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Gigolo Aunts Back From Dead;
Mia Boyle Not M.I.A.
CD review briefs, 2/24/99
Gigolo Aunts
Minor Chords and Major Themes (E Pluribus Unum) ****
The Posies may or may not be once-and-for-all broken up, but their main cohorts in way-melodic, way-sardonic power pop, Boston’s Gigolo Aunts, have suddenly and unexpectedly returned to life after almost five years of hiatusing, thanks to the Counting Crows’Â E Pluribus Unum label. The power of positive negativity never sounded so sweet.
Actually, the negativity part’s toned down here, counterpointed with reassurances such as “Everyone can fly (you just have to try)” and “Blue sky hopes and horoscopes agree in the end/that timing is your real friend, your only friend.” Even in the most hopeless of situations, singer Dave Gibbs’s characters keep on a-pushin’ for renewal, cranking out new personal ads and urging friends to “get yourself together baby.”
But the positivity parts are always kept from saccarinity by the quiet acknowledgements of realistic disillusion, such as in “Everything Is Wrong” and “Residue.” Yet even in the lyrics’ saddest moments, the smart, level-headed vocals and the plaintive guitars keep things from getting too mopey. What we have here, as in the best smart-pop from Big Star on down, is intelligent assessments of the personal condition set to hoppin’ guitar chords and drum fills that keep the vocals’ messages in a context of continual striving for, and demanding that, things be better.
I could listen to this for days. In fact, I probably will.
Mia Boyle
I Am a Diver (Kitchen Whore) ***
Onetime Stranger music editor Mia Boyle, who’s performed around Seattle in such bands as Bullet Train, Moxie, and Radialarmsaw, delivers a moody suite of slow and sultry ballads, performed on multitracked guitars and vocals with ample echo effects. One or two of the tracks sound sort of like what Hole’s “Doll Parts” might have sounded if it had been sung by a more human-scale personage. Other tracks drift into a hypnotic dreamstate somewhere between subtle awareness, erotic afterglow, and the quiet not-really-depression of staring outside on a rainy, overcast March day as the diffused light fades into diffused twilight. Utterly beautiful.
(One might also note that Boyle only includes a few, quite small, photos of herself on the inside flaps of the gorgeously-designed Digipak. In the age of Lilithmania, it’s refreshing to know there’s one female acoustic-singer-songwriter type who’d rather be known for her work than for her image.)
Whale
All Disco Dance Must End In Broken Bones (Virgin) ***
You like Pizzicato 5? You’ll surely like this. Bouncy electronic mixes and samples, wistful voices, a total swingin’ fun time. Easily the most Japan-O-Rama sound to have ever come from Sweden.
MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”
MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)
Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).
All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.
It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.
In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)
WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.
This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)
(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)
The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:
(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)
OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?
Kurt and Courtney and Nick
Film review, 2/17/99
Kurt and Courtney
(1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)
Hype!
(1995, dir. Doug Pray)
Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
(1994, various directors)
By my calendar watch, we’re only seven weeks from what’s sure to be another exercise in media excess–the fifth anniversary of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
No, I don’t think Cobain was really murdered. The various conspiracy theories are too pat, too dependent on ignoring facts of the case that don’t fit the theorists’ neat little conceptions.
Besides, nobody had anything to gain from Cobain’s death, except the conspiracy theorists. Even if he were planning to quit music and leave the admitted publicity-addict Courtney Love, she would’ve gotten as much (and possibly more useful) ink as Cobain’s ex as she did as his widow.
Yet the theories continue to find an audience, among Cobain fans who still don’t want to believe their troubled idol could possibly have wanted to die.
Yet the clues are everywhere in his songs and performances. He really was a sensitive soul who sought to acquire the virtual invincability of a rocker (NOT of a “rock star”–while his music was some of the most accessible U.S. punk ever made, he never wanted what he considered the corrupt rock-star lifestyle).
But the assorted stresses of suddenly becoming a generation’s icon (and the locus of a multimillion dollar business) proved too much for him.
What survives are his music, his haunting image, and the many hangers-on and media vultures still trying to cash in, literally or figuratively, on his story.
One of the latter, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, was thwarted in his attempt to make a movie about the Cobain tragedy; neither Love nor the surviving Nirvana members would talk to him or permit the use of Nirvana’s music or video footage. Instead, Kurt and Courtney is the personal story of Broomfield’s failure to make the film he’d wanted to make. He travels around Seattle, Aberdeen, Portland, and L.A. He interviews a few of the couple’s friends and relatives, none of whom had anything bad to say about the self-deprecating Kurt or anything good to say about the monomaniacally ambitious Courtney.
A large bulk of the film’s time is spent on the professional Courtney-bashers who’ve shown up regularly in magazine stories, talk shows, and Internet newsgroups–Courtney’s very estranged father Hank Harrison, conspiracy theorist Tom Grant, and washed-up early Seattle punker Eldon “El Duce” Hoke. Hoke, whose career (such as it was) was predicated on calculated noteriety, claimed Love had offered to pay him to kill Cobain but he’d turned down the offer. Hoke died days after Broomfield filmed him; he was hit by a train while stoned out of his gourd. (He reportedly told friends he’d made up the hit-man story in a scheme to get his own name back in infamy.)
Broomfield clearly wants to contrast the ill fate of the tender, ulcerous Cobain with Love’s final re-creation of herself as a total Hollywood celebrity. But I couldn’t help seeing a more telling comparison between Cobain and Hoke. Both were self-styled bad boys; both eventually died indirectly from their drug addictions. But Hoke, bereft of much talent or imagination, sought merely to push the offensiveness envelope, and ended up a long term burnout case, living out his existence on L.A.’s far outskirts. Cobain beautifully married punk noise and pop immediacy, art and entertainment, and (as can be seen in the compilation video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!) burned out much more quickly.
Meanwhile, the definitive videocassette document of Nirvana’s era remains Doug Pray’s Hype! It contains very little Nirvana material, but puts the band in the context of its time and place better than star-obsessed folks like Broomfield ever could.
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1: An outfit in northern California’s selling officially-licensed Space Needle brand bottled water.
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: Banners have been mounted all along the streets of the Darkest Eastside, calling on one and all to “Celebrate Redmond.”
WORKIN’ IT: A week or two back, we recounted alarming statistics in Variety claiming kids’ TV viewership was significantly down in each of the past three years. Now, other articles offer up a reason why. Not too long
ago, Those Kids Today were constantly berated as illiterate videots and Nintendo-junkies whose slacker study habits were going to be America’s downfall as a productive player on the global economic stage. Now, Time, the NY Times, and other media outlets are crying in alarm that kids as young as the first grade are being inundated beneath piles of homework so daunting nobody has time to be a kid. The NY Times account, citing a U. of Michigan study, claims in the last 17 years “homework for first- to third-graders had nearly tripled, to 123 minutes a week.”
