MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.

MISC. DOESN’T KNOW how to start this week’s item collection, with a touch-O-bemusement (the Jack Daniel’s Faux Faulkner writing contest limiting entries to 500 words or less? Bill couldn’t write a want ad that short!) or a solemn pledge (Guaranteed: Absolutely nothing about the Baby Boomers turning 50!).

SPACE PROBES: I know this is Anna Woolverton’s department but I gotta mention the gorgeous new Sit & Spin band room. A more perfect homey-glitz look I’ve never seen, and how they made a concrete box sound so good I’ll never know. Seattle band spaces never get bigger (at least not until this year’s planned RKCNDY remodel) but they do get better. Meanwhile, Beatnix (ex-Tugs, ex-Squid Row, ex-Glynn’s Cove) suddenly went the way of 80 percent of new small businesses; it’ll be back with new owners and probably a new name after a remodel. And there was big fun a couple weeks back at the reopened Pioneer Square Theater; whenSuper Deluxe sang their Xmas song about asking Santa for a skateboard and only getting a stupid sweater, the teen punx drenched the band members with sweaters. With occasional all-ages shows continuing at the Velvet Elvis that means there’s real punk now at both former homes of Angry Housewives, the punk parody stage musical that delighted smug yuppie audiences from 1983 to 1989.

TYPO-GRAPHY: I’m developing a theory that certain grammatical errors come in and out of fashion. F’rinstance, people in many stations of life still use “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”) when they mean “its” (the possessive). A year or two back there was a similar fad of spelling “-ies” plurals as “y’s” (i.e., “fantasy’s”), but it didn’t catch on very far. The incorrect phrase “A Women” was seen about a year ago in a Wash. Free Press headline. Then earlier this month the phrase showed up in a Sylvia strip. Even in hand-drawn comics dialogue, people seem to be falling back on the computer-spell-checker excuse (“it’s a real word, just the wrong word”). Either that, or cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s succumbed to the notion of “Women” as a Borglike collective entity.

MATERIAL ISSUE: As a tangental allegation to her $750,000 LA wrongful-termination/ sex-discrimination lawsuit, ex-Maverick Records employee Sonji Shepherd charges the Madonna-owned label and its day-to-day boss Freddy DeMann with running a payola machine, bribing DJs and station managers to play Candlebox and Alanis Morrissette songs with cash, expense-paid trips to lap-dance clubs, and even flown-in visits from Heidi Fleiss’s call girls. Candlebox-haters shouldn’t go around high-fiving and shouting exhortations like “Knew it! They couldn’t have gotten big without extra help!” That’s the same line rock-haters offered during the ’50s payola scandals, when pay-for-airplay charges destroyed pioneer rock DJ Alan Freed. Also, Shepherd’s allegations are aimed at label staff; no band members are charged with committing or knowing about anything unlawful.

NAKED TRUTH DEPT.: Ongoing science exhibits don’t often get reviewed in papers like this, but the best can give as much fun and insight-into-reality as any performance-art piece. My current all-time fave: the naked mole-rats at the Pacific Science Center. These li’l four-inch-long, furless pink rodents from sub-Saharan Africa are the perfect straight-edge punk mascot animals, the ultimate combination of cuteness and ferocity. They live totally underground, in networks of burrows that can be as big as six football fields. They’ve got an organized cooperative, matriarchal social structure (some dig, some walk backwards to shove dirt around, and the biggest ones shove dirt up through surface holes). They don’t drink. They’ve got huge long teeth that can chew through concrete. Their lips close behind their teeth. Science Center PR calls them “saber-toothed sausages.”

At the exhibit they live in a plexiglass-enclosed environment with clear plastic plumbing tubes to scurry around in. It may be impractical to get your own naked mole-rat colony (you’d have to specially import a queen and two or three breeding males, as well as build their elaborate home). But there’s plenty of other fun things you can make and do with science; an invitation elsewhere in this paper should help give you an incentive.

(Next week: A vilification of all those `Apple Computer death spiral’ media stories, and an appeal to Save The Blob.)

