INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.

Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.

MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.

Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”

The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”

Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.

Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”

Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)

The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)

The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”

Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.

Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.

There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.

YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.

The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.

IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.

EVEN BEFORE the P-I front page discovered it, Misc. was in love with the new Westin Hotel rooftop signs. While the red letters are nearly four feet tall, they’re placed so high up on the hotel’s round towers that they look real tiny from the street. They provide an unexpected spot of cheer against the downtown skyline and bring back memories of the past golden age of hotel neon. They’re also a statement of pride for the locally-based chain, rocked in recent years from a succession of out-of-state parent companies. Elsewhere in greater downtown…

OFF THE MENU: The 5th & Denny restaurant graveyard building maintains its curse on would-be operators–most recently with a would-be southern-esque dining concept called Jambalaya’s. The curse acted faster than normal this time; Jambalaya’s “Coming Soon” signs came down and the “For Lease” signs came up without the joint ever opening. In other money-related fantasies…

GAME THEORY REVISITED: The Seattle Monopoly game, premiered in a big Bon Marche promo event last Friday, is Monopoly owner Hasbro’s belated answer to Stock Block and CityOpoly, two ’80s indie board games based heavily on the Monopoly concept but with different street and business names for each town they were sold in. The thing is, there are enough avid game players and professional game designers in town for somebody to think up a real (not fill-in-the-blanks) Seattle board game. Maybe it could be about trying to start a computer-related company that could make it big, but not so big that Microsoft would crush it by copying its technology. Or it could be about coming up with schemes to improve civic life and trying to get them realized in spite of opposition by the big-money people. For example…

RIDING HIGH?: You can tell it’s election season ’cause the local TV commercial slots and daily-newspaper ad space, normally full of appeals to be a “rebel” by buying officially “rebellious” consumer products, are instead saturated with images of authority figures exhorting citizens to do as they’re told and just say nope to those crackpot initiatives on the ballot. There’s images of cops against (mild) handgun control, and images of nurses against (very mild) health care reform. Another case in point: the Monorail Initiative, denounced by the increasingly rabid-right propagandists at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Instead of opposing the initiative as the work of “crackpots” (i.e., of people outside the government/ business elite), our business leaders should welcome the chance to add more in-city mileage to a light-rail scheme initially intended for suburban commuters, and to add them in the form of a hi-profile, futuristic-looking elevated train system people would want to ride on.

We ought to pass the Monorail Initiative this election. Then we’ll let the city and the Regional Transit Authority (established in last year’s transit referendum) work out how best to incorporate the initiative’s mandate with the in-progress RTA planning and the future RTA operation. RTA was and is about reducing smog, easing freeway congestion, and making life easier for motorists by getting a few other motorists off the road. The Monorail Initiative is about those things, but it’s also about something more. It’s about dreams for the future, and about wresting control of these dreams from the suits, from the consultants and focus-group researchers and the politicians who never met a condo project they didn’t like. Historically, urban transit projects in the U.S. have been proposed from on high by political inner-circle members who would never deign to use public transit themselves, but who love the opportunity to award construction contracts to potential campaign contributors. This is something dreamed up by ordinary citizens, without years of bureaucratic “process.” And it appeals to everyone who’s ever loved the short Seattle Center Monorail and ever wanted to believe it really was the transportation system of the future. As I wrote back in April, much of the dream future presented at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair never happened. Here’s a chance to realize at least a piece of the fair’s promised “World of Tomorrow,” to be finished just a few years into Century 21.

UPDATE: On the day last week’s Stranger Misc. column went to the printer, with its call for the P-I to bring back Zippy the Pinhead, the paper announced it would indeed reinstate Bill Griffith’s exquisitely-drawn, smartly off-kilter comic. Nice to see the paper’s editors know what’s good for the publication as a whole, even if it’s not what scores highest in market research. Speaking of publications in tune with their readers…

I AM JOE’S LUMBAGO: The oh-so-venerable Reader’s Digest is having some financial woes. Executives are resigning, the stock price’s going down, circulation’s flat (though still 15 million, comparable to the whole population of English-speaking Canada). It’s easy to see why Wall Street doesn’t like the magazine or the company that makes it. At a time when Deadheads are joining AARP, RD‘s Lawrence Welk image isn’t what many advertisers want. More importantly, the clean-cut, hyper-respectable brand of conservatism RD‘s championed doesn’t fit with today’s go-go, business-above-all mentality.

