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YESTERDAY, we ended a piece on the decline and fall of the thrift-store lifestyle with a couple of links to thrift-store art on the Web.
Those links, natch, lead to other links, and those links lead to other links. Enough for a whole ‘nother day’s episode.
So herewith, some fun eye-openin’ viz-art sites for ‘ya.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A-Rod’s 40-40 Crunch, exploiting Mariners baseball star Alex Rodrieguez, is one of a whole line of regional sports-star cereals being put out by NYC-based Famous Fixins, “Producer of Celebrity Food Products.” It’s meant for box collectors, but the frosted flakes inside the box are quite good in their own right. They’re thicker and coarser than the Kellogg’s variety, and somewhat less sweet. (Now, if I could only get the company to put out “Frosted MISCberry Crunch” with my own picture on the box….)
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried at the end of this sports brief is potential great news–the just-maybe return of everybody’s favorite basketball benchwarmer, the immortal Steve Scheffler!
TOMORROW: How to make a book called Faster even faster: Just read the review.
ELSEWHERE:
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: By all means, see the Bumbershoot visual arts exhibition at Seattle Center this weekend. Edgar Leeteg’s South Seas black-velvet nudes (exquisite and sensual); the group exhibit More: A Show About American Consumption (highlighted by Ellen Forney’s lovingly-painted tribute to Pam Anderson and Anna Hurwitz’s plastic “gingerbread house” covered by baby dolls), scary oils by Alexi Kolesnikov, and a retrospective of Seattle’s greatest living painter Jacob Lawrence (I could mention how much his solid-figures-of-color style now seems like a precursor to the South Park look, but Lawrence would undoubtedly hate it if I did).
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE and I’ll say it again: Junk food (the things we eat or drink for pleasure rather than strictly for sustenance) just might be the most telling tangible artifact of a culture, especially ours.
Herewith, some links to astounding fun-food related items throughout the Net.
TOMORROW: One more how-to-save-baseball quick fix.
ELSEWHERE: As found by Anita’s LOL, some comic book covers with “perverse themes…”
AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.
Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).
TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.
ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…
MISC. WORLD, the online column that always loves cool, dark places, couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the totally not-getting-it blurb for SIFF installed at the top of some of those HotStamp postcard racks around town: “And you thought Sundance was crowded… Be sure to catch the 25th Seattle International Film Festival. The largest movie gathering in the U.S. is sure to showcase movies from Hollywood’s heavyweights to the next Quentin Tarantino.” SIFF, at its best, is about film as art (or at least film as bougeois-boomer quasi-art), not about stupid marketing-driven Hollywood hype. More about that, sorta, a few items down.
UPDATE #1: By the time you read this, The Big Book of MISC. will be printed, bound, and shipping to those of you who’ve graciously pre-ordered it. If you’re reading this early in the week, you can get a copy for your very own live and in person at our luscious MISC.-O-Rama party, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue in seedy Belltown (just north of 5th and Bell, across from the backside of the Cadillac lot). If you’re reading this after the event, you can still get a copy in person at the Pistil and M. Coy book shops, with more outlets to roll out in the next few weeks. And, of course, you can buy it directly online at this link.
ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: The $25,000 Pyramid.
UPDATE #2: Mark Murphy’s back as artistic director of On the Boards. Kudos to all the OTB supporters and members of the Seattle performing-arts community who successfully got OTB’s board to reverse its initial firing of the much-loved Murphy.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: “After Dinner Nipples” mints at Urban Outfitters are described by the woman who recommended them to me as “better than the real thing.” I’d heartily disagree, but I did find these mint-chocolate drops tasty and great to lick (but not all that soft to the touch, and without the creamy center that would’ve made the gag-concept more complete).
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: The 13th year of this little collection of odd-stuff-from-all-over called Misc. hasn’t been the luckiest. Something once read in print (or at least glimpsed at) by a third of Seattle’s adult population now has a much smaller, though steady and growing, on-screen audience.
I’m not going away, and neither is the site.
But it’s perhaps time to reconsider a few things:
(1) The online column is still based on the concept of the print Misc.–filling a more-or-less predetermined (albeit self-pre-determined) word count, at intervals corresponding to the column’s former appearance in a weekly tabloid.
(2) One of the column’s premises has been to passionately advocate urban life and specifically Seattle life. It started back when suburban flight was still considered an inexorable trend, and when everybody (especially Seattleites) thought Seattle was a hick town where nothing ever happenned and nothing ever would. Nowadays, even Newsweek has noted big downtown “revivals” across the country. And Seattle, whose downtown never really needed reviving, is creaking under the real burdens of the cyber-wealthy, buying up everything and making borderline-boho existences even less possible.
