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11/91 Misc. Newsletter
Clarence the Cross-Eyed Judge
A cool-weather greeting from Misc., the newsletter that couldn’t afford to go to the $295 Nov. 14 touring seminar on Producing, Designing & Writing Newsletters by a Georgia consulting firm. We’ll have to get along without learning what the flyer called “the 27 essential elements of all good newsletter copy which increase readership, credibility and motivation.”
Sign of the Month (taped to the inside of a Magazine City window): “Please don’t support the belief that panhandling supports drug abuse. The fact is, most `homeless’ people don’t have the mental capacities to get on government legal panhandling programs like welfare and food stamps. Besides, it’s your money and your decision right?? O.K. Pal… Thanx, `a homeless person.'” Runner-up (orange posters on Roosevelt Way light poles): “This is a Totem Pole. This pole is talking.”
Ad Slogan of the Month: “Fits like a glove. Feels like love.” The product: Side 1 tennis shoes.
When’s A Critic Not?: P-I art critic Regina Hackett, quick to denounce any work she doesn’t like, provided an unquestioning piece on 9/28 toward controversial writer Andrea Dworkin. You could almost learn that Dworkin has, over the years, denounced all heterosexual intercourse as rape, written novels about totally-good women and totally-bad men (except those who pledge never to confront a woman with an erection), and provided true believers with a drug-free high based on the intense power of martyrdom (a universal feeling, one I’ve experienced through other means and found dangerously addictive). Her most famous assertion is that virtually any image of a woman designed for men or by “male culture,” no matter how sweet/bland/loving/silly, is a statement of violent domination against all women. There is no love in Dworkin’s world, no humanity, only rage. Her only solution to old repressive stereotypes is to create new ones. Anyone who knows anyone who doesn’t conform to her archetypes knows her worldview is incomplete; but unlike many feminists, Dworkin doesn’t appeal to reason but to passion. She exploits a very real pain and fear held by many women. They find a recognition of their pain in her that they don’t find anywhere else. Yet she offers no way out, only the same compulsion for censorship and vindictiveness I abhor in right-wing males. Speaking of whom…
Here Comes the Judge: The Thomas/Hill debate was like a 12-hour episode of LA Law, without the comedy relief. It was exquisite that ABC’s Day 1 coverage led into Family Matters, the sitcom about a teen geek who mistakenly thinks he’s a great lover. The behavior charged to Thomas (and charged to others in acres of local-angle stories) is one aspect of office hustler behavior. From J.R. to self-styled “right-wing rebels,” a strain of American culture has mistaken obnoxious and contemptuous people for “winners.” This attitude embodied most of the Reagan White House except Reagan himself, and was taught in seminars and self-improvement courses (including the book Winning Through Intimidation). Nobody specifically endorsed sexual harassment, but they promoted an atmosphere of arrogance that incubates many expressions of rudeness. (These men also harass subordinate men in non-sexual ways, that feel psychologically like a schoolyard beating, not rape.) This is why I say we’ve got to get rid of all bigotry, all stereotypes, all dehumanizing, or you’re just emulating the behaviors you claim to hate. Oh — and Thomas was wrong when he said, “This isn’t America. This is Kafkaesque.” Don’t be silly: America is Kafkaesque.
Dough Boys: There was a great Times piece 9/29 on corporate debt. The same politicians who used to scream about government deficits arranged the regulatory policies that led to the funny-money economy of the late ’80s. The same business advocates who bitched about public debt eagerly built up the private debt that strangulates the economy. Companies can’t borrow or spend out of the recession; they’re too busy paying for funny-money takeovers. Laid-off workers, consumers who face fewer choices at higher prices, callers cut off because AT&T cut its maintenance budget, bank depositors, and all the rest of us are paying for the games of corporate predators. A UN study shows that this is the first year since ’45 in which world industrial output declined. Some of that is due to the collapse of the Soviet economy (a different type of funny-money), but a lot of it’s due to the damage by the western world’s speculator joy-riders.
One More Reason Not to Live in LA: The music video for Fun Day, shot on the streets of LA, shows Stevie Wonder driving.
Block That Metaphor (Paul Gregutt wine col. in the Weekly, 10/16): “This takes Brusset’s Cairanne to another dimension. It’s like the difference between Star Trek on TV and Star Trek in the movies…a voyage where no palate has gone before. Berries, sage, tannin, and acid explode from a wine that might be described as a zinfandel recruited by Hell’s Angels.”
The Hammering Man Crash: I wasn’t there at the time it fell, but got to see the massive wreckage. One can question whether the Seattle Art Museum should have spent $400G on a clone sculpture from LA, the town whose business is imposing its culture onto the rest of the world. One can question the smug condescension implied in a self-styled tribute to the Working Man at a development that represents the expulsion of working-class labor from downtown, overlooking the waterfront that now represents the expulsion of working-class labor from America. (I’m reminded of Vancouver author Brian Fawcett’s assertion that malls and subdivisions are typically named after the real places they replaced.)
Yes, But Is It Alive?: Belltown Inside Out was billed as a celebration of the “artistic neighborhood;” it turned out more like a wake. The big exhibit was highlighted by people who used to live and/or work downtown, before the arrival of the real estate speculators. The new and “restored” apartments and condos on display were shoddy-to-average pieces of construction, gussied up with thick rugs, goofy light fixtures and weight rooms. The image of an art community is considered important by the developers who are driving out all the artists (one brochure touts “Sidewalk cafes, galleries, pubs, the market and the most vibrant downtown north of San Francisco”), so expect more such events. The area was swarming with cops that Fri. nite, like the tower-dwellers’ political lobby has wanted for some time; only they didn’t seem to be going after any dealers providing pharmaceuticals for the fratboy-disco clientele, but just stood near the gallery spaces looking reassuring. It was also the first weekend of the Donald Young Gallery (nothing from here; nothing anybody here not named Gates can afford) and the last weekend of the Belltown Film Festival at the Rendezvous (a program and space virtually made for one another). The promotion seems to have worked overall; as of the first week of the UW fall quarter, the 1st Ave. bars were overflowing with the fresh faces that make old hippies squirm in disgust/jealousy. Seattle’s various hipster scenes over the decades never fully capitalized on the largest student population west of Austin. It’s happened now, for good or ill.
Yes, But Is It Mutating?: Seattle artist James L. Acord Jr., who makes “nuclear sculpture” using old luminous, uranium-containing Fiesta Ware, received a giant 2-part profile in the 10/14 and 10/21 New Yorkers, with an apparent first for that mag’s editorial pages: a color photo. (Color has occasionally been in New Yorker cartoons in recent years.)
Stages of Life #1: Penta, who as Leslee Swanson sang perky pop tunes with the early-’80s band The Dinette Set, has returned momentarily from NYC with a husband, a baby, and a street-theatre company. The Alchemical Theatre collectively creates and choreographs song/dance/chant/rant rituals to promote nonviolent anarchism. It sounds heavy and didactic, and some of it is; but parts of their work are also stirring indeed, as the seven performers mingle with the audience to seek a world without violence, hate or wasteful work. Their next piece will touch upon “desire, technology, pleasure, and revolution.” Look for it in a Pioneer Square cellar near you, or call 682-9359 or 447-1566 for reservations.
Stages of Life #2: It’s appropriate that Intiman’s Mary Traverse keeps the heroine clothed while stripping her mate during an abstracted simulated-sex scene. Nudity is oft used in film to strip the male hero’s girlfriends while not exposing him. Here, the heroine (who presumably knows what her own body looks like) offers her reaction to seeing a man’s body. Demystifying the male body would be a step toward more sexual honesty. Maybe those “butt shots” in male-action movies are a positive sign.
Cathode Corner: There’s a peculiarity to listening to football on the radio while watching the same game on TV. The TV signal is bounced off a far-away satellite, so we see the outcome of a play a second after it’s told by the radio announcers…. Al Owens is slowly growing into his job as KSTW entertainment reporter. His rhetorical reach still exceeds his grasp, but it’s still entertaining to see what his next overblown comment is going to be.
Fashion Plate of the Month: The woman on Broadway with a denim jacket, painted in blue with the slogan “Read Chomsky.”
Get a Life Dept.: A man was convicted for continually trespassing at Ann Wilson’s house. Maybe he could get hitched up with Letterman’s female trespasser and they could invade each other’s homes and stop bugging others.
Deconstructivism: The Music Hall’s back wall looked forlorn this past month, with a giant Jerry Mouse hole cut into it to let the demolition machines in. A tragedy that should have been permanently prevented years ago, when credit wasn’t as tight.
Steven Jesse Bernstein, 1951-1991: Didn’t really know one another that well (he sometimes confused me with ex-local writer David Humphries). I knew him well enough to chat up with him outside the Bon circa ’82 while waiting for his fiancée to come out. He talked all hopeful about the forthcoming marriage ;watching from inside a bus a minute later, I saw him cussing out loud for her to get out already. I kept wishing his work would show more discipline, more coherence.But people loved his incoherence, and his reality. He appealed to a punkoid audience who play-acted at despair, because he displayed real despair. For more than a decade, he alternated between periods of fpopular readings and periods of withdrawal (including visits to the U Hospital psych ward, to keep his emotions in check and to stay off drugs, a battle he lost months before ending up with a slit throat on Neah Bay).
‘Til our gala year-closing December saga, see the new SoDo Center (the good-ol’ 1st Ave. Sears plus Bizmart discount computers-n’-things), ask the folks putting up Anita Hill for President posters if they remember that she’s still a conservative, and ponder whether it’s time to listen to something else when those Silent Radio electric signs add a “Top 5 World Music LPs” chart.
PASSAGE
Walter Kendrick in The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment: “Our next age is the first in human history that will have all prior ages to gaze upon at will.”
REPORT
Not a single person responded to my request for ideas on turning this into a less unprofitable venture. If I don’t think of something, I may eventually have to reconsider this whole thing (at least in its present form).
My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is apparently going to be out sometime this winter. More info when I learn it.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Impecunious”
HALLOWEEN IS SUPERFLUOUS WHEN
TODAY’S SCARIEST CREATURES LOOK THE MOST `NORMAL’
10/91 Misc. Newsletter
Bart and Buster Simpson
An autumnal welcome to Misc., the quite serious pop culture letter that wishes it had gotten the “Bumbershooters from Hell” T-shirt: “There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.”
We mark the passing of Wes Anderson, 39, dead of cancer in NYC, part of the Seattle art-direction mafia who used the Rocket as their portfolio for landing jobs at the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere. A lot of musicians over the years have complained that the Rocket cared more about design than about local music. On the whole, though, those designers (including Anderson) got a lot more success in their field than our musicians had. As Anderson’s comrade Art Chantry noted a few years ago, the Seattle music scene had left a more notable visual legacy than a musical one (at that time).
Correction: This issue is #61, and the September issue was #60, despite what it said on the indicia. Sorry, collectors. That slip up will not stop us, however, from exposing other people’s slip-ups, such as the book bag sold at Tower Books: “Never Judge a Book By It’s Cover.”
Philm Phacts: The Commitments proves what the management of Bumbershoot and Pioneer Square clubs have known for some time now: that everybody loves black music, just so long as it’s 20 years old and performed by whites. It’s just what you could expect from the director of Mississippi Burning, that film “about” the U.S. civil-rights movement that had an all-white starring cast.
Needles-N’-Pins: TOf all the performances Larry Reid has conducted to pander to the thrill-cravings of the white-skin, black-clothes crowd, the piercing exhibition at COCA may have been the artsiest and classiest. It also brought a lot of questions about women and pain, women and self-righteousness, and women and the need to look beautiful (of the three most prominent spots in the room, two were given to the most conventionally attractive performers, with heavier or otherwise less “ladylike” figures positioned along the sides and back.) The third prominent spot, the front stage, was for a woman made-up as a marionette with her eyes masked by swim goggles and her arms and legs made up to look like puppet hinges. Her pierces were attached to strings, which were pulled by two assistants in a performance that Tristan Tzara might have thought of if he’d had the guts. She was clearly high on her own endorphines, as her pale arms and legs betrayed a massive shutdown of blood circulation. There was also a real-life log lady in the form of a tattooed, topless bodybuilder strung to a log to symbolize what a sign called “The Fate of the Earth;” a nude blonde with platinum-dyed hair (even below) who “wore” a hoop-skirt-like wire construction; and one in black tights who stood before a fan blowing a breeze onto streamers connected to her arms, the only participant who smiled and looked like she knew she was strong and beautiful. One beef goes to the sign outside the room, warning not to “touch or attempt to talk to the exhibits.” As if they were objects.
Cathode Corner: Bill Nye the Science Guy appeared on a syndicated special promoting the new cable version of the Mickey Mouse Club. He provided the only entertaining moment in a show of cute, talentless preteens in bad skits and dance numbers (including the requisite rap version of the old theme). Let’s hope this success doesn’t send him south for good…. The NY Times claimed that Law and Order is the only prime-time TV show this fall produced in New York City, dismissing The Cosby Show as a product of “Queens, N.Y.” — a place which has been part of New York City for about a century. Remember, this is the same paper that ran a huge essay questioning whether this country needed a (privately-supported) Museum of TV and Radio, implying that broadcasts that captured the hearts of America were too prole to be worth preserving.
