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HERE AT MISC., we continue to view with bemusement the twists of fate regarding our allegedly post-print-media era. Blockbuster Music on Lower Queen Anne now has huge window posters announcing “We Now Sell Books!” Amazon.Com Books’ stock sale is a big hit, despite the outfit’s lack of profits to date. Book superstore chains haven’t yet led to increased overall book sales (certainly not compared to all the increased retail square footage now devoted to books), but they’ve shaken up a hidebound industry and just might lead to the end of the bestseller mentality (it’s already happening in the record biz, with the same sales dollars now spread among many more releases).
And by the end of this month, local TV newscasts (not counting Northwest Cable News) will drop from a total of 13 hours per weekday (including two hours of 7 Live) down to 8.5, due to the second realignment of station ownership in two years and the return of CBS shows to KIRO. The decimation of the KSTW news operation (and smaller cutbacks at KIRO) leave some 58 station employees on the unemployment rolls. I can see it now: Blow-dried reporters on the sidewalk, in trenchcoats with white spots where station-logo patches used to be, holding up signs (printed on the backs of old cue cards) reading WILL COVER CAR CRASHES FOR FOOD.
UPDATE #1: Virtual i-O, local makers of the Virtual i-Glasses video headsets discussed here a few months back, has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-image experience, but (according to a Puget Sound Biz Journal piece) the company couldn’t get the quality and reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the company’s leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology.
UPDATE #2: The coffeehouse cereal fad quietly faded like a soggy bowl of Total. The espresso corner in the U District’s Red Light clothing store’s dropped its cereal selections; the downtown Gee Whiz cafe’s cut its own golden-bowl offerings down to a few top-rated brands.
ON THE RACKS #1: We’re still trying to make sense of People magazine’s “Sexy Moms” cover last month. They’re surprised moms can have sex appeal? The mag’s editors, like many Americans, must not realize that most people who have children have had sex first. And many of them even liked it.
ON THE RACKS #2: It’s been a quasi-frustratin’ year for this lover of obscure magazines, with the demise of the YNOT and ALFI stapled-goodie emporia. At least there’s the U-Village Barnes & Noble, where you can still get British Cosmopolitan, perhaps the sluttiest mainstream commercial women’s magazine published in the English language. Sample articles include “Why Bitches Get All the Best Men” and “The Single Woman’s Guide to the Men of Europe” (the latter complete with jokes about Bratwurst and “Nor-Dicks”). But the articles are just warm-ups for the little ads in the back of the book: phone astrology lines, phone sex lines for women, and more before-and-after implant photographs than you’d ever ever expect in the same mag with workplace-equality and anti-harassment essays in the front.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Want more proof computer geeks are the new idols? Just examine the new Think! brand “Proactive Energy” bar, using the old IBM slogan for its name and a Mac screen window on its label. Makers “Ph.D–Personal Health Development,” list a website (www.thinkproducts.com) but give no FDA-required city-state address (the website lists it as in Ventura, CA). It’s your basic exercise/ diet energy-bar thang, a fudgy-mediciny goo with a thin chocolaty coating. Mixed up in there are ginkgo biloba, choline, “complex peanut protein,” vitamins, herbs, and amino acids. It claims to “enhance the performance of your mind by promoting concentration, calmness, and stamina” if you eat one with water “30 minutes before using your brain.” But you ask, does it work? This column was written on one. Can you tell any difference?
MY ADORATION OF JACK BENNY notwithstanding, I decided years ago I wouldn’t rue or deny the inevitable entry into the fourties. I wouldn’t be like those pathetic boomers, forever striving to retain ever-fading remnants of youthful bodies and identities. (My recent diet-exercise regimen had nothing to do with staying young; I was as out-of-shape at 17 as I was last year.)
No, I plan to age disgracefully into a crochety old geezer. Having bosses younger than me, at a paper targeted at readers younger than me, has offered plenty of practice. “Back in my day Sonny, we had real music. Einstruzende Neubauten! Skinny Puppy! Throbbing-fuckin’-Gristle! That crap they listen to these days: Why, it’s just noise!”
I also plan to enjoy the collected experience of my years on Earth. A few years ago I wrote something called “Everything I Ever Really, Really Needed to Know I Learned on the Playground.” Since then I’ve learned a few more things, including the following:
HERE AT MISC. we’re trying to make sense of Nike’s reported flat sales trends, after years of huge growth. Is it the shoes? Is it the controversy over sub-subsistence pay for foreign laborers? Maybe it’s the ads that don’t try to sell any products, just the logo (not even the name!).
