WHEN `REAL’ ISN’T: I’d long ago defined porn as fantasies for purposes of masturbation, and early-’90s cyberporn as fantasies about masturbation. Sex robots, “dildonics,” virtual reality glasses, dream machines, holograms–whatever you call the schticks in cyberporn fiction, they’re still mere get-off gadgets, means to avoid the sacred confusion that is interpersonal contact.

So it’s not surprising to hear all the hype surrounding a California (natch) company called Real Doll, promising a partial fulfillment of one common cyberporn schtick. For $5,000 or so they’ll custom-build a full-size plastic version of your dream woman (they say they’re thinking of adding a male-doll line later). They promise the look and feel of real flesh, hair, and bone-muscle structure, in a variety of heights, bust sizes, and skin and hair colors. The pictures I’ve seen of the products look like the more grotesquely hyperreal creations of some NYC hotshot shock artist in the Jeff Koons tradition. The more “realistic” these things get, the less they rely on the imagination and the more aware you are that you’re staring not at a fellow biological creature but at a hunk of lifeless petrochemicals. Cyber-freaks might be turned on by that, but I’d just find it icky.

MORE IMAGINATIVE PLAY equipment might be found at Seattle Surgical Repair, 10726 Aurora N. The location (right next to the cemetery) might not be the most tasteful site for a dealer in used medical equipment, but the tiny building’s crammed full of goodies. Examination tables! Speculums! Knee-reflex hammers! Stethoscopes! Gurneys! (Old car and motorcycle parts, too.) Just play safe when you’re playing doctor, and don’t perform any actual procedures that should be left to qualified personnel.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Li’l Hassan’s Bleeding Head is Marcus Surrealius’s eight-page take on the sort of gentle new-agey satire pioneered by the likes of, say, the Church of the SubGenius. Issue #3 includes a cover tribute of sorts to Nico and Yoko Ono, a scrambled analysis of Huckleberry Finn, and an “Ebonic Hail Mary” that reads just like the fake-Black-dialect Bible passages I was once forced to listen to in my old liberal-Methodist youth group. Even better are the little slogans here and there (“Neachy is pietzsche”). Free at the usual dropoff spots, or online at www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/4475…. Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan’s quarterly True Northwest is my kinda regional-history zine. Why, right on page 2 there’s a reprinted old ad for the late, lamented Pay ‘n Save stores! Further inside are a big retrospective of Elvis’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, an interview with Seattle Pilots/ Portland TrailBlazers announcer Bill Schonely, and references to the Elephant Car Wash, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, TV’s Here Come the Brides, Spokane’s Bing Crosby memorabilia collection, Jimi Hendrix’s days playing guitar with Tommy Chong in Vancouver (the closest to Seattle Hendrix lived in his whole adult life), and much much more. $3.50 from P.O. Box 22, Olympia 98507; or online at www.olywa.net/truenw/.

CROSS-CUTTING: The editors of True Northwest previously wrote Seattle on Film, a fun little book chronicling locally-shot movies from the years before the sight of a car on screen with Washington plates automatically meant “filmed in Vancouver.” Is it fair for our neighbors to the north to have The X-Files and Millennium while we’re stuck with a certain cheeky cable show amply discussed in recent Strangers? Since this is the start of baseball season, a trade metaphor springs to mind. We should try to acquire at least one B.C.-filmed show in exchange for the aforementioned cable production. Since that wouldn’t quite be an equal exchange, we’ll have to throw more in the pot. Maybe some tanker trucks of cheap U.S. gasoline, a couple of 10-year-old rock bands, and a cartoonist to be named later. If we can’t get a spooky sci-fi series, maybe we could at least deal for other Canuck assets like decent health insurance or adequate arts funding.

PASSAGE (pianist-author Charles Rosen in the March Harper’s): “A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.”

A Star and His Bucks

Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey

8/21/97

Pour Your Heart Into It

by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Hyperion, $24.95

There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.

Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.

A comparison is due at this point: Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.

Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.

On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).

Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.

Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.

Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”

BRIEFS

Thrift Score

Al Hoff

HarperCollins

Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.

Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.

Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.

Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest

Lorna Price, ed.

University of Washington Press

The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?

These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.

EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.

The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.

If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.

HERE AT MISC. we’ve figured out the easy way to figure out whom to vote for next month: Vote for all the candidates who appear on TV ads in color, and against all the guys who appear in black-and-white.

BELO CO. TO BUY KING, SELL KIRO: This leaves a wonderful opportunity. Let’s buy KIRO-TV. We (myself and you dear readers) will form a private-stock corporation, get some venture capital, and take over Channel 7. First, we’ll bring back J.P. Patches. Then we’ll show America how a station oughta be run. Imagine: A local performance-art variety show, with the Black Cat Orchestra and Pat Graney Dancers. Consumer-watch segments attacking the real corporate crooks, not nickel-and-dime mail-order frauds. The Sanjyit Ray Movie of the Week. Art lessons with Ed Fotheringham. Live curling matches. Late-night rerun marathons of Thunderbirds (the original versions, not the cut-up Fox manglings from two years ago).

FIRST XMAS CAROL spotted on a Seattle restaurant background music system: Sept. 23.

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Sailors Union of the Pacific Hall, home of such nice all-ages shows last year, is now about to house the reincarnation of El Gaucho, formerly one of Seattle’s best-loved steak and bourbon outlets. Its old downtown manifestation, now the Olive Way branch of the Red Balloon Co., was famous as the watering hole of old KVI DJs Bob Hardwick (the official Ninth-Coolest Seattleite Ever) and Jack Morton.

DILLARD’S DULLARDS: During a post-speech Q&A at a Michigan writers’ conference some six months ago, Connecticut essayist/ poet Annie Dillard was asked if she missed living in the Northwest (she was holed up in Bellingham and the San Juans in the late ’70s). She said no, claiming “it’s no place for an intellectual woman” and offering a brusque retort imaging NW females as breast-feeding, fruit-canning, chainsaw-wielding mutes. Dillard’s remark eventually caught the attention of editors at the Seattle Times, who don’t have a particular interest in intellectualism but do have a lot invested in the image of Seattleites as at least a pseudo-sophisticated sort. A Scene section front page was assembled around Dillard’s brief quotation, headlined “Women intellectuals: A Northwest oxymoron?.” To fill the rest of the space, the paper added interview quotes from local citizens and defensive editorial commentary (“OK, Northwest women, dab that drool off your chin, put down your chainsaw and listen up”), treating readers as if they were as dumb as Dillard claimed they were. The Times, which would rather cultivate readers who can grapple with complex wines than ones who can grapple with complex ideas, treated Dillard’s throwaway remark as a call to defend, not the Northwest Mind, but the Northwest Lifestyle. The notion that there could be some bright earth mamas out there, or some well-dressed urbane ditzes, hasn’t seemed to occur to the paper.

Incidentally, here’s a perhaps-fortuitous slice of Dillard’s only novel to date, The Living (set in 1890s B’ham): “…But the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary… No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.” (Italics added.) (The Times’ review called The Living “a novel of character that blends history, social change, and individual dreams in a sophisticated, seamless prose.”)

BASES OF OPINION: So “Refuse to Lose II” ended with a whimper (and a wild pitch), not with a Grand Salami. That’s OK. Last year was the grand Drive for Repsect, when the Ms (and, by extension, the region) proved it had contender stuff. This Randy Johnson-less year was more for fun, for accomplishment for its own exhilarating sake, and for the fans to prove to the taxpayers there really was long-term support behind the team (and, by extension, the new stadium scheme).

‘TIL NEXT WE GRAPPLE with the limitations of the written word, recall these words from the legendary Hedy Lamarr: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Misc. began on June 6, 1986 as a column in ArtsFocus, the Lincoln Arts Center’s monthly tabloid. When that paper faded in 1989, Misc. became a newsletter with as many as 1,000 free copies and 100 paid subscribers. It joined The Stranger at the paper’s ninth issue in November 1991. Last year I stopped the newsletter and started the Misc. World HQ website, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.

Over these 10 years I’ve discussed many things, loosely tied to the concept of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond.” I’ve shared a few laffs and a few tears. But I’ve had one overriding subject–the city with which I have an ongoing lover’s quarrel. Seattle’s always had more than its share of vibrant, creative people. But they’ve long struggled against a social order opposed to anything too unclean, unrich, or unquiet.

The Commons people never understood why so many have grown tired of a city government exclusively By The Upscale, Of The Upscale, and For The Upscale. The “Parks Are For Everybody” slogan was clearly a desperation move by campaigners uncomfortable with the existence of non-yuppies and the need to appeal to such proles.

In much of the US, politics is controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “conservatives.” In Seattle, it’s controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “liberals.” Other politicians pay lip service to abortion foes and censors; ours pay lip service to gay-rights advocates and environmentalists. Both sets of politicians do these to buy votes while holding to their real cause, the worship of Sacred Business.

But I also believe politics is a subset of culture. Seattle’s politics tie directly into a culture that merely pretends to value “diversity.” A culture so thoroughly whitebread, it remembers the Sixties only as a playtime for college boys. A culture descended from Anglo Protestant “progressives” in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who’d championed an elitism of educated, understated “taste” to help keep working-class German Catholics out of power.

When Misc. started, Seattle’s arts had been for seemingly ever (at least since 1973) under the thumb of an extremely conservative “liberalism” I’ve since called Mandatory Mellowness. You know, the standard of “good taste” that wouldn’t merely discourage but forbid any art more challenging than Chihuly, any music more contemporary than Kenny G, any theater more immediate than doo-wop versions of Shakespeare, any literature more urbane than whale poems, any apparel more daring than “Casual Friday” suits, or any lifestyle more “decadent” than drinking whole milk instead of 2-percent.

While this aggressively bland anti-aesthetic still rules the city’s official culture, something else arose from the underground. Punk rock remained a relevant stance in Seattle throughout the ’80s precisely because it was the best available means of rebellion against the hypocrisy of mellowness. What the media called “grunge” was and is an aesthetic of darkness, but also one of honest discourse, passionate expression, and real pleasures. It values thrift and ingenuity, not the dictates of fashion. It sees Seattle as a city for Tugboat Annie, not for Niles Crane. It loves the south Lake Union neighborhood as it is. It would rather be “unhappy” yet truly alive than succumb to the Stepford-Wifedom of “The Northwest Lifestyle.” What the media call “cocktail nation” is the expression of these values through other means, to relive the best of pre-hippie pop culture and even to make jazz a populist genre again. Indeed, the staccato, disjointed Misc. format has always been a (perhaps feeble) effort to preserve the jazz-age three-dot column of Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I era Emmett Watson–perhaps America’s greatest literary invention.