MISC. WAS BAFFLED by a notice on the Internet search site Yahoo! promising a link to a British nudist camp for transvestites. How can you be undressed and cross-dressed at the same time? Did the queens just wear wigs, and high heels? But on reading the “Garden of Eden” site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/R_Brett3/), the explanation was simple. By summer it’s a normal nonerotic family nudist camp. (As the site says, “Our club is widely recognised as being the in place to go for a fun time holiday.”) But during the miserable Welsh winter, it holds weekends for fully-cross-dressed closeted queens to express their lifestyles away from the general populace. You have three seconds to fantasize about Robert Morley types or the bluebloods from the movie Scandal sharing high tea in frilly lace things.

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a “No Food/Drink” sign outside a video arcade on University Way): “Thank You For Your Coordination.”

CATHODE CORNER: Wm. Bennett, the Bush Administration drone we’ve previously dissed for his dissing of trash TV, plans to turn his heavy-handed pieties into a cartoon show, Adventures from the World of Virtues. It’ll air on PBS, which Bennett had previously denounced as a waste of tax bucks. If I had kids I’d rather let ’em watch Melrose Place.

BACK INTO THE DRINK: Your fave bar or coffeehouse might soon stock the Canadian-made Jones Soda, the latest attempt at a Gen-X pop sold at microbeer prices (and distributed by microbeer jobbers). It’s got five fruity flavors, each with a different level of carbonation, dressed in as many as 56 different label photos including a pierced navel, a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a skateboard, barstools, an OPEN sign, a black fedora, and a Corvette logo. If you ignore the desperate-to-be-hip marketing the pop itself’s not bad, especially the cherry flavor.

DEAD AIR REDUX?: I do have nice things to say about the Weekly sometimes. F’rinstance, their Mike Romano got KUOW/KCMU boss Wayne Roth to quasi-confirm a rumor I’d published a couple months back, that Roth was considering killing KCMU and using the frequency for a classical format aimed at the affluent audiences corporate sponsors (oops, “underwriters”) love. (Roth’s office issued a statement claiming his Weekly statement only expressed speculation, not a firm policy decision.) There’s nothing wrong with KCMU’s programming or finances that can’t be traced to Roth’s mistaken belief that the station is, or should be, his personal bureaucratic turf. Public broadcasting, when it’s really public, isn’t a private business and shouldn’t be run as one. It’s a trust between a dedicated programming team and a closely-involved community of listeners.

CLUB ME: F’r another instance, a Weekly brief last month casually revealed the mysterious “Erik Shirley” lurking behind the scenes at Moe’s was the son of Jon Shirley, prominent ex-Microsoft/ Radio Shack exec, who in turn has a bit of investment in the joint. I can’t imagine a Radio Shack vet caring about music, ‘cept those cool ol’ stereo-separation LPs. Besides, if Moe’s was led by somebody who knew tech, they wouldn’t have entrusted their first live Internet concert (with the Presidents on 12/31) to Spry/CompuServe and Xing StreamWorks, the outfits behind the Paramount’s Cyberian Rhapsody fiasco.

MISC.’S TOP 7: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, dir. Nelson Periera dos Santos (New Yorker Video), the greatest all-nude Amazon cannibalism comedy ever made… The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, dir. Dave Borthwick (Manga Entertainment Video)… Safeway coupon books… Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford (Faber & Faber)… The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, Jeff Kisseloff (Viking)… Blue Raspberry Squeeze Pop, the candy that looks like a tube of Prell… Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (BBC/ Discovery Channel miniseries)…

MISC.’S BOTTOM 6: Watch This! (KING-TV)… AJ’s Time Travelers (KTZZ)… CompuServe’s Usenet censorship (one more reason to switch to an indie Internet provider)… Double-cross-platform software (stuff that’s promoted as running on different operating systems but really only works on Windows)…The NBA’s attempt to shut unofficial fan websites… Betting on the Bud Bowl (it’s pre-scripted! You could be betting with the film editor’s cousin).

As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists

THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.

KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.

ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).

And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…

THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).

AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”

HERE AT MISC. we’re disappointed but not surprised to hear the B’vue Square FAO Schwarz store held a name-the-bear-statue contest and couldn’t come up with anything better than “Latte.” Speaking of names…

DREAM OF FIELDS I: Now that the building what replaced the Coliseum is now called KeyArena, what’ll we call the old Seattle Center Arena? The Thunderbirds’ pocket schedule simply calls it “Old Arena.” I’ve heard others call it the “RockArena,” its temporary name for the past few Bumbershoots. Its original, pre-World’s Fair name, the Seattle Ice Arena, is now inappropriate since the T-Birds will play all future games at KeyArena (unless any playoff games conflict with Sonics home dates). Cobain’s last local gig was there, but it might be tacky to rename the place after him. If you’ve any other ideas, lemme know at the Misc. World HQ website, <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>. Speaking of second-string sports sites…

DREAM OF FIELDS II: The Seattle Sounders want their own $25 million, 20,000-capacity, natural-turf soccer stadium. The unofficialSounders website shows a picture of a grand old UK soccer field and waxes on about the dream of a “natural turf soccer pitch in Seattle,” then quietly notes that the team’s only looked so far at potential sites in Bellevue, Kent and SeaTac, where the team and private investors could put up a whole complex of adult and youth soccer facilities. I always say, if it’s not in Seattle it’s not “in Seattle.” Let’s scatter youth and amateur soccer fields throughout the county, but have the stadium in town. It could even replaceHigh School Memorial Stadium (now a shoddy reminder of public-school budget cuts), either at its current site or at the ex-bus barn across the street. If we could get private money to put up a cool neo-classical soccer stadium, then rent it out during high-school football season at a fee no higher than the school district’s cost to maintain and upgrade Memorial Stadium (the WWII memorial parts can be moved or rebuilt), we’d have a clear winner–no penalty kicks required.

FOURTH & LONG: The Seahawks’ attendance woes coincide with the slow decline of the NFL. American football was “The College Game” for the first half of the century. The pro game was a novelty sport, far less popular than baseball, before TV showed how to market it. The networks and NFL Films took what was structurally a game of coaching, of the execution and interruption of pre-planned plays, and turned it into a spectacle of heroes and villains, of noble warriors and ignoble bullies.

But now, the league’s owners have come to believe themselves to be the invicible warriors lionized by NFL Films. Despite sagging attendance and TV ratings here and in other areas, the owners are playing stadium blackmail with cities on such a scale that I’d need to use a Telestrator on a map of North America to explain it. They’re going all-out for subsidized luxury-box arenas now, because they’ve seen the Telestrating on the wall. With the long-term decline of network TV, so will go the first real made-for-TV sport. Why watch a bunch of guys whose faces you can’t see knocking each other down when there’s women’s college basketball on Prime Sports?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jelly is a slick 16-page brochure containing record reviews of “Mostly All-American Blues Funk Jazz Country Soul Rock n’ Roll.” Get past the lame rock-bashing essay on the cover and you’ll find some quite tasty reviews inside, covering everything from Sam Cooke and Charles Mingus to ambient-dub and “Medieval Swedish blues,” whatever that is. The back page features Elvis’s allegedly favorite peanut butter and bacon sandwich recipe. ($1 from P.O. Box 24924, Seattle 98124-0924, or online.)

(More plugs of the shameless variety: I’ve got two (count ’em!) speaking-signing events this week for my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story; Friday at Pistil Books (1013 E. Pike, and Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 1st Ave. S. and S. Main St. Both are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Be there or be L7.)

At Misc. we know some things are just too creepy to turn away from. That was the case when some folks working late in a CapHill building looked ou the window and saw a film crew re-creating the Mia Zapata abduction for Unsolved Mysteries. Under banks of lights, an actress in vaguely punkish clothes kept getting into a passing car, take after gruesome take.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Can’t get it here, but Semtex is the hottest new soda pop in Prague. It’s named after one of the old Czechoslovakia’s most notorious exports–a plastic explosive popular with various terror and organized-crime outfits the world over. An NY Times story sez the chemical factory that made the now-banned explosive is suing. The soda people say they adopted the name ’cause it inspires “a feeling of activity and motion.” That’s probably the same reasoning behind Royal Crown Cola’s new fake Mountain Dew, Kick (“Warning: Contains stuff you don’t even want to know about!”).

