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7/93 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
Demographic Cleansing
Misc. thanks all who went to our big variety spectacular last month at the Two Bells. If you didn’t, future speaking engagements may be in store, possibly broadcast. I’ll forgive you; you were probably preoccupied anxiously waiting for the new-look Seattle Times (more on that later).
END-O-ERA DEPT.: A tired old sitcom about a bunch of maintenance drunks leaves TV after 11 years and gets the biggest hype campaign this side of the end of Communism. Dave leaves the same network after 12 years and doesn’t even get an ad in TV Guide. One word says it all: Weasels.
MEMO TO LOWRY’S HANDLERS: You’ve gotta reach out to the people of the state. Explain that the Right’s no-new-taxes/slash-all-spending/just-don’t-ask-us-how line is a crock. Remind folks that the interests that scream the loudest about slashing spending are the ones that lobby the hardest for breaks or subsidies for themselves. Point out that this “We The People” petition is really backed by big-bucks lobbies that like the health-care and transportation messes the way they are, that’ll do anything to stop real reform. Remind folks that we need roads and schools and colleges (not to mention prison guards for all the throw-away-the-key sentencing laws), and we’ve gotta get health care and public transit into shape or the state’s fiscal health will just get worse. To build a better future, ya gotta invest. Even rugged-individualist Eastern Wash. was settled by government aid (railroad land grants, dams, irrigation, farm price supports, Hanford).
TURNING A PAGE: The new Barnes & Noble book superstore in an old bowling alley (one of Bellevue’s few truly beautiful buildings) proves that the intellectual-elitist myth is wrong: people do read books these days, in increasing numbers. If they didn’t, corporate empires like B&N owner K mart wouldn’t build monster outlets like this. It’s what all these folks are reading that we can still argue about.
TURNING ANOTHER PAGE: Book sales boomed in recent years, but newspaper circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth. The Times is particularly frustrated, with suburban papers whopping it on its outer turf. In response, the paper’s built a Bothell printing plant and launched a massive redesign. Launched after two years of committee meetings, focus groups and “pagination” consultants, the new-look Times is a mix of elements from the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, SF Examiner, Oregonian, Tacoma News Tribune and many other papers. Most redesigned papers adopt huge type sizes that let ’em fill the same space with fewer reporters; the Times redesign is relatively modest about this, losing only 5 to 10 percent of its verbage per column inch (more is lost to goofy new features like the Page 2 blurbs). It’s like the remodel at the paper’s biggest remaining advertiser, the Bon. The paper, like the store, was an old workhorse not noted for flashy looks, suddenly given a “return to elegance” that it’d never had. The new Times is just more “tastefully” dull than the old.
BUMMER OF THE MONTH: The Nowogroski Insurance Agency closed its old office across from Safeco Tower in the U-District, and moved out somewhere by Northgate. It wouldn’t concern us, except the storefront office (an ex-A&P store) still bore the name of one of the operations that had been merged into it: the James M. Cain Insurance Agency. I always wanted to take out a life policy there, just so I could ask if they had a double indemnity clause.
THEY LOVE US IN EUROPE: Posh Italians think we’re “the ultimate frontier of the American look, costume and sound.” It says so in “Il Futuro Arriva de Seattle” (the future comes from Seattle), a 15-page spread in the Euro-style mag Max. There’s no NYC “designer grunge” wear (indeed, almost no women) in the Seattle spread, shot by photog Loca Trovato in January. You do get bike cops, fish tossers, the Smith Tower, the singles apartment house, Bruce Lee’s grave, Waiting for the Interurban, Bulldog News, the Waterfront Streetcar, and a mention of Bernardo Bertolucci filming Little Buddha here. The mag describes grunge (“Uno Stile, Una Musica”) as “expanding like an oil spill on the world scene,” local clubs as teeming with record producers ready to sign a band on the spot, and Seattle as a “laboratory for tomorrow…where the human dimension lives together with the future of technology, avant-garde urban planning and respect for nature.” They’ve got shots of the Sub Pop guys, Nirvana, Mother Love Bone, current club bands Dumt and Spoonbender, the Off Ramp, the Crocodile, the Vogue men’s room (looking unusually clean), the Colourbox and the Paramount, plus the fraudulent NY Times “Grunge Glossary” (Max doesn’t know it’s fake), a wacky sidebar on Madonna’s attempt to sign a grunge band (Candlebox, not Hole) for her label, and Chris Cornell complaining about the overcommercialization of the scene. And this allegedly common benediction: “It’s not rare, frequenting the Seattle clubs, to speak with anyone and hear the response: `Grunge will be you’ or `Grunge will belong to you.'” (Thanx to Tom Orr of Twist Weekly for translating help.)
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: XLR8R is the free monthly tab for local rave, techno and dance music lovers. Issue #2 includes an update on the rave-harassment issue, from the point of view of a promoter who’s managed to meet every bureaucratic hurdle and hold successful shows at the West Seattle rehearsal building Nirvana uses. He even reported getting a personal inspection and OK from asst. mayor Donna James (who’s married to the brother of the ex-wife of the brother of the previous mayor — all four of whom are present or former local TV personalities).
MORE SPACE EXPLORATION: The Showbox lives! — sorta. The legendary 1st Ave. ballroom that was Seattle’s grandest punk palace, then became a branch of the Improv comedy chain, has DJ/rave dance nights on Mondays. The Odd Fellows Temple also lives again with 18-and-over shows Fri. nights. The new promoters claim to have worked out all police and fire regs; we’ll see if the city tries to censor it again. And somebody named Troy is inviting bands to submit demos for a new all-ages series; call 285-0385 Mon. and Tue. afternoons for info.
THE FINE PRINT (from Cyborgasm, producer Lise Talae’s CD of surround-sound sex scenes): “Cyborgasm is a 3D audio fantasy anthology. The activities presented here have been created using sonic rendering and digital simulation. Cyborgasm should not be taken as an endorsement of these activities.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside the Off Ramp): “We don’t care if you smoke, snort, sniff, or shoot. Just don’t do it in here.” Runner-up (in the window of the Salvation Army service center on E. Pike, adjacent to a liquor-license notice): “The Salvation Army is moving. The liquor license is being sought by the future owners of the building. The Salvation Army has nothing to do with this.”
(latter-day note: The building in question became Moe, perhaps Seattle’s finest alt-rock club and one of my fave hangouts. The one relic from the space’s Salvation Army days is a long inside sign with the slogan “Self Denial Will Prove Your Love to God.” The current occupants stuck a big MOE sticker over “God.”)
`OTHER’ WISE: Where did this now-ubiquitous term “The Other” come from anyway, and why do all these white het male art critics use it to complain about white het males? I know there was an NY underground rag long ago called The East Village Other, but they presumably got the term from somebody else. The critics invoking it (including most everyone at Reflex) imply that there are only two classes in American society: the class of all the people they don’t like (called either The Patriarchy or The New World Order) and the class of all the people they like (The Other); the critics analyze all artworks accordingly. Shoehorning art into oversimplistic ideology is just silly, and sheds no insight onto either art or politics. In the ’70s, academic leftists claimed that Everything Is Political. I’m starting to believe Everything Is Aesthetic. Besides, anybody who thinks there are only two cultures in the U.S. isn’t looking very hard.
CATHODE CORNER: Local actor Patrick-Alden Moore wants to produce a weekly TV sitcom in Seattle. It’d be an all-local production: not just location shooting but local writers, actors, and crews. He’s writing a pilot script, which he hopes to film with money from some of those Hollywood bigshots with Puget Sound island homes. He envisions a lighthearted soap-parody like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Soap, though not too weird or too sexy (“I want this to be something everyone can enjoy,” he says, adding that he thinks The Simpsons is too racy for kids). His written premise involves psychiatry jokes and ethnic jokes (an Hispanic bartender learning Yiddish). Don’t look for any local references: the title, City, is the only name the show’s town will have. Casting isn’t final yet, but he says he’d like to get the unlikely teaming of Ichabod Caine (country DJ and born-again Christian) and Peggy Platt (empress of local standup comedy and outspoken pro-choicer).
WHAT’S (NOT) IN A NAME?: So Prince wants to no longer be referred to by name, just by his abstract pseudo-zodiac logo. It’s been done. There was a Seattle band in ’81 that had no written name, just a symbol of two interlocking diamonds with wings on each side and a graph line inside. Unlike the Prince symbol, this outfit did have a spoken name: a guttural shriek. And there’s still the famous local illustrator/tattoo designer, known by the logo of a triangle-slash.
DEMOGRAPHIC CLEANSING: Sometimes it seems that yuppies don’t want to coexist with anybody, that they want to take over a place, shove everybody else out, then appropriate the evictees’ cultural heritage. The downtown “cleanup” campaign can be seen as a plan to remove the young and/or poor from public areas. The Belltown “anti-crime” campaign is a system for harassing black kids who stand around quietly, while ignoring far rowdier white kids nearby. But now comes the second draft of the Seattle Commons Plan. The rich suburbanites behind the plan now insist they want to keep the same number of low-income housing units in the South Lake Union/Cascade area (not necessarily in the same buildings), though most of the planned net increase in housing stock would be luxury or “market-rate” (upper-middle-class). They’re even talking about keeping the Lincoln-Mercury building (without the great neon). But nowhere in the 126-page report is there a mention of the neighborhood’s funky lo-rise character, its half-dozen or more rehearsal studios, its photo studios, or its other current values to the city. Low-rent, high-ceiling districts are as precious an urban resource as jogging trails, and have just as much right to exist.
I ORDER YOU TO RELAX!: You probably missed out on Lighten Up America Day on 6/22, devised by Portland corporate-motivation speaker C.W. Metcalf (no relation to “Convoy” singer C.W. McCall). He thinks Americans are too darn depressed these days (I can’t imagine why). Metcalf wants us to think brighter thoughts, to let more light into our hearts. Speaking of which…
CHURCH WINDOWS: Some members of St. Mark’s Cathedral want glass artist Dale Chihuly to design the Episcopal landmark’s still-unfinished interior. I’d always thought of the Episcopalians/Anglicans as a religion of grandeur and spectacle. Chihuly, who sells prosaic decorative bowls to Microsoft millionaires, would be all wrong for that (‘tho I like his idea to freeze neon lights inside theTacoma Dome hockey surface). His passionless work would be more appropriate to my alma mater denomination, the Methodists. Speaking of which…
THE GOOD NEWS: Those who miss the activist calendar in Community Catalyst should check out The Source, the monthly “Ecumenical Newspaper” of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Even for non-churchgoers, it’s a great resource for events along the social-concern wing of mainline Protestantism. Last month’s topics include the Dalai Lama’s visit, Hiroshima memorials, the survival of faith in a hi-tech age, the Ste. Michelle wine boycott, helping the homeless, Cuban friendship advocates, and a big section about gay rights vs. right-wing disinformation campaigns. Speaking of which…
DEAD AIR: The talk radio goon squad, predictably, is at the forefront of pro-gridlock politics. The demagogues and their TV-pundit pals fancy themselves as Scarlet Pimpernels, valiantly rescuing helpless aristocrats from the pinko insurrection. They’re really more like old Soviet state ideologists, using twisted logic to find “moral” or “economic” justifications for preserving the status quo of power and privilege. They’ve got Clinton in retreat, forcing compromises on any issue that can be oversimplified into a faux crusade. The White House ought to capture the moral high ground. Hillary‘s trying, with her remarks about a “politics of meaning” to fight the “sleeping sickness of the soul” caused by a dehumanizing society. (It’s paraphrased from ex-UW campus radical Michael Lerner, who now runs the Jewish social-philosophy mag Tikkun.) The pundits and talk-radio guys (I hate to call ’em “hosts,” a term that implies gentility) scoffed: How dare a politician be sincere about social leadership, instead of using it as an excuse for hate-mongering? How dare anyone talk about spirituality who doesn’t belong to the former state religion of Robertsonism? Mrs. C.’s going where Mr. C.’s backed off, toward disarming the Right by exposing its corporate hypocrisies. Speaking of which…
BOXING BOUT: Buying CDs in jewel boxes, from stores that don’t supply those wasteful cardboard longboxes? Think you’re saving the Earth? Think again, after you pass the Precision Sound warehouse on Republican St. east of Westlake. On a rainless day you’ll see a crew of dudes & dudettes out on the loading dock, tearing off longboxes and tossing them into a Dumpster. Sure they’re all recycled, but it’s still a waste to make ’em in the first place. Any record co. that puts environmental hype in its inserts ought to offer jewel box-only CDs. Besides, longboxes were the last bastion of big cover art; you should have the option of getting ’em. They will be collectibles. Speaking of which…
CANNED HEAT: Some folks claim to have found syringes in diet-pop cans. It’s really either a hoax or a tampering, but I can’t help fantasizing about a company doing it as a stunt to become the Choice of a New Generation, Seattle-style. (Imagine the alternative-rock-star endorsement possibilities!) Note that officials insist any contaminant chemicals would never survive in a Pepsi can (should our kids drink stuff that strong?) Also note that KIRO handed the commentary spot about the soda scandal to its longtime resident shrink, Dr. Pepper Schwartz (no relation).
TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: In an item cut from a column back in February, I pondered future developments in watered-down “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the Betsey Johnson fashion show at Benham Studio (one “designer grunge” maker who’s actually been here!), get your official Jurassic Park dino-dolls with built-in, take-apart flesh wounds (just don’t bother with the movie, an overblown mix of WestWorld and Godzilla on Monster Island), and ponder this headline from British Vogue: “If Georgia O’Keefe were alive today, she’d be modeling in Gap ads.”
PASSAGE
Louis M. Haber in a Washington Post Op-Ed essay, defending Barney the Dinosaur:
“Is this incredible hostility toward Barney just a reflection of societal prejudice against idealistic and cheerful people who are often discounted as simpletons? Against males who are not afraid to reveal a delicate and sensitive persona and to display gentle mannerisms?…Are you so hard-boiled as to be unable to accept anyone who accepts everyone? So cynical as to think of those who are undauntingly optimistic as obsequious?”
REPORT
My book on the history of alternative culture in Seattle still doesn’t have a publisher (they’re throwing away the investment opportunity of a lifetime), but it’s attracting attention from here to Montreal (I’ve been interviewed for the CBC French channel about what Seattle kids really wear).
A broadcast Misc. is still in the works; more info when it happens. I’m also working on other marketing ideas (T-shirts, stickers, posters, a 900 line). If you’ve got an idea you think might work, drop me a line.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Penuriousness”
FIRST, LOCAL BANDS GET BIG. NOW, THE M’S ARE CONTENDERS.
I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!
5/93 Misc. Newsletter
THE STATE PASSES A HEALTH CARE PLAN;
THE MARINERS CAN HARDLY WAIT…
Misc. (one of the few local entertainment thangs John Corbett hasn’t tried to muscle in on yet) is moderately disturbed that no review of the Empty Space‘s new Illuminati play even mentioned the Space’s old Illuminatus! play, a 1980 three-part circus of by-the-numbers blasphemy and political conspiracy theories based on the Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea comic novels; it was one of the theatre’s biggest hits at the time.
CONFIDENTIAL TO MARK WORTH, Wash. Free Press: I’ve been trying to sell out for years; it’s just that nobody’s been buying.
IT’S BEEN A WACKY couple-O-weeks here in Misc. Country USA. The Weekly “discovered” a “New Art Scene” centered around the Galleria Potatohead folks, a year after that space closed. The Cyclops Cafe storefront got stuck into an AT&T ad inviting Americans to call up their ol’ Seattle grunge pals. Had a mixed time at the Crocodile’s Stumpy Joe goodbye party: great sloppy bands, but unwisely cranked up to inner-ear-pain level; at that distortion point, even the Young Fresh Fellows sounded like a fast Tad. I found an old Artforum review of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, where the guys prance around and act silly in dresses like Bugs Bunny; the reviewer somehow called it a profound anti-homophobic statement. And, while cable-cruising one midnight, I heard a bad instrumental of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” accompanying a Male Best Body Contest.