It hadn’t always been this way, of course. In the ’20s, RD founders DeWitt and Lila Wallace forged a niche product, taking existing articles from other magazines and rewriting them for fast, easy reading by people on the move. (For decades, its only ads were endorsements for itself by corporate hotshots and movie stars). By the ’50s, the Wallaces had turned their little reprint mag into a global brand, aimed squarely (pun intended, natch) at the most straitlaced of mass audiences. By championing cultural as well as political conservatism, it built a loyal subscriber base (a handy market for RD‘s mail-order books and records). But by defining itself and its audience as off to oneside from the social zeitgeist‘s twists-‘n’-turns, it now risks being left behind. Can RD avoid offending its easily-offended reader base while reaching out beyond it? As “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” might say, “Dubitable.” Speaking of shifting zeitgeists…

SPANKING NEW: If you think S/M fetishes around here have gotten as mainstreamed as they could get, you haven’t seen NYC’s new restaurant La Nouvelle Justine (named for the de Sade novel). An AP dispatch claims the three-month-old eatery supplmenents its French-inspired cuisine with “a birthday paddling, boot cleaning, or the chance to eat from a dog bowl at the feet of a whip-wielding mistress,” plus “Masochist” and “Necrophiliac” cocktails. Dimly-lit walls are etched with medieval fetish scenes. There’s a fake prison cell, an oversized high chair, and leather wrist cuffs. Waitresses and waiters are dressed as “dominants,” busboys as slaves. The story claims the place “draws more giggling voyeurs than hard-core afficionados of the master,” quoting one serious fetishist as saying it “could be a spot for bus tourists.” Speaking of fads gone too far…

OFF THE RACK: The Spice Girls, that singing group (Sporty Spice, Sexy Spice, Strong Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice) that claims in interviews to not be the shallow studio-manufactured image machine it really is, has proven so popular it’s spawned knockoff quintets throughout Britain. Here’s my idea for my own “Misc. Spice Melange”:

• Asthmatic Spice: Can only perform during the 30 minutes between the time her prescription antihistamines take effect and the time they knock her asleep.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Spice: Always holds up the tour bus by insisting on chewing her food exactly 32 times.
• Fiscal Spice: Business-dress-clad; dances with the efficient long steps of a FedEx courier. Always begging the other members for the authority to invest the group’s record royalties in dubious offshore mining stocks.
• Curious Spice: Nancy Drew wannabe, forever skipping rehearsals to investigate strange mysteries, like the mysterious connections between music-industry people and (gasp!) the sale and use of illicit drugs. Regularly getting herself caught in sticky situations, needing to be rescued by…
• Heroic Spice: Has no super powers, but that doesn’t stop her from athletically rescuing concertgoers from purse-snatchers, ticket-scalpers, and T-shirt price-gougers.

(Speaking of musical fads, we’ve already received plenty of entries in our search for formerly-popular music genres that haven’t been subjected to recent “hip” revival attempts. You’ve still time to send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org. Results here next week.)

Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.

UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.

YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.

DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.

Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.

Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!

WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”

(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)

AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…

EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced

June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.

Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.

(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)

MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.

THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.

E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.

E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”

INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)

KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”

(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source.

(2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully.

(3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians.

(4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego.

(5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.

AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).

Welcome, good buddy, to the high-rollin’ 10/4 Misc., in which we attempt to figure out the rationale behind the recent rash of beers with dog names. There’s already Red Wolf and Red Dog (one’s owned by Coors, the other by Busch, but I can’t remember which is which). Now, Seagram’s trying to get into the beer biz with something entering local test markets this week called Coyote. Dunno ’bout you, but as one who grew up in a dog-owning household, the association of yellowish-colored liquids with dogs is not an appetizing one.

WITH POPULARITY comes a wider audience not all in on the same cultural reference points. Some folks thought that recent Stranger Performance Issue cover was “kiddie porn.” (It was even banned by the Spokane post office!) It was really taken from an early-’60s lesbian-domination photo book, originally distributed in the pre-Stonewall gay underground. The brouhaha over it shows how folks “read” images based on their own suppositions. I was more shocked by a P-I front page the same week, with banner photos of glass-art renditions of what obviously were a diaphragm, a uterus and a dildo — with a headline about how the artists were “Showing Off Their Talent at Blowing.”

KNIT PICKING: I don’t think the discontinued Calvin Klein ads were “kiddie porn” either (more like deliberately antisexual sleaze, using old underground photography as another retro-pop-cult “inspiration”). However, there’s now a line of junior-size knit tops called Betty Blue. Do teenage girls wearing the tops know about the movie of the same name? Quite possibly. Do moms buying ’em for their daughters know about the movie? Maybe not.

