FROM `THE PESTO OF CITIES’: You’re probably either anxiously awaiting tonight’s final episode of Seinfeld, or you’re bored to tears by all the press the show’s gotten and you’re glad it’ll all be done soon. Both camps might be interested in the Seinfeld create-a-plot guides on the Internet. Fill in the blanks and you’ve got your own wacky li’l Mad Libs-esque story, little more implausible than those the show’s actually used. I’ve used some of the categories on that list, and made up some of my own, to organize my own riff on the show’s familiar formulae:

Discussion/argument about a topic of profound unimportance: If Carly Simon wrote about somebody and wanted to get at him by saying “You probably think this song is about you,” but it really was about him, what’s the deal here?

Slightly unsightly sight gag: Sticking quarters onto your forehead.

Sexual euphemism: A soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend is derided behind his back for spending too much time “mountaineering” and not enough time “spelunking.”

Kiddie snack-food product, still remembered and/or consumed by the lead characters: Fizzies–the tablets that, when dropped in water, are supposed to create instant soda pop but actually create a vaguely cherry-flavored, non-medicinal version of Alka-Seltzer.

Celebrity name-drop: Charlene Tilton.

Humorous situation in which this celebrity appears: Fighting with one of the lead characters over an object of pathetic obsession.

Object of pathetic obsession: A M@xRack movie-ad postcard with Gwyneth Paltrow’s name misspelled, and hence potentially collectible.

Urban-etiquette peeve: People who make too many consecutive transactions at an ATM while others are in line.

Proposed solution to this peeve: Start a petition drive outside bank branches, demanding banks to set a two-transactions-at-a-time limit at ATMs during peak hours, punishable by “eating” the violator’s ATM card.

Ethnic guest character: An Italian-American mother who works at the clothing-catalog company.

Ethnic-slur aspect of that character: Demands accordion music at her daughter’s wedding reception.

Reason to start dating someone: She appreciates really good Dr Pepper, and makes special buying trips to New Mexico where the local bottler makes an especially strong version. She even knows to never spell Dr Pepper with a period, and publicly corrects anyone who tries.

Reason to stop dating someone: Goes into a hissy-fit at any restaurant (or wedding reception) that even deigns to offer Mr. Pibb as a substitute for Dr Pepper, and in fact screams to the whole world that she would rather drink cherry-flavor Fizzies.

`Wacky’ money-making scheme: The last known cache of big-E Levi’s jeans not yet sold to Japan; a cache discovered at the rural New Mexico general store that also has the world’s best Dr Pepper.

Why this money-making scheme’s doomed: Nobody bothers to figure out that, with the Asian recession, the bottom’s fallen out of the Japanese big-E Levi’s mania.

How the characters learn this lesson too late: At the wedding reception, the clothing-catalog owner is overheard casually mentioning this during a discussion about a new unusual garment concept.

Uunusual garment concept: Garanimals for grownup men.

Potential benefit of this new garment concept: You’d never look like an ill-dressed, color-conceptless dork in public.

Potential liability: If you’re a single man and you don’t look like a color-conceptless dork, women will presume you’re either gay or married.

Potential benefit from that potential liability: Attracting a woman who’s specifically after married men, because she’s turned on by the transgressiveness.

Potential liability from that potential asset: You’re now living an elaborate lie in order to keep this woman from leaving you, which she undoubtedly will do if she finds out you’re not really married.

Non-sequitur catch phrase: “Do I even look like your caseworker?”

Now go make up your own answers to these categories, or categories like them; then stick them into a standard four-subplot Seinfeld story arc. The result will probably be funnier than whatever’s gonna be on tonight’s finale. Submit your entries to clark@speakeasy.org. The best entries will be posted online, for all to share in the being and nothingness.

IT’S A POST-MAY-DAY MISC., the column that had almost gotten used to the idea of the Mariners re-becoming the hapless team of old. Then they got better again. In the next few weeks: Who knows?

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE #15: Gus Van Sant’s directed a music video for Hanson.

RIDIN’: After the item last month about the Mercedes/Swatch Smart car (a mini-minicar to be sold only in Europe), a local outfit called Electric Vehicles Northwest wrote in to plug its new Twike machine, designed in Switzerland and to be assembled here from imported components. The sleek, three-wheeled two-seater has an 8.7-foot-long aluminum/glass bubble body, an AC motor capable of 25-40 miles between charges (at up to 52 m.p.h.), and even supplemental bike-pedal propulsion. What’s not mini is the price–$16,500.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ole is a line of fruit flavored, sweetened milk beverages; sort of an Asian style (made in Calif.) version of Strawberry Quik, but better-tasting (and in a wider variety of flavors). Just don’t mix Ole and Oly. (Though an Ole might help soothe your stomach after one too many Olys.) Available at Rite Aid and at ALFI, the convenience store across from GameWorks (for the time being).

STRAIT OUTTA COMPTON: Local TV news in Seattle, while increasingly obsesssed with “team coverage” of mayhem and disaster stories, is still slightly better here than it’s become in some other cities. One reason was KING’s Compton Report, a one-host, one-topic-per-show weekly half hour that combined intelligent reporting with slick videography and editing (while avoiding the PB-esque pomposity that’s helped make “documentary” a four-letter word among TV execs). Jim Compton himself was totally squaresville, but that was his charm. Now, though, the program’s on its way out. Compton accepted an early-retirement offer from the station. He’s not commenting on the split, but does say he’ll try to get another gig in town (acqaintances say he’s looked into starting a magazine). KING promises to replace his Sunday-evening show with another news-magazine format (look for something devised as a lead-in to Dateline NBC).