NUMBERS RACKET DEPT.: Sorry, I can’t believe there are only approx. 1 million adult gay men in the USA, as implied in that national sex survey by our Laurelhurst friends at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute. The national gay mags claim more than that many readers (including paid circulation and the industry-standard estimates of “pass-along” copies). I’ve met guys who claim to have had more than that many guys. If there are that few gay guys, then who’s buying all the non-Nutcracker ballet tix and Judy Garland laser disks?
SUMMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL: We’re amused that Clinton and Yeltsin‘s prearranged walking path led to Vancouver’sWreck Beach, known in warmer months as the Northwest’s largest nude beach. Hope it inspired ’em toward shedding outmoded political put-ons and attaining fuller disclosure.
TUNED OUT: The Supreme Court’s using 2 Live Crew‘s Roy Orbison takeoff “Big Hairy Woman” to decide if copyright holders can ban song parodies. It won’t affect MAD (which prints only its original lyrics “to the tune of” extant songs) or Al Yancovic (who always gets OKs from the original artists). It would inhibit satirists from commenting on copyrighted or trademarked material. Imagine the Squirrels pleading for permission to trash Frampton songs!
THE MAILBAG: Stacey Levine writes, “A friend whose judgment I trust thinks Clinton is a true radical, more than he let on during the campaign. The Nation says he’s middle; another friend professes that Clinton is not at all interested in real change, backed as he was by the major oil corps.” Good question. He made his name with national party brass as part of the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the Reagan years to defend the party’s institutions (if not its ideals). Some members wrote books suggesting that Reaganism was irreversible, that the Dems could survive as an organization only by embracing GOP policies. Clinton wasn’t quite like that; he’s more in the tradition of Washington’s late Sen. Warren Magnuson, a master deal-cutter who believed in social progress thru government paternalism and economic progress thru industrial policy. Clinton’s a well-meaning compromiser who’ll only go as far as he thinks he can go. He won’t lead us out of our assorted messes; but, unlike the previous couple of guys, we might be able to lead him.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME: The Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at 2nd & Pike was the sort of “social concern” experience my old Methodist youth group would’ve gone to. You walked past real street people (studiously kept outside) to enter a cleaned-up simulation of street life. You wandered thru a maze of tight corridors, small rooms, and plywood cutouts of muggers, drug dealers, johns, cops and bureaucrats; all to a Walkman soundtrack of interviews with street people (by a Calif. art troupe), tightly edited to shock suburban innocents with near-romanticized images of urban squalor. It worked as a thrill ride, but didn’t communicate how tedious and numbing that life can be.
BIRD GOTTA FRY: The Legislature’s reclassified flightless birds (ostriches, emus, rheas) as poultry, so they can be raised for food. The AP quotes breeders as saying they “taste just like beef.” It’s appropriate that Washington starts an industry in birds that run along the ground, since one of the state’s top poultry firms is named Acme.
ON THE WALLS: Art cafés are the apparent Next Big Thing in town. By serving espresso and pastries to gawkers, Offbeat Cafe (in the old Art/Not Terminal on Westlake) hopes for a steadier income than art sales alone could give, showing artists who can’t yet carry a whole gallery themselves. Offbeat also has some live-music and DJ parties. CyberCity, a similar place in the old Arthur Murray studio and Perot campaign office on Terry, closed almost before it opened. Most ambitious of the lot: Entros, in the old Van de Kamp’s bakery near South Lake Union, a huge space with several interactive and hi-tech exhibits — and a $15 first-time cover charge. The northern Californians (natch) running the place seem to think alternative-art lovers in this town have money (hah!).
ON THE AIR: KTZZ was put into involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy by three big syndicators. It’s over debts by the station’s ex-owners, who bought some high-profile reruns and sold few ads. The current (since ’90) owners say they’re on schedule for paying back the old debts. This debt service is why the station’s even cheaper now than it was before: less off-air promotion, more televangelists and infomercials. It gets those “Prime Time Talk” shows for free (the distributor keeps some of the ad slots)….KOMO wants to buy KVI, under new FCC regulations allowing it to have two AMs in the same town again. In the Golden Age of Radio, KOMO was sister stations with KJR, broadcasting from the Terminal Sales Bldg. (now home of the Weekly and Sub Pop) and affiliated with NBC’s Red and Blue networks respectively. From the ’50s to the ’70s, the tightly-formatted KOMO and the personality-driven KVI were arch rivals for the adult-pop audience. The Ike Republicans who run KOMO will likely interfere with KVI’s current talk format (despite current contrary assurances). They might be too patrician to keep the Agnewish rants of Rush Limbaugh, KVI’s top-rated show. And they’ll surely drop KVI’s use of news from KING-TV (now corporately divorced from KING radio).
PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD: Tucci Benucch, a new restaurant in Westlake Center, is the first local outpost of Lettuce Entertain You, Ron Melman’s Chicago outfit that revolutionized food service as entertainment. Its eateries have distinctive poppy decor and decent food at almost-decent prices. Its Chi-town flagship, Ed Debevick’s, launched the fake-diner fad. It uses young actors and comics as “character” waiters and buspeople, haranguing and cutting up the willing clientele. The acts are even more intense at the LA Ed’s, where every server’s a would-be star and every customer’s a possible casting agent. Melman also has Chicago spots bearing the licensed names of local celebs (Oprah, Cubs announcer Harry Carey), and sponsored that contest where a guy won $1 million for shooting a basket from opposite court during a Bulls game. Alas, none of that action’s slated for Westlake. All we’re getting is “rustic Italian food in a country atmosphere.”
WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH LA: LA Riots II: The Sequel failed to make its scheduled premiere, gravely inconveniencing the original producers (police) and distributors (news media). Back when Repo Man came out, one of my gothic-punk acquaintances described for me what was so different about it. His first sentence: “It was made in LA.” He meant that this film used the parts of LA that other LA films didn’t (and mostly still don’t). A few weeks ago, I found myself in the company of a semi-retired Hollywood bigshot. He talked about how he’s looking to move here, how “everybody (in the business) wants to get out of LA.” The LA people scattering across the western states are just re-creating the La La Land mentality in an exile made possible by faxes and FedEx. The airheads are leaving Hollywood so they can keep their worthless Hollywood culture alive, so they can stay unbothered by the issues of people other than themselves. They symbolize America’s withdrawal from social community into private hedonism. Beverly Hills is the reason South Central exists. The “Northwest Lifestyle” described in newspaper “Living” sections is usually defined according to misplaced LA priorities, as a narcissistic life of private pleasures. The yuppie dream of “Moving to the Country” (without depending on a rural economy) is just an upscale version of the suburban dream/nightmare. It reflects the abandonment of neighborhoods, cities, social services, education, health, infrastructure, etc.; all as guided by a politics that purported to celebrate the Rugged Individual but really just gave more power to the already-powerful. Reagan was the Spielberg president — and not just because both shared a nostalgia for a nonexistent past. Just as Spielberg turned the genres of sleazy fringe movies into the foundation of the modern film biz, so Reagan turned the hatemongering and quick-buck tactics of the west’s right-fringe political circles into the foundation of national government policy. Both camps trafficked in contrived sentimentality, not in real social intimacy. It’s way past time for this to end. Don’t move to the country. Stop running from your problems, America! Stay in town! Fight to make it better!
STAGES: The biggest thing to me about Ramona Quimby, now at the Moore Theatre (one of umpteen spaces Seattle Children’s Theatre’s using ’til its new building gets done) is that Beverly Cleary wrote and set the original stories in Portland. As a kid, I found that amazing. Cleary was the only author given me who wrote about a place I had been. Everyone else either wrote about a mythical Mayfield USA, the streets of NYC, or war orphans in Korea. From Cleary, I learned the importance of thinking globally/writing locally.
DEAD AIR: Manager Chris Knab still insists that his new KCMU-Lite will eventually be popular ‘cuz it’s more “professional” than Classic KCMU, even without most of the station’s experienced DJs. One volunteer who stayed, Marty Michaels, got rewarded for his loyalty by getting to host weekend public-affairs shows. In early April, after a taped segment on Jewish Holocaust survivors, Michaels told listeners they’d heard “one personal opinions about the alleged Holocaust.” He told irate callers (off the air) there was no proof that millions of Jews ever died in Nazi camps. Knab persuaded Michaels to resign; it would’ve been hypocritical to fire people for mentioning CURSE and keep Michaels. Also, anti-Semitism is one of the few offenses the UW Regents (who’ll ultimately decide KCMU’s fate) don’t easily forgive.
SKIN DEEP: Playboy had model recruiters at the UW recently. The Daily ran a series of columns and letters reiterating all the 25-year-old complaints about the mag. Most anti-Playboy arguments are as trite as the pictures themselves. Here’s some fresher criticism: There’s nothing intrinsically bad about the het-male sex drive, or about entertainments that exploit it. But the best erotic art is about passion, about the mysteries and compulsions that drive disparate humans together. Most Playboy pix, especially the centerfolds, are bland works of commercial ad-art. The models portray soulless, unlustful characters, overly “dressed” in hyperrealistic lighting and Charlie’s Angels hair, their flesh digitally retouched to look unlike any real-world biological entity. The models aren’t “degraded” in the sense most critics invoke; they’re “honored” with the same perverse reverence given to The Brand in magazine ads. These “Playmates” are made to look incapable of having any real fun. I want better.
THE OUTLAW LOOK: The Oregon Dept. of Corrections (sez Media Inc.) is doing brisk biz in felon-made jeans, Prison Blues. They’ve got no known Seattle outlet; Nordstrom had ’em for a while but stopped.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Nabisco SnackWells Devil’s Food Snack Cakes are the hit of the year, regularly selling out to diet-conscious snackers. They don’t have fewer calories than regular cookies, but they are fat-free, and in many current fad diets that’s what counts. The chocolate-covered cakes are big and chocolatey, if dry (halfway between a microwave brownie and a shrunk Ho-Ho).
`SELF’ INTEREST: I’ve heard from people who want more “personality” in the column. Some even suggested that I oughta try to be more like Hunter Thompson and make myself my own #1 topic. I never figured you cared who I was. So far it’s been a self-fulfilling assumption; when I tell people at parties or in bars that I do stuff for The Stranger, they only want to know one thing: “What’s Dan Savage really like?” I don’t do narcissism in print because I hate it when others do it. I review new novels in one of my other freelance gigs; I can usually tell when a story’s autobiographical because the dullest character gets the biggest part. I’ve seen too many young journalist-wannabes fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and turn every story into a rehash of their personal experiences — even if they have no such experiences worth reading about, even if they’re 25 and still living with their parents. Ya wanna know how long it’s been since I got laid? Didn’t think so. Gonzo journalism belongs to the unstructured narcissism of the late hippie era. I harken back not to “gonzo” but to the precision writing of pre-’50 newspapers, back when papers were more populist (and popular), when a columnist was someone with something specific to say and who seemed anxious to say it.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Gladhanding comic Ross Shafer, who started Almost Live on KING-TV in ’84 as a straight talk show with current host John Keister as a sidekick, then left in ’88 to be the final host of the Fox Late Show, has joined the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher: an infomercial for a VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials, that take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)
‘TIL NEXT TIME, see Marsha Burns‘s exquisite photos of alternately-beautiful people at the Bellevue Art Museum thru 5/16, and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”
MISSION CONTROL: Everybody’s got a mission statement these days — construction projects, gas stations, even porno mags. My mission: To challenge your mind. To awaken your imagination. And to stop talking right now.
James Darren in a pseudo-profound moment in Venus in Furs (1970): “When you don’t know where you’re at, man I tell you time is like the ocean. You can’t hold onto it.”
Still working on the big history of the Seattle scene. Thanx to those who’ve contacted me thus far. The rest of you, if you’ve got stories or mementos, write to me.
“Matutinal”
3/93 Misc. Newsletter
`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:
HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK
YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK
YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK
Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.
BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.
WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).
THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.
WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.
JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.
NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)
WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”
WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.
MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.
FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.
ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.
ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.
AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)
DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.
DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…
CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?
BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.
‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”
I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)
I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000Â Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.
“Captious”
1/93 Misc. Newsletter
ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:
`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’
It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”
From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.
In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).
The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)
Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.
SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.
SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….
The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.
THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”
AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….
Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.
ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.
IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.
WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….
I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.
‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).
Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”
Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).
“Flocculent”
•
AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST
For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,
not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.
12/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns
and one newsletter-only essay)
THERE’S HUSKY COFFEE NOW!
JUST DON’T SERVE IT ICED.
IT DOESN’T HOLD UP UNDER COLD CONDITIONS
At Misc., we have only one response to the reported infestation of coyotes in Discovery Park: Where’s Acme when you need it?
CLARIFICATION: For those of you not up on your pop-cultural literacy, the “Woody” referred to last month wasn’t Mr. Allen but Mr. Woodpecker.
ELECTION AFTERMATH: The electorate issued a big dose of reality. A positive reality, as in waking up dazed yet refreshed, to find Patrick Duffy telling you that the past 12 years were just a bad dream. For too long, our government and its business backers lived in a fantasy, in which the declaration of one’s innate “morality” excused all immoral actions, in which the stagnating defense of old socioeconomic privilege could be sold as a “growth policy.” The denizens of this delusory Pleasure Island, long since having turned into asses, expected that with enough money (ours) and lies (theirs), they could maintain the fantasy forever. But the lies ran out quicker than the money. The sleaze machine will finally be out of the Executive Branch. No more gag rules, no more Council on Competitiveness, no more friendly dictators, no more executive orders to appease Pat Robertson. No more race-baiting or gender-baiting as official policy. Now for the boring part: establishing a long-term, active constituency for getting done what needs doing. The two drug cartels (illicit and prescription) are still bleeding the nation dry. The pro-unemployment and anti-environment lobbyists maintain their unelective offices; they and their pundit pals still brand anyone who dares oppose them as “special interests.” Think it’s OK to go back to hip apathy? Get real.
IF I’M RIGHT about this being a new era, we’re gonna need a new aesthetic to go with it. It’s not just that the Clintons and Gores don’t like harsh lyrics and other shock art, but that they don’t like the divisive concept behind them. The visions of Karen Finley and Henry Rollins are clumsily reversed clones of the GOP’s politics of hate. The Young Republicans long ago co-opted the image of the self-made rebel sneering at the petty concerns of the little people; there’s no point in alternative artists acting like that anymore. There’s still a helluva lot to be angry about, but it needs to be answered by a more inclusive kind of anger, something that goes beyond the mere vilification of enemies. Now that 62% of the voters have rejected the organized Right, it may be time for the art world to reconsider its hostility against the so-called “sap masses” and to start communicating with people about the real problems. Leftist art used to be about promoting solidarity with the working classes; it can be about that again. The post-Bush era also means there’s less value in enduring bad art just so you can smugly know that you’ve consumed something the Right would hate. What counts now is whether you like it.
BEFORE WE FORGET the campaign, let’s remember the curiosity that was Ross Perot. It wasn’t just money that got him as far as he got. It wasn’t just a bullheaded unwillingness to play by the rules (including the rule of listening to others’ ideas). It was that he played these as assets. He exploited the ’80s romance of entrepreneurism as Reagan and Bush tried but couldn’t. His contrived maverick act caught many hearts within the subcultures that the NY Times doesn’t know about: Computer bulletin board users. Talk radio listeners. Franchisees and multi-level marketers. “Couples’ erotica” video renters. Self-help readers. Family nudists. The 30 percent of the population that no longer watches prime time TV. People in 12-step groups. Upscale health food eaters. Bodybuilders. People who use powder cocaine while denouncing people who use crack. People who go to comedy clubs. People who used to read National Lampoon in high school. Members of spouse-swapping clubs. Science fiction fans. Everybody who thinks they deserve to break the rules. A savvier candidate might have turned these groups into a force to be reckoned with indeed. God help us if it happens.