SIGN OF THE WEEK (one of the “Rules of Conduct” at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center): “#6. We want our guests to feel at home in the Game Center, so please practice daily hygeine and tidy up after yourself.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of the industrial-culture rag Voltage profiles three highly diverse Seattle bands–the ethereal Faith & Disease, the dark-techno Kill Switch… Klick, and the piously noisesome ¡TchKung! Even better is a piece on Project HAARP, the Army’s secret radiotransmitter base in Alaska. It’s equally skeptical of conspiracy theorists’ claims about the project and of the Pentagon’s denials. Free at the usual outlets or from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.
FLAKING OUT: Never thought I’d see it, but even the beloved institution of cereal has fallen to the horrid force that is “collectibles” speculation. Fueled by a couple of shrewd promoters trying to turn box collecting into the next big hoarding boom (to be surely followed by the inevitable bust, when foolish hoarders realize they’ll never unload their hoards for profit onto bigger fools), manufacturers have been toying with limited-run box designs, using some of the same tricks (like foil embossing) already used on comic books and sports cards. Now General Mills has come out with a Jurassic Park Crunch cereal (really Lucky Charms with dino shaped marshmallow bits), actually shouting on the box “Limited Collector’s Edition!” At least with all the BHT “added to packaging material to preserve freshness,” any unlucky box-hoarders will eventually be able to eat their losses.
GINSBERG WITHOUT TEARS: The local aging-boomer litzine Point No Point just came out with an Allen Ginsberg tribute by Stephen Thomas, who claimed “every left-of-center social movement since the ’50s is traceable back through Ginsberg’s poetic vision.” For good or ill, Thomas might be right.
In the months since his demise, I only found one obit (in The Nation) that emphasized his writing instead of just how cool a dood he was. This may be how he’d want to be remembered. He exemplified many annoying hipster trends: the incessant self-promotion, the championing of celebrity above artistry, the simplistic Hip vs. Square dichotomy, the concept of culture as something created exclusively in NY/LA/SF and merely consumed elsewhere. No wonder the folks at MTV loved him. He had the same business plan!
But there was more to Ginsberg than his carefully groomed icon-hood. There was his actual work–writings, speeches, performances. He championed not just gay rights but gay life. During the post-McCarthy nadir of American discourse, he wrote about forgotten or suppressed details of U.S. history. His pieces often lacked craftsmanship and “quality control” but oozed with exuberance, and thus at least indirectly inspired the punk/ DIY universe.
RAMPING UP: We’ll always remember the long-awaited opening of Moe’s in 1/94 as a special night. After almost two decades of playing mostly in tiny bars, rundown ballrooms, and basements, the “Seattle music scene” had a veritable palace, expensively built just for it. But all scenes change, and so it is here, with Moe’s life as a rock club ending next week. On the upside, the formerly much less palatial Off Ramp club’s about to reopen (pending those pesky Liquor Board bureaucrats) as the Sub Zero. When last written about in this space, it was announced the joint’s sale, remodeling, and reopening would take a little longer than first expected. As it turns out, a year longer. But much was done–it’s clean, and (thanx partly to an all-new floor) no longer smells of stale beer! The cafe part’s open; drinks and bands might commence any week now.
(If you attend only one column-anniversary bash this season, let it be the fantabuloso Misc.@11 party Sunday, June 8, 7:30 p.m. at Ace Studios Gallery, 619 Western Ave., Third Floor.)
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)
MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.
His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.
WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.
THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,
LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.
Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.
It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”
HERE AT MISC. we’re bemused in a melancholy way by the new logo for the Landmark (ex-Seven Gables) theaters; imposed by their new owner, John Kluge’s Metromedia empire. It features the words “Landmark Theater Corporation” surrounding a hyperrealistic airbrush image of the Hollywood sign and palm trees. It precisely symbolizes that creepy showbiz “glamour” the Seven Gables indie-film citadels were always supposed to represent an alternative to. Speaking of the supposed Year of Independent Film…
BAD-MOON-RISIN’ DEPT.: Remember that lifetime-achievement Oscar to English Patient producer Saul Zaentz, the Hollywood establishment’s idea of a proper “independent” film guy? Admittedly, he’s generated some of the more interesting celluloid products of recent decades (Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But amid the peaens to Zaentz on the Oscar show and printed in newspaper tributes, John Fogerty was never mentioned.