TAB KEYS: For those of you still stuck in post-adolescent snickering, the Weekly World News is now on America Online. I doubt it’ll be a hit there. It removes the only thing I like about the paper, its typography. Besides, online distribution too effectively targets that made-to-be-laughed-at tabloid’s real target audience of fratboys and hipster wannabes, negating the effect of imagining you’re the only WWN reader who knows it’s a joke.

REBEL WITHOUT A LUNG: Hope you’re ready for New Left nostalgia, corporate-style; for here come Politix cigarettes, with a peace hand-sign and a rainbow on the pack. It’s one of several brands (along with Sedona, exploiting the Arizona new-age colony of the same name) from the pseudonymous Moonlight Tobacco Co. (really R.J. Reynolds). The NY Times business-section story about Reynolds’s latest gimmick came the same day as a front-page story about the megabux being shoveled from the cig industry into GOP campaign funds…. Elsewhere in the product world, Coca-Cola quietly dropped OK Soda from its remaining test-market regions, three months after it ceased to be sold here. Chalk it up as another failure from Portland ad whizzes Wieden & Kennedy (of Subaru “Lack of Pretense Days” and Black Star Beer infamy). W&K’s string of flops may revive the old-school ad theory that cleverness might get your agency famous within the ad biz but doesn’t move product.

E.T. STAY HOME: The AP reported “three self-styled mediums” in Sofia, Bulgaria led some 1,500 followers to an airstrip to await eight space ships. Among other things, the mediums promised the aliens would help the poor Balkan country pay its $12.9 billion foreign debt. No non-earthers showed up. Just as well; if the space people had acted like Bulgaria’s last patron state, the ol’ USSR, the financial aid would’ve been in inconvertible currency that could only be spent in its home country.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, recall the words recited by Tom Berenger as Brigham Young’s bodyguard in the cable movie Avenging Angel: “The problem with polygamy is when you have 27 wives and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you.”

Mark your calendar to attend the book release party for my hefty tome, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, Sun., 10/15 at the Crocodile. It’s 21-plus, but an all-ages reading event’s in the works for later this month. More info at the Misc. World HQ website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.

WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.

WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)

WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.

BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.

JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.

RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.

NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.

THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”

CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!

BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.

Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.

I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…

X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.

THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.

EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.

But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.

Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.

So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.

Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.

DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.

Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.

ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.

The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.

FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…

BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.

Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”

Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.

DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

PASSAGE

As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:

“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”

REPORT

As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.

Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).

There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

9/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and additional material)

Generation X: The Original Poem

Here at Misc. World HQ, we’ve been trying like heck to figure out the intermediate intricacies of navigatin’ that Info Hi-Way. For a Machead like me to learn an Internet UNIX line-command interface from the online help (much of which is written for programmers and system operators, not end users) is like learning to drive by reading a transmission-repair manual.

IT’S A CRIME: Ya gotta give Clinton credit even in the face of apparent defeat. By trying to push some comprehensive health-reform, no matter how kludgy, he asked Congress to inconvenience big business, something it hasn’t done on such a general scale in maybe two decades. By even bringing up the premise that perhaps what’s good for corporate interests might not be good for the country, he’s significantly altered the boundaries of public debate at the “highest” levels of our political culture. I’m a single-payer-plan fan myself, but it was clear that there wasn’t enough common sense in Congress for that to go this time. This is an example of what I’ve been saying about the need for us “progressive” types to get into practical politics. We’ve gotta expand from just protesting things, into the comparatively boring nuts-n’-bolts of getting things done. The moneybags have a powerful voice; we need to get just as loud.

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

SPECIAL EVENT!

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

5/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating five Stranger columns)

Here at Misc. we can’t wait for the longtime local label K Records to start a joint venture with the new local label Y Records. The connection between the two would undoubtedly go very smoothly.

THE MAILBAG: Thanx to all the Aldus people who E-mailed words of reassurance after the piece here about the software giant last time. One guy said not to worry about Aldus’s future, that the firm’s forthcoming merger with Adobe Systems would be more like a “marriage” than a corporate takeover. (I think we’ve all seen marriages that were like corporate takeovers, but that’s beside the point…)

FOR LOVE OR $$ DEPT.: For shameless audience manipulation, nothing could compare to KCTS‘s weekend marathon of Getting The Love You Want, a home-video marriage counseling series. The facilitator picks a couple from the audience, has them reveal their issues and conflicts, then leads them in working out their differences. He closes the segment by getting the couple to hug and avow their continued empathy. This moment of tenderness and generosity closes, and then we see another pledge break.