If I’ve played any tiny part in popularizing these values, the values that made Seattle and real progressivism great, then I’ve succeeded at my goal–the Highlights for Children slogan, “Fun With a Purpose.”

(Thanx and a hat tip to those who attended the Misc. 10th anniversary party and to those who helped make it plausible; including Glen Allen, the band Big Sister, BSK(T) Screenprinting, Cellophane Square, Staci Dinehart, Rebecca Frey, Joseph Givens, Laughingas Productions, Verlayne McClure, Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, Moe, Mountain Sound, the New Store, Occupied Seattle, Charlotte Quinn, Frank Randall, Jeannine Uhrich, Joseph Weaver, and a host of others.)

As promised, here’s the second half of the official Misc. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List. If your question wasn’t used, you didn’t ask it frequently enough.

11. Howcum in your FAQ the questions are in italics, but in Savage Love it’s the answers that are in italics?

Dan looks better in italics than I do.

12. Why didn’t you write about that party/play/movie I saw you at?

(a) I tend not to review private events or discuss my personal life. (b, c) Either somebody else got to review it, or there wasn’t space for it that week, or it stank too bad to be worth mentioning.

13. Why didn’t you write about ___?

I probably didn’t hear about it ’til just now.

14. But you don’t really like ____ (football/beef/regular supermarkets/cold cereal/TV/ heterosexuality), do you? Don’t you have to be a redneck fascist to like that?

(a) Yes. (b) No.

15a. Isn’t the Seattle scene “over”?

If you mean a hegemonous gaggle of bands all playing the exact same “sound,” that never existed. If you mean people gathering to explore art and make statements, that’s just getting started. What made Seattle bands wasn’t a sound, but a non-Hollywood (sometimes even anti-Hollywood) attitude toward cultural production and consumption.

15b. I hate Seattle bands because I hate ____ (long hair, flannel, backward baseball caps, distortion pedals, heroin, teen angst). How can you possibly like them?

The media “grunge” stereotype became so precise that no local band came close to completely fitting it. The only thing all Seattle bands have in common is that they all now boast that they’re “Notgrunge.”

16a. How much do you really like the Northwest?

Mostly I think of my region like the big sister I never had, the kind of gal all the guys in school are in love with. I adore her dearly but I still feel the need to shout out, “She’s not the goddess already! She used to throw spitwads at me!”

16b. You must have loved growing up out in the country. You want to move back there, right?

Absolutely not. I was bored to tears as a kid; the place has a few more things to do now, but it’s also turned into big ugly houses as far as the eye can see. The “Back to Eden” fantasy is one of the chief things wrong with America. “Moving to the country” is simply the intellectually-acceptable version of suburban sprawl.

17. Why do college professors still obsess about Madonna, years after everyone else has stopped?

Shh. Let’s not tell them there’s been other music in the past 10 years, or that these days “a woman in charge of her music” means one who can write songs and/or play an instrument.

18. Now that the dream of economic empowerment thru entrepreneurism is available to more and more Americans, aren’t liberals obsolete?

Absolutely not. A forest that’s been clearcut by 20 small companies is just as dead as one that’s been clearcut by one big company; small business can shaft employees and customers just like big ones–heck, those old slave plantations would now be classified as “family farms.” The basic tenet of liberalism, as I see it, is that the business of America isn’t just business. We need to care for our people and our land, not just our bottom lines. Indeed, in an evolving economy we have to pay extra attention to non-material values.

Still, a decentralized, small-biz economy is the best hope for urban neighborhoods (make your own opportunities, don’t depend on big employers or big government), minority rights, free speech, and renewed creativity (though boho types will need another philosophical basis when there’s no more “Mainstream” to rebel against). However, change can work for people or against them. We’ve seen change done wrong in the ex-Socialist countries, as pensioners and working families get the shaft to make their countries more inviting to global financiers. Can we do better? Only if we treat this transitional time with truly moral concern, not with the piousfaux-morality of the right.

19. What were Yogi and Boo-Boo doing in the same bed all winter?

You’ll have to ask Dan that one.

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

Welcome back to Misc., your friendly roadside diner along the Info Hi-Way, the kind with the big neon sign facing the road that just says EAT. This edition is dedicated to Jim Althoff, one of the last local talk-radio hosts to dare to be smart instead of sleazy. He and wife Andee Beck (formerly the region’s smartest TV critic) are off to do a show in Milwaukee. We’ll miss ’em. (More on Althoff’s ex-station later.)

DEPT. OF CLARIFICATION: I don’t normally write about my personal life, but half the stuff written about me in the 5/11 Weekly isn’t true. If you need to know which half, send a SASE.

UPDATES: The pirate radio station Free Radio Seattle has had equipment problems and isn’t on the air yet, but now plans a 90-minute inaugural broadcast for midnight June 4, somewhere near 88 FM…. The people who left Month magazine and tried to start a copycat free mag called Monthly have subtly changed their name to Northwest Monthly to avoid confusion with what a Monthly editorial called “a junior high rag.” They’re also putting out Bean: An Idea Cafe, a literary/poetry zine with reviews of only old-hippie-acceptable music (folk, jazz, blues). (One corec: Month and Monthly‘s common ancestor, Face II Face, was originally sold for $2 a copy; it later became a freebie.)

REMINDER TO THE MEDIA: When Bob Hardwick, Seattle’s leading middle-of-the-road radio personality for 30 years, tragically shot himself a year or two back, you didn’t see any dorky commentators claiming the suicide proved that all middle-aged Sinatra fans were pathetic losers.

FADE AWAY NOT: In the first weeks after the Cobain tragedy, I heard several locals privately refer to it as the closing chapter in the “Seattle scene” mania. Does it really mean “the party’s over” locally? Ever since Mudhoney first appeared on the cover of Melody Maker almost six years ago, some people here have expected (and even hoped) that the bigtime music-biz would quickly tire of Seattle and everyone could go back to playing just for one another. It hasn’t happened yet, despite the concerted efforts of the media to shoehorn all Seattle bands into one stereotyped fad, and then to declare that fad over. Face it: The corporate entertainment establishment’s scared of people outside NY/LA making their own culture, refusing to be good passive consumers.

Seattle rock isn’t one singular sound, but it does represent an attitude of DIY production and distribution, of creating things you really like that communicate directly with audiences because they really like it. Just how well this formula worked was proved by the immensity with which Cobain’s death shocked and saddened people. The tragic loss of a singular artist and the end of Seattle’s premier band threw everybody for a big harsh wallop and made everything seem a whole hell of a lot less fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that the NW has two dozen other major-label bands at last count. There are as many as 50 other world-class indie acts in Washington and Oregon, playing a wide variety of sounds, plus hundreds of fascinating/fun/dull/bombastic club acts.

I’ve found that California people used to like Seattle when it was thought of as little more than a good market for Calif.-made culture product (LA films and fashions, SF rock bands and authors), a friendly rival to the LA aerospace-defense industry, and a middle-aged-hippie retirement home with good pot and lotsa magic ‘shrooms ripe for the pickin’. But somewhere along the line, us Nordic hicks started getting uppity; some of us thought we could create some of our own culture for a change. Maybe it was these Seattle rock bands and theater troupes that got the southwesterners to notice our new attitude; maybe it was when the pivot point of the PC biz moved from Palo Alto to Redmond.

In any event, I’ve seen a lot of attempts by Calif. writers and commentators to put us northern yahoos back in our place. The corporate culture industry of LA and the bohemian culture industry of SF both have a vested stake in preventing the movement of DIY empowerment that Seattle represents. All the rock-journalism hype about “Looking for the Next Seattle” was based on trying to promote the image that Seattle had just been a place where a few good bands were ready to be absorbed into the media machine, and that any other town might have similarly-exploitable talent. They’re not willing to admit out loud that Seattle and the other local scenes represent a threat to corporate rock’s very existence, that we want to replace the media machine with what that NY-centrist Patti Smith called “the age when everybody creates.”

PHILM PHACTS: Movies based on TV series have one basic flaw: A TV series isn’t a story. It’s a concept, a set of characters, running shticks and situations; more like a role-playing game manual than a story. A movie script is a sequence of events with a set beginning and end. Once a TV-based movie has established the characters and running gags or dramatic elements of the series, it finds itself with nothing to do and an hour of screen time to fill. The Fugitive avoided this problem by stringing together the initial premise and conclusion of the original series with some Steadicam chase scenes, avoiding the plot elements that made up most of the series episodes. Maverick, The Flintstones, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Beverly Hillbillies, et al. haven’t solved this.

THEIR MONEY: Let’s set the story straight about that ubiquitous right-wing bogeyperson, the infamous “added costs” that prevent businesses from pricing products and services at the cheapest price. Anything beyond the cheapest possible cost of making and shipping a product is “added cost.” Yes, that includes the standard old talk-radio nemeses of taxes and environmental regulations, plus the new talk-radio nemeses of employee health insurance; but it also included mob payoffs, excessive executive salaries and perks, advertising, lawyers, bank fees, lobbying, donations to the symphony, losses on bad real-estate investments, etc. Any Gucci-clad executive who whines that health care for his workers would be an excessive “added cost” oughta be willing to give up half his salary. If the conservatives had their way, we’d all be dying of TB caused by unsafe living conditions so the privileged could have even more privileges.