Stuff I Missed, just because I didn’t like the featured attraction: A Rockcandy gig with the normally insufferable band the Mentors had an unannounced extra on 9/4, when a woman jumped onstage and stripped during the set. A young man soon joined her onstage, then joined her onstage. The baffling part is how any woman could be aroused by such a notoriously sexist, stuck-up band.
Sign of the Month (at the Varsity concession stand): “Special Award for an act of distinction: Scott White, `a man of congeniality,’ for explaining that `Exclusive Engagement’ is not the title of a film.”
Good Buy, Baseball!: The Mariners’ woes have a lot to do with a flaw in the social culture of Seattle. In the pioneer days, people (particularly women) came here to build a city, to create a society. In the recent past, Seattle attracted people who wanted to escape social obligations, to retreat to million-dollar “cabins” where they could carry out “lifestyles” close to nature but far from people. It’s an unattainable, narcissistic fantasy, of course; but it’s a powerful fantasy that gives would-be baseball investors (or arts patrons) an excuse not to get involved. The sports that work here are those with tradition here (football) or league salary caps (basketball) or low costs (junior hockey). Baseball, with 81 stadium-capacity home games, farm teams, and salaries essentially decided by the NY/LA teams, requires more (and more loyal) fans, more broadcast money, more ad money, and more long-term investment. Can we raise those things for good?
The Fine Print (excerpts from Playboy’s style manual, written by Arlene Bouras and quoted in the newsletter Copy Editor): “Always capitalize Playmate when referring to the girl on our centerfold. And try to avoid using the word in any other context…. Once a Playmate, always a Playmate. Never refer to a former Playmate.”
Legal-Ease: The exoneration of Oliver North on a technicality does not mean he’s innocent. It means that, at least this time in this place, our legal system believes in the law — something North, to all evidence, didn’t give a damn about. Or rather, he thought he was so totally and utterly right that he could do illegal things and it’d still be OK. He represents the same twisted morality that gives us mass-murdering”heroes” in movies and video games, the right-justifies-might lie shared by the most ruthless communists and the most repressive anticommunists.
Sports Spurts: Football claims to be the most popular men’s sport among women, as evidenced by a new line of NFL merchandise for women including costume jewelry with team logos. To contrast, in the long tradition of the “making it in the male dominated world of…” article, Ms. is pontificating about the status of women in baseball (perhaps as a plug for the forthcoming women-in-baseball movie). It is true that all these soggy baseball-mysticism books are total guy stuff, even as they blather about magic numbers and dewey outfields and de-emphasize references to the game as an athletic contest performed by jocks. On the other hand, there are a hell of a lot more women into playing amateur baseball and softball than amateur football.
It’s Only Words: The recent revival of Story magazine, a forum for short-story writers, turns out to be owned by the publishers of Writer’s Digest. Could it be that they’re subsidizing one magazine of freelance fiction, in order to keep up unreasonable hopes among the thousands of would-be writers that Writer’s Digest and its costly books, workshops and merchandise exploit?
It’s Square to be Hip: There are serious limits to bohemianism as a political philosophy. You simply can’t build a popular coalition for real change if you just sit around mourning the end of the ’60s or if you treat everybody “squarer” than yourself as an idiot. The anti-gulf war movement was, let’s face it, dominated by people who seemed more interested in proving their loyalty to the hippie subculture than in persuading outsiders to their views. What a coalition of right-wing groups and their journalistic stooges demagoguily calls the “politically correct thought police” is really just a few scattered groups who would love to see a revolutionof “the people” in this country but only if none of those unsightly working class saps were in it.
Local Publications of the Month: The Stranger is an exceptionally promising weekly free tabloid of reviews (everything from the book Black Elk Speaks to scat singing), essays (including quasi-serious defenses of smoking and Barbie dolls), a love-advice column for all orientations “by a queer nationalist,” a combo film review and searing fag-bashing memoir, indescribable fiction (my favorite kind), and graphics by the great James Sturm…. Performance artist/filmmaker/astrologer Antero Alli’s Talking Raven is back, this time in a tabloid format. I’m no poetry critic so I can’t judge most of the contents, but I adore the haunting illos by James Koehnline, Tim Cridland and others, as well as the Cataclysm and Apocalypse Survey (“Vote for your favorite doomsday scenario”)….
Big Storewide Sale: Frederick & Nelson, the ex-grande dame of Northwest retailing that in recent years has acted like a dowager in gaudy make-up, is in bankruptcy and closing half its stores so that the remaining locations will have enough (old) stock to fill the shelves this winter. Most of the closed stores came from the Liberty House and Lipman’s acquisitions in the ’70s, when the chain tried to buy the market penetration needed to justify TV and newspaper ads. Also now dead is the least of the chain’s original four stores, leaving Aurora Village even more desolate (it’s now worthless as a mall but remains a well-situated site for a future outdoor baseball stadium).
Billy Jack Goes to Washington: ’70s filmmaker Tom Loughlin is running for President. Don’t scoff: his movies preached peacemaking and practiced violence. By recent standards, he’s perfect for the job.
The Spin Doctor Is In: Local phone bills in Sept. carried the following statement: “Through the efforts of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission and US West, we have implemented the five year Washington Revenue Sharing Plan which was approved in January 1990… It’s our way of thanking you for using US West services in Washington state.” The “plan” is actually a state-mandated rebate on windfall profits from regulated phone services, imposed after the post-breakup company stuck line fee after user fee onto phone bills.
Yes, But Is It Tableware?: Seattle’s own “environmental artist” Buster Simpson made the pages of Simpsons Illustrated, the kids’ activities magazine, under the heading “Unrelated Simpsons in the News.” The magazine noted how Simpson once “cast a set of vitreous plates and placed them at various sewage outfalls on Puget Sound. As the tide came in and out, pollutants in the water formed a hideous glaze on their surfaces. It’s clear that Buster could just as easily have conducted his work near the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.”
‘Til we greet you again in the throes of November, read my interview in the Oct. Belltown Brain Fever Dispatch, check out David Carradine’s Kung Fu Workout videos, see Slacker (the most seamless experience of exiting a movie and entering real life I’ve ever known) and the Seattle-set sitcom Good and Evil, and recall these words from Peter Brooks’s The Mahabharata: “Love, well made, can lead to wisdom.”
Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, quoted in the Village Voice (8/6): “The fabric of our society is composed of strands of synthetic desire.”
Still waiting to hear from the software company that more or less promised to put my novel out on disk. Until then, The Perfect Couple is still available (Mac only) for $7.
I do not have a business checking account at this time. All subscriptions, fax subs ($9), ads ($15), and Perfect Couple orders should be on checks made out to me. I’m still accepting suggestions on how to turn this into a potentially profitable publication (come on, one of you must have an idea!).
“Dolorous”
NOTE TO OUR OUT OF TOWN READERS
90 percent of Seattle’s bands don’t sound a thing like Soundgarden
8/91 Misc. Newsletter
Spend A Night in the “Night Gallery”
Welcome back to a midsummer night’s Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that’s highly disappointed now that we don’t get to hear mega-metal concerts at the never-to-be Ackerley Arena. We’re also bemused by the recent flap that Chief Sealth (the Milli Vanilli of the 1850s) never spoke about buffalo and railroads (which he never saw) and may not have said all attributed to him in the famous 1887-published translation of an 1854 speech. Hate to disillusion you, but folks often get famous for things they never actually said (Jesus never spoke in King James English, Bogart never said “Play It Again Sam”). Sealth has become a figure around which a body of ideas has coalesced — the best way for anyone to become immortal.
AN AROMATIC PROPOSAL, BUT SHORT ON BODY: Ste. Michelle and its sister winery Columbia Crest want the Feds to OK “Pacific Coast” as an official appellation for wines blended from Washington, Oregon, and/or California grapes. (Presently, wines with grapes from more than one state have to be called “American”.) A winery spokesperson admitted that the requested name is part of a plan to promote Washington wines to foreign markets far more familiar with Calif. product.
THORNS: KIRO showed a Seattle secretary who was “blessed” with the delivery of over 650 red roses and dozens of red balloons to her office cubicle on 6/26, from a boyfriend who wanted to become a husband. In a switch from most extravagant-surprise wedding proposals you hear about on the TV news, she said no.
ELSEWHERE IN CUPIDLAND: Successful Singles, the high-priced dating service with questionnaire-membership forms at every steak and pancake restaurant in town, was sued by a Denver man who sez they kept setting him up w/totally the wrong kind of woman. He put on his membership form that he didn’t want a woman who was obsessed with money, yet his arranged dates would ask immediately how much he made.
OFF KEY: The Big 6 multinational record companies want Congress to ban all independent importation of music, claiming some line about stopping “bootlegs” when they really just want to stamp out all imports and the independent stores that sell them. Even worse, the majors might be so eager to get an anti-import bill that they might make a deal with the pro-censorship forces in return.
SPROCKETS: Joel Siegel, the worst national critic since Dixie Whatley, called The Naked Gun 2 1/2 “Every bit as funny as The Naked Gun 1 and 2.” He didn’t even realize that there was no Naked Gun 2.
“LOVE PARTY” BUSTED: Police were quick to halt the BYOB disco affair at the Georgetown steam plant in late June, but decidedly less speedy responding to the rioting and looting by disgruntled patrons at the 2nd Ave. hat store where the tickets were sold. The store may not recover from the losses and damages.
WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: Went to Vancouver briefly. Heard a Quebecoise newswoman talking about Slovenia. Saw the CD jukebox at the Cruel Elephant rock club with the sign LOONIES ONLY (the $1 coin with a loon on it). Missed the Grocery Hall of Fame in the warehouse district of Richmond. Heard horror stories about Hong Kong investors deliberately hyper-inflating real estate prices for money-transfer purposes. Read about third-generation Chinese-Canadians facing hate attacks even tho’ they’ve no connection to the financiers.
WHAT ELSE I DID THIS SUMMER: Visited San Francisco, “The City” to which all others are compared (by its own boosters), almost as packed as Tokyo but less civil, where they stare you down if you mistakenly call the Muni Metro a “subway.” I now understand why Bay Areans never look at Seattle for anything we’re really like but for their own fantasies; since our houses have lawns, by their standards we’re a small-town paradise. Any illusions about the self-proclaimed intellectual apex of the hemisphere vanished when I overheard the staff at City Lights Books discussing which was the best theater to see Terminator 2 at! On the plus side, environmental group Urban Habitat has an “Eco-Rap” contest, to help rid the image of ecologists as only white college grads. And H. Caen, whose local columns are clipped and framed in the hundreds of stores and restaurants he plugs, had a great essay on how he misses the SF of Tony Bennett’s song, but realizes that era’s “urbane sophistication” hid a lot of sins, principally corruption and racism. He singlehandedly broke my image of San Franciscans as a people eager to bitch about everyone else in America but unwilling to take even valid criticism of their own town. All in all, a nicer tourist trap than most, with bookstores almost as good as ours, a bagel deli on every block, a decent handful of non-oldies clubs, and two Spanish TV stations. But I’m still gonna call it Friscoany damn time I want to.
(Everybody I met there, by the way, said they’d heard Seattle was “really a cool place,” but couldn’t say why. Came back to find that somebody made a passage from the July Misc. into a street poster, without credit.)
FRAMED: Big cost overruns plague the new Seattle Art Museum, as they so often do with such more officially respectable uses of taxpayer money as Stealth bombers. The contractor calls the Robt. Venturi design “unconstructible.” And I thought it was another concrete box with superficial decorative reliefs. But the P-I sez it’ll be a definitive architectural statement of the late 20th century, the first major US building by a guy whose writings have inspired many architects but himself hasn’t won many bids (well, actually it’s mostly by his design staff).
IN THE (COURT) HOUSE: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s got a nasty feud with his ex-label, Nastymix. Following two albums that were the first locally-produced-and-recorded million sellers ever (or at least since the Fleetwoods in 1960), Mix-A-Lot (a.k.a. Anthony Ray, who presumably took his stage name to avoid confusion with second-string big band leader Ray Anthony) accused Nastymix of cheating him and exploiting what had essentially been a “handshake” contract. Nastymix countersued to block Mix-A-Lot’s jump to a major label.
KNOCK ON WOOD: The Chicago Tribune said on 6/27 that lumber companies have suddenly, jointly raised wholesale prices 20 to 30 percent nationally, blaming the increase on the spotted-owl decision. Their aim, the paper implies, is to raise new-home prices enough that John Q. Middleclass will beg Congress to give the timber biz all the environmental excuses it wants, maybe even to scuttle the Endangered Species Act.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: General Mills Pop Qwiz is a new microwave popcorn for kids, in more colors than Trix (red, blue, orange, yellow, green, purple). There’s games and trivia quizzes in every box, to enjoy while hiding from parents yelling about who stunk up the house with imitation-butter-flavor smell.
SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (on a Diamond Parking receipt): “Park where you are invited and welcome.”
DEAD AIR: Another piece of our broadcast heritage dies as KJR moves to sports-talk and phases out its music (which had become an oldies-laden ghost of its old energetic Top 40 image). Space prohibits us from going into the legacy of KJR’s DJs, its onetime support for local music, its impact on anyone who grew up here followed by the shamefully bigoted anti-youth ads of its oldies phase, which were thankfully dropped.
BRAND NEW KEY DEPT.: A New York company has come up with the latest necessity for the single woman: Lady’s Choice, a“talking keychain” that “tells” men in bars whether you want them or not. By pressing one of five areas, you make the keychain give out digitized sounds saying “Get Lost,” “You’re A Loser,” “Nice Buns!,” or “What A Hunk!” or a random selection of the four. It’s made in China, where prearranged marriages are still the norm….