The first caveat, naturally, is the mass-media biz might be worrying that young eyeballs are getting too captivated by mandatory attention, therefore limiting the young’uns’ ability to be marketed to.
Beyond that, another question arises–at a time when the effective application of knowledge is more nonlinear (or, rather, multilinear) than ever, when Net-based reference tools may make data acquisition as simple as using a calculator, why should we be dooming our children by force-feeding them a rigorous, narrow discipline of left-brain rote memorization? The most likely answer’s that in the ’80s, everybody was so darned worried we weren’t keeping up with those other industrialized nations in producing quantifiable test-score results. Test-score results, of course, don’t really equal knowledge; and knowledge certainly doesn’t equal wisdom–let alone economic “success.” As far as I’ve been able to figure, Japan’s schools are just as tough and soul-sapping as ever, while the nation’s economy’s gone to the dogs for reasons totally unrelated to study habits.
POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: In a recent PBS hour called We the (Rude) People, Morton Kondracke joined the chorus of those who bemoan the death of “civil society” and who blame America’s subcultural fragmentation and in-group politics and just about everything else wrong (or perceived to be wrong) with America on those darned ’60s antiwar protesters. Really, for a veteran panelist on The McLaughlin Group to claim the liberals are causing all the hatemongering is beyond ludicrousness!
THE FINE PRINT (In the closing credits of Artisan Entertainment’s video trailer to Jerry Springer: Ringmaster): “All characters and events in the preceding motion picture were entirely fictional, and nothing is intended to depict any actual participant in, or aspect of, ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ which is broadcast on television. This motion picture is not connected to ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and is not licensed from its producers.”
THE OTHER FINE PRINT (from a brochure soliciting public-art proposals for the UW Medical Center’s new Maternity and Infant Care wing): “Since not every MIC patient outcome results in a live or healthy birth, the successful artwork will respect this fact with appropriate imagery. For example, the artist may decide to omit direct references to children, babies, or reproduction.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I seem to always be praising the NW punk bible 10 Things (Jesus Wants You to Know). Its latest issue (#20) is its best yet. Besides the usual acreage of interviews and reviews, it’s got editor Dan Halligan’s tale of his Vegas wedding, a woman named Mels disappointedly relating how punks turn out to have most of the same sex hangups as other Americans, interviews with two DIY Netporn entrepreneurs, lotsa talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance repeal advocates, an art-photo by Wendy Wishbone of three goth models representing “the Three Fates of Punk: Death, Hypocrisy, Capitalism,” and Ben Weasel’s cogent analysis of how a vital, energetic subculture’s degenerated and ossified into a conformist, formulaic, commercialized “New Punk Order.” (Mightily timely reading during last week’s ESPN “Winter X Games” with all the post-Green Day noisemakers used for snowboarding sountrack tuneage.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $3 from 8315 Lake City Way NE, #192, Seattle 98115.
LOSS OF DOWN: Another Super Bowl Sunday’s on the way, and with it the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage about pro football as an institution of violence and stupidity and that perennial fall guy testosterone–even though football puts more kid through college than any other sport, even though it’s really a game of coaching and choreography as much as one of hitting and tackling, and even though it’s got enough female fans for QVC to offer NFL-logo costume jewelry trinkets. Time staff essayist Lance Morrow recently claimed, “Football, still in bad odor among thinkers, needs a fancier mystique;” then proceeded to offer up a “deconstructionist theory” of the sport–which, natch, turned out to be less a defense of the gridiron game than a spoof of PoMo egghead jargon. (“Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or ‘fakes’ or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everytyhing that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole — the game lui-meme.”)
I, however, am not afraid to stake whatever remaining highbrow street-cred I might have on the line by actually and sincerely stating my praise for the game. I’ve (largely) grown out of my sensitive-post-adolescent jock-hating phase (my above remarks about snowboarding hype notwithstanding), and have come to an honest appreciation of the Big Game played by Big Dudes, their bodies (and usually their faces) hidden beneath the group-identity of the uniform, their individual heroics interdependent upon the coordinated effort of the entire team. A game with separate offensive and defensive players, in which fully half the participants can usually do nothing but “loss prevention.” (Hmm–maybe Safeco should’ve bought the naming rights to the new football stadium instead of the new baseball stadium.)
Here, then, is my partial list of what makes the perfect Super Bowl experience (please feel free to print this out and keep score at home):
NEXT WEEK: The long-delayed final results of our quest for appropriate honorees on a mythical Seattle women’s walk of fame. ‘Til then, here’s your next topic to mull over via email and our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards: What’s the most beautiful “ugly” building in town (i.e., a beautiful structure the official tastemakers would despise)?
MISC., your own four-man luge derailment-accident of online journalism, couldn’t help but be bemused by the awkward coincidence of Salt Lake City’s Olympics scandal (wherein local officials were forced to admit bribing Intl. Olympic Committee members as part of their successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games) just weeks after some Seattle movers-‘n’-shakers announced their overt displeasure with the City Council’s refusal to pursue a bid for the 2012 Summer Games. It also shows that they may profess to be sexual neo-Puritans over there in the Beehive State, but they know how to be corrupt when and where it proves materially valuable.
MADE FOR WALKING?: We still don’t have many nominations for our proposed, mythical, Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame. So we’ll keep the topic open one or two more weeks at our Misc. Talk discussion boards and by email to clark@speakeasy.org.
WHILE ROME BURNS DEPT.: I’m on two major e-mail lists these days, besides my own: One for the regional punk-rock community, and one for readers of the hi-brow novelist David Foster Wallace. Both lists descended to Nazi talk in recent weeks. On the punk list, a discussion about unfortunate fistfights and bullies at the Breakroom’s New Year’s show has descended into list members quibbling about Nazi skinheads (the general consensus: Not all skins are Nazis, and not all Nazis shave their skulls). On the Wallace list, somehow a discussion about an essay Wallace wrote about Dostoyevsky devolved into a shouting match about whether German philosopher Martin Heidegger was really a Nazi or just pretended enough to be one so they wouldn’t track him down & kill him like they did to so many other intelligentsia members in 1939-45 Europe. (Meanwhile, the Republican Sleaze Machine is attempting nothing less than the destruction of the U.S. electoral system, and nobody on either list (or I) has given it even a cursory mention.)