HARD BARGAINS: The Nordstrom family apparently learned a lot from its former ownership of the Seahawks about wringing forth public subsidies for private business. Nordstrom now allegedly won’t move its downtown store into the old Frederick’s building unless the city gives it big tax breaks, the state builds a bigger convention center, and the feds change rules to encourage cruise ships to dock here. (Store officials don’t call this a list of absolute “demands,” just suggested steps to improve the “business climate.”) If all this doesn’t happen, according to a meeting between corporate and government officials leaked to the P-I, the Nordies hint at threatening to diminish their current downtown store and to move their corporate offices to Oregon or California. Not quite the image of selfless customer service, eh? Speaking of businesses that demand your support…

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE DEPT.: I’ve already harped about the self-serving hypocrisy of vegetarians who smoke, but this is a life-n’-death issue so I’ll continue with another argument: If you’re such a rebel bohemian, why do you give up your money and your body to the tobacco industry, one of the most reactionary and anti-humanistic forces on the planet today? And don’t think you’re avoiding the campaign coffers of Jesse Helms if you buy that brand that’s falsely billed as Native American-made (it really isn’t; it only advertises to be “true to the Native American tradition,” whatever that means). That’s just a smaller company within the same huge legal drug cartel that’s gotten federal subsidies to keep making products that kill when properly used. Now the US cig industry’s responding to declining domestic sales by seeking new people overseas to enslave, like women in China. Speaking of legal drugs…

THE FINE PRINT: The Rainier Ice bottle prominently displays the product’s bountiful alcohol content twice, but you have to look to find out that you only get 10 oz. of the stuff, instead of the standard 12. Speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

THE EDGE OF WETNESS: In a desperate attempt to rebuild its still scandal-damaged US market, Perrier‘s launching four designer bottles with pseudo-art-deco designs by what its PR calls four “artists of the future” — really professional ad artists. This attempt to start a collectible craze ruins what had been the finest bottle design in its market segment, and doesn’t disguise the fact that what’s inside is still filtered H2O plus CO2, just like the cheaper domestic stuff. Still speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN RECYCLABLE ALUMINUM: The Coca-Cola Co. has made the most brazen attempt yet at reaching the young PoMo sensibility. OK (billed as “A Carbonated ‘Beverage’ “) is an orange-lemon-lime-cola melange with caffeine and a dark-pinkish color, test-marketed here and in eight other towns. It tastes and looks like that stuff you made as a kid by squirting a little from every 7-11 Big Gulp nozzle into the same cup. It’s got a set of package designs by ex-Seattle cartoon legend Charles Burns and another with the monochrome ennui of Eightball cartoonist Dan Clowes, who got $7,000 for the rights to existing panels of his art. According to Time, the brand is the product of two years of research into youthful attitudes, including data from MIT’s “Global Teenager” project, and is meant to sell to skeptical kids here and worldwide (one possible reason for the non-sequitur texts on the packages, which read like Japanese English ad copy.) The whole marketing campaign’s the work of Weiden & Kennedy, the infamous Portland ad agency that gave us Nike, Black Star beer, and the Subaru commercial with the line “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car.” Speaking of Rose City media products…

PUTTING THE X IN PDX: Several parties have tried to create a heterosex mag for the now generation. But Bikini is too steeped in snowboarding graphics, and Future Sex is too slopped in the anti-human dispassion of cybersex (masturbating with robots being the fantasy of male computer nerds who grew up with too few girls and too many issues of Heavy Metal; if traditional porn is fantasizing for purposes of masturbation, cybersex is fantasizing about masturbation).

It took a low-budget effort from Portland, the double-entendre-titled X Magazine, to come at least close to doing it right. It’s nicely printed on non-slick paper, with type you can actually read. The 42 photos (most in that “arty” black and white) include visual and verbal depictions of young women and men who like one another and themselves–the “alternative” press’s only current sexual taboo, the taboo against inter-gender friendship. The most erotic pic, for me, is on the contents page, with a friendly female face glancing playfully-knowingly toward the staff list. There’s also a spread of a passionate couple stripping out of grunge fashions (you don’t see whether the guy’s hair is his longest feature), some not-too-dumb poetry, an actually-funny spoof of the Tonya Harding media feeding frenzy, and a nice profile of Miss Red Flowers, Portland co-ed rock band that (like Seattle’s Sick and Wrong) has sometimes gone naked on stage. The only downsides: a dumb woman-in-bondage photo (illustrating a man-in-bondage fiction piece) and a puff piece on this moment’s worst corporate “alternative” band, Paw. Available at Bulldog News and Fantasy (Un)ltd. Speaking of sexy printed matter…

NEW MONEY: The feds are talking about redesigning our paper currency, starting with the smugglers’-favorite $100 bill. About time. We’ve got some of the least inviting-looking money in the world. Why should the Canadian buck be worth less but look so much more colorful? Hey, let’s have commemorative bills, just like stamps — money with a thin and fat Elvis, a thin and fat Jim Morrison, or a fat and thin Oprah.

DEAD AIR REVISITED: Irv Pollack is the kind of feisty senior citizen you might hear calling talk radio, unafraid to call the host on a grievously wrong point. When KING-AM was put up for sale, Pollack wanted to buy it, to make it America’s first for-profit community station. He had no experience in broadcast management (tho’ he was a former KCMU news volunteer) and no capital to invest, but he hoped the Bullitt sisters, who were selling the station to endow their environmental foundation, would give him the time to assemble a deal by raising funds from the likes of Robert Redford, Ben & Jerry’s, the Working Assets long-distance service, and author Paul Hawken. But neither time nor money were on the side of Pollack’s quixotic quest. Within weeks, KIRO agreed to pay $2.5 million for the station, which has lost money as long as anyone can remember. This kind of artificial price is only possible because the Feds now let big station groups to own up to four stations in a town. This policy reduces competition, stifles a diversity of voices, and helps nobody but the owners. Speaking of lost opportunities…

SPACES IN THE HEART: Tugs Belmont is now a non-gay bar called Beatnix, with a pool table and jazz and spoken-word shows. Thus ends a tradition that goes back to the original Tugs Belltown (1979-89), a less exclusively-gay disco than Tugs Belmont was. It was also, on weeknights, the first above-ground punk/new wave dance club in town. When Tugs #1 was evicted by its landlord for redevelopment, the Tugs people took over the space that had been Squid Row (1986-90), a gloriously stinky and dank live-music club that hosted a variety of sounds but was best known as one of the chief sites where a few people developed the beer-sodden growls that the outside world still mistakenly thinks all Seattle bands sound like. Both Tugs incarnations had their troubles with a Liquor Board that couldn’t appreciate gay erotic images or queer-positive performance art. Tugs #2 was slapped with a week’s suspension due to a recent underwear party. The owner, who according to inside reports was getting tired of keeping the joint afloat, decided to close it instead….

Also now closed is Belltown’s last lowbrow watering hole: the notorious tavern on 2nd, north of the Crocodile, that hadn’t had an outside sign for several years but was officially known as Hawaii West (I know we’re east of Hawaii; the name referred to a previous Hawaii Tavern in another part of town). As the last place of its type in the area to not get upscaled (besides the Rendezvous), it was a refuge of barflies who’d been 86’d or made unwelcome everywhere else….

And while nobody was looking (or rather, because nobody was showing), the Vogue quietly dropped its last live-music nights in favor of an all-DJ format. Now, nobody’s new band will be able to play the little stage where Nirvana made one of its first Seattle shows, that had hosted Seattle’s best & brightest since 1980 (as WREX). It now seems like a lifetime ago, but before 1990 the Vogue’s Tues. and Wed. night shows were some of the most important showcases a local band could get, back when the only other places to play were the Central and the Ditto (which were only open weekends) and the Rainbow (which had “new music nights” early in the week). Speaking of musical memories…

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 1: During most of my adult life, “Classic Rock” meant 1956-71 hits only. Then came the ’70s Preservation Society, Rhino Records’ Have A Nice Day CD compilations, the movie Dazed and Confused, ’70s dance parties in some cities, revival bands like the Gin Blossoms, and (most importantly, biz-wise) the aging of ’70s teens into the advertiser-preferred demographic brackets. ’70s-nostalgia radio formats have hit the airwaves in over 20 cities. Barry Ackerly’s turned the old K-Lite into KJR-FM, playing some of the hits heard on KJR-AM during that station’s Emporer Smith/Norm Gergory silver age (which followed its Lan Roberts/Pat O’Day golden age). The emphasis is on whitebread corporate-rockers (Eagles, Springsteen, Jackson Browne), not on the era’s wacky AM hits (as chronicled in Barry Scott‘s new book We Had Joy, We Had Fun), certainly not on late-decade punk, and not even on the decade’s great R&B-pop (much of it recorded by ex-Philly soul producer Thom Bell at what’s now Heart’s Bad Animals studio, then owned by KJR’s parent company). For that you’ll have to catch this season’s two ’70s-soul nostalgia movies or catch Spike Lee’s current Nike ads. The ’70s-nostalgia format just regurgitates the stupidity that the early punks rebelled against. What’s scarier is that it means corporate ’80s nostalgia will eventually appear. I can guess how horrid that’s gonna be: They’ll claim we all really were in love with Reagan and Rambo, just like corporate ’60s nostalgia claims that everybody alive back then was a white liberal-arts student.

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 2: A quarter-century ago, self-styled “visionaries” among the downtown business elite proposed radical solutions to two “blighted” areas of Seattle. They wanted to turn Pioneer Square into one big parking area, and to replace either all or most of the Pike Place Market with offices and condo towers. The pro-development forces (which included the local dailies and the mayor’s office) dismissed the people who lived or worked in those districts as bums, marginal types and hippie-dippies who were impeding the way of sacred Progress. Fortunately, the hippie-dippies et al. prevailed. Watch for similar arguments to be made against Commons opponents.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (meticulously painted on the facade of Sam’s Super Burger, 26th & Union): “No trespassing. No loitering. I don’t come to your place and sell my burgers, so don’t you come to my place and sell your drugs.”

COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES, RIP: Jack Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor turned hard-headed entrepreneur, who took over a calculator company in the mid-’70s and brought out one of the very first PCs, the Commodore PET. Clever low-cost engineering and lowball pricing helped make the PET’s successors, the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the first computers of many an early-’80s hacker-dude. In ’85, as the industry was consolidating (and just before Tramiel was ousted from his own company), the firm brought out the Amiga, a mid-level home machine with a proprietary operating system and one unique component — standard NTSC video input/output. The Amiga failed as a home machine but found a niche market among audio and video mavens, especially after the NewTek company brought out the Video Toaster add-on circuit board in 1990, which enabled budding TV-hackers to perform pro-level video editing and effects for less than the price of a big-screen monitor. The Amiga finally had a “killer app,” a third-party application that drove hardware sales. But it wasn’t enough, and now Commodore is being liquidated. No word yet what’ll happen to the Amiga or its loyal users.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Don’t be mistaken, newcomers: Eggheads are not larger versions of Cadbury Creme Eggs. They’re really miniaturized Mountain Bars (have a Northwest native tell you what those are). Just remember for now, “Brown & Haley Makes ‘Em Daily!”… Orville Reddenbacher’s microwave popcorn now comes in “Artificial Movie Theater Butter Flavor.” Actually, it tastes better than the popcorn you get in artificial movie theaters…. Ginseng-flavored chewing gum, a staple of Asian groceries, has been hyped in the new-age press as an alleged aphrodisiac. Something called Gum Tech International has responded with Love Gum (for “the woman with a healthy attitude” and “the man who wants peak performance”), Chiclets-like nuggets with just a touch of ginseng powder. The primary flavor? What else: cherry…. And be sure to attend our junk food film festival and Misc. 8th Anniversary party, 8pm Wednesday 6/8 at the Pike St. Cinema (all ages this time), 1108 Pike St. at Boren Ave., just east of the freeway.

