WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre’s heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens “hard chilled” (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin’ threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.)

A HEARTY GET-WELL WISH goes to art-music promoter Larry Reid. He and sometime partner Tracey Rowland were sideswiped by a car on 8/25 while driving their classic Italian scooters near Eastlake (Reid and Rowland helped run Seattle’s first scooter club in ’84). Reid hit the pavement head-first and was rushed to the hospital, where he was originally diagnosed with broken neck vertebrae. The next day an MRI scan showed just a few compressed discs. He’s home now but will have to take things easy for a while.

AD VERBS: Washington Mutual’s “Free Checking” billboard shows a checkbook with human female legs jogging at dawn. That’s not freedom, that’s rigorous discipline (which itself could be a positive metaphor for a bank, but that’s a whole other issue).

CATHODE CORNER: Harry Anderson, a member of the growing Hollywood colony out on the Puget Sound islands, wants to move production of his sitcom Dave’s World to Seattle after this upcoming season. It would be the first three-camera filmed sitcom shot outside LA since the ’50s. You can guess I don’t love the show, since I find nothing particularly amusing about the real-life Dave Barry (at least the show’s dropped the Billy Joel theme song). But after years of Florida trying to take away the Mariners (presumably over, now that it looks like Tampa’s getting an expansion team), it’d be fun to have a show set in Miami but made here.

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: Dallas kid Scott Glazer’s Page of Evil, <<http://rampages.onramp.net/~scottgl/index.htm>>, contains an almost Shavian lambaste of fantasy-novel hack Piers Anthony: “Some (fantasy) authors start with the germ of a good idea in the first book of a series and grind it down to pure crap as the books wear on…. (Anthony) has the courage and wisdom to eliminate the hard work that comes along with coming up with that good idea, instead skipping to unmitigated smegma from book one, page one…. The number of books in the Xanth series has been proven to be equinumerous with aleph-zero; in other words, infinite. This is possible because it actually takes a negative amount of time to produce a Xanth novel.”

ALL YOU’LL EVER HEAR ME SAY ABOUT WINDOWS 95: Leno really was the perfect choice to emcee the Windows hypefest in Darkest Redmond (the talk-show host who’s almost as good as Letterman but not really, shilling for the operating software that’s almost as good as the Mac OS but not really). Still, I understand why Windows 95 could be considered a significant introduction in some quarters. So many people have been suckered into using Windows, and have been so frustrated by it over the past five years or so, that the promise of a Windows version that sucks even a little less is cause for celebration among ’em…. In other MS news, the company denies its talks about pouring money into Turner Broadcasting have anything to do with Turner’s desire to raise cash for a raid on CBS. Some observers called MS’s statement a retraction worded so it could itself be retracted later.

GROCERY UPDATE: You’ve got another week to send your recommendations for Seattle’s best food stores, in the convenience, small-supermarket (under 10,000 sq. ft.), regular-supermarket, superstore (over 20,000 sq. ft.) and ethnic categories. More info is at the Misc. World HQ website. Organizers of the mass letter-writing campaign on behalf of a certain gourmet boutique in Madrona may stop now.

Akre-monious debut:

The Big G

Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 8/30/95

Carrie Akre has many loyal fans who stuck with her after the crash-n’-burn of her first band Hammerbox (shortly after their major-label debut album). Her fans are right; Akre’s got an amazing voice and a keen sense for the heartbreaks and frustrations of everyday existence.

The eponymous debut of her new ensemble Goodness (Y) shows Akre reaching out beyond Hammerbox’s full-bore-center rock assault in search of a wider range of sounds and moods. On several tracks she succeeds brilliantly. “For Lovers’ Sake” is a catchy, understated neo-power-pop minor classic delivered in a brisk near-whisper. “Between You & I” and “Viva Le High” are breathless heartmelting ballads. And “Labor Day” is a breezy goodbye ditty reminiscent of various British new wave singers’ variations on Motown.

Many of the disc’s other eight songs start out intimate and intriguing, then accelerate into vehicles for Akre’s older, bluesier rock-out style. It works the first one or two times (“Superwise,” “Smoking”) but later comes close to getting repetitious. Akre and company (Danny Newcomb, Garth Reeves, Fila McGann, and Easy/Give vet Chris Friel) maybe oughta consider alternating between more all-soft and all-hard songs in future sets. Fortunately, the untitled bonus track delivers a blast of Hammerbox-style righteous noise unfettered by opening niceties.

That caveat aside, Goodness reveals Akre’s tremendous growth as a vocal stylist and songwriter. This disc is already better than many of the rockin’-chanteuse products touted in Entertainment Weekly. And in its best moments, it holds the promise of what could solidify into a pop-rock band of mind-blowing potential.

