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”

4/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Why Men Don’t Get Madonna

We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).

Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.

Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?

Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.

The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”

Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).

Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.

Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.

Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.

Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…

Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.

Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).

Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.

License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…

The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”

‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”

PASSAGE

Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”

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WORD-O-MONTH

“Orthogonal”

7/91 Misc. Newsletter

DOES ANYBODY REALLY CARE ABOUT

JULIA & KIEFER NOT GETTING MARRIED? REALLY?

Misc. is back, the pop-culture newsletter that can still remember when we all used to scoff at the USSR’s idea of fun — tanks and missiles on parade, “honoring” those who obeyed orders fighting to prop up dictatorial puppet regimes.

DOWN THE PIKE: Three food booths in the Pike Place Market were gutted in late May for one huge eating table with only four chairs, one of which broke the first morning. This is not how they’re going to raise revenues to buy out the New York investors and pay off both sides’ immense legal bills.

REQUIEM FOR AN ECCENTRIC: Vic Meyers, who died in late May, was one of the true northwest characters, a jazz musician who got elected to the normally meaningless post of lieutenant governor on a joke campaign and managed to keep getting re-elected on the privileges of incumbency, much to the disgust of the real politicians. One such pol was Gov. John Langlie, who felt trapped in the state during his two terms, unable to fly to the other Washington for lobbying work out of fear that Meyers would become temporary acting governor, call a special session of the Legislature and issue who knows what disorderly executive orders. Finally Langlie got a chance when Meyers was himself off on a fishing trip; until Meyers heard Langlie was gone, and Langlie heard Meyers was rushing back to Olympia. Langlie hurriedly chartered a plane to fly him back west in the middle of the night, landing in Spokane just minutes before Meyers showed up at the state capitol to call the special session he was no longer authorized to call.

DOG DAZE: The UK is trying to eradicate all pit bulls from its soil, as a probable preliminary step toward exterminating soccer hooligans and perhaps even, if they’re lucky, the unspeakable foods they make out of the variety meats.

CLOTHES HOARSE: A national fashion trade magazine noted the increasing prominence of Seattle menswear designers, but the Times tried to stick a nonexistent spin onto the story by noting that these designers “show no Seattle influence” — by which the paper means they don’t have prints of outdoorsy scenes, but instead show a variety of influences from around the world. What rubbish! Seattle is, if you haven’t noticed (and a lot of reporters haven’t), a real city, an international trade center and home of the machines that made the Jet Set possible. A fashion style that mixes the best of America, Canada, Europe and particularly urban Asia could be about as distinctly Seattle as you’re likely to get.

SHOE BIZ: How appropriate that a cache of Nike shoes, lost at sea a year ago, would wash ashore along the Oregon coast the day before the Portland TrailBlazers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Almost poetic, no?

CATCHING `EM WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN: Seattle’s American Passage Media Corp., a company that began selling term paper “guides” and now handles various ad ventures, wants to put up ads in high-school locker rooms. Called “GymnBoards,” they’d be like Whittle Communications’ ad posters in doctor and dentist offices, a little bit of consumer info surrounded by slick ad messages. (Whittle, originator of the sponsored classroom newscast Channel One, is under fire from mainstream media reporters who don’t want ad dollars to cease subsidizing reporters’ salaries) Too many teens are already almost fatally self-conscious, without having diet, food, or grooming products confronting them while nude.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Johnny’s Fine Foods of Tacoma has launched a line of salad dressings with offbeat names: Jamaica Mistake, Honey! You’re Terrific!, Garlic: The Final Frontier, Poppy Love, Great Caesar, and Gorby Light: A Kinder, Gentler Russian. (The back label of the latter sez, “…unleashes the flavor of good Russian and eliminates those harsh old overtones…”)

GOOD NEWS!: The Clark bar is being saved, by Pittsburgh financier Michael P. Carlow. He bought the venerable candy from Leaf Inc. of Illinois, which had basically let it slide before announcing plans to sell or scrap it.

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #6: On-Your-Tie Cookies are no more. Neither are Uncle Billy’s Pasta Chips, Frutta di Terra dried tomato products, or seven other companies listed in the 1989 membership list of the Specialty Foods Group of Washington. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 other local specialty-food companies are struggling to survive.

FROZEN FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Whatever happened to the New World Order, anyway? This term was used only once by Bush as a justification for the war, but has remained as a catch phrase used by Leftists for every dishonorable aspect of Reagan-Bush foreign policy. T-shirts proclaim that it’s really an “Old World Odor;” bumper stickers insert swastikas between every word. I don’t know what the band New Order thinks of it all.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH, PART 2: According to the authors of the new book The Day America Told the Truth (a survey of moral/ethical attitudes by region), the quintessential Northwest personality might be that of bad ol’ Leland Palmer. According to James Patterson and Peter Kim, roughly one in four Northwesterners is a clinical sociopath, four times the national average. “Pac Rim [their name for a “moral region” of the Northwest and northern Calif.] respondents were much less likely to have strongly developed consciences than were individuals in any other area…Coupled with the observation that Pac Rimmers are the regional respondents least likely to present themselves to others as they really are, it seems that David Lynch may be onto something”…By the way, I still believe Twin Peaks has been 32 of TV’s best hours ever. It taught me how to write Northwest fiction that has imagination and wonder, that doesn’t reek of godawful God’s-country pretentiousness. The show’s “failure” only proved that ambitious genre-splitters may not be meant to be ongoing series, especially when erratically scheduled and poorly advertised. Lynch is now working up a feature; my choice would be a string of TV movies.

MORE ON SEATTLE TODAY: The old-clips final episode claimed the show had been on for 17 years, but it was really 40 years old (even older than I said last issue). I still have the TV and T-shirt I won on it on separate occasions in the mid-’70s. Under that name as well as TeleScope, The Noon Look, Good Company, and Northwest Today, it formed a part of the daily rhythm of the city that will be missed, even if the show itself had become stale (the same old fashion tips, the same old recipes, the same old touring psychics, the same old itinerant book-pluggers).

HOME TOWN NEWS: A Marysville woman got stung in a supermarket by a scorpion stuck onto the sticker of a Del Monte banana. In a lawsuit, she’s blaming the store for a miscarriage she had weeks later.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Weekly “Clarification,” 5/2): “In a Discovery item last week, Kit Hughes was quoted as saying that before she used Aqua Mirabilis Bath Salts she was a `shallow person.’ Hughes was a shower person. In a different story in the same issue, Jim Bailey was quoted as describing Lori Larsen (Tales of Larsen) as `wild and horny.’ What Bailey said was corny.”

ADS OF THE MONTH: I was slipped a newspaper ad promoting a shopping-mall appearance by Gerardo, the Latin Rapper. But the ad to the left of that won gets this month’s honors. It’s for Lovers Package (“Try One On for Sighs”) a chain store offering “Wonderfulwedding things meant to be seen,” including “lingerie, cards, games, bachelor & bachelorette party prizes.” Half the small ad consists of a photo of a model in gartered stockings, bra, panties, and a wedding veil. Reminds me of the old nudist-camp-wedding joke, where you can always tell who the best man is… Sears ran an ad for an electronics sale that showed dozens of dazed customers wandering into the mall, carrying out big-name products at “shocking” prices. What’s delicious about it is that the whole commercial makes no sense if you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead. In a similar old-movie reference, a Brut as has Kelly LeBrock discussing the “Essence of Man.” That was also the name of a device in Barbarella, in which the women of the corrupt sky city smoked from water pipes connected to a male prisoner in a water-filled glass cage. (By the way, a G-rated cartoon version of Barbarella has been optioned for TV series development.)