(3) Another recurring theme has always been to assert the worthiness of the punk-rock generation and its values. Far from defeatist or nihilistic, punks have strongly believed in community, in self-expression, in taking charge of their culture and their lives. Certain fogeys such as Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran still hate punks, but the media corporations came to love ’em. And the kids younger than me haven’t rebelled against punks and their allies the way I rebelled against aging hippies. Clueless mass-media reporters can still find goths and industrial-rockers in high schools and mistakenly believe these kids are doing something new.
(What many current white kids have done has been to ignore rock in general, turning away from the major labels’ glut of fake-Pearl-Jam bands and toward post-gangsta hiphop; which in turn has caused many young blacks to run from that and toward newer acts considered either too advanced or too lovey-dovey for the mallrats.)
(4) Punks also believe the “lowly” medium of rock ‘n’ roll music is, or can be, an art form; not via the bombast of early-’70s “art rock” but by being the best damn rock ‘n’ roll music it can be. That strident belief has fueled the column’s whole defense-of-pop-culture premise–once something few other ambitious writers attempted, but now commonplace.
In the mid-’80s, when the column first appeared in ArtsFocus (a publication mainly devoted to local fringe-theater and ethnic-dance activities), many intellectuals and art-worlders still believed there was a rigid dichotomy between “high” and “low” culture. This notion was perhaps best depicted in the 1990 “High and Low” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which purported to compare and contrast works from the two realms but which really turned into a long, desperate defense of this artificial division.
When “popular culture” was seriously talked about (in places like Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a whole department about it), it was usually treated in the post-leftist “cultural studies” manner, as a set of sociological and political phenomena to be dissected and theorized about–never as “real” art or even entertainment, never as the work of creative people who might be trying to express something.
That, of course, was the era of only three major TV networks, monopoly newspapers, and CD plants who’d only do business with the major labels. It was a time when the book business was still considered too marginal for big corporations to want to muscle in on (at least on the retail end). It was easy to still think of “popular” culture as “low” culture, as something factory-produced and best considered in industrial terms.
Things are a little different now, sorta. There’s dozens of cable channels, hundreds of book imprints, thousands of indie record labels, and scores of “alternative” weekies (though each business mentioned still has a few high-rollers at its top, struggling to stay on top via increasingly-frenetic dealmaking). Despite the current dropping-off of exhibitor interest in “indie” films (due at least partly to the glut of fake-Tarantino “hip” bloodfests from the big studios’ pseudo-indie divisions), true-indie filmers and videotapers continue to shoot and edit away.
Then there’s this World Wide Web thang. Whole books and magazines have been devoted to how the web and associated technologies are affecting marketing, shipping, TV viewing, music-listening, dating, masturbation, etc. etc. I liked to think when the web first took off, and I still like to believe, that it’s doing much more than that.
It’s vindicating the whole punk-DIY ethos. It’s helping to build real as well as virtual communities. It’s giving voices to tens of thousands of heretofore-obscure subcultures (some of whom I empathize with, some of whom I loathe; but that’s the whole point). Among these subcultures are the fan movements for popcult genres previously considered by the “cultural studies” snobs to be only liked by illiterates. I’m no longer a lone-voice-in-the-wilderness in my insistence that pop culture is real culture.
And what’s more, the web’s accellerating acceptance of the notion that art, music, literature, fashion, decor, graphics, video, and even movies need no longer be the exclusive products of the N.Y./L.A./S.F. elites.
Some elite forces realize this and are running scared (like Time and the censorous Australian parlaiment).
Other elite forces are trying to tame the Web into something safe for Conde Nast. Despite the failure of the Microsoft Network’s “shows” concept, corporate website-makers are still trying to launch online magazine sites with predictable texts and features aimed at rigidly defined demographic target audiences. I like to think web users are smarter than that.
Which gets us back to item (1), this here site’s print-legacy format. With The Big Book of MISC. now a-born, look in upcoming weeks for further changes to the miscmedia.com website. Don’t know for sure yet what they’ll be. But they’ll be designed to keep it all apace with an ever-changing, ever-Misc.-er world.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Saturnine.”
MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?
THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.
UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…
BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…
FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.
OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:
Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).
As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.
And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:
(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)
OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.
THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)
SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)
AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.
BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”
SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.
For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).
Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:
You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.
‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”
SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).
THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.
THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).
EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?
MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…
A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”
Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:
Speaking of public service sloganeering…
CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.
THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?
THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).
ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.
(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)
WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: Here it comes! No, not television’s most exciting hour of fantastic prizes, but the next phase in the 12.5 year history of the Misc. column. You can think of this as Misc. Version 4.0 if you like. The first version was a monthly column in the old Seattle tabloid ArtsFocus, from June 1986 thru July 1989. The second was the self-published monthly newsletter beginning later that summer, and continuing until January 1995. Third came the weekly installments in The Stranger, starting in November 1991 (concurrent with the newsletter version) and eventually reaching some 200,000 Seattle-area readers before the “alternative” tabloid’s bosses stopped running the column in October 1998.
THE NEW ONLINE COLUMN MIGHT BE more leisurely paced than the previous print versions, given that for the first time the column has no pre-set space limit. I may also experiment with different types of content, shuffling topics and departments in and out to test reader response. And new audience-building features might be added to the Misc. World website as well. More about that next week.
BUT FIRST, for those who came in late, a restatement of the column’s purposes and concepts. Under the classic “three-dot” newspaper column format, and within the meta-topic of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond,” Misc. World discusses the people, places, and things that combine to make up public life here at the edge of America and the end of the century. Some of the items in the column are as short as one sentence (or sentence fragment; some take up the whole space by themselves. Some of the subjects I write about are Seattle-specific; some are national (or have their equivalents in other towns across the country). Some involve big sociocultural trends such as stock-market fluctuations and downtown redevelopment schemes; others involve matters as small and specific as new junk foods and catch phrases. But they’re all parts of the cacophanous racket that is postmodern, pre-who-knows-what urban life, and as such they all have lessons to teach us about the cross-currents and cross-pollenizations of culture.
DISCLAIMERS: Misc. World contains no rain jokes, slug jokes, or coffee jokes. All statements of fact in Misc. World are, to the best they can be verified, true. The author will gladly retract all items proven false. All statements of opinion represent the author’s sincere beliefs; not spoofs. This column does not settle wagers.
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The same week The Stranger pulled the plug on the newsprint version of Misc., the art-studio lofts at 66 Bell (where the first ArtsFocus Misc. was written a dozen years back) started getting vacated under orders from the building owner, who’s finally making good on his year-long threat to upscale the place out of artists’ price ranges.
BOARD-ING SCHOOL: At ARO.Space a month or two back there was this performance-art night hosted by an apparent New York snotface who, after each act, taunted the audience with condescending remarks like “This is something called performance art. Something nobody in this town has ever heard of.” I never learned whether this dork was being real or just playing a character. If he really was as parochial and obnoxious as he made himself out to be on stage, he could’ve learned a bit about Seattle’s love of the ol’ perf-art by following the growth and institutionalization of our main perf-art staging outfit.
For 20 years, the On the Boards organization staged dance, music, and mixed-performance events at Washington Hall in the Central District. For the past 10 of those years, OTB’s been trying to move to a bigger, newer facility. Finally, the opportunity arose when A Contemporary Theater abandoned the lower Queen Anne digs it had occupied since ’63, and moved into a fancy multi-million dollar remodel of the old Eagles Auditorium downtown.
OTB then raised its own big-donor bucks to remake the old ACT building for its own purposes. The results are quite impressive: A 350-seat, proscenium-style main auditorium with state-O-the-art sound and light gear, a 99-seat studio theater (still unfinished as of this writing), a library/video room, and all the other tech and support facilities a bigtime staging entity needs.
OTB had always had a reputation as one of the most “ground-level” of Seattle’s full-time arts organizations, as being open to new local talent (even in years when most of its major shows were touring imports) and in touch with the frontiers of live art and music (even in years when much of its fare rehashed the previous decade’s avant-garde).
The Brave New OTB, however, is a whole different animal. The new building, like most other new public buildings around here, bears the name of somebody who paid for the privilege (it’s “the Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance”). The group’s newsletter announcing the opening of the new building is full of plugs for various corporate sponsors and contributors, (including AT&T, US Bank, Boeing, and Microsoft), offers a “new and expanded Business Club” which “gives local companies of all sizes an opportunity to benefit from a great incentive package–while also supporting On the Boarts.” Only time (specifically forthcoming schedules) will tell how well local and smaller-scale creators will fit in the new OTB’s scheme-O-things.