WHERE THEY BE NOW: I finally tracked down ex-local performing artist Tomata du Plenty in Miami, where he makes paintings at a studio in Little Haiti and tends bar in the Design District. He looked back fondly at his wild days in Ze Whiz Kidz (Seattle’s first gay theater troupe, and font of the homespun-camp-cabaret influence in local theater to this day) and the Tupperwares/Screamers (one of Seattle’s first punk bands). He was saddened to hear that fellow ex-Screamer Dave Gulbransen (aka Rio de Janeiro) had closed his family’s business, the Dog House.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be the first on your block to get FutureTech’s new disposable 3-D still camera, root for the Vancouver Canucksin the NHL hockey finals, and heed these words from Calvin Trillin‘s classic tome Alice, Let’s Eat: “Never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still.”

PASSAGE

Some more words-O-wit from that “self published aphorist” (zine publisher) of ’20s Vienna, Karl Kraus: “I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which other people don’t hear either.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Celebrate the 8th anniversary of this little literary serial and the launch of my next endeavor (see next item) with the MISC@8 party and Junk Food Film Fest, Wednesday, 6/8, 8 pm, at the cozy Pike St. Cinema (1108 Pike & Boren, just east of I-5 and the Convention Center).

My book on the history of the Seattle punk scene, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, will be published early next year by Feral House, the Portland cult-faves who brought you the anthology Apocalypse Culture and the Ed. Wood Jr. bio Nightmare of Ecstasy. I’m selling off my remaining stock of photocopy rough drafts. Get yours now, or wait for the real book.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”

From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.

In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).

The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)

Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.

SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.

SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….

The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.

THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”

AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….

Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.

ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.

IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.

WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….

I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).

PASSAGE

Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”

REPORT

Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,

not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.

12/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns

and one newsletter-only essay)

THERE’S HUSKY COFFEE NOW!

JUST DON’T SERVE IT ICED.

IT DOESN’T HOLD UP UNDER COLD CONDITIONS

At Misc., we have only one response to the reported infestation of coyotes in Discovery Park: Where’s Acme when you need it?

CLARIFICATION: For those of you not up on your pop-cultural literacy, the “Woody” referred to last month wasn’t Mr. Allen but Mr. Woodpecker.

ELECTION AFTERMATH: The electorate issued a big dose of reality. A positive reality, as in waking up dazed yet refreshed, to find Patrick Duffy telling you that the past 12 years were just a bad dream. For too long, our government and its business backers lived in a fantasy, in which the declaration of one’s innate “morality” excused all immoral actions, in which the stagnating defense of old socioeconomic privilege could be sold as a “growth policy.” The denizens of this delusory Pleasure Island, long since having turned into asses, expected that with enough money (ours) and lies (theirs), they could maintain the fantasy forever. But the lies ran out quicker than the money. The sleaze machine will finally be out of the Executive Branch. No more gag rules, no more Council on Competitiveness, no more friendly dictators, no more executive orders to appease Pat Robertson. No more race-baiting or gender-baiting as official policy. Now for the boring part: establishing a long-term, active constituency for getting done what needs doing. The two drug cartels (illicit and prescription) are still bleeding the nation dry. The pro-unemployment and anti-environment lobbyists maintain their unelective offices; they and their pundit pals still brand anyone who dares oppose them as “special interests.” Think it’s OK to go back to hip apathy? Get real.

IF I’M RIGHT about this being a new era, we’re gonna need a new aesthetic to go with it. It’s not just that the Clintons and Gores don’t like harsh lyrics and other shock art, but that they don’t like the divisive concept behind them. The visions of Karen Finley and Henry Rollins are clumsily reversed clones of the GOP’s politics of hate. The Young Republicans long ago co-opted the image of the self-made rebel sneering at the petty concerns of the little people; there’s no point in alternative artists acting like that anymore. There’s still a helluva lot to be angry about, but it needs to be answered by a more inclusive kind of anger, something that goes beyond the mere vilification of enemies. Now that 62% of the voters have rejected the organized Right, it may be time for the art world to reconsider its hostility against the so-called “sap masses” and to start communicating with people about the real problems. Leftist art used to be about promoting solidarity with the working classes; it can be about that again. The post-Bush era also means there’s less value in enduring bad art just so you can smugly know that you’ve consumed something the Right would hate. What counts now is whether you like it.

BEFORE WE FORGET the campaign, let’s remember the curiosity that was Ross Perot. It wasn’t just money that got him as far as he got. It wasn’t just a bullheaded unwillingness to play by the rules (including the rule of listening to others’ ideas). It was that he played these as assets. He exploited the ’80s romance of entrepreneurism as Reagan and Bush tried but couldn’t. His contrived maverick act caught many hearts within the subcultures that the NY Times doesn’t know about: Computer bulletin board users. Talk radio listeners. Franchisees and multi-level marketers. “Couples’ erotica” video renters. Self-help readers. Family nudists. The 30 percent of the population that no longer watches prime time TV. People in 12-step groups. Upscale health food eaters. Bodybuilders. People who use powder cocaine while denouncing people who use crack. People who go to comedy clubs. People who used to read National Lampoon in high school. Members of spouse-swapping clubs. Science fiction fans. Everybody who thinks they deserve to break the rules. A savvier candidate might have turned these groups into a force to be reckoned with indeed. God help us if it happens.

APPEARANCES #1: Someone signed only Elvira says she usually likes Misc., but that my consenting attitude toward shirt-doffing G ‘n R fans “really struck out”: “Is the above aimed at women specifically? If so then you are no more `enlightened’ than the band is regarding women! Why would anybody, actually, show a lot of flesh at concerts? Or anywhere else for that matter?” I can think of a million reasons, starting with: why not? I can’t tell women what to do. And I have no monolithic attitude toward all women. Fifty-two percent of the human race can’t be all alike. If some wanna make fools of themselves at dumb corporate-rock shows, I won’t go look but I won’t condemn ’em either. And yes, I’d support male nudity in mutually supportive situations, like the Berkeley, CA student who showed up in class either bare or bottomless all semester, to the condemnation of management but the support or indifference of his fellow students.

APPEARANCES #2: The same week that Pentagon brass got all cowardly about admitting gays and lesbians, a woman wrote in the NY Times about the lack of full male skin in mainstream studio sex movies. Both probably have something to do with some men’s fear of other men’s sex (an emotion oft exploited in wartime propaganda, the ol’ keep-the-huns-off-your-wife line). As I’ve said before, writers who depict “Men” as a single collectivized psyche are wrong. Forty-eight percent of the human race can’t be all alike either. We’re isolated souls; many of us hate each other. I grew up from locker-room intimidation games long ago, and wish others could do the same. And while I’m not attracted to other guys’ parts, I don’t mind their images. I’ve seen enough male nudity in plays and foreign films to know how it can add that ever-needed human vulnerability.

APPEARANCES #3: The fashion press has certified the “Grunge Look” as the official Next Big Thing. Except that some of these designers (including Perry Ellis staffer Marc Jacobs) turn it into commercial crap, with sand-washed silk “flannel” shirts and models’ hair elaborately styled to look unkempt. Others (including Betsey Johnson) define “Seattle style” as Dee-Lite-meets-Frederick’s-of-Hollywood, with sheer tops and rainbow bell bottoms over Doc Martens. I’ve nothing philosophically against $500 see-thru dresses or butterfly pasties (see above), but authentic Seattle wear oughta be something you can wear in November without catching pneumonia. More seriously, the Seattle arts community (in music, fashion and other media) is at its best when it gets folks together, unpretentiously, to achieve honest expressions (even honest banal expressions). If the big designers reinterpret it in pretentious ways, maybe it’s just too much for corporate fashion to understand.

APPEARANCES #4: Betty Page, the reclusive ’50s S&M model whose pinup photos are reprinted in countless books, mags and trading card, who’s inspired everyone from Madonna to the Cramps’ Poison Ivy with her kinky innocence, was finally found in Calif. by Robin Leach. She describes herself now as “old and fat” and living off Social Security; some of the publishers who’ve made money off her image are volunteering to help her out, which is nice. I never was turned on by her myself; I mean, her pictures in regular clothes look like my mom did at the time.

AIRING IT OUT: At the save-KCMU rally 11/8, several people booed when a speaker mentioned the letters “NPR.” They knew that despite NPR’s several liberal political voices, in operating practice it’s become a very Reaganite institution. For one thing, it does a lousy job at serving ethnic or cultural minorities. If you’re not an upscale baby boomer, you’re not welcome. KUOW’s newsletter boasts about how it appeals almost exclusively to the well-off, the perfect consumer audience for “enhanced underwriting announcements.” Also, many under-40 listeners loathe NPR’s cloying aesthetic, its patronizing attitude toward non-yup subcultures, and its “down home” features celebrating the purity of life in all-white towns. (See the current Whole Earth Review for more details.) Also, I’m as guilty as the rest of the local alternative press in keeping quiet about KCMU’s gradual state of siege until now. I wanted to support the station too much to speak ill of it, even as great volunteer DJs got axed one by one for disobeying petty rules or playing too much of the “harsh and abrasive” music that was making Seattle famous. Just call me a listener who loved too much.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Even if there weren’t a new fad of cereal-box collecting, the Cocoa Puffs Factory box would be a collector’s item. A flap on the back unfolds into a 3-D image of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a working chute system. Put a handful of the cereal in the bin at the top, release a trap, and watch the puffs roll down the device and into your bowl. Get one to use, and one to save for your grandkids… Hershey’s Desert Bar (“special formulation for desert and tropical conditions”) is a melt-resistant chunk of chocolate mixed with egg whites for extra body, as enjoyed by the troops of ’91. It’s a substantial biting experience, less gooey and sugary than the regular bar. It’s also got the powdery-white exterior familiar to anyone who’s worked in a candy kitchen and sampled a brick of “industrial chocolate.”

NATIVE LORE: The 11/23 Times sez the number of self-designated Native Americans in Wash. grew from 58,000 to 78,000 in the last census period, a figure far higher than that of officially recognized tribal members. I knew there were phony New Age shamen running around, but I didn’t know there were so many.