THE DRUG BUG: The Tobacco Institute, a venture of the big cigarette companies, offers free booklets entitled Tobacco: Helping Youths Say No. Hmm: an industry acknowledging that its product should be kept away from kids. Or is it? Not having read the book, I imagine it might be like all that counterproductive anti-drug propaganda of the past 25 years. You know, where the only “role models” of non-users are obnoxious jocks and hopeless squares…

BODY LANGUAGE: Pat Graney’s dance performance eloquently succeeded in contrasting healthy, natural sensuality with the clumsy, contrived “sexiness” of modern life as exemplified in that symbol of everything ex-hippie women despise, high heel shoes, at one point compared by Graney dancer Tasha Cook to Chinese foot-binding. (That many younger women have found a source of power in black dresses and uncomfy shoes is dismissed in the course of the piece, with the dancers eventually shucking off their im-ped-iments of needless discipline.) One must also mention the last of Graney’s four segments, in which she and her six other female dancers crawled across the floor nude (mostly with spines arched out to the audience). That this was accompanied by Mideval-inspired music (by Rachel Warwick) did not seem the least bit sacrilegious. Indeed (in a twist on liberal orthodoxy), Graney implied that old religious-based cultures held more respect for both body and spirit than current secular society.

TROUBLE IN FANTASYLAND?: French culture mavens, the Chicago Tribune reports, are predictably miffed at the rising upon their shores of Euro Disneyland: “A cultural Chernobyl” and “a black stain on the soul of France.” One of the American construction supervisors was quoted, “I know there were good political reasons for building it in France, but I wish they’d picked a country where the work ethic is a little more highly developed, like Germany.”

END OF THE ’80S ITEM #7: Working Women magazine lists the two hottest careers for 1991 grads as bankruptcy attorney and “outplacement specialist” — counseling the newly-unemployed.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (it was told in the Smithsonian last year; I just found it now): Before Muzak moved its HQ to Seattle, three-quarters of its 4,000-selection library had been recorded by a Czechoslovakia radio orchestra. The old owners liked its price and tolerated its admittedly odd musical flavor. It’s being steadily replaced by new tunes recorded mostly by synthesizers and “electronically enhanced” quartets. You have to wonder, though: what if Commies were hiding secret subliminal messages that got into offices and factories across America, messages like “Lower your productivity” or “Let America become a second-rate industrial power”?

CLEANING UP: Toronto entrepreneurs have brought one of Playboy’s most common and inexplicable images to life by starting the first commercial topless car wash. It’s apparently all legal (there is no contact with the customer’s body, only with the customer’s car). Perhaps this proves what Toronto’s own Marshall MacLuhan used to say about a car being essentially modern man’s new outer skin or something like that.

‘TIL AUGUST, when we might have warmth, visit Jersey’s Sports Club on 7th (a “sports bar” where people actually play sports inside instead of just watching them on TV), and resist the turning of Seafair into even more of a pro-war spectacle than it already is.

PASSAGE

One of the lines of the pathetically insufferable couple in the KBSG commercial, describing how only the sappy pop music of their childhoods saved their marriage: “We almost broke up over the wallpaper.”

REPORT

Following the “Misc.@5” anniversary show, I’ll probably hold another reading in August, as part of a COCA series. More in the next issue.

Kim Thompson insists that Mariel Hemingway’s line at the end of Manhattan was “NOT everybody gets corrupted;” somewhat diff. from my quote last time. All I can say is it ain’t the way I heard it.

Subscriptions are $7/yr., prepaid; fax subs are $9/yr.

My hypertext novel The Perfect Couple is available in photocopy-galley form for $10 prepaid.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Comogonic”

6/91 Misc. Newsletter

(fifth anniversary)

THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!

MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.

AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.

EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)

BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).

TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.

TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.

WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.

CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…

GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.

DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.

(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)

THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.

THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)

THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.

STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…

MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?

OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.

NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.

`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.

PASSAGE

From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”

EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′

The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Exsanguinate”

Jet City Lit:

So Many Seattle Writers, So Few Seattle Books

Article for Wire, May 1991

When I was a kid in a typically underfunded Washington school district, we were always hearing or reading stories about exotic lands like Korea or Harlem. But except for the incisive children’s books of Oregon’s Beverly Cleary (the Ramona series, etc.), we read nothing that took place in our own region. Without it ever being openly said, it was made clear that we were a forgotten corner of the world, stuck out in the west-coast-that-wasn’t-California, the region that didn’t count for anything.

When I was 12, the hope of every young male Washingtonian for national respect, the Seattle Pilots baseball team, left for Milwaukee. I remember national sports writers saying things like “Seattle, with its small-town country atmosphere, is clearly not ready for major league baseball.” Even from the perspective of a country boy who only got into Seattle occasionally, I knew that was mistaken as hell.

In the early ’70s, I discovered Ken Kesey’s two major novels. In the years since, a whole scene of “regional” novelists took inspiration from one of those novels. Unfortunately, they all chose the wrong one. Instead of Cuckoo’s Nest, with its bleak, wry humor and its portrayal of universal themes with a regional twist, they all chose to imitate the stoic machismo of Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nowadays, according to literary scene-chronicler Mitch O’Connell, there are at least a dozen guys (and, in a contrast from most fiction genres, they’re almost all guys) churning out what I consider to be Great Notion clones. (O’Connell actually gave me two dozen names, but he counts rural eastern Montana as “Pacific Northwest;” I don’t.) They’ve got titles like A River Runs Through It, Yellow Fish, and Honey in the Horn. They’re about hard, quiet men who live off The Land. Mainly, they’re romanticized fantasies of how noble and stoic Western farming is supposed to be. They’re upscale Westerns, and like most Westerns they’re fantasies created for Eastern consumption. The only member of this crew I’d recommend is Craig Lesley, who uses Native American mythology to contrast the romanticized memories of his people’s forbearers with the often harsh realities of modern Native life.

From what I’ve been able to piece together about my grandparents’ existence on the wheat ranches before World War I, it was a milieu of despair, disease, alcoholism, the frustration of staying married to somebody you hated, and the madness or weirdness that derives from all of that and gets passed on to future generations. It’s no wonder pre-WWII Eastern Washington seemed to be all Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic and Mormon. Only people who believed in an eternal reward for present suffering would stick around. That solemnness was not a mark of centeredness but a mask hiding a world of unfulfilled desires. Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson’s eastern Washington saga that became a 1988 film, shows this off quite well. So does This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, set in the beer-guns-and-cars teenage scene in the town of Concrete.

The Egg and I, Betty McDonald’s 1946 comic novel of a city slicker trying to make it as born-again farmers, not only tells a lot about the area as it was then but also launched the legendary low comedy of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Oh yeah, there’s also that Tom Robbins guy, whose books contain at least portions set in the back-to-nature fantasy that his fellow ex-hippies think Puget Sound and the Skagit Valley are or were.

So far, all the stories we’ve talked about had to do with Oregon, Idaho, and rural or pseudo-rural areas of Washington. I asked O’Connell if anybody wrote about places like Seattle and Tacoma; he was confused about why I’d even ask. “This is a literature about man and the environment. If people want to read about a city, there’s a million books about New York.” (As if that pair of islands off the Atlantic coast had anything in common with any mainland American city!)

In recent years, the Seattle area has become the home for many bestselling writers of stories set elsewhere. In the cases of Charles Johnson, Mark Helprin, and Pete Dexter, I’m proud that writers of their stature and quality are here. I hope they can inspire young writers to stick around. Writers who leave Washington tend to leave virtually no fictional record of their having been here. There’s little or no area content in the works of Frank Chin or the late Richard Brautigan, who both became known (in different decades) as San Francisco writers who happened to have lived here prior to their fame. Thomas Pynchon wrote much of his first novel, V., while living in a cheap U-District rental unit. (Surprisingly with the district’s recent massive development, it’s still standing.) The only piece of Seattle that’s in it, though, is the Yoyodyne Company, a lampoon of Boeing (where Pynchon worked as a technical writer).