SO THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE SECRET SAUCE: McDonald’s stores now sport Big Mac 30th anniversary posters, featuring pseudo-psychedelic graphics reminiscent of Starbucks’ 25th anniversary posters from two years ago. Hippies then and now, of course, have loved to invoke McDonald’s as a quintessential symbol of everything they hate about corporate America, suburban lifestyles, and meat consumption.
The mistrust was mutual. The company’s dress code back then, natch, frowned on excessive male hirsuteness. More importantly, the chain’s whole operation was (and is) built around the un-hippie values of uniformity, conformity, neatness, and efficiency. The Fifties (a Learning Channel cable documentary series based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name) featured a telling memo from McD’s top management, calling individualism a dangerous trait and asserting all managers, employees, and franchise owners will be broken into the organization’s proper spirit of total conformity. McD’s arch rival Burger King briefly used the ad slogan “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules;” Outback Steak Houses currently feature the slogan “No Rules, Just Right.” These are so false they’re not even preposterous: A restaurant chain, especially a fast-food franchise, is nothing but a set of rules. Without the standardized products, prices, and premises stipulated in a franchise agreement, there’s no reason for the national advertising or other brand-building techniques that make a chain franchise more valuable to a franchisee than simply starting his or her own indie restaurant concept. (Of course, even that’s no guarantee of success, as seen by the bankruptcy of the once-booming Boston Market circuit and the resulting sudden closure of all its Northwest outlets.)
OTHER VOICES (from KJR-FM DJ Norm Gregory): “The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a proposed new rule which would limit beer and alcohol sales at events when 25 percent of the fans are under age 21. This could end beer sales in the stands at the football and baseball games. Part of the thrill of going to the games for my kids was passing drinks down the row. I didn’t mind them handling alcohol–it was when they started the one-sip-per-drink rule.”
SURVEY SAYS: I’m asking your help for next week’s column. Seems the aforementioned changes in my publishing situation have triggered what self-help books used to call a “midlife crisis.” I don’t have a spouse to mercilessly cheat on or thinning hair to cover-up. I wouldn’t buy a monstrous SUV even if I had the money, and I’ve no desire to do the Green Acres thang (I grew up in the countryside and won’t go back). But that still leaves lots of new directions into which a gent could place one’s life. Please send any suggestions on how I should devote the next year or three (for cash income or otherwise) via email to clark@speakeasy.org. The best will appear in this virtual space next week.
‘TIL THEN, ponder these words attributed to one Louise Beal: “Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.”
> iMPRESSIONS: The Stranger office just got a couple of them new iMac computers. They’re gorgeous; they’re screamingly fast; they’re just plain fun. The iMac’s the first “home” computer designed as a piece of home decor, like old “cathedral” radios used to be (one old radio name, Motorola, makes the CPU chip in the iMac). Just as importantly, it expresses the MacOS’s superior visual aesthetic into tangible, physical form. This has the practical effect of reducing the dissonance, the trance effect a computer user may have while really concentrating on the “mindspace” of working or running software. On plain beige-box computers, an advanced user can become almost unaware of his/her physical presence (unless, of course, something goes wrong with the hardware). The iMac’s more noticable, yet pleasant, presence might help hardcore gamers and Net-skimmers keep at least partly aware of the tangible world surrounding them. That, in turn, might help relieve or prevent the loneliness and depression cited among hardcore computer jockeys by some Carnegie Mellon U. sociologists.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Usually for weird potato-chip flavors you’ve gotta go to Canada. But Benson’s T-Bone Steak Crisps are imported directly from England to local spots like the Old Pequliar tav in Ballard. They don’t taste like steak, but have an oddly smoky flavor without being overly spicy. The slow frieght, tho’, can leave ’em a little less fresh-tasting than domestic chips.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Swaank (no relation to the porn mag Swank) is a rip-rollickin’, stylish-as-all-get-out chronicle of local swing-revival happennings. Besides musician and dancer interviews, it’s got a valuable jazz-history lesson and retro-fashion tips that thankfully go beyond the semiannual “Return to Elegance” nonsense in larger publications. There’s even a cartoon demonstrating how a neo-bopper can revise an outdated death-rock tattoo! (Free at clubs with swing nights, or $12 for four issues from 12437 110th Lane NE, #P101, Kirkland 98034.)