OF COURSE, the relative lack of public discourse over the coup attempt may be just what the coup plotters want. The Sleaze Machine may very well want you to be so completely disgusted by its coup attempt that you’ll stop paying attention. That way they can continue to ply their methodical annihilation of democratic governance with even less public scrutiny.
DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: I may have been overgenerous last month in wistfully nostalgizing about KSTW’s former ownership by Gaylord Entertainment (owner of the Grand Ole Opry radio show and theme park, and co-owner of cable’s Nashville Network). The Columbia Journalism Review just named Gaylord’s flagship property, the Daily Oklahoman, “the worst newspaper in America.” According to the CJR story, old man Gaylord allows his other media enterprises to be professionally run, but continues to lord over his Oklahoma City monopoly daily like a back-country version of those oldtime reactionary press lords like Hearst.
IT’S ONLY WORDS (via Joe Mabel): “Have you noticed the recent rise of `actionable’ used to mean `able to be acted upon’ rather than `giving cause for a lawsuit’? Last night at the Washington Software Alliance awards ceremony, the keynote speaker actually said `content on your web site must be actionable.’ I guess we all knew what he meant, but my oldspeak ear couldn’t help hearing this as `make sure you slander someone.'”
ACCESS BAGGAGE: No, P-I “Arts Beat” writer Douglas McLennan, you’re wrong to suggest the city exploit TCI’s default of its city cable contract (the company admitted it wouldn’t upgrade service to all city neighborhoods by a contract-imposed deadline of next week) by getting the cable company to fund an “improved” public-access channel–a city arts channel, in which a professional programming staff would ensure “quality control” by picking who got to be on it. That wouldn’t be real public access at all. The whole point of public access is nobody chooses. Anybody can get on it and many do–evangelists, female and male strippers, pot-legalization advocates, UFO conspiracy theorists, Y2K scare-mongers, rappers, racists, zither players, video artists, cabaret performers, karaoke singers, high-school football players, political activists, etc. etc. etc. The city already has a designated TCI channel it currently barely uses to document council meetings and public hearings. It could put quality-controlled arts shows on that channel whenever it wanted to. If the city can get production funds for such shows as part of its settlement from TCI, that’d be great. But leave public access to remain true public access.
FOX TAKETH AWAY, FOX GIVETH: The X-Files is no longer produced in Vancouver, but another prime-time network show is now being filmed 150 mi. from us–in the opposite direction. The PJs, that instant-hit Fox 3-D cartoon, is animated by our Portland pals at Will Vinton Productions from scripts and soundtracks generated in Hollywood. Instead of the modeling clay Vinton’s crew’s famous for (“Claymation” is their registered trademark, ya know), The PJs utilizes foam-rubber dolls with wire skeletons and detachable-replacable facial parts. The result looks sharper on the small screen, and (vital for a weekly series) is a heckuva lot more efficient than clay-sculpting every figure for every frame. This means The PJs is the only animated series besides South Park to use no overseas subcontractors. It also means you can judge for yourself whether these aging Oregon hippies can accurately visualize the show’s setting (a generic east-coast inner city neighborhood), or if in the necessarily-exaggerated world of animation that even matters.
GOING GOING…: J.K. Gill’s last mall-based paperback and stationery stores are closing sometime this month. This was a Portland-based chain that had bought the retail arm of Lowman & Hanford (which claimed to have been “Seattle’s Oldest Retail Business,” and whose old Pioneer Square building later housed the startup incarnations of both Aldus (now Adobe) and Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks)). Countless former junior-high girls have fond memories of going out to Gill’s to steal Shaun Cassidy notebooks and unicorn figurines. Speaking of youth-culture memories…
REVERTING TO TYPE: The Delaware-based House Industries, a purveyor of retro-hip computer typefaces, is now selling “Flyer Fonts,” a $99 computer disk containing “18 hardcore and punk fonts, based on type from punk and hardcore flyers of the ’80s.” For only several times the combined production budgets of the original posters, you can get exact digital re-enactments of hand-lettering, cut-out, stencil, and umpteen-generation-photocopy faces with such titles as Distortion, Vandalism, Straight, Filler, Malfunction, and All Ages. You also get 25 clip-art images (skulls, skateboards, a circle-A), a T-shirt, and a CD with ancient noise-rants by the likes of Suicidal Tendancies, Youth Brigade, and the Circle Jerks. You could call it high tech trying to ape the street credibility of low tech. Or you could call it a service for aging punks now stuck in commercial graphic-design careers who want to relive their former artistic styles without the bother of re-learning the use of X-Acto knives and rubber cement. (For the whole House catalog, call 800-888-4390.) Still speaking of youth-culture memories…
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Among the old buildings demolished in recent weeks for yet more homely office/retail/condo collossi was the old church just east of downtown known from 1977 to 1985 as The Monastery, an all-ages, primarily-gay disco. Its operators had Universal Life Church mail-order ordinations and called its DJ events “church services.” As a place where underage males publicly came out, it would’ve attracted negative scrutiny even without the rumored use of common disco and/or teen drugs. Rumors at the time (unconfirmed then and unconfirmable now) claim a dad with major city-government connections blamed the Monastery for his son’s emergence as an openly gay user of some substance or another; the dad then persuaded his politico pals that all-ages nightlife was A Menace To Be Stopped. The result: The infamous Teen Dance Ordinance, widely blamed for helping make (live or recorded) music shows for under-21s nearly impossible to profitably mount in this town. Only today, with a somewhat less reactionary faction on the council authorizing a Music and Youth Task Force, is anything being done to correct this past over-reaction. By now, though, it might be too late. The cost of real estate’s getting so damned high in town, even if larger booze-free clubs were legalized (small ones like the Velvet Elvis have been exempt from the ordinance), there might be no place available in which one might feasibly be operated.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, ponder these words from Leonard Maltin, made while discussing the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments: “Sometimes people laugh at silent films because they find them corny or feel superior to them. I can understand that. I felt the same way about Armageddon.”
IT’S A DOG-DAYS-OF-WINTER MISC., the online column that couldn’t help but be bemused by the huge, handsome “Iams Sold Here” poster advertising yupscale pet foods, a poster taped to a window at the Queen Anne Larry’s Market–specifically, a window directly above the store’s cafeteria.
NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The Downtown Seattle Association/Community Development Round Table clique, via one of its frequent planted front-page puff pieces in the P-I, believes the Seattle City Council doesn’t have enough big-business toadies on it? What’s wrong with this picture?