The 7/17 Newsweek ran a tabloidy “shocker” proclaiming that many teenage females actually like sex and will assertively seek out boys who will provide it. While I haven’t known any suck women (for good or ill), it doesn’t surprise me that a new generation of women, comfortable with the disciplines of safe sex and weaned on ideologies of gratification (advertising, rock music), would find anti-sex “morality” (of the prudish right or the puritan left) worthless and self-defeating. (This is all a gross overgeneralization of a complicated topic, but so was the original article.)
BEST PART OF THE FIREWORKS: KING-FM’s biplane banners buzzing all around Lake Union; all classical stations should promote themselves in such populist ways. Worst part (besides the Coca-Cola war exploitation ad): The two-hour traffic jam, tying up every road that remotely led to a freeway on-ramp. If Seattle really had the vibrant nightlife scene so many of us have longed for, we’d have traffic this bad every Fri. and Sat. night.
BUYING THE FARM: A strawberry farm where I spent many an extremely boring summer afternoon will be closed, flooded, and brokered to developers wanting to trade wetland-preservation rights so they can build elsewhere. The Chicago Board of Trade, meanwhile, will soon start trading in pollution-rights futures….
THE BYTE BIZ: IBM and Apple, longtime sworn nemeses, are getting together to create the next generation of computer software (and the next generation of computers to run it). The deal is as disillusioning to Apple consignetti as the Hitler-Stalin pact was to US socialists. Apple was originally perceived as the triumph of sci-fi loving, T-shirt wearing techno hippies against the blue-suit mentality of IBM. In reality, Apple was fueled by Porsche-driving venture capitalists and got more corporate oriented every year, making great machines that it only wanted the rich to own; until it grudgingly cut prices last year (and laid off thousands to keep profits up). The one thing Apple still has going for it is superior engineering, particularly in software; now, the system that will replace the Mac in the mid-’90s will be available to IBM and others. The move also creates a software giant to rival (perhaps supplant) Microsoft (some computer insiders would jealously love to see it).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch is a funky bimonthly report on the slow strangulation of the latest “artists’ neighborhood” to be overrun by predatory developers, including the impending death-by-upscaling of the Cornelius Apts., immortalized in Holly Tuttle’s “Life at the Edge Apartments” strip in the early-’80s National Lampoon. (I wrote this weeks before they published an issue plugging me.)
THE UNTOLD STORY: A downtown dept. store was evacuated shortly before noon on 7/2, due to a small interior fire. I know this only because I was there; I found no story about it (correct me, please) in the papers that depend on its ads. I was so looking forward to a headline about how it was such a perfect summer’s day for a bon fire.
BALLARD HIGH TO BE REPLACED: No matter what building it’s in, the heritage will continue of pubescent frosh giggling at the team name (hint: it’s the same as Oregon State‘s).
‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN IN SEPTEMBER, tell KCTS to stop being such total toadies to big business, join the drive to save the historic Everett Theater, and recall these words from Richard Amidon’s Selling Yourself Raw, a new book on the poetic side of salesmanship: “I want to make love to your gullibility.”
Newfoundland columnist Ray Guy, quoted in the Toronto Globe and Mail about his fellow Canadians: “Of all the foolish, silly, pitiful crowd who ever dabbled in the ‘country’ game, that lot is it…. I don’t think I ever met a Canadian I didn’t like, and that’s about as bad a thing as I can think of to say about anyone.”
SPECIAL EVENT
I’ll be appearing at COCA’s Night Gallery reading series, 8 p.m. Wed., Aug. 28 at 1305 1st Ave. Also on the bill: Gillian “Johnny Renton” Gaar with parts of her new book on female rockers. Info: 682-4568.
We don’t issue paper-wasting renewal notices. Your mailing label tells when you need to renew in order to keep getting more wonderful issues.
Anyone with ideas on turning this into a professional, self-supporting operation (or who can invest in such an operation) should write in.
“Lambent”
GUNS N’ ROSES: FIRST WHITE BAND TO
MAKE HEADLINES FOR NOT STARTING A RIOT
7/91 Misc. Newsletter
DOES ANYBODY REALLY CARE ABOUT
JULIA & KIEFER NOT GETTING MARRIED? REALLY?
Misc. is back, the pop-culture newsletter that can still remember when we all used to scoff at the USSR’s idea of fun — tanks and missiles on parade, “honoring” those who obeyed orders fighting to prop up dictatorial puppet regimes.
DOWN THE PIKE: Three food booths in the Pike Place Market were gutted in late May for one huge eating table with only four chairs, one of which broke the first morning. This is not how they’re going to raise revenues to buy out the New York investors and pay off both sides’ immense legal bills.
REQUIEM FOR AN ECCENTRIC: Vic Meyers, who died in late May, was one of the true northwest characters, a jazz musician who got elected to the normally meaningless post of lieutenant governor on a joke campaign and managed to keep getting re-elected on the privileges of incumbency, much to the disgust of the real politicians. One such pol was Gov. John Langlie, who felt trapped in the state during his two terms, unable to fly to the other Washington for lobbying work out of fear that Meyers would become temporary acting governor, call a special session of the Legislature and issue who knows what disorderly executive orders. Finally Langlie got a chance when Meyers was himself off on a fishing trip; until Meyers heard Langlie was gone, and Langlie heard Meyers was rushing back to Olympia. Langlie hurriedly chartered a plane to fly him back west in the middle of the night, landing in Spokane just minutes before Meyers showed up at the state capitol to call the special session he was no longer authorized to call.
DOG DAZE: The UK is trying to eradicate all pit bulls from its soil, as a probable preliminary step toward exterminating soccer hooligans and perhaps even, if they’re lucky, the unspeakable foods they make out of the variety meats.
CLOTHES HOARSE: A national fashion trade magazine noted the increasing prominence of Seattle menswear designers, but the Times tried to stick a nonexistent spin onto the story by noting that these designers “show no Seattle influence” — by which the paper means they don’t have prints of outdoorsy scenes, but instead show a variety of influences from around the world. What rubbish! Seattle is, if you haven’t noticed (and a lot of reporters haven’t), a real city, an international trade center and home of the machines that made the Jet Set possible. A fashion style that mixes the best of America, Canada, Europe and particularly urban Asia could be about as distinctly Seattle as you’re likely to get.
SHOE BIZ: How appropriate that a cache of Nike shoes, lost at sea a year ago, would wash ashore along the Oregon coast the day before the Portland TrailBlazers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Almost poetic, no?
CATCHING `EM WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN: Seattle’s American Passage Media Corp., a company that began selling term paper “guides” and now handles various ad ventures, wants to put up ads in high-school locker rooms. Called “GymnBoards,” they’d be like Whittle Communications’ ad posters in doctor and dentist offices, a little bit of consumer info surrounded by slick ad messages. (Whittle, originator of the sponsored classroom newscast Channel One, is under fire from mainstream media reporters who don’t want ad dollars to cease subsidizing reporters’ salaries) Too many teens are already almost fatally self-conscious, without having diet, food, or grooming products confronting them while nude.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Johnny’s Fine Foods of Tacoma has launched a line of salad dressings with offbeat names: Jamaica Mistake, Honey! You’re Terrific!, Garlic: The Final Frontier, Poppy Love, Great Caesar, and Gorby Light: A Kinder, Gentler Russian. (The back label of the latter sez, “…unleashes the flavor of good Russian and eliminates those harsh old overtones…”)
GOOD NEWS!: The Clark bar is being saved, by Pittsburgh financier Michael P. Carlow. He bought the venerable candy from Leaf Inc. of Illinois, which had basically let it slide before announcing plans to sell or scrap it.
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #6: On-Your-Tie Cookies are no more. Neither are Uncle Billy’s Pasta Chips, Frutta di Terra dried tomato products, or seven other companies listed in the 1989 membership list of the Specialty Foods Group of Washington. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 other local specialty-food companies are struggling to survive.
FROZEN FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Whatever happened to the New World Order, anyway? This term was used only once by Bush as a justification for the war, but has remained as a catch phrase used by Leftists for every dishonorable aspect of Reagan-Bush foreign policy. T-shirts proclaim that it’s really an “Old World Odor;” bumper stickers insert swastikas between every word. I don’t know what the band New Order thinks of it all.
LIFE IMITATES LYNCH, PART 2: According to the authors of the new book The Day America Told the Truth (a survey of moral/ethical attitudes by region), the quintessential Northwest personality might be that of bad ol’ Leland Palmer. According to James Patterson and Peter Kim, roughly one in four Northwesterners is a clinical sociopath, four times the national average. “Pac Rim [their name for a “moral region” of the Northwest and northern Calif.] respondents were much less likely to have strongly developed consciences than were individuals in any other area…Coupled with the observation that Pac Rimmers are the regional respondents least likely to present themselves to others as they really are, it seems that David Lynch may be onto something”…By the way, I still believe Twin Peaks has been 32 of TV’s best hours ever. It taught me how to write Northwest fiction that has imagination and wonder, that doesn’t reek of godawful God’s-country pretentiousness. The show’s “failure” only proved that ambitious genre-splitters may not be meant to be ongoing series, especially when erratically scheduled and poorly advertised. Lynch is now working up a feature; my choice would be a string of TV movies.
MORE ON SEATTLE TODAY: The old-clips final episode claimed the show had been on for 17 years, but it was really 40 years old (even older than I said last issue). I still have the TV and T-shirt I won on it on separate occasions in the mid-’70s. Under that name as well as TeleScope, The Noon Look, Good Company, and Northwest Today, it formed a part of the daily rhythm of the city that will be missed, even if the show itself had become stale (the same old fashion tips, the same old recipes, the same old touring psychics, the same old itinerant book-pluggers).
HOME TOWN NEWS: AÂ Marysville woman got stung in a supermarket by a scorpion stuck onto the sticker of a Del Monte banana. In a lawsuit, she’s blaming the store for a miscarriage she had weeks later.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Weekly “Clarification,” 5/2): “In a Discovery item last week, Kit Hughes was quoted as saying that before she used Aqua Mirabilis Bath Salts she was a `shallow person.’ Hughes was a shower person. In a different story in the same issue, Jim Bailey was quoted as describing Lori Larsen (Tales of Larsen) as `wild and horny.’ What Bailey said was corny.”
ADS OF THE MONTH: I was slipped a newspaper ad promoting a shopping-mall appearance by Gerardo, the Latin Rapper. But the ad to the left of that won gets this month’s honors. It’s for Lovers Package (“Try One On for Sighs”) a chain store offering “Wonderfulwedding things meant to be seen,” including “lingerie, cards, games, bachelor & bachelorette party prizes.” Half the small ad consists of a photo of a model in gartered stockings, bra, panties, and a wedding veil. Reminds me of the old nudist-camp-wedding joke, where you can always tell who the best man is… Sears ran an ad for an electronics sale that showed dozens of dazed customers wandering into the mall, carrying out big-name products at “shocking” prices. What’s delicious about it is that the whole commercial makes no sense if you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead. In a similar old-movie reference, a Brut as has Kelly LeBrock discussing the “Essence of Man.” That was also the name of a device in Barbarella, in which the women of the corrupt sky city smoked from water pipes connected to a male prisoner in a water-filled glass cage. (By the way, a G-rated cartoon version of Barbarella has been optioned for TV series development.)
THE DRUG BUG: The Tobacco Institute, a venture of the big cigarette companies, offers free booklets entitled Tobacco: Helping Youths Say No. Hmm: an industry acknowledging that its product should be kept away from kids. Or is it? Not having read the book, I imagine it might be like all that counterproductive anti-drug propaganda of the past 25 years. You know, where the only “role models” of non-users are obnoxious jocks and hopeless squares…
BODY LANGUAGE: Pat Graney’s dance performance eloquently succeeded in contrasting healthy, natural sensuality with the clumsy, contrived “sexiness” of modern life as exemplified in that symbol of everything ex-hippie women despise, high heel shoes, at one point compared by Graney dancer Tasha Cook to Chinese foot-binding. (That many younger women have found a source of power in black dresses and uncomfy shoes is dismissed in the course of the piece, with the dancers eventually shucking off their im-ped-iments of needless discipline.) One must also mention the last of Graney’s four segments, in which she and her six other female dancers crawled across the floor nude (mostly with spines arched out to the audience). That this was accompanied by Mideval-inspired music (by Rachel Warwick) did not seem the least bit sacrilegious. Indeed (in a twist on liberal orthodoxy), Graney implied that old religious-based cultures held more respect for both body and spirit than current secular society.
TROUBLE IN FANTASYLAND?: French culture mavens, the Chicago Tribune reports, are predictably miffed at the rising upon their shores of Euro Disneyland: “A cultural Chernobyl” and “a black stain on the soul of France.” One of the American construction supervisors was quoted, “I know there were good political reasons for building it in France, but I wish they’d picked a country where the work ethic is a little more highly developed, like Germany.”
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #7: Working Women magazine lists the two hottest careers for 1991 grads as bankruptcy attorney and “outplacement specialist” — counseling the newly-unemployed.