BRETHREN AND CISTERN: For unknown reasons, the wife of sometime Stranger writer Bryan Clark was put on the mailing list for Your Church magazine (“Helping You with the Business of Ministry”). It’s a Protestant Sharper Image Catalog, by the publishers ofChristianity Today but with no theological content. Just blurbs and ads for nifty products: Office-cubicle walls “repurposed” to house Sunday School groups, vinyl siding, fiberglass baptism pools, choir robes, bulk quantities of communion wafers, candle holders, electronic organs (“the way Sunday should sound”), clear plastic pulpits (“where no visual barriers exist between you and your congregation”), new and used pews, shatterproof fake stained glass windows, kitchen supplies (“Equipping the Saints in a practical way”), computer software to keep track of membership and fundraising, even entire prefab church building sections. Coolest of all are the electronic music boxes, “digital carillons” (by a company called Quasimodo Bells) and “digital hymnals” (“Instantly plays thousands of hymns, choruses, praise music, children’s songs, wedding music, and gospel favorites”). Our lesson: Even the heirs of Calvinist austerity can’t help but be eternally fascinated by that most basic of human desires, the Quest for Cool Stuff.

`R’ GANG: Entertainment Weekly’s piece on the recent box-office failure of several “sex” movies only pointed out how unsexy those anti-erotic, un-thrilling “erotic thrillers” and equally grim exercises like Showgirls really were. Don’t worry: Sex still sells, these movies just weren’t selling it. They were trying to sell fear and/or hatred of sex; but hundreds of direct-to-video Basic Instinct ripoffs wore out the concept.

TELE-KINETICS: When the new-age talk show The Other Side was suddenly, quietly canceled last month, NBC was left with only three hours of daytime programming. Ratings for the show, which took an almost-rational look at “psychic phenomena, ESP, ghosts, alternative healing, and more,” were never great. Replacing original host Dr. Will Miller (the preacher/ psychologist/ comedian from old Nick at Nite promos) with a perky Entertainment Tonight droid only made things worse. You can make your own joke here about the show’s fans still being able to contact it psychically. Speaking of daytime TV personalities…

THE NEVERENDING STORY: I’ve avoided O.J. Simpson in this column, but now note that the recently retired daytime personality’s looking to start a new life in the face of ostracism by former L.A. acquaintances and hangouts. The Philadelphia Weekly reports his representatives are looking into potential homes for him in Philly’s ritzy Main Line suburbs. Imagine–the figure who nearly put the soaps out of business, moving to the real-life Pine Valley.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perv, a new local monthly gay paper, is a lot like what the Misc. newsletter would have become if I’d kept it going. It’s one big sheet of paper in Stranger’s old paper size but sideways, crammed with gossip, jokes and comix. Of course, I’ve never written about the gay-male bar scene and Perv writes about little else. Still, you don’t have to be gay yourself to realize the way-serious Seattle Gay News can’t be the only possible gay viewpoint in town. And I do like Perv’s comment on how “if every fashion show in town is fetish, then fetish isn’t much of an alternative anymore, is it?”

I’m Pseudo-Black and I’m Proud:

Kwanzaa for White B-Boyz

Original online essay, 11/20/95

This goes out to the phat n’ phunky white kids, hangin’ at the malls in their butt-cleavage threads and chuggin’ from 40-ouncers.

You might not know it, but you’re part of an American tradition of caucasian hip-wannabes remaking last year’s Black cultural stances into this year’s lifestyle uniforms.

Thing is, once whites start copying a black style, blacks do something else. When hippies took over electric blues, blacks went to soul. When soul became the property of Brit teen idols, rap emerged. Now that you’re the main gangsta market, Af-Am kids are listening to prosocial R&B harmonizers, as part of the Black Pride thang.

Another part of Black Pride is Kwanzaa. That’s a non-religious holiday created in 1966 by Black Studies prof Dr. Maulana Karenga. The name means “the first fruits of the harvest” in Swahili.

Here’s the short version of how it works: Each day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, Kwanzaa celebrants hold a simple home ceremony at a table decorated with straw, fruit, ears of corn, a communal cup, and seven candles. They light one candle and speak about one of the holiday’s seven principles: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujama(cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith).

That’s a long ways from the glorified lowlife white kids love about gangsta music. But to be an ahead-of-the-curve hipster is to fake today’s blackness, not yesterday’s white fake blackness. Otherwise you’ll look as dorky as Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues bit looks today.