(Latter-day addendum: Goodness soon signed to a major label, which reissued this debut disc, then dropped the band shortly thereafter. The band has self-released A Five-Song EP while working on a new full-length disc and a new record deal.)

Welcome to the Seafair Week Misc., the column that can’t wait for the annual return of the hydros. Reactionary hippies sometimes accuse me of political conservatism for daring to like the hydros. I was once asked to speak at the “Alternative to Loud Boats” poetry reading, accepted, and shocked the crowd by telling ’em how much I liked the boats. Still do. There’s something endearing about these mechanical manic-depressives that sometimes go 250 m.p.h. but more often just sputter dead in the water. They’re an unabashedly non-chic relic of pre-yup Seattle, combining three or four of the old city’s once-dominant subcultures (they were built by solemn engineers, driven by rugged pioneer types, watched by hard-drinkin’ workingfolk, and promoted by oldtime hucksters). One of my longtime fantasies, besides having my own cereal, is to have my own hydro. “Miss Misc.” would be run by one of those hard-luck indie racing teams with no spare hulls and maybe one spare engine, the kind of guys who win fans’ sympathy while the big-money Budweiser team wins the heats.

FIGHTING FOR HER HONOR?: At the Lollapalooza show in E. Washington Courtney Love allegedly punched out Bikini Kill singer and original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, one woman who wouldn’t stand up to Love’s business. This is almost too perfect to be believable: our region’s two biggest icons of strongly contradictory definitions of “A Strong Woman,” in a fight for the title of The True Righteous Rebel. It’s an exciting notion as a fantasy, but somewhat pathetic if it’s true. They oughta put aside any past personal differences and combine forces for the real battles ahead. Speaking of which…

THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUES: Meanwhile, as Love relishes her new role as Molson beer spokesmodel, another Canadian company (Pyramid Productions) is soliciting investors for a youth-market exploitation film to be called Horsey. In a fundraising announcement the film’s writer/co-producer, Kirsten Clarkson, calls it “a story that appeals to the MTV generation… `Baby Busters’ and `GenXers’ are prime multi-level consumers of small ticket items, such as movie tickets, soundtracks, comics, and other ancillary products.” Clarkson describes her script’s heroine as “a hard-core, explosive, and sexy artist, who after quitting university to become the next Van Gogh, finds herself unable to paint. Delilah drinks too much, smokes too much and fucks whoever she wants. Women or men. She falls in love with Ryland Yale, the utterly dedicated and monogamous heir to a lumber empire. Ryland sings in an underground punk band and is gleefully building up a tolerance for heroin… Tragically, Ryland starts to disappear under the layers of a heroin haze. Although she is overwhelmed by loneliness, Delilah struggles to rebuild her life.” Sound like thinly-fictionalized versions of anyone we know?

TASTY BITS: For a long time, lotsa people thought computer-age aesthetics would be all cold-n’-sterile. Then by the mid-’80s, emerging PC-related visual styles (in game software, user-group literature and digital illustration) threatened to drown us all in bad sword-and-sorcery geekdom. Now, I’m happy to report, it’s a whole new picture, especially in the homespun friendly covers of CD-ROMs by small independent developers.

There’s something promising about CD-ROMs, even the ones that suck. It’s a vital artform that can inspire this kind of generic mediocre content in identical bright-n-bouncy packaging. Just lounging in the CD-ROM section of Future Shop is a thrilling experience. If there’s shelf and catalog space for all those discs of generic clip-art, old shareware video games and swimsuit pictures, there’s gotta be a market for something really good if and when it ever arrives.

Another thought: D’ya think music CDs could be sold in 5- or 10-packs “in promotional packaging” like the grab bags of low-end CD-ROMs? With the Wall St. Journal reporting a “glut out there” in indie rock releases, maybe low-sellers could be repackaged as The Five-Foot Pack of Punk, or 1,001 Straight Edge Rants, or even Super Value Bundle of White Kids Who Think They’re George Clinton.

My apologies to all those who sent letters, e-mails and voice-mails to me about the anti-homophobia initiative. Haven’t had the time to personally tell each of you “you got the wrong Humphrey.” I support my non-relative Steve’s work, but he deserves the credit for it (or the hate mail, or the rabid calls from clueless reporters).

SHOW STOPPERS: My real brother’s in Alaska this summer, at his regular seasonal job driving tour buses. He gets to be the target of tourists’ disillusionment when they discover the truth about Alaska (and Alaskans), that the joint’s a lot more rugged and surly and a lot less “nice” and “wacky” than that mildly quirky fantasy Alaska on Northern Exposure.