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (it was told in the Smithsonian last year; I just found it now): Before Muzak moved its HQ to Seattle, three-quarters of its 4,000-selection library had been recorded by a Czechoslovakia radio orchestra. The old owners liked its price and tolerated its admittedly odd musical flavor. It’s being steadily replaced by new tunes recorded mostly by synthesizers and “electronically enhanced” quartets. You have to wonder, though: what if Commies were hiding secret subliminal messages that got into offices and factories across America, messages like “Lower your productivity” or “Let America become a second-rate industrial power”?
CLEANING UP: Toronto entrepreneurs have brought one of Playboy’s most common and inexplicable images to life by starting the first commercial topless car wash. It’s apparently all legal (there is no contact with the customer’s body, only with the customer’s car). Perhaps this proves what Toronto’s own Marshall MacLuhan used to say about a car being essentially modern man’s new outer skin or something like that.
‘TIL AUGUST, when we might have warmth, visit Jersey’s Sports Club on 7th (a “sports bar” where people actually play sports inside instead of just watching them on TV), and resist the turning of Seafair into even more of a pro-war spectacle than it already is.
One of the lines of the pathetically insufferable couple in the KBSG commercial, describing how only the sappy pop music of their childhoods saved their marriage: “We almost broke up over the wallpaper.”
Following the “Misc.@5” anniversary show, I’ll probably hold another reading in August, as part of a COCA series. More in the next issue.
Kim Thompson insists that Mariel Hemingway’s line at the end of Manhattan was “NOT everybody gets corrupted;” somewhat diff. from my quote last time. All I can say is it ain’t the way I heard it.
Subscriptions are $7/yr., prepaid; fax subs are $9/yr.
My hypertext novel The Perfect Couple is available in photocopy-galley form for $10 prepaid.
“Comogonic”
6/91 Misc. Newsletter
(fifth anniversary)
THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!
MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.
AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.
EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)
BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”
WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).
TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.
TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.
WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.
CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…
GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.
DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.
(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)
THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.
THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)
THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.
STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…
MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.
PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?
OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.
NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.
`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.
From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”
EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′
The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.
“Exsanguinate”
5/91 Misc. Newsletter
GOOD THING DANNY PARTRIDGE HAS
A SISTER WHO’S A LAWYER NOW
A hearty welcome to Misc., where we’re perfectly willing to pay a little more for our hydro power and our agribusiness-raised produce in order to save the dam-threatened Columbia River salmon. You’ve gotta love a creature who’ll go upstream a thousand miles or so just to squirt onto some eggs.
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The North Broadway 76 station was demolished, ending an era when the street began and ended with turning 76 balls. I’ll never get to live in the second-floor apartment on 10th Ave. E. that directly overlooked that sign, its bright orange globe turning outside like a postmodern successor to the blinking neon signs outside every seedy film noir hotel room.
STRUNG OUT: Palm Springs, Calif. mayor Sonny Bono tried to ban string bikinis. Now we know why his wife left him….
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture is a neat disjointed narrative by Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland about three young nihilist-ettes trading fanciful stories of rootlessness and sexlessness in between their no-future “McJobs.” St. Martin’s Press did a too-cute job on the design and illustrations, but the text itself is one of the first to treat people born since 1960 as having brains.
OPEN LETTER TO ANDREW WARD: Not all of us Northwest natives are “xenophobic” hicks as implied in your book of sentimental essays, Out Here. We just don’t like smug yuppies from the East coming here and expecting us to kneel to their alleged intellectual/aesthetic superiority. And this region is not the chichéd billowy paradise you imagine. It’s a real place, with real people and real problems. Wake up!
CATHODE CORNER: In Living Color, normally the most astute sketch show on TV, ran an “Iraqi fashion show” segment with women totally draped in black, including their faces. The catch is that Iraq had been one of the secular Arab states, eager to round up all political opposition but ambivalent towards modern clothes. It’s our friends in Saudi Arabia and our once-and-future friends in Iran who jail women for showing their faces….The Comedy Channel and Ha!, two cable comedy networks not carried locally, have merged to become CTV. The name is a takeoff on MTV (whose parent company partly owns the new venture). But there’s already a CTV in Canada (unofficially standing for Commercial TV, as opposed to the public but ad-bearing CBC). On Seattle cable until 1987, it mainly carried Hollywood shows with Canadian commercials. Its mandated quota of (really cheap) domestic programs included a lot of the schlock shows directly parodied on SCTV.
BUT DID HE EVER INJECT HIM WITH WINDOW CLEANER?: Merv Griffin, pal of the Reagans and rival of Donald Trump, was sued for $1 million in “palimony” by a male ex-driver who claims to also be his ex-lover. But what does this mean about lovable late sidekickArthur Treacher?
THE DIRT: The City of Seattle used to sell cedar-shingle composting bins at the subsidized price of $8 for the first box, $26 thereafter. Now the city’s distributing bins made of recycled plastic, and selling the wood bins for $49.50 through Smith & Hawken, the garden-supply catalog for rich snobs who’ll gladly pay twice what something’s worth just so they don’t have to be seen entering Sears.
MORE DIRT: A minor cause celébre occurred during the closing of seven Seattle artists’ joint installation Earthly Delights at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue Square. During the month the exhibit was up, visitors were asked to fill out questionnaires about themselves, their biggest fears, the things they liked most about the mall, and their opinions on compost and whether a wink was better than a handshake. They were then to tear off one sheet of the carbonless forms on which the questionnaires were printed, and to fold that copy into a paper airplane. But on the day before the closing, mall management canceled the scheduled launching of the 1,300 collected planes from the museum’s mezzanine into the main mall space. The official notice stated “there will be no artist presence in the mall.” Instead, organizers invited the 50 or so people at the closing party to take a folded questionnaire home as long as they treated it respectfully, “like a fine sculpture.” In order to exit through the mall without danger, partygoers were given stickers boldly stating NOT AN ARTIST. The six-part installation utilized video monitors, displays of old household goods, compost, trash bags, weaved-together plastic spoons, a glass-encased array of rotting food items in the arrangement of an American flag, and a Terry Amadei sculpture of a face-down child figure surrounded by moss. It was a pointed comment on how suburbanites delude themselves into believing they’ve moved to a “natural, country” lifestyle when they’ve really isolated themselves (perhaps due to fear of biological reality) with their cars, parking lots, malls, tract houses, and glassed-in buildings.
OPUS TWO: Everybody’s favorite living political-funny-animal cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is now living on Vashon Island, where he draws the weekly best-of-Bloom-County strip he still calls Outland, and works on an animated TV script for Steven Spielberg.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Mikakuto Pudding Candy is little caramel custard-flavor drops with a maple-flavored liquid center. It’s sold only at little Japanese convenience stores in the International District (where you can also sometimes get Felix the Cat Mystery Candy, whose pieces have different fruit flavors but are all colored black)… Vegi Snax are little poly bags of carrot and celery sticks selling for 69 cents, from a company called FreshWorld, described by the Weekly as a joint venture of Du Pont and something called DNA Plant Technology Corp.
OPENING THE AMERICAN MIND: Multicultural education is NOT a force for intolerance, as a coordinated right-wing push of articles in Time, the New Republic, the Atlantic and elsewhere suggests. Just the opposite: it recognizes the white-Euro “canon” of literature as the philosophy of our country’s dominant culture to date, but insists that the cultures of the rest of the world must also be studied, because we must live with those other lands and because America is becoming a “majority of minorities”. It’s the guys trying to keep non-white lit out of the classroom who are the real “new McCarthyites”. I wished I’d had more ethnic studies when I was in college. In grade school and junior high we did get to hear/read a lot of stories about Harlem, Korea, and Africa. (But, except for the works of Portland’s Beverly Cleary (Ramona, et al.), we never read a single story set in the Northwest. More about that in the June Wire.)
(latter-day note: The referenced article is `Jet City Lit,’ available from my essays index.)
OUTSIDE DIAMANDA GALAS: Some people at her show were moved to tears; others were bored to them. The screeches and moans she sang in her AIDS/Biblical-metaphor performance piece reminded some of actual cries of AIDS patients; others in the audience told me they thought she was just loud and pretentious. But nobody I spoke with or overheard after the show, save one, mentioned her topless evening gown. Any woman who performs solo (her music was recorded) while revealing her body, yet drawing all attention away from it, has a rare control over her audience indeed.
THE MALL OF FAITH: ABC ran a fascinating item on mega-churches, huge suburban facilities (the early ones were evangelical; most now are nondenominational) with arena-sized sanctuaries, complete lifestyle facilities (including bowling lanes and soft-rock concerts), few crosses or other childhood-church reminders, and noncontroversial doctrines designed to please as many boomer families as possible. One Colorado institution transformed itself from a Full Gospel Church/Assembly of God into “The Happy Church” (complete with happy face signs).
ONLY IN NYC: Several boxes containing severed human heads were stolen from a dissection-class instructor’s car. The crooks dumped their loot about a block away; an alert nearby cab driver picked up the parts and kept them in his cab until the doctor returned.
ONLY IN AUBURN: A 21-year-old was asked by a 17-year-old in a restaurant parking lot, “Where’s the party?” The young man told the stranger, “You’re not invited.” According to the Tacoma News Tribune, the teen slugged and threatened to kill the man, and engaged other nearby youths in the assault.
ONLY IN FEDERAL WAY: Someone has been randomly shooting at cats in house windows, killing five. Stuffed decoy cats have been placed in houses in the so-far futile hope of catching the sniper.
FROM THE LAND THAT TRIED TO BAN 2 LIVE CREW: The AP reports that a former aide to a Florida legislator charges that he regularly insulted and harassed her, and at a 1983 staff party tore the front of her dress off of her “in front of dozens of people.”
AD VERBS: Ivar’s first “Dances With Clams” commercial was withdrawn at the demand of Orion Pictures. What do you expect from a studio owned by a guy named Kluge (a computer term for an awkward, clumsily-designed system)?…Here’s one rock song you never expected in a commercial: The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (without the title line) for Bud Light.
THAT EXPLAINS HIS LAPSES IN MEMORY: Biographer Kitty Kelley romantically linked Nancy Reagan with the subject of her last book, Sinatra. More startingly, Kelly claims the Reagans once smoked pot while Ron was the staunchly anti-hippie Calif. governor. If true, it disproves a famous assertion in the ’60s book The Greening of America: “If a `straight’ college athlete, with little interest in politics, tries marijuana, it will inevitably lead him to social and political concerns.”
FERRY TALES: Talk of a new Everett-Seattle walk-on ferry brings back memories of growing up in the vicinity of that sad little city, and also the memory of my first writing teachers at North Seattle Community College, all ex-hippies (in 1976) who all responded to learning of my origin with variations on the phrase, “But every-body hates Everett.” It was my first discovery that hippies, despite claims to being the apex of intellectual/moral superiority, were no more immune to bigotry than anybody.
DID YOU KNOW?: The New York Public Library Desk Reference lists a visual symbol for “Weapons Needed.” It’s virtually identical to the two-piece Chevron logo in use since 1974.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (NY Times correction, 4/12:) “A picture caption yesterday about a concert by the Pet Shop Boys misidentified the theater where it took place. It was Radio City Music Hall, not Carnegie Hall.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH (one one side of the tunnel-project clock at 5th and Pine): “Clock under repair. Meanwhile (options): Call 526-7777 (time). Consult your watch. See other side. Correlate the sun’s position with today’s date. OR, slow down and relax.” Runner-up (Puget Sound American Atheists’ billboard in Central Area): “Atheism: It’s Not What You Believe.”
TEACHER’S FRET: The statewide teachers’ strike came during National Education Week, with all the sitcoms showing reruns of learning-related episodes and with all sorts of public service spots along the lines of “Don’t be a dope. Stay in school.” One teachers’-union lobbying ad on KING came right after an ad for college loans by Pacific First Federal with the slogan “We Fund Reality.”
‘TIL OUR GLORIOUS 5TH ANNIVERSARY issue in June, be sure to watch The ’90s Sun. nights on KCTS, check out the Bible Adventures cartridge for Nintendo, and learn Amy Denio’s new word “Spoot,” meaning her concept of spontaneity and of music as a shared experience of player and listener.
From W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Razor’s Edge (1944): “I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.”
The fifth anniversary of Misc. will be celebrated next month with a special reading, to be held the second week in June (after the Film Fest). For details on that or on ads in Misc., leave a message at 524-1967.
Misc. received a “Publisher’s Choice” citation from the small-press review mag Factsheet Five. “A fine observer of the cultural scene, with comment and quote to amuse and provoke,” sez FF’s Mike Gundelroy. “His commentary is light and witty, though he can get serious when the matter warrants.”
“Badinage”
4/91 Misc. Newsletter
ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN
“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”
ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE
We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.
CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.
STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.
A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”
THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…
STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.
TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!
SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.
MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.
OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.
LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”
NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.
VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).
SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.
PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”
‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”
The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”
The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.
I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.
Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).
“Approbation”
3/91 Misc. Newsletter
Think We’ll Ever See A Sensitive, Reverent Film
About Indiginous Americans Without A White Hero?
Welcome to the in-like-a-lion March Misc., the newsletter that liked Sofia Coppola no matter what anybody said. We begin by mourning the end of Kitchy Koo, the 11-year-old boutique of waveoid fashion (and, in its peak years, the world’s coolest Post Office contract station). We’re also trying to figure the mysterious message taped to bus shelters: “Please don’t buy vegetables, furniture, clothing, toys or gifts. Buy fruits, food, and necessities only (for 4 months).”