THE FINE PRINT (from the Internet service provider Xensei): “The requested URL was not found on this server. No further information is available. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And it looked so promising for a while there too.”
PUTTING-ON-AIRS DEPT.: A kindly reader did some seeking out on the FCC’s website and found some interesting license applications on file. KCMU’s applied for a power increase from 450 to 720 watts. Even more interesting–KSER, the Lynnwood-based successor to the late Seattle community station KRAB, has applied to move from 1000 to 5800 watts (will residents south of Shoreline be able to receive the station everybody in the Seattle area’s talked about but almost nobody’s heard?). And two more UHF TV channels are in the works: KHCV on channel 45 (which has been broadcasting black screens and computer graphics promising great shows any month now), and something called the African American Broadcasting Co. has filed a construction permit to start transmitting locally on channel 51.
I-KID-YOU-NOT-DEPT.: A headline in Variety announces a grim portent for our nation’s future: “Kids may be toddling away from television.” The story sadly relates, “Kids viewership is down a massive 13% so far in the fourth quarter compared with the same dime period a year ago,” across network, syndicated, and cable schedules; continuing and accellerating a two-year trend. Maybe the most recent demands that broadcast stations stick more educational content into their kidvid has worked to drive the tots away from the screen, something the anti-TV Luddites have wanted all along. Of course, it could mean the young’uns are simply switching to violent shoot-em-up video games on the Playstation instead.
The same Variety issue (12/21-1/3) also contained the trade magazine’s annual “International Locations Supplement” (containing absolutely no mention of any Washington location work but plenty of Vancouver stuff). It’s a document of either frustration or misplaced commercial ambition that all these cities, states, and countries are investing heavy amounts of public and/or private investment, not into making their own films but simply into providing scenery and/or cheap labor for Hollywood.
GAME THEORY: At a time when Hollywood rules the popcult globe, but Hollywood’s increasingly under foreign investment capital, The Price is Right has been running an opening banner “Made In the USA.” The show’s still churned out in LA, but it’s now owned by the British media conglomerate Pearson (owners of Penguin Books and a lot of other stuff), which acquired what’s left of Goodson-Todman Productions in order to strengthen its position as the global leader in administering foreign remake rights to new and old game show concepts. Indeed, it claims to either produce, co-produce, or control the rights to half the game shows now airing around the world, from the French version of The $25,000 Pyramid to the Australian version of Sale of the Century to the British version of Family Feud (retitled Family Fortunes). It’s even offering international remake rights to The Honeymooners (“Le Pow! Le Zoom! Dans la lune!”)
PHILM PHUN: The Faculty, that dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-space-aliens movie, is being hyped with an MTV video featuring the voice (and, for just a couple of seconds, the image) of erstwhile Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley (who’s otherwise still in his self-imposed hiatus from the stresses of the music biz), covering the Pink Floyd chestnut “Another Brick in the Wall.” The coincidence (well, maybe not a coincidence if Staley knows his local-film history): The onetime supergroup that recorded the track’s credited as Class of ’99. Very close to Class of 1999, the title of a dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-robots movie filmed ten years ago at Seattle’s old, now reopened, Lincoln High.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dinosaur Creamy Coolers are fruity drinks made with ultra-pasteurized milk, corn syrup, flavorings, a slight tinge of carbonation, and wild colors-not-found-in-nature. The label lists flavors by colors, just like Jell-O afficianados: “Red (cherry), orgnage (orange), blue (tropical punch), green (lime).” And it all comes in a little plastic miniature sports bottle, which you have to cut or rip open at the head of the built-in flexible straw. Made in California but sold at Uwajimaya.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jet City Maven is a feisty, independent free tabloid for the near-north-end neighborhoods of Seattle (Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, et al.), run by former North Seattle Press participants Clayton and Susan Park. Besides remiscinces by old North Central Outlook cofounder Stan Stapp, it’s got the usual business briefs, community-planning updates, neighborhood-vs.-developer articles, and arts-and-entertainment notices (by local journeyman musician Jason Trachtenburg). However, I’m personally a bit perturbed by the front-page editorial in its Jan. issue. The story involved Civic Light Opera musicians seeking union representation against management’s wishes, even while the company mounts a show (Rags) about old-timey working-folks’ struggles in 1900s NYC. Nick Slepko’s commentary on this not only is accurately summed up by its Newtesque headline, “BIG Labor takes on small community theater,” but goes on to Cold War-nostalgiac Red-baiting by gleefully describing picketers outside the show as including “UW Socialist Workers Party diehards outside blocking the theater.” I’ve worked for big employers and small employers, and trust me: workers at small outfits need a living wage and basic rights as much as workers at big outfits, and may require representation to attain ’em. (Free each month at drop-off sites in the targeted neighborhoods; by subscription from 12345 30th Ave. NE, Suite HI, Seattle 98125.)
DOUBLE DRIBBLES: The evening before the NBA’s belated return was announced, I witnessed Seattle Reign Appreciation Day at the Seattle Center House. The center floor of the cavernous old National Guard armory was full of mourning and love-festing fans–teenage girls, moms and daughters, dads and daughters, hand-holding lesbian couples, and more than a few gents like me who simply love the grace of the female form in action. To the corporate sports world, ABL pro women’s basketball may have been just another short-lived, underfunded wannabe league like the ones I mentioned two weeks ago (WFL, USFL, NASL, WHL, ABA, Liberty Basketball Association, several indoor-soccer attempts, Arena Football). But to the 500 or so at Reign Appreciation Day, and the two or three thousand regular gamegoers they represented, the ABL represented something different–a dream (albeit a commercially-exploited dream) that girls could one day be valued not merely for their bodies (as objects of desire) but for their bodies (as machines of active achievement), in an organization that understood the street-level, populist aspect of women’s-sports fandom and didn’t try to treat it as a junior version of all that’s icky about corporate sport.
(Meanwhile, a few pamphleteers at Reign Appreciation Day wanted to spread the news about some adamant fans in San Jose, CA who want to rescue the ABL by recruiting a few thousand of the league’s loyal followers to put up at least $1,000 each to collectively buy and resuscitate the league.)
The morning after that celebratory wake for this now-deferred dream, the NBA owners (purveyors of the ABL-killing, corporate-as-all-heck WNBA) ended their player lockout (the sorriest demonstration of what’s wrong with corporate sport since, maybe, 1995). As many of you know, the Sonics are owned by local billboard czar Barry Ackerley; for almost a year, the team’s dedicated Ackerley billboard site outside its practice gym facing Aurora Ave. has borne a message encouraging fan noise: “Your voice will come back. Eventually.” During the lockout, it seemed like a desperate promise that games would again be played one of these months (or years). Now, though, maybe it could be a rallying cry to encourage all the frustrated fans to raise their own voices against corporate sport’s increasingly pathetic edifice.