IT’S NOT JUST HERE: USA Today reported late last month on the gentrification of Chicago, with mayor Richard Daley fils presiding over the closing down of a popular sidewalk flea market and most downtown newsstands, all in the name of an upscale/bland vision of “beautification.” Daley’s next scheme: Establishing a sidewalk-restaurant row along the once-toxic Chicago River (for those few weeks a year it’s neither too cold nor too hot to spend an appreciable amount of time outside). Of course, Chi-town’s been at the upscaling game for over a decade now, replacing artists’ lofts (particularly along the aforementioned river) with condos and goofy theme restaurants, then putting up street banners proclaiming the former artists’ streets as “The Artistic Neighborhood.” Speaking of which…

EN `GARDE’: A kindly reader spotted the following graffito on a recent trip to Montreal: “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.” Actually, it’s not as cynical a notion as it might first sound. Remember, the term “avant-garde” originally meant the the vanguard of an advancing army (i.e., the shock troops). The notion, which goes counter to the more currently fashionable image of the permanently underground art world, was that the cutting-edge artists led where the rest of us followed. So it’d only be natural to extend that metaphor into formerly industrial urban neighborhoods as well as urbane aesthetic styles.

PASSAGE (German director Ulli Lommel, interviewed in Ian Grey’s Hollywood-expose book Sex, Stupidity, and Greed): “Americans are caught up in this American Dream, yet at the same time, in order to service that dream, they have to constantly deny what people are really like, what they really want…. You really like to do something but you don’t tell anybody because you hate yourself so much for doing it so you have to persecute everybody for doing what you are doing.”

Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Book review for The Stranger, 5/7/98

The mostly-British anthology Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: Stories to End the Century (Serpent’s Tail trade paperback; edited by Sarah LeFanu) purports to chronicle the return to the “traditional values” of social repression following the end of the purported ’60s-’70s Bacchinale. Actually, it’s more like a reassertion of one particular traditional value of U.K. fiction: the pre-’60s kitchen sink drama, Angry Young Man version. That was a genre particularly suited for the England of grey skies and grim industrial towns and lingering postwar depression, a place where things new and invigorating just didn’t occur. The protagonists of most of these stories don’t find satori or mind-expansion from their earthy pursuits. At best, they achieve a little solace or escape from their everyday tedium.The sex is mostly of the “alternative” variety, and mostly in conformance with current “alternative” propriety. Professional dominatrixes; gay men searching for mates while on ecstasy; future lesbians engaged in girlhood role-playing; a married woman whose husband supplies her with another man as her birthday present; a honeymooning intellectual couple sitting at cafés while discussing the philosophical implications of fucking.

Similarly, the drugs are mostly used to escape the darkness of one’s life (Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born to Bleed”) or to build an artificial sense of self-confident fuckability (the aforementioned ecstasy users in Philip Hensher’s “The Chartist”). The main exception: Laurie Colwin’s “The Achieve, or the Mastery of the Thing,” in which a student bride in the nascent hippie years turns her professor bridegroom onto the then-novel joys of spending one’s entire life too stoned to feel pain.

Not much rock ‘n’ roll is in here, and that’s OK since there’s so little good writing about that world that isn’t really about the sex and drugs. Certainly the main rock story here, Cherry Wilder’s “Friends in Berlin,” has little novel to offer about bandmates getting on one another’s nerves while on tour. Again, nostalgia for the days of potential rebellion provide the highlight–Christopher Hope’s “Gone,” about a ’50s white boy learning to love rock music in apartheid South Africa.

The notion of intense pleasures as dulling narcotics reaches its ultimate point in Michael Carson’s “Postcards of the Hanging,” imagining a near-future in which humans are implanted with 24-hour radio receivers in their bodies, letting the outside world fade away while listening constantly to the top pop hits (with commercials). Like much modern-day sci-fi, it’s based on the schtick of taking a present-day trend (Walkmen and boom boxes) and simply imagining it will become more-O-the-same in the future. In this day of “chaos theory” and “quantum thinking,” many science and pop-science writers no longer believe trends necessarily “progress” in one direction forever. Too bad so many science fiction writers haven’t discovered this notion yet. But then again, maybe chaos-influenced fiction would constitute stories to begin the next century, not stories to end this one.

THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…

I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…

LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…

SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.

MISC. IS PLEASED AS PUNCH, well at least pleased as non-alcoholic punch, that US West’s directory-assistance service has adopted the classic information number 411. Now, even the most clueless white mall gangsta-wannabe will get it when hip-hoppers they rap about being “down with the 411 boyyieee.”

UPDATES: KCPQ now has the made-to-be-rerun-forever Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine after its 10 p.m. news weeknights, an improvement over the tired M*A*S*H repeats previously at that time…. King County will probably ask voters to approve a 2012 Seattle Olympics bid, if the idea gets that far. I still wanna learn what quaint “local color” TV segments you’d be willing to appear in should the games come here; send suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org clark@speakeasy.org.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: We’ll be kind and say the two new Joey Cora chocolate bars are for baseball-stuff collectors, not for candy lovers. Lovely label, though. ($2 at Safeway.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: With seemingly everybody today caught up in the mad dash for bux, it’s not surprising a zine like Space for Rent would show up. In fact, I’ve seen publications like it before, wherein everything’s really a paid ad, including the text articles. This thing’s so cheaply produced, though, it’s hard to see why any would-be pay-to-play writer or illustrator wouldn’t just put out their own photocopied pamphlet. (Available from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.)… like ex-Rocket Veronika Kalmar, who’s put together her own modestly-sized newsprint zine, The Iconoclast. The first li’l issue’s got Kalmar dissing celebrity journalism (perhaps a disguised potshot at her ex-employer), fellow sometime Rocketeer Dawn Anderson trashing “post-feminist” reactionaries, and assorted show and record reviews. (Free at the usual spots or $1.50 from 117 E. Louisa St., #283, Seattle 98102).