Engulfed: At this writing, the war had been “won” but our units were still occupying a lot of Iraq, as if awaiting a march to Baghdad (like our 3-year attempt to overthrow N. Korea after quickly retaking the south). When will enough butt have been kicked? When will Bush stop acting like a wimp trying to prove his toughness? Vengeance does not stifle barbarism, it sets the stage for more… Pro-war spectacles grabbed the lion’s share of TV coverage, including a rally staged outside ABC’s LA lot by the Rick Dees show (one more reason the ex-Disco Duck sucks). Locally, KOMO loaded a Town Meeting with a one-sided audience and charged that protesters were smoking pot outside the Federal Building (they were burning sage, a memorial to those who would die in the war)… KING referred to the ground assault as a “lightning war.” In what language have we heard that phrase before?… CBS had one of its commentators, Gen. Michael Dugan (from East Texas?) run battle diagrams on a Kuwait map with the John Madden CBS Chalkboard… A new paper, War News, claims nearly all the network expert commentators come from the same conservative think tank that created the theory claiming the USSR was behind the attack on the Pope… CNN’s war theme music started out as solemn drumbeats the first week, then became more “upbeat.” By week 6, it was a brassy fanfare.
On the Lighter Side of Armageddon, the Rio de Janiero Carnaval canceled its “Night in Baghdad” party, a tradition going back 40 years. Woody Harrleston (Cheers) became the first actor blacklisted due to the war, when a Mardi Gras committee withdrew an offer for Harrleston to lead a parade after he appeared at a peace rally. The All-Breed Dog Show scheduled for the Sand Point Naval Station was scrapped “due to threat of terrorist attack”… Network newscasts replaced canceled ads with public service spots– including a cartoon reminding young men that if they don’t register for the draft, they’ll lose scholarships and will be losers the rest of their lives…Iraqi disinformation claimed U.S. troops on Muslim holy territory were entertained by thousands of Egyptian prostitutes — and, worse, by the dreaded Madonna.
Overheard on a Bus: Two fashion workers discussed how the war will affect home-front tastes: “Fluorescent nylon is out. What’s in is tough and practical clothes for people facing nuclear annihilation.”
Eastern Airlines, 1928-1991: Remember, airlines are dying and nobody can afford lots of bombers at every model change (this war is being fought from “inventory”), but Boeing will not be affected. Sure.
Cathode Corner: The Nostalgia Network, cable home for a re-titled version of KING’s Seattle Today, turns out to be owned by associates of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Fox network of Moon’s fellow conservative Rupert Murdoch canceled Haywire, a half-hour combining routines from KING’s Almost Live with astoundingly lame LA-produced skits…. The “lost episodes” of The Avengers on A&E with Honor Blackman may be cooler than the famous Diana Rigg episodes. The Blackman shows were taped without US money in a small studio, usually in one take. These disciplines enhance the show’s basic tensions, between good and evil and between weirdness and straight espionage. (Earlier episodes, where Steed had a male partner, aren’t being shown)… TBS’s Voice of the Planet is, so far, the great cheesy educational show of the year. It’s hard to describe the voices of Faye Dunaway and William Shatner out-over-emoting one another, making a mockery of the environmental disaster footage shown under the narration.
Deja Vu Isn’t What It Used to Be: Just as another unjust war re-divides American opinion, CBS trotted out retrospectives of three TV series that defined the era of the last war. At the war’s start, Ed Sullivan depicted a mass culture united by big bands and clean comedy, with a little guitar-pop mixed in for the kids. By 1970, Mary Tyler Moore showed a middle class pretending all was still holding center (its shock was a 30-year-old woman in no hurry to marry). Four months later, All in the Family (an off-Broadway play made for TV) broke through witha non-cute hippie and a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling lead. While embodying Hollywood’s stereotype of the “typical” TV viewer, the concept was based on a British show; the chief UK influence was the idea that political and class issues were a recognized part of everyday life. Seen anything like that on US TV lately?
Local Publication of the Month: The Protagonist is a quarterly newsletter produced by Tsao Lagos, Washington’s most famous Spy letter writer, on behalf of an outfit selling screenwriting courses… Deja Vu Showgirls is the first Seattle-made commercial nudie mag. Most of the models are local women you see every day in the malls, aspiring actresses, single mothers, laid-off word processors, your classmate who left school for a brief marriage… The Seattle Sourcebook by Roy F. Peterson Jr. superficially looks like an ordinary lifestyle guide. It even has “ads” for familiar restaurants, some of which went out of business since it was printed. Then you notice the pyramid behind the Space Needle on the back cover, or the spaceship chased by a flying dragon on the front. The book turns out to be an accessory rule book for Shadowrun, a role playing game that, behind the cute facade, seems to be the same old fantasy-action cliches.
Correction: Homer Spence was a UW instructor in marketing, not politics as said last time (as if you can tell the difference these days).
Computers Are Our Friends (letter in the computer magazine Macworld): “A spelling check on a recent document I was working on questioned my use of the word childcare. The editors of Microsoft’s dictionary, however, were able to offer only one alternative: kidnapper.”
Sign of the Month (inside the Pendelton store on 4th) “As long as sheep fall in love, there will be wool.” Don’t know how long the sign’s been there, but I noticed it the week after an NY Times feature about research into sheeps’ mating/nurturing hormones.
Airing It Out: Sandy Bradley’s Potluck, a folk hour on KUOW, included on 1/26 a “folk rap” (more like an ethnomusicologist’s attempt at a square-dance call) promoting an adult-supervised youth group called “Graffiti Busters.”One middle-class white guy simultaneously denigrated three authentic American art forms, turning two of them into smug pabulum… In Cincinnati, there’s a battle over what radio stations call themselves. WKRQ has sued to stop a rival station from using WZRQ.
The Fine Print (from the Wild Orchid video box): “This unrated version contains explicit `footage’ not included in the R-rated version released theatrically in the United States. Discretionary viewing by minors is strongly advised.”
True Crime: An Everett woman applied for a waitressing job, to receive a counter-offer from the restaurant manager to become his mistress for $3,000 a month. “He said she couldn’t get a better paying job with her credentials,” said a cop, who arrested the manager on solicitation.
School Daze: The Longview School Board voted to keep on its high-school reading list Stotan!, a novel about a Spokane swim team. A teacher said it had “vividly detailed descriptions of sadistic and erotic acts, vulgar names to degrade black women, put-downs about special education students, jokes about fornication and morally bankrupt philosophies.” In other words, it’s just like school itself.
Ad of the Month (newspaper insert): “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the vegetable.
Archi-Text: John Graham will be remembered as the designer of Seattle’s best known structure (the Space Needle) and its most destructively influential (Northgate), but not for dozens of nondescript buildings that kept his firm in business, buildings that marked the true postwar Seattle spirit or lack of same.
Striking: So the M’s are getting yoga instruction. Maybe they’d be better off with zen, particularly the proverbs where the hapless loser of the class is proven to be the wisest of all…Â Chuck Jones has drawn a set of Looney Tunes baseball cards, and made Daffy Duck a Mariner!
Ever So Humble: I’ve talked in the past about my hometown of Marysville, a place that once meant sawmill workers in dark taverns, clutching beer mugs with all seven remaining fingers. It has since become a Boeing suburb. But the Tulalip Reservation across I-5, home of several tribes “united” by Federal edict (and of the Boeing test site where live chickens are blasted from cannons onto windshields) is nearing approval to expand its bingo parlor into full casino gambling. While there won’t be any Vegas nightlife, it’ll still be the most exciting thing there since the Thunderbird Drive-In used to show sex flicks, fully visible from I-5.
Junk Food of the Month: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” Says The Economist,” “Granma failed to mention what is in the remaining 20 percent.”… Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Turtles Pies (“Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and green frosting.The “vanilla” probably came from a 42-year-old Seattle plant that made over 3 million pounds of vanillin a year, extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide and used for important drugs as well as flavoring. It’s being replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (No grumblings about how unappetizing this sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical to vanilla from a bean. Besides, some food purists drench pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)
Stuff: Women’s basketball gets corrupted by a 6-team pro league, the Liberty Basketball Association, featuring smaller balls and courts, shorter hoops, and “form-fitting uniforms.” The opposite of the no-nonsense attitude of women’s college basketball (about the only sport where women compete directly in the same space).
‘Til April, see Fantagraphics’ cartoon art exhibit Misfit Lit starting 3/15 at COCA; heed these words from Misc. subscriber Steve Shaviro’s book on social theory, Passion and Excess: “Power itself never notices, but the one thing it cannot regulate or pacify is its own violent arbitrariness, its own quality as an event;” and keep working for real peace.
The only memorable lines in Manoel De Oliveira’s obscure 1983 Portugese film Francisca: “Men have hearts like dry bread”; “I love you like God loves sinners.”
Wendy Brauer of NYC says “I’m quite amused” by Misc., but complains that “there’s a boycott on of those non-recyclable, waste-paper-backing stamps.” What? Recycle this? I thought you were all storing them carefully, waiting for me to offer deluxe collector’s portfolios. Don’t have those yet, but I do have ad spaces at $15 and $25 (first come first served); call 524-1967 for info.
A Mass. software firm might issue my novel this year. My second live reading was well-received; expect another one this summer.
Fax subs: $9/year.
“Integropalliate”
2/91 Misc. Newsletter
THE REAL VIETNAM SYNDROME ISN’T ‘LOSING;’
IT’S KILLING AND DYING WHERE WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE
Don’t know about you, but here at Misc. we’re proud to live in the state where Wash. St. Univ. is studying the effect of cattle belching on global warming. My vegetarian pals will say this is proof that we shouldn’t have all these food animals. But if we have more methane gas from more cows, at least we’ll have lots of ice cream to beat the heat. (The topic you’re expecting to see is on the reverse page.)
HOMER SPENCE, 1941-1991: The guy I expected to outlive us all. America’s oldest punk rocker (due to his stint in the Telepaths). A UW poli-sci prof who had left under circumstances I never quite understood, who ended up driving cabs and, eventually, spending his last 10 years tending bar at the Virginia Inn. He remained equally passionate about new music, art, politics, world cultures, astronomy, and especially baseball. He was a focal point for Seattle’s alternative cultural “scene”. His relationships with younger women never looked strange; he wasn’t “an older man,” he was “one of us.” I last met him on New Year’s; he boasted about having lived in seven decades before turning 50 (if you mark decades with the “1” years and mark the start of life with conception, neither of which he necessarily did). He did more living in those 49 and a half years than most do in 70. That he should have a heart attack the same week as the start of war is doubly tragic; he’d have been indescribably valuable in the anti-war movement. He knew how to bring disparate people together better than just about anybody.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Theresa Morrow’s Seattle Survival Guide is the best local guidebook since the Seattle People’s Yellow Pages in 1978. It’s almost a miracle that D. Brewster’s Sasquatch Books put out something about the essentials of urban living (and not just for the Demographically Correct)…I fully support the rights of gays and of poets, though I don’t participate in either activity. The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, however, gives me at least a vision of what both these loves might emotionally be like.
COINCIDENCE OR…?: Every time I’ve ridden a Metro bus up Pine past the Bus Tunnel entrance hole, someone on a nearby seat complains openly about the huge neon art.
WHY I STILL DON’T HATE USA TODAY: ‘Twas so refreshing to read, in their In/Out list for ’91, that Seattle is Out! “…Seattle, the wilderness city (was the writer ever here?), which had a great year in 1990, now is spoiled. Everybody who could move there has. It’s time to return to real cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where the air is clean thanks to two decades of recession in their manufacturing sectors.” The following week, an interminable NY Times Sunday-magazine essays called Seattle “a Midwestern hub” that had been the hot place to move to, but is now “a victim of its own success.” (This was during the death weeks of The Other Place, Henry’s Off Broadway and Mirabeau restaurants.) What nobody accepts is that this town did not cease to be a utopia, it never was. Take our ferry system, where a captain was charged with harassing an African-American crew member and broadcasting racial insults over the public-address system. It’s just the latest shame in a century of Indian massacres, pogroms against Chinese railroad workers, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a bomb plot against a gay disco.
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: The Economist, a weekly news magazine edited in England for a readership mostly in America, had a brief item on Tacoma’s needle-exchange program among drug abusers. The sad subject matter was lightened a little by the anonymous writer’s lead, depicting Tacoma as “a smoky industrial Sparta to the high-tech Athens of Seattle.”
ANOTHER XMAS STORY: The cutest holiday TV this year was TNT’s Silent Night — a whole evening of meticulously restored silent movies. Without spoken dialogue, there’s no way to wander off to the bathroom or kitchen and still keep up. You have to pay full visual attention throughout the feature.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at a Wherehouse video rental desk): “RoboCop 2; Henry V.”
A DIFFERENT BAND OF DWARVES: Sub Pop almost had a distribution deal with Hollywood Records, the newest off-brand division of the Walt Disney Co. Instead, Hollywood’s first act will be the Party, a promoter-assembled teen dance group heavily promoted at Disneyland and on The Disney Channel.
