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6/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
IT’S THE DAWS BUTLER MEMORIAL EDITION,
AND DON’T YOU FOR-GIT IT!
Welcome to the second-anniversary edition of Misc. This ragtag collection of little notices from all over does have some goals. I want to celebrate the chaotic, post-postmodern world of ours, and call for a world much like we have now but with more love and less attitude. I want to exalt English as a living, growing language. I want to separate political liberalism from the cultural conservatism that led so many post-’60s youth to view liberals as old fuddyduddies. I want to proclaim that you can be intellectually aware and still like TV.
Why the New Rainier Beer Ads Suck: They’re a Frisco ad agency’s idea of what us Northwest hicks’ll fall for: Pavlov/Spielberg stimulus-response images, based on tourist attractions and phony regional pride. They’re as awful as the big beers’ ads, without the media budget to pull it off. The new “small-capitals” logotype looks too much like that of Rainier Bank. It’s all because the brewery was sold to Australian mogul Alan Bond, who more recently bought out fellow Aussie Robert Holmes a Court (the man who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson). Bond also has large business ties with Chilean dictator Pinochet (gold mines, a phone company). Response to the ads has been underwhelming, while old Rainier posters sold briskly at the U-District Street Fair.
A Permanent Underground Tour: Bill Speidel, who died this month, was one of the first to write seriously about Seattle as a real city, with its own brief but vital history. Too few have followed his lead; “Northwest Writers” are still expected to do free verse about scenery, not narratives about people. Yet he’ll be remembered whenever Northwesterners seek an honest regional identity from holding on to one’s past: Not nostalgia for a nonexistent “simpler time” or the old west of movies, but a raucous cavalcade of pioneers and profiteers, matrons and whores, all trying to muddle through life much as we try now.
Local Publications of the Month: First, the fine mag misidentified here last time as Ground Zero is really Zero Hour. The temporal-spatial discord resolved, let’s discuss newspapers ashamed of their own towns. The Herald and The Morning News-Tribune no longer carry any front-page clue to their origins (Everett and Tacoma). The Daily Journal-American never had Bellevue in its name. Each wants to be identified not with real cities but with its own mapped-out segment of Suburbia USA, the everywhere/nowhere.
Junk Food of the Month: The experimental no-melt chocolate invented by our pals, the Battelle Memorial Institute. Since it stays solid at temperatures below 98.6 F, will the makers of car seats and kids’ clothes conspire to keep it off the market?
One More Time: Sequels, those efficient re-uses of pre-sold titles, have become vital parts of conglomerate-owned film studios. The trend has grown to the literary classics with the announced book project Gone With the Wind II. But I’m waiting for the Romeo and Juliet follow-up being written by ’68 movie Romeo Leonard Whiting. I want to know how they manage to be alive after part 1, but also whether they can keep their relationship growing amidst the problems of everyday life.
The Big Lie Indeed: Drugs continue to be used as the Red Scare of the Late ’80s, an excuse for anti-democratic actions of many kinds. Locally, Doug Jewett uses it to promote the destruction of low-income housing, and the Blaine feds are seizing vehicles for just an ash of pot (not the most enlightened way to reduce the budget deficit). Nationally, the Army’s being brought into domestic law enforcement (just like in drug-exporting states such as Panama). Some would prefer that the anti-drug cause remain associated with fascist tactics, so that non-fascists will keep getting hooked and killed in the name of rebellion. But there are better ways to approach the issue, such as shown on a new bumper sticker: “Stop Contra Aid — Boycott Cocaine.”
Goin’ to Jackson: It’s no wonder some have tried, and others may try, to kill Jesse Jackson, for he’s more than a soon-to-be-ex-candidate. He’s overseen a realignment of American politics, away from of the era of the Gilded Right and the Gelded Left. No longer can liberals bask in smug defeatism, readily accepting conservatives’ portrayal of things. (Most Americans never were flaming Falwellians, but the anti-Falwell set bought Falwell’s claim that they were.) Jackson’s shown that a universal movement for change can happen, whether party regulars are involved or not.
Cathode Corner: Johnny Carson may be writing his own bad jokes during the writers’ strike, but you won’t hear any gags about his financial advisor, “Bombastic Bushkin.” Johnny and the real Henry Bushkin have broken their long partnership. Some of Bushkin’s deals, such as investing in Houston real estate just before the oil bust, have come too close to the ones in old Carson monologues.
Loco Affairs: Martin Selig sez he wants a more beautiful downtown. He’s offered to pay the city to let him tear down the homely Public Safety Bldg. We could think of a few other buildings worthy of removal, ones for which he already owns all rights….The Westlake Center nears completion, and the developers’ intentions for the land the city gave them are appearing. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports local merchants as essentially fainting or laughing at the center’s proposed rents. Most tenants, the Journal sez, “are expected to be national chains.”
Ad Copy of the Month (by CBS Records for UK band Raymonde): “Let’s just say it falls someplace between Joy Division and the Beach Boys.”
Ride ‘Em: Metro’s losing passengers while Snohomish County Community Transit can’t stuff folks on board fast enough. To learn why, just ride a CT bus to Everett some night. It’s a nice, big, comfy bus, in pleasant colors. It’s a bus people can actually want to ride, and they do. But the folks at Metro were too busy to notice one of their own officials skimming the cash boxes, so we can’t expect ’em to learn from their neighbors’ success.
Close: ‘Til next time, petition KIRO to bring back Mighty Mouse, visit the 6 Star Factory Outlet store in W. Seattle, and heed the words of gambler-lawman Bat Masterson: “There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in winter.”
10/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Here’s Misc., the column that’s more fun than a Shaw Island heretic nun. Opinions here aren’t necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates or its advertisers. In fact, offer me a Supreme Court post and I’ll retract or explain away any position I’ve ever taken.
The Summer of ’67 commemorations turned out to be largely duds. That’s OK, really; it’s good to see folks being respectfully apathetic towards the hippie dregs’ shrieks about their own importance. I mean, everybody back in the late ’60s can’t have been as hip ‘n’ progressive as the ex-rads now claim everyone was – somebody voted for Nixon.
But all summers must make way for autumn. Each year at this time, Seattle’s five-month ennui generated by the Mariners vanishes with the first frenzied football crowds. But this year, there’s only half the madness, with the NFL players away. One issue: owners’ demands that players take mandatory drug tests for the privilege of entertaining 60,000 drunks.
The NY Times reports an unnamed Seattle air express firm sent a rare Picasso to a Texas Air Force base instead of the eastern museum expecting it. The story didn’t say if the museum got the aircraft parts the Air Force was expecting, but they would’ve made a great found-sculpture installation (they probably cost more than the Picasso, too).