I know of a 1987 local playwrights’ workshop at the New City Theater, where the instructor specifically told the writers not to set anything in an identifiable Seattle, because it was such a “given” that Seattle wasn’t worth talking about. Compare that to the situation in Portland, where novelist Katherine Dunn andfilmmaker Gus Van Sant aren’t afraid to confront the urban realities around them.

I don’t know more than a couple of people who are even trying to write fiction or drama set in Seattle, other than formula romances and mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local landmarks. It’s refreshing to read a J.A. Jance or Earl Emerson whodunit just to read about fictional characters eating at the Dog House, but I soon tire of the mystery genre’s predictability.

There are also a few romantic histories, such as Jane Adams’ Seattle Green, or Seattle by Charlotte Paul (“a passionate American saga of men and women fighting for the wealth and power of their chosen land…by the bestselling author of Phoenix Island“). Both feature the sort of billowy, porcelain-skinned woman who wouldn’t have lasted three weeks on the frontier. The early local white women were more like Norman Reilly Raine’sTugboat Annie stories in the Saturday Evening Post. While the stories (set in the fictional city of Secoma) really creaked along in Raine’s proto-sitcom style, the Annie character is quintessential Seattle: a woman who can work and drink as hard as any man, without needing to make a fuss about it.

Any look at the scores of nonfiction Seattle books shows a wealth of stories and story ideas. There’s quite a lot that remains to be documented about the last “real” city built in America before the suburban era, about a city just over a century old whose history is already being forgotten, about a city now considered a role model of tolerance but which was the birthplace of the officially racist Elks lodges, about a region that was a hotbed of radical labor movements (violently crushed) but later became obsessively middlebrow with the rise of Boeing’s corporate culture, a place that in the midst of being turned into a laid-back yuppie theme park has spawned the angry, passionate rock music discussed in other pages and issues of this magazine.

One of the most enduring nonfiction Seattle books is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the story of the Pilots. The economic forces that led to the birth and sudden death of that team tell a lot about a city trying too hard to become “world-class.”

I’ve met Weekly cover boy Jonathan Raban, whose new book of travel essays, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, includes a passage on why Seattle would be an ideal setting for a novel (its size, youthfulness, ethnic mix, Far East connections, last-frontier dynamic, etc.). Raban is a tall, affable middle-aged fellow with a Masterpiece Theater London accent. He offered several observations that would make great story fodder, such as the ludicrousness by Euro standards of a city whose “oldtimers” go back no more than three or four generations, whose “classic” era of architecture means the 1920s.

While “serious” writers disdain local subject matter, area cartoonists such as Portland’s John Callahan and Seattle’s Peter Bagge have no problem telling vibrant, personal stories of dark humor about themselves and the societies around them. The foremost of these cartoonists, ex-Seattleite Lynda Barry, has built her memories of her multiethnic Central Area childhood into a weekly comic strip, a bimonthly short-short story in Mother Jones magazine, and her novella The Good Times are Killing Me. A play based on her book has been running to good reviews in New York, where nobody apparently minds that it takes place in a mainland city.

Indeed, for the past year or so an obsessive cult following has gathered around a TV series about (among other things) the social structures of a typical Washington town. My sawmill-town home overlooked the mouth of the river fed by the Twin Peaks waterfall; I can assure you that virtually all the characters and stories on that show are a lot more naturalistic than you’d ever believe. While the show’s future is uncertain at this writing, it has proven that there is a culture here worth discussing and people eager to hear about it. It also showed me how to appreciate my culture in ways my grade-school teachers never dreamed.

12/90 Misc. Newsletter

MILLI VANILLA FRAUDS?

NEXT THEY’LL CLAIM ARCHIE AND JUGHEAD

DIDN’T SING THEIR SONGS!

Here at Misc., we’re holding a public wake for the 50-year-old Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge (known henceforth as Galloping Gertie II), which reached the end of its life “span” with a bang, not a whimper. Before the sinking, it had become a mile-long, 40-foot-wide construction/demolition project, strewn with a few scattered cars and Honey Buckets. It already looked like it was about to sink (something Boris S. Wart threatened but never accomplished on the J.P. Patches show). (Event info on other side.)

OUT WITH THE OLD, PLEASE!: Nostalgia is going to be the death of America. Every previous fad added something to the national heritage, for good or ill. Nostalgia only subtracts. It boils the flavor and texture away from our past, leaving a gooey syrup of vague memories. It’s getting harder and harder to find a restaurant, store, or beauty salon where the sound system plays any recent music. “Square” places play top 40 hits of 1956-69. “Hip” places play hipper music from that same era (Muddy Waters instead of the Beatles). Only in designer-jean stores can you hear songs by groups whose members are all still alive. And many of them take pride in never playing a single riff that isn’t reorganized Led Zeppelin.

ADDITIONALLY, I’m finding it harder and harder to explain to people that I’m neither (1) a nostalgist for the hippie era nor (2) a conservative. I regard hippie-era politics as a well-intentioned failure. The progressive, populist side of American leftist tradition got smothered by what we might as well call a bohemian aesthetic. There will never be a real left in this country until it stops depicting all working-class people as “the unwashed masses,” as hicks and flaming fascists. The world is not the few enlightened “Us” vs. all the ignorant “Them.” It’s all of “Us.”

NORTHERN REVOLT: The Canadian subsidiary of Popsicle Brands is under vocal attack from children from Victoria, BC (Mile 0 of the Trans-Canada Highway) to St. John’s, Newfoundland (the other Mile 0). According to the Vancouver Sun, the company promised free Nintendo cartridges to kids sending in 15,000 points’ worth of Popsicle sticks; instead, 10,000 kids got only letters of apology claiming that the company’s stock of 6,000 cartridges had been depleted and that substitute prizes would be given to everybody else sometime next year. Still, maybe the kiddie Canucks ought to be grateful to get even that; in a famous mid-’80s essay, Ontario’s ownMargaret Atwood wrote of growing up with Popsicle labels offering wonderful prizes but bearing the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Good Only in U.S.”

NO FREUDIAN COMMENTS, PLEASE: A staffer at King County Juvenile Hall reports that teenage boys inside there are signifying their gang membership by affixing Dole or Chiquita banana stickers onto their belts.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Manna Raisins & Oat Bran Flakes cereal, made in Delta, B.C. and “sprouted for life.” It’s “Certified Organic,” but (oddly, considering the name) isn’t certified kosher.

IS NOBODY INCORRUPT?: The Wall St. Journal (10/29) reports that the Doris Day Animal Fund Inc. spends 90 percent of its income on direct-mail fundraising (billed in official budget statements as “public education”).

AD VERBS: Rainier Light’s “It’s R Light” commercials are much better than the previous ad agency’s work, but they’re still hollow compared to the classic Heckler Associates spots, and for the same reason. While the Heckler ads had real fun in promoting the beer as a beverage for enjoyment, both of its successor agencies fell into the trap of selling a target audience on an image of itself, with the product merely a supporting player in the drama.

NO MORE FUR AT NORDSTROM: This is how an industry dies, when the first PR-conscious retailer proudly capitulates to public furor (and flat market shares). But fur is more than an inefficient source of outerwear; it’s one reason we’re here. The trapping of wild fur animals was the first white industry in the Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Co. and others subsidized many of the first non-military settlements in Washington Territory. They were supported by sales to the society ladies of Europe, whose essential financial contribution was totally ignored in last year’s books on women in Northwest history.

SAY IT AIN’T SO RUMOR OF THE MONTH: Is the Comet Tavern going to be upscaled?