AD VERBS: Howcum all these half-hour commercials are for products that you could explain in a minute, while the stuff that could use the time (like cars) still only gets regular spots?

THE FINE PRINT (on a bag of Fritos): “You may have won $10,000. No purchase necessary. Details inside.”

BEHIND THE PINE CURTAIN: Oregon’s Prop. 9, which would have officially dehumanized homosexuals, lost — but by a dangerously small margin. Its sponsor, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, plans to keep resubmitting the measure, to gain administrative control of the state Republican Party (onetime home to progressives like the late Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Wayne Morse), and to start a Washington branch.

The OCA and the Idaho Nazis are not aberrations to the recent mystique of the “laid back” Northwest. Their presence reflects the logical extreme of the myth of “getting away from it all” to a refuge populated only by “people like us.” This was one of the last parts of the continent that whites conquered. After that, we had race riots against Chinese laborers; after that, we sent our citizens of Japanese ancestry off to wartime internment camps. The “Northwest Lifestyle” ideology that coalesced in the mid-’70s promotes turning one’s back on “urban problems” (such as nonwhite people) and putting down roots in “God’s country” where everybody’s identically “nice” and wholesome. We don’t need any more of that. We need to attract people into the region who are willing to live among other people.

CATHODE CORNER: Sony’s about to bring the cyberpunk vision one step closer by introducing a Visortron “headset video screen.” The goggle-like device contains two tiny 0.7″ LCD screens, one just in front of each eye. Not only could this mean perfected of 3-D movies, it’ll let bus riders and hospital patients remove themselves even further from their immediate surroundings. Also, it’s one of the components that “virtual reality” developers have clamored for. They want to be able to rig up users with sensor gloves, feed computer animation into their eyes, and send them on journeys into computer-created “worlds” (depicted in the Neuromancer books and the forthcoming film Toys). Advocates claim it could be used for everything from simulated drug trips to sex with robots (a pitifully sterile fantasy, if you ask me). But you know it’ll end up being primarily used for military training.

STAGES: ‘Twas something really peculiar about seeing the New City production of Fever (Wallace Shawn‘s monologue piece about the limits of rich-liberal guilt trips) performed at a substitute venue: First Christian Church, usually occupied by people who don’t just go to upscale plays about poverty and suffering but actually try to do something about them. Shawn posited a world consisting only of the oppressed and the privileged (the latter including himself and, by implication, his audience). He conveniently concludes (or seems to, since he’s conveniently equivocal) that there’s little his class can do but feel sympathetic and give a little money to street people. Sorry Wally, not good enough. Next time, try to see the rest of the world, not as an artist looking for source material but as a citizen looking for a task to be done. You could start at the church and its ongoing ministry to street people.

OUR ANNUAL ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT: 24, including three colorized showings; plus three showings of Marlo Thomas’s remake It Happened at Christmas. Fortunately, the lucky few who get Summit Cable can see Rope (J. Stewart’s most morally ambiguous role) this month.

‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN in another year (with Seattle’s most accurate In/Out list), remember this holiday entertaining advice courtesy of Fay Weldon in Praxis (1978): “Never feed your family gourmet meals, because they will come to expect them.”

NEW CABINET SUGGESTIONS

• Energy: Who’s got more than Robin Williams?
• National Security Agency: Leo Buscaglia makes everybody feel more secure.
• Housing and Urban Development: Nobody’s created more housing for less money than the punk squatters.
• Human Services: Warren Beatty‘s serviced a lot of humans.
• Nat. Endowment for the Arts: Who knows more about art and endowment than the Men on Film guys?
• Defense: It’d take an army of millions to hold back Chuck D.
• Central Intelligence: Marilyn Von Savant‘s the most intelligent person I know.
• Treasury: The computer phreakers of the Legion of Doom know deeply how “virtual” (imaginary) our money system is.
• Commerce: Nobody in America knows anything about this anymore. Sell the dept. to Matsushita.
• Internal Revenue: We need someone with proven fundraising skills. Jerry Lewis could also work on increasing U.S.-European relations.
• Interior: The Mariners are great at keeping open spaces quiet and underpopulated.
• Agriculture: Orville Reddenbacher looks like he still gets up early to listen to the Farm Report.
• Veterans Affairs: The classic rock DJs know how to appeal to guys who’re still obsessed with our last wartime era.
• Labor: Jane Pauley‘s been through it a few times.
• Education: Spike Lee‘s always ready to teach a thing or two.
• Attorney General: A. Hill would be the obvious applause-getting choice, lest we forget her solid conservative stance. Otherwise, how ’bout someone who knows today’s legal frontiers, like whoever’s defending Negativland from U2’s anti-sampling suit.
• State: Let’s get someone who can bring people together and keep ’em smiling, like Mark De Carlo.
• Transportation: Who shows more love for public transit than George Carlin, the new Conductor on Shining Time Station?

PASSAGE

Ken Siman of Grove Press, on his Drew Friedman cartoon ad appearing in rags like the Village Voice:

“You don’t have to be snooty or dull or pretentious to read books.”

REPORT

After seven grueling months, I finally have a new day job as assistant editor of Mirror, a new local monthly for high school students, distributed only in the schools. If you’re a Clark completist (God knows I’m not), go to a local middle or high school starting Jan. 5. And while you’re there, consider joining a volunteer tutor or mentor program.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Noumenon”

9/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHAT’S A FAMILY VALUE?

TO WOODY’S AND MIA’S LAWYERS,

A FEW HUNDRED GRAND IN FEES …

Misc. is sorry to have missed the debut of the Grunge Rock Poets at the Puss Puss Cafe. I gotta see their next event, at least to check out the audience behavior. The thing is, hard rock fans are joyously eager to deride anything with the faintest scent of lameness, while poetry fans fraternally support even the tritest poet in their midst. What would grunge-poetry fans do, hiss at the poets and then give them hugs and handshakes?

CORRECTION: OK, I wrote “effect” last month when I meant to write “affect.” Sue me.

APOLOGY, SORT OF: Some music clubs are still sensitive that I referred to their clientele with the adjective “fratboy” some months back. I’m sorry. Few businesses want to be associated with guys who think “Handicapped Parking” signs are really “BMW Parking” signs, who scream sexist jokes at bartenders from their tables via cellular phones, who insult anybody on the street whose looks they don’t like. Now if fewer universities felt the same.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #3: The Republican convention was like an ad for an impulse product (beer, cigarettes, candy) that offers no claims about the product, only images of its ideal consumers. If you’re not an evangelical, country music-loving, hetero nuclear family (white or white-wannabe), they don’t want to see your face. Not long ago, the Republicans promised to become the new majority party for the next century. Last month’s convention abandoned this ambition, along with any coherent political or economic policy. The only remaining GOP agenda is cultural: the promotion of a British-style class system, with financiers and influence peddlers on top and passive-aggressive fundamentalists beneath. If you don’t belong to those categories, the Repos want nothing to do with you. Like the ’80s left, the ’90s right is obsessed with purifying its own ranks, not with building a sufficient base of support.

ONE LAST CONVENTION ITEM: In the Wall St. Journal, an anonymous Demo complained about the inefficiency of getting around in New York: “If this same convention had been held in Seattle, it would have been a success.”

PUMP IT UP: Years of Benny Hill jokes are fulfilled in Cole of California’s Top Secret swimsuit, with air-filled cups controlled by a discreetly placed pump. According to designer Jacqueline Bronson, it’s “the ’90s way to have cleavage.” The only one I’ve seen looked too small to provide anything practical, like floatation assistance.

MY MIND WANDERS: The Twin Peaks Festival at the Snoqualmie Historic Log Pavilion was free of the geekiness associated with fan movements. It was mainly a standard small-town fair, just the obsessively “normal” display of feigned innocence that David Lynch loves to deconstruct. Lynch loved “the look and the smell” of the North Bend Cinema, the moldy, 400-broken-seat concrete box where the festival ended with the premiere of the TP movie. Having grown up in a Wash. sawmill town, I loved the series as a mostly-realistic portrayal of power and frustration in such a place. The film goes further, abandoning donut fetishes and comedy relief to concentrate on how evil is executed and covered up beneath our region’s shallow protestations of “small town values”.

IT’S THE CHEESIEST!: I reiterate that people who only read the NY Times don’t have a clue about non-bourgeois existence. Take its essay on the “Cheese” movement, the paper’s term for the ’70s bad-art craze (from disco to Karen Carpenter). A third of the verbiage went to the writer musing whether or not “Cheese” was really derived from “cheesy.” (Of course it was. Duh.)

STILL, IT WAS NICE to see the NYT mentioning a big Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs, running local TV spots that don’t sell consumer services but promote an image to corporate clients. The paper described the ads as “actors impersonating lawyers at work and play — sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children…Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest.” Where did the firm go to create this invocation of the stereotype Northwest Lifestyle? That’s right, to a California ad agency.

MALLED DOWN: We’re pleased to see a nice word about the Everett Mall city hall in a NY Times article, which also noted the Happy Church of Denver (an evangelical church which lightened its theology to attract boomer families and uses a smile face instead of a cross for its logo) has taken over an abandoned mall for a sanctuary, office, gym, bowling alley, and rec center. Suburbs still suck, but more varied activities will make them suck a little less.

ALSO ON THE STANDS: Spy, the only magazine that thinks Bret Easton Ellis is still important, ran an esaay on “The Descent of Man,” purporting to show how downhill we’ve gone. One of their examples read: “Culture: Athens…Paris…New York…Seattle.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Sabot Times is an occasional four-page newsletter by some disgruntledSeattle Times reporters, vowing to sabotage the corrupt newspaper biz from within. Topics include how and when to fabricate quotes, a defense of “checkbook journalism” (paying interviewees and sources), and the shenanigans of creepy bosses. While the Times is the apparent topic of many items, issue #3 also discusses the Gannett chain’s papers, “where all of the stories (but none of the men) are eight inches long.” $1 cash per copy or $10 per year from “Lois Lane,” 12345 Lake City Way NE, Box #211, Seattle 98125.

A RIOT OF THEIR OWN: When you get covered in the Weekly and USA Today the same week, ya gotta worry about what you’re doing wrong. That’s the situation faced by the Riot Grrrls, a loose-knit network of punk women with its biggest scenes in Oly and D.C. Neither paper really said that this is hardly a new movement; these 22-year-old women embrace something that goes back to the late ’70s with the Slits and Lydia Lunch. I’ve said before that punk’s main difference from most cultural revolutions is that it had women out in front from the start, instead of in an auxiliary or a follow-up (such as the ’70s “women’s music” , a second wave of hippie folk). Also, while some R.G. ‘zines spout the same reverse-sexist slogans as earlier radical feminists, the R.G.’s I’ve met are open to the support of men who want to help change a society that’s hurting all of us. They know that there’s no organized conspiracy of all men to oppress all women (if there is, I’ve never been invited to its meetings). Men tend not to see themselves in solidarity with all other men. That’s why men have these little things called wars.