APPEARANCES #1: Someone signed only Elvira says she usually likes Misc., but that my consenting attitude toward shirt-doffing G ‘n R fans “really struck out”: “Is the above aimed at women specifically? If so then you are no more `enlightened’ than the band is regarding women! Why would anybody, actually, show a lot of flesh at concerts? Or anywhere else for that matter?” I can think of a million reasons, starting with: why not? I can’t tell women what to do. And I have no monolithic attitude toward all women. Fifty-two percent of the human race can’t be all alike. If some wanna make fools of themselves at dumb corporate-rock shows, I won’t go look but I won’t condemn ’em either. And yes, I’d support male nudity in mutually supportive situations, like the Berkeley, CA student who showed up in class either bare or bottomless all semester, to the condemnation of management but the support or indifference of his fellow students.
APPEARANCES #2: The same week that Pentagon brass got all cowardly about admitting gays and lesbians, a woman wrote in the NY Times about the lack of full male skin in mainstream studio sex movies. Both probably have something to do with some men’s fear of other men’s sex (an emotion oft exploited in wartime propaganda, the ol’ keep-the-huns-off-your-wife line). As I’ve said before, writers who depict “Men” as a single collectivized psyche are wrong. Forty-eight percent of the human race can’t be all alike either. We’re isolated souls; many of us hate each other. I grew up from locker-room intimidation games long ago, and wish others could do the same. And while I’m not attracted to other guys’ parts, I don’t mind their images. I’ve seen enough male nudity in plays and foreign films to know how it can add that ever-needed human vulnerability.
APPEARANCES #3: The fashion press has certified the “Grunge Look” as the official Next Big Thing. Except that some of these designers (including Perry Ellis staffer Marc Jacobs) turn it into commercial crap, with sand-washed silk “flannel” shirts and models’ hair elaborately styled to look unkempt. Others (including Betsey Johnson) define “Seattle style” as Dee-Lite-meets-Frederick’s-of-Hollywood, with sheer tops and rainbow bell bottoms over Doc Martens. I’ve nothing philosophically against $500 see-thru dresses or butterfly pasties (see above), but authentic Seattle wear oughta be something you can wear in November without catching pneumonia. More seriously, the Seattle arts community (in music, fashion and other media) is at its best when it gets folks together, unpretentiously, to achieve honest expressions (even honest banal expressions). If the big designers reinterpret it in pretentious ways, maybe it’s just too much for corporate fashion to understand.
APPEARANCES #4: Betty Page, the reclusive ’50s S&M model whose pinup photos are reprinted in countless books, mags and trading card, who’s inspired everyone from Madonna to the Cramps’ Poison Ivy with her kinky innocence, was finally found in Calif. by Robin Leach. She describes herself now as “old and fat” and living off Social Security; some of the publishers who’ve made money off her image are volunteering to help her out, which is nice. I never was turned on by her myself; I mean, her pictures in regular clothes look like my mom did at the time.
AIRING IT OUT: At the save-KCMU rally 11/8, several people booed when a speaker mentioned the letters “NPR.” They knew that despite NPR’s several liberal political voices, in operating practice it’s become a very Reaganite institution. For one thing, it does a lousy job at serving ethnic or cultural minorities. If you’re not an upscale baby boomer, you’re not welcome. KUOW’s newsletter boasts about how it appeals almost exclusively to the well-off, the perfect consumer audience for “enhanced underwriting announcements.” Also, many under-40 listeners loathe NPR’s cloying aesthetic, its patronizing attitude toward non-yup subcultures, and its “down home” features celebrating the purity of life in all-white towns. (See the current Whole Earth Review for more details.) Also, I’m as guilty as the rest of the local alternative press in keeping quiet about KCMU’s gradual state of siege until now. I wanted to support the station too much to speak ill of it, even as great volunteer DJs got axed one by one for disobeying petty rules or playing too much of the “harsh and abrasive” music that was making Seattle famous. Just call me a listener who loved too much.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Even if there weren’t a new fad of cereal-box collecting, the Cocoa Puffs Factory box would be a collector’s item. A flap on the back unfolds into a 3-D image of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a working chute system. Put a handful of the cereal in the bin at the top, release a trap, and watch the puffs roll down the device and into your bowl. Get one to use, and one to save for your grandkids… Hershey’s Desert Bar (“special formulation for desert and tropical conditions”) is a melt-resistant chunk of chocolate mixed with egg whites for extra body, as enjoyed by the troops of ’91. It’s a substantial biting experience, less gooey and sugary than the regular bar. It’s also got the powdery-white exterior familiar to anyone who’s worked in a candy kitchen and sampled a brick of “industrial chocolate.”
NATIVE LORE: The 11/23 Times sez the number of self-designated Native Americans in Wash. grew from 58,000 to 78,000 in the last census period, a figure far higher than that of officially recognized tribal members. I knew there were phony New Age shamen running around, but I didn’t know there were so many.
AD VERBS: Howcum all these half-hour commercials are for products that you could explain in a minute, while the stuff that could use the time (like cars) still only gets regular spots?
THE FINE PRINT (on a bag of Fritos): “You may have won $10,000. No purchase necessary. Details inside.”
BEHIND THE PINE CURTAIN: Oregon’s Prop. 9, which would have officially dehumanized homosexuals, lost — but by a dangerously small margin. Its sponsor, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, plans to keep resubmitting the measure, to gain administrative control of the state Republican Party (onetime home to progressives like the late Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Wayne Morse), and to start a Washington branch.
The OCA and the Idaho Nazis are not aberrations to the recent mystique of the “laid back” Northwest. Their presence reflects the logical extreme of the myth of “getting away from it all” to a refuge populated only by “people like us.” This was one of the last parts of the continent that whites conquered. After that, we had race riots against Chinese laborers; after that, we sent our citizens of Japanese ancestry off to wartime internment camps. The “Northwest Lifestyle” ideology that coalesced in the mid-’70s promotes turning one’s back on “urban problems” (such as nonwhite people) and putting down roots in “God’s country” where everybody’s identically “nice” and wholesome. We don’t need any more of that. We need to attract people into the region who are willing to live among other people.
CATHODE CORNER: Sony’s about to bring the cyberpunk vision one step closer by introducing a Visortron “headset video screen.” The goggle-like device contains two tiny 0.7″ LCD screens, one just in front of each eye. Not only could this mean perfected of 3-D movies, it’ll let bus riders and hospital patients remove themselves even further from their immediate surroundings. Also, it’s one of the components that “virtual reality” developers have clamored for. They want to be able to rig up users with sensor gloves, feed computer animation into their eyes, and send them on journeys into computer-created “worlds” (depicted in the Neuromancer books and the forthcoming film Toys). Advocates claim it could be used for everything from simulated drug trips to sex with robots (a pitifully sterile fantasy, if you ask me). But you know it’ll end up being primarily used for military training.
STAGES: ‘Twas something really peculiar about seeing the New City production of Fever (Wallace Shawn‘s monologue piece about the limits of rich-liberal guilt trips) performed at a substitute venue: First Christian Church, usually occupied by people who don’t just go to upscale plays about poverty and suffering but actually try to do something about them. Shawn posited a world consisting only of the oppressed and the privileged (the latter including himself and, by implication, his audience). He conveniently concludes (or seems to, since he’s conveniently equivocal) that there’s little his class can do but feel sympathetic and give a little money to street people. Sorry Wally, not good enough. Next time, try to see the rest of the world, not as an artist looking for source material but as a citizen looking for a task to be done. You could start at the church and its ongoing ministry to street people.
OUR ANNUAL ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT: 24, including three colorized showings; plus three showings of Marlo Thomas’s remake It Happened at Christmas. Fortunately, the lucky few who get Summit Cable can see Rope (J. Stewart’s most morally ambiguous role) this month.
‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN in another year (with Seattle’s most accurate In/Out list), remember this holiday entertaining advice courtesy of Fay Weldon in Praxis (1978): “Never feed your family gourmet meals, because they will come to expect them.”
NEW CABINET SUGGESTIONS
Ken Siman of Grove Press, on his Drew Friedman cartoon ad appearing in rags like the Village Voice:
“You don’t have to be snooty or dull or pretentious to read books.”
After seven grueling months, I finally have a new day job as assistant editor of Mirror, a new local monthly for high school students, distributed only in the schools. If you’re a Clark completist (God knows I’m not), go to a local middle or high school starting Jan. 5. And while you’re there, consider joining a volunteer tutor or mentor program.
“Noumenon”
11/92 Misc. Newsletter
WOODY’S STILL A FILM GENIUS!
I DON’T CARE WHAT THEY SAY
ABOUT HIS AFFAIR WITH CHILLY WILLY…
Be sure to stay tuned after this issue of Misc. for our “focus group” session, where we talk to a group of undecided readers in a West Seattle living room to learn their feelings about the column’s character issues.
INDECISION ’92: Not voting is exactly the same thing as voting for Bush. No matter how much you call it a protest, officialdom will still call it apathy. I have one and only one overriding goal this Nov. 3: the defeat of the right wing sleaze machine. C-SPAN’s reruns of the Kennedy-Nixon debates revealed that campaigns once offered detailed discussions of policy minutiae; after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, Americans are so accustomed to being treated like idiots that even Perot’s stand-up routines seem comparatively refreshing. No matter how impure or insufficient, I support every politician whose election will aid in the removal from direct political power of Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Manuel Lujan, Rush Limbaugh, et al.; who’ll stand up against the funny-money financial lobbies and the junk bond peddlers, against the NRA and the drug companies, and do what it takes to stop this country from becoming a neo-Dickensian disaster zone. Maybe Clinton/Gore won’t go as far as I’d like, but it’s still better than what we’ve got now. Besides, you’ve gotta root for a prez-to-be whose wife (sez Newsweek) used to be on Sesame Street‘s board of directors. At least there’ll be one person in D.C. who knows how to add.
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal sez an ’80s nostalgia theme nightclub is about to open in NYC. It’s a hopeful sign that the more wretched aspects of recent history might be past us. The question is, now that the Age of Sleaze might finally end, how will it be remembered? I fear that the ’80s could end up fetishized like the ’50s, whose most preposterous images are mistakenly perceived as the truth of American life then (or even as it had always been). For anyone reading this in the future, Reagan was not as universally popular as he claimed to be (or as his cowered opponents were too willing to believe); his economic “miracle” was a trick engineered by financial funny-money; the Religious Right was no great mass movement (Robertson’s regular viewership is half that of feel-good preacher Robt. Schuller); lots of people opposed the wasteful arms buildup and the gulf war; and violent action movies coincided with an actual decline in the moviegoing audience (the Stallone/Schwarzenegger killfests depended on a few addicts coming back repeatedly for their adrenaline fix).
PUTTING THE `HELL’ IN HELLENIC: A female UW student got partly blinded from a bottle-rocket thrown from a frat house toward a rooming house where some football players, some black, were throwing a party on the weekend before the start of fall quarter. She says the bottle came from the frat; its prez claimed at first that black players were responsible for everything, then began to back off from his assertions. (Frats are known cesspools of racism in admissions policies and behaviors, including an infamous minstrel show one year.) At one time, the Greek system was supposed to have symbolized the highest standards in scholarship and upright campus living. Now, even policewomen can’t walk Frat Row on a Saturday night without getting sexually harassed by Bluto wannabes whose rich daddies keep them out of jail. The UW administration seems unwilling to even condemn this behavior; while the city seems more interested in preventing blacks and 20-year-olds from having a place to dance. While everyone was making a fuss about making Belltown safe for the rich, a neighborhood full of the state’s young sons and daughters was allowed to become a snake pit. It was also in questionable taste for KNDD to go ahead with its “toga party” promotion the Fri. night after the tragedy.
ON THE TOWN: We seldom report about private events, but must admit that there won’t likely ever be a performance art piece as surrealistic as the Seafirst employees’ Oktoberfest. Lederhosen-clad oom-pah bands bellowing through the retail levels of the sterile Columbia Center. World-weary CPAs and perky tellers waiting in line in the Food Court area for free sausages, soft pretzels and microbrew (in specially painted steins that they got to keep).
GREAT NEW GAME: Since the Times now publishes wedding pictures only once a month, you can look through all the faces and exchange guesses about which couples have already broken up.
PAT ROBERTSON BUYS MTM ENTERPRISES: The company that once turned out some of the most progressive shows theretofore seen, now in the hands of Mr. Bigotry himself. What would Mary say?
A FRIEND WRITES: “So far, Tina Brown’s New New Yorker is like a crumbling but funky old apartment building that’s been “restored” into tacky luxury condos. All the humanizing qualities of the old format have been replaced by bland, “tasteful” flourishes. And most of the cartoons still suck (`I am a member of the legal profession, but I’m not a lawyer in the perjorative sense’); though it’s good to see Jules Feiffer joining Roz Chast as a beacon of real humor. Seattle readers should note Terrence Rafferty’s review of Last of the Mohicans: ‘(Michael) Mann gives Hawkeye rock-star hair, and precisely the right kind… a straight, stringy alternative-rocker mane (think Nirvana or Pearl Jam). This hair is exquisitely judged; greasy enough to shine with rebel integrity, yet not so disgusting that we start wondering what Hawkeye smells like.'”
MORE HAIR NEWS: Malaysian authorities have banned music videos depicting male long hair, claiming the need to “curb yellow culture” and prevent the subversion of impressionable youth. If they saw the crew-cutted boys on our Greek Row, they wouldn’t be so scared of a few tresses.
OFF THE WALLS: The best visual art show of the year so far (even surpassing fantastic photos by Patricia Ridenour and Mark Van S.) could be Dennis Evans‘s The Critique of Pure Writing at the Linda Farris Gallery. Twenty-six stunning collage installations combining old books, provocative display texts, and seductive graphics, positing a series of books containing the secrets of the universe. See the exhibit (until Nov. 15) or its commemorative book, then on Dec. 5 see the thematically and visually similar Prospero’s Books at the Neptune.
ALONG THE WATCHTOWER: Paul Allen won his bid to lease the ex-SAM Modern Art Pavillion for his proposed Jimi Hendrix memorial, over opposition by local art critic Matthew Kangas. He claims to have nothing against the Hendrix project (though he has something of a grudge against “the weight of the commercial entertainment industry”); he just wanted the building kept for fine art. It’s on the high-traffic Seattle Center grounds; it has high ceilings and perky ’60s white light; leasing it would remove it as a Bumbershoot venue. And face it, Allen can afford his own building.
STRIKING: KING’s Compton Report on 9/27 was aflutter about the need to preserve baseball from owners’ greed and waning fan interest. But the sport has a bigger problem, a bad rep among the young jocks needed to fill future rosters. The Mariners’ inability to find decent players directly results from the lack of good athletes getting into the game. It’s thought of as squaresville, the favorite sport of wimpy and/or right-wing authors, invoked by hypocritical “family values” advocates in “Get high on sports, not drugs” posters. In our anti-authoritarian society, it’s a slow game that emphasizes control and authority. In bowling, a perfect game is when everything happens. In baseball, a perfect game is when nothing happens. The sport’s best hope is for thawing U.S. relations with Cuba, bringing a new supply of great players who love the game.
FINAL MANGO TANG UPDATE: Ana Hernandez arranged for her cousin to smuggle a case of various Tang and “Frisco” brand 1-liter packets across the Mexican border; I now possess the contraband sugar/citric acid powder. The mango drink looks more orange than the Orange Tang and tastes vaguely like mangoes, but is too thin and sugar-gritty to make a convincing replica. The guava, melon, lemon and (especially) lime flavors are closer to the mark.
THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger has more info about “the baseball cap on the rear dashboard thing,” his topic of a previous letter: “these people one sees on the road display their goddamned baseball caps in their cars’ rear dashboards…Some tacky array of dime-a-dozen nylon mesh and foam things with a team/beer/tobacco/auto parts co. emblazoned on the H.G.W. Bush-type high-forehead brow thing”.. Thanks for the extra info; I still have no insights of my own on this…
FOR THE ACTIVE LIFE: The marketing of big-time men’s sports to female fans reaches a new level with Kimberly-Clark’s (no relation) offer for “Future Husky Fan” or “Future Cougar Fan” infantwear in exchange for Kotex proofs of purchase. Wouldn’t baby stuff make a more appropriate promotion for the Seahawks?
CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE: Nearly two dozen young caucasians were arrested for assorted rowdy behavior at the G n’ R Kingdome show. And yet you never hear any community lobbyists call for a crackdown against white music or the closure of white clubs. Also, the P-I‘s Roberta Penn curiously commented that since no female fans took their tops off during the concert, it was a possible sign that “women are refusing to let their bodies be used as entertainment”. (Dome officials asked the band not to flash its regular “Show Your Tits” notice on the Diamondvision screen.) If I were her, I wouldn’t invoke Axl lovers as representative models of their gender. Besides, a voluntary revelation of natural beauty could arguably be a more wholesome entertainment than that provided by the band.
LAST DAY OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE DEPT.: Sinead O’Connor expressed her displeasure with the pope on Sat. Nite Live, to the expected condemnation of church authorities and supporters. As if an Irishwoman wouldn’t have a legit gripe against an institution that keeps divorce, contraception and abortion severely restricted there. As if anybody watching at 1 a.m. Sunday would be at Mass later that morning. Then, in her very next public appearance, she was booed off the stage at Sony Records’ all-star Dylan tribute show. So much for the open-mindedness of the ’60s generation. Also, David Letterman complained about being stuck in a meeting with network brass for three hours after he did a list of O’Connor’s “Top Ten List Complaints About the Pope.” He didn’t say that NBC censored the list after the show was taped. VCR freeze-framers report catching one stray frame of “No. 8: His Holier-Than-Thou Attitude,” which was otherwise taped over with “No. 8: The Way He Snubbed Her at the Grammys.”
AD OF THE MONTH: The promoters of a Regional Transit Project latched onto the slogan, “We’re a big region now. Maybe it’s time to act like one.” In the Nov. 18 Stranger I wrote, “Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one.” Nice that they know where to get top-notch material.
THE FINE PRINT (on the Sparkle Fun Crest Neat Squeeze package):Â “This product contains no sugar, like all ADA-accepted toothpastes. To prevent swallowing, children under six years of age should be supervised in the use of toothpaste.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Hydro Legends is the journal of the Hydroplane and Race Boat Museum, a work-in-progress that collects and restores the boats, engines and memorabilia of Seattle’s peculiar hometown sport. The 32-page tabloid’s chock full of wacky vignettes and history about such hydros as Savair’s Miss, Such Crust, Burien Lady, Smythe the Smoother Mover, Miss Bardahl, and the five Slo-Mo-Shuns; plus ads for commemorative hydro gold jewelry and silver ingots. Available from 1605 S. 93rd St., #E-D, Seattle 98108.
FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: At the opening ceremony before the first “true World Series” game, the Atlanta color guard brought out a Canadian flag with the maple leaf upside down. And this is the town that’s hosting the next Olympics?
SPOOKED: Two Spokane grade schools cancelled their Halloween parties this year, due in part (according to an AP story) to “complaints from parents who believe the day has satanic associations.” I believe Linus would call this the case of a very insincere pumpkin patch.
DID YOU THC WHAT I SAW?: It’s not completely true that the War on Drugs is a war on blacks. The white-dominated pot biz is also getting hit hard, with agents using infrared detectors and power-company records to seek out hidden halogen hothouses. Now they’ve got an 800 number for you to rat on those mysterious neighbors who don’t like having strangers in their basement. While I don’t do the stuff myself, I believe that with all our other problems, maybe we shouldn’t be acting like a police state over a mild sedative.
ON THE CALENDAR: Dave Barry will speak in Nov. at a Seattle Public Library benefit, with tix from $15 to $50. My advice is the same as it was for the Live Aid album: Donate direct.
ON THE STANDS: Allure cover blurb, 9/92: “Sophia Loren, The Goddess Next Door.” Vogue cover blurb, same month: “Genna Davis, The Goddess Next Door.” For an upstart little mag, Allure seems to have landed in a ritzier neighborhood.
ON THE AIR: The title of Rosie Black’s excellent report in the 10/19 Stranger, “The End of KCMU,” was more ominous than she knew at the time. KNDD/The End’s frequency was once occupied by KRAB, a pioneer listener-supported station founded in ’62 by Beat Generation legend Lorenzo Milam. It offered a highly diverse mix of programming, from big bands and Asian-language music to feminist talk shows. KNDD’s Norman Batley was one of KRAB’s volunteer DJs. But in the early ’80s, around the time KCMU turned from a broadcasting-class lab to a community station, KRAB’s management tried to “mainstream” the station’s programming, to attract a blander but larger base of donating listeners, to support new ventures like a state-of-the-art mobile recording studio. Shows with dedicated volunteers and listeners were canned or consolidated. Many old listeners stopped donating; too few new listeners replaced them. The station’s new softer focus didn’t make many new listeners love it enough to give money. Faced with mounting debts, the station sold out to commercial interests. The parent entity, the Jack Straw Foundation, continued to run the recording unit and to seek a new slot in the 88-92 FM “educational band.” It failed in attempts to take over the frequencies of KCMU and KNHC. It now runs a low-power station in Lynnwood; people tell me it runs great eclectic stuff, as good as KRAB’s peak years or better. It would presumably still like to grab the first 88-92 spot in Seattle that opens up whenever a current public station fails.
`TIL WE RETURN at the close of the year, visit the exquisite Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art in Bellevue (which isn’t displaying the new doll that wets amber liquid into a clear plastic potty), get ready for the computerized Star Trek playgrounds coming to a mall near you (or, if you can’t wait, see the Playspace at Crossroads Mall), find creative uses for those plastic bowls from all the “Raisin Nut Bran Challenge” street giveaways, and ponder the thoughts of Cindy Crawford on the supermodel stereotype: “A lot of us aren’t educated. But that doesn’t mean we’re stupid.”
Charita Bauer, near the start of her 35-ish-year stint on Guiding Light: “I’ve heard it said, the more simple people are, the more complex they seem to other people, because those people are so complex that they don’t understand simplicity.”
Not only have no job offers come in direct response to my several pleas in this space, but one guy told me that he thought it was a gag, since he just assumed that I lived off trust funds and just wrote as a hobby. Let me repeat: This newsletter is not a parody. When I say something, I mean it. Not kidding. Duh.
In brighter news, The World of Zines by Mike Gundelroy and Cari Goldberg Janice (Penguin TPB, $14) calls Misc. “a wry observer of modern life in a progressive city (Seattle) and tells us things we didn’t even know we needed to know.” Now if they’d only printed the current address with the listing…
“Lambent”
10/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns and four newsletter-only items)
Here Comes Moshpit Tourism!
OK OK OK, Misc. is now ready to admit that the “Seattle Sound” is dead. The evidence: not Singles, but the 9/13 travel page of the Sunday newspaper insert USA Weekend (stuffed into the Bellevue Journal-American and dozens of other papers around the country), right after the Haband ad for mail order men’s slacks. The headline: “Get Set for the Seattle Sound: Next weekend’s rockin’ movie Singles puts the limelight on this musical metropolis.” As Jim Kelton writes, “Just as Memphis has the blues, Chicago and New Orleans have Jazz, and Nashville owns country, Seattle now has its own hard-driving sound, dubbed ‘grunge rock,’ giving travelers another reason to visit the city…Visitors will find entertaining and fiercely outspoken music in nearly every corner of this sprawling city. But first-timers should note that the best spots to hear its sounds aren’t always upscale. You can take in the sights during the day, then fill the nights with the fresh Seattle sound.” The page gave prospective grunge-tourists listings of five clubs, two costly hotels (including the Meany Tower, inaccurately described as being close to many important grunge venues), the youth hostel, and two eateries: 13 Coins and the Dog House (“the ‘in’ place for musicians and music fans”).
NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The article encourages tourists to come here to see live gigs by the very bands that got into making records in the mid-’80s because they couldn’t get live gigs. The music that was rejected by so many clubs for so many years might now become a boon to the state’s hospitality industry. Maybe we should just replace Seattle Center with a Grungeland theme park. Flannel-shirted costume characters could sneeringly blow Export A smoke into the eager eyes of affluent American families, on their way to enjoy hourly indoor and outdoor performances in between stops at a Jimmy the Geek house of thrills, senior citizen moshing lessons, an all-vegan food circus, bumper cars that look like beat-up Datsuns, wandering Iggy impersonators, beer-can crushing competitions, a detox clinic fantasy ride, (for the gents) a contest to become L7‘s chaste bondage slaves, and (for the ladies) an all-scrawny, all-longhair male strip show.
CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE?: The city wanted to collect 3% admissions tax on the “suggested donation at the door” for the Two Bells Tavern’s Chicken Soup Brigade musical benefit. On Sept. 23, city official Dale Tiffany sided with the tavern and withdrew the tax bill, noting in a letter that “you made a quite persuasive case”…. Meanwhile, COCA ran afoul of the police dept.’s crusade to shut down all-ages musical events. Its non-alcoholic rave party was shut down in August over a few creative interpretations of technical ordinances and the infamous “Teen Dance Ordinance,” a law ramrodded through the city council a few years back intended to ban all-ages events under the guise of regulating them.
ON DISPLAY: I saw COCA’s Native American political art exhibit, which uses images of pre-Columbian daily life as symbols of defiance, in the context of what if our entire way of life were similarly suppressed. After thinking some more about it, I couldn’t think of many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture that that weren’t already symbols of our past conquests. What music do we have that isn’t Black- or immigrant-rooted? What fashions have we got that aren’t based on street or folk dress? Through ethnic art (often designed for white consumption) and its equivalents in literature and music, armchair lefties like me get to anoint ourselves with the vicarious righteousness of pretending to be what some white ideologists call “The Other.” It’s a change from most American cultural experiences, which are typically fantasies of conquering something or someone. The only American genres to discuss what being conquered might feel like are science fiction and Red-baiting propaganda, usually as a pretext for heroic action. But imagine: What if our entire way of life was suppressed as North America’s indigenous cultures were? What practices would be kept underground? What pieces of everyday life that you take for granted would turn into symbols of rebellion? What things that you care about would be turned into jokes and stereotypes by the conquerors?
CAN’T I GET LIBERATED TOO?: The (Ero) Writes/Rights panel at Bumbershoot was mostly the usual inconclusive porn-vs.-erotica debate. But one woman made a good point about “censorship of the spirit and the intellect,” something too many of us do to ourselves. The alternative literary scene would attract more people if it weren’t always so grim and staid, if it expressed the whole range of human thoughts and feelings in our big wide world. In many ways, small press literature is the most aesthetically conservative art form this side of barbershop quartet singing (and a hell of a lot less fun). You’re not gonna get young people involved in advanced prose if it offers nothing more than Montana travelogues and ’60s nostalgia. I long for a literature of compassion, of participation. A good place to start is erotica, by its nature a genre that mustn’t be self-centered. Like Jae Carrlson and Kirby Olson in Reflex, I believe the answer to bad porn is better porn, that gleefully celebrates human connection in all its varieties.
OTHER B-SHOOT NOTES: Loved Book-It, the troupe that dramatizes short stories verbatim. Much more literate than most of the “literary” events….
Missed They Might Be Giants, who filled up the Opera House an hour and a half before they went on. In the line, two suburban kids joked about how this show should’ve been in the Coliseum instead of Queen Latifah (this year’s token non-’60s black act), because “nobody’s going to shoot anybody at this show.” I wished to hell I’d had a Walkman so I could’ve made them listen to TMBG’s song “Your Racist Friend.” The Latifah show was, by all accounts, a sedate affair full of perky White Negro wannabes….
The $25Â Quick Access Pass was an elitist scam, going against B-Shoot’s one-big-crowd tradition, and should not be repeated….
Michelle Shocked had a great line at the Interview Stage comparing most rock music to “a blackface minstrel show” without the makeup — affluent whites acting out a simplistic persona of blacks as sexy savages….
EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THIS GUY: I can’t wait for the Jimi Hendrix museum to open, even if it doesn’t display the uncensored Are You Experienced? cover art or Suzie Plastercaster‘s famous life-cast of his masculinity. Well-heeled local backers are looking at at least two potential sites, including the ex-Seattle Art Museum annex in Seattle Center. The guy deserves a proper public memorial. (KZOK tried a few years ago to get a memorial in a city park, but the Parks Dept. wouldn’t go along; the station settled for a pile of “hot rocks” at the African savannah exhibit of the zoo.) Besides, these days it’d be good to remind people of a guy who joined the Army just to get out of Seattle, his only hope of making it in music.
THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger writes, “Perhaps you might be able to enlighten us as to what exactly is the deal with this baseball cap display on the rear dashboard thing?” Would you please be more specific? What are these items, and what do you wish to learn about them?
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Husky Dawgs, in bright wrappers bearing official UW football logos, are really repackaged Canadian Jumbo Hot Dogs (the expiration date sticker says both “Meilleur Avant” and “Best Before”). As all good Seattle barflies know about Jumbos, they’re hearty if underseasoned tube steaks that can be steamed, boiled, or grilled, and are virtually impervious to decay even after rotating under a heat lamp all day….
As my budget and diet allow, I’m planning to try all of the faux Frangos being offered around town: Nordstrom Best Mints, Ala Bons, Boehm’s Encore, Seattle Chocolate Co.’s Milt Chocolate, etc. The Times sez that Nordstrom uses a higher grade of chocolate, no salt and no tropical oils. The Seattle Chocolate Co. makes the Nordstrom candy (mint flavor only), and also makes its own brand with a slightly different recipe (in three flavors). Ala Bons, the first faux Frango, are smaller and flatter, not as fully whipped. Boehms, in gold foil boxes, only have six ounces for $6.95 (Frangos and most of the imitators have eight ounces)…
MANGO TANG UPDATE: Mark Campos claims to have tried the stuff, obtained from relatives through an Oregon food warehouse outlet. “The mad chemists at the Tang labs were nowhere hear a mango flavor consensus…no matter how much I stirred, a majority of the stuff marched to the bottom of the glass and stayed there. Also, it’s the most unappealingly colored stuff. Like Mountain Dew, it should not be put into clear glasses for consumption.”
1-900-FAILURE: Megaquest, the Queen Anne-based parent company of some 50 phone talk services (many, but not all, sex-related) in a half-dozen countries, is close to bankruptcy, after earning a net income of $14 million in 1990. According to a great story in the Sept. 4 Puget Sound Business Journal, original partners Arthur Joel Eisenberg and Betsy Superfon (apparently her real name) are battling in court over control of the companies, whose revenues have tumbled as government agencies and phone companies crack down against the rights of those unimaginative Americans who can’t even abuse themselves without coaching.
AD OF THE MONTH (newspaper ad for Nationwide Warehouse and Storage Furniture): “The Chastity 4-Piece Bedroom Set, $198.” Runner-up: the Wm. Diericx Co.’s radio ad for office supplies, selling paper shredders endorsed by Fawn Hall.
“DIS” INFORMATION: Still still more proof that hip-hop culture can’t be successfully whitened comes from the Suzuki 4 x 4’s fall ad campaign, “Fear of a Flat Planet” (a notably lame exploitation of Public Enemy‘s Fear of a Black Planet).