THE HOLE STORY: The Seattle bagel craze has apparently gone day-old. The Brugger’s Bagels chain has turned into a “Breads & Cafe” chain, Zi Pani (a name as meaningless as Håagen-Dazs). We could be in for a rerun of the mid-’80s retreat when all those cookie shops tried to reposition themselves as “treats” shops. Elsewhere in changing-storefront land…

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Rumor has it that the next hip outfit to be evicted later this year by the Samis Foundation (that alleged nonprofit that acts more money-grubbing mercenary than some for-profit companies) just might be Colourbox, for some five-plus years the odd duck of 1st Ave. S. niteclubs (i.e., the one place on that “Blooze”-bound street where you could actually hear tunes composed since 1970). No word yet on just when it’ll get kicked out, or what its operators might plan to do in the future. Elsewhere in clubland…

SQUARELY GAY: ARO.Space, the new mostly-gay dance club in the old Moe building, is as clean looking a night spot as any I’ve seen. With its muted pastels and recessed lighting, and retro-modern furnishings, it could easily pass for a set in a ’60s sci-fi film or in the future world fantasized at the Seattle World’s Fair. It might also be seen as a desperate attempt to be fake-London, or as something too damn institutional looking to be really fun, or as an expression of gay designers too enraptured by Ralph Lauren colors or by that new interiors magazine Wall.Paper. Under this theory, the space evokes gay men trying to prove they’re just as respectable as anybody else by being bland in a Zurich airport terminal kind of way. But I prefer to see it as a “neutral” gallery-type space, only with the dancers and clientele as the “art” on display. It enhances its clientele’s outrageousness by not competing with it.

CRASS? WELL…: Ex-GOP gubenatorial candidate Ellen Craswell has quit the Republican Party to start her own political movement, one where the purity of her authoritarian right-wing ideology wouldn’t be compromised by those success-obsessed corporate Republicans. She plans to call her movement the American Heritage Party. She apparently hadn’t realized the name “American Heritage” is already trademarked, by a magazine and book line owned by that quintessential corporate Republican Steve Forbes, who’s currently on a personal crusade to keep Religious Right followers within the Republican fold. Will Steve object, or even care? Time will tell, or rather Forbes will.

Searching for the NW In NW Lit:

We Are Here! (Aren’t We?)

Feature article by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 4/9/98

From a very early age I was instilled with the (probably unintended but unmistakable) message that real art, and by extension real life, were things that only happened in places far away from my rural Washington existence. The stories read to us in class, and later assigned for us to read, all happened in Harlem or Korea or mythical fairylands or mythical Anytowns–until we got to read Beverly Cleary. Her kids had real attitudes. Her grownups had real tics and quirks. And they lived in a real place (Portland) I’d really been to. Ever since, I’ve sought out the stories of my own place, the affirmations that, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos, “We Are Here.”

Eventually, I found some stories that tried to reveal the people and attitudes of the place. And I found other seekers.

Last December, I was involved in an exchange of emails on the topic of Northwest literature. The original question, posed by Raven Chronicles editor Matt Briggs: “Is there any ‘Northwest’ in Northwest Lit’?”

Some of the respondents said there wasn’t any–that Caucasian-dominant society here’s still too new, and too subservient to the national/ global society of airports and strip malls and stadiums. I disagreed. I felt there were indeed distinguishing characteristics in stuff from here, at least the better stuff from here.

Defining the Literary Northwest: Let’s define “here” as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, maybe Alaska, and just maybe Montana; excluding the sociopolitically different worlds of western Canada and northern California.

If that’s the literary Northwest, then Northwest literature could conceivably include anything set in this place, or written by someone who resides or once resided in this place. But that could conceivably include everything from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (partly written while he was a Boeing technical writer) to tales where people leave Seattle early on and never return (certain Jack London stories,Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).

So for convenience’s sake, let’s classify the four faces, or sub-types, of Northwest lit, and the values and weaknesses of each.

Stuff written here but without “local” content. John Saul’s chillers, Robert Ferrigno’s thrillers, and August Wilson’s African American survival plays bear little or no relationship to their creators’ domiciles. Yet some of these manage to exploit a certain Northwest spirit. Stacey Levine’s Dra- and My Horse occur in surreal fantasy realms (the former in an all-indoor city); but Dra-‘s “drab and dreary world of utter dread” and My Horse‘s “painful psycho-logic” (as described on the cover blurbs) correspond internally to a sense of low-key resignation found in some more “realistic” works from here.

Locally-set genre novels. mysteries and romances with fill-in-the-blanks ‘local color’ (insert name of popular local nightspot here).

I haven’t the space nor the expertise to discuss romances, that last bastion of un-ironic genre fiction (and the only mass-fiction genre predicated on love instead of aggression). But the better whodunit-doers, here and elsewhere, go beyond place names to invoke the spirit of a region in the ways their characters commit and/ or solve crimes. Earl Emerson and K.K. Beck’s crime-solvers have a particularly Seattle kind of world-weariness; the crimes they investigate often invoke particularly local versions of ambition and desperation.

Land Lit. In college I was introduced to a whole “Northwest school” of writers and poets. Only their message, upon initial contact, seemed to be “We Are Not Here.” The poems usually consisted of minutely-detailed nature tableaux, devoid of human life save for the omniscient gaze of their narrators. The fiction viewed this countryside as verbal Cinemascope settings for noble women and stout-hearted men felling trees and fly fishing and behaving not at all like the all-too-human Norwesters I knew. None of those people, of course, lived in any city bigger than Port Townsend.

I now understand a little more about the formula’s pre-Beat-era origins. Concurrent with the Asian-inspired “Northwest School” painters and the spiritual-empowerment aspects of the Mountaineers movement, the first couple generations of nature poets (David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, Lake City kid Gary Snyder) sought a re-connection to the cyclical continuum of life. Even the “urban” writings of Richard Hugo are full of references to birds, streams, and native plants.

But the approach had its limitations, especially in the hands of ’70s-’80s imitators. What began as a quest for Zen tranquility eventually devolved into cloying sanctimony. Its nadir came in the ’80s with the NPR essays of Andrew Ward, who gushed reverently about the plants and birds surrounding his island “cabin” while acting like a landed-gentry snob toward his human neighbors.

Poet-editor Phoebe Bosche notes, “For a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, ‘urban’ (a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban = technology. These are the writers who don’t like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest [magazine] school.”