Details of the Fogerty/ Zaentz fiasco have been disputed, in courts and elsewhere. The following is pretty much agreed on: Fogerty was underage when his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, signed with Zaentz’s Fantasy Records, then a small Frisco jazz label. The terms were typically awful for the period (Fogerty & co. got pathetic royalties, the label took all ownership to their songs). Creedence became one of the biggest-selling acts in rock history, enabling Zaentz to expand his record empire (Fantasy now owns over a dozen labels, including the catalogs of R&B legends Chess and Specialty), and from there to enter the movie biz.
Instead of offering the band a better contract, Zaentz convinced them to invest their royalties at a Nassau tax-shelter bank. The bank disappeared in the ’70s, taking the band’s money with it. Fogerty left the business and moved to Oregon, living off the cents-on-the-dollar settlement he got years later from Fantasy’s lawyers. When he returned with a solo LP in ’86, Fantasy sued him, claiming one of his new songs sounded too much like one of his Fantasy-owned old songs. Fogerty’s first new record in a decade will be out in a month or two. Since he won’t perform any Fantasy-owned Creedence songs on tour, this little dispute will probably come up again. We’ll see if Zaentz (no longer active in Fantasy’s day-to-day management) gets mentioned in connection with the hassle. In any event, the story should serve as an object lesson for anyone who believes indie media operators are always more honorable than the majors. Speaking of pop history…
OTHER WORLDS, OTHER SOUNDS: Esquire magazine’s been so pathetic in recent years, it’s amazing its lounge-culture cover story turned out not-half-bad. Pity it didn’t more thoroughly explore one curious quotation from critic Milo Miles, complaining that the retro-cats were championing a worldview the Beats and hippies had desired to destroy. That’s true, but that’s also one of the movement’s positive points.
At its broadest definition, lounge culture is the culture of the first Age of Integration. It’s Sammy Davis refusing to perform at hotels that made him eat in the kitchen. It’s Sinatra demanding to tour with an integrated band. It’s Juan Garcia Esquivel, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Eartha Kitt, Yma Sumac, Perez Prado, Sergio Mendes, Nat “King” Cole, Desi Arnaz, Vikki Carr, Harry Belafonte, and Quincy Jones. (In comparison, can you name more then four stars of color in the past quarter-century of “progressive rock”?) It’s the sounds and sights of other lands, curated and juxtaposed to jostle the audience’s expectations (as opposed to the smiling-peasant complacency undertoning much of today’s “world beat” industry.) It reflects an aesthetic of respect for oneself and others, and also a postwar philosophy that personal and social progress were not only necessary but possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of posing and play-acting among today’s cocktail kids. But within the most “shallow” pose, as gay-camp afficianados know, lies a truth, or at least a desire for a truth. In the lounge revival, it’s a desire for seemingly long-lost ideals of beauty, adventure, community, mutual respect (the only source of true cultural diversity), economic advancement, and fun. Locally, that wish for a brighter tomorrow was and still is best expressed in the legacy of the Seattle World’s Fair. More about that next week.
MISC. WISHES A FOND ADIEU to Courtney Love, who (if you believe the British papers) is apparently leaving Seatown for good in order to further her new career as a Hollywood professional celebrity. Unlike some local print outlets, this column has prepared for the loss by building up an ample supply of non-Love-related items, and hence will not run short of supplies for at least the near future.
IN OTHER BABY-DOLL NEWS: Kelly, billed by Mattel as “Barbie’s Baby Sister,” is already showing signs of rebellion against her careerist, acquisition-obsessed sibling. Evidence: the new “Potty Training Kelly” model, shown in Saturday-morning TV ads “tinkling” into her own toddler-size toilet. Besides demystifying the mechanics of female elimination for young male cartoon viewers, the doll allows females just beyond toilet-training age to act out on an inanimate victim any traumas their own moms had imposed on them, potentially preventing deep psychological issues that might surface later in life.
CATHODE CORNER #1 (via Sherman Lovell): “Am I the only one who’s annoyed by the new KCTS VJs? All three of them are attractive, congenial sorts, but they don’t really seem to have any purpose other than to say `Wasn’t that great?’ and `Coming up is…’ If we have to have VJs on the PBS station, can’t we get Daisy Fuentes?” (Actually, they serve a third purpose: to give advertisers–oops, “underwriters”–more noticeable between-show spots to buy.)
CATHODE CORNER #2 (via Michelle Ellefson): “The KONG commercials on KING are driving me nuts… I’m just hoping (in vain, I know) this isn’t some dumb King Kong gorilla thing. The last thing this city needs is an inflatable gorilla on the Space Needle, and that’s what I see coming.” (It’s a UHF TV station out of Everett, to launch later this year after being in the works for nearly a decade. While nominally independently owned, it has some sort of joint marketing or programming arrangement with KING, just within the letter of FCC regs against one company owning two TV stations in the same metro area.)