(latter-day note: It wasn’t.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 11/14): “A story of 4 kids and how they died/`Anybody who has a teen-ager will related to this’ tale of tragedy.” Now that’s headline writing in the classic manner, almost Victorian in its cadence.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: It’s a shame that The Facts has such ugly design and typography, because some truly eloquent African-American voices may be found there. For example, hear the bitter “Life Among the Thorns” edition of F. Justina Nubay’s column “Say It With Flowers”: “I wholeheartedly believe that Thanksgiving should continue to be the only day when public spirited people ply the hungry with turkeys, pies, and other filling foods, enough to last them the entire year. Like the howling hyena, the hungry and the homeless, for the time remaining, should continue to gorge themselves on carrion and roam their jungles in wild anguish.”…At Cause is a Christian paper with a difference: A Reubenesque nude drawing on the front page, an essay titled “Party On!” saying it’s OK for Christians to “have exhilaration, ecstasy, bliss” — including being gay and/or transvestite if they wish to be so. (Editor M.F. Whealen seems to be an ex-Scientologist, from the use of certain catch phrases.)…The Oregon-based Sinsemilla Tipsmagazine folds after 10 years. Publishers blame the War on Drugs, which they claim has made people scared to sell or advertise in the mag.

CATHODE CORNER: Does the rash of inside jokes on The Simpsons (Marge’s surprise at “a Simpson on a T-shirt,” the on-air homage to Bart’s Macy parade balloon, his chalkboard message “I am not a 32-year-old woman”) mean the show has passed its peak?…A producer has paid millions for all rights to The Ed Sullivan Show; plans to release several video compilations, including the censored TV debuts by famous rockers and a tape of 50 different people doing the Twist. But will they ever include the peg-legged tap dancer, or the National Model Race Car Championship? (A licensed version of Sullivan’s most popular feature, the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, now appears in Spanish on cable’s Univision.)

KRIME KORNER: A Seattle man was fatally shot by an unlicensed Safeway security guard for allegedly pocketing a pack of cigarettes. Now will you listen to me about the dangers of smoking?… The Martinsburg, W.Va. city council plans to require panhandlers to buy $25 licenses or face jail terms. But how do you get the money to tell people you don’t have any money?

MALLED DOWN: The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $50,000 grant (with a 2/1 matching requirement) to the Rouse Co. to sponsor non-threatening art programs in shopping centers (including Westlake Center). Now we know the true priorities of new NEA head John Frohnmayer. He’s using “bringing art to the people” and corporate matching-fund requirements as ways of rewarding works acceptable to business/marketing interests.

PRESSED: Our news media, presuming us all to be beer-swilling xenophobes, devoted their attention on 11/22-23 to how nothing had really happened in the Persian Gulf lately, and only cursorily mentioned that the last major European dictator fell from power. The beginning of the end might have been foretold in an item from USA Today (11/12): “Richard Needham, British minister for Northern Ireland, apologized for calling Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a “cow” during a car-phone call to his wife. A paramilitary group in Northern Ireland picked up the call on a radio monitor and sent a recording of it to a news agency.”…What they didn’t tell you about the female, Socialist, pro-contraception Irish president is that the position is largely ceremonial, a sort of elected king. She will be less able to take political stances than when she was in the Irish senate.

SECTION BEE: The Killer Bees may finally be on our way! (Times, 11/3) It turns out that they’re not really that much more vicious to humans, but they are less tameable and they do drive out domesticated breeds.

XMAS GIFT OF THE YEAR: The Dance Aerobics game cartridge by our Redmond neighbors at Nintendo. You can vicariously experience the self-punishment and body-consciousness of aerobics without having to actually do the exercises. It’s one of only two games I’ve seen with a female lead character…. The Trivial Pursuit ’80s Edition is historically inaccurate. It’s got a question about Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, who was on from ’77 to ’80….Lynnwood’s Pacific Trading Cards is drawing national attention for itsAndy Griffith Show card set….Trump: The Game (“It’s Whether You Win”) was marked down from $39.95 to $19.90….Seattle’sGenerra has a “Men’s Collective” shirt line, for junior execs old enough to remember their student-Maoist pasts (they’re even made in the PRC!).

MORE VEGETARIANS IN LEATHER: The Vancouver rockmag Discorder sez the next big thing’s “straight-edge rock,” punk-like bands (including Seattle’s Undertow) who belong to the Hare Krishna movement. Their premise: Just as punk stripped rock of impurities and distractions, so should we do with our lives.

PHILM PHIRE: Remains from the blaze at Universal Studios (soon to be owned by Panasonic) soon became a major attraction on the Universal Tour; the simulated “burning building” attraction was temporarily closed. The sale of Universal/MCA leaves Time Warner as the last major US-owned record company. It also brings Japanese money into US publishing (MCA owns Putnam, Berkley and Ace).

NOT IN STORE: You won’t get to shop this Xmas at B.N. Genius, that land of expensive electronic playthings that you’d never buy but always loved to play with in the store. Meanwhile, the end of the Northgate Woolworth leaves only the downtown store as an inexpensive source for hats, socks, and hobby supplies, not to mention the long shelf of cheesy crossword magazines. (It’s also one of the last places still selling Clark candy bars.)

PICK A PEC: The 11/24 Newsweek (the same issue with the essay that claimed that “Cynicism is alien to America”) reported that trendy LA men are now getting silicone implants to make their upper bodies look more muscular. Look dudes, this recent interest in “men reclaiming the feminine side of their natures” ought to mean taking up the smart things about womanhood; just as women’s assertiveness training generally excludes lessons in beer-swilling or sexual harassment.

WE’LL TALK AGAIN in the palindromic year of 1991 (that year which picky purists insist is the real start of the decade), when I’ll count exactly how many times you could have seen It’s A Wonderful Life this holiday season. Until then, watch the astounding South Africa Now 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCTS, try to avoid calling the NY Times crossword-help 900 line, appreciate the appropriateness of the big Marilyn Monroe mural inside the Broadway Pay ‘n Save (shouldn’t all drugstores bear the images of people who died from prescription overdoses?), read The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pray for snow, work for peace, and consider the words of Frank Zappa on unauthorized musical sampling: “It’s just so cheese-oid.”

NOTICE

Sign at the Wood Shop, Pioneer Square: “Authentic East German nutcrackers. Last chance. Buy now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

REPORT

It’s been threatened before, but now it’s really gonna happen. I’m holding two live readings this month: Sun., 12/16, at the Two Bells Tavern (10 p.m.) and Wed., 12/19, at the Rendezvous (7 and 9 p.m., with vintage educational films). Each show contains at least some different material; each is a partial benefit for my Perfect Couple novel publication fund. (The novel is still available only on Mac disks, for $6.)

Subscribers may notice a new mailing-label design. My old label program crashed (thank God and Apple I could retrieve the data with the ResEdit program).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Vituperative”

10/90 Misc. Newsletter

CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!

It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.

LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)

ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.

DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.

FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.

PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.

IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.

STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.

CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)

OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.

NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?

ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.

UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.

YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.

AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”

‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.

PASSAGE

Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”

REPORT

It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.

I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Esconce”

3/90 Misc. Newsletter

Russia’s Getting A Multi-Party System!

(Wish We Had One.)

Spring, they say, is just around the corner, but you don’t have to wait any longer for Misc., the info-mosaic that wonders why you can now get a Big Mac in Moscow, but you still can’t get one in Winslow. You call that American freedom of choice? And hey, you vegetarians and epicurean snobs out there, stop scoffing long enough to consider the years of preparation McDonald’s undertook in making food ingredients in the USSR with the quality control needed for modern agribusiness. Most USSR food is still “natural” (as in less-processed), scarce and often rotting. Their system never developed efficient production and distribution; ours perverted those virtues into for-their-own-sake obsessions.