Junk food of the month:Â Souix City Sarsaparilla (made in New York), with a taste that blows root beer clean away and two stunning cowboy relief images on each exquisite bottle. Available at the Sunnyside Deli in Wallingford.
Local publication of the month: No one selection this time. Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle by Seattle is finally out, four years after it was made, and indeed worth the wait (it’s even turned out to be prophetic in its theme of an entire city disappearing before your eyes). Semiotext(e) USA, a compilation of underground-press materials co-assembled by ex-local Sue Ann Harkey, is out six months late with the best material being supplied by SubGenius Foundation cartoonist Paul Malvrides. Four-Five-One is back seven months after its fundraiser with a beautiful poster-mag featuring Marsh Gooch on Hank Williams, Angela Sorby on practical nihlism, and Kenneth M. Crawford on a toy-factory worker replaced by a machine, until “the machine eventually goes Union and puts the company back to square one.”
We’re not the only town to lose its semblence of economic power to outside speculation. AÂ Philadelphia paper sez that town, the country’s 4th biggest, is also now bereft of any big local banks and of many locally-based industries. The city celebrating the 200th birthday of the Constitution has lost the last of its economic independence.
Ann Wilson Update: The Heart singer is now seeking a husband with “streetwiseness.” Object: to sire 3 kids. . . . In other celeb gossip, one of the less harrowing parts of Patty Duke‘s memoir Call Me Anna is how she left hubby John Astin when he fell in with the fundamentalist-Buddhists and pressured her and the kids to do the same. Somehow, the vision of Gomez Addams sitting in the lotus position chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” through his cigar all day has an eerie sort of appeal to it.
The Hollywood idiots are at it again: Responding to the popularity of sexual themes in films like Betty Blue and She’s Gotta Have It, the studios have done their usual misinterpretation of the market and come up with a cycle of virulently anti-sex films. Don’t see Fatal Attraction (jilted mistress on a rampage), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (N. Mailer writes AND directs, ’nuff said), Lady Beware (creator of erotic window displays stalked by a sicko), Kandyland (exotic dancer stalked by pimps & pushers), or Blood on the Moon (feminists slaughtered by serial killer).
Among the fall TV season‘s only promising shows is Trying Times, a comedy anthology coming to PBS later this month. It was filmed in that familiar Vancouver-pretending-to-be-America, and was shown on the CBC as part of its series Lies from Lotus Land. It’s the perfect treat for your friends visiting Seattle, trying desperately to find the locations they saw in Stakeout….The Garbage Pail Kidscartoon show was unceremoniously yanked by CBS days before its debut, but don’t fret: a feature-film version is in the works.
Looks like a great theatre season in town with hot offerings coming from Performa ’87, the Group and Seattle Children’s Theatre among others. The best stage value of all has got to be New City‘s Late Night shows with music, dance and a serialized staged reading, “The Life and Times of Baby M,” every Saturday night for 99 cents.
One of Seattle’s best dinner-floor show combos is at the Broadway Jack-in-the-Box. Every Friday night, patrons are treated to the entertainment of watching an endless stream of teens barging in, walking right past the counter to the restroom doors, discovering that the restrooms are now locked to non-customers, and barging right out again without buying anything or speaking to anyone.
While you spend the next month figuring out what the Australians will buy next (after Rainier Beer and Ms. magazine; it was also an Aussie who sold the Beatles’ songs to Michael Jackson), we close with some of Team Chalk‘s work at Bumbershoot: “Outwit the great theif despair — an exercise in radical trust…It’s always tornado season in someone’s heart.”
9/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
ArtsFocus is back and so’s Misc., Seattle’s only whole-grain rumor mill. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates, its advertisers, or Brian Bosworth.
Welcome to the summer of our discontent. Some complained this summer about the traffic, the leaky roof at the Bagley Wright, about paying $8 to see the hydros without being able to get drunk n’ crude, about paying $16.50 for Dana “Church Lady” Carvey in the rain at the Mural Amphitheater, about paying $2 more for Madonna than for the Dylan/Dead show in Eugene, about celeb sellouts like Lou Reed for American Express. Me: I’m not complaining that much, though I did wish we could have had a combined Contra hearing/Isuzu ad, so you could always know when they were lying.
FOR THE RECORD, it’s also been the summer when Seattle got its own overpaid sports legend-in-his-own mind, its own MTV VJ, its own near Presidential hit-and-run, and the start of its own Underground.
Hope y’all had an enlightening time during the Harmonic Convergence. Remember: Author Jose Arguelles sez 144,000 of you had to be meditating at local sunrise 8/16. If the world ends 25 years from now, I don’t want to hear you moaning, “Darn it, I knew I should’ve set my alarm early.”
Already some hopeful news has emerged from the heart of New Age country, on people finding the personal energy to influence the world around them. Port Townsend’s local teens are battling one of the most backward, reactionary social forces known to humanity, the Northwest Nature Poets, over the right to eat Big Macs without having to drive to Port Angeles. More karma to them.
Patrick McDonald has endorsed the Young Fresh Fellows as a local band bound to make it big. As McDonald’s pick-to-click has traditionally meant the Kiss of Death (anyone remember the Heats?), the Fellows should immediately renounce it, declaring that they have absolutely no intention of ever getting a national hit record.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Flavored fortune cookies, as introduced at the Bite of Seattle. Seattle’s Rose Brand will soon market the treats in vanilla, mocha, strawberry, mint, raspberry, banana and bubblegum flavors. Every fortune has two happy-face symbols on it (you can also special-order cookies with custom fortunes).
Procter & Gamble’s announced multi-million losses from its Duncan Hines Soft Cookies. P&G expected a big hit due to a chemical emulsifier that made them soft, figuring it wouldn’t matter how poorly they tasted. They’re not giving up, though: Their next product will be diet cookies, made with a new “sucrose polyester” to be called Olestra.
PHILM PHUN: Japan’s Tampopo, easily the best comedy of the year, is also one of the few films anywhere to deal entirely with the preparation and consumption of food. The most that US films have come to discussing with this most pervasive of all human activities are Fatso, a few cannibalism pictures and some good Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Seattle Design Association Newsletter. Issue 18 has die-cut finger holes in all 12 pages; 11 of those pages have extremely clever illustrations by Carl Smool, Linda Owens, Michael Dougan and other famed local artists, all supervised by (who else?) Art Chantry. A measly $1.50 at Peter Miller Books on 1st Ave.
CATHODE CORNER: The use of retro rock in TV ads gets ridiculous when Time magazine uses the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a song originally made in part to protest the Vietnam War — a war that Time supported.