So put down that malt liquor (you probably don’t like the stuff really). Get one of Karenga’s books, like Kwanzaa: Origin, Concepts, Practice. He writes for descendents of the African Diaspora, but a lot of his message has universal meaning, including the part about how “History is Knowledge, Identity and Power.” Kwanzaa yenu iwe na heri (Happy Kwanzaa).

All Hail the Stomach Steinway:

Squeeze Please

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 11/15/95

The three-CD set Planet Squeezebox (Ellipses Arts) is perhaps the perfect use of the CD box-set format. It offers a wealth of musical education, to the point that it’s a must for the collections of every school and public library. Its 51 tracks by 51 acts in 40 genres provide listening experiences ranging from exuberant participatory folk celebrations to world-weary melancholy to mind-altering alternate melodics. For an instrument of so many variations (including the concertina, bandoneon, and organetto) used in so many places in so many ways, it’s surprising to read in the box set’s exquisite 56-page booklet that the beloved “Stomach Steinway” dates only back to 1829 (less than 50 years before the first phonograph). From Austria it quickly spread throughout Europe, and from there to Europe’s colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, the Americas, and scattered parts of Asia. Twice as loud as any previous Euro folk instrument, it was also capable of playing melody, harmony and rhythm at once. By the 1850s its various forms were mainstays of folk and dance music worldwide, taking the place of everything from bagpipes to violins in dozens of new and pre-existing genres. Wallingford-based Petosa Music still makes some of the best-loved accordions anywhere; over-30 locals remember the sqeezebox stylings of kids’ TV personality Stan Boreson (while ’90s hipsters know Accordion Joe’s performances on The Spud Goodman Show).

Planet Squeezebox offers great examples of much of what you might expect it to offer: Polkas, tangos, Irish jigs, American jazz and blues standards, zydeco, Jewish klezmer wedding music, sambas, assorted Lat-Am dance musics. You might not expect what else you’ll get: French musettes, Egyptian belly-dancing accompaniment, Quebecois barn-dance balladeering, Italian tarantella, achingly poignant modern-classical compositions, even a Debussy prelude. It’s unfortunately diluted, by the kind of conservatively-curated and blandly-mixed mellow tedium that still gives the U.S. world-music industry a bad name. That’s particularly the case on disc 3, in which the set’s curators go to Africa equipped with your basic Paul Simon notions of nice unchallenging world-beat tuneage. But hey, that’s what programmable CD players are made for.

But at a time when the “Unplugged” fad and the various successors to ’70s “women’s music” have revived the association of acoustic music with singer-songwriter solemnity, it’s important to have the best parts of a set like this reminding us how this family of instruments has long been a force for honest artistic expression, celebration, and working-class togetherness. Those “punk polka” spoofs in the ’80s by Weird Al Yancovic and others weren’t too off the mark; the squeezebox really is the original hi-NRG DIY music machine.

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)

Blessed Is the Meek:

Believe It

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/26/95

The press kit for the compilation CD It’s Hard to Believe It: The Amazing World of Joe Meek (Razor & Tie) talks about the early-’60s UK record producer-engineer-songwriter as an Ed Wood of music, a tragic figure of promotional energy but dubious talent at the center of a stable of bizarre non-stars. Not quite so. Joe Meek was a troubled genius who never came to terms with his homosexuality and eventually did himself in, but he was also a technical wizard, a savvy self-promoter (the first successful independent producer in the EMI-ruled UK record biz), and someone with a highly developed sense of what made a great pop single. The hundreds of sessions staged in his London home studio indeed included a lot of schmaltz and tripe, but even his secondary work conveyed a sense of urgency and excitement.

And unlike Wood, Meek had genuine hits. The entire electic-power-pop strain of music can trace its roots to the eternal space-age instrumental “Telstar,” which leads the CD. Credited to the Tornadoes, who essentially executed only the rhythm tracks, the tune is really a tribute to Meek’s writing, engineering and tape-manipulations, and to his space-age wonderment at the possibilities of aural fantasy. More importantly, it’s a lesson in deliberate lo-fi. Meek had his frequent partner Geoff Goddard perform the lead on a clavioline, a primitive electric organ; he then used equipment of his own devising to compress its sound. The result is a delicate clash between the galactic imagery of the arrangement and the honed-in focus of the final sound. It is, as all great pop singles are, a brief moment of perfection.