AT LEAST IN THIS COUNTRY SHE CAN SHOW HER FACE: Producers of the movie I Am Woman will reportedly pay female lead Jamie Lee Curtis $800,000, only 40 percent of co-star Dan Aykroyd‘s fee and even less than child actor Macauley Culkin (Home Alone). What did the song of the same name say? Oh yeah, “I’m still an embryo with a long, long way to go…”
LYCRA LOVE: According to the newsletter Japan Access, Tokyo’s top designers say the 1991 trend in swimwear will be the ecology look: earth-green colors, “designs borrowed from nature, including seashell, fish and flower motifs.” The garments themselves are made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics…
LANDLESS: We’ve seen ads for nonexistent housing developments and stock sales for nonexistent companies, but the 1/7 Forbes reported perhaps the ultimate con (besides the war). An American promoter calling himself Branch Vinedresser placed Wall St. Journal ads offering to sell corporate charters and passports in a “tax-free sovereignty.” The documents are sold under the name of the “Dominion of Melchizedek,” which Vinedresser claims is a “4,000 year old ecclesiastical sovereignty” on an island off the coast of South America. The island really exists, but is fully controlled by Colombia. Vinedresser has also paid to have fictional currency and securities for his “nation” listed on international exchanges, and has promoted the sale of these securities through a network of companies in different cities, most of which are just mailbox services and phone lines with call forwarding to his California office.
Latter-Day Addendum: On 4-1-98, I received the following email:
From: tzemach david netzer korem, tzemach@email.msn.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Dear Clark:
You might want to rewrite your page about DOM with something closer to the truth, which can be found at:http://www.melchizedek.com.
Best regards,
Tzemach “Ben” David Netzer Korem, Vice President (DOM)
NOW I UNDERSTAND QUAYLE: The Times says “an outbreak of `nonsense-speak’ is sweeping Hong Kong” among working-class youngsters with little hope of escaping the 1997 Chinese takeover. (The Cantonese name for the fad is “mo lai tau,” or “you have no head.”) The paper gave only one example of nonsense-speak dialogue heard on the streets: “My sister’s going to have a baby.” “Green babies look strange.” “Green socks aren’t blue.” Sounds to me like the foundation for a code jargon, perhaps for an anti-takeover resistance movement…
WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH AMERICA: AÂ Lava Lite is being sold at The Sharper Image, a Lava Lite with a base unit of a solid black marble-like substance. The Lava Lite is supposed to be goofy/fun, not corporate/grim. Sheesh!
FINAL VINYL: The death of records has, as predicted here, meant the loss of thousands of non-hit rock, folk, jazz, and even oldies recordings from availability. Many of the indie labels that had been getting LPs pressed in under-5,000 quantities just can’t afford to port them to CDs at such low figures. The Dead Milkmen contractually forced their record company to press a vinyl version of their latest album, but the stipulation said nothing about distributing it. The LPs are reportedly hidden in a warehouse, waiting to be melted down.
TRUE CRIME: The media went expectedly agog over a pair of killers who planted a thrash-rock CD by their victim’s corpse on Queen Anne Hill. But nobody reacted to bomb attacks at two auto parts stores by calling for the banning of spark plugs. Real thrashers never use CDs anyway, except as master copies to make 20 tapes from.
TRUER CRIME: A Spokane man was arrested after a series of residential burglaries in which the only things stolen were women’s shoes, preferably red. Over 100 such shoes, “mostly in pairs” according to the AP, were found in his home.
LIFE IMITATES LYNCH: KCMU’s environmental newscast, Earth on the Air, presented (on 1/11) a woman identified as Angela, who claimed to channel thoughts from trees. The narrator said the show had become acquainted with her “when one of our members met her at a bus stop.” Angela’s message from the deciduous realm: “Mother Earth is a united, intelligent organism” whose very life is threatened by “this parasite called humanity,” and who might one day resort to catastrophic means to save herself even at our expense.
OFF THE NEWSSTAND: The Texas Dept. of Corrections banned the Feb. Texas Monthly from all state prisons, for potentially subversive content: a state highway map, which officials say might help escapees get away.
WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS MONTH: “In a world where victory is the only thing that matters, the only way to win is by risking it all.” — This Paramount ad for the video release of Days of Thunder would have only sounded as stupid as any other commercial had it not premiered during the second week of January. It could be said that a decade of pro-violence culture has led to 1/16, from joy-of-slaughter movies (approved for juvenile consumption by the make-war-not-love attitude of the Ratings Board) to the stuffing of the Pentagon budget and starvation of schools, keeping people hungry and manipulable for recruiting and propaganda purposes. The “lite wars” in Grenada and Panama and the proxy wars in Central America and Angola may have been partly to condition the public to support butt-kissing in the name of butt-kicking. (Those wars, and this one, are also tryouts for all the post-Nam weapons, the goals of the Pentagon-sponsored R&D in microcircuitry that our computers, VCRs, and import cars depend on.) Our ex-friend Saddam was reduced to offering most everything we demanded if he could only get a Mideast conference (which would have been all talk and no solution). But Bush was willing to have thousands die rather than give in on even a trivial detail. The Congressional debates contained stirring moments, but enough members finally took the stance that looked tough but was really chickening out. It was heartening to see the 30,000 or so marching on the night of 1/14 and the thousands in later events (even the ones the media refused to show, under a policy starting around 1/18 of only covering pro-war opinions); there was an indescribable sense of life and hope in even the most earnest moments. I was also heartened to see the footage of other protests from the Everett Federal Bldg. (where my father used to work) to Kent Meridian High School; to see my latest successor as UW Daily editor, Loren Skaggs, denounce the war on the Today show. After a decade of bitching on our collective barstools, opposition politics in this country have been instantly reborn (with 5 months’ hard prep work). Let’s get it right this time. And don’t be discouraged by intentionally misleading polls comparing opposition at the start of this war to that near the end of the Vietnam war. The real war is by our leaders against true democratic values, and disinformation’s only part of it.
‘TIL MARCH, warily note how consumer recycling is offered as the one true way to save the environment by media outlets beholden to industrial polluters, and keep working for peace.
Bob Guccione Jr. in a 1986Â Spin editorial: “Maybe the American Dream is like the Civil War chess set: Once you’ve bought the board you’re committed to buying the rest of the pieces.”
Lite Lit 2: The Remake, an evening of readings (old Misc. items, fiction, essays) and vintage short films, will be held Wed., Feb. 13, 7 and 9 p.m., at the Jewl Box Theater within the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave. It’s a partial benefit for my novel publication fund, and is co-sponsored by the Belltown Film Festival. It replaces the reading planned for the beautiful snow-blessed night of 12/19, to which the film projectionist and I were the only attendees.
With the new postal rates, Misc. subscriptions rise to $7/year. (Fax subscriptions stay at $9.) Ads are $15 for spaces like the one below; $25 for that same height across the whole page. (To buy space, leave a message at 524-1967.)
“Enlizement”
12/90 Misc. Newsletter
MILLI VANILLA FRAUDS?
NEXT THEY’LL CLAIM ARCHIE AND JUGHEAD
DIDN’T SING THEIR SONGS!
Here at Misc., we’re holding a public wake for the 50-year-old Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge (known henceforth as Galloping Gertie II), which reached the end of its life “span” with a bang, not a whimper. Before the sinking, it had become a mile-long, 40-foot-wide construction/demolition project, strewn with a few scattered cars and Honey Buckets. It already looked like it was about to sink (something Boris S. Wart threatened but never accomplished on the J.P. Patches show). (Event info on other side.)
OUT WITH THE OLD, PLEASE!: Nostalgia is going to be the death of America. Every previous fad added something to the national heritage, for good or ill. Nostalgia only subtracts. It boils the flavor and texture away from our past, leaving a gooey syrup of vague memories. It’s getting harder and harder to find a restaurant, store, or beauty salon where the sound system plays any recent music. “Square” places play top 40 hits of 1956-69. “Hip” places play hipper music from that same era (Muddy Waters instead of the Beatles). Only in designer-jean stores can you hear songs by groups whose members are all still alive. And many of them take pride in never playing a single riff that isn’t reorganized Led Zeppelin.
ADDITIONALLY, I’m finding it harder and harder to explain to people that I’m neither (1) a nostalgist for the hippie era nor (2) a conservative. I regard hippie-era politics as a well-intentioned failure. The progressive, populist side of American leftist tradition got smothered by what we might as well call a bohemian aesthetic. There will never be a real left in this country until it stops depicting all working-class people as “the unwashed masses,” as hicks and flaming fascists. The world is not the few enlightened “Us” vs. all the ignorant “Them.” It’s all of “Us.”
NORTHERN REVOLT: The Canadian subsidiary of Popsicle Brands is under vocal attack from children from Victoria, BC (Mile 0 of the Trans-Canada Highway) to St. John’s, Newfoundland (the other Mile 0). According to the Vancouver Sun, the company promised free Nintendo cartridges to kids sending in 15,000 points’ worth of Popsicle sticks; instead, 10,000 kids got only letters of apology claiming that the company’s stock of 6,000 cartridges had been depleted and that substitute prizes would be given to everybody else sometime next year. Still, maybe the kiddie Canucks ought to be grateful to get even that; in a famous mid-’80s essay, Ontario’s ownMargaret Atwood wrote of growing up with Popsicle labels offering wonderful prizes but bearing the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Good Only in U.S.”
NO FREUDIAN COMMENTS, PLEASE: A staffer at King County Juvenile Hall reports that teenage boys inside there are signifying their gang membership by affixing Dole or Chiquita banana stickers onto their belts.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Manna Raisins & Oat Bran Flakes cereal, made in Delta, B.C. and “sprouted for life.” It’s “Certified Organic,” but (oddly, considering the name) isn’t certified kosher.
IS NOBODY INCORRUPT?: The Wall St. Journal (10/29) reports that the Doris Day Animal Fund Inc. spends 90 percent of its income on direct-mail fundraising (billed in official budget statements as “public education”).
AD VERBS: Rainier Light’s “It’s R Light” commercials are much better than the previous ad agency’s work, but they’re still hollow compared to the classic Heckler Associates spots, and for the same reason. While the Heckler ads had real fun in promoting the beer as a beverage for enjoyment, both of its successor agencies fell into the trap of selling a target audience on an image of itself, with the product merely a supporting player in the drama.
NO MORE FUR AT NORDSTROM: This is how an industry dies, when the first PR-conscious retailer proudly capitulates to public furor (and flat market shares). But fur is more than an inefficient source of outerwear; it’s one reason we’re here. The trapping of wild fur animals was the first white industry in the Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Co. and others subsidized many of the first non-military settlements in Washington Territory. They were supported by sales to the society ladies of Europe, whose essential financial contribution was totally ignored in last year’s books on women in Northwest history.
SAY IT AIN’T SO RUMOR OF THE MONTH: Is the Comet Tavern going to be upscaled?
(latter-day note: It wasn’t.)
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 11/14): “A story of 4 kids and how they died/`Anybody who has a teen-ager will related to this’ tale of tragedy.” Now that’s headline writing in the classic manner, almost Victorian in its cadence.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: It’s a shame that The Facts has such ugly design and typography, because some truly eloquent African-American voices may be found there. For example, hear the bitter “Life Among the Thorns” edition of F. Justina Nubay’s column “Say It With Flowers”: “I wholeheartedly believe that Thanksgiving should continue to be the only day when public spirited people ply the hungry with turkeys, pies, and other filling foods, enough to last them the entire year. Like the howling hyena, the hungry and the homeless, for the time remaining, should continue to gorge themselves on carrion and roam their jungles in wild anguish.”…At Cause is a Christian paper with a difference: A Reubenesque nude drawing on the front page, an essay titled “Party On!” saying it’s OK for Christians to “have exhilaration, ecstasy, bliss” — including being gay and/or transvestite if they wish to be so. (Editor M.F. Whealen seems to be an ex-Scientologist, from the use of certain catch phrases.)…The Oregon-based Sinsemilla Tipsmagazine folds after 10 years. Publishers blame the War on Drugs, which they claim has made people scared to sell or advertise in the mag.
CATHODE CORNER: Does the rash of inside jokes on The Simpsons (Marge’s surprise at “a Simpson on a T-shirt,” the on-air homage to Bart’s Macy parade balloon, his chalkboard message “I am not a 32-year-old woman”) mean the show has passed its peak?…A producer has paid millions for all rights to The Ed Sullivan Show; plans to release several video compilations, including the censored TV debuts by famous rockers and a tape of 50 different people doing the Twist. But will they ever include the peg-legged tap dancer, or the National Model Race Car Championship? (A licensed version of Sullivan’s most popular feature, the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, now appears in Spanish on cable’s Univision.)
KRIME KORNER: A Seattle man was fatally shot by an unlicensed Safeway security guard for allegedly pocketing a pack of cigarettes. Now will you listen to me about the dangers of smoking?… The Martinsburg, W.Va. city council plans to require panhandlers to buy $25 licenses or face jail terms. But how do you get the money to tell people you don’t have any money?
MALLED DOWN: The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $50,000 grant (with a 2/1 matching requirement) to the Rouse Co. to sponsor non-threatening art programs in shopping centers (including Westlake Center). Now we know the true priorities of new NEA head John Frohnmayer. He’s using “bringing art to the people” and corporate matching-fund requirements as ways of rewarding works acceptable to business/marketing interests.
PRESSED: Our news media, presuming us all to be beer-swilling xenophobes, devoted their attention on 11/22-23 to how nothing had really happened in the Persian Gulf lately, and only cursorily mentioned that the last major European dictator fell from power. The beginning of the end might have been foretold in an item from USA Today (11/12): “Richard Needham, British minister for Northern Ireland, apologized for calling Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a “cow” during a car-phone call to his wife. A paramilitary group in Northern Ireland picked up the call on a radio monitor and sent a recording of it to a news agency.”…What they didn’t tell you about the female, Socialist, pro-contraception Irish president is that the position is largely ceremonial, a sort of elected king. She will be less able to take political stances than when she was in the Irish senate.