THE BITS AND THE BYTES WERE THERE: The UW Computer Fair attracted all the usual exhibitors again this year. There were CAD/CAM graphics-software vendors, MS Windows training seminars, mouse-pad imprinters, and scads of Internet service providers. What I missed were the unusual exhibitors. After peaking earlier in the decade, the number of truly innovative or offbeat vendors at the fair has shrunk, perhaps due to the veering of PC-related business back toward corporate markets after a prior flowering of hobbyist/ home action. The most notable exception was one Tom Bourne of Bothell selling $79.95 handcrafted wood computer mice, items looking less like electronics and more like something fallen off an old Chris-Craft yacht. Bourne’s silly product name, “Li’l Woody,” doesn’t do this elegant product justice. (See for yourself at www.isomedia.com/homes/lilwoody.)
THE NAME GAME: There’s a (quite impressive) record store in Belltown called Wall of Sound. As of this week, there’s also a music-news website in Bellevue (part of Paul Allen’s Starwave organization) called www.wallofsound.com, which might get into selling records later on. Wall of Sound (the store) is now talking about possible legal action against Wall of Sound (the website). As far as I know, neither outfit ever discussed use of the name with record producer Phil Spector, credited with coining the phrase circa ’61.
TRIDENT IMPORTS, R.I.P.: Beyond the competition from out-of-state chains like Cost Plus and Pier 1, Trident was stuck with the de-romanticization of imported household goods. At one time, when most furniture, clothes and even shoes were still made in America, the first Cocktail Generation regularly sought for moderately-priced exotica to furnish its otherwise lookalike tract homes. Back then, the word “import” signified something more than mere pennies-a-day production wages. It meant affordable beauty, an unthreatening glimpse of an older and more rooted culture, even if in the form of a Tiki-god lamp fixture or a bamboo throw rug. There’s been lotsa talk about big, big development projects on Trident’s waterfront site, but you just know whatever goes in there won’t be half as much fun.
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that groaned and laffed with the rest of you during the media’s recent sheep-cloning headlines, but didn’t see any magazine use the most obvious such headline: “The Science of the Lambs.”
CATHODE CORNER UPDATE: Cox Communications will now be buying KIRO-TV instead of KSTW. Viacom made a last-minute deal to grab KSTW instead, and will shift its UPN network affiliation to channel 11; thus freeing channel 7 to again run CBS shows. Sources at both stations claim to be at best bemused, at worst befuddled, by the actions of the various out-of-state parties in this mega-transaction (including KSTW’s current owner Gaylord Entertainment and KIRO’s current owner A.H. Belo Corp., which started this by dumping KIRO so it could buy KING). All the parent companies’ PR people vow nothing but total confidence in the stations’ local managements; but the way station staffs were pushed, pulled, and kept in the dark during the wheelin’ ‘n’ dealin’, don’t be surprised if a few heads start rollin’.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Don’t know what to make of Klang (“A Nosebleed-High Journal of Literature and the Arts”), August Avo and Doug Anderson’s curious four-page litzine. The current issue (billed as “Vol. 3.14,” though I’ve never seen one before) purports to reprint an excerpt from a best-selling Russian novel; but the piece, “A Day in the Blood Line,” reads more like a smartypants American’s clever take on Russian lit, both of the classic and Soviet-era-underground varieties. (Of course, I could be wrong about this.) Free where you can find it or by email request to bf723@scn.com… 59cents (“The #1 Rock and Roll Magazine”) is an utterly charming photocopy-zine side project of the band Blue Collar. The current ish, officially #16 (though I’ve never seen a prior ish of this one, either), includes microbrew taste tests (juxtaposed with a screed warning “drinking till you puke or pass out is not rebellious”), an anti-Christian rant, and a brief rave for the Girl Scouts for removing the word “cheerful” from their pledge. Free where you can find it or from P.O. Box 19806, Seattle 98109…
ANNALS OF MERCHANDISING: Lilia’s Boutique, the fancy women’s-clothing store in Basil Vyzis’ condo tower next to the Vogue, started to hold a going-out-of-business sale. Soon after the SALE signs appeared in the windows, representatives of the real-estate company handling the building’s retail leases taped a “Notice to Comply or Vacate” paper to the store’s front door overnight. The notice told Lilia’s essentially to stop going out of business or be forced out of business. Apparently, there were terms in Lilia’s lease forbidding “distress sales” or any public acknowledgement that business conditions in the building were less than perfect. Anyhow, the dispute got quietly resolved, and Lilia’s got to continue going the way of 80 percent of new U.S. businesses.