While he’s in the real Alaska, I finally visited the heart of the show’s fake Alaska, for the for-profit auction of the Northern Exposureprops and costumes. Hadn’t been to the set before, but did go to another building in the office park where it was once for a job interview. The show was essentially a boomer fantasy about a “return to community,” yet its operations base was in the most sterile, life-denying corner of suburban purgatory — exactly the kind of soulless modern environment the show offered an alternative to. Once you got past the gate and the parking lot and inside the huge plain white building, it looked much more inviting inside.

The soundstages took up three large rooms of a humanely dank warehouse area, with carpet samples tacked onto the walls for soundproofing (making it look like the world’s largest band practice space). The sets had mostly been dismantled before the auction preview, except for a couple of big view-outside-the-window backdrop murals. Floor plans posted at the fire exits showed where the permanent sets had been (the doctor’s office, the restaurant, the town hall, etc.). The stages took up about 25,000 square feet, with more than that used by set-construction shops and storage in adjoining areas.

I only went to the preview; I could tell I couldn’t afford a winning bid on any auctioned items I might potentially want, ‘cuz the preview was full of well-to-do couples making notes about props from their favorite episodes (“Look dear, it’s the plastic gloves from when the bubble boy went outside”). Still, I wouldn’t have minded owning a moose-head desk lamp, a flight jacket worn by the retired-astronaut character, or a matched set of log-dugout furniture. (Most actual filmmaking equipment wasn’t included in the auction.)

AUGMENTATIONS: Some music CDs are beginning to be released with CD-ROM material stuck in at the end: A lo-res version of a music video, say, or an interview with the singer. Imagine the further possibilities: Dylan box sets with extra tracks of “scholars” claiming to have literal interpretations of every lyric. Heck, I’d rent a laserdisc version of a Madonna video collection if it had a Second Audio Program with a round-table troup of semiotics profs explaining every image to death.

NOMENCLATURE DEPT.: Still looking for a new term for Internet/World Wide Web usage that isn’t “surfing.” Recent suggestions include “crawling” (there’s already a WWW search site, WebCrawler, originally developed at the UW but now owned by America Online), “cavorting,” and “gallivanting.” More to come, I’m sure.

THE FINE PRINT (from a Rocket concert ad for Live and Collective Soul): “MCA Concerts is not responsible for, and has no control over, the contents of advertised performances.”

UNHINGED AND ONLINE: The Misc. web site is now up. Those of you with computers (or who can get onto the computers at the Speakeasy Cafe (2nd & Bell), the Internet Cafe (15th Ave. E. next to the Canterbury) or the downtown library) will be able to read every Misc. written in the past nine years, as well as a few samples of my fiction and essays, a preview of my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story (still not out yet and I don’t know when it will be), and my X-Words (you do know this paper has a crossword and I make it, right?).

Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.

PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…

THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…

LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!

A happy post-7/4 greeting to all Misc. readers who, thanks to draconian govt. crackdowns against even “Safe and Sane” home fireworks, still have all their fingers. You can use those fingers of yours to pick up free postcards from the racks popping up at “hip” spots around town. The cards themselves are impeccably natty-looking, but they turn out to really be flyers inexplicably advertising L.A. hair salons. Speaking of snazzy graphics…

DESIGN FOR LEAVING: Graphic design magazines have been abuzz recently about attempts to form a “professional” association that would “accreditate” graphic designers like architects and somehow keep non-members out of top-paying markets. Besides being a monopolistic restraint-of-trade move, it’s not needed. Architects need to be accredited; a badly-designed building can fall down and hurt people. A badly-designed magazine ad can do no worse than waste its client’s money. Speaking of corporate centralization…

MY BONNIE: In today’s corporate climate, even success can lead to trouble. Case in point: the Bon Marché, the dept. store of the masses (old, anti-upscale slogan: “Where All Seattle Shops”). In 1929 it was a founding member of Allied Stores, a combine of local stores whose owners banded together for financial reasons. In the recent years of merger madness, Allied became part of Federated Dept. Stores, which did what merged companies often do: it shed pieces of itself (including the Seattle I. Magnin) and consolidated what was left into new operating groups. In the process it’s retired such classic store names as Magnin and Abraham & Strauss. Now the Tacoma News Tribune sez upper Federated management wants to replace the Bon name with another of its acquired brands, Macy’s West. Bon managers in Seattle were quick to deny the report. The L.A.-based May Co. has owned Portland’s Meier & Frank for years, but has wisely kept the M&F name. Let’s hope Federated knows enough to keep the Bon Marché appellation, derived from Paris’s original 1-stop-shopping palace of the late 19th century. Otherwise, the parent co. would surely qualify for the modern colloquial French interpretation of the phrase “bon marché” (look it up). Speaking of chain-store shenanigans…