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: Who’da thunk The Stranger (originally a li’l 12-page sheet of coupon ads, movie listings, sex advice, and cartoons) would become such a robust force in alterna-media, reaching some 150,000 readers and revered nationwide? The growth of the paper has parallelled the growth of its “virtual community” of readers and advertisers. While a lot of beloved stores, bands, clubs, eateries, performance troupes, galleries, etc. have left us since late Sept. ’91, a lot of others have joined us. And while the corporate-rock biz has largely left Seattle alone lately (local bands no longer even feel they have to insist on how “not grunge” they are), there are more pro musicians doing more different kinds of things here now than maybe ever. (How many of them are really good at it is another question.)
But what’s in store? Wasn’t too long ago when the stock market was supposedly on a never-to-end rise, when Wired magazine predicted a “long boom,” when the only question anybody asked about the economy was how to keep up with (or survive) the megagrowth. Nowadays, things seem a bit more uncertain, particularly among anyone with direct or indirect dependencies upon Canada, Mexico, Russia, east Asia, or the U.S. stock market (as you might guess, that’s a lot of dependents). Can’t say what’ll happen next, but it might not be all on the upswing.
If there really is a recession later this year or early next, how will it affect our community? Seattle ain’t the same place it was when we lived on the trickle-down from Boeing and its subcontractors. But now the $$ coming into Seattle isn’t merely trickling down from overall national business conditions. It’s coming from whole consumer-economy sectors (software, chain coffeeshops) centered here, shipping cash into head offices that directly employ many art-worlders and art-biz customers. Of course, an overall slowdown will slow down these companies as well; just perhaps more moderately and slowly than Boeing slumps used to be. For whatever it’s worth, the nothing-ever-happens pre-Stranger Seattle ain’t coming back.
It’s a 4th-O-July Misc., the column old enough to remember back when many Americans were all worried sick that Japan and those other Pacific Rim powerhouses were gonna economically bury the U.S. under a tide of “principle-centered leadership,” “total quality management,” “work-team networking,” and hi-mileage compact cars. Could still happen one o’ these decades, I suppose.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dick’s frozen concentrated chocolate shakes are now at QFC. Frozen, they’re like that Darigold Frosted Malt. When thawed, diluted with a couple tablespoons of milk, and whipped up in an open-air blender, they’re just like what you get at Seattle’s favorite drive-ins. Even when whipped in a lidded blender (or even just stirred vigorously), they’re mighty tasty.
@ LAST!: By the time you read this, US West was supposed to have finally started advertising (and maybe even installing) its “MegaBit” high-speed Internet-access service, using the ADSL technology written about here nearly three years ago. It’s been delayed by state regulators, who complained the phone company hasn’t done enough to welcome independent Internet Service Providers into its ADSL connectivity. So maybe MegaBit will start taking installation orders next week, maybe not. Scrappy li’l Summit Cable, meanwhile, sez it’ll start offering cable-modem service in its neighborhoods (chiefly downtown, Belltown, the Central District, and Beacon Hill) perhaps as early as September; big TCI still promises to do the same sometime within the next year or so. While the hi-bandwidth revolution (enabling decent-quality live video, audio, and telephony thru the Net to home users) has been and will continue to be slow-emerging, at least it’s now underway. Maybe by this time next year, the whole media landscape will have begun to change, further away from the big boys and towards more decentralized structures. Speaking of revolutions…
REVOLUTION ONE-OF-THESE-DAYS-MAYBE!: I’ve talked to four people in recent weeks, who’ve mentioned either their desire or fears of a new American revolution. I have a hard time imagining a violent overthrow of the US of A, especially in these times of relative prosperity for So what would such a revolution be? (I mean a real sociopolitical revolution, not some advertised “fitness revolution” or “style revolution.”)
(To be more precise, Robertson’s relationship with the “reconstructionist” faction of the religious right’s a bit more complicted than I have space (in the print version of the column) to explain. He’s supported many ideological points similar to theirs, but at least for now he’s still a registered Republican. And Robertson’s former right-hand man Ralph Reed’s publicly come out against the reconstructionist agenda; Reed believes the religious-right platform (an authoritarian culture, under the twin thumbs of Fundamentalists and corporations) can be realized without dismantling the nation’s political foundations.
(Think you know how to accomplish any of this? Share your fervor at clark@speakeasy.org.)
Subject: Revolution
Sent: 7/4/98 1:59 AM
Received: 7/4/98 8:07 AM
From: Jason Foster, loosenut@scn.org
To: ‘clark@speakeasy.org’, clark@speakeasy.org
It’s about time. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say that there should be a revolution every 50 years? Aren’t we long overdue?