YOU MAY ALREADY BE A FOOL!: Like many of you, I just got a bold postcard announcing I’ve become a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winner–“pending selection and notification.” The postcard alerted me to watch the mail for the “prize announcement” soon to follow. What followed, of course, was yet another entry form with its accompanying sheet of magazine-subscription stamps. While I love much of the PCH program (the stamps, the Prize Patrol commercials, the cute interactive aspect of cutting and licking and pasting the entry forms), the just barely non-fraudulant pronouncements in its pitches has always struck me as unnecessarily taking us customers as gullible saps. A Time tote bag oughta be incentive enuf, right?
Then I realized who gets PCH mailings: People who’ve subscribed to magazines the company bought mailing lists from. In other words, readers. According to hi-brow commentators like Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, the very act of reading somehow mystically imparts taste and discernment onto the reader, regardless of content. Yet PCH became a national institution by treating folks who regularly pay for the writen word as potential suckers for weaselly-constructed promises of certain wealth. In this case, I’d believe money rather than ideology, and here the money loudly cautions against blind faith in The Word without specifying which words. (More on this topic next week.)
MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…
SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…
IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.
The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”
‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.â€
MISC. MUST BELATEDLY mourn the passing of Vox Populi Gallery, for nearly three years the town’s best locale for exciting, fun, provocative, and just plain rockin’ painting, photography, and comic art. Writer Grant Alden, who co-founded the gallery with Carl Carlson, has been living out of town working magazine jobs the past several months. Alden decided in mid-January to cash in his interests and leave the art-selling biz entirely. Seattle still needs a space like VP.
TUBE TIES: The pending sale of KSTW to Atlanta’s Cox company means for the first time since the Bullitt sisters sold KING, we’ll have a woman-owned TV station. The Cox sisters of Atlanta were listed in Parade as among the world’s 20 richest women, up with the likes of Queen Elizabeth. The Cox heiresses’ managers built a small southern newspaper chain into a media mini-giant, from the Auto Trader magazines to film producers Rysher Entertainment. Their Atlanta monopoly daily has given my ex-UW colleague, editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovitch, a prominent and relatively censor-free forum. By selling channel 11, Gaylord Entertainment‘s giving a clear no-confidence vote in CBS’s drive to avoid permanent also-ran status. It’s a vote I hadn’t expected, since Gaylord and Westinghouse (CBS’s new owners) are partners in the Nashville Network. (Westinghouse was recently rumored to be considering buying Gaylord, with or without KSTW.)
IN A HAZE: I’m still thinking about the pathetic spectacle that was the Jimi Hendrix statue dedication late last month, in front of Audio Environments Inc.‘s Broadway offices. It’s an extremely hideous artifact, made with less artistry than seen on a Franklin Mint collector’s plate. Some folks saw irony in the statue being commissioned and totally funded by AEI, a background-music company. I didn’t see that as much as I saw it as yet another instance of white boomers fetishizing the guy as an icon for their notions of the black man as sexy savage. I’m positive Hendrix, an intelligent and innovative artist who seemed to be slumming in rock for the money, would’ve eventually spurned that image and settled into a prog-jazz career (maybe finding a jazz-rock melange that would’ve prevented the development of fusion). We must also remember he left Seattle at 18 and only performed here again as a touring act. From all accounts, he found the Seattle of his day a town with neither the racial openness nor the artistic opportunities he needed. For local boomers to keep enshrining him as the city’s pride n’ joy is something he’d probably have had a heck of a time getting comfortable with.
PRESENT TENSE: After years of wanting to, I finally got in this year to the Seattle Gift Show, a trade show for retailers and wholesalers of less-than-necessary merchandise. It was just as great as I’d imagined–a gigantic bazaar, taking up the whole Convention Center and two Seattle Center buildings to boot; full of booths hawking the widest array of stuff. There were acres of “country craft” baskets, Husky sweatshirts, “Over The Hill” bras designed to droop, small-penis-joke greeting cards, Absolutely Fabulous fridge magnets, cocoa mix from an outfit called Pure Decadence, landmarks-of-hockey-map jigsaw puzzles, Alaska souvenir pennants, men’s-restroom plastic miniatures (complete with digitized flushing sounds when you press a button), bonsai mini-fountains, angel statues, Prozac/ happy-face T-shirts, Russian dolls, Men of Africa calendars, and more. One booth offered the perfect bachelor-pad accessory, the Moon Lamp (a milky-white large plastic globe emanating spots of pastel light). An Issaquah outfit called Loveable Chocolates offered chocolate and white-chocolate novelty gifts in assorted shapes, even as a set of dentures (“We sell a lot to dentists,” the woman at the booth claimed).