ANOTHER DRUG WAR: The local pharmacy biz has also been consolidating, with chain operations rising and independents falling. The one constant has been regional management at most of the chains: Bartell has remained locally-owned, and the Oregon-based Pay Less absorbed the formerly Seattle-owned Pay n’ Save. That’s changing. Walgreen, the Illinois-based giant, is about to invade Seattle in a big way. Work has begun on locations in Greenwood and the Central Area; the chain’s reportedly applied with the state pharmacy board to open as many as 60 sites. Some of the new Walgreen stores reportedly will even have that onetime drugstore staple, the lunch counter (Walgreen claims to have invented the milk shake, at a Chicago luncheonette in the ’20s). Speaking of refreshments…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Hero lemon soda (available at the Hillcrest deli-mart on Cap. Hill) is a tasty tarty carbonated substance with a friendly yellow color and a cute, space-saving eight-and-a-half-ounce can. Even better, it comes from that new global junk-food mecca, Breda, Holland (hometown of that ultimate postmodern cultural icon Mentos, The Freshmaker!). Speaking of PoMo icons…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: If you enjoy Steve Shaviro’s occasional appearances in these pages, you’ll enjoy Doom Patrols, his collection of essays (he calls them “theoretical fictions” for no readily apparent reason) on PoMo heroes and heroines ranging from Kathy Acker to Bill Gates and, yes, ex-Doom Patrol comic book writer Grant Morrison. It’s even got the Dean Martin essay he first published here. Doom Patrols isn’t yet available on paper, but the entire text can be downloaded from the Web at <<http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html>>. Speaking of the Web…

UPDATE: I’m still looking for a term for Internet/World Wide Web use that isn’t “surfing.” Suggestions so far include “trolling” (found out it has a Net meaning already, a derogatory one), “waltzing,” “meandering,” “strolling,” “courting” (my favorite so far) and even “geoducking” (please!). Got anything better? Lemme know.

First, thanks to the 27 people who came to my low-key party and video show two weeks back. A lot’s happened since then and I didn’t have a regular column last week, so please bear with an even speedier routine than normal.

SEATTLE SEEN: Hype, the Seattle music documentary director Doug Pray’s been making for two years, is now in an 83-minute rough cut. I saw a video of this cut and can only say it’s awesome and awe-inspiring, the one movie to finally get the story right. Pray and his partners still don’t have a distributor for the flick and it’s a shame. Let’s hope it sees release soon. Besides correcting what the national media got wrong about local bands, it includes some of the only performance footage of Mia Zapata. The fact that Pray didn’t sell this footage to tabloid TV after her slaying shows this is one scene biographer with some rare integrity. At a time when Cobain exploitation T-shirts have made it into the Spencer Gifts catalog, a film that treats Seattle musicians as creative artists rather than celebrities and treats the Fastbacks with as much importance as Soundgarden is a film that has to get out.

THE NEXT THREAT: Haven’t been able to prove the authenticity of the letter that’s been faxed around town, credited to be from the anti-gay-rights Citizens Alliance of Washington and “encouraging” CAW members and supporters to turn out and disrupt this Sunday’s Gay Pride parade on Broadway. However, there’s no harm in telling you all to turn out to support the basic civil rights and human dignity CAW wants to deny.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 6/4): “Boating Accidents Swell.” I happen to think they’re rather tragic, myself…

GOING FLAT: It’s the end of OK Soda, at least in this area, after one year of failing to become the drink of choice for the generation that doesn’t like products crassly aimed at it. I couldn’t find anybody at Coca-Cola World HQ in Atlanta who could say whether the vaguely orangey substance is being kept in any of the other test markets. As always, discontinued products disappear last from the smaller indie convenience stores, in case you want a six-pack to sell to a can collector.

IT’S THE PITTS: While you wait patiently for the Speakeasy Cafe, Seattle’s second Internet-terminal espresso house, to open, go see the new Cafe Zasu (named for ’30s comic actress Zasu Pitts) at the old Swan space in Pio. Square. Longtime local artist Alan Lande had a part in making the interior, which looks sufficiently Deco-revival without trying too hard to be “period authentic” or overly precious. My personal favorite local lounge-revival act, Julie Cascioppo, is there Thursday nites. It’s run by Sunny Speidel and connected to her existing Doc Maynard’s bar next door (she promises to upgrade the quality of acts at Doc’s starting later this summer). But to help pay for her new venture, Speidel quietly closed down another of the businesses she inherited from her legendary dad Bill, the 70-year-old tourist weekly Seattle Guide. Long before “alternative newspapers” were even a gleam in Norman Mailer’s eye, SG made a comfortable place for itself specializing in weekly entertainment listings, including things like burlesque theaters the daily papers didn’t always accept ads for. But in recent years, SG‘s main distribution turf, hotels, was muscled in on by chain-franchise publications, whose exclusive deals got SG kicked out of some locations. While SG hadn’t had a high local profile for some time, I’m still sad at any long-running periodical going the way of the Oregon Journal and the Seattle Star.