THE NEW LITTER: The P-I reports that the much-hyped closure of the legendary Dog House restaurant was just a ploy by its owners to get out from its lease and its union contract. But it backfired; the eatery’s landlord decided not to sign a new lease with the Dog House people, but instead to let the owners of that other legendary 24-hour hash house, Beth’s Cafe, take over the space. The newly-christened Hurricane Cafe doesn’t have a bar, organ player, murals (its walls are newly painted in the same plum color as Linda’s Tavern on E. Pine), or such old-time menu items as liver and onions, but it does have big food at reasonable prices at all hours. The Dog House folks are reportedly looking for a new downtown site to open a non-union cafe, which may or may not have any of the old Dog House iconography.

FOUL TIP: The Mariners opened another season amidst new hype about the team actually maybe winning a division this year (a new mini-Western Division shorn of the powerhouse White Sox). And as usual, a new season brings out the usual media hype of “Whither Baseball?” Here’s what I think’s wrong with the game: 1) a new TV contract worse than hockey’s, with half the national cable games, no network games until July, and regional-only playoff telecasts — a setup that won’t help promote the game to new fans; and 2) its reputation as the sport of writers and other dullards, who blather on about such esoterica as the dimensions of the field (I’ve never seen ponderous essays on how a basketball court’s 96 feet long, a multiple of the sacred numbers 8 and 12). When they’re not doing that, writers use baseball to conjure up images of that Bygone Innocent America, that nice all-white-middle-class wonderland that never was. Face it: a game marketed to exploit grandpa’s selective memories isn’t gonna attract enough kids to maintain a decent supply of players, let alone a decent supply of fans.

PUFF PIECES: The King County Council may vote this month on a plan, drafted by the county health department, to ban smoking in restaurants. If approved, the ban would first take effect in the suburbs, then spread to Seattle in ’95 when the county takes over Seattle’s restaurant regulation. You could still smoke in taverns, lounges, and in restaurants that were willing to serve adults only, at least until they pass a broader ban. I think smoking is a wretched habit; but everybody I meet these days smokes, especially the vegetarians. This is Big Brother-ism at its most persnickity.

INK STAINS: Fourteen months ago, some dudes in Lynnwood started Face II Face, a free monthly newsprint magazine with equal emphasis on fashion, art, music and fiction. The Face II Face team split up un-amicably last November, with several members relocating to Seattle and re-starting under the name Month (though the cover flag said “November,” “December,” etc.). That crew just had another falling out. Jim and Jodi Madigan continued to publish Month, unveiling a slightly revised graphic design in their April issue, while their ex-colleagues Bill Maner, Tom Schmitt and Roger LeBlanc just put out something called Monthly, whose premiere April issue is billed as “Vol. 1 No. 6” and looks just like the first five issues of Month except it’s not stapled. To add to the confusion, neither publication mentions the family feud in its pages. We’ll see if they start up fistfights over press credentials to runway shows.

WANKING ON PARADE: That professional egotist and artistic has-been John Lydon, in town on a book tour, was scheduled to appear on The Spud Goodman Show. Goodman had outlined half an episode to the Lydon interview, the most he’d ever alloted to a single guest. KNDD’s Norman Batley, who’d took on a volunteer producer position on the Goodman show, was in charge of bringing Lydon from his hotel room to the studio. But somebody, either on the local PR team handling the tour stop or one of the print-media reporters keeping him busy, dissuaded him from going, charging “that’s not even a real TV station.” Goodman and his normally scripted cast had to improvise a new show on the spot, shuffling in segments written for other episodes and making introductions for location segments that don’t exist yet, that will have to be shot and edited into the episode before it airs.

THE MARGINAL WAY: There’s been a big media blitz over the county’s plan to revive the beautifully rusty Industrial District between the Kingdome and Tukwila. The stories quoted officials claiming that unless We Act Now, the zone could become a “rust belt” a la the abandoned factories of Michigan and Ohio. The top paragraphs of the stories mentioned all-well-n’-good stuff like fixing roads and cleaning up toxic waste. But if you read further you find out that there really aren’t many vacant sites in the area, that it’s well-occupied by small and medium businesses. Most of the horror stories cited in the articles about companies leaving the ID turn out to be about firms that wanted bigger tracts than they could get.

It doesn’t take much between-line reading to wonder whether the politicians are really seeking an excuse to condemn and consolidate tracts down there, evict some of the little guys, and turn the area over to bigger operations by bigger companies — the sort of companies that employ proportionately fewer people, but make bigger campaign contributions.

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “race-blind casting” as the courageous risk of daring theatrical directors to award all major roles, no matter what ethnicity the characters may be, to white actors.