Giving Workers the Rack: I was set to write this month about the imminent closure of Nordstrom’s U-District branch (which has been there in various forms and addresses since the days of raccoon coats), but more important news came in the state’s $30-million decision in favor of employees stuck working extra hours for free. It took the pro-business but out-of-town Wall St. Journal to print the workers’ side of the labor dispute (kudos to reporter Susan C. Faludi, who uncovered not just mandatory volunteer overtime but a corporate culture of bullying, treachery, bigotry, and forced “happiness”). The local media have been as one-sided as they could get away with, taking the angle of “Bad news for Nordstrom” (Times headline, 2/16), never “good news for Nordstrom employees.” I can believe the worst stories and still understand the pro-management employees leafleting outside the stores. Some sincerely believe in the total-hustle policy; others just might be into the “defender” role familiar to analysts of dysfunctional families. What the cracks behind the mandatory Nordic smile mean to Nordstrom’s “service” reputation remains to be seen (computer magazines regularly publish columns suggesting it as a customer-relations role model to computer companies). Even more importantly, many facets of the scandal relate back to the laid back/mellow reputation of the Northwest, whose consumers madethe Big N. what it is today. Nordstrom is one of a handful of institutions that mean the Northwest to the rest of the world (along with the Nordstrom-founded Seahawks, Boeing, The Far Side, Heart, and Ramtha). What does it say when so many of us prefer to buy from a place that hires people on the basis of their conformity to the corporate “look” (a nebulous criterion that could be used against those with too-kinky hair or too-dark skin), and apparently treats them like well-dressed little Oliver and Olivia Twists?

Snow Wonder: You can tell real Seattlites by their attitude towards a big urban snowstorm. To them, it’s a source of childlike wonder and merriment. To suburbanites and Easterners, it’s a nuisance. To Southern Californians, it’s a mix of terror and shock that the weather they love to talk about to prove their “adopted native” stance can do something this big. I loved it, even if it didn’t last longer than four days. I almost got to see a Samurai turn over, live and in person!

The Fine Print (sticker affixed to the back cover of Ernie’s Postcard Book, funny-cat photos by Tony Mendoza, published by Capra Press): “The captions on the back of each postcard are unauthorized and not the work of the author.”

Local Publication of the Month: Adbusters Quarterly, a newsprint magazine on how we are all prisoners of the North American ad culture and even what we can do about it. A sort of radicalized McLuhanism, from the apparent capital of anarchist thought in the western hemisphere, Vancouver.

Modulations: The KZOK-AM frequency, long known as KJET and more recently as KQUL (which played moldie-oldies automation tapes inherited from the old KUUU), is playing new (or at least recently-recorded) music again, mass-market metal under the slogan Z-Rock. If the quintessential KJET song was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” the quintessential Z-Rock song is Guns n’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s nice that the new format also has room for local acts, though a lot of it sounds like KZOK sounded in 1979.

Cathode Corner: I’m trying to decide whether The Simpsons is the best TV show of the past 10 years or the best ever. From Bart’s different weekly chalkboard affirmations (“I will not instigate revolution”) to the gags you need a pause button to get (the nuclear-plant entrance sign, “Unauthorized Visitors Will Be Shot”), every second is packed with sharp humor and social commentary. And to think that it all comes from an ex-Olympian, Matt Groening (whose Life in Hell list of Forbidden Words for the ’90s alone qualifies him as world-class). The show’s setting, Springfield, is, of course, the name of the most famous “hick town” in Groening’s native Oregon; the nuclear plant where Homer Simpson works looks a lot like the one north of Portland on the Columbia. Am pleased to report that Bart T-shirts are being visibly displayed as far away as Federal Way, with Bart-head-shaped bubble gum due in June.

Everything’s Not Coming Up Roses: Oregon has a lot to cheer about this winter, between The Simpsons, the TrailBlazers and the OSU men’s basketball team. But there’s no pride in the governor’s race, in which incumbent Neil Goldschmit was forced out when rumors of a marital split came true (apparently we can have a divorced man in the White House but not in Salem). The rumor about the rumor claims it was started by GOP candidate Leon Frohmeyer, state attorney general and self-proclaimed environmentalist (really, say more radical eco-activists, an architect of compromise deals with logging and mining interests).

Power Politics: Downtown Blackout II lasted four hours, while its ’88 predecessor lasted four days. Could City Light have worked harder knowing that the thousands of Lotto players in three counties were losing their chances at becoming $6 million men and women (Lotto’s dedicated computer-phone lines are routed through downtown)? Ehh, probably not….

Tourist Trappings: Some multinational has started a mini-cruise ship, the Spirit of Puget Sound. Its ads promise “three hours of live entertainment and fabulous food” along with the usual seaside scenery. Don’t they know what the phrase “a three-hour tour” has come to mean?

Junk Food of the Month: Frozen dinners for kids. Banquet and others have devised microwave versions of all the classic kiddie meals (hot dogs, chicken, chili, etc.) with stereotyped kiddie graphics on the boxes. They’re presumably intended for the growing numbers of offspring with all-working parents, who must fend for themselves after school. Wish I had those things back when I was in that situation.

End of the ’80s Item #4: Perrier water can be bad for you!

Street of Silence: It’s sad to witness the death-by-installments of Broadway, the Aurora Village of urban business districts. Speculators would rather see buildings go empty than lower unrealistic rents. Hence, over a dozen major storefronts are now empty, from the venerable Broadway Theater to the Benneton sweater stand that replaced the cool Different Drummer bookstore. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn’t cruise there much anymore, now that he’s got a house in Kent. Only Keeg’s remains of thesix furniture stores that had made Broadway Seattle’s furniture row back when E. Pike was its auto row. (But the long-pending Dairy Queen finally opened, that venerable chain’s first in-town Seattle store since the mid-’70s.)

(latter-day note: Broadway again thrives, with indie businesses replacing downsizing chains (including an ethnic restaurant where Dairy Queen was). Aurora Village got demolished. Keeg’s closed, leaving no more furniture stores on Capitol Hill except used office furniture outlets.)

Street of Noise: The Pike Place Market authorities are all a-flutter over what they claim are semi-secret plans by the NYC speculators who may or may not own the buildings to turn the Market into a high-priced, chain-stored parody of itself. What they’re not saying is that this would only accelerate a process the Market leaders already instigated, starting with sweatshirt stores and tourist-oriented parking projects. The promotion of the Market as a sight rather than a marketplace has already affected the remaining farmers, who see Saturday after Saturday of crowded walkways full of sightseers but bereft of actual food purchasers.

Ink Inc.: Just as we declared Spy magazine “outski” for 1990, imitations began to sprout. If the real Spy’s quaint we’re-from-New-York-and-you’re-not attitude doesn’t quite get your soul afire, you can enjoy self-conscious prose, retro art and graph-chart stories inWigwag (for the Garrison Keillor audience), Forbes Publishing’s Egg (for the most emptyheaded lifestyle wannabes), and Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly, designed by Mark Michaelson (who worked on the infamous summer ’79 UW Daily with Lynda Barry, John Keister, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Mike Lukovich, and an underachieving writer who does some little newsletter about pop culture). And is it a mere coincidence that the mass media have become overtaken with chronicling the daily life of Spy’s most frequent satirical target, Donald Trump?

Hearts and Thorns: If Christmas is when everybody’s expected to be in a nuclear family, then Valentine’s Day is when every adult is expected to be in a couple. This is a reasonable if superficial conclusion from the newspapers and the self-help books. There are, at last, support groups for people who need to learn about getting out of bad relationships, but still none about getting into good ones. To admit one’s wish to share one’s life with another goes against the unisex rugged individualism of early-’90s America. To call a place a “singles’ bar” these days is to be insulting; to still be out looking is to be shut out of a lot of social activities and, despite insurance-institute reports that hetero AIDS may never take off in this country, even to be denounced as a menace to society. At least you can get candy really cheap during the following week.