IT’S ABOUT YOU-KNOW-WHAT: Someone from L.A.’s been dropping flyers around town selling $19.95 mail-order booklets on how to build your own time machine. I don’t know if she invented these plans herself or if somebody just came back in time and told her.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, please write in with your suggestions for a non-California-centric metaphor for Internet and World Wide Web use. Decentralized, post-Hollywood media should have a post-Hollywood name. Besides, around here “surfing” is something done only out at Westport by a few rugged loners in full wetsuits.

UPDATE: The Weathered Wall’s new owners are now gonna keep live music there Thurs. and Fri., and maybe add it on other weeknights later on. Anxious bands can contact the club’s new in-house booking agent, Julie Wynn (728-9398).

DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: One issue in the three-year KCMU Kontroversey was the ongoing drive to turn the station into an adjunct of KUOW. That’s become official, now that KUOW’s taking over KCMU’s administrative and fundraising operations. They’re not changing KCMU’s programming, like they tried during the World Cafe era, but the move sets up a chain of command that would allow it. They fail to understand that KCMU succeeded in the past because it was perceived as a grass-roots operation of people who loved music, not a professional institution out to draw well-heeled donors with bland “upscale” fare. It’ll be up to the next UW prez to sort it out. Let’s hope s/he understands it’s in both stations’ best interests to be separate operations with separate missions.

WISH I’D SAID THAT DEPT.: I don’t normally comment on other things in the Stranger (what do you think this is, the Vill. Voice?). But now and again there’s a piece I get additional thoughts about. Here are some recent ones:

Die Hard w/a Vengeance review (4 * 34): Don’t think it’s been mentioned in the media, but the Seattle Symphony recorded some of the background music for the film. Of course, they also did the theme to KIRO’s old News Outside the Box…

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black preview (4 * 34) The V.H. of K.B. singer is like Madonna’s good twin: lo-fi and funky, but still an image-based performance artist who only uses songs as a means to an end, and who as such can be recommended as a live (or home-video) act only. Audio-only documentation of her work is superfluous.

Bathhouses (4 * 33): I know I’m not the only lonely straight guy who’s been jealous of gays for having such an industry . Imagine, going to a place alone and getting laid on the spot, and not by a paid worker but by someone who wants it just as bad as you–the male zipless-fuck fantasy, unencumbered by feminine propriety.

Savage Love (4 * 33): What the letter writer calls “insanity” could also be interpreted as discovering his new lover’s “real” self, not her sociable front persona. If he’s having trouble finding a woman who always keeps the illusion of “sanity” most of us maintain in public, maybe he should resign himself to shallow affairs with married women who want to “bring romance back to their lives.”

The Information book review (4 * 33): Lots of people who think they have talent are jealous of the success of people they think have less talent. Almost every highbrow author-wannabe I’ve met has tried at one time to write a commercially successful work just by making something “bad enough to sell,” without knowing the formulae and disciplines involved in genre lit.

Theater calendar comment (4 * 32): Ah, “risk” in theater. The Empty Space, Bathhouse, Pioneer Square Theater (RIP) et al. have for decades boasted of their daring programming while mounting boomer-friendly wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody revues. AHA! merely follows in this venerable tradition.

COCA feature (4 * 29): Greg implied but didn’t state that bad-boy art might have seemed rebellious and “alternative” enough in the ’80s; but in the Newt era, when the John Carlsons of America drive Harleys and call themselves “rebels,” a different aesthetic may be more appropriate.

Cut & Run (4 * 29): The usual rad-feminist response to an author like ex-Portland punk singer Rene Denfield is to first accuse her of backsliding from the orthodox view of what All Women are or should be. S.P. instead accuses Denfield of the same gross overgeneralizing Denfield accuses Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin of. There’s no such thing as All Women, and certainly no such thing as All Feminists. A movement for individual self-realization can’t be (or become) a monolith.

LAST PLUG: Our ninth-anniversary reading/ performance/ video shindig, Fun With Misc., happens this Thurs., 7:30 p.m.-whenever, at the Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, downtown on University between 1st and 2nd. BYOB; clothing optional.

Welcome back to Misc., the column that’s still had it with these expensive imports by local bands. When’s one of our newfangled Seattle music millionaires gonna start a label to release the Glitterhouse acts in North America where they belong?