THE LAST WORD ON GANGSTA RAP: When hiphop was ruled from NY, it was an explosion of creativity with a social conscience. Then the Hollywood showbiz weasels took charge and, as usual, ruined everything. If I believed power, money, intimidation, sexism and egotism were the answers to everything, I would’ve become a Republican.

LITERAMA: Clever people across the country are discovering a real use for the Apple Newton Messagepad, that overpriced electronic Rolodex that’s supposed to read your handwriting but usually can’t. It may not be able to make an exact digital version of what you write on it, but it can turn it into computer-assisted cut-up poetry! Yes, you can make your own faux-Burroughs without having to shoot anybody or get addicted to anything. In my own experimental-fiction days, I used to be in a group that played the “writing games” devised by the French Oulipo group (Raymond Quaneau, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, et al.). One of them was “n + 7”: take an existing passage and replace each common noun with the noun seven dictionary entries past it. Similar discoveries await when you Newtonize a familiar saying. Here’s some vintage “Abe Newton” as posted on the Net: “Foyer scrota and severe heavers ago our flashovers brought force on thy cosmetician a new notion conceives in lubricate and deducted to the prosecution that all men are crated quail.”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Thomas Kemper Weizen-Berry might be America’s first raspberry-flavored beer. I wouldn’t say it was particularly good, but it might qualify as an experience in learning just how bizarre foreign-inspired food-and-drink recipes can really be…. Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls is the first basketball-shaped cereal! They’re wheat/corn puffs, sorta like oversize Kix with alternating pink and brown basketball seams dyed onto them and an odd brown-sugar taste. Better still is the hype on the side: “Hey Mom & Dad! Tired of putting on the full-court press to get your kids to eat a wholesome breakfast? Introducing new Dunk-A-Balls, the one-of-a-kind breakfast cereal that will have your kids fast breaking for the breakfast bowl. Dunk-A-Balls is the perfect tip-off to the whole day…. Score a slam dunk with your kids, sky-hook them a bowl of Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls now, before the buzzer sounds on this limited time offering!”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: My Spokane is Evergreen student Jon Snyder‘s oversize photo-essay book on the sights, sounds and dreams of his beloved Inland Empire hometown (though he does complain in an insert that he couldn’t find an Eastern Washington printer willing to run it, due to a chapter on adolescent sex fantasies). Of special interest to west-side readers is his ode to the Spokane Dick’s Drive-In, a completely separate enterprise from the Seattle Dick’s chain (and servers of superior flesh-n’-grease products, or so he claims). $7.50 at Fallout Records or from 214 S. Coeur D’Alene St., Spokane 99204….

Sell Yourself to Science is, at first glance, just another Loompanics Unlimited tome of quasi-demimonde self-help access; in this case, about how to make small sums of money by participating in medical experiments or by selling your blood, semen or other bodily products. What sets it above the Loompanics norm is the oft-hilarious writing, by local kid Jim Hogshire; especially when he asserts that you should be allowed to sell post-death rights to your organs to the highest bidder. Even better is the collected set of Hogshire’s zine Pills A-Go-Go, which studies pharmaceuticals (legal and otherwise) the way Spin studies music (available at Pistil Books on E. Pike, that handy place to go mag-shopping on a Fri. night while avoiding an opening act at Moe).

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT?: You don’t have to be in Ulster to get harsh treatment at an Irish cultural event. A couple of bouncers at the Moore were overheard vowing to “get” some kids at the Pogues show a few weeks back. And they did, grabbing people (particularly the small and/or female) from the pit, forcibly removing them. One frustrated attendee tried to leave voluntarily, only to get grabbed and tossed outside herself; she reports still having sore limbs and muscles. The bouncers in question are reportedly no longer at the theater; its new owners were already planning to hire new security.

BOOZE NOOZE: Dewar’s Scotch, whose youth-appeal magazine ads we’ve discussed, isn’t the only distilled liquor trying to capture a younger generation weaned on cheap beer. The trade mag Market Watch: Market Intelligence on the Wine, Spirits and Beer Business just had a special issue about it. The opening note from the publisher, pictured as a plump moustached old guy, declared, “They’re diverse. They’re young. And they have decidedly different attitudes about alcoholic beverages than do baby boomers. Just who are these new consumers, you asked? Generation X, that’s who.” Inside, we learn the market strategies aimed at pushing spirits, extra-sweet chardonnays, ice beer, and mass-produced pseudo-microbrews to under-30s. But the most telling parts of the issue are the ads, boasting to retailers of the youth-market atrategies of Southern Comfort (“One small age group buys enough spirits to empty your store every hour”) and Black & White Scotch (“They’re passive-aggressive vidiots who grew up too fast and have no faith in the system and think holes in jeans are cool and that party is a verb and will never buy anything in your store anyway. Congratulations. They’re your new Scotch customers”)….