SECTION BEE: The Killer Bees may finally be on our way! (Times, 11/3) It turns out that they’re not really that much more vicious to humans, but they are less tameable and they do drive out domesticated breeds.
XMAS GIFT OF THE YEAR: The Dance Aerobics game cartridge by our Redmond neighbors at Nintendo. You can vicariously experience the self-punishment and body-consciousness of aerobics without having to actually do the exercises. It’s one of only two games I’ve seen with a female lead character…. The Trivial Pursuit ’80s Edition is historically inaccurate. It’s got a question about Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, who was on from ’77 to ’80….Lynnwood’s Pacific Trading Cards is drawing national attention for itsAndy Griffith Show card set….Trump: The Game (“It’s Whether You Win”) was marked down from $39.95 to $19.90….Seattle’sGenerra has a “Men’s Collective” shirt line, for junior execs old enough to remember their student-Maoist pasts (they’re even made in the PRC!).
MORE VEGETARIANS IN LEATHER: The Vancouver rockmag Discorder sez the next big thing’s “straight-edge rock,” punk-like bands (including Seattle’s Undertow) who belong to the Hare Krishna movement. Their premise: Just as punk stripped rock of impurities and distractions, so should we do with our lives.
PHILM PHIRE: Remains from the blaze at Universal Studios (soon to be owned by Panasonic) soon became a major attraction on the Universal Tour; the simulated “burning building” attraction was temporarily closed. The sale of Universal/MCA leaves Time Warner as the last major US-owned record company. It also brings Japanese money into US publishing (MCA owns Putnam, Berkley and Ace).
NOT IN STORE: You won’t get to shop this Xmas at B.N. Genius, that land of expensive electronic playthings that you’d never buy but always loved to play with in the store. Meanwhile, the end of the Northgate Woolworth leaves only the downtown store as an inexpensive source for hats, socks, and hobby supplies, not to mention the long shelf of cheesy crossword magazines. (It’s also one of the last places still selling Clark candy bars.)
PICK A PEC: The 11/24 Newsweek (the same issue with the essay that claimed that “Cynicism is alien to America”) reported that trendy LA men are now getting silicone implants to make their upper bodies look more muscular. Look dudes, this recent interest in “men reclaiming the feminine side of their natures” ought to mean taking up the smart things about womanhood; just as women’s assertiveness training generally excludes lessons in beer-swilling or sexual harassment.
WE’LL TALK AGAIN in the palindromic year of 1991 (that year which picky purists insist is the real start of the decade), when I’ll count exactly how many times you could have seen It’s A Wonderful Life this holiday season. Until then, watch the astounding South Africa Now 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCTS, try to avoid calling the NY Times crossword-help 900 line, appreciate the appropriateness of the big Marilyn Monroe mural inside the Broadway Pay ‘n Save (shouldn’t all drugstores bear the images of people who died from prescription overdoses?), read The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pray for snow, work for peace, and consider the words of Frank Zappa on unauthorized musical sampling: “It’s just so cheese-oid.”
NOTICE
Sign at the Wood Shop, Pioneer Square: “Authentic East German nutcrackers. Last chance. Buy now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
It’s been threatened before, but now it’s really gonna happen. I’m holding two live readings this month: Sun., 12/16, at the Two Bells Tavern (10 p.m.) and Wed., 12/19, at the Rendezvous (7 and 9 p.m., with vintage educational films). Each show contains at least some different material; each is a partial benefit for my Perfect Couple novel publication fund. (The novel is still available only on Mac disks, for $6.)
Subscribers may notice a new mailing-label design. My old label program crashed (thank God and Apple I could retrieve the data with the ResEdit program).
“Vituperative”
11/90 Misc. Newsletter
TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’
Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.
To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.
FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)
UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)
THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”
PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.
WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”
STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.
TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).
DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.
LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…
FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”
BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.
CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.
WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.
THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…
KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.
BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.
WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.
‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.
Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”
Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).
“Lachrymose”
LITE LIT
(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)
Page Passage
2 He was a smiling, handsome man…
8 She smiled at him.
11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…
13 …he said, and smiled at me…
14 He smiled at me.
21 …he said, and smiled…
22 She smiled at me…
27 …looked around at him and smiled.
31 He was smiling and looking at me…
34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.
37 She smiled up at me…
37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.
38 …my mother said, still smiling.
38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.
40 …and she was smiling.
40 She smiled at him.
44 She smiled and shook her head.
48 She smiled.
52 …she was smiling.
52 …and one of them smiled.
53 …my mother said, and smiled.
53 …and smiled at me.
56 …she said, and smiled at me.
63 She looked around at me and smiled.
70 …he was smiling.
72 …then she smiled at me…
72 She was smiling…
73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…
75 She smiled…
77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.
77 She smiled at me.
82 …he looked up at her and smiled…
82 She looked at me and smiled.
84 He was standing there smiling…
88 …the woman was smiling…
90 She smiled at me.
91 …smiling and fanning herself.
92 My mother smiled.
92 Warren…smiled at my mother.
93 She smiled at him.
100 My mother smiled at me.
101 She smiled at me again.
101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.
104 She smiled at me again…
110 He was standing…and smiling…
111 …my father’s clean smiling face…
120 She smiled at me…
122 She smiled at me…
123 She smiled…
131 …looked at me and smiled…
133 She looked up at me and smiled…
134 She smiled.
136 She smiled at him.
136 He was smiling.
136 And then she smiled at him again.
137 She smiled at him…
139 My father smiled at me.
143 …smiled at her.
143 …and smiled.
143 …and smiled again.
144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.
154 …and he was smiling.
170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.
10/90 Misc. Newsletter
CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!
It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.
LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)
ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.
DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.
FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.
PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.
IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.
STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.
CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)
OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.
NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?
ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.
UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.
YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.
AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”
‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.
Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”
It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.
I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.
“Esconce”
9/90 Misc. Newsletter
NORTHGATE BACK-TO-SCHOOL SLOGAN:
“DO THE BRIGHT THING”
Welcome to Misc., since 1986 your honest source about the weird, the gross, the fresh, the beautiful and the damned. One reason take pop culture seriously is that the “serious” media don’t. The NY Times did a long profile of actor Paul Benedict, mentioning his roles on Broadway and in such films as The Goodbye Girl, but completely ignoring his 11 years on The Jeffersons. The New Republic, the opinion mag that recently decided it would rather be rich than liberal, did an interminable essay about Madonna as Image, as Marketing Machine, as Sociological Phenomenon — as everything but an entertainer.
IRAQI AND HIS FRIENDS: Saddam Hussein used to be a U.S. ally. We were asked to pity his poor government in its long hard war against Khomeini’s Iran, not quite realizing that each leader was ruthless in his own way. Again, “realpolitik” (unquestioned support for strategically-convenient dictators) has backfired. There are no democracies in that region to support, only monarchies or other dictatorships which treat their women, dissidents, and intellectuals with greater or lesser severity. Even Israel, the lone multi-party state in the area (besides the powerless govt. of Lebanon), is not the example of tolerance and human rights that it still could become. Among the frozen Kuwaiti assets are the oil ministry’s 6,500 gas stations in Europe, bearing the genuinely cute name of Q8.
KOMO SAID IT: “Bush is laying down an iron curtain on Iraq.” Thirty years ago, we condemned the immorality of E. Germany trying to starve West Berlin. Now we do the same. The would-be Oil War fulfills 11 years of accumulating U.S. warlust, incompletely satiated by the conquests and skirmishes in Latin America and the Caribbean; all as the long-lead-time monthlies still displayed think pieces about the possibility of a post-Cold War, post-military nation. Was this conflict escalated so sharply, so swiftly, as a way to keep the Pentagon and its suppliers in business at current levels?… Meanwhile, a Sony-owned theater chain in NYC changed its marquees to promote the temporarily-renamed IRAQNOPHOBIA. There will, of course, be movies about all this. Unlike Vietnam movies, these films could all be made in the close-to-Hollywood Mojave desert; like Vietnam movies, they’ll likely depict conflicts between different American characters, with no Arabian people in sight.
ROSEANNA ARQUETTE IN PLAYBOY: What would her grandfather Charley Weaver have thought?
RUSTLE THEM SOYBEANS: B.C.’s own k.d. lang has based her career around appropriating the music and the images of the cowboy culture, as filtered through kitsch art over the years. Now she speaks out against the industry that all the real cowboys were in – meat — and gets flack from country radio stations afraid of offending today’s cowboys, not to mention fast-food advertisers. It leads one to wonder what country music would have been like with no burgers, no cattle drives, no branding irons, no rodeos. k.d. may be the Angel with a Lariat, but with nothing to lasso.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: MU Press’Â Balance of Power comic book is mostly the same old stuff about corporate assassins and ninjas jumping around, but the futuristic Seattle setting does give us one cool panel: a sign on Broadway, “Dick’s 60th Anniversary: 1954-2014.”
THE LAST LAFF: The Improvisation, a national chain of comedy clubs, is moving into the Showbox. Now, where the leather-jacketed vegetarians used to pogo and fight, where the Police and Psychedelic Furs once played to under 800 people, now generic yups will pay a big cover charge to sip cocktails and hear well-dressed smartasses tell insults about all the rest of us.
GOODWILL GAMES LOSE $44 MILLION: Did the official theme of the “spirit of goodwill,” of international friendship and pulling together, diminish the spirit of ruthless battle TV sports viewers have been used to?
WHAT’S IN STORE: The Bon had this really strange Goodwill sculpture by the main-floor elevators. Three male figures held up a large sphere, while wearing bottom-baring loincloths over what from a side view clearly showed as hemispheric, one-part bulges. The Bon also quietly closed the 62-year-old Budget Store, a refuge not so much for moderate prices as for moderate styles, an island of calm in a sea of fashion victims. Now we’re all expected to go to chains in the far suburbs to get cheaper clothes.
ELEVATOR MUSIC IN ONE-STORY BUILDINGS: A Tillicum 7-Eleven store drives teens away by blasting easy listening music into the parking lot. This music was scientifically engineered, based on 40-year-old principles, to be as inoffensive as possible; but to today’s generation, this is the most offensive thing imaginable (with the possible exception of worldwide environmental disaster or Ed McMahon). But the Muzak company is now trying to reshape its image. It’s getting the rights to make easy-listening versions of contemporary hits by such artists as P. Abdul and even U2. Maybe if 7-Eleven could get a tape of the Muzak “Pride in the Name of Love” and play it over and over, they’d never worry about anybody under 35 showing up within half a mile of the place.
THE FINE PRINT: “At Kellogg Company, we are committed to making the highest quality toaster pastries available. We do not make generic or store-brand toaster pastries. To insure Kellogg quality inside the box, make sure there is a Kellogg’s label outside.”
WASHINGTON MAGAZINE R.I.P.: It tried to do nothing but make money, and failed at that. The next people to try a regional magazine should learn from Washington‘s mistakes and, instead of just running lavish but bland peans to scenery, pay some attention to covering people.
ADS OF THE MONTH: The McDonald’s commercial in which a white guy, shaving, sees a black female singer in his mirror (with shaving cream on her face!), exhorting him to start his day with an Egg McMuffin…A Wild Waves amusement park commercial shows a teenage boy in swim trunks sliding into a tunnel section of a water slide, intercut with shots of bikini-clad females. Honest, this really aired! . . . Frito-Lay‘s youth-bashing ads, which alternate between condescendingly depicted kids and childishly acting alleged adults only prove how smugly out-of-it the yups really are (or at least the role-model yups who may be more populous in advertising than in actual existence).
HOW INFOTAINING: KIRO is actually running those commercials disguised as talk shows, in the former Pat Sajak slot. Those “shows” belong on the chintzier cable channels, if even there (though, I must admit, most of them are funnier than Sajak ever was). . .
HOW COME?: King Broadcasting is about to be sold; bringing an end to its status as the largest women-owned company operating in Washington (with the possible exception of the Sisters of Providence). KING is a Seattle institution, one of the few network-affiliate stations in the country that has its own strong identity. The papers have talked about KING’s documentaries and editorials, about its Seattle magazine of the ’60s (still perhaps the best thing published here). They haven’t talked about its great movie The Plot Against Harry, or about KING’s once-great arts coverage, or about The Great American Game (the first public-affairs game show, where all the contestants had to be volunteers in community organizations) Or about Wunda Wunda, the TV kiddie star who was this sort of harlequin character, and her potted flower Wilting Willie. When she watered it every day and sang the Wilting Willie song, you never knew whether the flower would proudly rise up to become Stand-Up Willie (with appropriate fanfare from the organist) or stay Wilting Willie and lie there drooped over the edge of the flower pot. God, don’t let GE buy the station.
AUTO MOTIVES: Chrysler is offering cash payoffs to any of its 60,000 union employees who retire early. Or, as Joe Garagiola might say, “Quit your job — Get a check!”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Chicago’s Viskase Corp. will supply any company with hot dogs containing an advertising message printed in edible inks. So far, no takers… A Dallas-area company that already makes Miracle Smile teeth bleach, is now entering the soft drink field with Cool Cola, a drink that’s not only caffeine-free and preservative-free but vitamin-enriched.