Bosche also disagrees with my disparagement of nature writing: “To just dismiss ‘nature poetry/ writing’ is blind to the overriding presence of our surroundings here. There is the presence of nature in all the urban writing being created here. It is different than the open possibilities that infuse writing from southern California, my home. The cynicism here is also different from east-coast or L.A. cynicism. It is rooted in a denser feeling of our relationship with our surroundings, in the character of this city.”

The real thing. The rarest and dearest, the works that attempt to convey how people here behave, think, and relate. I’m not merely talking about highbrow-appeal, or even what appeals to me. (The annoyingly “lite” Tom Robbins certainly expresses the aesthetic of a certain ‘shroom-munchin’ caste of NW residents.) But I prefer works expressing the moods Robbins’s escapism is escaping from.

Timothy Egan called it “Northwest Noir.” Briggs calls it “the slippery sense of place and identity in the Pacific Northwest… a strange dislocation that sometimes expresses itself in deformed characters, like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; a reduction of realty into a heavily weighted and controlled narrative, like Raymond Carver’s short stories; or in the complete absence of family history and a sort of constant self-invention as in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, or stories about isolated and small communities as in Peter Bacho.” To that roster I’d add Gus Van Sant’s philosophical down-and-outers, the Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff’s rambunctious yet worryful teens, Rebecca Brown’s obsessively intricate life scenes, Jesse Bernstein’s defiant celebrations of despair as a life force, Willie Smith’s dark fantasies, and the sublime desolation of Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point.

“There is a common, nervous energy (like overcompensating for the overcast winter) to a lot of the writing that I think strikes me as particularly PNW,” Briggs adds. “This spirit I’m talking about is like your weird uncle,” Briggs adds. “Your characters are generally losers. They’re not heroic; they’re just odd.”

Even the humor in NW lit, and there’s a lot of it, is off-center (Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, Gregory Hischack’s beautiful zine Farm Pulp), self-deprecating (Spud Goodman’s TV skits, Scott McCaughey’s song lyrics), or concerned with the dichotomy between crudity and beauty (cartoonist Jim Woodring, Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook).

Which brings us to the here and now. At live readings, the nature poets have largely been succeeded by slam poets. The younger would-be literary writers I meet want to be Anais Nin or Charles Bukowski. The economics of publishing virtually dictate that a work with “alternative” appeal reach out to a national or global subculture, while a work with local or regional appeal must hew to a mainstream zeitgeist. And the local mainstream zeitgeist has been thoroughly gentrified beyond David Brewster’s wettest dreams. With all the material riches to be grabbed here now, detective writers can imagine higher-stakes crimes and romance heroines can enjoy more luxurious adventures.

But what place is there for the quirky, the depressive, the unparodic noir, in a social landscape dominated by hypercapitalistic monomania? Marty Kruse, small-press buyer at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, says he’s “really disappointed with the output from the Pacific Northwest (of late)…. There was a great deal more enthusiasm when we all had less to lose.”

But if the best NW lit’s about people who’ve left behind, or been left behind by, family and society, then there’ll be plenty of material to come about people who’ve been left behind by the boom. As Briggs points out, “This has been an industrial town and a seat for the labor movement and there are all of these people who were here before the 1980s (and even those who were there before them, all the way back to the original Salish tribes) milling around, working strange jobs, and who aren’t exactly jumping on the Boeing/ Microsoft bandwagon, largely because they can’t.”

> ON THE LINE: Jack Whisner, a transit planner for King County, left a phone message claiming Misc. was wrong to describe planned north-Seattle bus changes as favoring commuters instead of the voluntarily carless. He asserts the proposals are really meant to increase cross-town routes, so more people can ride from one neighborhood to another without having to transfer downtown. However, I’ve still got reservations about the scheme. Since the county wants to shovel most new-service bucks toward the ‘burbs, some new in-town routes may start as weekday-only, daytime-only services, and some existing routes some folk have become accustomed to might be cut back or even dropped. Public hearings and comments on the scheme are now being taken; call 684-1162 for details.

THE MAILBAG: Our item a couple weeks back, seeking a replacement term for the ’80s relic “yuppie,” engendered this email response from Bryan Alexander of Louisiana: “Liking your emphasis on their aging, how about `boomer geezers’? Returning to the acronym, how about `ayuppies’ (aging young urban etc.) or `dyuppies’ (decrepit etc.), which raise both senesence and the victims’ delusions of perpetual youth? The former is a more Southern pronounciation, the latter nearly Slavic.” Jesse Walker, meanwhile, takes umbrage at a throwaway line in the original column item which claimed the young adult bourgeoisie didn’t share its elders’ taste for bland pop songs. Walker felt I was wrong to “put Bonnie Raitt on the same level as James Taylor. And what about the revived popularity of the uber-bland Elton John?” John, of course, never really went away, at least not from Lite FM stations. A more serious challenge to my remark might involve the younger Lite FM stars (F. Apple, S. Crow, et al.).

SWANKOSITY: The Pampas Club opening was like a scene out of the 1990 debutante movie Metropolitan, with exquisitely-dressed rich kids of a type I’d not previously known to exist here, all in the former site of the raucous My Suzie’s and Hawaiian-kitsch Trade Winds. It reminds me of a scene in the memoir of a Depression-era UK left activist. After living through nearly three decades of mass deprivation due to the depression, the war, and Europe’s lengthy postwar slump, he was shocked and astonished to find teenagers running around the streets of late-’50s London with the cash to spend on clothes and music and partyin’.

One side effect: The new Belltown wine-‘n’-dine clientele is, on the whole, much better-behaved in public than the Bud Light-chugging fratbar crowd more common in the neighborhood two or three years ago.