Meanwhile, that new desperate-to-be-hip malt beverage Zima has reportedly been casting locally for commercials, seeking out models who are 25 or older but look younger. Encouraging underage drinking, you say? Heavens no! Just looking hip and urbane! Speaking of which…

SNOWED UNDER: I’d hoped that springtime would bring a seasonal end to articles about snowboarding, full of all the requisite MTV Sports-style hyperbole, neon-drenched graphics, “unfocused” typefaces, and Prince-esque spellings (“D Place 4 U 2 B”). But instead there are now at least six year-round snowboard magazines, all more or less drenched in “grafique XS.” The art aside, there’s a bigger issue at work: the case of a countryside athletic activity attracting an urbane-hip mystique. I’m meeting intelligent, club-going, artistically-minded young adults who play the sport, who either don’t mind the hype about it or like it.

To many old-line punkers and wavers like myself, athleticism was the suspect domain of the Evil Jock Mentality, or of anti-intellectual adults (cf. “Get High On Sports Not Drugs” programs in school, which posited that the only alternative to being a mindless junkie was to be a hopeless jock). Artistically-aware people weren’t into sports; they were more likely to be beaten up by the guys who were into sports. But in recent years, some free-thinking youths have begun to accept that the human body might be useful for activities besides dancing, fighting, fucking, and dressing (cf. Vedder‘s surfer-dude acrobatics). Speaking of sports…

FROZEN IN TIME?: The New Times, that monthly new-age broadsheet, offers a specialist perspective on recent events: “Tonya and Nancy: An ECKist’s View.” That’s Eckankar, “The Ancient Science of Soul Travel.” Author Robin Adams McBride claims Harding’s misdeeds and/or lapses in judgment resulted from her personal development over successive reincarnations over the centuries, “as the soul sets up its scenarios for learning and then forgets that it had anything to do with planning her experiences….Tonya Harding can experience the ultimate transformation of an evolved Scorpio personality if she responds to this wake-up call positively. The phoenix arising from the ashes of personal humiliation and defeat can replace the scorpion which stings its enemies to gain advantage.”

THE FINE PRINT (from promo copies of the Sister Psychic CD Surrender, You Freak!): “Advance CD — Instore-airplay promo only. Will explode if sold.”

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “classic rock” as the work of radio station managers wistfully looking back to a more innocent age, before the radio was controlled by people like them. Speaking of which…

LIVE AIR: Here’s all I know about Free Radio Seattle, the new pirate station advertised on flyers around Capitol Hill this past month. It was scheduled to go on the air at midnight 4/30 for a 90-minute broadcast, transmitting somewhere in the vicinity of 88 on the FM dial. Further broadcasts are tentatively scheduled on a weekly basis. Content will include community news and commentary, club listings, and freeform music (“like what KCMU used to be,” according to an anonymous communique sent to me). Because this whole thing’s somewhat illegal, the broadcasts will be recorded at one undisclosed site and transmitted from another; to avoid (or at least delay) FCC detection, the portable transmitter will be set up at a different place each time. If these guys are putting their butts on the line to do this (and there’s a strong chance they’ll get caught before long), they’d better have a good reason, like having something important to say.

CATHODE CORNER: A recent wire service item placed Married… With Children as one of the top 10 TV shows among African American audiences. (The only white-cast show with more black viewers is Blossom, which until recently shared a time block with the black-starring Fresh Prince of Bel Air.) My theory: Married‘s black co-creator, Michael Moye, clearly set out to devise a family that would affirm the stereotypes some hard-striving black middle-class families have about lazy, privileged white trash. It’s either that, or the utter failure of Bud Bundy’s attempt to play-act as “Street Rapper Grandmaster B.”

BAN, ROLL ON: Yes, the Washington legislature tried again to revive the Erotic Music Bill, a misguided attempt to shore up the morals of Those Kids Today by restricting selected rock records (Gov. Lowry vetoed the “anti-porn” package of proposals that included the music bill). In the short term, control-freak schemes like this can be dangerous to free expression and personal privacy, and must be fought vigorously. But in the long term, the tide is starting to turn against the forces of cultural suppression, because it’s bad for capitalism.

In the pre-industrial age, censorship was a tool of economic as well as social control. When only the upper classes were taught to read, the number of potential rivals for prestige positions was kept within means. The class system was kept in place by restricted information.