TRUE CRIME: It’s been reported that the Denny Regrade Crime Prevention Council, dominated by rich condo residents, singled out black music nights as the sole target of club-censorship recommendations, even though more violent acts have occurred at white bars. After living in Belltown a year, I’ve not been personally threatened by blacks but have been by gay-bashing whites. (You don’t have to be gay to be gay-bashed; you just have to look insufficiently macho for a drunken twerp’s taste. You can even be walking with a woman, while the twerp’s in an all-male group.)

MORE TRUE CRIME: New York officials claim that, thanks in part to new police reforms, their town has fewer reported major crimes per capita than Seattle. Don’t scoff! It could happen. NYC just might be safer, but it’ll still feel more dangerous with its noise, summer heat, canyon-like streets and tense people. If a loud residential burglary happens there, 300 people might hear it and think of it as one more thing to hate about New York. The same crime here might be heard by 10 people, and they might think, “that’s weird. That doesn’t happen here in wholesome little Seattle.” Well, it does.

DON’T BANK ON IT: Key Bank is running ads depicting local businesses it claims to have worked with since the ’50s. Those firms really had a long-term banking relationship with Seattle Trust, Key’s first local conquest. But if Bush can claim credit for Gorbachev’s accomplishments, why not this?

RAP SHEET: I’ve said before that hip-hop is the first black-culture invention that white hipsters haven’t been able to convincingly “tribute” (i.e., take over). More proof: The Pillsbury Doughboy wearing dark glasses and rapping, “It’s a pie thing.” Still more proof: the Basic fashion show at Down Under. White guys in baggy candy-color trousers slumped down the butt, a graffiti backdrop, an onstage DJ pretending to spin records and swigging from a quart bottle of malt liquor. Quite silly.

`M’ IS FOR THE MANY THINGS SHE GAVE ME: The personal celebrity of new mom Courtney Love is eclipsing the career of her still-somewhat-obscure band Hole. Now, she’s done her own Vanity Fair full-belly pic (in undies). FutureNew Yorker editor Tina Brown ordered a lit cigarette airbrushed out of the shot, declaring that smoking while pregnant is not role-model behavior. Brown left in text claiming that Love and hubby Kurt Cobain shot up heroin and other drugs during the early months of her fetus’s life. She vehemently denies it. The mag stands by the story.

GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: My used-bookstore wanderings have landed Criswell Predicts, a 1968 paperback by the late syndicated prognosticator who also narrated the cult film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here, he predicts a Soviet leader whose five-year rule will transform the USSR toward free enterprise “with only a few symbols of communism remaining;” the death of another socialist leader and the breakup of his country in a civil war (only he thought it was gonna be Mao); a series of “homosexual cities” (“small, compact, carefully planned areas…complete with stores, churches, bars and restaurants”); bald women on the streets of a major city (he blames it on pollution); contraceptives in the water supply (industrial contaminants might make us sterile, so it could happen); the evacuation of New York City due to floods; and the end of the world in 1999 (just like Nostradamus, Prince, and the evangelists I mentioned last month).

He also makes predictions for each state. “I predict that the state of Washington will become the art center of America, for it is in that state that a Federal Arts Center will be built. Persons showing aptitude in any of the arts — painting, music, dance, writing, acting, etc. — will be allowed to go to this Federal Arts Center and live at government expense to pursue their talents. From this arts center will come road companies of performing artists who will tour the nation.” Hey, Kurt & Courtney: You’re just fulfilling a destiny.

SPURTS: I saw pieces of the Olympics Triplecast in bars. It seemed to be almost worth the money: Coverage from the international-pool video feed, without the network frills. No personality profiles of people who (since they’ve spent every waking hour since age 3 training) have no personalities. Far less jingoism. Non-Americans actually shown winning things. With three channels, you could keep watching Olympics without having to see the nightmare of the “Dream Team” treating the real Olympians like the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

MORE SPURTS: I finally got two drawings (shown below) in response to my invitation to speculate about John McCaw, reclusive car-phone magnate and Mariner investor. The contributor on the left, D. K. O. Dog, suggests that more people didn’t enter because “your readers aren’t in the sporting class. I for one could give the proverbial rip if the Seattle Mariners moved away and became the Boise Weiners.” I’ve been noticing an all-too-outspoken hatred of sports among mandatory ideology of conformist hippies. A couple of self-styled “radicals” even told me that all sports fans were “fascists.” The problem with radicals is that they’re too conservative. Bohemian square-bashing is just another form of mindless bigotry. For the record, while I’m no fanatic, I don’t hate sports. Also, I don’t hate fast food. I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate computers. I don’t hate USA Today. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate MTV. I don’t hate contemporary music. I don’t hate Madonna. I don’t hate rap. I don’t hate men. I don’t hate teenagers. I don’t hate people from small towns. I’m not kidding.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to see the magnets, hats and cow furniture at Magnetic North on 12th near Denny, furrow your brow at the faux-obscurity of the Bon‘s “98181” billboards (you did know it was them all the time, didn’t you?), and remember: when the far right claims that everybody in the “real” America belongs to it, don’t believe it.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

What I love/hate about Seafair is what I love/hate about this town in general. I love its unabashed hokiness. I hate its coldness, its Protestant stoicism concealing a face of sheer terror. It started in the early postwar years, when our raucous post-frontier city was trying too hard to prove it had grown up. A civic-development group, Greater Seattle Inc., devised a series of rough-and-tumble events with a veneer of good clean fun. The core events reveal two facets of Seattle: an obsessive blandness on the surface (influenced by the Boeing corporate culture) and repressed frustrations underneath.

Newcomers hate it. It contradicts the laid-back stereotype of the modern Northwest. It’s a throwback to the clumsy, pre-pretension Seattle. It’s also an example of what feminists call “imbalanced male energy.” Officials try to downplay the rowdy parts, especially the Seafair Pirates, costumed mischief-makers, originally recruited from Elks lodges. (In the ’50s the Pirates used to “kidnap” a young woman at their annual landing ceremony, “releasing” her at the end of the afternoon with a big badge that said “I was raped by the Seafair Pirates.”) But there’s still the hydros (250,000 people getting drunk and waiting for a boat to burn). There’s the Blue Angels, loud fast planes that terrify dogs and neighborhoods for Navy recruiting. There are shiploads of sailors on the streets, courtesy of the same Navy that brought you Tailhook. There’s a Friday-night parade before 300,000 spectators who are eager to release their ids but are instead shown marching bands, motorcycle drill teams, corporate floats, and sideshow clowns. Take that many people (many with Thermoses of booze), bore them to tears, and some are bound to end up fighting.

The chief female energy comes from a beauty pageant that was already innocuous, and is now toned down further to avoid charges of sexism. Turning it into an amateur talent show reduces its ability to add any yin to the yang-heavy activities. Compare Seafair to Portland’s more civilized Rose Festival; on the Saturday of the (daytime) main parade, the Oregonian would devote its full front page to a color photo of the Rose Queen and her court, in a healthy respect for traditional feminine power. Or compare it to Mardi Gras, where Catholic passions and Creole sensuality are gleefully celebrated.

Still, I do like the hydros. There’s something noble about big, fat machines of wood and fiberglass, run on obsolete surplus airplane engines, maintained by mechanical geniuses who spend the year scrounging for enough parts to challenge Budweiser’s big bucks. These great manic-depressive machines either bounce above the water at a roaring 150 mph or conk out and die. There’s a lesson for us all in there.

PASSAGE

Jennifer Finch of L7, quoted at “Endfest” on Seattle rockers’ 12-year loyalty to plaid flannel shirts: “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t tell the lumberjacks from the rockers.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Crenellated”

1/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating three Stranger Misc. columns and

the 1992 In/Out list, also published in the Seattle Times)

1991 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE RERUN COUNT: 21

Welcome to a new ever-lovin’ fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture report that doesn’t follow trends and doesn’t really lead them either, but just stays out of their way.

Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero’s Books on 11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don’t think I’m going to see The Rapture…. There appear to be two Addams Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I saw. Maybe it’s like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw the critics’ edition, tell me what it was like…. This year’s best-of list by Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and never bothers to check what’s playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of 14) that didn’t show here, down significantly from previous years.

Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11 p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station’s next owner, the Providence Journal, was one of the papers that didn’t run the Doonesbury strips about Quayle’s possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them… Almost Live might go national next fall. Worldvision’s offering a syndicated weeknight version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.

Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like “Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed” and “Complex, condensed, SAM tough to build.” It had “thank you Seattle” vanity ads from Acme Iron Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the Carpet Resource Center. It’s more proof of how much easier it is to get politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing contractors, instead of uncouth artists.

Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): “What’s that up there?” “It’s a gas station.” “No, that’s a flower. Don’t you know, flowers are bee pee stations.” The real BP has a kids’ book promotion with G. Burghoff saying it’s important for children to read, so “you can become anything you want to be.” No — it’s important so America can regain a capable workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies like BP.

No “Willie” Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels. First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys who insist they’re not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN’s electronic masking made her look like Madonna’s “Blank” character in Dick Tracy. The defendant’s name is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy’s nephew but seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten Kennedys.

Ad Slogan of the Month: “It’s not your mother’s tampon.” I should hope not…

Good Buy, Baseball!: So let’s get together and buy the Mariners. Granted, it’s not as important as saving Frederick’s, but it’s still a good cause. At $100 million, it’ll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I’m reminded again of Jim Bouton’s words at the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle’s first attempt to keep a team: “Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can’t be all bad.”

Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested, presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)… The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It’s appropriate that Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).

Xmas ’91: Frederick’s save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that’s a sign of confidence to the store’s bankers remains to be seen… Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment of Hasbro’s product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle dock.

Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in hardcover.

None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, “David Ansen of Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of your seat.'” Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: “The twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone’s Movie Can’t Be Trusted.” But the last word, as always, goes to Oliver (“Fuck me, rock god!”) Stone: “I think a president was illegally killed.”