The statement that the revolution will not be led by the Religious Right made me think of something I read in Hakim Bey’s Millennium. He suggests that the religious right will have to band together with the anarchists and everybody else that thinks our current system is bullshit. They should be able to see the effect that greed has had on our government as much as anyone else.
I don’t think the revolution will be something to accomplish. I think it will just happen as result of social conditions. The destruction of the environment, dumbed-down mainstream media, super-greedy corporations, fucked-up politicians, grassroots politics, and real access to real information raising awareness (like through the internet) will be all be catalysts. Hopefully it will be bloodless.
And as for the revolution being televised: Do you think they will know what it is they are televising?
Misc. is a great column. Thanks for keeping me entertained and informed. (And thanks for reinforcing a lot of my belief system 😉 In an age severely lacking in heroes, you are one of mine.
Peace,
Jason Foster
————-
Subject: Re: revolution bullets
Sent: 7/9/98 8:29 PM
Received: 7/10/98 7:52 AM
From: JJAXX@aol.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org
It has seemed that at one time or another most everyone either anticipates some coming revolution or hopes for one. At the most personal level this is just wanting to get revenge on ones “boss” or parent.
The singular item that stopped my casual disrgard for another jeremiad was the phrase “unjust system.” Now that is something to think about! What exactly IS an unjust system? And, gosh!, relative to what other system did you have in mind?
At this point in history, about every culture I know of favors the powerful and wealthy (redundant?). There is good reason for this. And to various extents the less so are battered by the inequity. This does not mean there is a pending revolution. Most people are well aware of their own vices and shortcomings, regardless of their anger. And the consequences of poor impulse control are seldom long term positive for anyone. What comes after any revolution, any overthrowing impulse? These concepts are weighty to most people who have good memories or education. History is not kind to successful revolutions.
The establishment of a constitutional united states that has endured 200+ years is startlingly freaky when one compiles all of the governmental, corporate, and traditional upheavals the planet has supported in the last couple millenia. As it is, far too many people in this country have a huge economic and health incentive to suppress any so called revolution. The portion of the population that sees itself as the recipient of unjust treatment, I suspect, if gathered together, would never be able to agree on their own manifesto.
The result of this is scattered, small clubs of “revolutionaries” whose main goal is to “overthrow” their unworthy oppressors. Unfortunately, the number of “oppressors” in the US in something like 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than any of these groups. Focusing only on the superelite misses the size of the benficiaries numbers. In a country as armed to the teeth as the US, if the superelite were really threatening peoples well being their tenure would be so risky that their identities would be eyes only secrets. And that is a situation that the system itself could not support.
Conclusion: for all intents and purposes, people in the west, and surprisingly, even third world countries, are living in a time that, viewed over a millennium, is a golden age. To posit a successful revolution one must have some vision of a future that betters all 5 billion plus the ecosystem. The only people with that kind of vision are already creating that future. They tend not to be tearing down the current institutions (which have the current reins of power, and tons of money), they are building new institutions, creating new pathways of power and vast arrays of wealth. Individuals that are incapable of participating in this generation…first must look to themselves. If I elect to not pick up a book on HTML and front a web page, it isn’t BIll Gates to blame. If I cannot read to learn HTML it isn’t my teachers to blame.
Revolution is already happening. Show me someone on top in the US who was there 10 years ago. The better future is more like a river than a rock. It requires more in the sense of ability to navigate it than to stand on it.
JJ
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 11:02:42 -0700
From: hbarron
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: clark@thestranger.com
Subject: vive le revolucion!
im writing in response to a misc of a week or two ago in which the ? was something like ‘how to save the world’
id like to mention an org im active with that i think if succesful will greatly increase the joy and peace in the world.
its the party of non-aggresion and non-intervention -the Libertarian Party!
libertarians know that all human interaction can go one of two ways -either peaceful and mutually beneficial(commerce, charity) or coerced and destructive(drug prohib., slavery). therefore the more we can increase voluntary, peaceful, tolerant living and decrease violent social interaction(of which our government is the worst example) the better off we all will be!!!
please drop me a line if you want or if i can answer any ? re/ Libertarianism for the Stranger!!!
It’s the 12th-anniv.Misc., the column that wonders if Vancouver essayist Brian Fawcett was right when he said malls and subdivisions are typically named after the real places they replaced, whether a corollary might be made about car commercials promoting further traffic-jamming steel tonnage with images of the wide open road, or (even better) SUV ads using nature footage to sell landscape-ruining gas-guzzlers.