T. Boone Pickens, who tried to conquer Boeing, has made a fortune attacking companies; some of them have surrendered to other overtakers rather than face his wrath. Unocal, Phillips 66, Gulf and Citgo got no government help against his assaults, but state and federal pols rushed to the side of our beloved big employer/big defense contractor. One of the govt’s fave companies was threatened, starting the end of unregulated company-poaching, one of the hallmarks of ’80s commerce….
In other big news, the Easterners who bought Seattle Trust claimed at the time to be impressed by the bank’s reputation and good name — so why’d they demolish it all, as soon as the takeover deal was cleared, by slapping on those ugly Key Bank signs?….
Microsoft’s illustrious reputation has finally gained a little tarnish. A major software program was released full of bugs; then the Redmond firm received undeserved criticism when IBM released new computers designed for an operating system that MS won’t have ready for another year.
Get those “Save the Turf” badges back out. A Contemporary Theater has replaced Intiman as the cultural villain in a plot to destroy one of Downtown’s last truly human spaces for yet another totally unneeded office project. Expect no intervention from the city, which has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the developers…. Give thanks that the Paramount Theater/KKFX empire was rescued from possible bankruptcy. With its prime Convention Center location, the grand ol’ Paramount just might have been bought and razed.
As the moths swarm around the Frederick Cadillac floodlights this hot August night, a final reminder to avoid the $.25 foil-pouch wine at the Liquor Stores, take the 911 Homes for Art tour, read the new bio of cartoonist Winsor McCay, watch Cruzin’ Northwest Sat. morns on KSTW, and come back here next month. ‘Til then, peace and flowers for all.
7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”
It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.
On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.
TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.
No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?
(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)
In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.
Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.
PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….
NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.
The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.
Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…
Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.
CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.
Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.
Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.
‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.
6/87 ArtsFocus Misc
(one-year anniversary)
Welcome to the first issue of the new Arts Focus and the first anniversary of Misc., the at-large column that tries to keep ahead of a world where Hüsker Du goes on the Today show, the Central Area’s Liberty Bank becomes the largest Seattle-owned commercial bank by default, the M’s briefly take first place, and the Pope tries to stop people from doing all they can to have babies.
Top story of the month: Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s and other top national advertisers are refusing to place any ads in Florida, after that state passed a tax on advertising and other professional services. If Booth had gotten his original tax plan past our myopic Legislature, we too would be sharing in this rare and wonderful blessing.
At that same time, Contragate and Hartbreak battled for the public viscera, with many Americans somehow finding lying, cheating, and killing in the name of democracy to be less immoral than sleeping around.
Local junk food of the month: Midnight Sun Dark Chocolate, made in south King Co. by an Alaska firm, with such a bold flavor that it’s the Everclear of candy bars. No relation to the “Midnite Sun Chocolate” in Eskimo Pies.
Local publication of the month: Moviemakers at Work. Despite what the Times says, this is Microsoft Press’ first non-computer book, and its choice of interviewees reflects the real star system in late-industrial Hollywood. Not a single actor, writer or composer is in the book; the only subjects with director credits are two animators. Instead, we get audio technicians, photographers, editors, and most especially special-effects artisans. The newfound prominence of these people indicates how the big-money boys now in charge at the movies have dropped all notions of story, dialogue and character in a relentless rush toward old Darryl Zanuck’s dream: to find a movie formula wherein investing in a certain level of pure spectacle will bring a guaranteed return. It didn’t work for Zanuck (Cleopatra, Dr. Doolittle); it’s not working today.
Time Travelers, one of this column’s favorite record and comic stores, hopes to move away from 2nd near Pine this summer. The folk there say it’s ‘cuz the neighborhood has become too scuzzy, and I agree. That Nordstrom Rack has attracted totally the wrong element. In other comic news, Marvel is now owned by New World Pictures, presumably meaning we’ll get more great comic-based films in the grand tradition of Howard the Duck. Gary Larson, meanwhile, has sold rights for a live-action Far Side movie to Alan Rudolph (Trouble in Mind, Welcome to L.A.) would fit in perfectly, as long as he doesn’t sing.
Sports spurts: Have the Sonics’ recent playoff successes led me to reconsider my stance against letting more than half of any league’s league’s teams into its playoffs? No. This does not mean I don’t love the Supes or will approve of any move to Bellevue (what would they be called then? The Evergreen State Warriors?)…
Most of the potential new local owners for the Mariners are stingy bean counters just like George Arduous. They might meet the requirements of Commissioner Peter Uberalles, but could keep the team strictly a stop for players on their way up or down. The M’s may be contenders now, but the question is whether this year’s stars’ll get paid what they deserve here next year or go to someone who will.
Cathode Corner: Joan Rivers has finally been fired by Murdochvision. Why didn’t it happen sooner? ‘Cuz Rivers & Rupert shared the same worldview, one based on gross-out aesthetics and Righteous Right politics. With any luck Murdoch’s Fox Network will fold this year, leaving KCPQ to running its great movies (with the usual breaks from greatness for the monthly Gratuitous Violence Week). I’d hate to see the Ding-Ding Channel’s uniqueness become lost to more of those fashionable-but-dumb Fox shows, shows which prove that it’s square to be hip.
Richard Nixon has received a Fine Arts award from the French government, presumably for such acts of support for the arts as helping Joe McCarthy’s terror crusade against filmmakers and artists, trying to kill PBS, and putting half the big names in showbiz on his hit list. Of course, this award is coming from the nation that idolizes Jerry Lewis.
The Rep’s production of Red Square inspires this comment from P. Shaw: “The biggest thing about it is the conflict between the cold, badly conceived, laborious Rep set and the fast-paced, anarchic nature of the farce. The way that the fast action stops cold for these slow, slow scene changes sets up a whole other kind of absurdity in the spirit of farce, where inappropriate things are happening all the time.”
The Empty Space’s Gloria Duplex raises lots of questions on religion, sex, artistic inspiration, and hip-art-world attitudes toward lowbrow and folk culture, but none more intriguing than that of why Seattle doesn’t have anything like the intimate passions of body and soul celebrated in Rebecca Welles’ Louisiana-set work. It’s probably a combination of our Nordic Lutheran heritage (in which the only fully accepted alternative to quiet piety is quiet drunkenness) and our post-frontier heritage (in which most expressions of the free human spirit are suppressed to try and prove that the Wild West has “grown up”). In any event, we could use just the revival of both true spirituality and true sexuality promoted so sweetly in Gloria’s Kitten Paradise Temple and Lounge.
‘Til we talk again in midsummer, remember these memorable words from Shaka Zulu (the first live-action nudity-violence miniseries from the producers of Robotech): “Don’t just stand there like a pack of old women, kill me!”