BE SURE TO ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS for our still-hypothetical Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame by email to clark@speakeasy.org, or at our very own Misc. Talk discussion boards. Results will be announced in this space next week. Until then, see Elizabeth, pray for snow, and consider the potential application of these words from Samuel Butler to the current D.C. tragicomedy: “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
From Hot Bollywood Action to
Lo-Fi Turned Into Hi-Tech
CD review roundup, 12/30/98
KALYANJI, ANANDJI
Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, & Sitars
(Motel) ****
I LOVE movie music from Bollywood (the Bombay commercial film industry)! This is as great an introductory sampler of it as you’ll find. The Motel Records gang’s taken 15 tracks from ’70s crime and gangster films scored by the brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah, and heavily remixed and remastered them for western rock-oriented tastes. (Unfortunately, Motel’s added jokey song titles to most tracks (“The Good, the Bad, and the Chutney”) and left off any specific info about the original films they’re from.) Syrupy strings, twangy sitars, sireny synths, smoky harmonicas, metallic guitars, blazing horns, mod tambourines, and a hundred eastern and western musical traditions both smoothly mesh and jarringly confront to create what the liner notes rightly call “some of the wildest, funkiest, and least incidental `incidental’ music ever made.” To attempt to describe this any further would be foll. Just get it and be astounded.
If you’re after a purer packaging of the original music, without the gag song titles, check out the import 2-CD set The Golden Collection.
TIFFANY ANDERS
Runnin From No Place to Nowhere
(Up) **
Anders (sometime Dinosaur Jr./Mike Johnson backup singer, ex-Hot White Noon frontwoman, and daughter of filmmaker Alison Anders) has assembled twenty-five minutes of light, bright, sarcastic, sardonic, almost quaint singer-songwritery balladeering, backed by her own energetic indie-rock electric guitar (with assistance from bassist Jeff Tobin and three guest drummers, one of whom is Dino-boss J. Mascis in case you care). It takes about six listenings to really get into, but once that point’s reached Anders’s sweet-yet-strong voice and harsh-yet-melodic strumming can get to one.
PASTELS AND FRIENDS
Illuminati: Pastels Music Remixed
(Up) ***
How to make an electronic “remix” CD from one of the most enduring lo-fi indie rock outfits anywhere (Scotland’s long-running Pastels): Hire great synth composers and arrangers to create what are essentially new works, taking the titles, inspiration, and sampled bits of instruments and voices from old Pastels tracks (predominantly from the 1997 CDÂ Illumination). The result: Not a cute-jangly-guitar album with electronics underneath, but a predominantly electronic album perfectly adhering to the Pastels’ aesthetic of patience, understatement, and wistful observance of life. Utterly perfect winter-drizzle music.
ROKY ERICKSON
Never Say Goodbye
(Emporer Jones) ***
When these home-tapes were made (mostly in 1971 and ’74), the Peanuts comic strip had already speculated about the Great Pumpkin, a dimigod-like gourd who searched the earth for the most sincere pumpkin patch. If ex-13th Floor Elevators frontman Erickson had been a gourd farmer, that mythical G.P. wouldn’t have had to look further. This solo-acoustic compilation’s the absolute most earnest, heartfelt set you’ll ever hear. No hypocrisy, no affectations (well, maybe a couple of fake-Dylan nasal wails but even those come off as charming), all serious and all rooted in Erickson’s rock-solid lyric writing and the real pain of his life. Indeed, six of the 14 tracks were made while Erickson was living in a psychiatric hospital (some associates claim he emerged more disjointed than when he went in). It’s perhaps not the best intro to psychedelic pioneer Erickson, but a great treat for completists, and for anyone who truly loves pure pop in the rough. (It’s also, the label claims, the first disc on which Erickson owns all the songwriting royalties. Currently living a semi-subsistence existence as a forgotten pop pioneer, he could use the bucks.)
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….
WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).
WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?
WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.
WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.
WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.
THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.
LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….
Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)
SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”
THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”
HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?
NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.
As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:
“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”
A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car. “When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court. “In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.
“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.
I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’
YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”
IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)
HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.
SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?
AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.
MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.
This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!
SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.
The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)
Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.
SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)
Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.
Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”
Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.
Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?
NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.
NO, YOU’RE NOT living out a real-life version of that TV show where the hero gets tomorrow’s newspaper today. Your online Misc. dose now comes on Mondays, in a change from the Thursday posting dates that had coincided with the column’s former publication in The Stranger. Now you can start your week with these fun & informative insights. Or, you can wait until midweek and still find a relatively-fresh column waiting your perusal. It’s just one of many changes in the works, to make Misc. World one of the most bookmarkable, remarkable pop-cult-crit sites on the whole darned Web.
ONE MORE REASON TO HATE SAN FRANCISCO: The December Wired (now owned by NYC magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. but still based in Frisco) has this cover story listing “83 Reasons Why Bill Gates’s Reign Is Over.” I actually got into it, until I got to entry #31: “All Microsoft’s market power aside, building World HQ near Seattle has not shifted Earth’s axis or altered gravitational fields. The Evergreen State is still the sticks….” A sidebar piece recommends Gates “get connected–move software headquarters to Silicon Valley.” Look: You can badmouth the big little man all you like (I’ve done so, and will likely do so again). But when you disparge the whole Jet City and environs, them’s fightin’ words.
BEDLAM AND BEYOND: Ultimately, the Planet Hollywoodization of America’s urban downtowns is the same process as the Wal-Martization of America’s small-town main streets. Bed Bath and Beyond, a suburban “big box” chain that does for (or to) shower curtains what Barnes & Noble does for (or to) books, represents something else. Some call the big-box chains, which normally hang out off to the side of malls, an extension of the Wal-Mart concept. I differ. Wal-Mart (and such precursors as Fred Meyer and Kmart) offer a little of everything. But big-box stores (also represented in greater Seattle by the likes of Borders, Sleep Country USA,Video Only, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Home Depot ) try to bowl you over with their sheer immensity, to offer every darned item in a product category that would possibly sell. Speaking of which…
NAILED: Eagle Hardware, the Washington-based home-superstore circuit, is selling out to Lowe’s, a national home-center chain with no prior presence up here. Flash back, you fans of ’70s-style ’50s nostalgia, to the Happy Days rerun where Mr. Cunningham lamented the threat to his Milwaukee hardware boutique by an incoming chain from out of town called Hardware City: “They’ve got 142 different kinds of nails. I’ve only got two: Rusty and un-rusty.” Now, flash ahead to the mid-’90s, when P-I editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg ran a fish-eating-fish drawing to illustrate mom-and-pop hardware stores being eaten by regional chains like Ernst and Pay n’ Pak, who are then eaten by big-box superstores. Greenberg neglected to include the final fish, the national retail Goliath eating up the superstore operators.