A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE: The Florida state tourism dept. rushed out some newspaper ads insisting that their state was still open for business. The state had to produce the ads at their own Tallahassee office, because it couldn’t complete a phone call to its Miami ad agency.
CATHODE CORNER: Alert home satellite dish owners know about the supplemental feeds of network football games, with the field pictures and sound but no announcers or commercials. I saw part of a Seahawks game this way; you can tell all the important aspects of the game, and don’t have to hear any dumb anecdotes.
DUDS: One piece of good news in the Generra bankruptcy came in a Times story noting that the company, like many in the sportswear biz, is starting to get clothes made in the U.S., after years of only using overseas sweatshops where workers make as little as $1.03 a day. Seems that it takes too long to ship stuff from over there. By the time a fad item gets here, the fad can be over.
“DON’T WALK” THIS WAY: Bellevue officials are promising to make their town “more pedestrian friendly” — by beefing up citations against people walking against the Don’t Walk lights. If they really wanted to help walkers, they’d change the lights on some intersections that allow walking for only three seconds every three minutes, so you have to jaywalk to get anywhere on time.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Tiny, King of the Roadside Vendors is an affectionate tribute by Sharon Graves Hall to her late brother, Richard “Tiny” Graves, the girthy and jovial operator of Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere (one of Washington’s few authentic “roadside attractions”, with ad signs attracting tourists along U.S. highways throughout the west). For just $12.95, the book’s more fun than a case of Aplets and Cotlets….
Meet Me at the Center is Seattle Center’s authorized history, written by ex-Times guy Don Duncan. It’s chock full of World’s Fair camp images (which I can’t ever get enough of). It’s also essential reading for all of you who don’t know what Seattle was like in the era prior to Starbucks and PCC, when a small remote city was trying desperately to join the “jet set” its machines had made possible….
Journeys of the Muse is a 12-page quarterly newsletter by Pamela Reno of Naches, Yakima County. Topics include “The power of thought to influence the sun: A turning point for humanity?”
FUN WITH WORDS: Husbands and Wives stands a chance of becoming the biggest audience-participation movie since Rocky Horror. Here’s how it works: go with all your feminist friends, and hiss whenever Woody says something that turns out to have been eerily lifelike… Another great new cussing site is the downtown library, specifically at the terminals of the new computer card catalog. On any given afternoon you may find retired schoolmarms, Mormon ancestor-researchers and valedictorian wannabes struggling to cope with the confusing software and the mistake-ridden data, talking back to the VDT’s with words not found in the bowdlerized dictionaries.
INDECISION ’92: A requiem is in order for failed gubernatorial primary candidate “You Must Be” Joe King. He’s actually been a pretty good state House speaker, fighting to keep the Wm. Spafford murals up in the Capitol and to support a lot of good legislation. But for his first statewide campaign, he let image consultants package him as something just this side of a Reagan Democrat; an unlikely recipe for success this year….
Campaign commercials used to feature a big red “NO!” crashing down on the face of the sponsoring candidate’s opponent. This time, at least one candidate used “NOT!” instead.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, pick up some great bargains at Blowout Video on 1st (the video equivalent of a remainder book outlet) and the Evergreen State Store in the Center House (your one-stop tourist trinket shop), watch the Japanese soap The 101st Proposal Sat. mornings on KTZZ, and heed the words of Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the cartoon character): “Fear and I were born twins.”
John Kricfalusi, the cartoonist-director-actor who made Ren & Stimpy into the cult sensation of the year (and just got fired for his trouble by Viacom bureaucrats), quoted in Film Threat before his dismissal: “Everybody’s ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody’s nose. Look in — who’s the big actress today? Look inside her nose and then think about porkin’ her.”
“Funambulist”
STOP THIS WEATHER CHITCHAT ALREADY.
WE’VE GOT ABOUT THE DULLEST WEATHER IN THE WORLD.
8/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating three Stranger columns and an original essay)
High Fashion and Running Naked
Welcome again to Misc., the only column made with the Miracle Substance ZR-7. This is the one and only genuine, original Misc. Accept no substitutes! Especially not “High and Low” in the Weekly. The title comes from a tacky show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on “modern art and popular culture” that treated the greatest works of illustration, cartooning, entertainment and industrial design as mere fodder to inspire “real” artists. And while B. Barcott can write a halfway-decent item, his apparent assignment is to belittle anyone doing anything interesting, in the tradition of old-fogey columnists everywhere. I’m reminded of the words of
John Lydon: “Imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”
RESULTS of our last contest, wherein we asked “What does John McCaw, Mariner investor and noted recluse, look like?”: No entries were received by the deadline. You oafs.
HOW TO KILL A SCENE: Some of the same alleged criminal elements who used to be at Jersey’s Sports Bar are said to have been outside Club Belltown, starting fights on 7/19 that culminated with gunshots fired into the air, which cops didn’t respond to for 20 minutes. Some downtown residents are advocating the restriction or even closure of music clubs. It took a lot less violence and damage to shut down the live punk scene a decade ago, a loss from which local music has only now recovered. (Jersey’s is now reopened with different DJs, few problems, few customers.)
ONE HOT SHOW: It’s sad that that old Leary Way warehouse burned before the Bathhouse Theater and On the Boards could move in, but I’m glad it burned without a cast and audience inside.
PHILM PHUN: The LA Times said Bill Gates wants to start a Seattle movie company. He denies it. Maybe he dropped the idea after observing his tax-bracket comrade John Kluge, who made a mint selling some TV stations to Murdoch and has spent a lot of it keeping Orion Pictures alive. Gates’s only movie project to date is a Microsoft Press book, Moviemakers at Work. Its authors slighted the more boring film practitioners (writers, actors) in favor of what they felt were the real movie stars — designers, editors, and especially special effects crews. While I’d love to see more movies made here, I admit that most of them are bad. The only distinguished features made here were Tugboat Annie (’33), The Slender Thread (’67), and maybe Cinderella Liberty (’73). The Fabulous Baker Boys was a doze when the Bridges Boys were on. Twice in a Lifetime got undeserved praise from critics eager to proclaim a “film for grownups at last.” I won’t talk about McQ, Harry in Your Pocket, Harry and the Hendersons, and 99 44/100% Dead (though I have a soft spot for Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and the David Jannsen-Frank Gorshin thriller Ring of Fire).
A FRIEND WRITES: “The best part of Tina Brown‘s assumption of command at The New Yorker was USA Today‘s headline: ‘Vanity Fair Editor Takes Over Fave Literary Mag.’ Second best: Everything I read about Brown talked about her own strengths and weaknesses, and didn’t just call her the `First Woman Editor.'”
THE BALD FACTS: The Hair Club for Men is now one of the top advertisers on MTV, showing middle-aged out-of-its enjoying second childhoods thanks to phony-looking hair transplants. Are 40ish geezers really watching the channel, searching to stay young? Does that mean that imitation rap slang will soon be audible in lawyers’ watering holes? Will we see Body Gloves in the Columbia Center Club? Worse things have happened (cf. every men’s fashion ad in a 1971 Playboy).
THE BARE FACTS: Political Diversities, Seattle public access cable’s first all-nude talk show, is an exercise in ego-tripping under the guise of politics. The host and his guests (to misquote B. Breathed, “pretty much an ugly all-male operation”) preach indignantly about the hemp movement (they like it) and censorship (they hate it). I agreed with most of their points, but wish they could make them more persuasively, without presuming their viewers to be idiots. The show’s backdrop wasn’t designed with close-ups in mind; the painted banner features all sorts of provocative icons, but the host’s face is right in front of a swastika. I still like the idea for the show (and have, ever since I picked up a paperback of Rex Reed‘s
Conversations in the Raw and was disappointed to find the title was just a come-on).
SINCE WE’RE NEIGHBORS DEPT.: The dreaded Port Townsend Lifestyle Police struck again, ordering Safeway to replace its regular-style sign with “old style” letters. Next thing you know, they’ll stop the store from selling Twinkies and meat.
SIGNS OF THE MONTH (flashing sign at Honda of Seattle): “Nikki is awesome…single & pretty.”… At Front Street Specialty Nutrition in Issaquah: “Always lowest prices! Well, usually — O.K., O.K., at least sometimes!”
ART MEETS NON-ART: Live music keeps popping up in new places. One recent Sat. nite, a clerk at the Glass Curtain porn shop on 1st was playing a saxophone on duty. His only audience: the wandering people outside and the photos of fake fun inside.
SEARCH FOR YESTERDAY: Shokus Video’s Sudsy Television is a 3-videocassette series of the true American video noir, black-and-white soap operas. Forget everything about TV being incessantly bright and snappy. These are interminably slow 15-minute shows, performed live on small, shabby sets (sometimes just furniture and prop doors in front of scrim curtains) by somber, uptight actors who stumble over half their lines but stay inside their Beckettian grimness. The infamous organ music (used on General Hospital
as late as 1978) sounds more like a restored-silent-movie soundtrack than like anything to do with modern entertainment. Even the commercials are stern: beady-eyed announcers pointing at diagrams, reiterating the values of Anacin compared to regular strength tablets. Most of the actors never went further than this, but you do see a pre-Mayberry Don Knotts and a very pre-St. Elsewhere Bonnie Bartlett.
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: Margaret Thatcher‘s landed a consulting job with
Philip Morris to increase cigarette sales in developing countries. As if she hadn’t done enough to her own country…
FUTURE RULES FOR A POST-REPUBLICAN FCC: Classic R&B songs should not be used in commercials (a) for laxatives or (b) for companies that wouldn’t do business with blacks when the songs came out.
JUST PLAIN BILL: Didn’t hear much of Clinton‘s speech on 7/26 (they didn’t have speakers in every direction), but I did get handed a tract by a Korean-based fundamentalist group that predicts the Rapture for Oct. 28 (that’d make the campaign irrelevant, if it weren’t that it’s been predicted many times before, and will be many times again, especially at the turn of the millennium).
THE RACE IS ON: With Longacres on track for demolition, the big hope for horse racing may lie with Native American tribes. Following the modest new
Tulalip casino, the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes announced separate projects for tracks and huge 24-hour casinos. The Puyallup plan, which would be managed by a Vegas firm, would also have a 1,000-room hotel, mall, bowling alley and native-theme amusement park. Both plans require the state Gambling Commission’s OK, which may be tough.
‘FAMILY’ FEUD: If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, family values are their next-to-last refuge. Or, as GOP loyalist G. Will sez, “morality is the last refuge of the politically desperate.” Almost any destructive policy can be trumped up as a pean to “The Family” (as if there were only one kind anymore, and as if all families were good for the people in them). Bush/Quayle, in their total lack of contact with the real world, haven’t noticed the spectacular rise of “dysfunctional family” 12-step groups and other forces that are pointing out the basic structural faults of the nuclear-family system. “The Family” is, to millions, an image of stifling cruelty and authoritarianism — just what the Right loves.
HELP WANTED, FEMALE: Anybody who generically votes for any female candidate, no matter who she is, wasn’t living in Wash. when Dixy Lee Ray was governor. Ray was a co-founder of the Pacific Science Center and ex-head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who ran in ’76 as a Democrat (a label of convenience, to gain the party-line endorsement of our powerful senators
Magnuson and Jackson). In office, she tried to demolish environmental laws and to prop up the unprofitable Hanford nuclear industry. She amassed a massive re-election fund from timber and development interests, but lost in the ’80 primary. Today she speaks to business groups trying to quash land-use laws.
AMAZING DISCOVERIES DEPT.: Two Seattle women have invented a washable, reusable sanitary napkin. It saves trees and doesn’t use the dioxin bleaching used to make paper white. I laughed too soon when I snickered at the commercial that starts, “I’ll borrow my mother’s earrings, but my mother’s tampons?”
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Seattle Mariners chewing gum is very soft (like the team), is very sweet (like the team), and has a strong aroma (like the team)…. I’m still trying to get a jar of Mango Flavor Tang, sold mainly thru Hispanic-oriented groceries in the southern tier states. It presumably tastes as much like mangoes as regular Tang tastes like oranges. I wonder if it was in the spaceship with Bill Dana, the Hungarian-born comedian who did the Mexican-dialect comedy record The Astronaut.
ON TAP AT THE KIT KAT CLUB: The gourmet pet food craze reaches a new extreme with Alpo Dairy Cat, described as a “low lactose milk for cats that have trouble digesting regular milk.” Why not go further and make sure that your cats only catch mice that eat fake cheese?
ON THE AIR: As some of you know, I was one of the first new music DJs on KCMU, one of the first to practice what they now call the “variety format”: juxtaposing hard rock, skinny-tie new wave, reggae, R&B, and anything else that seemed to fit in. The concept still works, with one exception: the momentum of the music comes to a halt four times an hour, when the volunteer DJs are told to go to the “world beat” rotation. There’s a lot of great music around the world, but KCMU’s world-beat bin is mostly bland yuppie exotica, the P. Simon/D. Byrne unthreatening Afropop or Braziliapop that belonged more on the old KEZX. I’m not asking the station to stop playing foreign music, I’m asking it to play more diverse, more exciting foreign music. To find it; they’ll have to get on the lists of a lot of obscure record companies. But it’ll be worth it.
ON THE STREETS: A middle-aged man with short-trimmed hair and a grey suit came up to me outside a deli-market and repeatedly asked, “Do you read the newspapers? Do you read the paper regularly?” After two minutes, he asked if a minor recent news item was really published. I said it was. He walked away.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, have a gourd reading at Tribes Native and Nature Art and Tea Co. in Fremont, collect all of Mattel’s Beverly Hills 90210 dolls (almost as completely hot as the people on the show and just as good actors).
“Napiform”
DOES ALPHA HYDROX FACE CREME COMEÂ FROM THE INSIDES OF COOKIES?
BODY CONSCIOUSNESS
One recent weekend, I saw two very different events celebrating the human body. Both promoted leisure-time lifestyles baed on distinct philosophies of life:
(a) Arena 3, a fashion show at the Mountaineers Hall on a Friday night, celebrated the body strategically hidden and revealed. Night heat in the city. Crowds of people in their best clothes and brashest attitudes. Eighteen local designers and some 100 models (mostly women, mostly young, many races) slinking down the runway, to the flash of photographers and upbeat music.
(b) The Bare Buns Fun Run, a nudist foot race at the Fraternitie Snoqualmie Nudist Camp on a Sunday morning, celebrated the body unencumbered and unadorned. Searing daylight in the suburbs, halfway up Issaquah’s Tiger Mountain. Nearly 300 people (mostly men, mostly 35ish and older, almost all white) running along 5K of steep trails, most clad only in socks and shoes. Afterwards, many runners enjoyed a leisurely afternoon at the lawn, pool and sauna.
Despite its aura of proud individualism, Arena showed off a design scene that’s become a true community of people working together to bring attention and employment into Seattle. The Seattle designers have grown to attract national (or at least NYC) notice. They’ve got a diverse set of styles that all express a fun, play-dress-up attitude.
The nudists boast of being one big family living in laid-back togetherness. But their retreatist lifestyle reflects the get-away-from-it-all philosophy behind many of America’s problems (suburban sprawl, urban neglect, alienation). Also, the road up to the camp was clogged with cars; you’ve got to guzzle lots of gas to commune with nature.
Nudists like to laugh at the hypocrisy of nudity in fashion marketing (such as the Drew Barrymore cover of Interview magazine, an Arena co-sponsor), contrasting it with their own de-emphasis of lust. They assert that by treating no body part as special or shameful, they’ve become some of the least sex-crazed people around; even though much of their literature features pictures of nubile young adults. In fact, the nudists were courteously seeing and being seen. But the scene was still much less gaze-active than a normal Green Lake Saturday; maybe because it was mostly married couples and older guys. It’s too bad more women don’t join; it might help overcome negative body image to be in a safe environment with a lot of bodies that are clearly no better or worse than yours.