4/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Greetings, pop-culture followers, to the 10th edition of Misc., the column that knows how to solve two of the city’s architectural dilemmas in one bold stroke: Simply move the twisted remains of the Husky Stadium project to Westlake Mall. Instead of yet another unfillable office/retail complex, we’ll have the world’s largest piece of found art at our core. It’ll be a beautiful, shimmering amalgam of bent steel, creating a fascinating pattern of lights and shadows throughout the day. With the proper supports, it can become a popular spot for climbing, eating lunch, watching musicians and performance artists, and (in the more obscure alcoves) developing new romances. Alternatively, the wreckage could go atop the Convention Center, in place of the planned rose garden dropped several budget cuts ago.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Sourdough Chips. Each tiny piece contains a powerful dose of flavors and seasonings, nearly enough to produce a profound centering experience. Habit forming; not for the wheat-sensitive.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Reflex, from the 911 Contemporary Arts Center (now desperately needing a new space). At last: A paper that treats the Seattle visual-art scene as worthy of serious criticism. By resoundingly eschewing the “It’s Not New York So Who Cares” attitude toward Seattle artists, it challenges artists and the art bureaucracy, leaving no excuse for mediocrity. Issue 2 has a long, good piece on the new Seattle Art Museum (the dawn of a new artistic consciousness or the same old snuff bottles in tourist trappings?) and a pack-page collage by one of this column’s favorite illustrators, who signs her work only with a logo of a triangle with a line through it. (She’s not related to the local band whose printed name was two diamonds with wings and whose spoken name was a growling scream.)
You already know I usually hate pro wrestling, but Britain’s The Face has a great section on Japan this month, highlighted by pix of top female wrestlers Dump Matsumoto and Bull Nakano, in punk kneepads and punk/samurai/KISS makeup, engaged in a typical real bodyslam, having finished their pre-match set of pop songs. The audience is mainly teenage girls; this is the refreshing overdue reaction of a generation raised on Hello Kitty kitsch. (In the same issue: an account of the Sankai Juku tragedy in Seattle.)
In other violent mythological spectacles, the end of the annual Ring Cycle could be a great blessing for local performing arts. Now we can put some of that money and effort into something fresher, something with more contemporary relevance than an interminable succession of tired ol’ proto-Fascist imageries. (The Ring was begun here as the centerpiece of a scheme to move the Seattle Opera out to Federal Way, something we can all be glad didn’t happen.)
Anyhow, there’s a second Richard Wagner leaving Seattle. This Wagner, he of the Anglicized pronunciation, opened the CBS NewsSeattle bureau less than two years ago. Now the network’s closing the bureau, as part of massive cutbacks orchestrated as an excuse for union busting, and Wagner has been reassigned overseas. Ex-KING anchor Bob Faw, meanwhile, is more prominent than ever at CBS as a national affairs reporter.
CATHODE CORNER: Could anyone have imagined the Beach Boys special with Brian Wilson, everybody’s favorite obese burnout case, resurfacing as slim, energetic and even cheekboned? It’s as if he totally regenerated, a la Doctor Who….
The “news” segments on the UHF Fundamentalist channel are really just more evangelism, with Reagan portrayed as God and the “liberal media” (even the aforementioned CBS) as Satan. The political agenda of Fundamentalism, to foster fear and mindless loyalty, is nowhere else as nakedly shown.
The local Sanctuary movement might be helped by a Supreme Court ruling making it far easier for candidates for asylum to prove they can’t safely return to their homelands. Ironically, it was a Nicaraguan’s case which may help the refugees of “friendly” genocidal governments.
Five members of the Jazz Section, a Czech underground music society, have been convicted of cultural treason for performing unauthorized types of music. It can’t happen here, though perhaps the politicians fighting Michael Spafford’s state Capitol mural and trying to keep all under-21 Seattlelites with no live entertainment would like it to happen here.
Merger mania, totally manufactured by Federal “regulators,” marches on. Now we must say goodbye to American Motors, the last little guys in the car biz and the inspiration to people in many other fields struggling to stay independent. Maybe if they’d brought back the Nash Metropolitan….
Kudos from here to KCMU, the volunteer-run new music station, on its powerful new 90.3 signal. Now people from Duvall to Bainbridge Island can get Ground Zero Radio — or at least hear it….
Further congrats to the Center on Contemporary Arts. Just as its ’87 season was starting (with the California Natural Foods gazebo on First Ave.), it found a new office space in the building where Trouble in Mind was filmed. May COCA keep troubling area minds for many years to come.
One side effect of the film Platoon’s success is in sportswear. Last year, area designers tooled up for the War-Is-Fun Look, inspired by the success of Rambo and Top Gun. Now that the candy-colored camouflage has arrived from the Asian factories, the attitudes that were supposed to have made it a hit have changed. Look for it all at your local close-out store real soon.
‘Til next month, remember this quote from A.M. Maslow: “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” Ta ta.
2/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hi again sports fans, and welcome to the compressed short-month edition of Misc., the regional pop-culture column that had Shirley MacLaine’s baby in a previous life.
The passenger ferry is, as of this writing, in deep trouble. Seems would-be riders never know if the boat’s going to be in the water or in the shop on any given day. Officials say they can’t effectively test the service’s appeal without, you guessed it, a second boat to run when the first one doesn’t have its act together. Maybe we could also get a spare set of ferry officials.
The NY Times sez it’s OK in DC social circles again to call yourself a liberal, even to admit that you liked Carter. Social concern isn’t as gauche as back in the early ’80s, when the Reaganites had everybody thoroughly intimidated. Perhaps, just perhaps mind you, this is another sign of the nation waking up as if from a long dream (or a masochistic love affair). Other ins/outs are in our handy sidebar.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Pocky, the colorful little rice candy sticks from Japan. Eat the chocolate or fruit flavors (both with that distinctive waxy taste), then keep the lovely boxes as collector’s items.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Pacific Northwest’s “40 Local Leaders Under 40” issue. Your columnist is not listed but has about a dozen more tries to go.
UPDATES FROM PAST COLUMNS: The CD menace continues its assault on the American tradition of cheap populist sound recordings, with the Seattle Symphony joining the list of artists refusing to cater to us vinyl proles. Rhino Records, however, is to be commended for its forthcoming 25-record set of 78s, intended for jukebox collectors…. SRO sold its theaters to Cineplex Odeon, the Canadian-based firm that produced The Decline of the American Empire (now showing at someone else’s theater). The bad news: Cineplex is half-owned by MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios which, according to a new book, was once known as the “Octopus That Ate Hollywood” and had close ties to both Reagan and the Mob. The good news: MCA’s lost millions lately on flop movies and overpriced reruns; the whole company may be sold off, as a whole or in pieces.