My Nightmare: I dreamed of an old man with white hair whining, “Ever wonder why you can’t get your hooded robes white again after a night of cross burning? Nothing seems to get all the smoke and ash out, not even the old-fashioned real bleach with the sediment at the bottom of the jug.”… I also have dreams in which Denny Hill was never torn down, and had by now become Seattle’s most fashionable residential neighborhood.

‘Til next time, write your Senators to stop the ban against Silly String (we have only one party to spray for our country!), see Roger & Me, don’t buy from the itinerant street gang of perfume salespeople, beware of any self-proclaimed “environmental President” who came from the top of the oil industry, and heed these words of Tim O’Brien: “A real war story is never moral. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it.”

REPORT

Factsheet Five, the Publisher’s Weekly of Xerox and desktopped literature, likes MISC. “Witty and interesting, even for those of us who live clear across the continent,” sez editor Mike Gundelroy. If you like it half as much, you might consider subscribing to MISC. (with one of Fait Divers’* funny mini-posters as a free gift).

(*Say “Fay Dee Vare”)

BEACON

Philosopher Elaine Pagels, interviewed in Bill Moyers’ A World of Ideas: “Guilt involves a sense of importance in the drama. To say that one is not guilty is also to acknowledge that one is in fact quite powerless.”

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Ataraxia”

11/89 Misc. Newsletter

Empty Space Renovators Find Asbestos in Showbox Walls;

You Thought the Punks Looked Deadly!

Welcome to yet another ennui-packed edition of Misc., the column that wonders whether Monty Python’s Graham Chapman would have wanted to die on the same day as, and have his obituary upstaged by that of, the race horse Secretariat, and decides that he might well have. This is the special newsletter edition, containing (not much, but some) additional material, cut from the version in ArtsFocus. While that tabloid was on indefinite hiatus this summer, I put out a special newsletter version and solicited for subscriptions. Two people replied. This is for them, and anyone else who might end up applying for the mailing list.

NO JANE, NO PAIN: I do not mourn the impending departure of Jane Pauley, who has held her position on Today for 13 years despite a distinct incompetence. She was particularly bad in her early years, but still maintained a level of journalistic ineptitude to the end (we’ve already mentioned her interview with the Seattle Rep’s Dan Sullivan, in which she never “got” the idea that non-NYC theater is real theater).

STAGE OF DECLINE: The demise of the Pioneer Square Theater has been dissected elsewhere. I’ll simply note that at one time, a local theater company was able to support itself mostly on its own receipts, and might have continued to do so had its original team stayed in town. Another case of LA ruining everything.

SPECIAL INTEREST: The John Lennon purists (a bunch of gracelessly-aging ex-potheads) may scorn the memorial Visa cards authorized by Yoko, but I love ’em. There’s nothing quite like going over your limit as the receipt-stamper pulls across the face that sang “Imagine no possessions.”

THE WORLD SERIOUS: So the A’s, thanks to Mike Moore and their other ex-Mariners, finally won. “But where in all this,” you haven’t asked, “is ex-A’s owner Charles O. Finley, the man who wanted to give us orange baseballs?” He’s still dabbling in sports. While Oakland was in mourning over the quake, Finley was safe up here, giving a public demonstration of his new glow-in-the-dark footballs. Their fluorescent green stripes are supposed to make them more visible at night in dimly-lit high school stadia; which would ruin one of the joys of the high-school game. O well, at least they’ll still have under-the-bleachers fights and the sound of both schools’ bands simultaneously playing “On Wisconsin” as their own fight song.

COME BACK, SAM! ALL IS FORGIVEN!: Am still trying to learn whether the Samuel E. Schulman credited as publisher of the new magazine Wigwag is the illustrious ex-Sonics owner and B-movie mogul of the same name. The mag is subtitled “A Picture of American Life;” it looks a bit like Spy and reads a lot like the last half-hour of All Things Considered. Lotsa smug Ivy League “populism” and pretentious cuteness. It does have one nice item on loneliness from the only single black woman in Tucson.

THE PLANE TRUTH: At this writing, the Boeing strike is going strong. It’s a novelty among recent U.S. strikes: it’s against an industrial manufacturer that’s been doing well enough that the usual pleas that the battered workers “sacrifice a little more” to keep management comfy just don’t work. If successful, this may be the turning point in American labor. People at Boeing and other firms may be getting tired of being pushed around, of getting sick from hazardous chemicals only to have management claim it’s just psychosomatic or “hysterical,” of being treated as a mere “cost” to be “contained,” of having any disagreement with any of this denounced as disloyalty to the corporate “family.”

MEANWHILE, Martin Selig’s fall from the heights of local office development should not surprise. In an ongoing attempt to cut corners from the costs of his big projects, he’s been late on payments to smaller suppliers for years. He got caught when he tried to slow down his payments to outfits big enough to fight back: first City Light, then some big creditors. In the end though, an ex-strip-mall-builder in an overbuilt market was no match for the big guys from LA and Toronto, now poised for total dominance.

TOY BOY: The first Xmas product with promise is the Heartthrob game by Milton Bradley, the years-late answer to Mattel’s Mystery Date game (circa 1962). It’s for girls ages 8-12, who draw and trade cards pertaining to their ideal boy’s traits, trying to assemble the most attractive guy possible.

GAS PAINS: The great oil slump continues, as Chevron sells or demolishes some of its most prominent locations (Ballard and Market, Evergreen Point) while the independent Gull sells all its Seattle stations. Gull, along with Mobil, thus joins these other long-gone brands from town (how many do you remember?): American, Carter, Douglas, Enco, Flying A, General, Gilmore, Gulf, Hancock, Hudson, Payless, Phillips 66, Red Crown, Richfield, Rocket, Signal, Standard, Time, USA, Valvoline, Vickers, and Wilshire. Seattle never had any outlets, however, for Clark Oil (no relation), the Midwestern brand that sold premium gas only.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Belgian waffle snacks at Gaufres (“gauf”), a storefront at 106 James with the shortest menu of any restaurant in town. For a buck, you get a small cup of coffee and a hot, glazed waffle on a sheet of wax paper. No butter, syrup, or whipped cream; this is finger food. Eat too many, though, and you’ll have a “gauf figure.”…Seattle’s Starting Right Co. now has the first gourmet frozen dinners for babies – strained, pre-cooked mounds of rice/squash/cod, zucchini/potatoes/beef, and pasta/carrots/turkey.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Miscellania Unlimited (again, no relation) is launching a new line of Northwest-produced comic books. The starting lineup ranges from the funny-philosophical Morty the Dog (who was “killed off” during his previous series from Starhead Comics; how he returns is the chief mystery) to the all-too-typical Rhaj (a female warrior in ancient Egypt with big eyes, a big knife, and a bigger bare bosom)…. I wish somebody here had a paper as lively as the Portland Free Press. It’s a monthly left-anarchist broadsheet concerned with toxic dumping, deforestation, and particularly with the Citizens Crime Commission, a panel of Oregon’s wealthiest and most powerful people who lobby for more prisons and fewer civil rights using the “drug emergency” for a justification….Every two months Factsheet Five, a national directory of small-press and self-published matter, includes several listings of Seattle-area “zines” available only by mail. As space permits, I’ll occasionally reprint one of these listings. This time it’s The Whetstone, described by FF (haven’t seen it myself) as “a new ‘magazine for independent people’ on news ignored by the major media…the alleged A-bomb test at Port Chicago in 1944, the AIDS-syphilis connection and alternative high-energy sources.” Available for $15/4 issues from FIFE Publications, Box 45792, Seattle 98145-0792.

THE KING AND THEM: Yul Brynner, according to one of those son-of-star-tells-all books, had steamy affairs with many of your favorite Hollywood leading ladies, and also with the actress who later became Nancy Reagan. It’s a gruesome thought, I know, but not as shocking as a pic published last year in the French Photo magazine, a full-frontal nude of a pre-stardom Brynner — with hair on his scalp!