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS: Loyal readers have been sending junk food samples from far and near. Scott McGrath, though, takes the no-prize for the biggest cache of snax from the furthest-away place. The centerpiece of his shipment: a hamburger (made with chicken) he found at a Beijing convenience store, in a sealed envelope complete with bun, lettuce, and “salted sauce.” The English half of the envelope’s back warns of a two-to-three-day shelf life for the product, depending on the time of year. The bun got squished in transit, but it’s otherwise a normal looking way-past-pull-date meat food. The rest of his box contained Japanese, Filipino, and Taiwanese products he found in Guam: Banana catsup, dried squid and cuttle fish, soybean and herbal-jelly soft drinks, and Marine World Biscuits (shrimp-flavored animal crackers in fish shapes labeled, in English, “Tuna,” “Dolphin,” and even “Sea Lawyer!”). Many of these are more conveniently available at Uwajimaya and other local Asian-food emporia, but it’s the thought behind the gift that counts.
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: I’ve traditionally used this, the anniversary week of Misc. (begun in the old ArtsFocus tabloid in June 1986), to take a look back at the column, the changes in Seattle, or my journeys. This time, I want to look ahead. This li’l corner-O-newsprint ain’t my sole ambition in life. There’s plenty of other things I’ve always wanted:
UPDATE: Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady peep-show photos will get a display in Seattle after all. After the Seattle Art Museum said it’d show tamer images from Langley’s photo book, then chickened out, the Linda Cannon Gallery announced an uncensored Langley exhibit, opening June 4. Speaking of images and misunderstandings…
INK SLINGIN’: The Newspaper Association of America’s running ads on MTV, pleading for the kids to “Read a Newspaper Every Day.” Not that the publishers are gonna make papers any less parochial or conservative or bland; nor are they gonna stop stereotyping teenagers as dumb thugs and young adults as soulless slackers. Speaking of media and attitude problems…
ONE LAST `SEINFELD’ ITEM: The Variety Club held a “Sein-Off” benefit party at the Paramount last Thursday. You could support kids’ charities by showing your admiration for a show about total selfishness, that ’90s too-hip-to-care attitude-schmattitude so big in today’s Global Business zeitgeist. Speaking of corporate aggression…
THOTS ON THE VIDEO RELEASE OF `ANASTASIA’: Why hadn’t I realized it before? The total symmetry of a movie made under the auspices of that would-be emporer Murdoch, at a studio he built in Phoenix for anti-union purposes (AZ’s a “right-to-work” state), depicting the world of the Russian czars as a lost Golden Age–an age depicted as having been destroyed not due to a workers’ revolt, or even due to military conquerors who exploited a workers’ revolt, but by an individual villain within the aristocracy. Speaking of modern-day empires…
THE MERGE LANE: So Chrysler’s gonna let itself be bought out by Daimler-Benz, makers of Mercedes snobmobiles (and of the infinitely cooler Freightliner trucks). This means the Germans will now own the Jeep trademark, originally coined to describe the U.S. Army’s “general purpose” vehicles in WWII. However, we ought to think of this as an opportunity to wring some favors out of the company during the antitrust and SEC approval hearings. Let ’em merge, I say, if they promise to (a) bring that ultracool tiny Mercedes/Swatch Smart Car to America; (b) fire the Dodge commercial spokesdork and bring back Ricardo Montalban; (c) re-introduce some Chrysler Chlassics like the Dart Swinger and the Plymouth Duster (not to mention some of those old American Motors cars Chrysler now owns the rights to, like the AMX and the Pacer!); and (d) pay to track down, buy up, and melt down all K Cars still on the road. Speaking of the romance of industrial design…
JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Two companies are selling candies in containers that look exactly like computer mice. Candy Mouse tarts, made in Mexico by a Wrigley subsidiary, taste like SweeTarts but are shaped like pet-mouse food pellets. Web Fuel mints (“Cool Mints! Cool Sites!”), made in Holland for NYC-based World Packaging, are triangular faux-Altoids; the paper wrapping inside the aluminum box is printed with addresses of “cool” websites, including that of local kids’-computer-game firm Headbone. The Candy Mouse container looks like a two-button PC mouse and costs less than the Web Fuel box, which looks like a one-button Macintosh mouse and holds a tastier, more powerful product. (Both are at Walgreen’s.) Speaking of the march of modernity…
BIG STADIUM FALL DOWN AND GO BOOM: It’s more or less official. The homely yet homey home of Griffey and the Big Unit, of the Sonics’ 1979 championship, of Promise Keeper rallies and U2 shows and monster trucks and Boeing strike votes, will go away, almost certainly in one spectacular implosion. But when? If our area politicians had succeeded in attracting the 2000 Democratic National Convention, the Kingdome would probably have had to stay up until that August. But now that the Dems have removed Seattle from their list of convention hopefuls, the Dome can go boom whenever the exhibition facility in the south lot, between the Dome and the new baseball field, is done. Work on the exhibition hall can’t really start until the adjacent new baseball stadium’s complete, sometime around July 1999. Likely, that won’t allow for an implosion party on the big Millennial New Year’s, alas.