J Michael Kenyon, the rusty-throated practitioner of homespun cynicism and low-key wit, is back on local radios at last. At this point he’s having a hard time reconciling his style to KING-AM’s withering all-news image, but he may turn out to be KING’s ticket out of the ratings cellar.
If you haven’t seen a TheaterSports performance, you’re missing one of the funniest, liveliest experiences in this or any city. My personal favorite team in the weekly improv wars: The Many Splendored Things.
CATHODE CORNER: The first arthritis ad with a rock song is now on the air. A portent of the decades to come, when my generation will have to pay for the much larger Big Chill generation’s Medicare…. Don’t buy anything on “home shopping” shows. It just encourages them to put on more…. KOMO, home of the most pandering news scripts on local TV, now advertises “News You Experience.” Somehow, I’ve never wanted to be, even vicariously, a preteen Iranian soldier or a hit-and-run victim.
(By the way, our secret support of both Iran and Iraq has helped to lengthen a ghastly war (7-year body count: 300,000+), just to prop up oil prices and achieve the “geopolitical” goals of a White House that calls itself “pro-life.”)
The Little Biscuit deli-grocery on Broadway, one of that neighborhood’s last cheap places to eat, suddenly closed over the new year. If there is a higher consciousness, please don’t let the site become another trendy mini-mall. Pretty please with sugar on top.
The Jackson Street Gallery had a wonderful show in January: K.L. Slusher’s “Images of Construction” (documenting the Convention Center), John L. Harter’s “Construction of Images” (acrylic fantasies of the formation and decay of ideas), and R. Mutt’s “Constructions” (really nice industrial sculptures). Just when I began to think Pioneer Square had irretrievably evolved from a noun into an adjective, something great and provocative like this shows up.
Incredibly Strange Matinees, the independent film club I’m directing, is now renting the plush little Grand Illusion screening site for 12-noon Sunday tributes to the best exploitation films. ‘Til then, contemplate on the inner meanings of the phrase “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” So long.
INS AND OUTS FOR ’87
Unlike the authors of some lists of this type,
I’m not assuming that any trend that’s hot now will simply keep getting hotter.
I’m glad the authors of some lists of this type don’t work for my stockbroker.
Insville
Outski
1/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome again, shopping survivors, to Misc., your pop-culture column and voice of the Post-Sixties Generation.
THE TOP STORY THIS MONTH: Seattle is becoming world corporate headquarters for Muzak. The most famous name in office music recently merged with locally-based Yesco, a purveyor of music tapes for bars and other businesses for which the briefly famous DJ Steve Rabow once worked as national program director. From now on, when you hear a 100-violin rendition of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” at your local doctor’s office, you can take pride in knowing that the dulcet tones are being carried across North America from right here in your hometown.
The fact that the new Stage Left Cafe is advertised as being right next door to Angry Housewives first and in the Smith Tower second must say something about the relative public awareness of the two longstanding Seattle landmarks.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Blue Suede News. Pick up a free copy at a better record store and read all about cool music that would never have been recorded if CDs and “adult contemporary” radio had been around in its day.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Old-time gum. Beeman’s, Clove and Black Jack are back in a few select stores (some of which are already sold out). If you ever wanted to chew Beeman’s, the official gum of The Right Stuff, now’s your chance.
BEST NEW ALL-AGES LIVE MUSIC VENUE: The Century Square mezzanine. A recent Saturday night found me in the ground floor plaza there, with some professional-sounding (slick but bland) rock emanating from above. At the top of the escalator I found five guy musicians in identical shirts and a young woman singing in exactly the same type of contrived hysterics heard each week on Fame.The answer came in the slick brochures stacked next to the band: They were from the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, a new private school that appears to be for parents who want their teens to be just like the Fame kids. The band really cooked considering its limitations as a class project, and the acoustics of that huge glass-walled space made it sound even better.
CATHODE CORNER: Cable viewers should check out an awesome Japanese cartoon series (dubbed in Montreal), Astroboy, 9:30 a.m. Saturdays on BCTV. It’s the adventures of a robot boy with superpowers and jet-rocket feet, and his robot sister (without superpowers, which means traditional-sex-role-time in the rescue scenes, the show’s only flaw). It has way-cool music, pleasing characters and very imaginative scripts, many based on the Futuropolis humans’ unfounded prejudices against robots. The best part is the four-minute filler scene at the end of each show, when Astro summarizes the episode’s plot with one obscure error in a name or storyline. You’re supposed to play with your friends after the show and see who spots the mistake — but they never tell you the right answer. A must-see….
With the Michelob Yuppies off the scene, the current Worst Commercial on TV is the one for a maxi-pad using computer graphics to show how it fits in your undies better than any other brand….
Coming to a video store near you: Video Shorts 6, the winners of last month’s national video-art contest run by Seattle’s Parker Lindner. The best video on the tape (and the only winner from Washington) is Crash Your Car, a sprightly music clip using edited gore from old driver-ed films with a peppy synthesizer tune. The real psychotronic thing about it is that the finished video is actually being shown in driver-ed classes!
UPDATE on last month’s item on cable deregulation: Group W’s selling its last local systems to TCI, which burst into town with an instant image problem. They announced that in return for an extravagant rate hike, they’d give viewers many new channels — which turned out to be garbage networks like The Weather Channel and Cable Value Network, which TCI happens to own stock in. To make room, some popular local channels would be dropped out and others moved down to the far end of the black box. Thanx to Reagan’s foxes in the FCC chicken coop, the city could do nothing to stop it –Â except delay approval of the license change until after the new federal tax law, which would cost TCI millions. So it looks like KVOS and KTPS are safe — for a while.
My best wishes to New City Theater, which has had hard times of late. They’ve taken many notable risks this season, trying to expand into a “full service theater company” showing contemporary and challenging works without a camp/nostalgia cash cow production to support them. Hope they’re back in good shape soon.
More kudos to The Weekly for its recent follow-the-money expose of the downtown building boom. Turns out all those glass boxes haven’t been built because anybody needed the office space, but because the old tax law and deregulation of banks and pension funds made real estate speculation a lucrative proposition whether or not the buildings themselves made any money. Therefore, expecting the free market to regulate tower growth without public intervention is useless. This cancerous growth has been going on in most US cities. In Manhattan they call it “gentrification;” in San Francisco they call it “Manhattanization;” in Seattle they call it “becoming more like San Francisco.” In Houston they call the new, unleaseable glass boxes “see-thru buildings.”
Until next month, let me leave you with a line from an obscure Portuguese film about a beautiful woman dying of consumption: “I love you like God loves sinners.”
12/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome to Misc., the regional pop-culture section of ArtsFocus, the second most widely-read publication among the Seattle arts community.