Another side effect: The ex-Sailors Union building where Pampas, El Goucho, and the (separately owned) Casbah Cinema are is right across from Operation Nightwatch, where homeless folk line up for shelter-bed tix. What used to be called “limo liberals” climb out of pug-ugly Mercedes SUVs, only to witness the less-than-formally dressed standing and arguing and cussing in line. While few affluent persons feel personally responsible for an economy that creates a few “winners” and a lot of others, maybe the sight will at least give some “winners” a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God humility. In other economix thots…

BUBBLE BURSTING?: Many of Seattle’s art-world and “alternative” denizens like to think they’re not part of the planes-and-software boom economy. But we’re all affected. I’m writing here soon about some of the writers and artists with day jobs at Microsoft. There are also plenty of actors, playwrights, cartoonists, photographers, illustrators, videographers, graphic designers, and audio engineers toiling away at assorted high-tech outfits on both sides of the lake, and at these companies’ subcontractors and spinoff firms. With the ripple effect of these bucks passing among retailers, landlords, etc., the commercial underpinnings of local alt-culture haven’t been higher.

So are its potential commercial underminings. As the Stranger‘s already mentioned, there’s a housing crisis threatening the fiscal well-being of most anybody who’s not rich. When housing prices go up, they seldom go back down. So if the Asian economic slump ravages Boeing and agribusiness exports, and if fears of a coming market saturation in the computer biz come true, even more of us will be scrambling for the remaining affordable abodes.

It’s a post-April Fool’s Misc., the popcult column that hopes the popular new local band A/C Autolux will one day appear on the same gig with the even-newer local band MoPar. Let’s just hope no band members forget their parts.

UPDATE: Since writing about the Triangle Broadcasting Co., I’ve learned of another gay radio outlet, sorta: The Music Choice section of the DirecTV satellite-dish service has a nightly package of “Out” music, starting around 11 p.m. It’s commercial-free and even flashes the titles and artists’ names on screen.

CLASS-ACTION RACISM SUIT HITS BOEING: Some of you theoretically might ask, “But aren’t pocket-protector-clad Boeing engineers the virtual epitome of squaresville fair play and quiet devotion to duty?” Maybe, in myth; but any huge organization with an almost all whitebread leadership (even an officially “nice” whitebread leadership) can be prone to insult “jokes,” promotion preferences and other discriminations, even anonymous threats and attacks. It’s happened in the past decade (according to suits and pubilshed accusations) at Nordstrom, City Light, the fire department, the ferry system. And with affirmative action under attack and with every boor and bigot using the all-justifying label of “political incorrectness” as an excuse to actually take pride in their own obnoxious inhumanity, we might see more ugliness ahead. Speaking of untoward behavior at unexpected places…

CATHODE CORNER #1: The (still alive, still free) online zine Salon recently ran allegations of sexual harrassment in the offices of 60 Minutes (following that show’s sympathetic treatment of Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey). Salon‘s article was built around eight-year-old allegations by freelancer Mark Hertsgaard, who’d written a piece for Rolling Stone (which published only a watered-down version). He charged the show’s bigwigs, including exec-producer Don Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace, with acts of gender-hostility ranging from lewd jokes to groping and bra-snapping. It’s enough to bring new meaning to my old foolproof formula for “Safer sex” (imaginining that the person you’re about to have sex with is really Morley Safer oughta stop anything from happening).

CATHODE CORNER #2: KCPQ’s news, after the expected bumpy first weeks, is turning into a snappy li’l broadcast that, partly out of necessity (fewer camera crews, no helicopter), spends a little less time than the other stations chasing ambulances and a little more time covering issues, including issues deemed important to those youngish X-Files viewers. Any broadcast that gives top billing (on 3/17) to the fight to abolish the Teen Dance Ordinance at least has a set of priorities in concordance with those of some of our readers. Just one little thing: If they’re trying to skew to a younger audience, why do they follow the newscast with a M*A*S*H rerun that probably looked creaky when made (before the station’s target audience was born)?

PINNING IT DOWN: Bowling as a source for hip iconography is way on the rise. Bowling shirts (particularly the Hawwaiian variety) have been in for a couple of years now and may have another resurgence this summer (if the collectors haven’t stowed away all the good ones by now). New bars from the Breakroom to Shorty’s are festooned with balls, pins, and other acoutrements of the sport. It’s a way to be fun ‘n’ retro without the bourgeois trappings of the cigar-bar crowd. But don’t look for any new bowling alleys anywhere around here anytime soon. Banks and landlords think bowling’s a suboptimal use of square footage, compared to other entertainment or retail concepts. When a Green Lake Bowl or Village Lanes or Bellevue Lanes goes away, it doesn’t come back. All we can do is support the remaining kegling bastions (including the occasional “rock ‘n’ bowl” nights at Leilani Lanes in upper Greenwood).

QUESTION OF THE WEEK: If the Olympics come to Seattle in 2012 (and I know some of you are dead set against the idea but if the Schellites have their way it won’t be our decision to make), will you still be willing to be televised as part of a quaint, exotic human-interest piece about those strange local customs? Submit your reply, with your choice of quaint custom, at clark@speakeasy.org. (Remember, no latte jokes.)

WHEN `REAL’ ISN’T: I’d long ago defined porn as fantasies for purposes of masturbation, and early-’90s cyberporn as fantasies about masturbation. Sex robots, “dildonics,” virtual reality glasses, dream machines, holograms–whatever you call the schticks in cyberporn fiction, they’re still mere get-off gadgets, means to avoid the sacred confusion that is interpersonal contact.

So it’s not surprising to hear all the hype surrounding a California (natch) company called Real Doll, promising a partial fulfillment of one common cyberporn schtick. For $5,000 or so they’ll custom-build a full-size plastic version of your dream woman (they say they’re thinking of adding a male-doll line later). They promise the look and feel of real flesh, hair, and bone-muscle structure, in a variety of heights, bust sizes, and skin and hair colors. The pictures I’ve seen of the products look like the more grotesquely hyperreal creations of some NYC hotshot shock artist in the Jeff Koons tradition. The more “realistic” these things get, the less they rely on the imagination and the more aware you are that you’re staring not at a fellow biological creature but at a hunk of lifeless petrochemicals. Cyber-freaks might be turned on by that, but I’d just find it icky.