In the industrial age, supporting censorship was a convenient way for big business interests to forge convenient political alliances with more populist right-wing elements (note Michael Milkin, Jesse Helmes, et al.). The Republicans of the rural west proved particularly adept at using the religious right to help elect politicians whose real loyalty wasn’t to churches but to big ranchers, miners and real estate developers. Censorship was also a convenient way for the corporate power structure to deny responsibility for some of the social upheavals its own machinations had caused. Corporate America could say: “We’re losing our technological edge to Japan? Don’t blame us; all we did was encourage slashes in education spending so the government could reduce business taxes. Blame the decadent liberals — yeah, that’s the ticket! Sexual permissiveness did it! That, and the devil’s rock music, and those naughty TV shows!” Or: “Urban crime? We didn’t cause it; all we did was move all our jobs to the suburbs! Blame the homosexuals, or the immigrants, or the lack of family values!” Or: “Child abuse? Don’t look at us; we merely promoted a culture where selfish aggression was treated as a virtue. No, just get rid of those magazines with the pictures of bad women in them. That’ll solve everything!”

But in the Information Age (which spread into the realm of politics about 18 to 24 months ago), censorship is a threat to what is becoming big business’s most prized asset — intellectual property. Free expression is the new frontier of post-industrial capitalism. The Viacom-Paramounts and the Time-Warners will begin to fight against the principle of censorship in the same way the timber industry has fought designated wilderness areas, or the way GM has fought pollution controls. A key connection of the old Reagan coalition has been severed, perhaps for keeps. The religious right, having outlived its usefulness to much of the business community, just might find itself sent back into the shadows due to a slow drying up of big-money support, destined to become just another of the many isolated subcultures in today’s fragmented society.

But it won’t go away quietly. There will be more kooky drives like the Erotic Music Bill and that initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination. These campaigns will become blunter, shriller and more divisive, as their instigators strive to hold on to their own core support base.

UNTIL NEXT TIME, root for the Sonics and for single-payer health care, and ponder this sign outside Catholic Community Services on 2nd: “Depression Support Group, 8:30 a.m. Wednesdays.” If you can get up that early, do you really need to go there?

PASSAGE

Words of love from the animated, syndicated, underrated 2 Stupid Dogs: “The world is our pancake house, and you’re my flapjack stack with a scoop of butter and maple syrup and a side of hash browns and some toast and a large orange juice.”

REPORT

A small publisher of cult-appeal books has expressed serious interest in my book, The Real Seattle Music Story. Once I sign a contract, I probably won’t be able to sell any more printout copies of the text. So if you want a Preview Edition, you’d better order it now.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phylloxera”

LET YOUR KIDS SEE ANY MOVIE THEY WANT. JUST DON’T LET `EM NEAR THE POPCORN

The word came into local media outlets shortly after 10 a.m. Friday. An electrician had found a dead male body at 8:40 a.m. in Kurt Cobain’s house on Lake Washington Blvd. A shotgun and an apparent suicide note were nearby. Authorities refused to identify the body, but that didn’t stop Nirvana fans (and reporters) from gathering outside the house. Thirty people were there within half an hour of the first announcement; an hour later the street had become too crowded for regular traffic to get through. Shortly after noon, investigators confirmed that it was indeed Cobain who had done himself in.

The AP quoted Cobain’s mother as saying he hadn’t been heard from in six days. That Wednesday, it was announced that Nirvana was bowing out of plans to headline the Lollapallooza ’94 package tour. His wife Courtney Love, who’d saved him when he took the champagne-and-sedatives overdose in Rome in March (officially billed as an accident), was off in LA wrapping up preparations for the release of a new album by her band Hole.

During the Rome coma-watch, The Stranger ran a piece by Eric Fredericksen on how the media would treat a Cobain death, as a cultural icon and a nostalgia industry just like Hendrix and Morrison. I’ll try to avoid that shit here, but I’ll try to give a personal view on the guy’s work. Like most of you, I didn’t know him personally, had never seen him offstage. I knew people who knew him; they inveriably described him as just a soft-spoken regular guy who loved to make music and art and who hated the bullshit of The Industry.

Punk rock had developed in New York as an arty affectation. England took it seriously as a voice of youthful anger. The local new wave scenes across the US took the DIY aesthetic of punk even more seriously, eventually questioning the very need for New York/London tastemakers. Cobain emerged amidst this indie-rock movement, among guys who’d chosen not to listen when the industry said punk was dead. Cobain and Krist Novoselic started playing together when they were 19, and by the time Cobain turned 21 in 1988 Nirvana was becoming a big fish in the still-small pond that was the Seattle club scene. By the next year they had an album and were part of TAD’s European tour; by all accounts it was a miserable experience, with Cobain having a nervous breakdown onstage at the last show.