The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the Northwest is not Paradise. There’s this whole mystique that gets more exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters “turned conservative” in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women’s-choice initiative was due more to opponents’ well-funded lies than any deep anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson to the Senate, how we’re no more or less conservative than ever. It’s just getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the early ’70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: “Northwest Style: Laid Back with Dockers.”) The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our “tolerance” was more like apathy. We’re not mellow, we’re cold and sullen. The real spirit of the Northwest isn’t in aPoulsbo bed-n’-breakfast, it’s in the acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The syndrome’s worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by folks who think our State Reps are called “assemblymen.”)

Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and shrillily demand the right to destroy the few “real” spaces left.They built the S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan’s deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L’s) Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture. Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds, was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the nation’s social terrain.

Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the “rabbit ears” TV antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P. Middlemark died in ’89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, “nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all).” Sounds like my kinda guy.

‘Til our fab Feb. ish, make a ’92 resolution to petition KCTS to show The ’90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn’t count), and join us again.

PASSAGE

Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 12/1: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of thing.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I don’t have a business checking account at this time. Please make all subscriptions payable to “Clark Humphrey.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Synecdoche”

THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR ’92

I don’t claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That’s the logic of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what’s peaking, declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I previously predicted the rise of Estonia, ’70s music, and nose rings, as well as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.

11/18/91 Stranger Misc.

(the first Stranger Misc. column)

The Misc. Statement of Purpose

Hi. My name’s Clark and I’m going to be your columnist today. Since 1986 I’ve been writing Misc., the monthly newsletter on popular culture in Seattle and beyond. I write a lot of little segments about a lot of different topics. I have a very individualistic sensibility, but I don’t try to be contrary for its own sake. I have certain underlying beliefs. Among these are the following:

1. The Pacific Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. It’s a real place with real people and real problems. It did not suddenly come into existence when you moved here, nor even when the first white people moved here. I’m from here, so I have no illusions about the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle” that was invented in the mid-’70s.

2. Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one. We need people who are willing to make it a better city — people willing to work in the arts and community service. We don’t need any more people who just want to go to the mountains for the weekend or buy a million-dollar waterfront “cabin.”

3. I’m a leftist but I’m not a hippie. I want a better world, a more compassionate and just world. The only way to get to that is to build movements, to reach out to people, not to sit around and mourn the end of the ’60s or to treat everybody except yourself as a hopeless square.

4. Television and male sexuality are not automatically evil.

5. Popular culture is a far more accurate portrayal of a society than highbrow culture. You won’t find the real character of England, for instance, on Masterpiece Theatre. You’ll find it in cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, and the horrid things they make out of the variety meats.

6. On the other hand, popular culture isn’t an exact replica of popular beliefs. The millions of women who buy sleazy crime books don’t necessarily want anything in the books to happen to them.

7. Our country’s totally screwed up in its attitudes about work, sex, democracy, and ethics. But so’s most every other country, in its own way.

8. Lame parody is the death of real humor. J. Webb’s Dragnet was a helluva lot funnier than D. Aykroyd’s.

9a. Hardcore fascist kitsch is not cute. I’m not a consumer of TV evangelists, wrestling, big-budget violence movies, or the Weekly World News, not even to laugh at them. I hate those things.

9b. When I say I hate something, it doesn’t mean I really like it. It means I really hate it.

10. George Bush is like those small-town lawyers on Scooby Doo after their ghost masks are taken off. The difference is those characters were businessmen pretending to be monsters. With George, the reverse is true.

11. I believe in the power of the written word, though I have a healthy respect for its limitations. I don’t believe in “serious literature,” nor in the lifestyle and belief system “serious” writers are expected to conform to. Writers are some of the most aesthetically reactionary folks around, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics. If only modern novels had one percent of the vitality found in the best modern music, dance, and visual art.

12. The only real way to make an artistic or political idea accessible to the general public is to present it in the most lively, compelling way possible; not to make it bland and soft.

13. The three-dot newspaper column is a dying American art form, one which Misc. tries to keep alive.

Here are some of the things you’ll see in Misc.: Junk food. Giant public art works crashing to the street. Local publications. Capsule comments on film, TV, politics, and other lesser arts. Quotable quotes. Celebrations of great new ad slogans and new products. Words and word usage that deliberately contradict academic standards. No sex gossip or spoofs.

Selections from Misc. begin in this space in the next issue.

5/91 Misc. Newsletter

GOOD THING DANNY PARTRIDGE HAS

A SISTER WHO’S A LAWYER NOW

A hearty welcome to Misc., where we’re perfectly willing to pay a little more for our hydro power and our agribusiness-raised produce in order to save the dam-threatened Columbia River salmon. You’ve gotta love a creature who’ll go upstream a thousand miles or so just to squirt onto some eggs.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The North Broadway 76 station was demolished, ending an era when the street began and ended with turning 76 balls. I’ll never get to live in the second-floor apartment on 10th Ave. E. that directly overlooked that sign, its bright orange globe turning outside like a postmodern successor to the blinking neon signs outside every seedy film noir hotel room.

STRUNG OUT: Palm Springs, Calif. mayor Sonny Bono tried to ban string bikinis. Now we know why his wife left him….

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture is a neat disjointed narrative by Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland about three young nihilist-ettes trading fanciful stories of rootlessness and sexlessness in between their no-future “McJobs.” St. Martin’s Press did a too-cute job on the design and illustrations, but the text itself is one of the first to treat people born since 1960 as having brains.

OPEN LETTER TO ANDREW WARD: Not all of us Northwest natives are “xenophobic” hicks as implied in your book of sentimental essays, Out Here. We just don’t like smug yuppies from the East coming here and expecting us to kneel to their alleged intellectual/aesthetic superiority. And this region is not the chichéd billowy paradise you imagine. It’s a real place, with real people and real problems. Wake up!

CATHODE CORNER: In Living Color, normally the most astute sketch show on TV, ran an “Iraqi fashion show” segment with women totally draped in black, including their faces. The catch is that Iraq had been one of the secular Arab states, eager to round up all political opposition but ambivalent towards modern clothes. It’s our friends in Saudi Arabia and our once-and-future friends in Iran who jail women for showing their faces….The Comedy Channel and Ha!, two cable comedy networks not carried locally, have merged to become CTV. The name is a takeoff on MTV (whose parent company partly owns the new venture). But there’s already a CTV in Canada (unofficially standing for Commercial TV, as opposed to the public but ad-bearing CBC). On Seattle cable until 1987, it mainly carried Hollywood shows with Canadian commercials. Its mandated quota of (really cheap) domestic programs included a lot of the schlock shows directly parodied on SCTV.

BUT DID HE EVER INJECT HIM WITH WINDOW CLEANER?: Merv Griffin, pal of the Reagans and rival of Donald Trump, was sued for $1 million in “palimony” by a male ex-driver who claims to also be his ex-lover. But what does this mean about lovable late sidekickArthur Treacher?

THE DIRT: The City of Seattle used to sell cedar-shingle composting bins at the subsidized price of $8 for the first box, $26 thereafter. Now the city’s distributing bins made of recycled plastic, and selling the wood bins for $49.50 through Smith & Hawken, the garden-supply catalog for rich snobs who’ll gladly pay twice what something’s worth just so they don’t have to be seen entering Sears.

MORE DIRT: A minor cause celébre occurred during the closing of seven Seattle artists’ joint installation Earthly Delights at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue Square. During the month the exhibit was up, visitors were asked to fill out questionnaires about themselves, their biggest fears, the things they liked most about the mall, and their opinions on compost and whether a wink was better than a handshake. They were then to tear off one sheet of the carbonless forms on which the questionnaires were printed, and to fold that copy into a paper airplane. But on the day before the closing, mall management canceled the scheduled launching of the 1,300 collected planes from the museum’s mezzanine into the main mall space. The official notice stated “there will be no artist presence in the mall.” Instead, organizers invited the 50 or so people at the closing party to take a folded questionnaire home as long as they treated it respectfully, “like a fine sculpture.” In order to exit through the mall without danger, partygoers were given stickers boldly stating NOT AN ARTIST. The six-part installation utilized video monitors, displays of old household goods, compost, trash bags, weaved-together plastic spoons, a glass-encased array of rotting food items in the arrangement of an American flag, and a Terry Amadei sculpture of a face-down child figure surrounded by moss. It was a pointed comment on how suburbanites delude themselves into believing they’ve moved to a “natural, country” lifestyle when they’ve really isolated themselves (perhaps due to fear of biological reality) with their cars, parking lots, malls, tract houses, and glassed-in buildings.

OPUS TWO: Everybody’s favorite living political-funny-animal cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is now living on Vashon Island, where he draws the weekly best-of-Bloom-County strip he still calls Outland, and works on an animated TV script for Steven Spielberg.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Mikakuto Pudding Candy is little caramel custard-flavor drops with a maple-flavored liquid center. It’s sold only at little Japanese convenience stores in the International District (where you can also sometimes get Felix the Cat Mystery Candy, whose pieces have different fruit flavors but are all colored black)… Vegi Snax are little poly bags of carrot and celery sticks selling for 69 cents, from a company called FreshWorld, described by the Weekly as a joint venture of Du Pont and something called DNA Plant Technology Corp.

OPENING THE AMERICAN MIND: Multicultural education is NOT a force for intolerance, as a coordinated right-wing push of articles in Time, the New Republic, the Atlantic and elsewhere suggests. Just the opposite: it recognizes the white-Euro “canon” of literature as the philosophy of our country’s dominant culture to date, but insists that the cultures of the rest of the world must also be studied, because we must live with those other lands and because America is becoming a “majority of minorities”. It’s the guys trying to keep non-white lit out of the classroom who are the real “new McCarthyites”. I wished I’d had more ethnic studies when I was in college. In grade school and junior high we did get to hear/read a lot of stories about Harlem, Korea, and Africa. (But, except for the works of Portland’s Beverly Cleary (Ramona, et al.), we never read a single story set in the Northwest. More about that in the June Wire.)

(latter-day note: The referenced article is `Jet City Lit,’ available from my essays index.)

OUTSIDE DIAMANDA GALAS: Some people at her show were moved to tears; others were bored to them. The screeches and moans she sang in her AIDS/Biblical-metaphor performance piece reminded some of actual cries of AIDS patients; others in the audience told me they thought she was just loud and pretentious. But nobody I spoke with or overheard after the show, save one, mentioned her topless evening gown. Any woman who performs solo (her music was recorded) while revealing her body, yet drawing all attention away from it, has a rare control over her audience indeed.