The first is, of course, the Weekly World News. And if I may be presumptuous, I think we’re better. Sure, the WWN is handsome looking and has great mail-order ads, but buying something just so you can laugh at everyone else who buys it is an aesthetic dead end. It leads to an unattractive smugness, an attitude of scoffing at other people’s lives without ever questioning one’s own.
The logical extreme of this attitude is shown by audiences of the documentary Rate It X. “Progressive” guys watch this film of interviews with sleazy redneck guys and come away confirmed about their superiority to those working-class creeps. “Progressive” women come away knowing they don’t have to care about anyone or anything to be morally superior, since men obviously aren’t really people.
There are more pressing crises in this day than anti-thought “intellectual” films, though — like the closing of the Rainbow Tavern, just as it had finally broken the stranglehold of aging hippie R&B bands that had ruled all local clubs for too many years, and had established the most eclectic, truly progressive array of live music this town’s ever seen. The Seattle music scene will never be the same, even if a “New Rainbow” opens in the spring in some less-convenient location.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Seattle Star. One of the best free papers around, it’s a forum for the wittiest just-above-ground comics created anywhere.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Soup in a tube. From Germany, where everything from mayonnaise to milk comes in toothpaste-like tubes, comes Nutri-Soup, a thick sludge of bullion, herbs and natural and artificial flavorings. Just two inches (one tablespoon) is enough for a cup of great-smelling and adequately-tasting soup.
I hope you all saw the Art Expo in the Trade Center last month. It was a true cash-from-chaos scene, as the city’s art hustlers abandoned all remnants of cultured propriety. From now on, the question in visual art won’t be whether creative people can also sell, but whether salespeople can also create.
One answer to that question is found at D’Art, the home of Quality Artist’s Products. The permanent D’Art store may now be closed, but a holiday edition is now open in the Madison Valley neighborhood. As always, it’s filled with cute, outrageous and just plain rockin’ things, all at somewhat reasonable prices.
Alan Lande’s recent Autocratic, a “ballet for cars” in the new SCCC garage, was also tons-O-fun. Where they got a wrecked car in the same color as the rented wreckers was only the first of many great mysteries that night, as four concrete floors of dance, live and recorded music, video bonfires, signs with names of parts of the human digestive system, and other post-industrial entertainments were explored by an audience of carpools stretching a quarter-mile north of the site.
There’s a wine store in Post Alley with a great tabletop miniature of a modern winery. It uses taped narration, flashing lights, and motorized machinery to show the entire winemaking process, from vineyard to tasting room. It does not contain a tiny AA or MADD meeting.
This is being written in a tiny room overlooking the central downtown waterfront. The Port of Seattle and the usual development suspects are out to destroy the waterfront we know and love, by putting up yet another scheme of junky “gourmet” boutiques, junky “luxury” hotel rooms and junky “upscale” offices. I love the waterfront just as it is now, and don’t want it turned into another lifeless pseudo-suburb like today’s lower First Avenue or Broadway. It’s the same sort of destructive “improvement” that threatened the Market and Pioneer Square, before those great areas were “saved” by putting the trashy new businesses in the great old buildings. The waterfront deserves more than that — it deserves to stay the honest, funky, lo-rent district it is now.
In more uplifting news, Sen. Fishstick has been granted a permanent leave of absence from his taxpayer-supported position of being “hard on Communism” in Latin America as an excuse for being soft on fascism, of promoting the censorship of musicians who even suggest that religious and lifestyle alternatives exist, of making deals to let incompetent but ideologically-correct men become judges. America is even rediscovering the grand and noble tradition of disrespect for one’s president. Now comes the hard part: Getting away from complaining about the way things are done long enough to do them some other way.
Despite the posters, the local small-press book Young Men Can Sing is not “the first novel with advertisements.” Mass-market paperbacks have often had ads stuck in the middle. I remember one ’50s paperback with an ad for Time magazine, promising to inform me all about “Pasternak, Voice of the World’s Free Spirit… Einstein, Investigator Into the Unknown… Kruschev, Frank Lloyd Wright, Brigitte Bardot.” And I’d always thought she was the Voice of the World’s Free Spirit….
CATHODE CORNER: The first Christmas commercial this year came on Oct. 13 on WTBS, for an LP of holiday favorites….
Viacom Cablevision will soon add the Cable Value Network, one of many channels and individual programs established in the wake of FCC regulations regarding all-advertising “shows” and “services.” Using sophisticated marketing techniques at relatively unsophisticated audiences, these companies prey on compulsive shoppers to buy tacky wall clocks and briefcases. Cable systems running the channels get a percentage of all sales from their subscribers. No system that runs this form of unabashed audience manipulation should ever again claim to be providing a public service to plea for exorbitant rate increases. Not that it’s necessary; by this time next year the FCC will let cable systems charge whatever they can get away with.
Don’t ask where I got it, but I’ve now got a 1972-vintage tourist map of scenic El Salvador. It looks just like a Tourmap publication, with cheesy drawings of local industries and recreational opportunities. The saddest part, though, is the color photos of ugly modern lo-rise office buildings. The government is obviously proud of its attempts to make its capital city look like an imitation LA. Pity.
I’ll see you at the Incredibly Strange Matinees, noon weekends at the University Cinemas. Until then, remember to always be a good sport, be a good sport all ways. So long.
11/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome again to Misc., the regional pop-culture column with the same non-aspirin pain reliever as the prescription brand Motrin.
The astounding playoff and World Series performances by ex-Mariners Dave Henderson and Spike Owen, now in Boston, prove there really has been some Big League Stuff in the Kingdome, if not in the team owner’s box.
Twenty-four percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans got their fortunes in entertainment or publishing. You’ll notice the name printed at the top of this column was not on that list.
The long nightmare is over:Â Expo 86 closed. Even with almost as many visitors as there are Canadians, the thing still lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Canadian dollars, but it’s still a lot). The deficit will be paid from BC lottery revenues which normally support charities.
Speaking of what BC politicians call “megaprojects,” seen (or better yet driven under) the Convention Center yet? That thing’s a monster! It’s already totally out of scale with the surrounding First Hill neighborhood, just a few months into its four-year construction cycle. It’s fun looking now as a Paul Bunyan-sized Erector set, but once it gets walls it’ll be a horrible monolith — at least until the graffiti artists get to it, we can only hope.
HUGE STOREWIDE SALE DEPT.: Frederick & Nelson is now under local management and I’m sure they’ll do well, particularly if they follow these few suggestions: bring back the fabric and pet departments, the lending library, the Men’s Grill, and especially the Paul Bunyan Room. The big Paul & Babe mural and the serpentine counter may need to be rebuilt from scratch, but it’ll be worth it….