But the item that might most interest some Stranger readers is Magnetic Jewelry, from the Gravity Free Factory (an NYC-founded outfit with a new Seattle office). It’s a line of stud, crystal, and spike-shaped face jewelry giving the appearance of piercing with no holes, thanks to a second magnetized piece of metal you wear on the other side of your ear, lip, or nostril. (No other applicable body parts were mentioned in the brochure or at the booth.)
MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)
DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.
WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”
HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.
So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).
As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.
ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”
‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”
(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)
NFL Films’ 16mm Heroics:
The Movies of Champions
Original online essay, 1/28/97
As a U.S. Male who came of age in the ’70s, it seemed pro football was always with us, and so was its official biographer, NFL Films. In schools, at church teen retreats, on the lonely late-afternoon weekend TV slots now occupied by infomercials, NFL Films’ half-hour reels of grainy 16mm film were ubiquitous, with their pompous narration and brassy music scores.
So it’s surprising to learn that American football, a major college and high-school sport since the 1890s, was a decidedly secondary attraction as a pro sport, far less popular than baseball, until the ’60s. The pro game’s explosion had three main causes: TV coverage, the NFL-AFL merger, and the evangelizing artistry of NFL Films.
The early to mid ’60s was a golden age for sports documentaries, thanks largely to the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras with advanced lenses and film stocks. The surfing film The Endless Summer was a hit in theaters; Warren Miller’s skiing films drew roadshow crowds across the northern U.S. and in Canada. Ed Sabol, a Philadelphia businessman with no pro filmmaking experience, sent in a blind bid to shoot the official filmed record of the 1962-63 NFL championship game. The next year, Sabol sent crews to every NFL game, editing the footage into a catalog of highlight reels. By 1965 Sabol convinced the league’s team owners to buy his company and keep him in charge of it. Ed’s son Steve Sabol, who in college was both a football player and an art major, soon became the studio’s creative czar. He still is.
From the start, Steve Sabol established a house style that would sell the game and the league, albeit by using the filmmaker’s art to bend the game’s story. Football is essentially a game of coaching and planning, with squads trying to either complete or stop fully choreographed five-second plays. But Steve Sabol’s guys presented instead a game of individual heroics.
“We emphasize the struggle of a game rather than the strategy,” Sabol explained in a recent phone interview. “We portray the game as a passion. When I was a [college] player, the game was only shown from the top, from cameras in the grandstands. I wanted to show the muscles bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. There are two spheres in sport; there’s one sphere where things are measured by seconds and inches and yards, then there’s the sphere where things are measured by heart and guts.
“When we started, our goal was to create an image for the game; to show sport at its most passionate and visceral level. But at the time we were just a bunch of young guys who loved to make movies and loved pro football and wanted to communicate that love to an audience.”
The first film released under the NFL Films name, They Call It Pro Football (commissioner Pete Rozelle called it the best sports movie he’d ever seen), started with a booming intro (written by Steve) that set the stage for three decades of histronics: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown… A call. The ball is snapped and the play continues. A drama of man on man and a race against the clock. It’s precision, persistance, power. The unleashed speed of the kickoff. The whistling feet of a great runner. The reckless fury of a goal-line stand. The crowning glory of a winning touchdown. The swelling roar of the crowd… This is pro football, the sport of our time.” (These and countless later, equally momentous lines were delivered with booming stoicism by ex-Philly newscaster John Facenda, who died in 1984 from the cigarettes that had given his voice its trademark gritty rasp.)
Facenda’s voice and the stirring martial music (first assembled from stock-music selections, since the ’70s taken from a library of original orchestral tracks) accompanied footage that used every known sports-film trick and many tricks NFL Films invented. A typical segment of a film might cut from overhead shots to field shots to cutaways of anxious fans to wired-for-sound coaches’ exhortations to reverse-angle replays to super slo-mo shots made with a mammoth 600-mm telephoto lens to tackle shots pumped up with highly exaggerated sound effects.
Even the studio’s “humor” reels were rough-hewn and overblown, with Mel Blanc giving the only unfunny performances of his career by means of trying-too-hard-to-be-wacky gag voices.
As the NFL grew in prestige and popularity (if not in intellectual respect), NFL Films became an institution within an institution. Between seasons it churned out a few films on other sports, commercial and industrial films, and even a few music videos (for Slayer and Bruce Springsteen). It was supposed to make a propaganda film saluting the US military’s work in the 1991 Gulf War, but the deal fell through. And it’s been called upon to replicate its style in movies about the sport (Semi-Tough, Brian’s Song, Black Sunday,Paper Lion, Everybody’s All-American) and in last year’s Nike commercials about pee-wee football.