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

SUDSLESS: In the wake of some so-far successful shows at the Sailors Union hall on 1st, several other all-ages show sites are popping up, including Club 449 in Greenwood (the former G-Note tavern, now a “clean and sober” dance club that’s added rock Wed. nights in addition to its normal 12-stepper oriented adult DJ formats weekends) and The Black Citroen in Fremont (a beautifully rustic garage-turned-coffeehouse). The latter is only all-ages as a provisional format; it’s already applied for a liquor license. As a 21-plus venue it might pick up some of the north end live alt-music slack dropped when the University Sportsbar moved to “young country.” Elsewhere in 21-plusland, the Weathered Wall will have new owners as soon as the Liquor Board approves. The new guys plan to drop live shows in favor of something approximating the WW’s original all-DJ format.

MOTORCYCLE MAMMON: Remember when Harleys were associated with Hell’s Angels instead of Young Republicans? (Given a choice, I’d feel much safer among the Hell’s Angels.) Now there’s Harley Davidson Motorclothes on 4th, selling new leather gear and assorted licensed products, including cans of the official Harley Davidson coffee (but not Harley Heavy Beer or H-D cigarettes yet). The store has a not-for-sale motorcycle in the window, but the only motorcycling-related product it sells is motor oil.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: For two decades now, the ultimate perjorative for a showy, shallow hippie was “Granolahead.” The imagery behind the insult was perfect; granola can be a high-fat, high-calorie sweetened foodstuff that still bears the image of something “good for you.” But now, the false image of granola is being stripped away, revealing the chewy oatmeal-honey-brown sugar concoction as just another great American food ingulgence. This reimaging can be partly credited to RJR Nabisco and its new Oreo Granola Bars! They taste better than they sound or look. The oatmeal and glaze blend perfectly with the crumbled-and-solidified cookie crumbs and blotches of “Creme.”

NETTING: From time to time, I’ve advocated the ideal direction for the Info Hi-Way as “many-to-many” communication, not “one-to-many” monopolized media. The pivotal breakthrough in achieving this has been announced, and it’s from none other than one of the most monopolistically-minded companies in the media biz, TCI Cable. In partnership with a company run by one of the Hearst descendents, TCI says it’s gonna offer “@ Home,” a service connecting home PCs to its cable lines and from there to the Internet and commercial online services. It won’t be available anywhere until the end of the year, and might take years to get onto your local cable hookup. But if and when it does show (and if TCI doesn’t ruin it by only offering limited Net access), it’ll be the hi-bandwidth answer to anyone’s indie-networking wet dreams, ‘cuz TCI’s PR people promise transmission rates of a megabyte in three seconds. Imagine: live one-way near-broadcast-quality video, or live two-way CD ROM-quality video and other multimedia applications. Local bulletin board systems made available by Telnet software to anyone anywhere, without extra long-distance charges. CD-quality audio downloaded at twice playback speed. And all this with content choices decided not by a few big corporations but by anybody who can get their stuff together and can hook up a “server” computer (as a sometime acquaintance of hardware hackers, I know it to be a task that can be either cheap or easy but not both).

STATE HEALTH CARE REFORM `AMENDED’: The operation was a success. The patient died.

EARLY WARNING: This year’s annual column anniversary party, Fun with Misc., will be an all-ages gathering Thurs., 6/8 at the Metropolis Gallery (downtown on University between 1st and 2nd). Details forthcoming.

DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: Here at Misc. World HQ we already miss the “Today’s Rock” sounds of KGRG, a mere two weeks after the Green River Community College station became unavailable to Seattle listeners. For the past three years or so, the Auburn-based KGRG had been rebroadcast at least part-time on the stronger signal of KBTC, out of Tacoma’s Bates Technical College. The combination station played western Washington’s strongest and purest dose of pomo, indie and A-word noise music, as delivered by a team of undisciplined and unjaded young DJs.

They’re still at it, but you can only hear them if you’re in range of KGRG’s own 100-watt transmitter. KBTC’s now airing its own stuff full-time, a forgettable “classic rock” format with nothing you can’t get on commercial oldies stations. KGRG’s management is looking into signal improvements and other ways to reconnect with its Seattle and Tacoma fans, but isn’t promising anything right now. Of course, if the Bates people were smart, they’d bring in volunteers from KGRG and other stations who could help turn KBTC into a station people would want to listen to. But they’re not, at least not yet.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Wurms -N- Dirt candy simulates the fishin’ hole bait bucket of your youth (at least of the youth the nostalgia industry expects you to have had). The clear plastic bucket contains gummy worms in a black powder of crushed chocolate cookies. It’s made by the same Texas company that packages bubble gum in CD jewel boxes, and is available at the new Candy Barrel national-chain outlet in Pioneer Square…. Those oh-so-clever candy and gum novelties from Wrigley’s Amurol division are now all at one handy display in selected stores, including the Plaid Pantry on 50th and Roosevelt. One-stop shopping for candy beepers, bandages, signet rings, and fake chewing tobacco–now that’s what I call convenience.