COLOR ME BLUE: COCA recently held a performance by NY artist Mike Bildo. Three local women walked onstage and spent the next 10 minutes brushing bright blue paint on their nude selves. Occasionally, Bildo instructed the models to tastefully flay themselves on one of two large paper “canvases.” A group calling itself the Gorilla Girls picketed outside, calling the work an “appropriation” of women. The Gorillas’ literature drew heavily on quotes from Alice Walker, a writer who has dismissed any criticism of her work with the all-damning phrase “white male attitude.” The Bildo piece did NOT advocate male power over women. It questioned the valuesof originality and individualism, a topic frequently covered in feminist art writing. The models, the six clothed musicians, and Bildo were all re-enacting roles devised in 1960 by conceptual-art pioneer Yves Klien, who in turn was commenting on both French ooh-la-la exhibitionism and on the role of the nude figure in art. (Bildo’s enactment was closer to Klein’s concept than was the re-edited version of Klien’s event in the exploitation film Mondo Cane ). Body painting is an old tradition in other cultures, and has oft been used in Western alternative art. Weeks before Bildo, Karen Finley appeared on the same stage, her nude self covered in chocolate syrup, giving a charged lecture on bodies and body images. The chocolate motif had been used in ’74, with similar metaphors, in Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie. The UK female punk band The Slits once posed for an album cover in mud and loincloths (as re-created this fall by the Seattle male punk band Mudhoney). Had the Gorilla Girls overcome their own stereotypical notions about gender and power, they’d have been treated to a spectacle full of images worthy of smart criticism. (Something like this section may appear in the KCMU Wire).

IN CONCLUSION, copies of the special “What I Did This Summer” report are available by sending a SASE to Box 203, 1630 Boylston, Seattle 98122, as is information on my novel The Perfect Couple (currently available only as Macintosh computer software). Until our next report, vote for Rice (claiming you’re “too hip to vote” is just the same as voting for Jewett), see the Art of Music Video Festival at 911 (no, I won’t bow to the current fashion and call it “the 911 space,” though I might start calling my home “the Clark space”), and remember this quotation from Goethe: “Everything that needs to be found out has been found out.The hard part is finding it again.”

10/89 Misc. Newsletter

(the first self-contained newsletter edition)

Welcome one and all to the never-say-die return of Misc., the only column in town that wonders why “original flavor” toothpaste doesn’t taste like “original flavor” bubble gum.

This is a successor to a column that ran monthly in ArtsFocus magazine for three years. For those who weren’t with us before our summer hiatus, this is a compendium of things that usually aren’t official art events, but are still part of the world in which we and our arts live. Much of this edition happens to consist of corporate mating and decompsing rituals; other months have dealt with politics, books, religion, music, mass behavior, fine food and wine.

WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation (far more important than the 20th anniv. of Woodstock) by meditating on the “herald of impeachment” still displayed at the Comet Tavern and reminiscing about those pre-Reagan days, when fewer people mistook corruption for a virtue. I finished a novel, to be put out somewhere within the next year. Saw the opening of the first segment of the bus tunnel, a slick brown shopping-mall-of-transit designed to make suburban commuters feel at home. Also saw the construction of the Outlet Mall, now open with complete designer stores by Liz Claiborne, Evan Piccone and others, right on the Burlington exit to the north Sound’s Calif.-colony “getaways.” The annual Popllama Records Picnic was censored by anti-rock forces in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Dept., but promoter Conrad Uno may have kept happy by pretending he was the guy all this summer’s headlines from Japan were about. This second greenhouse-effect summer ended on a stunning autumnal equinox day (even to me, not a weather person). The Ave’s venerable Cafe Allegro was closed for the wedding of two longtime employees (the reception there, the alternative ceremony at the U’s Medicinal Herb Garden). Later that night, Broadway’s Gravity Bar stayed open all night for performances and tarot readings.

DENTAL FLOSS TYCOONS: According to a Wall St. Journal piece, two guys in a New York jail spent months quietly trading cigarettes for dental floss, then hand-weaving the nylon thread into a sturdy rope. They used it one night to carefully climb down from their fourth-floor window. They were still seen by a passerby and got caught.

THE EMPEROR’S NUE CLOTHES: Robert Campeau was forced to turn over control of his dept. store empire to bankers. For a clue to his possible mismanagement, note Campeau’s Bon Marché and its slogan, “The Nue Hits for Back to School.” You’d think a Quebeçois would know better than to sell clothes via the French feminine word for “nude.” (Of course, it’d fit if the promotion includedGuess? jeans.)… Nordstrom might buy Marshall Field of Chicago, which owned Frederick & Nelson for over 50 years. If so, then Frederick’s will be paying Nordy’s for the right to make Frangos (Frederick’s invented them, but Field’s kept the copyright when it sold Frederick’s).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 8/12): “Incarceration for man called too short.” Runner-up (P-I, 8/30): “Margo St. James wants to see a prostitute for president” (haven’t most of them been?).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Frosty Paws are imitation ice cream treats for dogs, made with no harmful lactose. “Not harmful to humans, but made for dogs.” For humans, meanwhile, there are the new Trix Pops, by General Mills subsidiary Vroman Foods, in the three classic Trix colors (including Orange Orange!)…. Ralston Purina’s new Barbie cereal is the same recipe as its Nintendo cereal; only the shapes and boxes are different. If boys and girls can’t be taught to play with the same toys, at least they can eat the same sugar puffs.

DIRTY DANCING ON MY GRAVE: Just a few months after Vestron Pictures flayed itself all over the Seattle International Film Festival, it went under. Still undetermined: the fate of Vestron’s unreleased products like the fake-DePalma ripoff Paint It Black and of Dan Ireland, whose onetime beloved Egyptian Theater was, at time of Vestron’s first layoffs, showing a cultured, sophisticated James Bond shoot-em-up…. Meanwhile, thanks to Sony’s buyouts, Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records are finally owned by the same company; while Disney’s acquisition of the Jim Henson organization was probably inevitable. Henson’s recent shows have gotten mired in the worst Disneyesque cutesy-wootsies.

WHOLE LOTTO BLUES: A Portland man killed himself in early Sept., thinking he’d lost a $3 million lottery ticket. In fact, he never had it, since the lottery computer registered no winner in that drawing. Undaunted by the bad PR, Ore. still plans to start legal football betting.

HOW WE DOIN’ ON TIME?: David Letterman turns out to be a shareholder and board member of one of the companies buying baseball’s own stupid human trick, the Mariners. He’s said how much he loves Seattle during segments with ex-locals George Miller and Lynda Barry, but that alone wouldn’t stop the majority owners from moving the team. We’ll know their intentions the next time they have to choose whether to keep a star player (Argyros got rid of anybody who got good enough to become expensive).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: National Boycott News. Far from the amateur rabble sheet depicted in a recent Lacitis column, it’s a very long, well-researched compendium on who in corporate America is doing what and why we should care. Editor Todd Putnam keeps revising his listings to reflect changes in commercial behavior or new information, leading to fascinating sagas about the evolving notions of “good business.”

END OF THE ’80S ( #1): David Horsey’s Boomer’s Song, proclaimed “the worst comic strip in the papers” by our first Misc. column in ’86, has gone out with a whimper. No big Gary Larson/Berke Breathed sendoff; the P-I buried the strip’s discontinuation in a notice about the return of Andy Capp (formerly in the Times).

END OF THE ’80S (#2): That American institution, the convenience store, is in deep trouble. Circle K tried to make up for disappointing national sales by raising prices, a counterproductive move. Plaid Pantry is in bankruptcy, after trying to strike an alliance with Arco. Even the mighty 7-Eleven is reeling in debt from a buyout, and is raising short-term cash by turning company-owned outlets into franchises.