While tagged by out-of-town media as the Leader of the Grunge Rock Revolution, he hadn’t been a central member of the hard-partying, extroverted schmoozers who had developed the punk-metal crossover sounds in Seattle. He was an inwardly-directed soul who, during Nirvana’s club years, holed up in an Olympia apartment and lived on corn dogs and cough syrup. While he kept his private life private, he put his personal torments into his work with a rare purity and clarity. It was his curse/blessing to be the best songwriter of his generation, and to be ripe for the picking just as “alternative rock” was becoming a big business. But it was his decision to go to Geffen; if Nevermind had come out on Sub Pop, as was first planned, it might have sold a few thousand copies, the label would have continued its slide into bankruptcy, and the Seattle rock hype would have died down leaving Soundgarden as national stars but few others.

We’ll probably never really know what finally led him to quit the world. Perhaps it was the slip back into drugs after the highly-publicized hell he went through to get off heroin. Or perhaps the hype and the pressure finally got to him. To the end, however, he maintained a public image as a survivor.

On March 27 the following statement, credited to Cobain, appeared on the Internet’s Nirvana mailing list:

“So this is the Information Highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about. Well, my manager told me some kind of fan-thing was going down here and that I should come over and check it out. Well, here I am. I’d be lying if I said I’m not surprised to see the band’s popularity reaching even into the depths of the electronic underworld. Cool.

“Well I won’t keep you people long, but I thought you might be interested in what the band is up to. Last month Chris, me, and Dave came out of London Bridge finishing up a revamped “Pennyroyal Tea” (I didn’t much care for how we did the album version and thought we could’ve done much better with the song). Geffen should have that out shortly, knowing the speed with which their money machine rolls.

“We’re all taking a break from the music and touring for a bit. I’m still a little freaked over the Rome thing and need some time to rest and get over it, you’d think they could make a good milkshake, but no. Hope you people are ready for a calmer moodier album. Yep, Nirvana’s going back into the studio at the end of the summer. I’m already working on the new songs and artwork for the new album. If you’re expecting the same verse-chorus-verse, well, I suppose you have but two choices, don’t buy the new album when it’s released in early ’95 or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity folks.”

(latter-day note: An Internet user in Victoria later claimed to have fabricated the note. My excerpts from it got printed up as authentic in Dave Thompson’s quickie Cobain exploitation book.)

GATHERING OF THE VULTURES: The vehemence with which conservative and old-hippie commentators alike treated Cobain and his fans is unprecedented in my lifetime, unless you count the bio-sleaze books of Albert Goldman (who thankfully died before he could write a Kurt exploitation book) or the Arizona politicians who wanted to prevent a Martin Luther King holiday by red-baiting King 20 years after his death. Rush Limbaugh called Kurt “a piece of human debris” and treated Nirvana listeners with equal disrespect; thus proving for all time the essential cruelty behind his worldview. If Limbaugh deliberately gloated over the demise of an opposition spokesperson, Andy Rooney was merely clueless in his denunciation of Cobain, and by extension anyone who loved him, as a “loser” not worthy of respect, only condescending pity. Locally, that professional pious hypocrite John Carlson echoed the Limbaugh party line in claiming the “sad and pathetic” Cobain should have quit music and found religion (as if Carlson has ever represented sincere Christian charity). P-I cartoonist David Horsey was at least more sympathetic when he suggested that Kurt could’ve found solace if he’d done more hiking in the woods; Kurt grew up near the woods, and from all accounts was more in touch with the terror of timber country than with its majesty.

Then there’s Times columnist Eric Lacitis, whose profound and utter incomprehension of Cobain, his music, his depression and his audience was matched only by his intransigence. First, he wrote a snide “joke” about Cobain’s March coma for a Sunday feature section that was printed before his death but distributed after it. Then, he wrote a “serious” column questioning what somebody with all that money could possibly have to worry about. Then, when many readers rightfully objected, Lacitis wrote a succession of shallow arguments attempting to defend his earlier bluster.

This is more than just the case of some oldsters who don’t get that new music (even though Cobain worked in a nearly 20-year-old genre). It’s the case of people who are paid to communicate, yet who lack a basic understanding of their topic, and in some cases have been defensive and even proud of their own ignorance. If the media business really wants to know why today’s young adults are consuming more books but far fewer newspapers and TV newscasts, it need only look to its own industry-wide “just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it” attitude. Not “getting it” is not a positive quality, and neither is inhumanity.