation waking up as if from a long dream (or a masochistic love affair). Other ins/outs are in our handy sidebar.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Pocky, the colorful little rice candy sticks from Japan. Eat the chocolate or fruit flavors (both with that distinctive waxy taste), then keep the lovely boxes as collector’s items.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Pacific Northwest’s “40 Local Leaders Under 40” issue. Your columnist is not listed but has about a dozen more tries to go.

UPDATES FROM PAST COLUMNS: The CD menace continues its assault on the American tradition of cheap populist sound recordings, with the Seattle Symphony joining the list of artists refusing to cater to us vinyl proles. Rhino Records, however, is to be commended for its forthcoming 25-record set of 78s, intended for jukebox collectors…. SRO sold its theaters to Cineplex Odeon, the Canadian-based firm that produced The Decline of the American Empire (now showing at someone else’s theater). The bad news: Cineplex is half-owned by MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios which, according to a new book, was once known as the “Octopus That Ate Hollywood” and had close ties to both Reagan and the Mob. The good news: MCA’s lost millions lately on flop movies and overpriced reruns; the whole company may be sold off, as a whole or in pieces.

J Michael Kenyon, the rusty-throated practitioner of homespun cynicism and low-key wit, is back on local radios at last. At this point he’s having a hard time reconciling his style to KING-AM’s withering all-news image, but he may turn out to be KING’s ticket out of the ratings cellar.

If you haven’t seen a TheaterSports performance, you’re missing one of the funniest, liveliest experiences in this or any city. My personal favorite team in the weekly improv wars: The Many Splendored Things.

CATHODE CORNER: The first arthritis ad with a rock song is now on the air. A portent of the decades to come, when my generation will have to pay for the much larger Big Chill generation’s Medicare…. Don’t buy anything on “home shopping” shows. It just encourages them to put on more…. KOMO, home of the most pandering news scripts on local TV, now advertises “News You Experience.” Somehow, I’ve never wanted to be, even vicariously, a preteen Iranian soldier or a hit-and-run victim.

(By the way, our secret support of both Iran and Iraq has helped to lengthen a ghastly war (7-year body count: 300,000+), just to prop up oil prices and achieve the “geopolitical” goals of a White House that calls itself “pro-life.”)

The Little Biscuit deli-grocery on Broadway, one of that neighborhood’s last cheap places to eat, suddenly closed over the new year. If there is a higher consciousness, please don’t let the site become another trendy mini-mall. Pretty please with sugar on top.

The Jackson Street Gallery had a wonderful show in January: K.L. Slusher’s “Images of Construction” (documenting the Convention Center), John L. Harter’s “Construction of Images” (acrylic fantasies of the formation and decay of ideas), and R. Mutt’s “Constructions” (really nice industrial sculptures). Just when I began to think Pioneer Square had irretrievably evolved from a noun into an adjective, something great and provocative like this shows up.

Incredibly Strange Matinees, the independent film club I’m directing, is now renting the plush little Grand Illusion screening site for 12-noon Sunday tributes to the best exploitation films. ‘Til then, contemplate on the inner meanings of the phrase “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” So long.

INS AND OUTS FOR ’87

Unlike the authors of some lists of this type,

I’m not assuming that any trend that’s hot now will simply keep getting hotter.

I’m glad the authors of some lists of this type don’t work for my stockbroker.

Insville

• Ford Taurus
• Emilio Estevez’s brother Charlie Sheen
• Curling (the last gentleman’s game)
• Video camcorders
• No-booze nightclubs
• Group marriages
• Single-flavor ice cream
• Olives
• Plastic shoes (known to animal lovers as “cow-free”)
• The color green (except then used to refer to money)
• Artichoke hearts
• Social concerns
• Underground desktop publishing
• Georgetown/South Park
• Woolworth’s
• The ’70s
• Max Headroom (until he’s blanded out for ABC)
• Cleavage as symbol of defiance
• Sean Penn (not as an actor but as the Norman Maine of the ’80s)
• Astro Boy

Outski

• Cross-country skiing
• BMWs
• Mimes<
• He-Man
• Jolt Cola
• The “new celibacy”
• Cauliflower
• Ad slogans with the word “America”
• Wine coolers
• Prime-time soaps
• Power
• Entrepreneurs
• The ’50s
• All ex-Saturday Night Live stars
• Downtown NYC
• AIDS hysteria
• Wrestling
• Wheel of Fortune
• Big sweatshirts
• Cleavage as symbol of passivity
• Camp
• Conspicuous consumption