While the league itself is in trouble on several fronts (greedy owners, unpopular team moves), NFL Films is as big as ever. Today’s NFL Films is a 200-employee outfit in its own office complex behind a New Jersey shopping mall, with its own film labs, editing suites, soundstages, and vaults (Sabol claims the only human event more thoroughly documented on film than NFL football is World War II). It sends at least two camera people and four support staff to every game. Everything but the in-studio narration segments is still shot on film, though some editing is now done on video with telecine color correction (I prefer the more mythic look of the older films, with more grain and washed-out colors). The footage they shoot is edited into weekly shows for ESPN and HBO (coaches’ and players’ cusswords are still bleeped on the HBO shows), annual highlight reels for each team, plus several home videos a year, occasional TNT specials, and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special. The 98-piece London Symphonic Orchestra records two sessions’ worth of background music for NFL Films every year.
The NFL Films look has influenced major filmmakers; Steve Sabol loves to tell how Sam Peckinpah publicly noted “the way we used the camera at different speeds, the editing and the intensity of the violence as an influence on how he did the end of The Wild Bunch.” But the thing’s really a universe of its own. By giving heroic treatment to players whose faces can’t even be seen on TV, it’s forged an audience intimacy the real game can’t provide. As Sabol calls it, “What we are is storytellers and mythmakers.”
(Some selected NFL Films video releases: Feel the Power, Idol Makers, NFL Throwbacks, NFL Talkin’ Follies, and The NFL’s Greatest Moments.)
WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.
* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.
* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.
* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.
All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.
* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)
* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.
* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).
Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?
* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”
`MISC.’ GLADLY LEAVES behind the Year of ’96 Tears and heads face-forward into a time of uncertainty in many aspects of our civic culture. Three months ago, the regional architecture rag Arcade ran a story called “Is Seattle Losing It?” The piece was predicated on the Commons defeat, which I called a victory for city-dwellers and they called a defeat for planners and dreamers. Since then, my faith in local voters’ priorities was further affirmed by the transit vote, which will add immeasurably to regional liveability.
THEN CAME the dueling-stadia debacle. Since the Mariners’ and Seahawks’ demands and responses to those demands seem to change several times daily, there’s no way to predict how it’ll turn out. It should’ve been expected, tho’. Sports-superstar salaries continue to skyrocket, while sports TV ratings have been fractured by cable. Since team owners won’t give up their private jets, their only new-income sources (besides team-logo products) are to sop up additional stadium revenue (through high prices, luxury boxes, etc.) and to slash stadium costs (by getting taxpayers to foot the bill).
It’s all coming to a head now because some U.S. Senators threaten legislation this next session to stop localities from issuing tax-exempt bonds for stadia. So if the owners are gonna get their big public subsidy, they’ve gotta get it now. Hence, the PR blitzes, threats, and crocodile tears to cajole our leaders and us to fork over a staggering half-billion. That’s $100 (plus future bond interest) for every Washingtonian. And it still won’t solve Big Sports’ real problem–runaway costs in the face of heightened competition for entertainment and ad bucks. The sports biz hasta get its own house in order; then it can invest its own dough into new houses based on the basic risk-and-return principles that got these owners rich in the first place. Besides, there’s something annoying about the sense of bland “luxury” in the drawings of the proposed new Hawk stadium, something deadeningly Commonsesque.
MEANWHILE, the side of Seattle Stranger readers are expected to care about has hit its own doldrums, as Kathleen Wilson deftly analyzed here last month. The major record companies, MTV, and commercial radio have succeeded at killing “alternative” music by ignoring or mishandling today’s more original artists in favor of promoting the most formulaic, derivative bands. (How can anything called “Blur” be distinctive? How can anything called “Garbage” be really good?) That, and the maturing of the late-’80s music scenesters beyond prime moshing age, has left a distinct malaise over the local scene. Many of the more promising 1993-94 bands have broken up. Others are wallowing in the purgatory of record-label nonsupport. The three top local clubs get their biggest draws from touring acts. Everybody from the NY Times to Time has noted how the latest Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Presidents discs are vastly underselling their predecessors.