The CD’s other 19 cuts will be first-time experiences for most of you. (Even its other U.S. Top 10 hit, “Have I The Right” by the Honeycombs, isn’t really part of today’s classic-rock canon.) They’re a cross-section of mostly US-inspired styles of the day: Country-rock, blues-rock, good-girl balladeering, dead-teenager rock, monster-movie rock (including the novelty great Screaming Lord Sutch), note-perfect tributes to Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, even Stereo Action bachelor-pad music. They all feed easily into Meek’s precision primitivism. Even the dross shows off his eccentric genius, adding echo-on-reverb-on-compression and string sections from nowhere to make the most of even the tritest material. He’d turned down the chance to produce the first Beatles record, preferring to work with studio bands and pre-fab celebrities he could personally mold (bleach-blond pretty boy Heinz, Petula Clark wannabe Glenda Collins).

By February 1967, when a distraught Meek shot his landlady and then himself, the UK pop revolution he’d pioneered had passed him by. By the end of the year, Sgt. Pepper and prog-rock would render the pop single an obsolete commodity for the next decade. But his work survives; and now’s the perfect time to bring it back.

I COULD SAY I now know what it was like to be a Cubs fan in ’84 or a Red Sox fan any year, but will instead just say: Damn fine ride. All possible kudos to the players, the coaches, and especially to Dave & Rick.

I’VE GOT IT: Here’s the way to make that maybe-finally-funded but yet-undesigned retractable-roof Son-of-Kingdome thang a better investment, and attract the last major-league sport we haven’t yet got: Make it the world’s first combination baseball-hockey arena! Just make the natural-turf baseball surface in a removable-tile format (that’s how they made instant natural-turf fields in some of the stadia for World Cup soccer last year). Then acquire some of those mobile bleachers like they use for Kingdome basketball. Then bring in whatever they use to make that temporary rink inside the Flag Pavilion at Xmas and stick it on top of the whatever floor’s left when the boxes of turf-tiles are trucked away for the winter. Even if we don’t get an NHL team (what with Seattle money investing in Vancouver’s team and Portland’s franchise try), truck-away turf would let the new ballpark be used as an off-season Kingdome annex for car and boat shows.

THE BROTHER ‘HOOD: Watched parts of the Million Man March on C-SPAN and CNN. The former’s unedited coverage was better, but CNN’s mix of speech segments, commercials and “analysis” brought up some of its own issues. The transitions between the sea of solemn Af-Am faces in the crowd and the pale yup models in the commercials was enough to bring home the message about America’s continuing class struggles.

CATHODE CORNER: You can now see Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the show with a guy and some robot puppets heckling bad sci-fi movies) even if you don’t live in a Viacom Cable neighborhood, thanks to KCPQ. The syndicated rerun version’s only an hour, so the movies are heavily truncated and/or split into two episodes. And so far they’re showing only films from the same repertoire of a couple dozen public domain 50’s badfilms that have circulated the cheapo-video circuit forever (probably due to trouble getting syndication rights to still-copyrighted B flicks). But at least there’s now something for Saturday stay-homes to watch at midnight that’s not the reeking undead corpse of SNL.

CONFIDENTIAL TO RYAN B.: Yes, I know Soma magazine’s a pathetic goop of “cliché generational angst” and “anti-marketing marketing.” But it’s no more so than any of those other 20-odd pretentious Frisco mags that claim to cover “The West Coast” but end up only writing about Frisco. At least the title’s appropriate, taken from a cutesy name for a “restored” ex-industrial district there but reminiscent of the mind-control drug in Brave New World. Speaking of printed effluent-for-the-affluent…

I KNOW I PROMISED to cease Weekly-bashing and stick to going after more worthy targets, but I couldn’t resist its sarcastic, classist ad depicting a glass-eyed, square-jawed, power-suited reactionary yuppie as its mythical average reader under the headline “One of the punk rock weirdos you’ll find in the Seattle Weekly/ EastsideWeek personals.”