ILL-DEFINED: Saw the hi-definition TV fest at the UA Cinemas, put on by KCTS and the Japanese Film Festival. HDTV has been on the air in Japan for a few years now. KCTS, which has ties to Japanese broadcasting thanks to its Asia Now news magazine show, has one of the few HDTV production setups in the US. It uses the equipment to make those Over America travelogue videos.

The Japanese incarnation of HDTV works a lot like regular TV, but with a wide screen and over twice the image lines. For this demonstration, pictures were shown simultaneously on a projection TV system on the theater screen and on a consumer-model HDTV receiver in the lobby. The image in the theater looked enough like film that you had to squint at the subtitles to tell it was video. And the picture-tube image in the lobby was better than any movie film except IMAX; brighter and sharper than anything you’ve ever seen.

Program content left a lot to be desired: Besides the aforementioned helicopter travelogue landscapes, there were a couple of silly-pretentious surrealistic drama shorts made by Japanese networks and a demo video made by TCI Cable. In the latter, a noble native American shaman tells his cute grandson that modern communications technology will make all the world’s peoples into one family, so maybe they’ll stop fighting one another. (These two must belong to a less-dysfunctional family than any I’ve known.) The best two pieces were the ones that didn’t try to show off the technology: A Yussou N’Adour number from Woodstock ’94 and a documentary about legendary film composer Toru Takemitsu.

So when’s HDTV coming to American consumers? Never, for the system shown at the UA. Japanese HDTV technology has already been superseded, at least on the drawing board, by several proposed American systems that would use compressed digital transmission. The TV-set industry and the FCC are supposed to decide the final specs for digital HDTV within the year. The first sets will be expensive, aimed mostly at laserdisc collectors and at scientific-technical applications. Satellite, cable, and/or UHF HDTV broadcasts could start by the turn of the millennium.

We start this Misc. on a sad note with the passing of another of my favorite places in the whole world, the Western Coffee Shop in the Maritime Bldg. on Western and Marion. It closed so suddenly (around mid-March), it appeared posthumously in the P-I’s Final Four tourist guide. It was a legendary hole-in-the-wall with some of this town’s best sandwiches, omelets, hash browns, beefy chili, espresso shakes, and coffee; served in a cramped, cozy room with classic diner tableware and loving cowboy-camp decor.

SEAGRAM’S BUYING MCA/UNIVERSAL: If you’ve read books like Hit Men, you know both companies have shady pasts. Seagram’s Bronfman family was allegedly involved in Prohibition booze-smuggling from Canada to the U.S.; MCA, prior to its last ownership by Matsushita/ Panasonic, was one of the most Mob-connected companies in Hollywood. But that’s history; what counts in modern mergers is that boardroom buzzword “synergy”–using both companies’ assents toward joint goals. Since MCA owns the pre-1948 Paramount films as well as the Universal library, will we see stills of Mae West and W.C. Fields endorsing Crown Royal? Or maybe they’ll use computer graphics to insert V.O. bottles into Marlene Dietrich’s saloon scenes in Destry Rides Again. (This also marks the first time since the ’60s that a major North American movie studio and record label has been Canadian owned.)

FOOLS AND THEIR MONEY: The Dallas zine The Met ran a cover story earlier this month about two Texan young-adult guys who claimed to be the real Beavis and Butt-head. In the story, they argue that they’d been graphic design students studying under creator Mike Judge’s wife; that they’d told her and Judge wild tales of their high-school prankster days; that Judge turned that into the toons you hate to love; and that they now want millions from Judge and MTV plus half of B&B’s merchandising income. Halfway down the final jump page of the long story, the Met writer stated, so quickly you had to read carefully to see it, that the whole article was an April Fool’s hoax.

ON LINE: In the first half of this century, serialized novels (usually forgettable romances and mysteries) were a staple of newspaper feature pages. Now, the popular computer service America Online’s bringing that tradition back. Under the overall rubric Parallel Lives, the service now offers three ongoing text-with-illustration stories. Each offers a new 1,000-word chapter each week (each has four chapters so far). The most promising is A Boy and His Dog, not the Harlan Ellison story that became a 1975 Don Johnson film but a rather grim tale of a lonely kid in a dying industrial town harassed by someone who might be his estranged dad. The other stories involve the upscale NYC singles scene and interracial family values in Hollywood. They’re located in the Arts and Leisure section of AOL’s “@Times” area.

OFF LINE: Remember last year, at or about this time, when we worried that Ballard Computer was taking over the local retail computer market? Look at it now: Hemmed in by out-of-state superstore chains, unable to expand big or fast enough to compete against them, it closed two of six stores. The others are stocked with “returnables” like software, but the computers themselves are as thinly-stocked as the last days of F&N. They say all will be fine once their new Canadian investors get on line. ‘Til then, amazing bargains on remaining display stock can be had.