MORE IMAGINATIVE PLAY equipment might be found at Seattle Surgical Repair, 10726 Aurora N. The location (right next to the cemetery) might not be the most tasteful site for a dealer in used medical equipment, but the tiny building’s crammed full of goodies. Examination tables! Speculums! Knee-reflex hammers! Stethoscopes! Gurneys! (Old car and motorcycle parts, too.) Just play safe when you’re playing doctor, and don’t perform any actual procedures that should be left to qualified personnel.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Li’l Hassan’s Bleeding Head is Marcus Surrealius’s eight-page take on the sort of gentle new-agey satire pioneered by the likes of, say, the Church of the SubGenius. Issue #3 includes a cover tribute of sorts to Nico and Yoko Ono, a scrambled analysis of Huckleberry Finn, and an “Ebonic Hail Mary” that reads just like the fake-Black-dialect Bible passages I was once forced to listen to in my old liberal-Methodist youth group. Even better are the little slogans here and there (“Neachy is pietzsche”). Free at the usual dropoff spots, or online at www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/4475…. Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan’s quarterly True Northwest is my kinda regional-history zine. Why, right on page 2 there’s a reprinted old ad for the late, lamented Pay ‘n Save stores! Further inside are a big retrospective of Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, an interview with Seattle Pilots/ Portland TrailBlazers announcer Bill Schonely, and references to the Elephant Car Wash, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, TV’s Here Come the Brides, Spokane’s Bing Crosby memorabilia collection, Jimi Hendrix’s days playing guitar with Tommy Chong in Vancouver (the closest to Seattle Hendrix lived in his whole adult life), and much much more. $3.50 from P.O. Box 22, Olympia 98507; or online at www.olywa.net/truenw/.

CROSS-CUTTING: The editors of True Northwest previously wrote Seattle on Film, a fun little book chronicling locally-shot movies from the years before the sight of a car on screen with Washington plates automatically meant “filmed in Vancouver.” Is it fair for our neighbors to the north to have The X-Files and Millennium while we’re stuck with a certain cheeky cable show amply discussed in recent Strangers? Since this is the start of baseball season, a trade metaphor springs to mind. We should try to acquire at least one B.C.-filmed show in exchange for the aforementioned cable production. Since that wouldn’t quite be an equal exchange, we’ll have to throw more in the pot. Maybe some tanker trucks of cheap U.S. gasoline, a couple of 10-year-old rock bands, and a cartoonist to be named later. If we can’t get a spooky sci-fi series, maybe we could at least deal for other Canuck assets like decent health insurance or adequate arts funding.

PASSAGE (pianist-author Charles Rosen in the March Harper’s): “A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.”

NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (NY Times, 3/4): “Jockey is introducing an advertising campaign intended to imbue the once-hidebound underwear company with a hipper image, particularly among younger shoppers.” Just what’s so bad about a “hidebound underwear company?” What other kind of underwear is there? Runner-up item (KIRO Radio News Fax, 3/5): “A Longview-area man plans a rally at the state Capitol to protest Indian hunting in the Mount St. Helens National Monument.” I thought we were over that despicable era of Western history.

GIRLY SHOWS: In recent weeks, the P-I Lifestyle section’s run two wire service stories, headlined “A New Heyday for Teens” and “Teenage Girl Power at the Box Office.” Of course, their idea of “girl power” is strictly limited to purchasing power, not political power or even the power to make films instead of just watching them. Still, that’s at least something. Some music historians claim we should credit teen-female fans for “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. In other over-the-counterculture news…

QUEER NATION, INDEED: By now you’ve probably seen print ads for Triangle Broadcasting, “America’s First Gay Broadcasting Network” (unless you count American Movie Classics). The L.A.-based company just opened its second branch operation here (the first is in Philly). It runs low-power transmitters out of Bremerton (1490 on the AM dial) and Tacoma, plus a three-person sales office in Pioneer Square. All the programming’s beamed by satellite from Calif. They plan to include lotsa Seattle-based events listings and talk-show guests, but that’ll diminish as more network-owned stations start up around the country. The debut lineup’s mostly talk, with some dance-music hours at night. One host is described as “the queer Rush Limbaugh;” there’s also a Dr. Laura-like tuff-advice lady and a wacky-wacky morning dude. The company’s PR literature’s light on discussing station content, but big on praising gays and lesbians the way corporate America likes to hear people praised–as upscale, upscale, upscale! I suppose it’s progress or something like it if queers can now be depicted as not only non-threatening but as a key economic sector. But to effectively reach all those double-upper-income-no-kids households, they’ll have to grow into something beyond gay/ lesbian topics tacked onto regular dumb ol’ talk radio formulae piped in from out-of-state. Let’s hope they do. Speaking of gay listening habits…

INSERT OLD HOLYFIELD `EAR’ PUNS HERE: If lesbians hear more like men, howcum there’s not a male-appeal equivalent to Ferron? (Jewel doesn’t count.) On a more practical level, imagine if a special tuning fork or whistle could be developed, producing a sound only lesbians (and men) could hear. Single lesbians could find one another in any crowd, avoiding those straight women who think it’s hip to pretend to be bi. (And, if affirmed by further research, this could give further credence to something I’ve long believed-lesbians and straight men have more in common than the more bigoted members of both camps will admit.) Speaking of gender roles…

BYTE OF SEATTLE: Employment fairs can be glum occasions, with self-esteem-challenged jobless folk solemnly filling out application forms whilst getting sermonized about good grooming and interview skills. A far brighter milieu was offered at the Northwest High Tech Career Expo at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Dozens of firms, from Microsoft and H-P down to temp agencies and software-catalog companies, even outfits not primarily tech-oriented like Starbucks and PACCAR trucks; all with flashy booths and smiling flunkies eager to take resumes and business cards–at least from applicants with enough years of the right experience. (Safeco even offered to help train folks without hardcore computer experience to learn to program in COBOL). And you didn’t even have to be a short-listable candidate to pick up some of the freebies at the booths. More candy than Halloween. Sports bottles. Key chains, compasses, letter openers. Pens and pencils of most every variety. Luscious photo postcards (from digital stock-photo agency Photodisc). Sponges. Soap-bubble kits. Plastic mini footballs and baseballs (from Starwave). And the wackiest of all: Official Boeing-logo Hackey Sack balls! (Bet they bounce great off those tall hangar walls.)