MISC.’s TOP 6: I Should Coco, Supergrass (Capitol)… VCRs that mark recording/ playback progress in minutes and seconds, not “counter” numbers… The “Opportunities” ads in USA Today offering prepostrously unlikely franchise or multi-level-marketing schemes… Endust for Electronics (Johnson Wax)… The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine (Little, Brown & Co.)… The downscale, pulp-paper, ’60s-’70s men’s magazines sold at That’s Atomic on E. Olive (mags that relied less on sex than on faux-Spillane tuff-guy writing and garish graphics)…

MISC.’s BOTTOM 2: Internet service providers that go down for whole weekends, leaving users in acute Web Withdrawal… The slowness of America’s bookstore distribution system…

(Thanks to those who overcame the Sunday-night weather and Mariner Fever to attend my book release party and see four of the rockin’-est sets-O-tunes ever performed. The book itself (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) oughta be in more stores this week. As always, info’s on the Misc. World HQ website.)

TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.

IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.

ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”

HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).

`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.

ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”

Some things make even Misc. disoriented. The Mariners winning in Sept.? Vying for not just a newfangled wild-card playoff berth but (at this writing) not far from a real division lead? Aargh! My whole reality system is collapsing on me!

READ YOUR TV: Early-morning television has always been radio with faces. Producers presumed breakfast-time viewers were too busy grooming and feeding to watch the screen. Bloomberg Information Television on the USA Network and its “lite” version, VH-1in the Morning, challenge that notion. They’re cablecast live to the East, so you’ll have to get up at (or set your VCR for) 5:30 a.m. Both Bloomberg shows fill the screen with words and numbers: News headlines, weather for cities across the country, sports scores, and trivia. The USA show has a gloriously jumbled screen packed with info, while announcers in the top-right corner read news and business stories. The VH-1version has a slightly less-cluttered screen of data surrounding easy-listening music videos. Both require a TV big enough to read from, and would work better in still-far-away hi-definition TV or as hi-bandwidth computer services. The USA version is like a video caffeine jolt compared to the snooze-button blandness of regular morning shows.

NO ESCAPE: As the notion of “mass media” deteriorates, marketers get ever more creative in seeking ways to market to people who don’t particularly like to be marketed to. They’re now putting paid product placements in video games. Now, the trade journalInteractive Week sez game maker Digital Pictures wants to stick on “interactive commercials.” In one proposed example, game players would point-and-click through Coke logos and arrive at an 800 number to get a free six-pack — if they agreed to be in demographic surveys. I can imagine more creative stuff, like a Mortal Kombat warrior endorsing Coke as the perfect refresher after you’ve ripped out your opponent’s skeleton.

NOTED: The Seattle Symphony, refusing to surrender amid anti-arts mania, has worked damn hard to draw younger and/or nontraditional audiences. It’s performed with Peter Gabriel, created a Frank Zappa tribute night, and even appeared on Almost Live!The culmination of this drive to bring orchestral music into the 20th Century is Cyberian Rhapsody. Billed as the first symphonic concert on the Internet, the Nov. 10 event at the Paramount will include string-n’-brass versions of Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Queensryche tunes, as well as material by those boomer favorites who left town at the dawn of their careers (J. Hendrix, Q. Jones). For the first time, Seattle’s cultural establishment is noting the existence of living (or recently-deceased) people who’ve created original music in Seattle whose last name isn’t G. Whether it’s a mark of long-overdue respect or an omen of attempted co-option is for you to decide.

ELSEWHERE ON THE MUSICAL FRONT: KCMU can’t seem to stop rumors spreading among the new-music community that it’s gonna be forced off the air so sister station KUOW can have both frequencies (one for classical music, the other for news/ talk). Station management denies it, saying the recent merger of KCMU’s and KUOW’s administrative and fundraising operations was merely an efficiency measure. The KCMU Kontroversy a couple years back hurt the station’s fan rapport and financial stability, but proved there’s an active community of listeners who love the station and want it to be better at what it now does. At a time when public broadcasting’s threatened on all sides, it needs to make friends by seeking diverse audiences instead of narrowcasting everything to Upscales only. Let’s hope the UW administration realizes this.