PHILM PHUN: Finally saw Roger Corman’s 1995 made-for-Showtime remake of A Bucket of Blood a week or two back. The new version (part of a series he produced for the pay channel, and released to video as The Death Artist) of is not only more slickly produced than the 1959 original (which I know isn’t saying much, since I’d promoted the original’s last local theatrical showing, in 1986 at the Grand Illusion), but the story works far better in a contemporary setting.
Largely known today merely as the precursor to Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (both original films were written by Charles Griffith, who had to sue for credit when Little Shop became a stage musical which in turn was filmed in 1986), the horror-comedy plot of Bucket involves a struggling young sculptor named Walter Paisley trying unsuccessfully to break into the hipster Beatnik art scene–until he sticks plaster onto a dead cat, displays the resulting “artwork” to hipster audiences enthralled by his combination of realism and gruesomeness, and finds he has to make more and grislier “works” to maintain his new-found status, to the point of seeking out street bums to turn into “artistic” corpses.
In the original, Corman had to fictionalize the beat art-scene beyond recognition in order for the beat art-scene characters to fall in love with life-size dead-man statues. But for the ’90s Bucket, he and his collaborators merely had to accurately portray the postmodern art world with all its adoration of cartoony morbidity.
END THE BEGUINE ALREADY!: One good thing about this column no longer appearing in The Stranger is I can now comment on things that are in it, such as freelancer Juliette Guilbert’s 7,000-something-word diatribe against retro-swing mania.
One of Guilbert’s more curious stabs against the movement is its embracing of big-band pop jazz and not the more intellectually challenging modern stuff that started later in the ’40s. Of course, college undergrads aren’t going to get into bebop on a mass scale. Even Guilbert acknowledges the whole point of bebop was to make a black music that whites couldn’t easily take over.
The Swing Era was not the nadir of race relations Guilbert makes it out to be but rather was a first, halting step out from that abyss (at least for African Americans–Japanese Americans faced problems of their own at the time). I’ve previously written about the previously-nostalgized Lounge Era as the dawn of the Age of Integration. The seeds of this progress were sown when white sidemen first played under black bandleaders, when Josephine Baker calmly demanded to be served at the Stork Club, when Jackie Robinson first donned a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball uniform, when thousands of black families migrated from the rural south to industrial jobs in northeast cities (and in Seattle), etc.
And sure, there aren’t many modern-day African Americans in the swing revival. Traditionally, black audiences rush to the Star-Off Machine to abandon black music forms once they’ve gone “mainstream” (white), which with retro-swing happened sometime after Kid Creole and the Coconuts. (When ruthless Hollywood promoters turned rap into gangsta rap, nakedly exploiting white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men assexy savages, black audiences rushed to support acts you or I might consider sappy love-song singers, but they saw as well-dressed, well-mannered, prosocial alternatives to the gangsta crap.)
Similar statements could be made gender-wise about the swing years, esp. when thousands of women took over civilian jobs during the war. It was at swing’s end when gender roles temporarily went backward. The Pleasantville movie connection here, of course, is Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie Nelson was a swing bandleader, Harriet Hilliard (who still used her own last name when their show started on radio) an RKO contract actress who’d become Ozzie’s singer and wife. When they saw the market for swing bands collapse after V-J Day, they invented new, desexualized, images for themselves on their radio show. It was the end of the Swing Era that coincided with (or presaged) the movement to get women back in the kitchen.
Besides, gay men are forever celebrating the style and glamour of decades in which their own sexuality was thoroughly repressed. What’s the Cadillac Grille on east Capitol Hill but a work of fetishized nostalgia for, well, for the Ozzie and Harriet golden-age-that-never-really-was (especially for gays)?
As you might expect from these summaries, Guilbert also finds something semi-scary in the swing kids’ dress code; the stuff their grandparents wore and their baby-boomer parents rebelled against. What she doesn’t realize are the reasons for voluntarily dressing up today can be quite different from the reasons for involuntarily dressing up yesterday.
Guilbert ultimately assigns the swing movement to plain ol’ materialism, “the late 20th century tendency to define the self through purchased objects.” That might be the case with some collectible-hoarders among the retro crows, but it sure doesn’t apply only to retro folks. You see it in people who define themselves by what they do or don’t eat, what they do or don’t drive, etc.
My conclusion? It all goes to show you. If a lot of young people do something (anything), some grownup’s gonna whine about it. Having lived through at least three or four attempted swing revivals (remember Buster Poindexter? Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive LP? The Broadway revues Five Guys Named Moe and Ain’t Misbehavin’? The movies Swing Kids and Newsies?), it amused me at first to see a new generation actually pull it off. Of course, as with anything involving large masses of young adults, it tended to become something taken way, way too seriously. Guilbert also takes it very seriously, perhaps more seriously than the kids themselves. My Rx for her: A good stiff drink and a couple spins of that Ella Fitzgerald sampler compilation.
IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR when we’re supposed to find things to be thankful for. It’s been an up-‘n’-down year around Misc. World HQ, but I’m way, way grateful for my web server Speakeasy.org, which is helping me construct the next version of the site, and to the many kind letters, phone calls, and emails supporting the column’s online continuation. I invite you to share what you’re thankful for this season to clark@speakeasy.org; selected responses will appear here next week.
Work (Out) Music
Record review roundup, 11/18/98
These go out to all those working at home these days, whether by choice or otherwise. If your home office sometimes gets as nonsensical as Letterman’s, maybe it’s time to get a good set of headphones beside your workstation and heed some of the Muzak company’s old research into music’s role in aiding worker productivity. Herewith, suggested accompaniment for personal deskbound accomplishment.
STAR SYSTEM:
**** = Executive suite
*** = Corner office
** = Cubicle
* = Temp pool
SAM SPENCE/JOHN FACENDA The Power and the Glory: Original Music and Voices of NFL Films (Tommy Boy) ***
There are days when you need this: Monday mornings, deadline days, times when you must do something really scary (say, a job interview) or otherwise head into battle. The glorious symphonic anthems of classic 16mm pro-football documentaries will stir you into action like, well hopefully not like recent Seahawk seasons. Anyhow, these masterpieces of orchestral bombast are alternated with short snippets of gravelly-voiced ex-Philly news anchorman John Facenda’s narrations from the films, hokey (sometimes even rhyming) yet never ever hip or ironic. You don’t have to like (or understand) pro football to like this record.