READERBOARD AT MEAD MOTOR CO. on Roosevelt: WE PAY CASH FOR ARS. If Roosevelt Way were in England and this were the new Ms. magazine, you’d be reading this on the “No Comment” page.
BREMERTON, MOST LIVABLE CITY?: Maybe in the past, when there was a cool, compact downtown with Bremer’s Dept. Store and one of the nation’s last classic 3-story Montgomery Ward units. But not these days. Other Money ratings: Seattle 2, Tacoma 4, Eugene 6, Olympia 8. Michael Moore would love to hear that Flint, Mich. is no longer last on the list of 300 metro areas; it’s not even in bottom 10. Why does Money’s list so often favor the Northwest? Could be that a Portland consulting firm, Fast Forward, does the research and makes the judgements.
YOUR CHEATIN’ MAYOR: In the city that made adultery the stuff of gold records, Nashville, Mayor Bill Boner (no jokes please), 45, has been appearing in public with aspiring country singer Traci Peel (ditto), 34. He’s calling her his fiancée, even though he hasn’t yet divorced his third wife (whose $50,000 salary from a defense contractor had led to a House ethics committee investigation of him, before he left Congress to be mayor). A local newspaper reporter said they’d told him he’d called them “at a bad time,” with Peel adding that they’d gone at it with one another for as long as seven hours.
BUT AREN’T ALL POLITICIANS LIKE THAT?: Illone “Cicciolina” Staller, the ex-porn star in Italy’s parliament, offered to sleep w/Hussein to persuade him to make peace. Perhaps she was inspired by the New Age book, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take War Out of Them, about ancient “sacred prostitutes” who performed spiritual rituals (of which sex was merely a part) to initiate returning soldiers back into the community.
NAKED TRUTH: If I may overgeneralize, the women at the Silver Image Gallery‘s Nudes show seemed much more comfortable with looking at women’s bodies than the men were with looking at men’s bodies. It’s odd, considering that men pay big money to look at men’s bodies that are dressed in athletic uniforms.
UNTIL OUR BRISK AND COOL October ish, demand the saving of the Boeing Supersonic Transport mockup plane (now in a Fla. church), read Willie Smith’s Oedipus Cadet (an odd little novel about troubled boyhood), and work for peace.
QUOTATION
An El Camino with major dents, parked outside Temple de Hirsch Sinai, bears white press-on lettering on the driver’s door: “Graduate of the Dale Ellis Driving School.”
Still no ads in Misc., still no bigger size, Probably won’t be unless some generous reader’s willing to help out (selling space, distributing copies, etc.).
More of my writing can be seen in The Comics Journal (a magazine available at better comics shops; accept no substitutes) and occasionally in the Times arts section.
“Celerity”
PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH
“Jimmy, the dominant male of the Seattle Aquarium northern fur seal colony, has died of congestive heart failure. Jimmy had been receiving medical care for the bast month from Drs. Joslin and Richardson of the Woodland Park Zoo. Jimmy was collected in the Pribilof Islands in November 1976, at the age of two years. In his 13 years at the Aquarium, Jimmy fathered two pups — Baabs, born in 1988, and Woodstock, born in 1989 — and was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. One of the Aquarium’s females is currently pregnant and, if all goes well, will deliver Jimmy’s third pup this summer. At age 16, Jimmy was indeed an ‘oldster,’ having lived a normal lifespan for males of this species.” (Thanx and a hat tip to Sunny Speidel)
7/90 Misc. Newsletter
LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.
WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?
Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.
OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?
IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.
ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)
THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”
SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.
UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”
AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.
O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.
CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”
ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.
WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.
GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).
SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.
ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.
HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.
DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?
SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.
KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.
OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.
CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).
Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”
Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Plectrum”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION
The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.
features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products
(junk food for people with too much money).
Some highlights:
* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds
* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)
* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)
* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)
* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)
* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)
6/90 Misc. Newsletter
Look Out, Tuna Boats!
The Incredible Mr. Limpet’s Got A Gun!
Welcome back one and all to the fourth anniversary (and still ungraduated) edition of Misc., the essential news source for all local“Posties” (a term used in a silly KING report about all of us who are postmodern, posthippie, postpunk, etc.).
UPDATE: The Blue Moon Tavern lives; while the shell of the old Rainbow Tavern next door will be sacrificed to luxury condos. In the midst of all the fuss, developer Scott Soules (a bystander in the dispute) said about the western U-District, “The area is prime for redevelopment.” Tell that to the folks who lost affordable housing to massive apartments supported by steel posts over ugly street-level parking, or to anyone driving on NE 45th during Safeco rush hour.
AXL ROSE MARRIES DON EVERLY’S DAUGHTER: “How we gonna tell your pa?”
LOCAL BOOM #1: The 10th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens was a lot of fun. I know full well that the eruption killed 57 and could have killed hundreds more. Still, seeing the old blast footage on the endless TV retrospectives brought back fond memories of a spectacular, exciting event that affected most everybody here. My memories are also all tied up with general memories of 1980, a year when it began to look like things were getting hopeful in music, in fashion, in world affairs (the start of Solidarity, the fall of Somoza) — until the end of the year brought the rise of Reagan, the fall of Lennon, and all the stupidity that followed. Now it’s another “zero year,” and things are again looking cautiously hopeful in most areas of the world culture (except, for now, in U.S. partisan politics). This time, let’s hope it sticks. (Also loved a Spokane candy firm’s chocolate mountain with a powdered-sugar middle that you can “erupt” with a tiny plastic air pump.)
LOCAL BOOM #2: In 1980, Seattle was still (mistakenly) perceived by many people here and elsewhere as some backwater burg, an overgrown town instead of a city. Some loved the image, some hated it, but few disbelieved it. But in 1990 I’m preparing myself for the expected onslaught of Northwest Chic. Twin Peaks has turned a tiny cafe seen in two minutes of the first show (re-created in an LA studio for later episodes) into a tourist/reporter mecca. It’s going to get worse when the show appears in Europe (at last word, UK documentary crews were still prowling the streets of Dallas for anything reminiscent of J.R.). After that, throw in all the national hype over the local coffee, those flashy local sportswear companies like Generra and Nike, the Nordstrom labor flap that still helps publicize Nordy’s “uniqueness,” the increasing sight of local landmarks in national car commercials, the acclaim over local cartoonists, rappers and thrash-rock bands, and a certain upcoming cable-TV sports event. Responding to this and other activity, Newsweek almost opened a Seattle bureau this past winter, but then decided to save its money. Can such a sparsely-peopled region (only 10 million including B.C.) deserve or survive much more limelight? Well, that’s more people than N.Y.C. and much more than other places that get far more attention in the U.S. as a whole, places like Nicaragua and Israel, so why not let it be our turn (preferably without warfare).
CATHODE CORNER: While the eruption footage on the St. Helens TV specials still looked spectacular, some of the news tape from the weeks before the blast was washed out and bereft of many “scan lines”. Will current video footage last? When high-definition TV comes along, will current video images look so bad in comparison that they’ll be retired from common viewing? If so, that’d make filmed shows and news footage from the ’50s and ’60s eternal but leave taped stuff from the ’70s and ’80s to rot. The Beverly Hillbillies would live forever, while Married With Children becomes a trivia question. Many shows now shot on film are still edited on tape, and would also look decidedly low-definition on HDTV…. Graham Kerr is taping a new syndicated series at KING. The ex-Gallopping Gourmet still lives in Tacoma, across town from the Frugal Gourmet’s house.
AD VERBS: Those spots touting Puget Sound Bank as the last home-owned big bank also display an anti-city bias. The outside-owned banks are represented by urban scenes of LA, SF, Portland and NYC (for Key Bank, actually based in Albany), while the narration about the good home boys accompanies country and suburban scenes….The Home Club hardware warehouse stores are running commercials with The Addams Family theme song (“Yes!, I wish they said, “your house can look just like theirs!”)….Those cable commercials for Mace for women, in tasteful pocketbook-size applicator cans, exploit fear of the opposite-sex, opposite-race stranger in the parking garage (while most violent crimes against women are actually done by acquaintances).
THE FINE PRINT (small sign posted in downtown library): “Title Change: Switch Fund Advisory has become Mutual Fund Investing.“
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Tina is the typewritten/photocopied journal of the Church of Tina Chopp in Bellingham. It’s a variant on the Church of the SubGenius fun and games, built around the “Tina Chopp is God” graffiti that was everywhere in B’ham and Seattle in the early ’80s. Like real churches, it has a detailed philosophy and an us-vs.-them demarcation (in the “Tinite” worldview, to “go Safeway” is to become that most unforgivable of sinners, a suburbanite). Don’t expect any facts about who Tina Chopp is or was (various rumors peg her as a male WWU student’s unsuccessful love pursuit or as a Seattle rock groupie). If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.
Latter-Day Note: On 9/28/99, I received the following email:
the little blurb about The Church finished with the request “If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.”
now i realize that this article was originally written in 1990, and someone may have directed you towards our web site since then (it has been online since 1995), but if not, you can read “the true story” for yourself at http://www.aa.net/cotc/
if you would like any further information about the church, please feel free to write.
Praise Tina Chopp!
Rev. Guido S. DeLuxe, DD, LDD, OGG, OHS, ST, MSU
High Priest – The Church of Tina Chopp
deluxe@marijuana.com — http://www.aa.net/cotc/
CUCKOO’S NEST CUISINE: Officers at the Oregon Correctional Center in Salem can now resume their experiment in disciplining inmates while reducing waste. A state appeals court ruled that Nutra Loaf, baked ground leftovers served to disobedient prisoners, was not cruel or unusual punishment.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Envir-O-Mints are little chocolate mint wafers from Seattle’s Environmental Candy Co. Each mint is stamped with the image of a different endangered species; each wrapper also holds a tiny photo-card of another threatened animal, plus an address on the back for your own Wildlife Action Kit (free) or Endangered Species T-shirt ($3 and 20 wrappers).
IN A JAM: Like most tots in the (then) farm and sawmill town of Marysville, I served my penance as a summer strawberry picker at Biringer Farms, a large operation that sold fresh fruit to traditional wholesale markets. It also had a U-Pick operation and shortcake stands at county fairs. Now my past has risen, in the form of a Biringer store and shortcake stand in the Pike Place Market. Besides breakfasts and desserts (with local fruit when in season), it sells its own new line of gourmet jams, fruit taffy, honey, tea, cocoa, dessert pasta, rum cake, and “Ecstasy” ice cream toppings. They package many of the items in gift sets; they take mail, phone, and fax orders. I know they had to do something like this or lose the farm to tract houses. Still, there’s an ol’ loss-O-innocence about it all, like a nice homely old building “restored” with gaudy paint.
PHILM PHACTS: The most belovedly odd hit of this year’s Seattle Int’l Film Festival could be The Documentator, a 3.5-hour Hungarian orgy of re-cut video (action and sleaze films, TV commercials, socialist economic speeches), interspersed with the story of three people illegally amassing western currency by selling pirated videocassettes. This decidedly peculiar attraction sold out (though several dozen left the Harvard Exit at the start of hour 3).
SONIC DOOM?: It’s quite appropriate that Barry Ackerly’s proposed basketball arena, for which city taxpayers would directly and indirectly bribe him not to move the Sonics, is on the site of a former railroad yard, near the old terminus of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. These and other lines received massive tracts of free land by the U.S. government and decades of virtual land-transportation monopoly in their operating regions, in return for “opening” the American west to white settlement.
BORN TO HUSTLE: Convicted swindler Ivan Boesky has deducted his fines from his income tax, and even bribed fellow prisoners to do his laundry. Did he ever see the last scene ofThe Producers ?
CENSORY OVERLOAD: Dennis Miller got to perform at the White House, but all his jokes were pre-screened for questionable content (can’t have any obscenities in earshot while you’re working on strengthening our friendship with the Chinese government). Locally, the King County Arts Commission put part of an exhibit in its upstairs Smith Tower gallery behind black butcher paper, later replacing that with a partition. The hazardous image? A male nude.
O NO CANADA!: My favorite foreign country may be irreversibly headed toward dissolution, yet the U.S. media virtually ignore it. If the confederation fails, will it be considered a sign of the inherent weakness of the North American capitalist system?…In lighter news, the new Toronto Skydome has hotel rooms overlooking the stadium, where one guest couple made their own show with the curtains wide open during a Blue Jays/M’s game.
UNTIL OUR NEXT EXCITING CHAPTER, get all the plastic postage from cash machines that you can (bound to be a collector’s item), avoid the espresso bar at University Ford (inferior lattes fail to protect against thermal breakdown of viscosity), get those neato Graffiti Gear jackets that you can decorated with marking pens then wash clear, see the Russian constructivist art at the Henry Gallery, and join me in celebrating the 25th birthday of the Lava Lamp.
Author-social critic Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling ) in New York mag: “I left my exercise session after I’d only done one leg. I risked asymmetry.”
HYPE
The Weekly seems to like Misc. “The best one-page read in town,” sez their Bruce Barcott. All Weekly readers are invited to subscribe to Misc. this month for $6 and get a bonus sample from my forthcoming novel. Age, height, race not important.
“Optative”
HOW OFFICIAL ARE YOU?
In order to be a true Goodwill Games fan,
you must consume as many Official Products and Services as you can.
Use this handy checklist.