SILO R.I.P.: It’s one thing for suburban superstore chains to seize the retail dollars of Tukwilans. It’s another thing when chains that situate stores in town (like Silo in the U District) pull out of a region ‘cuz they can’t match superstores’ marketing clout. You could have foretold Silo’s fate when its ads got panicky n’ defensive about matching superstore prices, foregoing old such slogans as “Silo: Where people have fun with electricity.”

(Nothing new this week at the Misc. World HQ website <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>, but please see it anyway.)

A NON-CYNICAL MISC. WELCOME goes to the Rocket’s new owners, the Frisco-based BAM Media. I’ve heard the rumors, how the new Rocket guys wanna go after this paper’s readers and advertisers. But we can be sports about it. F’rinstance, here’s some tips for the newcomers on what not to do to succeed in Seattle:

* Don’t arrive in town in suits, impose a dress code on the office, yet claim to be “one of you” with the staff because you love ’60s classic rock.

* Don’t expect us cowtown hicks to kneel in worship before your superior Cali essences. Don’t act aggressively and pompously among Seattle bands, club owners, and advertisers, boasting how you’re gonna do everything exactly the way it’s done in San Francisco.

* Don’t replace what’s left of the Rocket style with corporate-rock PR and bland shopper-tabloid design.

* Don’t replace familiar Rocket staffers with parent-company transfers who can’t even pronounce the “a” in “Ivar’s” right (it’s theschwa sound).

Avoid these temptations and the Rocket might get fun again. Heck, stronger competition would be good for both papers.

B’SHOOT NOTES: The upgrading of musical acts this year was great, though Sweet Water (perennial also-rans of the Silver Management stable) selling out the Arena surprised me. The cops went after TchKung! for the second straight year, ‘tho the band and its audience managed to keep the officers slightly better-behaved this time. The Stranger had a stage co-sponsorship this year with Biringer Farms, for whom I spent many a boring summer day picking strawberries as a kid. At least this year there was no Lamonts Blues Stage; ’twas bemusing in the past to see bands that considered themselves first-rate, beneath the name of a store popularly known as a perpetual clearance sale.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE UPSCALE: This column and this paper have talked more about the Commons than the other money issue on next Tuesday’s ballot, the new baseball stadium. The stadium, like similar stadium tax measures across North America, is a simple matter of asking taxpayers to subsidize businesses. That’s a story as old as railroads, agribusiness price supports, and unneeded weapons systems. (In Canada they use slogans like “Partners in Progress” to promote subsidies for worthless oil scams.) But the Commons represents a twist on public pay for private gain, a twist with implications for our future.

Around 1969-70 there was a revolution in City Hall: a slate of progressives ousted a machine of tired, inbred business interests. That new regime has calcified into a replica of the regime it replaced. Politics in Seattle is now essentially the same as in D.C.; i.e., money, power, privilege and to hell with anyone who can’t offer any of them. Seattle’s political machine doesn’t even claim anymore to speak for “The Little Guy.” Seattle, steadily over the past 20 years but now accelerating rapidly, is becoming a city by, of, and for only one class. The Upscale control the politicians, even the “progressive” politicians. The Upscale control the media (cf. KIRO’s hype-laden puff piece on the Nordstrom family, promoted as “The faces behind the brand name everyone loves!”).

The Upscale loathe real cultural diversity; they accept a culture of all races and nationalities who believe and behave exactly alike, like Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World” robots. Anybody who neither belongs to the Upscale nor can be dismissed by it as “quaint local color” is beyond the pale. (Belltown condo dwellers circulated petitions some months back demanding the Vogue’s closure.) Certain non-Upscale subcultures have returned this loathing, though by and large the Upscales don’t know they’re hated. (Corporate “designer grunge” fashion was such a joke because the “Seattle scene” aesthetic was anti-fashion, specifically anti-Nordstrom.)

The Commons is essentially a scheme to create an Upscale haven a la Vancouver’s West End, anchored by a mini-Stanley Park. It’s an Upscale wet dream; it removes blocks of non-Upscale businesses for Upscale condos, stores, and dineries. And it’d remove some of those disgusting punk clubs too! They insist on making Seattle a World Class City, even if it’s ruined as a place for the rest of us to live.

NOW AT THE MISC. WORLD HQ WEBSITE (<<http://www.miscmedia.com>>): Name your favorite Power Ranger.