FROM `THE PESTO OF CITIES’: You’re probably either anxiously awaiting tonight’s final episode of Seinfeld, or you’re bored to tears by all the press the show’s gotten and you’re glad it’ll all be done soon. Both camps might be interested in the Seinfeld create-a-plot guides on the Internet. Fill in the blanks and you’ve got your own wacky li’l Mad Libs-esque story, little more implausible than those the show’s actually used. I’ve used some of the categories on that list, and made up some of my own, to organize my own riff on the show’s familiar formulae:
Discussion/argument about a topic of profound unimportance: If Carly Simon wrote about somebody and wanted to get at him by saying “You probably think this song is about you,” but it really was about him, what’s the deal here?
Slightly unsightly sight gag: Sticking quarters onto your forehead.
Sexual euphemism: A soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend is derided behind his back for spending too much time “mountaineering” and not enough time “spelunking.”
Kiddie snack-food product, still remembered and/or consumed by the lead characters: Fizzies–the tablets that, when dropped in water, are supposed to create instant soda pop but actually create a vaguely cherry-flavored, non-medicinal version of Alka-Seltzer.
Celebrity name-drop: Charlene Tilton.
Humorous situation in which this celebrity appears: Fighting with one of the lead characters over an object of pathetic obsession.
Object of pathetic obsession: A M@xRack movie-ad postcard with Gwyneth Paltrow’s name misspelled, and hence potentially collectible.
Urban-etiquette peeve: People who make too many consecutive transactions at an ATM while others are in line.
Proposed solution to this peeve: Start a petition drive outside bank branches, demanding banks to set a two-transactions-at-a-time limit at ATMs during peak hours, punishable by “eating” the violator’s ATM card.
Ethnic guest character: An Italian-American mother who works at the clothing-catalog company.
Ethnic-slur aspect of that character: Demands accordion music at her daughter’s wedding reception.
Reason to start dating someone: She appreciates really good Dr Pepper, and makes special buying trips to New Mexico where the local bottler makes an especially strong version. She even knows to never spell Dr Pepper with a period, and publicly corrects anyone who tries.
Reason to stop dating someone: Goes into a hissy-fit at any restaurant (or wedding reception) that even deigns to offer Mr. Pibb as a substitute for Dr Pepper, and in fact screams to the whole world that she would rather drink cherry-flavor Fizzies.
`Wacky’ money-making scheme: The last known cache of big-E Levi’s jeans not yet sold to Japan; a cache discovered at the rural New Mexico general store that also has the world’s best Dr Pepper.
Why this money-making scheme’s doomed: Nobody bothers to figure out that, with the Asian recession, the bottom’s fallen out of the Japanese big-E Levi’s mania.
How the characters learn this lesson too late: At the wedding reception, the clothing-catalog owner is overheard casually mentioning this during a discussion about a new unusual garment concept.
Uunusual garment concept: Garanimals for grownup men.
Potential benefit of this new garment concept: You’d never look like an ill-dressed, color-conceptless dork in public.
Potential liability: If you’re a single man and you don’t look like a color-conceptless dork, women will presume you’re either gay or married.
Potential benefit from that potential liability: Attracting a woman who’s specifically after married men, because she’s turned on by the transgressiveness.
Potential liability from that potential asset: You’re now living an elaborate lie in order to keep this woman from leaving you, which she undoubtedly will do if she finds out you’re not really married.
Non-sequitur catch phrase: “Do I even look like your caseworker?”
Now go make up your own answers to these categories, or categories like them; then stick them into a standard four-subplot Seinfeld story arc. The result will probably be funnier than whatever’s gonna be on tonight’s finale. Submit your entries to clark@speakeasy.org. The best entries will be posted online, for all to share in the being and nothingness.