NINO TEMPO & APRIL STEVENS Sweet and Lovely: The Best of Nino Tempo and April Stevens (Varese Sarabande) ****
The only album on this list to include English-language vocals. Muzak never used vocal cuts on its “Stimulus Progression” channel, believing voices attracted too much listener attention. But at certain points in the workday, a little mental diversion can help. For calm-down moments after the stress moments, nothing could be finer than this brother-sister team from 1962-67 and their friendly, upbeat, jazzy-pop renditions of Broadway and Brill Building song standards. Also included: Stevens’ torch solo, “Teach Me Tiger”–recorded in ’59 and still too steamy for mainstream airplay, due both to the words (wherein Stevens pleads to her boy to initiate her into sexual knowledge, then turns around and offers to initiate him instead) and to the heavy-breathing growls between the lines.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Organs in Orbit (Capitol Ultra-Lounge) ***
WALTER WANDERLAY Rain Forest (Verve) ****
In the long hours before lunch (if you even take a scheduled lunch break at home), you need something light ‘n’ lively that’ll keep you at a steady pace. The friendly tones of the lustrous Hammond fit this task with a smile. Let your worries go, let your work-output flow.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners (Scamp/Caroline) ***
VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners,The ’60s (Scamp/Caroline) ***
A quick early-afternoon pick-me-up, these two are as close to Muzak’s old-time “stimulus progression” sound as you can get on commercially-available CDs. Old tracks from a British company that sold (and still sells) royalty-free stock music for use in any and all occasions (commercials, B movies, game shows, cartoons). Hear the full, original versions of songs you’ve heard in cut-up form on Ren & Stimpy, CBS Sports, Russ Meyer movies, Vaseline Intensive Care ads, and more.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Easy Tempo Vol. 6: A Cinematic Jazz Experience (Easy Tempo/Right Tempo import) ****
Back to the light-‘n’-lively, but with a more assertive tone for the afternoon when the outside world’s temptations must be drowned out for just a short while longer. Soundtracks from European commercial-entertainment movies of the ’70s are so darned cool because they had to be. The films they were made for needed such clever touches to keep up, even in their domestic markets, against Hollywood’s big-budget product. Any of Easy Tempo’s releases will envelope you in a dreamscape of fast Euro-cars, hot Euro-sex, and suave Euro-spies. This volume’s a particularly spectacular starting point. Here’s some of what I wrote on my computer’s CD-track database program: “`Gangster Song’ (torch vocal, tap dancing SFX). `Notte in Algeria’ (swingin’ brass). `Tap 5′ (sultry saxes, flute). `Semplicissimo’ (smoky male vocal, in Italian). `Quando La Coppia Scoppia’ (vibes, electric piano). `Sally’s Surf’ (way-far-out Farfisa organ). `Genova, Piazza de Ferrari’ (slinky vibes, guitar).” Purists might call these 18 tracks commercial affectations of ’50s-’60s U.S. jazz greats, but don’t you mind.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Samba Brasil (Verve) ****
“World music” that’s not curated by or for Volvo-drivin’ post-graduates. Easy-going and lively at the same time. Perfect for passing the early-P.M. hours in mindless data entry. Your hands and eyes are at the computer; your mind is in the Rio Sambadrome.
ED KALEHOFF Music from The Price Is Right (Available from The ’80s TV Theme SuperSite) **
You’ve probably heard these music cues several times (America’s last surviving network game show has been on since the Nixon administration), but never in their full-length, announcer-free form. They turn out to be bouncy, breezy, HI-NRG synth-and-horn anthems; perfect for that last-hour push toward completing the day’s tasks.
ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA F.A.B.: Music From the TV Shows by Barry Gray (Silva Screen import) ***
Workday’s done, tasks completed, deadlines met, documents e-mailed or FedExed away. Time to give yourself a thundering brass-band salute, with a blast of re-created themes from the Gerry Anderson “Supermarionation” puppet adventure shows. Thunderbirds Are Go!
Local Bands On Parade
GIRL TROUBLE Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (Wig Out) ****After 15 years years of high-test garage shows, and five years after the group’s last recording, Tacoma’s own masters of fun-time three-chord power finally have another record out, even if the members did have to release it themselves (with distribution help from Estrus). It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s smart-alecky, it’s smart, it’s their best ever. My fave part’s singer K.P. Kendall’s sax solo on “Strother Martin,” but it’s all great. Kendall’s vocal snarls blend perfectly with Kahuna’s guitar, Dale Phillips’ bass, and Bon Von Wheelie’s drums (yes, the only girl in Girl Trouble’s the stick-slammer). This disc firmly establishes Girl Trouble as the true successors to the T-Town hard-pop tradition of the Wailers and the Sonics. Get it. Now.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Designer Drug Volume Two (Estate) **
Estate entrepreneur Wallace Hargrave had been out of action for much of the four years since his first Designer Drug collection. The story why (the death of a bandmate and his own near-death) is very briefly touched upon in the liner notes. When combined with the online memoir of Hargrave’s ’80s punk-scene existence, it’s is one of the all-time hard-luck tales, as powerful as anything on his second compilation of his and his friends’ bands.
Like most indie-label promo compilations, it’s an uneven batch (that’s what programmable CD players are for). Among the several highlights: Primate Five’s almost dangerously aggressive garage stompin’; Pretty Mary Sunshine’s mix of ethereal vocals and art-damage guitar; Iron Beef’s sprightly power-pop ode to Sumo wrestling; and, completely out of place yet the best thing here, Michael Rook’s ultra-ultra-fast composition for a computer-controlled acoustic piano. There’s also some old-school metal, acoustic-metal, and metal-punk hybrid cuts (there used to be a word for that latter genre; darned if Ican’t remember what it was).
SLUGGER Back to Our Roots (Swizzle) **
That brief early-’90s subgenre, the three-girls-and-a-boy-drummer band, returns via this snappy suite of harsh yet cheery hard heartbreak tunes. If you like Goodness or remember the likes of Maxi Badd, you could get into Slugger.
XING Worldwide (Laundry Room) **
You could wait for your favorite ’80s new wave stars to show up on reunion tours at the Fenix or Ballard Firehouse. Or you could listen to the Portland combo Xing, which recaptures the expansive synthpop stylings of Gary Numan, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, Missing Persons, et al., without directly aping any one of them. A pleasant little trip back to yesterday’s sound of tomorrow.