MISC. CONTINUES to be haunted by the Winter Olympics opening-ceremony theme song, “When Children Rule the World.” Sometimes it seems they do now, only in grownup bodies…

SHADES OF PALE: The Times reported this month that Kenny G’s one of the most respected white musicians among black jazz purists. My theory: G represents a stereotype of whiteness corresponding almost perfectly to the stereotypes of blackness profitably portrayed for years by some white people’s favorite black acts.

DELIVERING INFLUENCE: A recent Wall St. Journal told how United Parcel Service tried to pay the Univ. of Wash. to lend its institutional credibility onto pro-corporate research. The formerly locally-owned UPS offered $2.5 million to the UW med school in ’95. But instead of directing its gift toward general areas of study, UPS insisted the money go toward the work of UW orthopedic surgeon Stanley J. Bigos. The WSJ claimed UPS liked Bigos because “his research has suggested that workers’ back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job.” The company’s fighting proposed tougher worker-safety laws, and wanted to support its claims with “independent” studies from a bigtime university that happenned to need the money. Negotiations with UW brass dragged on for two years, then collapsed. Bigos insists he wouldn’t have let UPS influence his work if he’d gotten its cash. But if companies can pick and choose profs already disposed to tell ’em what they wanna hear, “academic independence” becomes a bigger joke than it already is.

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Steve’s Broiler has lost its lease and closed. The 37-year-old downtown restaurant/ lounge was beloved by seniors, sailors, and punks for dishing out ample portions of good unpretentious grub and drinks, in a classic paneling-and-chrome-railing setting. (It was also the setting for Susan Catherine’s ’80s comic Overheard at America’s Lunch Counters.) The owners might restart if they can find another spot. It was the last tenant in the former Osborn & Ulland building, which will now be refitted for the typical “exciting new retail” blah blah blah…. Remember Jamie Hook’s Stranger piece last year about the Apple Theater, one of America’s last all-film porno houses? If you want to witness this landmark of archaic sleaze, better hurry. The Apple’s being razed soon for an affordable-housing complex incorporating the apartment building next door where the Pike St. Cinema was, and where the rock club Uncle Rocky’s is now. Rocky’s will close when the remodeling starts, and won’t be invited back (the housing people don’t like late-night loudness beneath residences).

MORE, MORE, MORE!: A recent Business Week cover story calls it “The Entertainment Glut.” I call it a desperate attempt by Big Media to keep control of a cultural landscape dividing and blossoming to a greater extent than I’d ever hoped. BW sez the giants (Disney, Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, et al.) are trying to maintain market share by invading one another’s genre turfs and cranking out more would-be blockbusters and bestsellers than ever before, to the point that none of them can expect anything like past profit margins. (Indeed, many of these “synergistic” media combos are losing wads of dough, losses even creative accounting can no longer hide.) It gets worse: Instead of adapting to the new realities of a million subcultures, the giants are redoubling their push after an increasingly-elusive mass audience. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book company scrapped over 100 planned “mid-list” titles to make up for losses on costly big-celeb books. BW claims the giants’ movie divisions are similarly “spending lavishly” on intended Next Titanics and trying “to stop producing modestly budgeted fare.” Their record divisions are dropping acts after one album, while ardently pushing the retro rockstar-ism of Britpop. The longer the giants try to keep their untenable business plans going, the better the opportunities for true indies in all formats–if the indies can survive the giants’ ongoing efforts to crowd ’em out of the marketplace.

(If Jean Godden can make personal appearances at coffee shops, so can I. I’ll be “guest barista” the evening of March 10 at Habitat Espresso, on Broadway near John. Mark your calendars.)

As of this writing, Misc. can’t see what the big deal is about a president who’s (allegedly) continued to behave like good-ole-boy politicians from all regions have been known to behave. At least, even if the worst current allegations hold up, it only means he’s conducted his affairs more discreetly than Wilbur Mills, more consensually than Bob Packwood, and with less potential damage to the republic than JFK (who, it’s largely acknowledged, carried on a long-term fling with a Mafiosa). Of course, JFK and even FDR didn’t have to deal with an out-for-blood industry of talk-radio goons, “Christian” TV demagogues, and rabid GOP hypocrites out to personally smash anyone who, like Clinton, even vaguely threatens their drive for unquestioned total domination. Hard to believe there was once a time when bigtime politicians were largely criticized over policy and job performance.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: If you’ve always wondered where the term “having Moxie” originated, or remember the word popping up in old MAD magazines, it happens to be the oldest brand name in the soft-drink biz. It started as a patent medicine, or “nerve food,” in Massachusetts back in 1884. When the 1907 Pure Food and Drug Act restricted the beverage maker’s claims that it could cure almost any ill (including loss of manhood, “paralysis, and softening of the brain”), Moxie was reformulated as a carbonated recreational drink. It continued to be advertised with images of vigorous health, leading the name to be associated with spunk and audaciousness. It was sold nationally, and at one point was bigger than Coke. But by the 1960s it had retreated back into a minor New England regional brand.