Arena, on the other hand, reveled in positive body consciousness with personas that ranged from ridiculous to stunning. I can’t subjectively comment on the gay costumes (Jason Harler had a topless guy in half-unzipped pants and a feather boa; other designers had see-thru shorts above codpieces). The more straightforward men’s looks were playful and joyous. As for the women’s wear, I fell in love several times per minute. Short black dresses with short red hair (by Siren Blue). Red and black patterned cocktail dresses (Carol McClellan). A cherry-red bridal gown (Tohma). A calico dress with acres of frills (Raven). A green raincoat, doffed to reveal a backless one-piece swimsuit (Susan Hanover). Orange vinyl body suits (Direct). All modeled by people clearly at home inside their bodies.
Many of us need to break out from our social norms and make friends with our physical nature. That can mean taking off your clothes or putting on better ones. A nudist camp membership is cheaper than a designer outfit, but you don’t have to leave town to get dressed.
(Many of the clothes shown at Arena 3 are available at Fast Forward, 1918 1st Ave.; Darbury Stenderu, 2121 1st Ave.; and Basic, 111 Broadway E.)
(The next Fraternitie Snoqualmie public event is “Nudestock” in mid-August. Tickets will be available through KISW radio; for info call 392-NUDE. Nude & Natural magazine, sold at better newsstands, covers issues related to the nudist philosophy.)
7/92 Misc. Newsletter
Is John McCaw Batman?
A warm, warm greeting to another distinctively cool edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t decide which is sillier: calling Hollywood producers “cultural elitists” or calling them “cultural”.
HOT WEATHER DRESSING: Misc. still wears its baseball caps with the brim in front, the way Abner Doubleday intended. Besides, you can tell when a fashion trend has outworn its welcome when they start making custom caps with frat-house letters printed only on the back.
IN YOUR EAR: Last week, Misc. showed several people the Times picture of a half-dozen acupuncture needles stuck into a heroin addict’s ear to reduce his dependency; only ear-pierced women gasped “Gross” at the sight. The therapy combines the popular trend of body piercing with a sadly “hip” form of self-destruction (Seven Year Bitch guitarist Stefanie Ann Sargent died of an apparent overdose on 6/27; many other local musicians are said to use heroin). Trendy rockers are bound to imitate the look for fashion’s sake. I only hope people will take the real acupuncture or otherwise try to clean up. Remember: hard drugs are a tool of people in power to silence opposing voices.
PHILM PHUN: Here in the town that was among the first in the U.S. to discover the Dutch and Australian new waves, Hong Kong movies are the certified Next Big Thing. They just can’t churn out Chinese Ghost Story installments or vicious/spectacular gangster films fast enough. “But what,” you ask, “is gonna happen to these filmmakers in ’97, when Beijing’s butchers take over the colony?” Many of Hong Kong’s production companies, along with the crime syndicates that allegedly provide financing as well as subject matter for some films, have begun their own 5-Year Plans by setting up offices in Vancouver. Just think: we’ll have a genuine full-time Northwest feature industry, and Canada will finally make movies that don’t look like Hollywood on a discount.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Muttmatchers’ Messenger is a bimonthly photo-ad tabloid promoting “Companion Animals for Adoption.” Photos of forlorn cats and dogs appear, accompanied by a description and phone number. Some are part of display ads, “sponsored in the interest of animal welfare” by Realtors, insurance agents, lawyers, a garage, and a clinical psychologist.
NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1970-1992?: “The Humor Magazine for Adults” was more like a college paper’s April Fool edition, only with good writers and great artists. It was a true rebel without a cause. Its purpose was not to make you smile but to stare you down. Born as the student protest movement passed its peak, its only message was its own sense of self-righteous superiority to the world. No wonder original co-editor P.J. O’Rourke emerged as a right-winger, and Belushi’s character in the NL movie Animal House became a senator. Like the teen/college generation that grew up with it (mine), its only sacred cow was the Almighty Ego Trip. Some people insist that it used to be funny, before its original staff dispersed to Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. I wouldn’t give it that much credit (though it did nourish the career of a few great cartoonists, including Seattle’s own Sherry Flenniken and her droll Trots and Bonnie). The magazine’s officially on “a six month hiatus” (its NYC office is closed and it hasn’t published since February). It may not come back. But its spirit lives on, in thousands of rude stand-up comics.
SPURTS: Still no hope for NHL hockey here, but the Canadian Football League‘s considering its own southern invasion. It’s being courted by Portland, which had a team in the short-lived World Football League. See if they can live with a 110-yard, three-down game where scores of 57-36 are common. Heck, it’d still be better than either Oregon college team. Just make sure it doesn’t get an Indian-motif team name, ‘cuz the Portland paper won’t print it.
STUFF YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE HEARD: Over half of the 18,000-ish arrests after the LA riots were against Hispanics; the sweep has given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a chance to ship hundreds of immigrants back to Mexico and Central America, while others languish for failure to pay exorbitant bail (sez the Nation).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ralston Purina’s Batman Returns cereal is far better than the cereal made for the first Batman film (I didn’t like the first movie much either). The new cereal contains the following “fun-shaped” marshmallow pieces: “White bats, purple Penguin hats, tan Batmobiles, blue cat heads.”
CATHODE CORNER: The Seattle City Council is thinking about taking over the local cable TV franchises as a city-owned company. Do we really want politicians deciding whether we’d get to keep MTV, let alone the Playboy Channel?
FOLLOWING FASHIONS LIKE CATTLE: The San Angelo, TX Standard-Times (it’s called that even during Daylight Savings) reports that “the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo adopted new market steer regulations calling for animals to have no more than one-fourth inch of hair any place on their body, besides the tail switch.” Reporter Jeanne Serio quotes a show official: “The sculpting of long hair has become so intense in junior market steer shows that we have lost sight of the original intent of this competition, to teach young people responsibility, knowledge about the care and raising of animals, and skills in choosing and raising market animals with proper body structure and conformation.” I say if long hair is good enough for the entire male student population at Evergreen, it’s good enough for other neutered beasts.
PRESSED: Ever wonder if newspaper headline writers actually read the articles? A 6/24 USA Today cover blurb went, “Book Buying in Dumps: Are We Doomed?” The article itself noted that “spending on adult consumer books increased 10.7% between 1985 and 1990″ and kids’ book sales were even higher. (The story didn’t mention that newspaper circulation in that era was flat and network TV viewership dropped.)
HAD TO HAPPEN SOMETIME: The Beatniks are a new-music cover band, giving totally straight copies of your favorite R.E.M., Violent Femmes and Nirvana songs in between the more typical stale Beatle tunes. It brings to mind an idea: how about some smart promoter forming multiple “Sounds of Seattle” cover bands, all assembled from scratch, to perform your grunge-rock favorites in every Sheraton dance lounge in America.
STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #1: When I ask folks why don’t they like Clinton, they offer vague allusions about an unattractive personality or a simple “isn’t it obvious?” His groomers are working to give him this image. He’s being handled the way Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were, by party leaders who believe America will elect a “lite right” candidate who doesn’t bash conservatives too much and says as little as possible about non-suburban issues, all for the mythical “Bubba” vote in the south (where Jacksontook seven states in the ’88 primaries). Party leaders ignore the concrete examples that this approach will never work. Clinton’s the “beneficiary” of a primary system in which Demo fundraisers anoint the candidate most likely to run a consultant-controlled campaign — and most likely to lose the election.
STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #2: Winds-o-change are a-blowin’, and coffeehouse leftists may worry about the threat of actually attaining a voice that people might listen to. No problem! Just use these handy steps to let the right wing win every time: Don’t vote. Don’t run for office or support anyone who does. Never try to respectfully persuade new people to your views. Call everyone who doesn’t already agree with you a redneck, a fascist, or both. Keep using that strident us-vs.-them rhetoric that worked so well in the ’60s to turn people away from progressive causes. Shun modern media and communications, so the right can monopolize them. Do this and you can keep complaining about the world without ever having to do anything.
SIGNS OF THE MONTH (handwritten flyer on downtown light poles): “Public Information Notice. If you are in a high plant pollen area, it is a good idea if you properly wrap your vegetable scraps, bread scraps and meat fat, vegetable oil-soaked paper towels-rags and tie the top of the bag securely. Wrap your cigarette, tobacco scraps separately, making sure that they are not ignited before you dispose of it. If you have meat that is `bad’ or milk that has soured, wrap it in two plastic bags and tie the top or seal it and then put it in a paper bag, writing on the paper bag `Bad Meat’ before you dispose of it, so that if anyone does look through the garbage they will not construe it as something healthily eatable. If you go to a park or a bench, instead of putting your cigarette out in the dirt or sand, bring a container along with you that is metal, like a small canister or cough drop box, and make sure that the tobacco and/or tobacco filter is no longer ignited before your dispose of it. If you wash your garbage containers on a regular basis, it will make your environment healthier also. Please try to do these things, for it will lessen the possibility of infection for yourself and others in the area. It will lessen the chance of food poisoning and may also reduce the amount of emergency intake at hospitals. Thank you for your cooperation.”… Handwritten note with a Sylvester sticker, taped to a garbage can at 3rd & Blanchard: “In our area, look for a solid wall of windows that can’t be opened by guests. The Rabbit.”
TABLED: I remain perplexed by this phony “Northwest cuisine”. In the P-I, Stouffer Madison Hotel chef Rene Pax insisted that “Seattle food means fresh food and the best of the fresh produce.” If there really is a culinary tradition here, it would have to take into account our short growing season (the freshness obsession comes from LA-trained chefs used to year-round growing) and our frontier heritage, particularly of the days before highways or rural electrification. Truly traditional NW foods would be those with brief seasons (cherries), or are made to keep (evaporated milk was invented here). A cuisine that reflects the character of the local populace (as opposed to laid-back fantasies) would stay modest and unpretentious, at least fun. Nothing gaudy or cutesy. An honest smoked salmon, adequate white wine, plain tossed salad, and the quiet elegance of an Almond Roca dessert.
WAITING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: The authorities made their second move to silence the Seattle music scene (after banning Pearl Jam from Gasworks) by shutting down the funk nights at Jersey’s Sports Bar. It must be noted that Jersey’s mostly-black crowd was, on the whole, no more or less rowdy than the white suburban crowd at local yup meatmarkets.
TRUE CRIME: I’ve had two reports of skinheads bashing homeless people outside the New Hope Mission next door to 911 Media Arts on the night of 5/2. Apparently, the skins claim to be Army men, despite their swastika tattoos and designer boots. They repeatedly kicked and beat men sleeping under the I-5 overpass to the point of major internal injuries. Despite frequent emergency calls, the attacks were unresponded to by cops too busy standing watch over Westlake Center.
VIBES: My Pleasure vibrators may be the first women’s product endorsed by porn queens (“Personally Chosen by the Girls Who Know Them Best”). According to a blurb on the box by one Ginger Lynn, “I like a vibe that’s of exceptionally high quality, and with variable speed control. Because I like sexual control. And I am quality.” What if sex stars as role models catch on? Would beauty standards come to be based on what men seem to like (instead of what women think men like)? Would women reshape themselves toward plump torsos with fat silicone lips and catatonic eyes? Would they imitate porn “acting” by slurring their words and staring blankly into space?
BET ON IT: The new Tulalip Reservation casino was described by a spokesperson on KUOW as “a touch of Las Vegas with a Northwest Indian motif.” What’s that, a Thunderbird totem stitched on the back of a silk jacket?
HYPOCRISY ON PARADE: Rupert Murdoch fired Fox TV executive Stephen Chao, at a Murdoch-convened symposium at an Aspen, Colo. hotel on “the threat to democratic capitalism posed by modern culture”, filled with the usual conservative media-bashers. Chao gave a routine anti-censorship speech at the meeting, claiming violence was more obscene than sex or nudity. On cue, a man in a hotel uniform revealed himself to be a male stripper hired by Chao; he stood nude for 30 seconds before the shocked panelists (including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney his wife, Nat’l Endowment for the Humanities head Lynne Cheney) while Chao talked about how people have to get over their hangups about the human body. Murdoch, who made his first fortune with the toplessPage Three Girls in his UK tabloids, called Chao’s spectacle “a tremendous misjudgment” and sacked him on the spot.
THE REAL CULTURAL ELITISTS: The state Republican convention, as dominated by the religious right and at least tolerated by top GOP officeholders, condemned abortion rights, homosexuality, divorce, sex education, foreign aid, the UN, arts funding, civil service, and the teaching of non-western cultures. It also denounced “channeling, values clarification, relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, yoga, Eastern religious practices, or similar ideas.” My yoga teacher might call that sort of bigotry a fiery ball of negative energy, that impassions people but can also engulf them. Meanwhile, some Nevada Republicans officially denounced that over-publicized Elvis stamp as glorifying “a habitual drug user.”
EYES WITHOUT A FACE: It’s nice that the Mariners are finally a local team again. But why won’t team investor and car-phone tycoon John McCaw appear in public? When the papers ran pictures of the other new owners, they put a blank box above his name. At press conferences, he sent a lawyer to speak for him. Is he ashamed to show his face with the hapless M’s? Will he show up in the owners’ box with a New Orleans ‘Aints paper bag on his head? What if he’s a mystery man, who can’t appear in public lest someone discern his crimefighting secret identity? We invite you to send in (a) a picture of what you think he looks like, or (b) a written explanation of his seclusion. Accuracy doesn’t count, since we don’t know what he looks like either. Stranger employees and people who’ve seen McCaw are ineligible. Results will be published here in three weeks.
ROBERT E. LEE HARDWICK, 1931-1992: Before what we now call “talk radio” took off here, he ran a chat show with a few records. He was adamant that non-rock radio needn’t mean “middle of the road.” He ruled Seattle radio (adult division) from the late ’50s to 1980, when new KVI management decided his postwar-jazz sensibility was an anachronism. He spent a decade wandering from station to station, supported in some years only by commercial endorsements. Sponsors loved his straightforward, no-nonsense persona; station managers hated it, because it contradicted the hype and hustle of modern radio. He was a Scotch-on-the-rocks guy in a wine-cooler world. Two months after losing his last gig (on KING-AM), he drove into the Cascades and blew his brains out. The KING-TV newscast that announced his death had one of his commercials (for Honda dealers).
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to go to the Seattle Hits exhibit of local pop culture at the Museum of History and Industry (including the gallant return of Bobo the stuffed gorilla), visit the exquisite Collector’s Doll Store on 35th and Northlake, and ponder this Cynthia Tucker commentary from the Times: “Successive tides of human progress have rolled back slavery, the subjugation of women, and more recently the oppression of communism.” About time we stopped oppressing communism, don’t you agree?
A Tri-Cities community college student’s guide to life from Shampoo Planet, the forthcoming new novel by Generation X author Douglas Coupland: “Flippant people ask stupid questions and expect answers. Secrets divulged under flippant circumstances aren’t valued. People don’t value other people’s secrets, period. That’s why I keep my secrets to myself.”
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is supposed to finally come out on disk this summer. Contact Eastgate Systems Inc., (800) 562-1638.
“Adumbration”
EVERY VEGETARIAN I KNOW SMOKES THE HIGHEST-TAR CIGARETTES AVAILABLE.
ARE THEY TRYING TO GET EXTRA PROTEIN OR WHAT?
Junk Food: The American Way
Essay for Wire, 6/7/92
For five years, I’ve been writing a newsletter called Misc. It usually contains a segment commenting about the “Junk Food of the Month.”
I believe junk food is an important part of Americana; an important part of any culture. Archaeologists on their digs like to show off rare treasures and ceremonial objects, but they get the most productive research out of examining the remaining objects of a culture’s everyday life. What it wore, what it used as tools, and how it ate.
Our understanding of England would be just a bunch of cluttered stereotypes if we knew only about its fine cuisine (come to think of it, is there any fine cuisine in England)? You can tell much more about how England really lives by taking a quick glance at lukewarm thick ale, cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips that used to be sold wrapped in newspaper, and the near-unspeakable things they make out of the variety meats.