The Bon may be bought by a Canadian company. If it happens, don’t expect the name to ever revert to The Bon Marche. The original name, borrowed from a Paris store, originally means “good buy,” but in colloquial French has come to mean “cheap” in the demeaning sense — not the best image to promote to the French-literate Canadians who drive to Seattle to shop….
The Heart of Pay n’ Save, that great section with discount imported trinkets of all sizes, colors and uses, has been dropped by that chain’s new out-of-state owners. They concluded shoppers here aren’t as bargain-driven as elsewhere. Much of the “Heart” merchandise will remain in the stores — but at higher prices….
Three of the U District’s best stores and one of Broadway’s have been replaced this year by candy-colored sweatshirt stands. Can the horror be stopped before it devours us all?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Market Tab. This photocopied sheet contains gossip, items of interest around town and pithy comments, much like another writing product I know of.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cheese sticks at the Gourmet Thrift Shop. Each fresh batch is made with a food processor full of real cheeses. Like everything at the quaint little shop in the old Rubato Record space on Broadway, it’s amazingly good and amazingly cheap. Now if they’d only stop playing that same Steely Dan tape over and over….
In other junk food news, the Dr Pepper Co. just bought the 7 Up Co. Upon hearing the news, I used a can of each product and one drinking glass to determine just how well the companies will merge. Results: a definite clash of corporate cultures.
FILM CLIPS: Jumpin’ Jack Flash isn’t a big hit; audiences are comparing Penny Marshall unfavorably to the three other directors in her immediate family. I still may see it, ‘cuz Whoopi Goldberg’s bank-telecommunications job in it is the same job I used to have. Never got involved w/any spies or killers like she does, ‘tho….
Children of a Lesser God raises some interesting questions. Will Hollywood ever find another starring role for hearing-impaired star Marlee Matlin? And the special subtitled screenings for the hearing impaired are nice, but why don’t studios make similar prints for other domestic films? Deaf people are interested in other things than just deafness, ya know.
Foreign films come with subtitles, of course, like the ones shown by The Cinematheque, which I associate-direct, at the University Cinemas on 55th and U Way. This month a new Cinematheque series begins weekends at noon, with (non-subtitled) horror, cult, comedy and other specialty films. Like the foreign films, these are for the viewer who wants an active, adventuresome film experience.
EARLY WARNING: A local theater company is planning a musical based on a certain very popular cartoon property. High-level rights negotiations are underway between the theater’s fearless leaders and a Mr. Big in LA.
Industrial art takes on a new meaning as construction begins on 6th Ave. S. for a new office-warehouse for the Frye Art Museum. How the Industrial District’s loft photographers, painters and video artists will react to the pastoral oils and watercolors moving in is anyone’s guess.
We all know the local literary scene generally won’t accept anything too far removed from free-verse nature poetry, the written equivalent of a Frye painting. Other writers give me flack for not hating technology (writing this on Lincoln Arts’ word processor instead of in longhand, watching TV). Our local Luddite authors, however, have a ways to catch up to the reactionary behavior of a Chicago group, Writers Without Phones.
There’s one piece of electronics I do despise: The compact disc. They don’t give you big cover art or colorful labels. You can’t make a scratch mix with them. They sound sterile, flat, too clean for any of the music that made this country great: Hot jazz, swing, bebop, bluegrass, gospel, folk, blues, R&B, country, and their mongrel child rock n’ roll. What’s worse is that the record biz is realigning itself to favor the high-priced spread. Already Motown has dropped 82 oldies albums, which henceforth will be sold only on CD. Those records, like most good non-classical music made since 1950, owe their original existence to the low cost and mass market created by cheap vinyl discs. If CDs take over, all you’ll get is slick, bland product (like the current Motown roster). CDs suck real big.
CATHODE CORNER: Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the undisputed Best Show on TV this year, is now on at 9 a.m. Saturdays, despite what the papers say. Don’t miss it, or the rest of the day people will scream when you inadvertently say the Secret Word and you won’t know why.
Maybe I’ll see you at the next Ballard Market Singles Night. If not, keep stroking your miniature replicas of Waiting for the Interurban until next month. We’re in touch, so you keep in touch.
10/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome, art lovers, to the fourth profundity-packed installment of Misc., the pop-culture column recommended by women who used to use powders.
So how ’bout that Moore sculpture in front of the old Seafirst building? Nobody knows who bought it, nobody knows who sold it, nobody knows who owns it now, and on the day it was to have disappeared, its creator did instead. It will be very fitting if the business leaders responsible for selling Seattle’s most famous privately-owned artwork get to remove it; for the absence of “Vertebrae” will show just how spineless they are.
In other news of public spaces without public input, Seattle Center director Ewen Dingwall recently tried to get members of the City Council to give the Disney theme-park people $250,000 to study Center re-development, without such pesky details as open bidding or public hearings — and to sign away to Disney first-refusal rights to any building projects its own study might recommend. Just because Florida gave Disney its own political fiefdom, it doesn’t mean they should expect us to.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Neat Stuff. How could a cartoonist living here in Mellow City come up with such searing commentaries on American sleaze as the hopelessly gauche Bradley family and the definitively bad attitude of Girly-Girl? Perhaps Peter Bagge’s mind was affected for life from formerly living in New Jersey; more likely, though, is that it was affected for life from formerly living in Redmond. Available at all better comic book shops.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Imitation crab meat. Take some useless bottomfish, some potato paste, some “natural crab flavor,” flaking-and-shaping machines and good ol’ Northwest entrepreneurial spirit, and you’ve got an artificial delicacy worthy of an artificial king. Good with salads, pizza, burgers, Ritz crackers, or just as finger food.
My own hometown, Marysville, already the bingo capital of western Washington, may soon become its garbage capital too. There are two proposed sites for a garbage-burning plant on Tulalip reservation property — exempt from state environmental laws. By the way, my folks have this house that’s for sale….
Another gambling mecca, that cardroom and punchboard capital Vancouver USA, is now without its most famous industrial site and tourist attraction. The General Brewing Co. plant, home of Lucky and generic beer, has been closed and the equipment shipped to China. Wonder how those bottle-cap rebuses look in Cantonese….
The latest annual Erotic Art Show at Ballard’s Salty Dog Studio was a fine collection of over 50 2- and 3-D works, expressing the glories of human animals through witty, folksy points of view. Let’s just hope there’ll be more shows of its type. We need more of these intelligent, healthy rebuttals to the modern-day Anti-Sex Leagues.
Metro’s continuing, unannounced bus stop closures have spawned the latest excuse by cheatin’ lovers and undedicated employees. “I didn’t want to be late, but when I got to the old stop the bus went right by, and by the time I finally found a stop that was working the next bus had gone.”