THE MALL OF FAITH: ABC ran a fascinating item on mega-churches, huge suburban facilities (the early ones were evangelical; most now are nondenominational) with arena-sized sanctuaries, complete lifestyle facilities (including bowling lanes and soft-rock concerts), few crosses or other childhood-church reminders, and noncontroversial doctrines designed to please as many boomer families as possible. One Colorado institution transformed itself from a Full Gospel Church/Assembly of God into “The Happy Church” (complete with happy face signs).

ONLY IN NYC: Several boxes containing severed human heads were stolen from a dissection-class instructor’s car. The crooks dumped their loot about a block away; an alert nearby cab driver picked up the parts and kept them in his cab until the doctor returned.

ONLY IN AUBURN: A 21-year-old was asked by a 17-year-old in a restaurant parking lot, “Where’s the party?” The young man told the stranger, “You’re not invited.” According to the Tacoma News Tribune, the teen slugged and threatened to kill the man, and engaged other nearby youths in the assault.

ONLY IN FEDERAL WAY: Someone has been randomly shooting at cats in house windows, killing five. Stuffed decoy cats have been placed in houses in the so-far futile hope of catching the sniper.

FROM THE LAND THAT TRIED TO BAN 2 LIVE CREW: The AP reports that a former aide to a Florida legislator charges that he regularly insulted and harassed her, and at a 1983 staff party tore the front of her dress off of her “in front of dozens of people.”

AD VERBS: Ivar’s first “Dances With Clams” commercial was withdrawn at the demand of Orion Pictures. What do you expect from a studio owned by a guy named Kluge (a computer term for an awkward, clumsily-designed system)?…Here’s one rock song you never expected in a commercial: The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (without the title line) for Bud Light.

THAT EXPLAINS HIS LAPSES IN MEMORY: Biographer Kitty Kelley romantically linked Nancy Reagan with the subject of her last book, Sinatra. More startingly, Kelly claims the Reagans once smoked pot while Ron was the staunchly anti-hippie Calif. governor. If true, it disproves a famous assertion in the ’60s book The Greening of America: “If a `straight’ college athlete, with little interest in politics, tries marijuana, it will inevitably lead him to social and political concerns.”

FERRY TALES: Talk of a new Everett-Seattle walk-on ferry brings back memories of growing up in the vicinity of that sad little city, and also the memory of my first writing teachers at North Seattle Community College, all ex-hippies (in 1976) who all responded to learning of my origin with variations on the phrase, “But every-body hates Everett.” It was my first discovery that hippies, despite claims to being the apex of intellectual/moral superiority, were no more immune to bigotry than anybody.

DID YOU KNOW?: The New York Public Library Desk Reference lists a visual symbol for “Weapons Needed.” It’s virtually identical to the two-piece Chevron logo in use since 1974.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (NY Times correction, 4/12:) “A picture caption yesterday about a concert by the Pet Shop Boys misidentified the theater where it took place. It was Radio City Music Hall, not Carnegie Hall.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (one one side of the tunnel-project clock at 5th and Pine): “Clock under repair. Meanwhile (options): Call 526-7777 (time). Consult your watch. See other side. Correlate the sun’s position with today’s date. OR, slow down and relax.” Runner-up (Puget Sound American Atheists’ billboard in Central Area): “Atheism: It’s Not What You Believe.”

TEACHER’S FRET: The statewide teachers’ strike came during National Education Week, with all the sitcoms showing reruns of learning-related episodes and with all sorts of public service spots along the lines of “Don’t be a dope. Stay in school.” One teachers’-union lobbying ad on KING came right after an ad for college loans by Pacific First Federal with the slogan “We Fund Reality.”

‘TIL OUR GLORIOUS 5TH ANNIVERSARY issue in June, be sure to watch The ’90s Sun. nights on KCTS, check out the Bible Adventures cartridge for Nintendo, and learn Amy Denio’s new word “Spoot,” meaning her concept of spontaneity and of music as a shared experience of player and listener.

PASSAGE

From W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Razor’s Edge (1944): “I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.”

REPORT

The fifth anniversary of Misc. will be celebrated next month with a special reading, to be held the second week in June (after the Film Fest). For details on that or on ads in Misc., leave a message at 524-1967.

Misc. received a “Publisher’s Choice” citation from the small-press review mag Factsheet Five. “A fine observer of the cultural scene, with comment and quote to amuse and provoke,” sez FF’s Mike Gundelroy. “His commentary is light and witty, though he can get serious when the matter warrants.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Badinage”

5/90 Misc. Newsletter

NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT

FOR TEARING DOWN

THE MUSIC BOX THEATER

Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).

Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.

Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.

As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.

Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”

Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.

Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.

Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.

The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”

Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.

Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.

Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).

News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.

Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.

Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”

Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.

‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”

PASSAGE

One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”

REPORT

If you want Misc. every month (we don’t get to every drop-off every time), subscribe.

My novel The Perfect Couple is available on Macintosh discs for $10.

CALL TO ACTION

ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Syncretize”

6/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

C.A.P. WINS, WESTERN

CIVILIZATION DOESN’T END

(latter-day note: That was a city initiative measure to instill mild zoning controls on new high-rise office towers, fought bitterly by developers who are now bankrupt ‘cuz with today’s corporate downsizing they can’t fill the buildings they’ve already built.)

Welcome back to Misc., the column for a world where three AA-level pitchers are called a “good trade” and a million Chinese protesters are called a “tiny minority.” We do know why Willard Scott called Starbucks Coffee “almost as good as Maxwell House” on a recent location shoot. He’s got an ad contract with that product of General Foods (founded by Seventh-Day Adventist C.W. Post to sell health foods, now owned by a cigarette firm).

Three Men and a Pillow: A Seattle firm has invented the Empathy Belly, a 35-pound prosthetic tummy with Velcro outside and lead weights inside. It’s to help expectant fathers empathize with their wives, by sharing some of pregnancy’s discomforts. I wonder if its makers saw the Bewitched where Endora made Darren kinder to pregnant Samantha by making him crave rich foods and feel queasy in the mornings.

Prosaic Paroxysm: We’ve been amused over the years at the creation, practically from scratch, of a mythical “Northwest Lifestyle.” Less amused have been residents of hick towns rechristened as “romantic getaways.” Some of these oldtimers have formed Citizens for Lesser LaConner. Their ads in Seattle papers warn of traffic jams and inadequate facilities for the tourist hordes. It’s so rare to see an ad pleading you not to buy. Businesses there, of course, would remake the place to meet the tourist demand. It’d destroy thetown’s “rustic charm,” but that might not matter to those visitors who came here five years ago for the “lifestyle” invented by people who came here 10 years ago.

Cathode Corner: Joe Guppy, the Mark Langston of local TV, helped make Almost Live into a contender, then jumped to HBO. Another ex-Off-the-Wall Player, Dale Goodson, is now at MTV, writing comedy material for fellow Seattlite Kevin Seal. Then there’s Ross Shaffer’s ABC show, Day’s End. He mostly narrates clips from other shows, telling the late-night audience how much they’re missing by not watching more prime-time TV. As the TV nation keeps diffusing, expect desperate self-promotions like movies used against TV in the ’50s. Already, NBC’s “Come Home” slogan both plugs its living-room comedies and extols prodigal viewers to return from cable and VCRs.

Body Politics: The Christian Science Monitor’s become the nouvelle cuisine of newspapers (exquisite but too small to satisfy), but still has a good item now and then. It recently noted that teen beauty pageants are returning to Nicaragua (first prize: a trip to Melledin, Colombia). Some of the all-male leadership of the Sandinista Youth League grumbled that there should be intelligence pageants instead. A typical “male feminist” attitude, to slag feminine behavior as an irrelevant frill. A generation that’s faced so much work and self-denial (due largely to our hypocritical ideology) deserves a taste of healthy individual pride…. On a similar note, Poland’s first Bennetton store was announced. Maybe Walesa will start wearing nicer sweaters.

Junk Foods of the Month: The Nintendo Cereal System gives you the sugar rush to keep playing; the clever packaging lets you munch it from the box while keeping your joystick hand free…. Champs de Brionne in George, WA would rather be known for outdoor concerts than for Scarlet, a blend of reisling and cherry wine. It’s the same shade of pink as the dress on the label mascot (who looks more like a Barbara Cartland heroine than Scarlett O’Hara). She asks us to “look for my message on the back of the label”; I couldn’t find any…. The trade mag Restaurant Business sez the next eatery fad will be Mom Food — meatloaf, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. “Paying money for something you probably didn’t even like that much as a kid will lose its appeal, but we are reassured that it’s OK to enjoy comfortable food.”

Grinding Down: Many of Seattle’s 10 burlesque joints are feeling financial goose pimples. They’re cutting hours, raising prices, and even bringing mud wrestlers. The problem: overexpansion. Too many entrepreneurs want to make big bucks by keeping all cover and drink charges, making the performers live off tips. You often see the same scam in music and comedy clubs (though comedy clubs don’t offer “table jokes”).

That Last Hurrah Thang: In 1980, I was a student reporter on Sen. Warren Magnuson’s last campaign tour. He chartered an Amtrak train (a symbol of Magnuson’s belief in the benefits of federal spending) to the Tri-Cities (ditto). In stops at Seattle, Tacoma and Wenatchee, he spoke about the influence and privilege our state had achieved with Henry Jackson and himself (they’d been our senators since before I was born). But nationally, the Demos were too busy fighting each other to stop the Reagan stampede. That fall, Demo control of the Senate would be interrupted for six years and Maggie’s career, built on getting people to work together, would end.

Positive Steps: Until further notice, Seattle’s best window displays are at Church’s Shoes on Pike. Some of the displays have less to do with product than with cultural causes (saving the Admiral Theater in W. Seattle and the Spafford murals in Oly).

Local Publication of the Month: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. John Callahan, everyone’s favorite paraplegic, recovering-alcoholic cartoonist, expands his Clinton St. Quarterly essays (“The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life”) into a fascinating memoir. With the CSQ on apparent hiatus (editor Jim Blashfield is now a videomaker for Michael Jackson and others), it’s good to keep seeing one of its stars.

How Randy Is It?: The Rep’s mounting a revue of Randy Newman’s songs. I’d prefer a tribute to his Hollywood-composer uncles Alfred and Lionel, but there is some potential in dramatizing his better songs like “Cleveland.” I just hope they don’t re-create the “I Love LA” video (is any Seattle actor homely enough to impersonate Tommy Lasorda?).

‘Til July, visit the Karaoke Lounge at Tatsumi Express on the Ave, ask your bank for a memorial Salvador Dali MasterCard, and ponder these words of John Lydon: “Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”