That’s why I write about junk food, because it’s the true symbol of one’s country. It embodies the American obsessions with advertising flair, instant gratification, and obsessive-compulsive “fun.” There’s more real America in a box of Teddy Grahams than in a thousand white-college-boy blues bands.
The history of junk food is the history of America, from the first Uneeda Biscuit ads in turn-of-the-century magazines to the building of the first companies capable of supplying fresh food products through a network of plants connected to every spot on the continent.
Junk food is also a microcosm of modern advances in technology. Several years ago, there was this great British documentary shown on the PBS series Nova, about the making of a new snack product. It began with surveys showing that consumers wanted more wholesome, natural snacks — but then these guys with college degrees in food tech reduced those desires to a set of flavors and textures, to be re-created with the newest manufacturing advances. The end result was a tubular cracker with a cheese-flavored filling, “co-extruded” through an experimental continuous-run machine. Even that wasn’t half as cool as the scene with the stuffy Brit executives trying to figure out how “natural” they could legally call their product while still getting to use their complete arsenal of additives and processes.
Junk food is not always pretty, but neither is this country, as we have seen in recent weeks. But it can be a source of understanding. For one recent example: Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Hostess Turtles Pies (advertised as “Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Farley’s Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and a thorough layer of green frosting. I have publicly nauseated people by eating one in their presence. Kids, of course, get off on doing things considered gross by people my age. As for the fantasy of foods arriving fresh from the sewer, it’s a natural for a target audience of guys living in the years between toilet training and puberty, some of whom have a healthy obsession with exploring the sides of human/animal nature that us grownups keep trying to ignore.
The “vanilla” flavor in the pies probably came from a 42-year-old south Seattle plant that made over three million pounds of vanillin a year. According to the Times, the chemical flavoring was extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide. One pound of vanillin was taken from 140 pounds of pulp, used for important drugs as well as flavoring; the remaining pulp was sent on to paper mills. Now, the plant’s closing, replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (I want to hear no grumblings from the natural-food crowd about how unappetizing this all sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical (“nature-identical” in British lingo) to traditional vanilla; it just comes from a tree instead of a bean. Besides, some of these same purists will drench their pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)
Disappearance is an accepted fact of life when one is a junk food aficionado. So many of the junk foods I’ve written about in the past five years are no longer available. You can’t, to the best of my knowledge, get Space Food Sticks, or Pudding Roll-Ups. I know you can’t get Billy Beer, and that it’s even become hard to find the generic “Beer Beer” with the puzzles inside the bottle cap letting you test whether you’ve had too many that you can’t see or think straight. And you can’t even get Vernell’s Gummy Transformers anymore, those chewy candies in the shapes of powerful robots.
But wherever there is disappearance, there is scarcity, and the chance to profit from people’s memories. Somebody is trying to start a craze for collecting cereal boxes, reportedly primarily to raise prices for his own collection, and is starting a magazine called Flakes to promote the new hobby. Look for it. Also look for a three-volume video collection of cereal commercials.
You can tell where a nation’s heart is any given year by the ways in which it consumes its sugar and/or alcohol. Envir-O-Mints are not going to save the world all by themselves, but the yummy locally-made little chocolate pieces with pictures of endangered species embossed onto them do show off the consumer’s concerns for a better future. Sure, you could say that these animals would stand a better chance of survival if more of the Third World wasn’t cleared off to grow cocoa, coffee and sugar for western consumption, but a few cases of mints aren’t going to change that imbalance in either direction.
Or take a recent Kraft newspaper insert, headlined “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington in a green suit, pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the famous vegetable. Not only is the ad a wonderfully garish display of almost glow-in-the-dark colors, but it ties a gooey processed dairy product in with the public image of a president who, at the time the ad was designed, didn’t have much of a public image to exploit.
Junk foods are also an underrated force in local and national politics. Note the attempts to ban McDonald’s in a few towns across the country that think they’re “progressive” but are really just paternalistic. And note how the soft drink bottling industry always comes to Olympia when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), and now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products.
And if you still don’t think snack foods are an integral part of the modern human condition, think of this: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” The notion that Castro would divert precious meat supplies for a snack product shows how vital snack products are to people’s souls. To buy something to eat which has been prepared by someone else is in its own little way a mark of luxury. It proclaims that one has risen, at least slightly, above the standards of one’s ancestors who toiled all day, every day, to gather and prepare a meal.
6/92 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating five Stranger columns)
QUAYLE SHOULDN’T PICK ON CANDICE BERGEN.
SHE GREW UP LEARNING HOW TO ARGUE WITH A DUMMY
We at Misc. bemusedly note the spectacular rise of Perot as the candidate of bus commuters, computer bulletin board users, and talk radio callers. He appeals to their sense of independence, of freedom from the petty rules of governance. The GOP has long appealed to the frontier mentality of people living outside the old social structures, especially in the west. But when times got tough, the Repos retreated to their old-money, old-power base, leaving the Mad-As-Hell crowd to seek a new champion. But Perot’s not beholden to special interest groups, he is one. He ran a bureaucratized company with a Safeco-like dress code, courted politicians of both parties for sweetheart contracts, and sponsored dubious foreign adventures on behalf of right-fringe causes. (His name is a soundalike to moralistic fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault, whose version of Red Riding Hood was an uppity female who paid for her unladylike curiosity by becoming wolf chow.)
PAY ‘N SAVE, 1947-1992: Washington’s dominant drug chain for four decades grew from a single outlet at 4th & Pike to over 120 outlets. It was the flagship of the Bean family’s retail empire, which at various times included Tradewell, Rhodes of Seattle, Ernst, Malmo, Lamonts, Sportsland, Sportswest, Schuck’s, Bi-Mart, Price Savers, The Bean Pod, and Pizza Haven. The Beans were known for their Mormon paternalism, particularly in their generous employee benefits — which made the company ripe for a hostile takeover and dismemberment in 1984. Shorn of its sister chains, Pay ‘n Save lost its focus and market share. Now, the stores will be absorbed by Pay Less, a much less classy operation started in the ’20s by the Skaggs family (also involved in the founding of Safeway and Albertson’s). By the ’60s the Pay Less logo was divided among three completely separate companies: one in Oregon and Washington; one in California; and a four-store chain in Tacoma. The northern and southern Pay Lesses were both bought by K mart a few years back; they remained somewhat gaudy places, while P ‘n S was getting glitzy in past years. P ‘n S stores will now change to PL’s garish pastels. But the P ‘n S headquarters staff will be thrown out. A similar front-office closing is rumored for for Seven Gables Theaters, which will now be run directly from LA by the parent company, Samuel Goldwyn. As we’ve seen with banks, fewer people will be able to authorize local charitable or arts donations. Fewer firms will be able to respond to local market needs.
ICONO-GRAPHICS: CNN’s Showbiz Today lists the weekly Neilsen ratings against a graphic of TV antennas rising from urban rowhouses. A cable channel offering nostalgia for the pre-cable days…
CORRECTION (Times, 5/12): “To keep cats away from indoor herb and vegetable plants, sprinkle leaves with red cayenne pepper. An article in the home/real estate section on Sunday listed another spice.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Journal of Northwest Music is Bruce Blood and Chris Carlson’s catalog of discs (real and compact) by area bands from the Dynamics up to the Melvins. It’s also got an interview with jazz guitarist Larry Coryell (an ex-UW Daily writer just like me), on his early days in Seattle rock, circa ’61 (“the kind of music the local bands were playing for the kids was a higher, more sophisticated type of R&B than they might be getting in other regions”).
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT: In endorsing the destruction of most spotted owl habitat in Washington, Bush gave final proof of his total submission to big bucks. The owl is an indicator species whose disappearance signals the decline of an ecosystem. To move a few birds away as an excuse to level that ecosystem is the most cynical action that could be taken. Few jobs will be saved by clearcutting at an already too-high level. Timber workers are out of work because of log exports, mill automation, corporate consolidation, and excess cutting from past years that’s left too little old growth left and not enough tree-farm stands to replace them.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at the Christopher Paul Bollen print gallery on 3rd): “Hi. Popcorn, candy, children and pets are most WELCOME in this gallery. If you break it, no big deal. No shoes, no shirt? Goodness, it must be sunny. COME ON IN.”
AD OF THE MONTH: (huge boldface slogan on a brochure for Ultra Meditation tapes from Zygon of Issaquah): “In 28 Minutes You’ll Be Meditating Like a Zen Monk!”… We’re always mesmerized by the Horizon Shuttle billboards with the digital clocks flashing in half-hour increments every second, bearing the slogan “Nonstop Non-stops to Portland.” As I recall, Delta was the first to run billboards proclaiming, “Fly Non-Stop to Portland.” Every flight from Sea-Tac to Portland is non-stop. There’s no place for a commercial-class plane to stop, except an emergency landing at McChord AFB.
CATHODE CORNER: When Sony took over Columbia Pictures, it inherited rights to the Merv Griffin and Chuck Barris game shows. Now, it plans the latest specialized cable network, The Game Show Channel. (What’s next: The Soap Channel? The Blooper Channel? The Station Break Channel?)
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: The much-touted Milky Way II bar has the solid, chalky taste of the original Milky Way imitator, Milk Shake. The 25-percent calorie reduction comes from Caprenin, “a reduced calorie fat made from natural sources”… Get ready to welcome back that fond relic of the ’80s, New Coke, rechristened “Coke II.” It’s being test-marketed in Spokane, and may go national this fall…. People call me a cynic but I’m not. When I shop for a soft drink I look for Minute Maid Orange Soda because I enjoy the bizarre combination of syllables of that mystery ingredient, “glycerol ester of wood rosin.” I enjoy the slippery thickness it gives to the beverage, making a glass of flavored water feel like something juicier.
THE MAILBAG: The anonymous editor of something called Eye on Nirvana: A Report on Nirvana and Nothing Else writes in part that I shouldn’t scoff at Rolling Stone‘s comparison of Seattle to Liverpool; since we’re “becoming one of the power centers of the alternative music scene”, I could only oppose publicity for the town if I were living “in fear daily of having our little pan of heavenly mazurkas sliced into even thinner pieces and distributed to even more `outsiders.'” Yes, I used to scoff at outsiders. But the people coming here now are making real contributions to our community. They’re moving here to be part of something. People used to come here to avoid social involvement. That horrible “Emerald City” slogan, adopted by the Convention and Visitors Bureau in ’82, typified a post-hippie generation wanting to get away from it all to a dreamland where nothing ever happens. So many people wanted their own nature oasis that they destroyed a lot of nature so they could have their big ugly estate houses. We don’t need that. We do need all the people we can get to make great cultural stuff, to make a better community.
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1 (NY Times “Surfacing” brief, 5/14): “Test Tube Pets: Today, leopards by artificial insemination. Tomorrow, sperm banks for cats.”
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: In the unauthorized bio Hard Drive, an ex-girlfriend of Bill Gates describes him as “a combination of Einstein, Woody Allen, and John Cougar Mellencamp.”
THE FINE PRINT (from Cakes Men Like, Benjamin Darling’s book of photostatted pages from old food-company recipe brochures): “The recipes in this book are the product of an earlier era, and the publisher cannot guarantee their reproducability or palatability for contemporary readers.”
LATEX LESSON: Without straying too far into Mr. Savage’s topic range, Misc. wants to briefly note how the ex-“new morality” generation just doesn’t understand the cultural implications of safe sex. They think that anybody having sex must be having it the way it was had in the ’60s, either as strict monogamy or undisciplined licentiousness. They don’t get that with today’s much more assertive women, relations would naturally be more protection-conscious even without STDs to worry about. Contraception alone would be taken more seriously. Women taking more charge, even in short-term relationships, invariably means more discipline (I don’t mean S&M but simply more thought and planning). That attitude shows in the elaborate visions of club fashions, in dance music that’s all about energy and control instead of “letting it all hang out”.
WIRED: Pat Robertson tried, then gave up trying, to buy what remains of United Press International, the news service that reported the end of World War I a couple days prematurely in 1918 and hasn’t had editors’ full respect since. It’s no longer carried by many papers, including the Times. (It’s still a big supplier of news bulletins to computer information services.) Anyone who’s seen a 700 Club “news” segment knows that Robertson’s idea of news is more like sports reporting, cheering his heroes (Reagan, Helmes, Israel, the Pentagon) and hissing his villains (abortion-rights supporters, peaceniks, artists, the First Amendment, rock music, unions, environmentalists, anybody to the left of Franco). The UPI name may live a while longer, but any remaining credibility it had is shot.
YOU THOUGHT THE SIMPSONS WERE TOO MERCHANDISED: The Channel 9 Store in Rainier Square is one of a series of boutiques run by PBS stations. They sell books, soundtrack CDs, videos, toys and assorted doodads inspired by your favorite “noncommercial” shows. No MacNiel/Lehrer salt and pepper shakers, yet…
OFFICE HUMOR TURNS PRO: The Wall St. Journal sez a New Jersey branch of Seattle’s Red Robin restaurant chain has comedy shows in its bar, and is getting local companies to sponsor employee entrants in a Corporate Laugh-Off. Do you tell your cruelest boss jokes to win, or not tell them and keep your job?
FOR YOUR TRAVEL PLANS: Seattle-area McDonald’s are sporting paper tray liners with a cartoon map of all its 25 outlets in Alaska. It shows a Coke straw-sipping salmon, a French fry-eating moose, and burger bags delivered by float plane, snowmobile, and in an eagle’s talons. However, the lifelong Dog House fan in me can’t help but be offended by the headline on the liner, “All Roads Lead to McDonald’s” — a ripoff of the “All Roads Lead to the Dog House” placemats.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, voice your opposition to those who want to ban musicians and street vendors from Broadway, and heed the words of local artist Joanne Branch in her recent show at Art/Not Terminal: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, at least for a little while.”
Hugh Hefner’s editorial in the first Playboy (1953), on why his would be one of the few men’s mags of the day not about hunting or fishing: “We plan to spend most of our time inside. We like our apartment.”
BIG EVENT!
The sixth birthday of Misc., and the 35th birthday of your correspondent, will be celebrated Mon., 6/8, at the Queen City Film Festival Dream Theater, 1108 Pike St. (Enter thru the mystery bookshop.) Bring stuff to celebrate with. There’ll be readings, short films, and audience participation.
“Amanuensis”
IN THE STREETS
The Weekly, in one of its best reportages ever, noted that the 4/30 mixed-race window-busting spree downtown was smaller than fight scenes at two Rainier Valley dances last year that the white media ignored. As you know, the following night’s mob scene was mostly white guys, led by U-District anarchists who wanted a riot of their own. They’re the successors to the punks I knew in the early ’80s, whose idea of creativity was to imitate the latest LA fad. But like the second wave of most subcultures, today’s circle-A guys are more orthodox and serious than their forbearers. They may think they were formenting revolution in solidarity with blacks, but (with the help of irresponsible media who exaggerated the threat) they just made white Seattle more afraid of African Americans, who will now be collectively blamed for the anarchists’ work. Most of the busted windows, except for the Bon and a 7-11, were at youth- or hip-oriented stores, including a sneaker outlet, blue jean boutiques, the Broadway Jack in the Box and Kinko’s Copies. Most were independent businesses that could least afford the damage and the panic-driven loss of clientele; none had anything to do with the Rodney King verdict. The nightclubs that weekend were shut or mostly empty; the anarchists directly threatened a youth culture that’s taken 10 tough years to build. To the people who stayed home, I say: Two isolated sprees of highly visible property damage must not kill the scene. If anything, we need more people out at night, making positive contact with one another.