OFF THE RACKS: The Rocket Cobain exploitation issue was banned at Sub Pop’s offices and its Mega Mart store, as authorized by label co-honcho Jonathan Poneman. Meanwhile, compare the Times columnists’ cruel remarks about Cobain at the time of his death to the fawning “tribute” Pat McDonald gave him last week, and also to the much more sympathetic treatment the paper’s given to someone else facing internal emotional issues, Sonics player Kendall Gill.

GROWTH INDUSTRIES: The P-I now runs those penile enlargement ads on the stock-market pages as well as the sport section. You can insert your own snide comment about noise-makin’, foot-stompin’ jocks or Beemer-drivin’, cell-phone-yappin’ capitalist hustlers acting that way to compensate for other deficiencies.

A non-foolish April greeting from Misc., the column that wishes it’d coined the slogan of the Mpls. zine Cake: “Copyright Infringement Is Your Best Entertainment Value.”

THE LOWRY FIASCO might not have caused our Gov. to reconsider his past actions, but it still offers the rest of us a lesson: There’s not a line between excess chumminess and harassment, there’s a continuum. A politician, whose success depends on making and keeping friendships, oughta know enough to err on the safe end of that continuum. If Lowry really was the kind of “traditional politician” conservatives denounce him as, he’d have known this. In the end it doesn’t matter that Lowry probably wasn’t trying to get those staff women into bed when he nudged or slapped them or whatever. But he should know in the world of politics, persuasion is everything. And in the world of persuasion, perception is everything.

NOT FADE AWAY AND RADIATE: I’ve dissed Wired magazine in the past, but must draw praise toward a one-page plug in its April ish all about Ed Grothus. He’s a junk collector in Los Alamos, NM. His Los Alamos Sales Co. shop buys and sells leftover artifacts (computer stuff, office stuff, construction stuff, scientific equipment) from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and longtime recipient of Cold War spending waste. The piece doesn’t mention Ed’s son Tom, the Seattle writer-cartoonist who in the ’80s made a cute series of exquisitely droll mini-comics (Manzine, Errata, The Bermuda Love Triangle).

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Better Faster Be$t$ellers (http://www.digimark.net/mful/bselcurr.htm) is a weekly fanciful satire of commercial literature that purports to be “entirely the result of algorithmically compressing (or compacting together) the less dense, slower titles of the current Publishers Weekly bestseller list.” It’s doubtful, tho, that a random-recombination program could come up with such mirthful titles as “Men are From the Hot Zone, Women Are From the Surface of Common Sense,” “The Celestine Bedtime Stories,” “Time to Correct the Warrior Treatment” (“by Seinfeld with Fyodor Dostoevsky”), or “Makes Me Wanna Do Ten Highly-Effective Stupid Things to 7 Driven People.” The same home page also contains Most Fucked Up Person Alive Tells All, an anonymously written pseudo-autobiography written in a cut-up nonsense style similar to that of Mark Leyner.

OF OXFORDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS: While I’ve admittedly not been Evergreen State’s biggest rah-rah booster (the world’s a lot more diverse than the world they teach at Evergreen, the mythical world of the New England/Upper Midwest “progressive” utopia), the state House’s plan to slash its budget and ratchet up its tuition strikes as pure censorship. Some GOP legislators admit it, using the word “liberal” as an all-purpose purjorative to justify their McCarthyite vindictiveness against the school. But the smear campaign against Evergreen goes beyond demonizing people who look or act different. There’s something about the very notion of a school that encourages (or at least claims to encourage) “free thought” that strikes a nerve among some who want to build a sociocultural system of naked fear, greed and obedience.

MISC.’S TOP 9:

• Jet Dreams: Northwest Artists in the ’50s, Tacoma Art Museum: At last, a regional-art show in a mainstream museum without a single glass bowl in sight!
• Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The copycat shows might equal the original in silly dialogue, but just can’t beat the childlike wonder and excitement of Power Rangers’ borrowed Japanese costume footage (from the studio that made the Gameramovies).
• Pickapeppa, Jamaican pepper sauce
• Presidents of the United States of America (PopLlama)
• Green patio furniture
• Self-folding maps
• The Literary Companion to Sex, Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Random House)
• Alaskan Amber Ale
• Marie Callender’s frozen pasta entrees

MISC.’s BOTTOM 6:

• Using that Janis Joplin song in a real Mercedes ad
• Cheap boom boxes that eat tapes for lunch
• Store chains that say “We’re Here Seattle!” or show the downtown skyline in their ads, but only open stores in the far suburbs
• Turbo Charged Thunderbirds: Live-action space teens shouting would-be hip lingo while watching Supermarionation footage shot before they were born
• “Ice” versions of cheapo beers
• Disclosure: Hot interoffice sex in the software biz? Come on now.