Now, the Redmond-based Orca Beverage Co. is locally distributing drinks under the Moxie name. There’s a cherry cola and a creme soda now, with an orange-creme flavor soon to follow. They’re tasty drinks, with strong flavors and light carbonation–but none of these is the original Moxie flavor, a root-beer-like concoction described (by some ex-Bostonians I’ve met) as an acquired taste. That one’s not being brought out west, at least not now.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The slick Oly-based rockzine Axis just keeps getting better. The January issue includes brisk reports about Mudhoney, Nomeansno, Engine 54, Sky Cries Mary, an alternative-scene barter system, a recent Oly spoken-word fest starring Lydia Lunch, the Swiss suicide cult Solar Temple, and the cannibal-movie classic Motel Hell; plus kissable b/w photos and a raunchy-yet-innocent comic by Tatiana Gill. (Free at the usual dropoff spots, or $2 from 120 State Ave. NE #181, Olympia 98501.)

VISIONS: Another Super Sunday’s come and gone. While watching the game in a friendly neighborhood bar, I started wishing for more public video-viewing opportunities. Almost all bars and restaurants with TVs will only let you watch sports on them, with only the scattered X-Files or Melrose Place viewing parties for exceptions. I’d like to see a room with a satellite dish and different monitors in different corners, showing all kinds of fare in a convivial party atmosphere. People could join in to hiss at soap villains, cringe at awful music videos, see who can get the most obscure Simpsons gags, take umbrage at Sam Donaldson, and view shows unavailable in parts of town (Comedy Central’s South Park, the International Channel’s foreign music shows) or on any local cable (the Game Show Channel’s Gong Show reruns). The only fare you couldn’t legally show in such a place would be movies from home videocassettes, most of which aren’t licensed for public screening.

IN A STEW: Seattle magazine’s looking for “The Martha Stewart of Seattle.” The mag seeks a super-cook or super-decorator, but I think the title should go to somebody who, like Stewart, has forged a highly lucrative self-made-woman career by ironically promoting a fetishized version of old-fashioned stay-home-hausfrau values. Hmm, who do we know in this state who might qualify? Linda Smith perhaps, or maybe Ellen Craswell? If you can think of someone similar who lives a little closer to town, report it at clark@speakeasy.org.

HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)

Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.

Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”

`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…

WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.

Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.

I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.

(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)

Welcome back to MISC., the pop-cult column that thinks it’s finally figured the reasoning behind the Spice Girls’ second CD cover, which looks almost exactly like the first one except the letters SPICE are tall instead of wide. It’s probably a subtle claim that these women can get anything elongated. Elsewhere in gender-land…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: By now even the most budget-minded among you probably have your clearance-sale ’98 wall calendars. You few remaining stragglers might consider the just-out Sensitive Geek Boys of Seattle calendar by Christina Malecka and Erika Rickel. Assorted sweet-faced models are photographed (by Trish Dickey and Cory Smith) exploring their feminine sides, in ways ranging from the sublime (smelling flowers, sewing) to the ridiculous (hugging at a “Pet Loss Grief Support Group”). Free at the Lava Lounge and elsewhere, or $6 from Rickel, SBRI, 4 Nickerson St. #200, Seattle 98109.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (at Larry’s Deli on 4th): “`Food’ Stamps Accepted Here!” Perchance a comment on the actual-food status of convenience store staples? Elsewhere in foodland…

PUT ‘EM UP, JOE: In the past couple of years, Metro route #2 has become a veritable study in contrasts for Seattle grocery fans. It passes by or within three blocks of the Plenty gourmet boutique in Madrona, the fancier-than-they-used-to-be Rogers on MLK Way and Red Apple on 15th, the already-mentioned-in-this-column Broadway QFC, the First Hill Shop Rite, the Pike Place Market, Belltown’s quite-fancier-than-it-used-to-be Dan & Ray’s, a smaller QFC, the great big Larry’s, the smallish lower Queen Anne Safeway, the fancy Queen Anne Thriftway, and the exquisite little jewel that is Ken’s Market.

And now the 2 goes right in front of the new Trader Joe’s gourmet convenience store at 1st W. and Galer. As you might expect from the slogan “Your Unique Grocery Store,” it’s from California (Pasadena to be exact). It’s got 113 stores scattered across nine states; this is its seventh Washington outlet. In less than 5,000 square feet (a tenth the size of the Broadway QFC) it’s full of goodies for gourmands with more taste than time. Everything about the store’s designed to increase the company’s profit margins above industry average while offering near-supermarket prices. Fresh meat, produce, and dairy (those notoriously low-margin departments) are almost nonexistent. There’s no bulk bins, no on-premises butchers or sandwich makers, no deli counter, no magazines, few staple goods (sugar, flour, etc.), and few housewares. Just about everything’s prepackaged, and most of it’s under the chain’s own house brands (various ethnic-flavored items are branded Trader Jose’s, Trader Giotto’s, or Trader Ming). This cutesy, “informal” style extends to store design (wood-paneled interiors, fake-driftwood aisle signs) and flyers (set in the Times Roman font family, a la early desktop publishing). The merchandise mix emphasizes wine (natch), prepacked veggies and salads, ethnic rice mixes, trail mix, candy and cookies (like you’d find at Cost Plus), frozen entrees (many of them vegetarian), frozen seafood, canned fruits and juices, soups, organic cat food, cheese, fake milk, microbrew beer and pop (including Ernest Borgnine’s Coffee Soda!), canned unground coffee, and vitamins. Unlike the monster-marts, Trader Joe’s doesn’t try to be everything to everybody. It just sells stuff that tastes good and/or lets you feel good.

THE SCIENCE OF THE LAMBS: Amid all the media furor over the threatened spread of sheep-like cloning to human subjects, there wasn’t much heard from people who might like it. Here are a few groups of potential supporters: Separatist lesbians who want reproduction without any involvement from men; bigots or twisted eugenicists dreaming of a super-race; medical-world types wishing to custom-engineer immunity to diseases (or to cultivate “spare parts” for transplants); sci-fi fans who’d like real-life mutant superheroes; techno-hippies seeking “the next plateau of human evolution;” rich people who want their own personages to live on; caste-society proponents who’d like a real Brave New World; fetishists who want to keep (or bring back) specific examples of human beauty. (Your question this week: Who’d you clone and why? Respond at clark@speakeasy.org.)

MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.

A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…

DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.

A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.