BACK SOUTH, who’s to blame for the conditions that sparked the rage? Every CEO who moves jobs to the suburbs, the Sunbelt or overseas. Every politician who ignores lower working class people or treats them as something to protect “decent people” against. Every baby-boomer who treats minorities as sexy savages, not as human beings. Every yuppie customer of drug dealers. Every bank that “invests” in funny-money schemes instead of in its own community. A tax system that insures that only rich suburbs get the best schools.
I HOPE THIS IS THE END OF LA LA LAND, of the disgusting mythical SoCal of Fleetwood Mac and Tommy Lasorda, limos and liposuction. Of celebrities who’d rather care for the rainforest than for their own city. Of violence movies celebrating “cops who break all the rules”. Long before this, when people tried to turn me on to the latest “alternative scene” in LA, I told them that LA is what everything else in the world is an alternative to. If LA’s so hip, how come it gave us Nixon and Reagan? Calif. wasn’t just home to those old student rebels, it was home to most of the things they were rebelling against. Then, the more violent faction of the white New Left accomplished little except to serve its own ego trips, drive working-class whites into the law-&-order Right, and destroy any hopes for a real broad-based movement to actually help people. Few “relevant” white songwriters mentioned racism except as a pretext for peace-n’-love sentiments. One song that did address the issue was Frank Zappa‘s “Trouble Coming Every Day,” from the now-reissued Freak Out! album. In biting monotonic couplets that predate rap, Zappa describes watching the 1965 Watts riots through the then-new gimmick of live TV helicopters. At one point he shouts, “I’m not black but there are times when I wish I could say I’m not white.”
4/92 Misc. Newsletter
Why Men Don’t Get Madonna
We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).
Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.
Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?
Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.
The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”
Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).
Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.
Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.
Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.
Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…
Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.
Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).
Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.
License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…
The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”
‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”
Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”
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“Orthogonal”
2/92 Misc. Newsletter
Love Songs for Vacuum Cleaners
Welcome to another morosity-packed edition of Misc., the pop culture report that believes all Presidential candidates, just to be fair, should have to eat (Times, 1/9) “marinated raw salmon, consommé with mushrooms, filet of Japanese beef, cooked vegetables, salad, passion fruit and ice cream with strawberry flavor.” If Brown wants to forego the beef, he can substitute stale bean curd.
UPDATE: Puget Sound Bank indeed cut funding for local arts on public TV, but both the bank and the station insist that the decision came long before they saw the Seattle Men’s Chorus show. So don’t call ’em homophobic. If you must complain, complain that as a proud urbanite you deplore last year’s commercials where PSB showed itself as the bank of wholesome white suburbia while associating its out-of-state competitors with evil inner cities (even using Manhattan images to bash Albany, NY’s Key Bank).
GOOD BUY, BASEBALL!: Nintendo of America singlehandedly brought an entire industry back from the dead. It may be the shrewdest entertainment marketer in the world today. I can think of no higher qualification for a Mariners owner. Besides, it couldn’t hurt the team to adopt some of the philosophies in those zen-of-baseball books or in the Asian-American Theatre’s play Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder. As I write this coming home from a sold-out SAM retrospective of Yoko Ono films, I think of how this town is socially closer to Japan than it is to certain other US regions. Not only are Boeing and the timber companies among the nation’s top exporters, we’ve got the Nissan and Subaru docks. Hardly the “xenophobia” attributed to us by nature writer Andrew Ward… The 1/27 “Morning” (née Tacoma) News Tribune had a headline, “M’s deal shows where the action is: in Seattle’s suburbs.” The paper, whose current circulation push is into those suburbs, noted that none of the would-be buyers works in Seattle. It didn’t note that the government and business leaders who brokered the deal are all downtown.
IN THE STREETS: I witnessed the anti-hate-crime march on Broadway 1/25, but didn’t catch the start of when it turned violent. People who saw part of it put the source of the roughness at provocations toward cops by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, run by Bob Avakian, who claims to be a purer Maoist than China’s current leaders. For 12 years, I’ve seen the RCYB as the smallest, loudest part of any protest march, ready to move in on any movement and pretend to be leading it. Members of another of his groups started that whole flag burning fuss. They know how to make precise, irrelevant acts that provoke the most fiery backlashes. This is not the same skill as building a real movement to empower real people.
STAGES OF LIFE: A major hit of the London theater season is A Tribute to the Blues Brothers, starring Aykroyd/Belushi impersonators ripping off their ripoffs of R&B greats. Ads quote a Times of London review: “The most slickly staged concert since the last Madonna tour, and much more fun.” Maybe somebody could do a tribute to it, so you’d get a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff (or politely, a tribute to a tribute to a tribute).
IMPRESSIONISM: Behind all the hoopla surrounding the end of the Reds, there was a little item about how the freedom movement survived at its nadir, thanks to one of my favorite things in the world, self-publishing. Newsweek sez that during the ’81 crackdown on Solidarity, the Polish underground fashioned a printing system using inks made from detergent and silkscreens made from elastic from men’s underwear. Imagine: the Soviet Union undone by union suits.
DEFENSIVENESS: The Weekly immediately followed its sensational date rape cover (proving just how hard it is not to get tabloidy about the subject) with an equally tabloidy self-defense story, with circulation staffers studiously removing the “This Image Offends Women” stickers from the vending-box windows. Let’s hope they find another reason soon to have two non-restaurant covers in a row…. And what’s this new pseudo-Rocket logo, anyway? The old Weekly logo was no award-winner, but it was a mark of design evolution going back to the paper’s founding in ’76 — when it ignored people too young to be “from the sixties,” instead of scoffing at us like it did in recent years. Now, the paper can only maintain its circulation/ad base by reaching out at last to us Generation X-ers. Natch, it does this in a patronizing way, with an uninspiring pomo logo that looks like what out-of-it oldsters think “those kids” will eat up. (I may have a totally diff. opinion a month from now.)
BUSH CAMPAIGN HEAD WILL PETUS (in USA Today, 1/12) insisted the campaign was not hopeless by saying, “George Bush has been declared dead more times than Elvis Presley.” The thing is, Elvis was declared dead just once, accurately. It’s the folks who declare him undead who are insistent and wrong. Which is the better metaphor for Bush’s chances?
PHILM PHUN: The Seattle film-production community is growing to the point of extensive postproduction facilities. This means we get such spectacles as Rebecca de Mornay, dubbing her lines from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, telling techies how proud she is of how her breasts look in one scene. Forsaking us for cheap Vancouver filming are the producers of This Boy’s Life, based on Tobias Wolff‘s Skagit County coming-O-age saga that’s the closest anybody’s come in nearly years to the Great Northwest Novel. R. DeNiro and E. Barkin star.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Commas Are Our Friends is English teacher Joe Devine’s “painless, fearless, and fun-filled approach to the rules of grammar.” At last: somebody who doesn’t use the language to belittle his inferiors, but who communicates the importance of communicating, the elegance of well-designed writing that leads to (and from) well-designed thinking…The Cereal Killings is Stranger cartoonist James Sturm’s new comic book that uses a standard murder mystery to ponder what if breakfast talking animals were real (and not like Roger Rabbit but like any sensitive artist forced into the compromise world of advertising). The premise brings a whole new dimension to the American iconography of spokes-critters. You could even stick in an analogy between black customers not allowed into the Cotton Club and the Trix Rabbit never getting the cereal with his own face on the box. (Well, maybe not.)
THOUGHT WHILE LISTENING TO KNDD replay the greatest nonhits of my youth: The punk/newave era can be said to have begun in ’76 with the first Ramones LP. Its end is somewhere between Angry Housewives, Duran Duran, and the LA hardcore bands that made punk orthodox and stale. But the real deathknell came with the emergence of rap, which fulfilled what the bebop guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t need white people to “popularize it” (i.e. muscle in). The whole century-old premise of what it meant to be a hip white boy was dislodged. (KNDD, by the way, is using its mention in last month’s In/Out List in its sales brochures. They didn’t mention my earlier, less nice, piece about ’em.)
EVENTS WE OUGHTA HAVE: Chicago’s Berlin Club advertised an “8th Annual Anti-New Year’s Party…No midnight announcements. No party favors. No cheap champagne. No `Auld Lange Syne.’ No more Father Time to kick around. We’re going to be covering all watches with tape at the door to prevent cheating.”
COLOR ME BEMUSED: There’s a distinct color-scheme generation gap. Yuppies (and yuppie ad agencies trying to appeal to teens) are into bright, gaudy, neony colors. Teens themselves are dressing in black and watching b/w music videos…Why is it that the kids who are supposed to be the New Chastity generation strut about in skintight spandex and black bras, while the newly middle-aged who still boast of their wild swinging pasts wear ugly grey sweaters and shapeless faded jeans?
CATHODE CORNER: Who at NBC saw to place a Teen Spirit deodorant ad in Sat. Nite Live‘s last network commercial slot (separated by two local slots) before Nirvana’s network debut of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (whose title wasn’t mentioned in the intro and isn’t in the lyrics)?…Some of the 71 Awards for Cable Excellence categories: “Directing live sports events coverage special or series. International educational or instructional/magazine/talk show special or series. Business or consumer programming special or series. Extended news or public affairs coverage. Entertainment host. Program interviewer. Stand-up comedy series. Game show special or series.”
REWIND: I’d like to advise you to avoid Blockbuster Video stores. You may already know that they’re trying to drive indy video stores out of business (exec Scott Beck in Video Business: “We’ve done our best to eradicate as many as we can, but they just stick with it”), that they’ve banned NC-17 movies while amply stocking repulsive slasher and shoot-em-up flicks. Now, film zine Ecco sez BBV’s imposed chainwide buying (preventing local stores from choosing anything), and has cut back sharply (some sources say entirely) on independent, foreign or classic films. If you don’t want the video revolution to die, don’t go there, or else we could end up with nothing to see but action hits.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Gosanko Chocolate Art makes chocolate baby coho salmon, $5 at fancier non-chain candy shops near you. Since the same molding process can be used to make both candy and plastic toys (indeed, a Quaker Oats division sells “industrial chocolate” to candymakers), sweetness can be made in virtually any 3-D shape. We’ve already mentioned the Ken Griffey Jr. bar, the Space Needle on a stick, and the skyline-of-Seattle collection. We can hardly wait for the Stars of Grunge Rockcollection.
NO DIRTY WORDS: Thanks to my antique-dealer mom, I now have a copy of Songs of Regina, a 1931 songbook for door-to-doorvacuum cleaner salesmen. The lyrics, written to the tune of popular songs of the day, were presumably to be sung at motivational sessions. “Glory, glory what a cleaner/Yes, the name of it’s Regina/And the money it will bring ya/As we go marching on.” The company survived the depression, perhaps due in part to these pep-rally songs. But it couldn’t survive the ’90s recession. The brand recently disappeared in a merger.
THE WORKS: A sense of realistic despair fell over the country rather swiftly, after years of strained overconfidence and hip nihilism. America’s hi-tech/service sector future was replaced by visions of a nation of glorified temp workers with no pensions, no insurance, no futures, no ability to buy the luxury goods and services that our economy was restructured around. What little investment was made in this country was made in the expectation of an affluent professional class that the rest of us would serve. That class is now shrinking, and nobody’s making anything for any other class. We’re reaping the fruits of the cynical ’70s-80s, from non-voting liberals to conservatives who’ll sell themselves (and the country) to anybody. From speculators who buy companies to loot their them, to CEOs who annihilate their workforces (decimating the consumer wealth needed to support their own companies’ products).
MAILBAG: Michael Protevi sez, “Misc. is wonderful. I can’t wait to show my friends/family back East. I really appreciate `The Real NW.’ It’s refreshing to hear news of the old Seattle, the pre-deluge. It always bothered me that they would tear down so many great buildings (Music Hall, etc.) and then pat themselves for being the most environmentally conscious (`recycling,’ etc.). What a crock! Obvious where the real power lies (and lies).”
‘TIL OUR RITE-O-SPRING March ish, vow to ask the next would-be tuff guy on the street in an LA Kings jacket if he’s ever in his life been to a hockey game, see the Museum of History & Industry’s five wooden-ship maidens on a stairwell wall (all sealed up in plastic packing wrap like seabound Laura Palmers), visit the new Signature Bound bookstore on 2nd, and recall the wisdom of child-development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce (from the Canadian journal Edges): “Intellect alone has never changed anyone. All change comes from the heart.”
THE GOOD OLE DAYS
Time, 9/15/61: “The ban the bomb campaigners…are dedicated to the dubious proposition that any political fate is preferable to the horror of atomic war.”
Thanks to the person who listened to my KING radio appearance on 1/15.
The format of Misc. will remain stable for the near-term. Should I find a way to reduce the number of other things I do in order to support this, a bigger newsletter may ensue (maybe with ads, graphics and/or a cover price).
“Fueilletonist”
JUST CUZ WE MAKE CARS TOO BIG FOR JAPANESE CITIES,
WITH THE STEERING WHEELS ON THE WRONG SIDE…
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…Â 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.
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.”
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“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.
11/18/91 Stranger Misc.
(the first Stranger Misc. column)
The Misc. Statement of Purpose
Hi. My name’s Clark and I’m going to be your columnist today. Since 1986 I’ve been writing Misc., the monthly newsletter on popular culture in Seattle and beyond. I write a lot of little segments about a lot of different topics. I have a very individualistic sensibility, but I don’t try to be contrary for its own sake. I have certain underlying beliefs. Among these are the following:
1. The Pacific Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. It’s a real place with real people and real problems. It did not suddenly come into existence when you moved here, nor even when the first white people moved here. I’m from here, so I have no illusions about the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle” that was invented in the mid-’70s.
2. Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one. We need people who are willing to make it a better city — people willing to work in the arts and community service. We don’t need any more people who just want to go to the mountains for the weekend or buy a million-dollar waterfront “cabin.”
3. I’m a leftist but I’m not a hippie. I want a better world, a more compassionate and just world. The only way to get to that is to build movements, to reach out to people, not to sit around and mourn the end of the ’60s or to treat everybody except yourself as a hopeless square.
4. Television and male sexuality are not automatically evil.
5. Popular culture is a far more accurate portrayal of a society than highbrow culture. You won’t find the real character of England, for instance, on Masterpiece Theatre. You’ll find it in cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, and the horrid things they make out of the variety meats.
6. On the other hand, popular culture isn’t an exact replica of popular beliefs. The millions of women who buy sleazy crime books don’t necessarily want anything in the books to happen to them.
7. Our country’s totally screwed up in its attitudes about work, sex, democracy, and ethics. But so’s most every other country, in its own way.
8. Lame parody is the death of real humor. J. Webb’s Dragnet was a helluva lot funnier than D. Aykroyd’s.
9a. Hardcore fascist kitsch is not cute. I’m not a consumer of TV evangelists, wrestling, big-budget violence movies, or the Weekly World News, not even to laugh at them. I hate those things.
9b. When I say I hate something, it doesn’t mean I really like it. It means I really hate it.
10. George Bush is like those small-town lawyers on Scooby Doo after their ghost masks are taken off. The difference is those characters were businessmen pretending to be monsters. With George, the reverse is true.
11. I believe in the power of the written word, though I have a healthy respect for its limitations. I don’t believe in “serious literature,” nor in the lifestyle and belief system “serious” writers are expected to conform to. Writers are some of the most aesthetically reactionary folks around, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics. If only modern novels had one percent of the vitality found in the best modern music, dance, and visual art.
12. The only real way to make an artistic or political idea accessible to the general public is to present it in the most lively, compelling way possible;Â not to make it bland and soft.
13. The three-dot newspaper column is a dying American art form, one which Misc. tries to keep alive.
Here are some of the things you’ll see in Misc.: Junk food. Giant public art works crashing to the street. Local publications. Capsule comments on film, TV, politics, and other lesser arts. Quotable quotes. Celebrations of great new ad slogans and new products. Words and word usage that deliberately contradict academic standards. No sex gossip or spoofs.
Selections from Misc. begin in this space in the next issue.