But they’re underplaying the fact that overall record sales are holding steady, despite the drop in superstar sales. This means more listeners are listening to a wider variety of stuff, not just the same few hyped celebrities. For everyone except the major labels and the celeb-obsessed media, this is good news. It’s good for musicians, for indie labels, for the stores that bother to stock indie labels, for clubs, for fans who prefer non-arena venues, for publications like this that tell you who the heck all these touring indie bands are, and especially for my oft-stated ideal of a decentralized culture, where smaller groups of people are into things they really like instead of following the dictates of mass marketing. This is, at least on one level, what the Seattle music scene had been all about–not providing material for the rock star machine, but building an alternative to the rock star machine. To quote one of Bruce Pavitt’s early zines, “A decentralized cultural network is obviously cool. Way cool.” When the dust settles from this industrywide reorganization, I fully expect Seattle’s bands, managers, and labels to be better equipped than most for a post-superstar world. (And don’t worry about the Soundgarden guys; they can always sell more of their band-photo phone cards thru their fan club.)
AS LONGTIME MISC. READERS know, I love snow in Seattle. That pre-Thanksgivin’ white surprise we had was a perfect example. It kept Eastsiders out of town while blessing urban denizens with a two-day-duration Wonderland of brightly altered vistas. Its glistening blanket offered a temporary respite from our normal Seasonal Affective Disorder-inducing grayout conditions. It created an instant holiday, a Jubilee interrupting the routines of work and school and shopping. It turned everyday life into an adventure, from Counterbalance snowboarding to parking-lot snowball fights. Yes, I know it was a horror for the homeless, but we oughta be taking better care of our brethern year-round anyway.
CATHODE CORNER: As you assuredly all know, Frasier contains enough Seattle inaccuracies to make a drinking game. (“Finish your glass if Niles pronounces Oregon “arra-gone.”) But even that didn’t prepare me for seeing John Mahoney, who plays Dad on the show, miss the following answer on Jeopardy!: “This Seattle-based coffee chain takes its name from the first mate in Moby Dick.” Speaking of local landmarks…
WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH THE AVE: No merchant-sponsored rent-a-thugs harassing the street kids will improve the currently sorry state of U District retail. The District’s problems go back a decade, to when Ave landlords decided to jack up rents in one big hike. Longtime indie businesses were replaced by chains. Some of those, like Crown Books and Godfather’s Pizza, then bugged out of their leases at first opportunity). Other stores spent so much on rent, they cut back on interior improvements, merchandise, personnel, etc. Meanwhile, the long-slumbering U Village blossomed into a shopping theme park for the Volvo set. The Ave has risen and fallen several times before. It can rise again. But strong-arm tactics won’t do it; indeed, they’d just make the street’s young-adult target market feel unwelcome. Speaking of questionable neighborhood “renewals”…
WANTON-DESTRUCTION DEPT.: The end of Belltown’s 11-year artist-housing experiment SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers, named years before the Gulf War) and its downstairs eatery neighbor Cyclops had been rumored for over a year. Now it’s official, with MUP boards announcing plans to raze the lo-rise for condos. Cyclops’ owners are already looking for a new restaurant site, perhaps in Fremont. As for the much-photographed golden Jell-O molds gracing the SCUD exterior these past five years, no fate has been announced. I’d have ’em auctioned off to benefit new artist housing (and I mean real artist housing, not the millionaire penthouses sometimes promoted under that term). Speaking of goodbyes…
`PANDEMONIUM,’ 1992-96: Most of what I’ll miss about the idiosyncratic music monthly had already disappeared from its pages in recent months: The schmooze-free gossip column, the Tacoma-centric features, the odd columns like “Town of the Month.” ‘Twas sad to see the tabloid’s “Final Print Issue” carry a Seattle instead of a Tacoma mailing address. Seattle Square, a budding commercial Web company, has bought the Pandemonium name and will now use it for music review and interview pages on its site. Speaking of what’s-in-a-name…
INTO THE DRINK: In the spirit of Husky Cola (that early-’90s fundraising soda for UW athletics) comes Keiko Draft Root Beer, from Newport, OR. Every can bears the image of America’s most famous killer whale, who starred in the two Free Willy films and now lives in a rehab tank at Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium. An unspecified “portion of the proceeds” from the pop has been pledged to the foundation paying for Keiko’s veterinary treatment. I’ve only seen the stuff in regular, not diet, so if you consume too much you could become, you know… There’s also Keiko Brand coffee, but I’m still holding to my no-coffee-jokes policy.
ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: Because he’s just a commontator.
YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT FOR XMAS: Your suggestions for the year-end Misc. In/Out list. Send ’em to clark@speakeasy.org. ‘Til then, consider these words by ex-Philly restaurant critic Jim Quinn: “Never eat in a restaurant where the menu is larger than the table, the pepper mill larger than your date, and the baked potato larger than your steak.”