17 REASONS WHY The Dark Years (Laundry Room) **
It says here 17 Reasons Why won Musician magazine’s 1998 “Best Unsigned Band Competition.” It’s easy to hear at least a few reasons why: Slickly written and produced singer-songwriter ballads with standard neo-soft-rock band arrangements backing Sattie Clark’s nice, unthreatening vocalizings. It’s nice, it’s laid back, it’s mellow. I hate laid back and mellow. I prefer something distinctive–even distinctive mediocrity–over the merely well-made.
LOSER s/t (self-released) **
Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow produces the first two tracks, which would make a dandy little cynical-pop 45. They don’t have the lyrical bite of Stringfellow’s own work, but they could otherwise pass for a Posies cover band. Then we get to the group’s own production work, which sounds more like Revolver-era Beatles. They do a fully competent job at it (at least as good as the Rutles did), but the Beatles’ own material is already widely available on CD. This three-man Tacoma combo oughta work some more on getting its own sound together.
WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)
KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.
THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.
Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.
Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.
WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:
Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)
WELCOME BACK TO THE ONE-&-ONLY ONLINE MISC., the pop-culture column that was as startled as you to find a full-color, almost full-page, atatomically-correct (more or less), side-view computer illustration of a male lower torso on the Lifestyles page of the 10/19 P-I. It was there, natch, for a long story encouraging prostate-cancer tests. But hey, if it takes the “educational” justification of a deadly disease to help demystify and de-demonize the Staff of Life, so be it.
STAGES: The Seattle Repertory Theatre now has a managing director named Benjamin Moore. So far, no scheduled productions of Paint Your Wagon.
AD OF THE WEEK (on the Stranger Bulletin Board page): “Lesbian Guitar Teacher.” Hmm, an instructor in the heretofore-underappreciated art of the Lesbian Guitar: I could go for the cheap anatomical-reference jokes every guitar student’s heard or said at one time, but instead will ponder “Lesbian Guitar” as a specific musical form. Could it be the ever-so-earnest acoustic fret-squeakin’ of Holly Near or Ferron? The somewhat more humanistic, yet still stolid, chord-thumpin’ of Phranc? The electrified “Torch and Twang” of early k.d. lang?
It’s the curse-in-disguise of all these women (and others of their various ilks) that they’re known first as statement-makers, second as stage presences, third as singers, and almost not at all as instrument-players. This neglect of the role of music in female-singer-songwriter-ing is at least partly responsible for the near-total lack of female instrumentalists on both Lilith Fair package tours. It dogged Bikini Kill throughout their career; it took that band’s co-leader Kathleen Hanna to start a whole new concept with a whole different instrumentation (Julie Ruin) for some critics to even notice that she’d been a darned-good musician all this time. (Lesbian-led bands that have gotten at least partial critical notice for their actual playing, such as Team Dresch, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Elsewhere in tune-land…
CLOSING TIME?: An NY Times story (10/15) discussed the precipitous decline of commercial rock as a music-biz force, noting sales charts now dominated by rap and rap/R&B hybrid acts. One quoted industry expert said “the Seattle bands” had been rock’s last best hope, but Nirvana ended and Pearl Jam got lost in its politics and the whole Rock Reformation got sidetracked. I’d put the blame on the suckiness of chain-run rock radio and MTV, which have bled the patient (themselves) to near-death with their repitition, selection of awful bland-rock acts, and stupidity. Of course, the suckiness of corporate rock radio (and of corporate rock promotion in general) is one of the things the Seattle bands had been trying to rebel against. Speaking of getting lost in politics…
BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK (seen in Belltown): “Chris Cornell for Mayor.” Actually, why not? If business success is the only prerequesite for a political career, Cornell sure counts. He and his Soundgarden bandmates started an enterprise from scratch, which grew steadily into a multimillion-buck operation that helped put Seattle on the music-biz map. (He’s even begun to assert a political worldview, having participated in that joint petition to Al Gore on behalf of old-growth forest preservation.)
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Steve Mandich’s Heinous #5 (the first issue in three years) is a professionally-written, DIY-printed mini-size zine, bound with strings of old audio-cassette tape. Topics include the Seattle Pilots (our ill-fated first MLB team), ’70s self-made celebrity The Human Fly, women’s motorcycle-jumping champ Debbie Lawler, rock records about Evel Knievel, and a Bob Newhart career retrospective for a change-O-pace. ($2 from P.O. Box 12065, Seattle 98102, or by email request to smandich@teleport.com.)
EX-LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Not only is commercial film production in Washington at an even lower ebb this year than last, but even MovieMaker, the slick magazine about indie filmmaking, suddenly moved from Seattle to L.A. over the summer. Does that mean no remaining hope for true indie (i.e., totally non-L.A.) filmmaking?
SCREEN PATTERNS: Actually, the reasons for the repertory program’s move to the Egyptian have little to do with the filmgoing tastes of college students and more with Landmark (née Seven Gables) Theaters’ schemes. 7G started repertory movies in Seattle at the Moore, which was where the Seattle International Film Festival also had started. Then Landmark came to town and bought the Neptune in the U District, driving 7G out of the repertory side of the biz until Landmark bought 7G. From there, Landmark decided to use the Neptune for hi-profile new releases, shunting the rep films to the smaller Varsity. Now it’s repositioning the Egyptian as the “Year Round Film Festival” theater.
(Still no word, by the way, about Landmark’s corporate fate. Last we heard, its current owner, financier John Kluge (who made a fortune selling five TV stations to Rupert Murdoch and promptly lost much of that fortune in Orion Pictures) had put the chain up for sale.) Meanwhile, Seattle’s other ex-locally-owned theater chain, the onetime Sterling Recreation Organization circuit now part of Cineplex Odeon, quietly had a change of management in recent months. CO’s now jointly owned by Sony and Seagram (whose respective studio units, Columbia and Universal, were the only major Golden Age Hollywood studios that hadn’t been connected to theater chains back in the ’40s).
MATERIAL BOY: Last week, I asked for your suggestions on new career moves I, your long-underemployed author, could take. A few of you didn’t quite get the “career” part of it (such as those who thought I should start a cable-access show or other unpaid stuff). Other responses generally fell into a few main categories, among them the following:
TO CLOSE, some words-O-wisdom from the recently-deceased former TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Amory: “`Action-packed’ means the boys can’t act but the girls are stacked.”
(Our next reader quiz: What does Seattle need? The full essay and invite will appear in next week’s column, but you can send in your ideas now to clark@speakeasy.org.)