END OF THE `80S (#3): Cuisinarts Inc. declared bankruptcy. Only major asset: unsalable inventory. Has it been so long since its food processors were so scarce, you could only buy a certificate for one?

NO MORE MEAN GREEN?: The gov’t’s thinking of redesigning our money, officially to make cash transactions more traceable. They’d be the first changes since the exchange-for-silver guarantee was dropped. They could change the colors or even print Universal Product Codes with each serial number! This society sorely needs to de-mystify money; turning it into just another ugly official document might help.

’90S PREDICTION #1: The “drug war” is replacing the cold war as the official excuse to stage military adventures abroad. By strange coincidence, the only countries to be targeted will just happen to be countries where U.S. business interests seek more control over the local governments.

NORTHERN BYTES: If you haven’t been to Vancouver lately, you haven’t seen a city “go big time” and do it right, with some big exceptions. The downtown East End, a collection of residential hotels and pubs that some feared would be eradicated with Expo 86, has been preserved as a neighborhood and as a film site. It’s the unnamed city in 21 Jump Street; the downtown-underground portion of the light-rail system (above-ground elsewhere) was a murder site in the last Friday the 13th film. Expo itself is now a vacant concrete slab winding along the waterfront, except for three buildings: the Science World museum (check out the “Music Machines” room, sounds just like Throbbing Gristle playing Charles Ives); the 86 Street disco (where any slam dancing is punished with a thorough beating by the most fascistic bouncers in the west); and the floating McDonald’s. The BC gov’t sold the the rest to Hong Kong developers, whose predatory developments elsewhere in town have led to unfortunate racial attacks against the established Chinese-Canadian community. But the best sight in today’s Vancouver is a stencil-painted graffito downtown, “Jesus Saves,” modified by the spray-painted addition, “Gretzky scores on the rebound.”

YES, THERE WILL be another of these reports, and it will feature our own ’80s nostalgia review (get your nominations in now for what’s worth remembering and what’s lest-we-forget). `Til then, read the haunting comic book Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, listen to Car Talk on KPLU, and heed these words of the immortal Irving Berlin: “You’re not sick. You’re just in love.”

Published monthly. Subscriptions: $6 per year by check to Clark Humphrey, 1630 Boylston #203, Seattle 98122. Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS. (c) 1989 Fait Divers Enterprises.

12/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

WE’LL SUPPORT UNITED KEEPING THE TOKYO ROUTEONLY IF THEY’LL CUT THE “DISCO GERSHWIN” ADS

Look: I’m not “just kidding folks.” When I say something here in Misc., I MEAN IT. (OK, the call for a crackdown on violent opera music was a bluff, but nothing else.) The louder I state that these are my sincere opinions, the more some people brush me off with a smug wink. If I were the uncaring, insincere cynic I’ve been cracked up to be, I’d be a Republican, or at least the Good Company producer who put a Gamblers Anonymous show on election day.

Anyhow, this month’s column is dedicated to Seattle’s newest grocery chain, Shop-Rite. Shopping, of course, IS a rite, especially in December. Hot Xmas gifts this year include the new plastic teen makeup kit (for plastic teens?) that looks just like a fishing-tackle box (“date bait” indeed). Those going east can get that special gift at NYC’s new Soap Opera Furniture Store, selling surplus room settings from daytime dramas. Sign up now for a bar stool from Ryan’s Hope. The 13-year-old show, which launched the career of sometime Seattle actress Kate Mulgrew, is being axed to give more time to local legend Sandy Hill’s Home show.

Unlisted: Washington mag’s list of “100 Washingtonians Who’ve Changed the World” left out Ray Charles, Judy Collins, David Lynch, Mary Livingstone, Dyan Cannon, Carol Channing, Lynda Barry, Martha Graham, John Cage, Quincy Jones, Steve Miller, Willie Nelson (once a Vancouver, Wash. DJ), the Sonics rock group, Robert Culp, Dawn Wells, Patrick Duffy, Mark Tobey, Mark Morris, Larry Coryell, Robert Cray, Chet Huntley, John Saul, etc. My biggest beef is leaving out Spokane-born Chuck Jones, perhaps the greatest maker of animated films ever. Any list to leave him out must have been edited by Elmer Fudd.

Towering Achievement?: In a rare show of minor courage, the City Council voted a temporary, slight restriction on new highrises (with exceptions for some well-connected projects). In all other recent cases save one, the city’s succumbed like a lapdog to the developers. Will it really serve the public interest at last? (Personally, I like the Wash. Mutual Tower and some of the others, and realize that office-building is inevitable in an economy gone from making stuff to pushing paper. But that’s no excuse to do it as poorly and inconsiderately as it’s too often been.)

Space Exploration: You may know that the name of the new AFLN gallery-cafe on E. Madison stands for “A Frilly Lace Nightie.” You may not know that the bldg. was the shrink’s office in House of Games (one of the few sites in the film still standing, just two years later). The nearby Bagel Deli on 15th now has keen art shows of its own.

Faulty Femmes: I submit that Robin Givens IS NOT the “most hated woman in America,” as charged by some paper. But who is? Imelda Marcos, the likeliest prospect, is just a resident alien here. Others frequently disliked, often undeservedly, include Phyllis George, Tammy Bakker, Tipper Gore, Yoko Ono, Linda Ronstadt, Phyllis Schlafley, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Burford, and Springsteen’s new girlfriend. Pretty slim pickings, but once more women achieve positions of real power, more will emerge who truly deserve our loathing.

Music Notes: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Posse on Broadway, with great shots of Dick’s and Taco Bell, made the MTV rap show, but became “Stir Mix-A-Lot” in the credit…. Yuban Coffee is sponsoring this year’s performances of The Nutcracker. If the girl had had the coffee, she wouldn’t have slept and there’d be no show.

Local Publication of the Month: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. To Vancouver, B.C.’s Brian Fawcett, Pol Pot’s crimes are just an extreme form of what the media/corporate culture’s doing to us: fostering passive obedience by destroying history, memory, community and individuality. I don’t buy all of it, but admire his passion and technique, cross-referencing St. Paul, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Homer, satellite dishes, Expo 86 and Reggie Jackson…. On the Bus,Metro’s newest newsletter, gives driving but not bus directions to a bus-base open house.

Graphic Details: Fantagraphics Books, America’s premier publisher of alternative comics (including Seattleite Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff ), is moving here from LA. It’s not a big boost to the local economy (its prestige title, Love and Rockets, sells under 20,000 copies), but is a clear sign of our emergence as a graphic-arts mecca. In another positive move, the UW’ll now require arts credits by incoming frosh. Maybe that’ll stop state school districts from killing arts classes.

Disappearing Ink: As you know, we believe in reading everything. Now, that “everything” may shrink. Two vital news sources, theChristian Science Monitor and Mother Jones magazine, are reportedly switching to yuppified formats with less political and foreign news, and in MJ even “upscale” lifestyle features. MJ, which prides itself as the biggest left-leaning rag since WWI, ought to know that the Yuppie media aesthetic, selecting a rich minority as the only people worthy of attention, is inherently reactionary.

The REAL Skinhead Story: After a tragic murder in Portland, the media have branded every kid with a shaved head a racist thug. Not true. The few who are thugs specifically follow 10-year-old UK grooming fads and the “ethnic-purity” policies of the British and French “National Front” movements (and the most virulently pro-apartheid groups in South Africa). Purity, of course, is for geeks. Anybody who goes killing or bashing people to prove how superior he is obviously isn’t.

Until we next meet in the new year, with our annual In/Out list (your suggestions still solicited), help fight to save the Music Hall and the Hat n’ Boots gas station, and heed the words of VH-1 VJ Ben Sidran: “War is never as much fun as a good piece of music.”

1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?

Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.

XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.

FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.

CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.

MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).

ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.

JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.

CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.

CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.

SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.

CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.

INS AND OUTS FOR ’88