FALL TV SEASON: Best new show, by far, is Pee-wee’s Playhouse…. USA Today reported that many of this year’s contestants onThe New Dating Game appeared last year on The New Newlywed Game (“the honeymoons didn’t last long”)…. With Cosmos now in syndication, Carl Sagan’s exquisite warnings against nuclear insanity are co-sponsored by Army recruiting.
HOME VIDEO TIP: Beany & Cecil. Eleven tapes of the late Bob Clampett’s early ’60s TV cartoons are now available, and the miracle is that RCA/Columbia Video didn’t run out of good segments in the early volumes. They’re all stunningly innovative, with great stories, characters, dialogue, animation and music (though the theme song repeats Clampett’s name as gratingly often as you may remember). They look especially great compared to the Hanna-Barbera shorts of the period (now on the USA Network), which Clampett savages on Volume 9 with a gangster character named Stogie Bear.
Spin magazine columnist Andrea ‘Enthal has a list of 1,000 Best/Worst Band Names available for a SASE from Box 4904, Panorama City, CA 91412. Local rock groups that made the list include the New Age Urban Squirrels, Prudence Dredge, Napalm Beach, Body Falling Downstairs, No Cheese Please, Nation of Milk, Alien Nation, and Lapses In Grammar (Afforded to Avoid Sexism). Not included: Danger Bunny, Idiot Culture, the Fartz, Springfield Flute, Color Twigs, Limp Richerds.
Finally, we are still looking for the ultimate Helga lookalike. Send a photo or drawing of a pose reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth’s mystery model to Misc., c/o Lincoln Arts, P.O. Box 31693, Seattle 98103-1693 by Oct. 17. The winning model and artist will receive University Cinema tickets. As with Elvis impersonators, the right attitude and grooming count more than physical resemblance.
6/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
(the first Misc. ever)
This “At Large” column will mainly discuss things that don’t fit into the other ArtsFocus departments, but which are still a part of the culture in which we live. All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or its affiliated artists, supporters or advertisers. This column does not settle wagers.
I keep expecting one of the student DJs on KCMU or KNHC to mispronounce the name of the current Bathhouse Theater production as “A Day in the Life of Vic and Shar-day.” Hasn’t happened yet, though.
LOCAL SMALL PRESS PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Manzine, from Tom Grothus’s Function Industries Press. If you’ve ever seen the droll humor of Function’s little cartoon books (Errata, Land of the Cynical Dog-Men), you’ll enjoy this tiny collection of comics and stories. Available at Art In Form in Belltown, 2nd Story in Wallingford and other better book outlets.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Vernell’s Gummy Transformers. Not only can you make them do robot aerobics by twisting them around (they never snap apart), but the very concept of violent Japanese robot toys depicted as colorful, chewy candies made in Bellevue contains almost Zen-like ironies.
Until further notice, the worst comic strip in the newspapers is Boomer’s Song. David Horsey, the P-I editorial cartoonist (now on sabbatical in Britain) and progressive Christian, obviously feels offended by ex-radicals now engaged in airheaded materialism. Unfortunately, Horsey’s contempt for his characters is too heavy-handed, his gags more bludgeoning with an unfunny punchline lettered in boldface italic with an exclamation point. While Horsey’s in Britain, he should get some lessons from Andy Capp cartoonist Reg Smythe in making unsympathetic characters appealing.
On the national scene, National Public Radio had a tribute to the late folk singer Phil Ochs a few Saturdays ago. It finally made this liberal understand what other people have against liberals. The show featured a number of Ochs’s fellow folkies. They all embodied, but didn’t discuss, the dilemma of how to love the Common Man and hate the Great Unwashed at the same time. One of them interrupted his off-key dirge to The People by remarking, “In the old days everyone would be singing along by now.” There was a lot about Us vs. Them, Them consisting of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. You can tell when a liberal has it all wrong when s/he pays too much attention to the paper tiger Falwell and not the real bigwigs in DC.
Elegant posters were up around town last month for “Elan 86, An Expression of Self-Assurance,” a fashion show by design students at Seattle Pacific University. Didn’t make it to the show, but the clothes on the poster were quite sharp. It’s nice to see a sense for good looks among the Free Methodists, operators of SPU and known as one of the most modesty-obsessed religions this side of the Mennonites. (SPU used to send recruiting brochures to high schools with a cover photo of the Phinney Ridge traffic sign pointing in opposite directions for Zoo and Seattle Pacific University. The comparison was intended, not just with big universities, but with other little religious schools.)
You certainly wouldn’t have seen any Free Methodists among the corps of tract-passers seen downtown recently. They held colorful red-and-white flags with a Gothic crest and were dressed like refugees from a Renaissance Faire. Their big two-page tract proclaimed that Halley’s Comet was a sign from the prophet Jacob, signalling the impending punishment of “tyrants and despotisms,” leading to the victory of the true believers. The whole thing is beautiful, with shocking pink headlines and 1940s-style graphic design. It even has small-print sheet music to a non-rhyming hymn: “Co-met comes to destroy / Kingdom of beasts and tyrants / Christ the Lord shall come soon / To build up Cosmic Republic.” I’m not passing judgment on the theology of this Grace of Jesus Christ Crusade, based in Taiwan; I just like their style.
The style of humor on KING-TV’s Almost Live has improved greatly in recent weeks due to a new crop of writer-actors, including former Off the Wall Players Andrea Stein and Joe Guppy. One of their ex-colleagues, Dale Goodson, has recently turned from comedy to music with the Dick Everson Trio; another, Mary Machala, was, at last report, part of the off-season staff at the Grand Canyon National Monument.
In other video events, Frito-Lay has a commercial in which the suave Tostitos man converses, through the miracle of film editing, with Addams Family stars John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan and Ted Cassidy. The fact that all but Astin are no longer with us just adds to the macabre aura associated with their beloved characters. I’m sure the posthumous endorsements are approved by the actors’ heirs; Frito-Lay once got into big trouble with the W.C. Fields estate over the unauthorized use of a “W.C. Fritos” character.
The 17th University District Street Fair was almost identical to the 7th, the earliest one I saw. The rainbow candles, seascape prints, brown leather sandals and wooden duck toys were just as trite then as now. It’s hard to imagine merchandise like that ever having been fresh. Since the fair has always been tightly controlled by a screening committee employed by a Chamber of Commerce, I suspect it may have been this stale from the beginning, an attempt to tame the hippie spirit into a tourist attraction. It’s sad to see all these aging craftspeople who might have become innovative artists save for the need to please committees.
CLOSING THOUGHTS:
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”– Albert Einstein
“The mediocre mind you encounter may be your own.” — Gilbert Hernandez
